Walter Isaacson

Well, it's not a requirement.

Some people with happy childhoods who do quite well.

But it certainly is true that a lot of really driven people are driven because they're harnessing the demons of their childhood.

Even Barack Obama's sentence in his memoirs, which is, I think every successful man is either trying to live up to the expectations of his father or live down the sins of his father.

And for Elon, it's especially true because he had both a violent and difficult childhood and a very psychologically problematic father.

He's got those demons dancing around in his head.

And by harnessing them, it's part of the reason that he does riskier, more adventurous, wilder things than maybe I would ever do.

Yeah, well, Elon and Kimball would tell me that, for example, when Elon got bullied on the playground and one day was pushed down some concrete steps and had his face pummeled so badly that Kimball said, I couldn't really recognize him.

He was in the hospital for almost a week.

But when he came home...

Elon had to stand in front of his father, and his father berated him for more than an hour and said he was stupid and took the side of the person who had beaten him.

Yes, and there's also Veld School, which is a sort of paramilitary camp that young South African boys got sent to.

And at one point, you know, he was scrawny.

He has very bad at picking up social cues and emotional cues.

He talks about being Asperger's.

And so he gets traumatized at a camp like that.

But the second time he went, he'd gotten bigger.

He had shot up to almost six feet and he'd learned a little bit of judo.

And he realized that if he was getting beaten up, it might hurt him, but he would just punch the person in the nose as hard as possible.

So that sense of always punching back has also been ingrained in Elon.