Musk Biographer Ashlee Vance On 'The State of Elon' And His New Book

What it's like covering someone who doesn't exactly love the media.

Ashlee Vance may be the journalist with the best relationship with Elon Musk. After writing a biography of the enigmatic entrepreneur in 2017, Vance is back in touch with him. This time, they’re talking about Neuralink, Musk’s company that’s working to connect the human brain and computers.

On the occasion of releasing a new book — When The Heavens Went On Sale — Vance joined me on Big Technology Podcast to discuss Silicon Valley’s race to claim a piece of low earth orbit. You can listen to the full episode here:

Spotify: spoti.fi/32aZGZx

Apple: apple.co/3AebxCK

Below, I share the part of our discussion focused on the state of Musk, his Twitter acquisition, and what it’s like covering him. This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.

Kantrowitz: What’s your assessment of the state of Elon Musk right now?

Vance: I've had a real up-and-down relationship with Elon over many years. As somebody who's studied him, I find the situation pretty funny. The world seems to have chalked him up to this binary proposition, you're either for Elon or against him. Obviously, he brings a lot of this on himself through what he says and does on Twitter, in particular. But after a period when he would not talk to me at all for years, we talk a lot more now and I've seen him in person. He's so much more nuanced, and complicated, and interesting than most people give him credit for. He’s pretty upfront that he's a troll. When you talk to him in person, I wouldn’t say he’s down to earth, he’s Elon Musk, but he’s really easy to talk to, he’s interesting, but he’s a much more nuanced character than the rest of the world seems to see.

He hasn’t done a good job with Twitter. But I'm glad that SpaceX and Tesla exist. So I’m a bit conflicted about where to place him.

If SpaceX and Tesla were to go away tomorrow, you cannot question that he changed the world. Electric cars and commercial space would still be a reality. The U.S., which had this dwindling, depressing, sad space program would still be at the forefront of space. The man did a lot in 20 years. The Twitter stuff — he’s never been super savvy about reading consumer tastes or human wants and needs, that is not his specialty. He's getting horrendous advice on how to run Twitter. But he is relentless and persistent and who knows where it ends up when all is said and done.

Do you think there's a chance that he turns Twitter around at this point?

It’s not looking great at the moment. I know he will not give up. It's like in every other thing. Tesla and SpaceX were days from dying. He’s been through this before. It’s not really horrifying to him. The prospect that he'd lose $42 billion. If the lights at Twitter are still on, he will be there trying to fix it. It was always a flawed business to begin with, so he's got to figure out a new idea that makes it bigger and more useful than it has been historically. It was not a well-run company before.

When you speak with Elon, what do you talk about?

I spent most of my time at Neuralink, which is his brain-computer interface company. It's an area I've been into for years, so we spend a lot of time talking about monkeys with chips in their head.

What is going on there?

Something very fascinating has happened in that space. It had been a very academic pursuit for 20 or 30 years And almost just because Elon showed up and put a bunch of money into it has become like Silicon Valley again. There are 20 or 30 brain-computer interface startups now, and some of them are certainly farther along with human trials of bits and pieces. But Neuralink is the most ambitious and has the most advanced technology by about 100 to 1,000x. The question is if we can get it safely into a human anytime soon.

Within five years, could you see yourself with one of those chips in your brain?

No. I just went to Switzerland for my TV show Hello World and saw paralyzed people walking again, thanks to a spinal implant. The obvious beneficiaries of this technology will be people who've suffered from horrendous diseases where they can't talk or move anymore,  they will get that back. I do think that will happen within the next 5 to 10 years. I will not be signing up for the general-purpose Neuralink chip anytime soon, and I also don't think that'll be available.

Within your lifetime?

The technology will be there, and it might be safe. But we still don't even know if it's possible to send information from a computer into your brain. We know you can command a computer with your thoughts. We don't know about the going in and what that would look like, brain research hasn't gotten that far. What does it even mean, if we can do this? I don't think that's clear yet.

SpaceX does a lot of business with the government, does that make Musk’s recent political turn risky? 

There was a time when Elon was dependent on the US government to help fill gaps with SpaceX. Now the tables have turned. The US government is completely dependent on Elon when it comes to SpaceX. We have no other way to get humans to the ISS. They send up the bulk of our military assets in space. There are a couple of other rockets that are incredibly expensive.

I know people dig on SpaceX, getting what they call subsidies from NASA or other parts of the government. SpaceX is the biggest saver of taxpayer money you can imagine when it comes to space. What happened in Ukraine with Starlink was probably horrifying for the US government, to realize that they are at the whims of a person they do not control and who doesn’t have a deep track record of predictable decision-making. 

Tesla depends on China. How do you think that will influence his operation of Twitter?

What can you say? Tesla has a huge business in China. I noticed Elon doesn't tweet a lot about China, or jump on any anti-China bandwagons.

Why does he hate journalists so much?

Elon has always had his version of the truth. In the early days, when I started covering him, he would disagree with something someone had written. He's got this very literal kind of brain to him, and it was a deep affront against what is true and right, even though reasonable people could make a case for either side. As time has gone on, he's said as much, it gets to him. And due to the things he says on Twitter, he's become way more polarizing than he used to be and gets dragged through the press. People used to only complain about Tesla cars not doing this or that, or mileage not being what they said. I don't think this plays to his strengths. 

He used to be a moderate Twitter user, and around 2017 or 2018 he realized he doesn't have to talk to the media anymore, he can just talk through Twitter. He started to talk to the Tesla fan club to put out news instead of a New York Times Tesla journalist. He did that BBC interview, he grew up in South Africa and he still has this soft spot for British powerhouses.

In your position, being able to speak with Elon gives you insight into four or five really important businesses, the biggest tech story of the year has recently been an Elon story. How do you balance the need to stay in touch with him with the understanding that if you write something that he's not gonna like, he might ice you out?

After the Elon Musk book (2017), I was tired of thinking about him. Writing a biography, you just get way too much into this person's life to the point where you're dreaming about them, you have to think about it all the time. And then he was threatening legal action against me. So I put the Elon stuff down for a while.

In that interim period, Bloomberg, like many other publications, developed five Elon Musk reporters who were either doing SpaceX, Tesla, or just Elon himself. He didn't talk to me for a lot of that period. Neuralink was the first thing that I had that same fresh enthusiasm for and wanted to dig into. I felt like I had done so much SpaceX and Tesla stuff and I was doing the new book. I have my first big Neuralink piece coming soon. We'll see what happens.

You spent years looking at space. Do you have a desire to go?

The stuff that's existed so far with Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic where you do these six minutes barely on the edge of space is not really what I would want to do. I was hoping to use my connections as a well-sourced space reporter to be the first journalist out there. SpaceX is going to do a multi-day mission, with two laps around the moon. I don't think I could afford that, but if I could go as a messenger for the good people of Earth, I would do it.