‘People Don’t Give Him Enough Credit!’ CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin Heaps Praise on Elon Musk

CNBC anchor Andrew Ross Sorkin joined the Post Run High podcast with Kate Mackz this week and gave his take on the driving forces behind the world’s most successful people.

The conversation also included Mackz’s husband Jeremy, who pushed Ross Sorkin to explain Elon Musk’s singular success in business and tech.

“Well, what is it unique about him? Like, how is he just like single handedly, like pushing so many different things like forward at the same time we talk about, like the, you know, the commonalities of successful people over generations. Like, is it, is he common?” Jeremy asked.

“He just has a grander ambition than everybody else. And, and a, a belief, that it’s possible. And I think people don’t give him enough credit for this,” Ross Sorkin replied, adding:

People think of him as sort of a singular entrepreneur, and he is, but he’s actually a good manager. Think about, you know, you can’t create a Tesla or a SpaceX or the Boring Company or a Neuralink and have them be this successful without actually having people who want to work for you, who want to do great things. And then who ultimately go and execute and do them.

So I think there’s both the vision that he’s had and a sort of ability to sort of just keep at it, even when things were not looking like they were going to work. I’d also say one other thing about him that’s extraordinary, his ability to pivot.

So it looks like a straight line up in a certain way, but there were a lot of lines where it was about to falter. And he always… Even when he finds himself in a corner where he looks like it isn’t going to work, he finds some clever and interesting way out of it. And that’s, I think, just a determination. It’s not just a determination. I mean, there’s something really going on, like I said, that’s a little bit different than a lot of other people.

“And did you, when you met him, you said you met him in 2007?” Jeremy followed up as Ross Sorkin replied, “2007 originally.”

“It was funny when in 2007, 2008. You’re talking about Elon Musk. You’re talking about Elon. Yeah, we’re talking about Elon. In 2007, 2008, on the car side, there was Tesla. And actually, there was a guy people forget about, a guy named Shai Agassi, who was creating the other competitive electric car company,” Ross Sorkin continued.

“Was it Lotus?” Jeremy replied.

“Wish I was going to give you the name of the company. But Shai’s company,” Ross Sorkin added.

“Not a relevant company,” Jeremy added.

“Well, not a relevant company. But at the time. People thought what he was doing was the more interesting version of all of this because people didn’t believe the batteries could go long enough. And so what he was doing was he was going to create these stations, almost like car washes, where you’d get your battery replaced. So you’d drive for like 200 miles and you’d go to this basically electric battery station where they’d replace the battery. You would have a subscription to your car, like a cell phone. And people thought that that was going to be the future of all of this. And it really was this sort of very interesting competition between two guys,” Ross Sorkin explained, adding:

And it seemed pretty clear to me that in terms of people who wanted it more and who had sort of thought through the physics of it, I mean, I will say to his credit, Elon Musk’s sort of engineering background, physical engineering more than anything else, is extraordinary.

And that is, I think, what’s made SpaceX work. In terms of the launch business, it’s what’s made Tesla’s work. He’s now in data centers. Why are his data centers working? He’s building the data centers faster than anybody else because he actually understands the physical engineering piece of how to create a data center faster and how to make the energy component part of it work. That’s really what his talent is. It’s an extraordinary thing.

Watch the clip above.

Jason Cohen contributed to this report.

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