Walter Isaacson

That sounds pretty mundane.

But for me, if you say, what makes him special?

There's a mission-driven thing.

I give you a lot of reasons.

But one of the reasons is he cares not just about the design of the product, but visualizing the manufacturing of the product, the machine that makes the machine.

And that's what we failed to do in America for the past 40 years.

We outsourced so much manufacturing.

I don't think you can be a good innovator

if you don't know how to make the stuff you're designing.

And that's why Musk puts his designer's desk right next to the assembly lines in the factories, so that they have to visualize what they drew as it becomes the physical object.

Well, having an end-to-end control is important, certainly with Steve Jobs.

I'm looking at my iPhone here.

It's a big deal.

That hardware only works with Apple software.

And for a while, the iTunes Store only works, you know.

So he has an end-to-end that makes it like a Zen garden in Kyoto, very carefully curated, but a thing of beauty.

For Musk, when he first was at Tesla and before he was the CEO, when he was just the executive chairman and basically the finance person funding it, they were outsourcing everything.

They were making the batteries in Japan and the battery pack would be at some barbecue shop in Thailand.

And that sent to the Lotus factory in England to be put into a Lotus Elise chassis and then –

was a nightmare.