In episode 3 of Open Tab, Substack co-founder Hamish McKenzie shared a few rounds with filmmaker and tech journalist Ashlee Vance at Fred’s Place, a longtime neighborhood dive in Mountain View just minutes from where the technology that gave Silicon Valley its name was born. After two decades covering tech for major publications, Ashlee circled the globe for Hello World, Bloomberg’s travel-tech documentary series exploring “the freshest, weirdest tech creations” and introducing viewers to “the beautiful freaks behind them.” That same pull toward tech’s biggest risk-takers also led him to write a bestselling biography of Elon Musk, based on months of interviews and unusually direct access—a profile Musk first praised as “95% accurate” before turning on it at publication.

With Core Memory , the media company he founded and now runs on Substack, Ashlee is still writing, reporting, and making films, but with his own shop and team. He says his work gives audiences a window into where the world is going six or seven years before the rest of the culture catches up. In his conversation with Hamish, he talks about what it actually takes to get close to a subject, why he walked away from what he called the best job in media, and the stories and formats he’s building as the bet seems to be paying off.

CORE MEMORY

Started: 2025

Subscribers: Thousands of paid (orange checkmark bestseller)

Format: Newsletter, podcast, video series, documentary films

Team: A crew of writers, producers, editors, and a social media team, led by Ashlee alongside a COO, a chief creative officer, and an operations lead

Extensions and verticals: Multiple writers producing regular newsletter sends across beats; podcast; merch; feature documentary projects in production, including an upcoming Neuralink documentary produced and self-funded through the company

Hamish: Why are we here at Fred’s Place in Mountain View?

Ashlee: I spent most of my early 20s in the Tenderloin [in San Francisco] bonding with dive bars. It was part of my lifestyle. Fred’s has been here for about 60 years. They go back to the ’50s. And down the road, probably about a mile from here, is where Fairchild Semiconductor was—which was like the first real semiconductor company. There’s always been this part of Silicon Valley culture that I like, which is they were boozers. As the chip industry was starting to explode, they were pushing the limits of physics, they were pushing the limits of chemistry, they were all super-competitive at their companies. But as engineers are wont to do, they couldn’t help themselves but come to the bar and reveal how they’d just gotten past something that was challenging the whole industry. They would all share this knowledge, and then the whole industry would move forward. Even today, you have AI companies in this multi-trillion-dollar life-and-death struggle. And those guys don’t go to bars, but they meet up and share their takeaways. They do hot yoga and then share how they figured something out. The same thing, though. So I thought, this bar will be symbolic of those roots and traditions.

Hamish: Ten years ago, you published the first good biography of Elon Musk, which became a massive bestseller and a phenomenon in its own right. You got a lot of access to Elon through the writing of that book. It must have been hard to convince him to give you that time in the first place. Can you tell me about what that experience was like, working on a book like that while giving access to the principal—and this particular kind of principal, who’s prickly?

Ashlee: It was really strange. I’d done a big magazine story on him—that was the first time I’d met him—and we’d got along okay. There was some kind of rapport, and that’s what made me a little bit confident about doing the book. But when I told him what I was doing, he said, “No, I’m not going to participate. I’m not going to help you.” So I spent two years interviewing hundreds of people. Huge chunks of them would report back to Elon. I always thought it was going to work out okay, because he wasn’t actively telling people not to talk to me. He wasn’t making it miserable, which would’ve made life a lot harder. Back then, he was already really litigious. People were afraid of him. Nobody had ever written anything truly revealing. He was kind of the weirdo, almost like a circus freak. I’d come into all these meetings and everyone was like, “He’s going to sue me. I don’t want to talk.” It was really hard for a couple of years.

Then one day I was actually ready to start writing, done with all my interviews. He must have some sixth sense, because it was almost in that moment he called. Elon Musk on my caller ID. I had a landline back then. He said, “You’ve been way more persistent than I ever imagined. I’ll do interviews with you if I can read the book before it comes out and make changes.” I said, “Well, I’m not going to do that. Let’s have dinner and hash it out.” It was one of those moments where he’d either say yes or no. Right there on the spot, he said, “Okay, fine. We’ll do one interview a month for as long as you feel like you need.” Which was incredibly fair.

So we’d meet for dinner once a month. Some dinners were an hour, some were four hours—just depended on his schedule and how things were going. It was totally different days. We’d show up to restaurants in Mountain View, Palo Alto. He’d walk in by himself, sit down at the table. No security, nothing. He had a driver, but the driver didn’t even come in. And nobody in the restaurant seemed to notice who he was.

Hamish: So you got a good book out of it, sold 6 or 7 million copies. What was his response like when it came out?

Ashlee: It was funny. I made sure all the books were on boats heading to stores—about five or six days before it was going to be in stores. I just wanted everything to be where he couldn’t undo it, file a lawsuit and block it or something. But he had spent so much time and been really fair, and it felt like he should read it first. So I sent him a PDF the week before it came out, went to bed, and woke up to this stream of emails. He was basically live-blogging the book as he went through it. He’s always been hung up on the Tesla founding question. Marc Tarpenning and Martin Eberhard, the original founders, would say they founded Tesla. Elon would say, “No, I founded Tesla.” When you look at it, they had filed the paperwork, they were working on it. Would Tesla exist without Elon? Definitely not.

Hamish: Especially not in the way that it currently exists.

Ashlee: No way. In the fact-checking process I told him, “Elon, I am going to say that Marc and Martin founded the company. There is no way around this.” He said, “I understand.” And then in the emails, he’s going off about it again. But otherwise he was okay—really just two things upset him. I’d written about when he and his brother Kimbal were coming out here to start Zip2 and had gotten a used BMW. Kimbal told me he bought it with money from painting houses. Elon said he bought it. I told them they could fight about that. The other thing was a quote from an engineer saying Elon takes too much credit for the engineering at SpaceX. [Elon] said, “You wrote that I take too much credit.” I said, “I didn’t write that, Elon. That’s a quote from an engineer. He’s allowed to have his opinion.” Those were the things he was upset about. Otherwise, fine. He actually sent me an email—which I saved in case things got litigious—saying the book was 95% accurate. For Elon, who already hated journalists, that was incredible.

Hamish: I remember you telling me that at the time. I was like, “Well, that’s an amazing result.”

Ashlee: And it was mostly okay. Then about a week later, the Washington Post did a story: the 27 most outrageous things from the book. A big chunk of it was about what a pain in the ass he was to work for. Funny thing is, when he’d read the book, none of that had really fazed him. He’s actually kind of proud of being a tough boss. But then I think when he saw how the world was reacting to it—Tesla was just starting to get a little competition, hiring was a big thing—I think he worried people weren’t going to want to come work for him. And he just flipped the switch.

Hamish: So a week after he gave you the 95% mark, there’s a press reaction, and then he reacts in the press.

Ashlee: Yeah. He starts saying things—there’s the Google acquisition thing. He’s like, “Who told you that?” I said, “Elon, you know who told me that.” And that was the first time I really experienced firsthand some of what I’d heard about. Emails saying things like, “You’re an a*****e. I’m going to destroy your life.” I figured he needed to vent. But then a friend inside Tesla told me, “He’s just asked me to find the world’s best libel lawyer.” And I think—I’ve never confirmed this with Elon—but I think he did ask somebody whether it was physically possible to buy every copy of the book worldwide and make it disappear.

Hamish: Did he know publishers can print new copies?

Ashlee: ...