Best Of: Decoding Elon Musk

Next week, Walter Isaacson, former editor of Time, ex-CEO of CNN, and the biographer of Steve Jobs, Ben Franklin, and Leonardo da Vinci will publish a new book. It's called The Greatest Sentence Ever Written. You know the one. The one that begins, We hold these truths to be self-evident. that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Walter's book is a close reading of those immortal lines, what they meant when they were set down on parchment, and why, two hundred and fifty years later, they matter more than ever. I just interviewed him about it, and that episode comes out on Tuesday. In preparation for our conversation, I went back and listened to my last chat with Walter. He came on the show in 2023 when he published his biography of Elon Musk. I was surprised listening back by how relevant that episode feels.

And also, of course, how dated. Relevant because Musk remains one of the most powerful and frustrating people on the planet, dated because a lot has happened since 2023. That was before Musk's flirtation with far-right provocateurs blossomed into a full-fledged love affair, before he spent more than a quarter of a billion dollars to get Donald Trump elected, before Musk as the head of Doge cut 1.4 billion. in federal spending. A mere fraction of the $2 trillion he sought to slash, but still enough, according to some calculations, to cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people around the world due to defunding U.S.

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