On Musk with Walter Isaacson

What is it like to shadow Elon Musk for two years? To sit courtside as he builds a rocket? Or tears apart an engineer? Or couch surfs at the homes of billionaires? And how on earth do you make sense of it all? Walter Isaacson is the biographer of giants: DaVinci, Franklin, Doudna, Jobs...and now Musk, former enfant terrible, rocket launcher, electric car innovator, and Twitter—er, X—disruptor, to put it gently. In this four part series, author Evan Ratliff (Mastermind, Longform Podcast) sits down with Isaacson to draw out the behind-the-scenes stories of this epic biography, and what the writer has learned as an outsider inside Silicon Valley. Walter Isaacson is the bestselling author of biographies of Jennifer Doudna, Leonardo da Vinci, Steve Jobs, Benjamin Franklin, and Albert Einstein. He is a professor of history at Tulane and was CEO of the Aspen Institute, chair of CNN, and editor of Time. He was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2023. Visit him at Isaacson.Tulane.edu. Evan Ratliff is an award-winning investigative journalist. He is the author of The Mastermind, and the host of PERSONA and Longform. Evan’s reporting and writing appears in Wired, The New Yorker, Bloomberg Businessweek and other magazines. He was also the cofounder and editor in chief of the narrative publication The Atavist Magazine, which under his editorship was nominated for two Emmy Awards and nine National Magazine Awards and the co-founder of Pop-Up Magazine.