“I feel like I was reborn.” Ashlee Vance on launching his media startup, Core Memory

The Elon Musk biographer talks about what’s wrong with tech coverage today and how Washington needs “a chaos agent for a little while.”

Credit: Balazs Gardi

After 14 years as a tech writer and video host at Bloomberg Businessweek, Ashlee Vance feels liberated. Last month, Vance formally launched his own media company, Core Memory, which feels to him a lot like his days at the British tech publication The Register two decades ago. “It was run by the writers, and we just had so much freedom to be funny and cynical and say what we actually thought,” Vance tells Depth Perception. “And it’s kind of amazing, at 47, to come back to this place all over again.”

Vance, perhaps best known for his 2015 best-selling biography of Elon Musk, says he’s been working 18- and 19-hour days on Core Memory, which has two other full-time employees. The core of Core Memory is a self-titled Substack. There’s a podcast and a YouTube channel, and the company is shooting a documentary on brain-computer interfaces. Then there are some scripted projects in the works, two of which revolve around artificial intelligence. On top of all that, Vance is writing a book on OpenAI, which has already been optioned by a “very prestigious production company.”

Last week, Vance, who is based in Silicon Valley and produced the recent Netflix documentary Don’t Die: The Man Who Wants to Live Forever, spoke to Depth Perception about what’s wrong with the tech press today, how he feels about the chaos Musk is causing in the US government, and how AI will turn everything we know — including journalism — completely upside down within the next five to 10 years. The following has been edited for length and clarity. —Mark Yarm

Why did you become a journalist?

I always knew I wanted to be a writer. I thought more of a novelist than a nonfiction writer. I never worked for my school paper or anything like that. I was a philosophy major, and when I was a junior in college, I wanted to live in San Francisco one summer. And I found an internship at Information Week magazine in 1999, so kind of the peak of the dotcom boom. I ended up writing, I don’t know, 50 stories during the summer, and I just found I fell in love with it. I never really even considered being a journalist, and definitely not a tech journalist. I was not a very techie person, but my first story was a scoop — a stupid, minor scoop [about Microsoft retroactively fudging press information], but it was a scoop. I loved the adrenaline rush that came with that and just got hooked.

When Semafor covered the launch of Core Memory, you told Ben Smith, “A lot of what I read in the mainstream media on tech feels like activism to me, and people who are very slanted in their point of view.” Who did you have in mind when you said that?

You’re gonna get me in trouble, but let’s do it. A lot of the publications that would immediately come to mind to a lot of people: the New York Times, the Washington Post, even Bloomberg, to a degree. Maybe a little less the Wall Street Journal.

We went through this weird transition where it was like, yes, I think journalists were probably too soft on tech companies. For a long time, tech was exciting. It was this new thing, and they were afforded a lot of slack that politics and sports and business don’t get. And then, around the 2016 election, there was such a backlash against Facebook and what the internet had wrought. And I think the pendulum has just swung back too far.

If I go to the New York Times and I look at the tech section, it does not strike me that many of the reporters are actually interested in what they're writing about. I do not want to be a propagandist or anything like that. I just have a very genuine, deep interest in science and technology and approach the stories from this baseline of actual curiosity. As opposed to most of the stories I read, it feels like the starting point is hostile.

“I think Trump and Elon were very expressly clear about exactly what they were going to do on a level that we don’t actually often see in politics. And the [near] majority of the country voted for this very thing to happen.” —Ashlee Vance

When your biography of Elon Musk was released in 2015, he was generally well-regarded as a tech “genius,” and now he’s one of the most divisive men on the planet. How much do you think he’s changed in the past decade, as opposed to his true self being revealed?

He’s changed a lot. Even the Elon that I was covering had already gone through a lot of transitions that people kind of forget. He went from being the “it” guy to Silicon Valley getting tired of this dude who was always talking about this stuff that wasn’t happening. And then the companies started to do well. Over that transition, he went from what you would think of as more of the stereotypical kind of tech nerd and started to find himself as a business person.

Over time, there’s been this steady progression where this kind of shy, insecure person has not only grown into celebrity and attention and power, but fully embraced it. The thought of him being up on stage with Trump at a rally, that would have been very hard for me to imagine back in the day. And then obviously his politics have flipped quite dramatically. I understand the people saying that some of this was always lurking in there, and that it’s been unleashed, but I think there’s extremes to what has happened that I would not have seen coming.

So at the risk of sounding like an activist journalist, are you at all concerned by how much power Musk — an unelected figure — has in the Trump administration?

I don’t know if I’m concerned yet. I can see why the left is shocked and does not enjoy what’s happening. If you look at this from the other side, I think Trump and Elon were very expressly clear about exactly what they were going to do on a level that we don’t actually often see in politics. And the [near] majority of the country voted for this very thing to happen.

I have traditionally leaned left, and that was my predisposition. But I was so appalled by the way the government handled Covid, especially in California. I thought the absolute best part of the Covid response was the speed at which they pursued and developed the vaccines; I think pretty much everything else was an absolute shitshow. And if I’m speaking really honestly, I lost almost all faith in the way the government runs, and I’m not fully convinced whatever Elon’s doing is that much worse or different or better than what has come before it.

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You know that given your views on Musk’s involvement in the government, you’ll probably get a lot of shit from the left.

I think Elon tends to be an agent of chaos. I think there are times where that’s worked incredibly well, like if you compare what SpaceX has done versus what NASA has done over the last 20 years, you have to say whatever Elon is doing is working. But when you look at Twitter, it’s a mixed bag. I think people overreacted when he did mass layoffs, saying “The site is going to completely break.” I think the politics and everything that you see on Twitter is a much different experience, and I would argue, a worse experience than what existed before. So there’s pros and cons. I see what’s being reported [about Musk], and some of it is shocking, but I’m so appalled by Washington that I’m just not convinced that it doesn’t need a chaos agent for a little while.

What, in your opinion, is the biggest tech story of the next decade? Is it artificial intelligence?

If, in the next three to five years, it plays out remotely like some of the people I talk to say, I can’t imagine how it could not be. I’m sitting in rooms these days with people who are extremely bright and quite level-headed, and they’re telling me that five years from now, the world is upside down in every sort of way, shape, and form we can imagine. Also, I’m so deep in the biotech moment. I think when we decoded the genome back around 2000, there was this thought that we’re going to cure all these diseases, and medicine was going to change forever. It’s taken a long time, but I think we are actually on the cusp of some extraordinary medical breakthroughs now. And in the next five to 10 years, I think these two things, AI and biotech, sort of collide.

Do you think that AI is an existential threat to journalism?

I’m sure it’s an existential threat to a lot of journalism. If you spend most of your day at your desk, I think you’re in a lot of trouble. I am not saying whatever I do is better or more right than other people, but most of what I do is going out into the world to gather information that doesn’t actually exist on the internet. I at least like to try to convince myself that it’s going to be hard for the computers to do for a long time. I get really sad when I see young journalists who just email people, they don’t even pick up the phone. I mean, the AIs I see today could do a lot of that.

So what makes you hopeful for the future of journalism?

The tools at our disposal. If you at all have a creative impulse and are willing to work hard, almost anyone with quite limited resources can do fantastic things now. I’m not sitting over here having raised like $300 million or anything like that, and I can start a media company that can do all of these things across it. I don’t want to give people a false impression. I think it’s hard to build and sustain an audience, but I think for the people who can, to actually be able to have your own readers and all this freedom, it’s incredible. I feel like I was reborn.

Further reading from Ashlee Vance

• “Take Me to Bed or Lose Me Forever in the Supersonic Corridor” (Core Memory, Feb. 3, 2025)

• “A Young Man Used AI to Build A Nuclear Fusor and Now I Must Weep” (Core Memory, Jan. 29, 2025)

• When the Heavens Went on Sale: The Misfits and Geniuses Racing to Put Space Within Reach (Ecco; originally published in 2023)

• Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future (Ecco; originally published in 2015)

• “Neuralink’s First Patient: ‘It Blows My Mind So Much’” (Bloomberg Businessweek, May 16, 2024)