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Dennis Neil is an award winning journalist. He is the host of the What's Bugging Me? Podcast. He was host on CNBC Fox Business Network. Senior editor at The Wall Street Journal. He's the managing or was the managing editor at Forbes. He has written a new book that everyone is talking about because the man in question, Donald Trump, aside, is arguably the most talked about man on the planet, Elon Musk. The book is called The Leadership Genius of Elon Musk. It's a HarperCollins publication. He joins me from New York. Dennis, thank you so much for your time. Lovely to meet you.
It's wonderful to meet you, and thanks so much for your interest. I am absolutely thrilled. You know, you work for months and months and months and over a year on a book, and then it takes the publisher quite a long time to get that thing out there, and then finally the official day it comes out there, and you just feel utterly elated and grateful and excited. So I appreciate your time here.
I love when we're arranging this chat, you said let's do it now because Alon heights procrastination. So are you starting to channel some of his qualities in your own life, Dennis, I.
Am, and that I hadn't thought that when I first embarked on the book. But the more I studied him, the more I became convinced that there are some lessons we can learn from him and apply to our own, admittedly much smaller lives. But there are some underlying foundational things and beliefs and approaches he has that I think are incredibly effective. And I became I came to admire him more and more as I studied them and pursued them, And they're terrific lessons, and I think that they can help someone who reads this book. My hope is it helps them build a better life or feel better about the life they have.
You describe him as a bacon of inspiration. Was there one particular thing that he did initially or just the it's the sum of Opod's.
I mean, the thing is, look at the incredible, almost seemingly impossible achievements that he goes after that no one else has. He's how is it that he goes way beyond the bounds? I mean, this idea of a private enterprise trying to make it to Mars twenty years ago. As you may know from the famous story thanks to Walter Isaacson's in six hundred and eighty eight page tome Elon Musk. You know the Russians spit on his shoes twenty years ago when he dared ask them, let me buy some rockets. I want to get to Mars. No one thought anyone would ever do it. Well, he's closer now than he's ever been, and he has this ability to bet on things, have dreams, and pursue them for decades. An announcement went out on the X platform today that Visa has allied with X to be its money X money transmitter. Okay, in other words, you can just send a friend one hundred bucks on X. Well, Elon invented X dot com over twenty years ago. He was at PayPal. He had a disagreement with them over the vision. They wanted to turn PayPal into just an easy payment platform. He wanted X to be everything app by stock, by property, send money to people, et cetera. Well, now he's taking steps to do that. It's more than twenty years later. He's renamed Twitter, X dot com and now today he just got payments on the platform and something he's had in mind for twenty years. He never gives up. And you know, someone suggested to me, if your dreams don't require years of pursuit on your part, maybe you're not dreaming big enough.
Well, he does dream big, doesn't he. That's his And you look Tesla, spicyx, neuraling, which are all extraordinary achievements. Your book gives into the way that he leads too, because it is genius. Soddled up with controversy and criticism, He's able to get through that.
He's like a fast train.
And incredible fierceness. You know. One thing is at a time when mini workers, especially younger workers, frankly, are wimpy, lazy working from home. You know, the federal government had the ten top vacant buildings, the Federal Government's twenty three million square feet of combined space, one energy department building, forty eight hundred workers, eighty nine people in the building for the past year because they work from home. No, they're not working from home. And Elon works harder than everyone else around him. And so less than five of the book. I think it is of my eleven lessons of Elon. I love alliteration. Okay, so the only writing technique. I have eleven lessons of Elane. Lesson five is most people are loafers. Work harder than you ever have before. And it's true. And Elon feels like, if I work fifty percent harder and longer than my rivals, I will get things done in half the time or two thirds of the time that it takes them to get it done, and I can move on from there. And it's a really good, good lesson for all of us to follow, because in America we used to be the land of opportunity and hard work, and now it feels like we were turning into the land of envy and sloughing off. Fifty percent of workers in America admit to quiet quitting. They keep earning their paycheck, but they're not really working well. Shame on them for wasting resources. We're wasting their own lives. They're becoming what Elon would call NPCs. Is it, you know, non player characters in a video game. Yeah, there's a lot of stuff layers to this going on. But the more you follow them, and the weird thing is so as weirdest ideas are just so fascinating that the more you study them, the more you begin to believe them.
Well, the proof he's in the pudding, as you say, from Pipal to electric cause to spice. Oh, it's just a kype can. Ever of a Christmas. I saw a spice X everywhere. There's as many SPICEX songs as there are NASA soons. Now he saw up to the president with seeing he met Annolgaurishans.
You know already the Democrats and the libwit media are trying to tear them asunderd trying to make Trump jealous of him, trying to stir up trouble, and they're saying that that Elon is the shadow president, he's in secret the real president. And the New Yorker magazine a terrific weekly magazine here there's extremely stupidly liberal. Unfortunately, I've subscribed to it for thirty years. It ran this cover cartoon at the inauguration and you see Elon there in square center with a hand up, and then you see kind of half of Trump being pushed off off stage to the left. Is it's very funny, and they're doing what they can to to tear them apart. Look, it was really odd for Elon and any CEO to get as deeply involved with Trump as he did. And you know what, he's offending half the audience and he wants to sell Tesla cars to one hundred percent of the audience.
Right.
But he did this truly, and I admire this so much in him. He did this because he felt like America, a land he loves, a land he adopted as US citizen. I think was in twenty eleven or something. It's in trouble. It's descending into craziness and woke mind virus and no free speech, so you won't even be allowed to criticize something and try to change it. This stunned me. Leith like, Hey, I haven't heard that name before, but it's kind of cool.
Thank you.
This stunned me. Something like a third of Americans believe it is more important to prevent and wipe out hate speech, which is protected by our First Amendment. Hate speech especially is protected. It's more important to wipe that out than it is to protect free speech. And then another third roughly of Americans say, well, I don't know. Shame on both of those groups, because the First Amendment is the most important foundational right to be able to speak freely and criticize and worship freely, and Elon did an amazing thing when he stepped up up you know, something like, is it forty or sixty percent of Americans don't even know that the First Amendment protects you in terms of art and film and television and podcasts. They don't even realize that we've lost that in education. We're too busy in education telling people how bad America is and we wiped out the Native Americans and all of this.
The book he's called The Ladyship Genius of Ella Musk. My guest is Dennis Neil. Dennis, I'm going to say this, and please go with me on this because clearly you're a fan. This part of me thinks that. And can you be a genius and be slightly nuts as well? Is there an element of illin that's slightly nutty? Do you need to be and people talk.
About that old?
Yeah?
Correct? At least I think you're entirely right. And I think that it's required for him to reach the heights that he's reaching for. Is that extra in sanity? You've got to be absolutely bonkers to try some of this stuff? Are you out of your mind? A private company funding a trip tomorrow where he wants to put millions of people. Yeah, you've got to be insane. Now there's a second element that I explore on the book. Do you also have to be such a world class jerk? Do you really have to you know, be an asshole and be constantly fighting with people are telling him what you think and and and and breaking so much glass? And then you look though, you look at Picasso and Steve Jobs and Edison and Gordon Ramsey, uh and jerks, every single one of them, and brilliant and accomplished and achieving things. And so maybe maybe it is a requirement. I hope not.
Well, it seems to all the genius is seem to have that element to them, and maybe that's why they get to where they get to. You certainly have to have that. Has he been in your universe? Has he been in your world? Have you been able.
To you know that whole thing about six degrees of separation? M okay, Well, I kept I've been stopped fucking him for months and months and trying to get him to respond to me. I've got a private email address that I got from one friend, and you know, I just managed to well, at one point, finally he did. I sent him a image of tweet of mine. He reposted one tweet of mine that criticized kind of a just a tech person that I think he wanted to trash so or a friend wanted to try. So you retweet him. I got like thirteen million views, which I never get him. I could swear. We all think we're Shadowman on X because our stuff doesn't get hundreds of thousands of views. Okay, but so I copied it put into an email, so there'll be the visual they'd see there, Okay, not just words and say thank you so much for doing this. You know I've got this book. Will you talk to me? And he answers this says, which she always does this right, cool period, and then uh no, no thanks. I think I've pretty much said everything I have to say. The next day, he did a two hour interview with Jordan Peterson. Okay, this famous kind of shrink guy in Canada, so apparently he changed his mind for Jordan. But no, and it says in my bio literally that I dream someday of having dinner with Elon Musk.
Well, I believe you'll get there one day. Dennis, we have a connection here in Adelaide because again through Twitter. At the time, there was all this talk about solar power batteries and he said, I will build it for you, and if I don't have it built in time, you can have it for free.
Did take him up on this?
They did our premier. Did we have that battery and it will delivered it on time?
Correct?
But we It was such a real novelty for all of us that this billionaire, mad genius came to our small little state here in Australia and lived up to his promise. So he's a fascinating figure to watch because he's so polarizing.
He gets it done because of his brutal tactics and his ability to just call it out and say screw this. It's very like Trump. You know. Trump has been doing amazing things, rude things, just just calling out people right to their face in front of the TV cameras. It's just the most extraordinary thing. And they're both very much like that. They share quite a few traits. I think one reason they came together, in addition to Elon worrying about the country his adopted country, is that old saying the enemy of my enemy is my friend. These two men are hated by the same parties. They're hated by the Democrats, They're hated by the media, a lot of the media in America. Here they're despised by NGOs and liberal pixel pundits. And they came together in part because they share that I think.
You've written a book.
People can get that where they get all good books on Amazon, go to our bookstores. As I mentioned, it is a publication here in Australia through HarperCollins, the leadership genius of Ela Musk. Your podcast is called What's Bugging Me, which people can download and listen on all podcasts forums. Can we find out the lessons do you teach people?
Are you? Are you like I name the lessons? You know, things like work harder than you ever have before, and dream huge and spend years pursuing it, and you know, reduce, reduce, reduce in all aspects of your life and emails you send, and you know, stop renting storage bins, you know, two miles away for stuff that if you really needed it, it wouldn't be in a storage bind. I mean, this guy has in the Tesla ten thousand parts, a Ford has thirty thousand, so he tries to reduce everything in his life he sold all of his homes. Of course, he does live in the lap of luxury, living at the homes of rich friends around the world wherever he goes, apparently. But he's a fascinating figure and we're lucky to have him, and it's going to be fun to watch what happens next, right.
It is indeed lovely to make you, Dennis, congratulations on the book. Good luck with it. It came into my consciousness because we had a headline here in Australia in the newspaper today that said bot size bulls.
Indeed, that's Elon.
That's what he's gone. Yeah, it's great to make.
Just all the best Dennis Neil, aworld winning journalist and author The Leadyship Genius of Elon Musk.
It is out now through Harpercolons.