The Man Who Followed Elon Musk Everywhere: 7 Elon Secrets! Walter Isaacson

You're the only person on Earth that followed Steve Jobs and Elon Musk for years and years. So, what did you learn?

(laughs) This is going to be a fun ride. Walter Isaacson. One of the greatest biography writers ever.

Whose work allows all of us to learn from some of the greatest minds in history.

And all the people I've written about who are disruptors, they tend to have had demons driving them. But for Elon Musk, it was particularly brutal. A scrawny kid on the autism spectrum, no friends, beaten up quite often, but the scars from that were minor compared to what happened when he went home. It took traveling around with Elon for two years, morning, noon, and night before I could get him to open up about his father, and then it started coming out. Everything from his hard-wiring to a psychologically abusive father helped make somebody who's addicted to drama. He was at Twitter headquarters. He decides they should get rid of one of the server farms, and the engineers say, "We can't do it." He fires them, and then Christmas Eve, Elon forces his way into the server facility with a set of wire cutters and cuts the cable to the servers. It drove the teams crazy, but it drove them to do things they didn't think they could do, because Musk spends 80% of his hardcore mental energy on...

But is he happy? How did Steve Jobs change you?

When he was dying, I was in his backyard with him, and he says, "I regret..."

Imagine that you could follow Steve Jobs and Elon Musk for years and years and years and years. Imagine what you would learn. Imagine what you would see. Imagine the value that you would take from that experience of following two of the greatest world-shifting entrepreneurs that have ever lived. Well, the man that sits in front of me today was given that privilege. He got to follow Steve Jobs until the day that he died, and he got to follow Elon Musk for years and years and years, in order to write down what he saw and share that information with you. If you've ever wondered what it takes to be a genius, what it takes to change the world, what the cost is, the sacrifice, how to make decisions, how to think, and how- and what motivates these world-changing entrepreneurs, in the next hour and a half, you find out. And before this episode starts, I want to make a deal with you. About 58% of you that watch this podcast frequently haven't yet hit the subscribe button. If you enjoy what we do here, here's the deal that I want to make with you. If you hit that subscribe button, I promise you that we will keep making this show better in every single way, and we have huge plans to turn this into more of a documentary-style conversation where we work incredibly hard to bring in footage of the things we're talking about to give you greater context and greater meaning. So if you hit the subscribe button, I promise you that we will deliver an even greater version of this show. I hope you choose to come along on this journey. Enjoy this episode. Walter, you have a tremendous amount of insight from following and studying some of the world's greatest minds, but also from a tremendously successful career of your own as a CEO and as a businessperson. For anybody that doesn't know, who are the individuals that you've been able to follow and study and had unique exclusive access to?