If Books Could Kill

Elon Musk Part 2

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Peter: Michael.


Michael: Peter.


Peter: What do you know about the period of Elon Musk's Life starting in 2018?


Michael: All I know is that I appreciate his dedication to setting up a website where everyone says that whites are the master race and shows that's not the case at all.


[If Books Could Kill theme]


Peter: Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson, Part 2.


Michael: Part 2, Peter's first Part 2.


Peter: They said that I was constitutionally incapable of doing it. [Michael laughs] And for a very long time they were right. In Part 1, we centered our discussion around Tesla and SpaceX and some of his, like, offshoot companies. And I left it on a cliffhanger.


Michael: Oh, yeah.


Peter: About 2018-


Michael: What's going to happen?


Peter: -which Walter Isaacson frames as a tumultuous year for Elon Musk. And it's really the year where the media's fawning coverage of Elon starts to grind to a halt.


Michael: You can only be a huge piece of shit for like 10 or 15 years before the media really catches on.


Peter: So, there was one seminal event that really flipped popular perceptions of Elon Musk on their head. The Thai cave incident.


Michael: Pedo guy. Yes.


Peter: Yes. I am going to send you a bit from the book.


Michael: Also, as soon as you say seminal event, it makes me think we're going to talk about his, like, 12 kids.


Peter: I don't like that.


Michael: Too many seminal events.


Peter: I don't like that you said that. [Michael laughs] 


Michael: That's on you, man.


Peter: No, no, it's not. [laughs] 


Michael: [laughs] I'm blaming you.


Peter: Don't just, don't just hear the word seminal [Michael laughs] and be like, "you know what that made me think of," and then blame me. [laughs]


Michael: So, Isaacson says Musk was scrolling through Twitter and stumbled upon a message from an unknown user with very few followers saying, "Hi, Sir, if possible, can you help in any way to get the 12 Thailand boys and their coach out of the cave?" He was referring to a dozen Thai soccer players who had been trapped by a flood while exploring a cave. Then his action hero impulse kicked in. Working with engineers at SpaceX and the boring company, he began building a pod like mini submarine that he thought could be sent into the flooded cave to rescue the boys. Sam Teller got a friend to let them use a school swimming pool for testing that weekend. And Musk began tweeting pictures of the device. Oh, his action hero impulse.


Peter: Action hero Impulse. No dude, this is a delusional savior complex. [laughs] 


Michael: I know. Dude, just give money or something. People don't need you to design things.


Peter: You know one of themes of Part 1 was like, there are a few areas in which I actually think Elon shines and they were on display at Tesla and SpaceX in like his early work there and what he was able to accomplish from a business perspective.


Michael: But now they've been buried under snow drifts of cocaine.


Peter: It then leads to this man with this incredibly outsized view of himself.


Michael: Yeah, yeah.


Peter: And he's like, "I'm the smartest guy in every room." So, like you have a bunch of experts working on this situation and he's like, "I'm going to make a submarine."


Michael: I would not say this is an action hero impulse. No, I would say this is an egomaniac impulse.


Peter: So, eventually kids are rescued, the sub was not needed, and it would not have worked because the cave's passages were too narrow. Like they wouldn't have made it through. You needed the kids to actually like move their way through themselves.


Michael: Also, that's like such classic Elon, where he just like rushes through to provide some technological fix to something.


Peter: 100%.


Michael: And he skips the part where you actually understand the problem at hand.


Peter: Dude, if you could fit like an eight-foot submarine tank through the passage, [Michael giggles] like, do you think it would be really difficult to get him out of whatever?


Michael: Yeah. They would have rescued the fucking kids by then.


Peter: A 63-year-old English cave explorer named Vernon Unsworth, who had advised the rescuers on the scene, gave an interview to CNN where he described Musk's efforts as a PR stunt that had no chance of working. And then he said that, "He can stick his submarine where it hurts." Taking a stab at Elon on television. And if you know Elon, you know that he is not going to take that lightly.


Michael: That's his action hero impulse.


Peter: He responds with a bunch of tweets going after this guy, and then at one point says, "sorry, pedo guy, you really did ask for it." So, then a Twitter user says, "Hey, are you calling Unsworth a pedophile?" And Musk says, "Bet ya a signed dollar it's true."


Michael: Nice.


Peter: So, this guy sues Elon for defamation. Send you a bit. This is from Isaacson.


Michael: When Ryan Mac of Buzzfeed asked Musk for a comment, Musk prefaced his email response by saying “It was off the record.” But Buzzfeed had never agreed to that stipulation and so printed the barrage that followed. "I suggest that you call people you know in Thailand, find out what's actually going on, and stop defending child rapists you fucking asshole," Musk began. He's an old single white guy from England who's been traveling to or living in Thailand for 30 to 40 years, mostly Pattaya beach, until moving to Chiang Rai for a child bride who was about 12 years old at the time. There's only one reason people go to Pattaya beach. It isn't where you'd go for caves, but it is where you'd go for something else. Chiang Rai is renowned for child sex trafficking. The statement about Unsworth's wife was untrue. [giggles] And Musk's allegation did not help bolster his claim that the phrase pedo guy was simply a random insult rather than a specific allegation. So, basically this guy lives in Thailand, therefore he's a pedophile, and then just, like a bunch of lying.


Peter: That's basically it, right?


Michael: Yeah.


Peter: So, Isaacson does not cover the trial, but the basic story is that Elon has a very talented lawyer, Alex Spiro, who runs circles around Unsworth's lawyer, who is Lin Wood. If that name sounds familiar to anyone, Lin Wood is like a 2020 election denier.


Michael: And, like a Trump weird, Trumpy guy.


Peter: Yeah, like a known conspiracist freak. This is a couple of years before 2020. But Wood is not a great choice here. He assessed damages at 190 million, which made people think it was a big cash grab. He didn't seem to understand Twitter in a big way that Elon's lawyer makes the case is basically by saying on Twitter, like, the boundaries of jokes are a little more fuzzy than they are in other situations.


Michael: Oh, that was the defense?


Peter: I mean, the defense was that it was unserious. That it was sort of a joke. None of that's actually really true.


Michael: Yeah, yeah.


Peter: He just had a way better lawyer.


Michael: One of the world historical bag fumbles, this guy's choice of a lawyer.


Peter: 100%. 100%. I mean, he should have at least gotten a few million bucks.


Michael: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Settle out of court, whatever. Yeah.


Peter: So, then there's another controversy in 2018, Musk tweets, "I’m considering taking Tesla private at $420 funding secured."


Michael: Oh god.


Peter: This was half true. He was, in fact, considering taking Tesla private, possibly even around that price, even though doing it at 420 is simply an incredibly hilarious joke.


Michael: You're so cool, Elon. Oh, my God. 420. He knows what it means. He's just like us.


Peter: At the end of the day, he's just cool. [laughs] He's just flat out cool.


Michael: Next, he's going to say nice after hears the word 69.


Peter: Dude.


Michael: Wow, man. Got it.


Peter: Me at home just cheering. [laughs] Get a Milan. Use those jokes. [Michael laughs] So, the part of this that's not true is the funding secured part, which makes this all potentially fraud.


Michael: It is wild how much, like, just openly illegal shit he's done.


Peter: These, like, consecutive scenarios are very formative for him in the sense that after this, he very much acts untouchable-


Michael: Yeah, yeah.


Peter: From a legal perspective, because he's just like, "Oh, there aren't consequences. I can just call a guy a pedo."


Michael: This is why I've always said that we actually do need broken windows policing for elites.


Peter: Yeah, yeah, yeah.


Michael: Any of this shit, like, you spend a night in jail, you pay a meaningful fine. It's like, even once you let little things slide, because these are crimes of calculation, right? They're not crimes of passion.


Peter: I think two weeks in Rikers. [Michael laughs]


Michael: Or that.


Peter: All right, here we go. I'm going to send you this.


Michael: In order to avoid a federal lawsuit for misleading investors, Musk's lawyers worked on a deal with the SEC to settle the charges. He would remain CEO of Tesla, step down as chairman, pay a $40 million fine, and put two independent directors on his board. Musk would not be allowed to make public comments or tweets about any material information without getting clearance from a company monitor. Gracias and Tesla CFO pushed hard for him to accept these terms and put the controversy and perhaps his months of meltdown behind him.


But Musk surprised them by abruptly rejecting the proposed deal. On the night of September 26, the SEC filed a lawsuit seeking to ban him for life from running Tesla or any other public company.


Peter: So, this causes Elon to fold.


Michael: Correct.


Peter: Tesla's stock plummets 17% in a day. And eventually he accepts the deal. Tesla stock recovers. Everyone takes a deep breath.


Michael: It's weird how people respond when they experience consequences.


Peter: That's the thing is he's like, "Well, I don't need to worry about this $40 million fine. Go fuck yourself." And then they make a move to prevent him from running any public company ever again. And he's like, "Oh, fuck. All right"


Michael: You hit him where it hurts and he caves.


Peter: Then Musk gives a weird, very erratic interview with the New York Times. The interviewer asks him at one point if he was on drugs when he sent that tweet, and he says “No.” But he's so, like, exhausted and weird sounding in the midst of this interview that the interviewer asks him, "Are you okay?" [laughs] So, here's Elon--


Michael: Should I speak only out of the front of my mouth? [Peter laughs]


Peter: You got to keep your mouth small. [Michael laughs] 


Michael: "It's not been great, actually," Musk said. "I've had friends come by who are really concerned." Then he paused for a long time, overcome by emotion. "There were times when I didn't leave the factory for three or four days. Days when I didn't go outside," he said. "This has really come at the expense of seeing my kids." Oh, we're going to do, like, a sympathetic portrait now, right Peter? [Peter giggles] This guy doesn't see his kids. He has 18 kids.


Peter: The New York Times story says Mr. Musk alternated between laughter and tears. He said he had been working up to 120 hours a week recently and not taken more than a week off since 2001 when he was bedridden with malaria. And then, like other organizations are picking up this story. The headline in Bloomberg is, "Erratic NYT Interview Raises Alarm About Tesla Chief's Health." So, these stories are piling up. They're building into this, like, meta narrative that Elon is unwell, unstable, right? So, his people try to combat that. I'm going to send you a bit.


Michael: It says in the wake of stories about his precarious psychological condition, Musk's public relations consultant, Juleanna Glover, recommended that he clear up the issue by giving a long interview. [Peter laughs] Who does he have advising him? [laughs] Let's have you in public more, Elon.


Peter: The people are going to want to see more of you. Elon. [Michael laughs] 


Michael: This is like Tom Cruise after the Scientology interview. [laughs] Just like, let's lock this motherfucker up. Do not give another interview for the rest of your life.


Peter: They're like, "Put him on Oprah [Michael laughs] and try to act like a normal human being who loves a lady.”


Michael: "We just need to kill this nonsense speculation around your mental state," she wrote. She said she would come up with options that present you at length, leading the companies in charge, droll and self-aware. She added a warning. "In no universe is it okay for you to continue to contemplate the sexual predilections of a Thai diver who insulted you." [laughs] Let's get you out in public more and don't do the things that you do when you're out in public.


Peter: You know how every thought that comes into your head is fucking dumb as hell. [Michael laughs] So, the solution, the strategy, of course. Go on, Rogan.


Michael: Oh, God.


Peter: This is when he smokes weed on the show.


Michael: Yeah, yeah. With, like, big blunts together. Yeah.


Peter: He offends, like, the stiffs by doing drugs, and then he offends cool people by looking like a big fucking dork while he's doing it.


Michael: God.


Peter: During this period, there's a rupture with Kimbal his brother, various top executives are leaving his companies. This is followed with the announcement of the Cybertruck the next year. We talked about the failure of the Cybertruck the last episode.


Michael: Right.


Peter: It's important to understand it not just as a business failure, but one of, like, the early cracks in his public image.


Michael: Because it used to be like, “Okay, he's quirky, he's kind of an asshole, but he has all these successes technologically.” But the cybertruck was just like a failure on every level, like, aesthetically, culturally, and financially.


Peter: A lot of the public had this view, very similar to what Isaacson pushes and we talked about last episode. That's like, “Yeah, he's a weirdo, but this is the cost of genius.” And then you see that stupid truck and you're like, "Actually." I'll send you a little bit here.


Michael: On November 21, 2019, the truck was driven onto a stage in the design studio for a presentation to the press and invited guests. There were gasps. Many in the crowd clearly couldn't believe that this was actually the vehicle they'd come to see. CNN reported “The cybertruck looks like a large metal trapezoid on wheels. More like an art piece than a truck.” There was also an unexpected surprise when Von Holzhausen tried to show the toughness of the truck. He swung at the body with a sledgehammer, which didn't make a dent. Then he threw a metal ball at one of the armor glass windows to show it wouldn't break. To his surprise, it cracked. "Oh, my fucking God," Musk said, "Well, maybe that was a little too hard." [laughs] I heard my favorite description of it was someone said it looked like a PlayStation 1 asset.


Peter: Yeah, yeah, yeah.


Michael: Not enough polygons.


Peter: For sure. [Michael laughs] Sending you the next bit.


Michael: Afterward, he took Grimes for a spin in the prototype to Nobu restaurant, where the valet parkers just stared at it without touching. On the way out, pursued by paparazzi, he drove over a pylon in the parking lot with a no left turn sign and turns left.


[laughter]


Michael: That's also just the, like, "Watch this." And then just, like, spin down.


Peter: Yeah, yeah. There are these moments when you're wondering if Isaacson is cool. [Michael laughs] You know what I mean? Isaacson is too much of a journalist to ever talk the amount of shit-


Michael: Yeah, yeah, yeah.


Peter: -that I would like him to talk. But I am fascinated by these moments when it seems like it's revealed that Isaacson does understand that Elon Musk is a little bit of an idiot--


Michael: Or he's such a loser that it's impossible to write about him without back peeking through sometimes.


Peter: That lands us, if you're paying attention to the chronology here in 2020. And as you might imagine, things are about to unravel very quickly, both in Elon Musk's brain and across the world. The pandemic hits and two things are happening at once. One, stay at home orders in California are keeping Musk's factories from operating, at least for the first part of 2020. Two, he's on Twitter getting his brain fucking fried, dude.


Michael: If you went to his feed at this time, he was tweeting like hundreds of times a day, like, this rich guy sitting there on his fucking phone.


Peter: This is, I think-- This is when his belief that he's the smartest person in every room and that he can, like, easily solve every problem, it's really looming large because society has a very big problem at this point. [giggles] Right? And he believes that he could figure this out, like, just put Elon in charge.


Michael: Of course. Yeah.


Peter: One of the biggest misfires of the book, and it's a severe one, is that Isaacson compresses politics into a single chapter out of over 90.


Michael: Wait, really?


Peter: There's just one chapter titled Politics.


Michael: What?


Peter: It covers Covid Musk's conflict with the Biden administration a little bit, some Ukraine stuff, and like his obsession with wokeness, but it's just a few pages.


Michael: That's wild. Because that's like the story of Elon in the last five years. Like, he's completely lost his mind and become obsessed with this shit.


Peter: This is the story of Part 2. Isaacson, starting in 2021, is in the room for a lot of this and he's telling the story that he wanted to tell, which is his great man biography about this complicated guy who gets shit done. And at the same time, he's missing the big story, which is about the radicalization of the richest man on earth.


Michael: And like, I feel like there was also this weird press at the time where like New York Times wrote an article of like, "His ideology is not left or right," as he's becoming just like a total run of the mill, right wing psycho.


Peter: I think this is the single biggest problem with Isaacson's book. He had an incredible story. He was sitting in the room while Elon Musk was losing his fucking mind.


Michael: Yeah.


Peter: And he relegates it to a C plot. Isaacson is also not savvy enough to understand Elon's anti-union activity or worker safety stuff as being part of his politics. He also doesn't see any through lines between Elon's childhood in an apartheid state and his modern political views.


Michael: Also, I feel like the pedo guy thing is also telling where he sees some random guy giving him an insult.


Peter: Yeah.


Michael: He can't just be like, "Just some random guy. I'll move on." He has to fire back and he has to escalate. And that's also, like, part of the political radicalization. Like, it's all resentment based.


Peter: So, Isaacson is in the room starting in, like, September 2021. So, a little after the period we're talking about right now. But that makes it almost less excusable because at that point you had a lot of information about Elon's early radicalization and you still don't think that's the story. Right?


Michael: Yeah, yeah, yeah.


Peter: Isaacson says, "Musk had never been very political. Like many techies, he was liberal on social issues, but with a dollop of libertarian resistance to regulations and political correctness. He contributed to presidential campaigns of Barack Obama and then Hillary Clinton, and he was a vocal critic of Donald Trump in the 2016 election." He tells the story of how Elon goes to meet Trump after he's elected, and [giggles] Trump is, like, too stupid to understand what Elon does exactly and starts talking about getting NASA going again.


Even though, like, Elon is a competitor with NASA, [Michael laughs] Elon's just like, "Okay." I wouldn't say that. Musk had never been very political. He had donated just, like a little bit over a million dollars before he really gets going in 2022. And it's really targeted. It looks a lot like lobbying local politicians. He's trying to win over people in California. He's trying to win over people in Texas once he moves his factories there. The idea that he was liberal before, it doesn't really seem true.


Michael: Right.


Peter: He had some alliances with Democrats, but they were alliances of convenience. They weren't ideological.


Michael: Yeah, yeah, yeah.


Peter: Isaacson does cover some of Elon's early pandemic meltdowns, but it's very telling what he omits. So, in early March, Elon tweets, “The coronavirus panic is dumb." He then sends out an email to the whole company saying, "I'd like to be super clear that if you feel the slightest bit ill or even uncomfortable, please do not feel obligated to come to work. I will personally be at work. My frank opinion remains that the harm from the coronavirus panic far exceeds that of the virus itself." Isaacson does not mention Musk's various predictions about the pandemic. [Michael laughs] 


On March 19, 2020, Musk tweeted, "Based on current trends, probably close to zero new cases in US by end of April."


Michael: Nailed it.


Peter: Killer, dude, you're so smart. Current trends. Oh, it's like fucking Rain Man. In his brain. He's analyzing the current trend.


Michael: Although the current trend at the time was like a giant hockey stick upward. 


[laughter]


Peter: The current trend was just so much more Covid every week [Michael laughs]. In September 2020, he said that he would not take any vaccine. He seemed to later backtrack on that he took the vaccine, but then he expressed skepticism about boosters after having a bad reaction to the vaccine. Isaacson ignores that too. I don't entirely know why. I wonder whether it just interferes too much with the narrative of Elon as the guy who is, like, the master of any expertise that he sets his mind to mastering.


Michael: It's also weird like this-- I feel like the radicalization to the right of all these Silicon Valley guys kind of at the same time is one of the biggest political stories of the last decade. But most of the media seems reluctant to tell it. It's like, "Oh, they're quirky," or like, "Ooh, it doesn't fall easily onto left or right."


Peter: You know to shut up and dribble, when [crosstalk] started talking about politics, Fox News types were like, "Shut up and dribble." I feel like we need that for these guys. [Michael laughs] It's like, “Ship me my fucking package, dude.” [Michael laughs] “Just shut your mouth and get to work.”


So, in August 2021, Joe Biden hosts some of the great American automakers at the White House. But he seems to snub Tesla. The reason given was that the automakers he hosted were all big employers of United Auto Workers and Tesla, of course, hadn't unionized. Musk, of course, takes this quite personally.


Michael: It's funny, there's no situation in which you'd imagine him going, "Huh, maybe I should just, like, hire some union labor [Peter laughs] and that'll fix the problem." No, you know, he's just going to, like, have a little fucking tantrum.


Peter: And then, things get a little bit worse. I just sent you something.


Michael: It says Biden went even further that November when he visited a GM factory in Detroit with CEO Mary Barra and members of the UAW leadership. "Detroit's leading the world in electric vehicles," Biden said, "Mary, I can remember talking to you way back in January about the need for America to lead in electric vehicles. You changed the whole story, Mary. You electrified the entire automobile industry. I'm serious. You led and it matters." In fact, GM had started to lead the way to electric vehicles in the 1990s, but it had pulled the plug on the effort when Biden made this statement. GM had only one electric vehicle, the Chevy Bolt, which had been recalled and was not being produced at the time.


Peter: Say what you want, this is a snub.


Michael: Yeah, this is wrong. Yeah, yeah, yeah.


Peter: There is only one name, especially at this time that's like really revolutionized the industry.


Michael: Also, my parents drove a Chevy Bolt and we tried to take it to my grandma's house in Tacoma like an hour away and it broke down in Factoria and we had to call a tow truck. [laughs] So, maybe Elon was right all along. Maybe it is worth it. Peter. [Peter laughs] I wouldn’t have made it to Tacoma that day.


Peter: Or you might have died in a battery fire. [Michael laughs]


Michael: Or that.


Peter: Until someone-- by the way, until someone has like a very clear solution to the battery fire problem, I'm-- I don't know that I can-- I could ever buy-- like a Tesla, like someone new, someone woke as fuck [Michael laughs] could take over the company and I don't know that I could do it.


Michael: I think it's cool that cars turn into saw scenarios while you're driving on the freeway. I think that's great.


Peter: That would be a cool in a situation where there's a battery fire. If they could program it so that Jigsaw's face comes up on the screen. [Michael laughs] In December 2021, Elon starts tweeting about "the woke mind virus" terminology that he uses to this day. Here's Isaacson.


Michael: Musk had taken up the cause of battling what he considered to be the excesses of political correctness and the woke culture of progressive social justice activists. When I asked him why, he responded, “Unless the woke mind virus, which is fundamentally anti-science, anti-merit and anti-human in general is stopped, civilization will never become multiplanetary." Good point, Elon, good point.


Peter: I’ve always said that. [Michael giggles]


Michael: “Musk's reaction was partly triggered by his daughter Jenna's transition, her embrace of radical socialist politics and her decision to break off relations with him. He feels he lost a son who changed first and last names and won't speak to him anymore because of this woke mind virus," says Jared Birchall, the manager of his personal office. "He is a first-hand witness on a very personal level of the damaging effect of being indoctrinated by this woke mind religion." So, it's actually worse. It's actually a personal animus against his own daughter. [laughs] 


Peter: You might think that this is political, but it's actually he just hates his trans daughter.


Michael: In fairness, he hates his children.


Peter: So yeah. Vivian Jenna Wilson. I think she goes by Vivian more in the book.


Michael: Okay.


Peter: Isaacson says Jenna. I'm honestly not sure which is her preference, but I'm going to send you a little bit more about her.


Michael: It says “Musk had made peace with Jenna's transitioning even though he had not embraced the protocols about listing one's pronouns. He believed that she was rejecting him because of her political ideology. “It's full-on communism and a general sentiment that if you're rich, you're evil” he said. It was all very jangling for Musk, “We are simultaneously being told that gender differences do not exist and that genders are so profoundly different that irreversible surgery is the only option” he tweeted that week.”


Peter: Now, does this sound like someone who has made peace with his daughter transitioning? Isaacson is, like, very credulous of just, like, "Look. Yes. He accepts his daughter is trans. He's just a little bit confused."


Michael: Yeah, yeah.


Peter: Again, Isaacson is not familiar enough with right wing ideology to recognize that Elon's acceptance of Vivian is disingenuous. Right? He mocks pronouns. He makes these sorts of like, "Oh, I just don't understand it," comments about trans people, which, like, if you're tuned into the right wing, you would very quickly clock as someone who is hiding their transphobia. But Isaacson cannot seem to read between the lines here. And so, if you read this book, you might be confused about why Musk now openly deadnames his daughter and, like, calls for the criminalization of gender affirming care. Right?


Michael: He accepted his daughter's conversion to Judaism. Then he did tweet about how Jews are lizard people. 


Peter: [laughs] Yeah.


Michael: If I was in the room as Musk's radicalization was happening, I would ask about his news sources because these are like-


Peter: Yeah, right.


Michael: -very clearly far right talking points from, like, far right websites that he's reading.


Peter: Vivian spoke about the book publicly and said Isaacson never reached out to her-


Michael: No way really.


Peter: -very indicative of his failures here because he's only really interested in this as it impacts Elon's arc. He has no interest in the people who Elon hurts.


Michael: Because to say that they made peace without talking to her.


Peter: What he said is Elon made peace with the transition. Not that he made peace with her.


Michael: Right. Not that they're in contact or they have a positive relationship.


Peter: I mean, it's just outrageous.


Michael: I'm fine with my daughter marrying a black guy. We just don't talk. And I'm just, like, tweeting slurs about black people constantly. But I made peace with it.


Peter: That reminds me very vaguely, I think I told you once about my experience in Portland, Maine, a few years back, where it was somehow a lesbian town during the day and then also the most reactionary place on earth during the night when all the all, like, the white boy townies came in.


Michael: And you got called an F slur because of your sweater.


Peter: I got called an F slur because I was dressed good. [laughs] And at one point, were, like, sharing a cigarette with some kid who, to this point, had seemed perfectly reasonable, and he was like, "Oh, I had to get out of the house. My sister's husband's there." And we were like, "Oh, he sucks or something." He's like, "Well, he's black, which--" [Michael laughs] And then there's like a pause, and we're like, "Okay." And he was like-- He's like, "What's like-- I don't have a problem with." And then he just trailed off.


[laughter]


Peter: And that was it. And we were like, "Oh, right."


Michael: Also, Peter, can we sell the sweater that got you called an F slur in our merch store? [Peter laughs] Can we steal the IP? If you want to get called a faggot in Maine, here's a sweater you can buy. [giggles]


Peter: If there's a way to make money off of being called a slur, I will do it. [Michael laughs] So, let's think on it. Back to Elon sort of fixation on wokeness. Here's Isaacson.


Michael: “On a more mundane level, he had become convinced that wokeness was destroying humor. [Michael giggles] His own jokes tended to be filled with smirking references to 69, other sex acts, body fluid, pooping, farts, dope smoking, and topics that would crack up a dorm room of stoned freshmen. So, he's eight.”


Peter: Yeah.


Michael: “Once a fan of the satirical news site the Onion, he switched his loyalty to the Babylon Bee, a Christian conservative site, and gave them an interview at the end of 2021. ‘Wokeness wants to make comedy illegal, which is not cool’ he contended, ‘Trying to shut down David Chappelle. Come on, man, that's crazy. Do we want a humorless society that is simply rife with condemnation and hate and no forgiveness? At its heart, wokeness is divisive, exclusionary, and hateful. It gives mean people a shield to be mean and cruel, armed with false virtue.’ That's why I have disowned my trans daughter, because I'm against being mean.’”


Peter: Well, that's that-- it's very funny to be, like, "Woke police are trying to sort of govern what's funny." And also, "I don't think the Onion is funny anymore." [laughs] Like, “All right, dude.” So, at this point, he's very primed to become a full-on reactionary, and then he gets pushed into it. Here's a little bit by wokeness.


Michael: Are you about to say wokeness did run amok in 2020? Like [unintelligible 00:28:35] 


Peter: This is a little more classic, rich guy radicalization arc.


Michael: In May 2022, Musk got a call from Business Insider, which was about to run a story saying that he exposed himself to a flight attendant on his private jet and asked for a hand job. In return the story went, he would buy her a pony because she loved horses. [giggles] Musk denied the claims and noted that he had no flight attendants on his jet. But documents showed that Tesla had paid the woman $250,000 in severance in 2018. When the story appeared, the company's stock fell 10%, and Musk's political resentments were further inflamed. He believed that the story was leaked by a friend of the woman who was, in his words, “an activist, woke, far left Democrat.” Wow. I guess jokes really are illegal.


Peter: I mean, that is classic comedy. [Michael laughs] Jerk me off and I'll buy you a pony.


Michael: Yeah. [laughs] 


Peter: So, Isaacson says, “As soon as heard the story was about to run, Musk tried to inoculate himself with a tweet, casting it in political terms. ‘In the past, I voted Democrat because they were mostly the kindness party, but they have become the party of division and hate. So, I can no longer support them and will vote Republican. Now watch their dirty tricks campaign against me unfold.’"


Michael: Dude, right-wing people fall for this shit every time. It's so fucking funny.


Peter: It's so funny. It's so funny that, like, someone's like, "Hey, they're about to tell the story of when you tried to get a hand job for a horse." And then he's like, "Keep your eye out for Democratic dirty tricks again,"


[laughter]


Michael: And no one on the right gives a shit. They'll just embrace it with open arms. Like, "Yeah, yeah, this guy's a huge piece of shit, whatever."


Peter: If anyone, if any public figure ever tweets like, "I've angered the deep state. So, whatever you hear about me is just them trying to get back at me." That person did it for sure. [Michael laughs] Whatever is about to drop is real as shit.


Michael: They're going to say “I killed a bear and left it in Central Park just because I killed a bear and left it in Central Park.”


Peter: So, this is the era where Musk's political transformation becomes more obvious. He publicly announces that he voted for a Republican congressional candidate in the summer of 2022, which Isaacson doesn't mention. He also says that independent voters should vote Republican in 2022 because Democrats are in power.


Michael: Yeah. That's also the thing of everyone wants to fucking support Republicans without just saying they're a fucking Republican only because only they're out of power.


Peter: Isaacson does not mention that either. He is pretty clearly aware of this political shift. He just doesn't really discuss it in any depth.


Michael: That is insane to cover all this in one fucking chapter.


Peter: Around the same time, Musk is hobnobbing with a lot of the PayPal guys, right? Who range from ideological libertarians to just fascists. One of them is David Sacks, who Isaacson describes as, "not rigidly partisan."


Michael: Guys, guys.


Peter: Now, in 1995, Sacks co-authored a book with Peter Thiel titled The Diversity Myth, which was like a screed against political correctness. It is true that Sacks had bounced around politically at times. He supported Romney, then he supported Hillary. But by the time Isaacson is writing this, he's very distinctly right wing. He was a leading figure behind the campaign, to recall Chesa Boudin in San Francisco, the progressive DA. He called him a Soros DA. [Michael giggles] 


Michael: Impossible to say where he lands on the ideological spectrum though.


Peter: He was also a pack that donated six figures to DeSantis.


Michael: Yeah.


Peter: So, Isaacson, again, just sort of blind to this type of reactionary ideology, which is wild because, again, he once ran CNN. And by the way, Sacks now works in the Trump administration, [Michael giggles] not rigidly partisan.


Michael: This is like my parents. My dad walked in on me making out with a girl when I was in, like, ninth grade or something. And he coasted on that for years. It's like all this other evidence that I was gay was piling up. And my dad was like, "But you made out with that girl." I was like, "That was like 10 years ago, dad.” I asked for a Barbie Dream House for Christmas when I was seven years old."


[laughter]


Michael: You can just ignore the one piece of evidence against it, dad. [laughs] 


Peter: It's like a scale and on the right is, like, suck 10 dicks, [Michael laughs] and on the left is kissed one girl when 14 and they're dead even in your dad's mind.


Michael: There's a clinging onto that with the girl, when I was 14.


Peter: Now, to take a pause from politics for a bit. There is one big, famous error in this book. Big enough that he had to edit it in future editions.


Michael: Interesting.


Peter: It is about Starlink. Starlink is a subsidiary of SpaceX. They provide Internet service through satellites.


Michael: Okay.


Peter: So, there's a piece in the book that says that Musk ordered the shutdown of Starlink during a Ukrainian attack on Russian naval forces in Crimea. So, here's the passage.


Michael: Throughout the evening and into the night, Musk personally took charge of the situation. Allowing the use of Starlink for the attack, he concluded, could be a disaster for the world. So, he secretly told his engineers to turn off coverage within 100km of the Crimean coast. As a result, when the Ukrainian drone subs got near the Russian fleet in Sevastopol, they lost connectivity and washed ashore harmlessly.


Peter: So, this excerpt is published by CNN and the Washington Post before publication of the book, and a lot of people flag it as questionable.


Michael: Really? Okay, I didn't know about this.


Peter: So, first of all, what's the source for this? There was no reporting on Ukrainian subs washing ashore anywhere. It's also a very weirdly active role for Musk in this war, right? Like, he supplied Starlink capability, but now he's actively deciding that a specific attack shouldn't happen. This circulates and Elon goes to Twitter to dispute it. He says, "No, what happened is sort of the opposite. There was no Starlink service in that region. Ukrainian authorities requested we provide Starlink services for an attack, and we declined because they thought that would be too active of a role in the war effort for Starlink." So, they're like, "No, we're not doing that. We're not going to provide additional services for attacks."


Isaacson responds, saying, "To clarify on the Starlink issue, the Ukrainians thought coverage was enabled all the way to Crimea, but it was not. They asked Musk to enable it for their drone sub attack on the Russian fleet. Musk did not enable it because he thought, probably correctly, that would cause a major war. Based on my conversations with Musk, I mistakenly thought the policy to not allow Starlink to be used for an attack on Crimea had been first decided on the night of the Ukrainian attempted sneak attack."


Michael: That's a huge fuck up.


Peter: Isaacson frames this as a misunderstanding. But you look at the passage. And like, where did the imagery of the Ukrainian subs washing ashore come from?


Michael: Because he wasn't getting it from news reports, obviously, because there were no news reports.


Peter: And if Musk declined to turn on Starlink coverage for this region, the subs wouldn't have been out there to begin with. Right?


Michael:  Yeah, yeah.


Peter: So, this is one of those things that really highlights how bad Isaacson's actual journalism is, to the extent it was a misunderstanding, it could have been addressed by looking for sources besides Elon himself. This is the problem with an unreliable primary source.


Michael: Also, it's interesting that he twists this to make Elon look worse, which is not something he does throughout the rest of the book.


Peter: I think it's kind of a crazy position to be put in either way, not to sympathize with Elon, but like, fucking Ukraine is like, "Hey, can you help us with this attack?" And you're like, "Jesus Christ, I'm in a fucking war now?"


Michael: So, the point of this episode is that Elon is falsely accused of having right wing ideology, but he's actually standing in between. He's a hero, both sides have a problem.


Peter: So, where we land next is the Twitter saga. During the Covid era, he has become steadily radicalized and like many conservatives, obsessed with the idea that Twitter is stifling free speech and censoring conservative voices. Right? Part of this is like his woke mind virus thing and the idea that wokeness spreads on social media.


Michael: And also, just the general right wing victimhood complex.


Peter: During Covid, the stock market heats up, especially in tech. Tesla's stock is going nuts. Elon cashes out some stock and he is flush. He has his people start buying up shares of Twitter. He doesn't initially have a clear plan. He's just trying to exert leverage over Twitter. This leads to Twitter offering him a board seat, but he eventually becomes convinced that a board seat is not enough here. If you remember, I had mentioned that during the initial PayPal debacle, he left that realizing that he needed full control over these companies. He's not satisfied without control.


Michael: And the robot army. Yes, that's right. You want control.


Peter: So, he makes an offer to buy Twitter and take it private for $44 billion, a 38% premium over where shares were trading the prior day, which for a company like this, which has struggled with growth, from a financial perspective, it's a slam dunk. So, they accept. Isaacson actually has a relatively coherent and interesting thesis for Elon's reasoning here. I think this is worth reading.


Michael: “I believe there was a psychological, personal yearning. Twitter was the ultimate playground. As a kid, he was beaten and bullied on the playground, never having been endowed with the emotional dexterity needed to thrive on that rugged terrain. It instilled a deep pain and sometimes caused him to react to slights far too emotionally, but it also is what girded him to be able to face the world and fight every battle fiercely. When he felt dinged up, cornered, bullied, either online or in person, it took him back to a place that was super painful, where he was dissed by his father and bullied by his classmates. But now he could own the playground. I think this is giving him way too much credit.”


Peter: Probably gives him a lot of credit, but I think the owning the playground thing is an interesting framework and feels right to me. Everyone's jabbing at each other on Twitter and he just wants to own the whole thing. He wants to be in control of it.


Michael: I think he's experiencing emotional pain at people being mean to him and people not liking him or laughing at his jokes or whatever. Like, he's bad at posting.


Peter: Yeah, yeah.


Michael: And so, instead of, I don't know, in any way internalizing, there'd be like, "I should better at posting" or "I should fucking solve world hunger or do something to make people like me." He's just like, "Fuck you. I'm going to buy this. I'm going to-- I'm going to make you like me." Like, I think a lot of it is like resentment based or like a kid kicking over a sandcastle because somebody else built one better than him.


Peter: He believes that he can quintuple Twitter's revenue by 2028. He wants to do user subscriptions and data licensing as the primary drivers of revenue. And he also has, like, this idea that, like, he will recreate X.com as he envisioned it in 1999.


Michael: He has only had one idea in his entire life that he wants to implement it now.


Peter: But also, the scale of it is a little bit preposterous, which we talked about last time. It's just like, "Oh, what if every payment in the world was going through my app? Wouldn't that be sick?"


Michael: Yeah.


Peter: And then also you can call someone the N word. [laughs] At this stage, Musk has not formally bought the company. He's made an offer and it's been accepted. He pretty quickly seems to have regrets and he tries to wriggle out of it. So, just a couple weeks later, he tweets. "Twitter deal temporarily on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of users." This wasn't meaningfully true. He had made an offer, it had been accepted. The deal was not on hold in any legal sense. His people yell at him and he tweets, "Still committed to acquisition" shortly after. But he latches onto this idea that Twitter is obscuring its bot problem. There are a couple things here that Isaacson skirts around a little too much for my taste.


One is that Elon doesn't actually have a factual basis for this. He's just convinced himself that something is amiss. That 5% sounds too low. That's what Twitter told him. It seems like he wants this to be true so that he can back out or has some kind of reason for backing out. And he convinces himself that it must be true. The other thing here, which Isaacson doesn't mention at all, is that as part of his offer, Musk waived due diligence, meaning people look through the finances and so forth. The seller would be obligated to help the buyer with it, provide them with documents, etc.


Michael: Right.


Peter: Elon waived that. Isaacson, again, doesn't talk about this. I'm not sure why he is willing to talk about Elon as reckless and impulsive including the context of this. Maybe Isaacson just doesn't get it.


Michael: Or maybe he thinks those people saying pussy in bio [Peter giggles] in his mentions are real.


Peter: Ultimately, Musk is of course compelled to buy Twitter. Isaacson receives a text from Elon at 3:30 in the morning that says, "I am very excited about finally implementing X.com as it should have been done, using Twitter as an accelerant, and hopefully helping democracy and civil discourse while doing so."


Michael: And free speech has been protected ever since.


Peter: And that's the end, folks. Free speech for everybody.


Michael: I love to see cats getting tortured when I go on a nice social media website where I go to find [Peter giggles] sports course.


Peter: I hate having to search for the most disgusting pornography on earth. [Michael giggles] I want to just see it at the top of my page when I log in. Do you remember the day that he arrived at the Twitter HQ?


Michael: Dude, the sink. The fucking sink thing.


Peter: He brought a physical sink and then just tweeted, "Let that sink in. Let that sink in."


Michael: Just so annoying.


Peter: Just shoot, shoot me with a shotgun.


Michael: The whole fucking thing.


Peter: Right in the middle of the forehead, dude.


Michael: There was like the sinking feeling when you saw that. And then it's also just gotten so much worse from there. That's like the best thing he did. [giggles] It was like this dumb joke.


Peter: Yeah. In retrospect you're like, "Good joke, Elon." [laughs] 


Michael: Yeah. It's bald and downhill. [Peter laughs] 


Peter: That's the funniest thing he's done in years.


Michael: Twitter is so responsible for the radicalization of so many public figures, but he bought the platform and then turned it even more into an engine to radicalize him further. It's like I'm drinking too much alcohol. I know what I'll do. I'll buy the liquor store so that I can have even more alcohol. It's like you're taking this thing that is poisoning you and you're making it more poisonous.


Peter: Let's hear from a 14-year-old in India who's posing as a Nazi in upstate New York. Let's hear what they have to say. All right, so the big initial story for Isaacson is the culture clash. Musk likes to run his companies leanly. He does not like employee comfort shit. There are some vignettes in the book of Musk wandering the Twitter offices, which are very like 2010s tech culture and just getting pissed off at everything he says. [laughs] Here’s a little bit.


Michael: Musk seemed amazed as he wandered around Twitter's headquarters, which was in a 10-story art deco former merchandise mart, built in 1937. It had been renovated in a techno hip style with coffee bars, yoga studio, fitness room, and game arcades. The cavernous 9th floor cafe with a patio overlooking San Francisco's City Hall served free meals ranging from artisanal hamburgers to vegan salads. The signs on the restroom said gender diversity is welcome here. And as Musk poked through cabinets filled with stashes of Twitter branded merchandise, he found T shirts emblazoned with the words Stay Woke, which he waved around as an example of the mindset that he believed had infected the company.


Peter: Twitter had allowed for mental health days and like work from home. And the common buzzword they used is psychological safety. So, here's Musk's reaction to that.


Michael: Musk let loose a bitter laugh when heard the phrase “psychological safety.” It made him recoil. He considered it to be the enemy of urgency, progress, orbital velocity. His preferred buzzword was hardcore. Discomfort, he believed was a good thing. It was a weapon against the scourge of complacency. Vacations, flower smelling, work-life balance, and days of mental rest were not his thing.”


Peter: You know when there's like someone rolls their eyes at the idea of therapy and that person is also the person who needs therapy more than anyone you've ever met in your life. It's like that's how I feel when Musk is like, "Oh, no. Psychological safety is terrible." It's like, “Bro, you need-- You don't know how badly you need to introduce these concepts into your fucking life.”


Michael: Also, he's like, "Why do you need psychological safety?" As he's like melting down about a T shirt with a phrase he doesn't like.


Peter: [giggles] Just fucking popping ketamine [Michael laughs] and getting mad at everything he sees.


[laughter]


Michael: Are you triggered, libs?


Peter: So, he gets very focused on the idea that the culture was lazy and unproductive and that they should be trying to identify the company's best engineers and lay everyone else off. One thing Isaacson says about Musk is that he views everything as an engineering problem. This is the only way that he knows how to operate, which is like you strip everything down to the bone and then you just sort of step back and see what breaks.


Michael: Which is now what the government is fucking doing, but yeah.


Peter: There are several rounds of layoffs, all of them center around retaining the most fanatical engineers. In mid-November 2022, he sends an email to all employees saying, "Going forward, to build a breakthrough Twitter 2.0 and succeed in an increasingly competitive world, we will need to be extremely hardcore. This will mean working long hours at high intensity. If you are sure that you want to be part of the new Twitter, please click yes on the link below. Anyone who has not done so by 5:00 P.M. Eastern tomorrow will receive three months of severance.


Michael: The hardcore thing is so annoying.


Peter: It's so corny.


Michael: It's like, "We have to go X Games mode."


Peter: It must be extremely hardcore.


Michael: Oh, hardcore.


Peter: Between people leaving and several rounds of layoffs, the workforce is cut from 8,000 to 2,000 in the span of a few months.


Michael: That is wild.


Peter: There were some early hiccups, like he very hastily moved the servers early on, which caused a bunch of outages. And that led to a lot of chatter online that the website was falling apart. But eventually it stabilized. And I think you can say with some certainty now that the doomsayers about the ability of the website to just stay online have been proven wrong. Right?


Michael: But also, he also cut a lot of invisible infrastructure. I remember after this happened, people were uploading entire movies, somebody uploaded I think it was Avenger’s Endgame, just the whole movie. [giggles] And then, I went on there at one point and saw like, a video of a cat being tortured. Like there's actual abuse materials that were being uploaded. And you don't notice the fact that as an internet user, you don't come across fucking animal torture because there's lots of people working on making sure that doesn't happen.


Peter: There's a period there where footage of people and animals being tortured of child sexual abuse.


Michael: Yeah, yeah, yeah. 


Peter: It was just like getting through at record rates. Right? And that's the price you pay for ripping out the infrastructure and backfilling it.


Michael: Now it's all just like race science garbage.


Peter: Yeah. No, now you will never see child sexual abuse material. You will only see someone who privately has a ton of it being racist online.


Michael: Yeah, yeah, yeah. 


Peter: There were some other big debacles early on. The first was the blue check system.


Michael: Oh, yeah.


Peter: Twitter had a system where public figures could get a blue check mark by their name, right? And that would indicate that they had verified their identity. A lot of journalists got it and conservatives resented this because the blue checks had some cachet.


Michael: That was also the most tedious thing where like, "Oh, the blue checks," like "blue checks don't want to admit," like using blue checks as a slur.


Peter: It was bizarre.


Michael: It was so cringe. You're complaining about someone who has verified by this fucking jalopy of a website.


Peter: So, Musk wants to remove this feature and replace it with a system where anyone could get the check for a fee.


Michael: That was the beginning, I think, of many normies being like, "Oh, this guy's dumb." You don't understand the purpose of the blue check system is that, like, if you can buy one, then the whole system fucking breaks down. There's no point in the system anymore.


Peter: Sent you this.


Michael: This was one of Musk's core ideas for Twitter. Making people subscribe using their credit card and cell phone number would be a way to verify and authenticate their identity. The algorithm could favor those users who would probably be less likely to engage in scams, bullying and spreading what they knew to be lies. It might reduce how quickly any discussion degenerated into comparing people to Nazis.” Yes, comparing people to Nazis [Peter laughs] is the real problem on Twitter. [laughs]


Peter: Right? Such a beautiful insight into the right-wing mind. Like the prime-- The primary problem on Twitter was that people would be called Nazis.


Michael: Too much throwing around the Nazi slur. Yeah.


Peter: The initial rollout of the new blue check system is a disaster. This is Isaacson, he says “There was a tsunami of fake accounts with blue checks pretending to be famous politicians and worse yet, big advertisers. One purporting to be the drug maker. Eli Lilly tweeted, ‘We are excited to announce insulin is free now.’ [Michael laughs] The company's stock price fell more than 4% in an hour.”


Michael: Yeah.


Peter: They have to freeze the rollout to figure this shit out.


Michael: It's funny how predictable this is. You're like, "What could go wrong? Anybody can get a blue check." Like, “Yeah man. Of course, it's the first thing that happens on a fucking website with millions of people.”


Peter: Musk is very out of his depth in a social media space because what he is actually the worst at is understanding and connecting with other human beings.


Michael: He also, in a million years, would never think of something funny. And the Eli Lilly thing is so funny. [laughs] 


Peter: It's so good.


Michael: People are going to start doing this, like, set up an account as like Tom Cruise and be like, "Scientology is fake." People are going to do this. If you have any sense of humor, you're like, "The chaos that this is going to unleash."


Peter: He's an engineer. All he can do is figure out what gets clicks and then just try to promote that shit.


Michael: Yeah, yeah, yeah. 


Peter: And that's why now Twitter is a click-driven shithole.


Michael: It's unbelievable how bad it is.


Peter: The real big issue early on and what continues, of course, to haunt the platform in various respects is content moderation. Musk goes into this occasionally describing himself as a free speech absolutist.


Michael: Which nobody is.


Peter: Nobody is.


Michael: Everyone who says that is lying. Yep.


Peter: He establishes an early alliance with Yoel Roth, the head of trust and safety at Twitter. Roth is a liberal gay dude with very different political sensibilities, but they actually do agree on some stuff and partner up early on. Previous Twitter had been a little more aggressive about deleting and banning offensive speech, but Roth wanted to lean more on warning messages and lowering visibility as a tactic. Elon liked that. Early on there's like a racist troll campaign and Elon tells Roth to just nuke it. And so, Roth is pleasantly surprised. He's like, "Okay, maybe Elon is not the free speech freak that I thought he was." This starts to unravel pretty quickly. I'm going to send you a bit.


Michael: There was a tweet by Musk about an attack by the hammer wielding intruder on Paul Pelosi. The 82-year-old husband of the speaker of the House. Hillary Clinton had posted a tweet that blamed people who spread hate and deranged conspiracy theories for such violence. Musk responded by linking to a right-wing conspiracy site that falsely suggested, without offering any evidence, that Pelosi might have been hurt in a dispute with a male prostitute. Musk commented, “There is a tiny possibility that there might be more to this story than meets the eye.” He quickly deleted the tweet, apologized, and later said privately that it was one of his dumbest mistakes. That's actually surprising. He never does that anymore.


Peter: Isaacson does not talk about the internal reaction to this tweet, but here's an excerpt from Character Limit, which is a book about the Twitter takeover by Kate Conger and Ryan Mac. This is an exchange between a data scientist and Elon. The data scientist is speaking.


Michael: “I'm resigning today. I was feeling excited about the takeover, but I was really disappointed by your Paul Pelosi tweet. It's really such obvious partisan misinformation, and it makes me worry about you and what kind of friends you're getting information from. It's only really, like, the 10th percentile of the adult population who'd be gullible enough to fall for this. The color drained from Musk's already pale face. He leaned forward in his chair. No one spoke to him like this, and no one, least of all someone who worked for him, would dare to question his intellect or his tweets. His darting eyes focused for a second directly on the data scientist. ‘Fuck you’ [Peter giggles] Musk growled.”


[laughter]


Peter: Dude fucking cooked him. He's like 1 out of every 10 people [Michael laughs] is dumb enough to fall for this, you fucking schmuck.


Michael: The dumbest 10% in the fucking country. [giggles]


Peter: The satisfaction he must have felt in that moment.


Michael: Seriously.


Peter: Just telling Elon, "You're a fucking dumbass. Only an idiot would fall for this." Oh, it must have been so good. It must have been so good.


Michael: I would also immediately reach out to authors of this book and be like, "Look, I just want you to know that I did cook this guy in person." Let me tell you this story. [laughs] 


Peter: Absolutely fried his ass. But, like, I think that it was embarrassing for him. I think that he got called out as a dipshit by enough people where he was like, "Oh, this was, like-- this was embarrassing," whether or not he processed that. [giggles] Right?


Michael: But also, it sounds like what he's gone through in the years following this is the process of getting rid of every person who would ever speak to him like this.


Peter: Yes, absolutely.


Michael: It's fucking wild people are still on that website honestly. You still have Sesame Street has a fucking Twitter account and various, I don't know, movie studios and companies, people are still there and it's fucking psychotic.


Peter: When Elmo said the 14 words, [Michael laughs] I thought that was too far. Very interesting. Again, that Isaacson can't read the situation here. He seems to believe that Elon sincerely regrets the Pelosi tweet. But then just a couple of pages later, he explains that when ad sales fall, as a result, Elon is out there blaming everyone else. Musk tries to frame the ad collapse as being an orchestrated effort to "destroy free speech in America." Right?


Michael: A sign of a well-working mind. Absolutely, it's a conspiracy against you.


Peter: Are those the actions of someone who was actually remorseful in some meaningful way?


Michael: Yeah, yeah. 


Peter: Between this shit and the Twitter blue rollout, Yoel Roth is fed up and resigns. The next big thing is reinstatements. There had been all these people who were suspended by Twitter. Jordan Peterson, the Babylon Bee had both been suspended for misgendering a trans person. They're reinstated. Kathy Griffin had been suspended for impersonating Elon. She's reinstated. [Michael giggles] Isaacson says-- Oh, actually, I'll send this to you.


Michael: He drew the line at Alex Jones, the conspiracy theorist who claimed that the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting was a giant hoax. Musk said Jones would stay banned. "My firstborn child died in my arms," Musk tweeted. "I felt his last heartbeat. I have no mercy for anyone who would use the deaths of children for gain, politics, or fame." Do I even need to check if Alex Jones is on there now?


Peter: Oh, he is. Isaacson does not mention that this is actually a lie. Elon did have a child who died of SIDS, but his first wife, Justine, tweeted after this that Elon made up the part about holding him as he died.


Michael: Yeah.


Peter: Keep in mind, he's tweeting, "I have no mercy for anyone who would use the deaths of children for gay." [Michael laughs]


Michael: I know.


Peter:  He's literal as he made up a story about the child dying in his arms. That is so fucking sociopathic. And, yeah, he reinstated Alex Jones in 2023. So, he does have some mercy for people who use the deaths of children for gain, politics, or fame.


Michael: Also, it's again, his weird thing about lying and embellishing everything. He did lose a child, which is a huge fucking deal, but it's like he has to make it even more of a cinematic story.


Peter: Awful things can happen to awful people, and it's an awful thing that happened to him, but it just goes to show it did nothing to build his character as a human being.


Michael: Yeah. Not at all. Yeah, yeah. 


Peter: So, the big reinstatement is, of course, Donald Trump. He makes the decision via a Twitter poll. Isaacson says, "I asked him right afterward whether he had a sense in advance of how the poll would turn out." "No," he said, "And if it had gone the other way, would he have kept Trump banned? Yes. I'm not Trump's fan. He's disruptive. He's the world's champion of bullshit."


Michael: Again, a very consistent belief that he continues to hold to this day. Absolutely. [Peter laughs] 


Peter: Musk would, like, keep doing polls for this sort of thing. And Isaacson doesn't even mention that these polls are put out by Elon himself, so they select for his followers-


Michael: Yeah, yeah, of course.


Peter: -who are going to be more ideologically right wing. And to this day, he makes decisions based on them and acts like it's like some democratic principle he's upholding. It's just so stupid. There are a few other moderation meltdowns, and the big one is the ElonJet account. ElonJet was an account run by a young guy that published real time data about the takeoffs and landings of Elon's private jet based on public flight information. Here's Isaacson.


Michael: Musk had long been infuriated by the ElonJet account, which he thought was doxxing and endangering him. In April, when he was first thinking of buying Twitter, he discussed it at a dinner of friends and family in Austin, and both Grimes and his mother argued strongly that he should ban it. He agreed. But once he took over Twitter, he decided not to. ‘My commitment to free speech extends even to not banning the account following my plane, even though that is a direct personal safety risk’ he tweeted in early November.” Okay, so when did he ban it? [giggles] Like, a couple months later?


Peter: So, first of all, it's later revealed that Musk had actually visibility filtered the account. So, while he's bragging about his commitment to free speech, he's actually trying to suppress the account.


Michael: Yeah.


Peter: Then a longtime Grimes stalker followed a car that had Musk and Grimes stupidly named Child X something in it. Isaacson says, “Musk believed that the stalker had been able to find where he and Grimes were staying because of ElonJet. The connection was murky. Musk had landed in Los Angeles the day before, but Grimes said that is when she started noticing the stalker's car lurking outside. Elon then creates a new policy about doxxing someone's location and bans the account. And he also bans multiple journalists who had reported on the situation, claiming that they violated the policy too, even though most of them just linked to the account, which was like, then suspended.”


Michael: Right.


Peter: Isaacson says “It does seem that Musk had acted partly out of pique, [Michael giggles] retaliating against journalists whose stories had been critical of him. Musk has a private conversation about this with Bari Weiss, who, as we'll discuss, was doing the Twitter files at the time. She reaches out to see what's going on, ask him how he's doing, and he says, “They doxxed my plane. They attacked my son.”” [Peter and Michael laugh] You remember Denzel, an American gangster? “They tried to kill my wife. They tried to dox my plane."


Michael: I also-- I just love that all these people are fucking texting each other constantly. All these people are like, "Oh, I have no ideological dog in this fight. I'm just, like, calling balls and strikes." They're all fucking in group chats together.


Peter: Here's a little bit from Isaacson.


Michael: Sitting in the Hotbox conference room one evening with Bari Weiss, some of her colleagues and James, he started poking fun of the practice of people posting their preferred pronouns. Someone made a joke that Musk should-- Oh, God. [giggles] Someone made a joke that Musk should be Prosecute/Fauci. There were a few nervous laughs. Weiss admits to not wanting to challenge Musk at that moment. And Musk started cackling. He repeated the joke three times. Then at around 3:00 A.M. he impulsively tweeted it out. "My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci." God. It's not even his joke. It's a bad joke. It's not even his.


Peter: Beautiful vignette.


Michael: God.


Peter: Someone makes a completely incoherent joke.


Michael: Psychotic joke. Yeah.


Peter: Musk loves it, starts repeating it to everyone in the room where it was originally made by someone else. [giggles]


Michael: Yeah, someone else.


Peter: Like, someone else in the room made this and he's just repeating it.


Michael: Yeah, yeah, yeah. 


Peter: And then he tweets it out as if it's his own. It's so good.


Michael: And also, Bari Weiss being too chicken shit to say anything, even though this is, like, completely fucking nuts.


Peter: So, this irritates a lot of people, including his brother Kimbal, but he leans into it. After the Fauci tweet. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Posts "Fauci purchased omerta among virologists globally [Michael giggles] with a total of $37 billion in annual payoffs in research grants. With the paymaster gone, the orthodoxies will unravel." Musk replies to this "Precisely."


[laughter]


Michael: Be careful, Peter. I've been sexting RFK Jr. for nine months now, and I'm ready to finally talk about it.


Peter: Well, he's irresistible. [Michael laughs] Is there a journalist not compromised by their sexual entanglements [Michael laughs] with one RFK Jr. This is also around the time where Dave Chappelle at one of his shows invites Elon on stage and everyone boos him. [giggles]


Michael: God, that felt so good.


Peter: There's a lot of reporting that this really shook up Elon.


Michael: Yeah, I know. I love it.


Peter: He, like, posted about it in a very defensive way that was like. "It was actually only 10% boo boos and 90% cheers," but, you know, and there was reporting that he was just, like, secluded for days after this. [giggles]


Michael: Just, like, staring in the middle distance while the sound of silence plays. [laughs] 


Peter: Isaacson doesn't write about that part, but anyway, this is, like, it's damaging his psyche. Isaacson is very clearly aware of Musk's hypocrisies when it comes to Twitter. Like, coming in as a free speech absolutist and then abandoning it. Right? Doing all of these things that he once complained about it. Where you're doing different types of visibility filtering and stuff like that. But Isaacson is not really interested in that. I think he views it, again, as just like, another element of Elon's grandiosity on one hand and eccentricity on the other.


Michael: Of course, it's an actual sign of his radicalization where he's stating all these lofty principles and immediately violating them within days/weeks of taking over this website. He never-- Either he never believed them in the first place, or he's completely lied himself into this position where he has to be this radical fucking white supremacist psycho online.


Peter: He's being hypocritical in the way that every other right winger is. But Isaacson doesn't understand politics well enough to see this, right? He knows enough to know that Elon is absorbing some right-wing shit, but that's really it. He doesn't even get into the specifics of Elon's early promises. Elon initially said that he was going to allow for all legal speech on the platform, which he obviously abandons very quickly.


Michael: Yeah, yeah, yeah. 


Peter: Isaacson also does a chapter on the Twitter files which I-- We won't spend too much time here.


Michael: That could be a fun bonus episode. Just because that's such a nothing burger. There's nothing there.


Peter: So, Musk is talking to David Sacks about what he views as, like, the misfeasance of the previous Twitter ownership, which he thought, of course, censored conservatives and favored liberals and all that shit. Sacks tells him to talk to Matt Taibbi. Isaacson describes Taibbi as, "a former writer for Rolling Stone and other publications who was difficult to pigeonhole ideologically.”


Michael: Of course. Every fucking time.


Peter: Dude. Isaacson has never met a right winger like--


Michael: Dude, come on.


Peter: -Isaacson has no idea what a right winger is.


Michael: The thinnest veneer of, like, "I'm a liberal, but" is enough to fucking fool these people.


Peter: So, Musk gives Taibi access to old emails and slack messages concerning content moderation, with the basic mission of exposing any wrongdoing or bias. And the only condition, he says, is that they have to post it on Twitter. They have to post their findings on Twitter.


Michael: Right.


Peter: Musk tweets, “This is a battle for the future of civilization. If free speech is lost even in America, tyranny is all that lies ahead.”


Michael: Such little babies.


Peter: Like, "Save your shit. Don't worry. I'm saving free speech by giving the internal Twitter slack messages to Matt Taibbi."


Michael: And also, this weird catastrophizing over, like, internet moderation. Even if Twitter is censoring fucking stories about Hunter Biden or something, this is not like a battle for the soul of civilization.


Peter: Isaacson is vague about what Taibbi actually uncovers. He says that he exposed the fact that Twitter had looked for an excuse to ban the Hunter Biden laptop story. And Twitter executives would later say they made a mistake about that. For people who don't remember, the Hunter Biden laptop story initially looked like it might be fake. And so, there was a lot of concerns about misinformation. It was right before the election. And yeah, he also notes that the files revealed a lot of voluntary cooperation between Twitter and government agencies and political figures. Also, true but Taibi didn't find anything that looked like government coercion.


Michael: Right.


Peter: It's also worth noting, this is the Trump FBI.


Michael: Yeah, yeah, yeah. 


Peter: This is not the Biden FBI even though it sort of gets framed as a liberal thing.


Michael: They kept casting it as like some sort of smoking gun that they had as sort of like a caseworker or whatever at the FBI that they were in ongoing contact with. But like, you're running a website with millions of people. People post libel on there, people post revenge porn on there, people post child sex abuse material on there. Like, law enforcement is relevant to things that get posted on the website. So, you're going to have an open relationship with law enforcement.


Peter: There's basically no way to run a website of Twitter's scale without doing this.


Michael: Yeah.


Peter: And Isaacson does not mention that Elon has not stopped this practice. Right?


Michael: Yeah, yeah, yeah. 


Peter: Twitter under Elon started approving a higher number of government censorship requests, especially from right wing governments in Turkey and India.


Michael: Shocking twist.


Peter: There's a report that found that they fully complied with 83% of requests and at least partially complied with nearly 99% of requests. The prior regime was fully complying with like 50%.


Michael: Yeah.


Peter: Also, so there's a gap between a government requesting that something be taken down and a government saying, "Hey, this is illegal to post in our country." Right? And sometimes Twitter-- previous Twitter, would take those governments to court, saying, "No, we're not going to take this down" - a practice that Musk has abandoned. Here's the last thing he says about Taibbi.


Michael: Taibbi's revelations illustrated the problematic but unsurprising fact that the moderators at Twitter were biased in favor of suppressing stories that would help Trump. More than 98% of the donations made by people at the company went to Democrats.


Peter: That's it. A couple of anecdotes and donation data does not prove that moderation was biased against Trump. You're a fucking journalist and you're-- and you're just going to say this with a straight face?


Michael: Right. Because the political donations, that 98% figure would be company-wide. That wouldn't necessarily be people on the moderation team. And also, if the issue is moderation and you want evidence regarding moderation. Just the fact that like there's lots of left leaning people at a company is not remotely the outcome that you're looking at.


Peter: Some additional drama that happens in this time period is, Yoel Roth, the former head of Trust And safety, publishes an Op-Ed in the New York Times. I'm going to share it here.


Michael: He says “Platform policies are shaped by the preferences of a small group of predominantly American tech executives. Steve Jobs didn't believe porn should be allowed in the App Store, so it isn't allowed. Stripped bare, the decisions have a dismaying lack of legitimacy. It's this very lack of legitimacy that Mr. Musk correctly points to when he calls for greater free speech and for the establishment of a content moderation council to guide the company's policies. But even as he criticizes the capriciousness of platform policies, he perpetuates the same lack of legitimacy through his impulsive changes and tweet length pronouncements about Twitter's rules. In appointing himself the chief twit, Mr. Musk has made clear that at the end of the day, he'll be the one calling the shots.” Yeah, this is always the issue with all this fucking free speech meltdown.


Is that like, it's true, that it's really fucked up how much of like ideological policing we've turned over to people like fucking Mark Zuckerberg and now Elon Musk. Like, that is a real problem.


Peter: And I think this points this out, right? That like, Musk is identifying what in some ways is a real problem, like the arbitrariness of content moderation on social media. But the right-wing solution is just for them to control the arbitrariness.


Michael: Exactly. Yeah.


Peter: It's presented as an argument about fairness, but it's actually about who gets control.


Michael: And there was never really any evidence that it’s conservatives were overly affected by this unless you just acknowledge that conservatives are more likely to lie and stuff like anti-vax conspiracy theories, holocaust denial, the kind of stuff that really was taken offline is almost exclusively associated with the right.


Peter: Right.


Michael: So, to the extent that it's like right-wing bias, it's like, “Well, yeah, they're more likely to lie. They're more likely to believe in conspiracy theory.”


Peter: Someone find-- Someone on Twitter finds Roth's PhD thesis about Grindr, which talks about the need to provide safe access to dating services for teenagers to keep them to-- to protect them. [Michael giggles] 


Michael: I don't know about teenagers on Grindr. [laughs] That's where I would-- 


Peter: No, no, no--.


Michael: That's not the hill that I would die on.


Peter: No, no, I think that-- I think the point was, like, if you don't provide a safe dating service for teenagers, they will then use adult services like Grindr. Right?


Michael: Oh okay, Yeah, yeah.


Peter: Where they're unprotected. Right?


Michael: Jesus Christ. Yeah, yeah, yeah.


Peter: So, anyway, someone finds that distorts it, just like you did right now [Michael laughs] and calls him a pedo, which Musk boosts. And yeah, Roth harassment, death threats, has to move. It's a fucking nightmare.


Michael: Of course.


Peter: At this point, the book sort of trails off, which I mentioned in the last episode too. Like, Isaacson is in the room from September 2021 through the beginning of 2023. And the story he writes is about this eccentric rich guy who's a volatile jerk on one hand, but he makes great things happen on the other hand. And the story that's actually happening in front of him is that the richest man in the world is becoming a right-wing nut job and he's not even noticing it.


Michael: And he's not producing fewer and fewer great things at this point. All he does is sit on his phone on fucking Twitter all day.


Peter: Robot army dude, [Michael laughs] it's coming. In two years, we're all going to be getting jerked off by robot butlers and you're telling me that he's not creating anything beautiful? So, I was curious about Isaacson, about his politics, right? And they're hard to find because he's a journalist. He's not someone who like comes out there and talks about his own politics or whatever.


Michael: He wouldn't deign to have values or moral beliefs.


Peter: There's some reporting from 2001, when he first took the helm at CNN. I'm going to send you something from FAIR, Fairness and accuracy in reporting. It was originally reported in Roll Call.


Michael: It says “Early this month, new CNN chairman Walter Isaacson met with top Republican lawmakers in Washington, D.C. to discuss how to improve relations between the Cable News Network and conservative Republicans. I was trying to reach out to a lot of Republicans who feel that CNN has not been as open to covering Republicans. And I wanted to hear their concerns. One GOP aide told Roll Call that Isaacson said, “Give us some guidance on how to attract conservatives.” He said he wanted to change the culture at CNN.” God, these guys are so easy to work.


Peter: Tale as old as time, dude.


Michael: Yeah. 


Peter: A guy heading up a major news organization wants to do outreach to conservative audiences because conservative audiences complain that the organization is too liberal. So, again, hard to tell where Isaacson stands. But he does have at least a 25-year-old record of being an absolute sucker for reactionary bullshit.


Michael: And taking at good faith of this stuff of like, "I'm being censored online" and like, ”What you're being censored about is like take fucking horse paste."


Peter: What happens to Elon in the next few years is a matter of public record. We did consider doing a Part 3 here, but I want to-- I'm sticking to the book, [giggles] I want to keep it in the context of the book because if you try to do a comprehensive Elon Musk thing, you're going to lose your mind. And frankly, he says so much insane bullshit every single day that you couldn't possibly compile it in a way that felt comprehensive. But there are a couple of things that we can't really skip past. Elon, of course, turning further right, in 2023, he expresses interest in the Ron DeSantis primary campaign. And in May, he helps DeSantis announce the campaign on Twitter Spaces, which glitches out severely. [laughs] The whole thing crashes.


Michael: I remember this.


Peter: In 2024, Musk creates a PAC, America PAC, which he uses to funnel something in the realm of $250 million in support of the Trump campaign.


Michael: Hard to categorize his ideology. Hard to say.


Peter: Towards the end of the campaign, of course, he becomes an active element. He's speaking at Trump rallies. We're going to watch a very quick video.


Michael: Oh, are we? For fuck's sake.


Peter: Oh, yeah.


Michael: I hate watching him, dude. I hate watching him.


Peter: Okay, well, guess what? I thought. It's funny. [laughs] So, we're going to be watching several videos of Musk.


Michael: Are we?


Peter: Yep. You thought this was almost over.


Michael: I did.


Peter: You thought this was almost over and it should be.


[laughter]


Michael: But--


Peter: Look, I want a way-- I want a way to soften the landing here. And we're going to do it by making fun of him. Okay.


[video clip starts]


Elon: We're going to get the government off your back and out of your pocketbook.


[audience cheers]


Michael: What does that mean?


Elon: And America's just not-- not just going to be great. America is going to reach heights that it has never seen before. The future is going to be amazing.


[audience cheers]


Michael: Peter, why are you doing this to me?


Peter: Hold on. We're getting-- We're getting to the best part.


Peter: Forgot how long the short is.


[audience chanting Elon, Elon]


They're chanting Elon.


Elon: You guys are awesome. Honestly, this is like--


[audience cheers]


Michael: Peter.


Elon: I mean, this is-- this is like-- this is the kind of positive energy that America is all about.


[audience cheers]


Michael: I, like, physically can't watch him.


Peter: I almost was-- made you watch the entire Waluigi skit.


Elon: Yeah. USA. USA. USA. USA.


[audience chanting USA, USA]


Michael: Why are we watching this?


Peter: [laughs] Yes. All right, we can stop.


[video clip ends]


Peter: I just wanted to do the USA chant. Why does he have such an unnatural USA chant?


Michael: He's so unsettling.


Peter: He’s like “USA, USA.” It's so bizarre. You can cut that. I just wanted to show it to you. [laughs] 


Michael: Those kids did not bully him enough. [giggles]


Peter: He's often seen doing little weird jumps at the rallies and just sort of-- He's acting less human than you'd like to see. But the real thing we need to talk about, I think, at least briefly, is that Musk joins the government, of course, as part of DOGE, the unofficial government agency, the Department of Government Efficiency. A full list of DOGE's crimes would be impossible to fit into this episode. There are a couple things we should touch on though. One is that DOGE was involved with cutting funding to USAID, which handles foreign aid. A UCLA study found that if these cuts persist, it will cost 14 million lives worldwide over the next five years.


Michael: That's insane.


Peter: Dude was in the government for three months and put up Hitler numbers.


Michael: Yeah, yeah, yeah. 


Peter: It's wild, bro. The amount of monstrousness. The other thing I want to talk about in a little more detail right before we wrap, and we will wrap after this-


Michael: Thank God.


Peter: -is the extensible Social Security fraud, right?


Michael: Oh, yeah.


Peter: Because I think it's a great encapsulation of both the myth and reality of Elon. Right? He's brought in to bring his private sector efficiency knowhow to the federal government and then also sort of expose all the fraud and waste that conservatives have always believed was there. Right?


Michael: Also, his efficiency in the private sector is like firing 80% of people [Peter laughs] like all that surgical.


Peter: So, one of the things that happens is that he tweets that there are 150-year-olds in the Social Security database who are listed as alive. Right? Here's a little bit of AP coverage about that.


Michael: “On Wednesday, Social Security's new acting commissioner acknowledged recent reporting about the number of people older than age 100 who may be receiving benefits from Social Security. The reported data are people in our records with a Social Security number who do not have a date of death associated with their record. These individuals are not necessarily receiving benefits." This like Social Security fraud thing comes up in right wing media on like four-year cycles. They'll always be like 150,000 people are scamming Social Security. And then you look at the actual numbers and it's like a 0.05% error rate.


Peter: The AP notes that part of the confusion comes from Social Security's software system using the COBOL programming language, which has a lack of a date type, which means that entries with missing or incomplete birth dates will default to a reference point. And that reference point is over 150 years ago. So, everyone who doesn't have a birth date will show up as super old. There is also a July 2024 report from Social Security's inspector general that states from fiscal years 2015 through 2022, the agency paid out almost 8.6 trillion in benefits including 71.8 billion or less than 1% in improper payments.


Michael: Boom.


Peter: Most of those erroneous payments are overpayments to living people. So, like, there are audits.


Michael:  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly.


Peter: We need to look at this stuff. Right?


Michael: The idea that these agencies themselves don't give a shit about fraud, when we've had this fucking ideology of benefit cheats for three decades, four decades now. The eligibility criteria to get onto these programs is difficult. And they're not just like, "Oh, you're alive, here's some money." That just isn't how it works.


Peter: I'm going to show you an interview from not super long ago this fall. This is Rogan and Elon content warning. We won't watch it for too long. But this is what they're talking about.


[video clip starts]


Elon: So, we found, for example, people who were 300 years old in the Social Security Administration database.


Rogan: Now, I thought that this was a mistake of not registering their deaths, that people were born [Michael giggles] a long time ago and it had defaulted to a certain number. And so that after time, those people were still in the system. It was just an error.


Peter: Rogan's on the right track here.


Elon: So, that's not true. So, there's or at least one of two things must be true. There's a typo or some mistake in the computer or it's fraudulent.


[video clip ends]


Michael: So, either it matters or it doesn't matter. [Peter giggles] 


Peter: So, that's not true. Or actually, let me rephrase this. Either it's true or it's not. [laughs] That's-- That's what he said. It's incredibly hollow, but I think that the way he talks tricks certain types of dumb people into believing that he's insightful.


Michael: I mean, the one thing that is good about Joe Rogan is he will actually, like ask basic follow up questions. [giggles] But it just shows again that like, Elon is not subject to people being like, "Sorry, what do you mean? Like, does it matter that people are 300 years old? Are they receiving benefits?" He's not getting these kinds of questions.


Peter: I think it's so interesting that he just fires back to that with "That's not true," and then makes it very clear that he actually doesn't know. [Michael laughs] He's like, "Well, one of two things. Either there's an error or people are on the rolls fraudulently."


Michael: Right.


Peter: And it's like, “Yeah, dude, that's--"


Michael: That's the entire distinction.


[laughter]


Peter: It's like something happened. And Elon's like, "Either it was an accident or it was on purpose." It's like, “Right, Elon, that's true of actually all things. [Michael laughs] So, do you have any information here?” Here's another short clip and this is the last one that you will have to watch.


Michael: God.


[video clip starts]


Elon: So, there was like, I think something like 20 million people in the Social Security Administration database that could not possibly be alive. If their birth date is, like -- based on their birth date, they could not possibly be alive.


Rogan: And then to be clear, 20 million people that were receiving funds? [crosstalk]


Elon: Most of them were not receiving funds. Some of them were receiving funds. Most were not receiving funds.


Michael: Well. [giggles]


Elon: So, let me tell you how the scam works. It's a bank shot. So, the Social Security Administration database is used as the source of truth by all the other databases that the government uses. So, even if they stop the payments on the Social Security Administration database like unemployment insurance, small business administration, student loans, all check the Social Security Administration database to say is this a legitimate alive person? And if the Social Security database will say “Yes, this person is still alive” even though they're 200 years old, but forgets to mention that they're 200 years old. It just says-- it just returns when the computer is queried, it says, “Yes, this person is live.”


And so, then they're able to exploit the entire rest of the government ecosystem. So, fake-- then you get fake student loans, then you get fake unemployment insurance, then you get fake medical payments.


Rogan: And this doesn't have to be tied to an individual where there's an address where you can check on this person.


Michael: He can't even convince Rogan.


Elon: If you did any check at all, you would stop this.


[video clip ends]


Michael: I'm so concerned about 129-year-old’s getting student loans, Peter. Do you know how many 129-year-olds get Pell Grants every year?


Peter: So, I actually think this clip is a very good example of Elon's style of dishonesty. You can see that Rogan is trying to pin him down on some specifics here, right? Rogan is, I think, too dumb to realize that he's being bullshitted, but he is asking the right questions. “How many of those people were receiving benefits? How much fraud did you actually uncover?” Right?


Michael: Right.


Peter: And Elon very consistently dodges the question or provides like this rambling answer. So, Joe asks how many of those 20 million people who based on their age couldn't be alive, were actually receiving benefits? And Elon says “Most of them were not, but some were.” And it's like, “Okay, well how many?” Right?


Michael: That's the issue in question. Elon, we don't care how many people are in the fucking database.


Peter: So, I do think Elon is getting a couple of numbers mixed up. He says 20 million people who couldn't be alive are in the database. DOGE says they found 20 million over 112.3 million over 120.


Michael: Because some of those people over 100 are alive. So, yeah.


Peter: Yeah, right. So, in terms of people in the database over 120 who are receiving benefits, my guess is that the answer is zero or near zero because a law was passed in 2015 that generally speaking halts payments when someone hits 115. So, at the very least, if there were a notable number of people over 120 receiving money, I imagine that Elon would say the actual number.


Michael: Right.


Peter: But I am relatively confident based on what I understand about the law that the number is zero.


Michael: Also, it's such a-- it's so telling about like the right-wing media ecosystem that they come up with this dumb fucking talking point of like people over 120. It sounds like the government passed a law saying, okay, at 115, your benefits turn off.


Peter: Yeah.


Michael: Does right-wing media stop spreading that myth? No, they just spread it anyway.


Peter: So, that report I mentioned earlier, the inspector general report, which spanned 2015 to 2022, found that 0.1% of benefits went to people over the age of 100.


Michael: So, that's about right. It's probably what, how many people in the population are over 100?


Peter: There's no like epidemic of these extra old people which, by the way, if you were doing Social Security fraud or any type of fraud, why would you have the identity of someone who is like 150? Wouldn't that be the most easily discoverable? [giggles] whatever.


Michael: Exactly. The idea that like these obvious things that people work in the Social Security Administration aren't being caught. It's like, I'm sure you can just do a fucking query and be like, "Okay, how many people are over 120? Let's check it out." Like, this is so fucking obvious.


Peter: You know, Rogan basically says, "Isn't there some kind of check?" [laughs] Elon says “They do -- Literally they don't do any checks. And any check would reveal all of this." And it's like, that's not true.


Michael: And also, the number of 120-year-old’s getting unemployment insurance would also be pretty fucking easy to check out. But it's like as close to zero as you can meaningfully get.


Peter: One thing lurking behind this conversation is that the number of Social Security recipients and the payment amounts, the payment totals are public information. The SSA posts them online. So, you can see that the number of recipients now is higher than it was in January, [laughs] which means that DOGE has not purged any particularly large amount of fraud in Social Security itself.


Michael: Also, thank God they didn't just purge a bunch of random ass people. That's great.


Peter: Later, Rogan asks him how much the fraud was costing and Elon finally gives something like an actual number saying hundreds of billions. But if it's that much, where the fuck is it? Where is it? Where is it? Where are the prosecutions?


Michael: Right.


Peter: Presumably, if you busted hundreds of billions of dollars in fraud, we're talking about massive criminal rings, right?


Michael: Huge deal.


Peter: I just-- I think I wanted to talk about this. And because it's like, this is the central myth of the great American entrepreneur, right? You're a master of efficiency. The government is so inefficient and so incompetent that if only we got someone like Elon in there. This is like what right wingers have been talking about for decades.


Michael: Totally.


Peter: And it happens. And what happens? First of all, we barely even know. There's no vision, right? There's no, like, report published that has data. You get Elon talking on Rogan and clearly bullshitting. Clearly bullshitting.


Michael: You could argue that, like, Isaacson should have written his book about the way that this myth ended up feeding Elon's worst tendencies and potentially America's worst tendencies. But instead, he just repeats the myth even as he's like three years, too late for the myth to be relevant. I get that he didn't write this. Maybe if he wrote a couple years later, it would be too undeniable.


Peter: I genuinely believe that if it had been a couple years later, he wouldn't have written the book because he only writes this type of book. This is like, what he's interested in. It was obvious by early 2023 that shit was changing.


Michael: Because it could have been about, like, the downfall of Elon and all of the things throughout his life that could have been clues to this or the way that he was enabled by various systems to become this fucking monster. But it sounds like he just quite deliberately, ultimately missed that story.


Peter: It's really hard to tell what exactly is going on with Isaacson himself. He's just-- He's not a super public figure in that way. I don't think he has the chops to do the analysis that was necessary. But it also seems like he didn't have the interest. And that's like deeply shameful shit because you had it right there, man.


Michael: I think the problem, maybe the core problem, is that he set out to write a great man biography and he never asked, "Is this really a great man?"


Peter: Self-explanatory, self-explanatory. To someone like this, the fact that Elon is rich and successful. Of course he's a great man. There's-- That's what it is. That's what being a great man is.


Michael: I do think it's, like, profoundly bad for a person to be this wealthy and have this much power, but you just don't have genuine relationships anymore.


Peter: Right. But there's only one way to find out. [laughs] Someone gives me $1 billion.


Michael: Elon, if you're listening, for only 1/44th the price of Twitter, you can have a Podcaster.


Peter: There's no way I don't get worse.


Michael: Your house will be made entirely of beverage centers. [Peter laughs] 


Peter: That's right.


Michael: Like bricks.


Peter: There are, like a million other awful and offensive and bizarre things that Musk has done recently. Like his AI chatbot, Grok has been programmed to be more conservative. At times, it has described itself as MechaHitler.


Michael: I hate how funny that is.


Peter: But it's also very Elon, because it's like nerd Hitler.


Michael: Yeah, yeah, yeah. 


Peter: I am MechaHitler. [Michael laughs] Of course. Of course. That's the Hitler that Elon produces. He split with Trump in the summer and briefly floated the idea of funding a new political party before he backed off of it.


Michael: I was like, "Please, Elon. Please do it. Please split the right-wing vote. Please."


Peter: There is nothing I wanted more. Just to watch him be humiliated.


Michael: Yeah, yeah, yeah. 


Peter: He couldn't possibly list off everything he's done. So, I was wondering, like, how--“Okay, how do you end this episode? We talked about his flailing incompetence in the governmental context.” I actually think that the best way to sum up Elon Musk is with a joke. And I know that you've heard this before.


Michael: Oh, no. Was this the clip you sent me of Elon Musk trying to tell a joke on Joe Rogan?


Peter: Yeah. Yeah. [laughs] All right, so here you go.


Michael: Dude, I can, like, barely watch this.


Peter: No, it's so funny. And I love watching it and I watch it every day.


Michael: It makes my skin crawl dude.


Peter: Sent you the link.


Michael: I want to die.


Peter: You're going to watch it. This is my episode. Okay? [Michael laughs] Also, this is only. It's like a minute long. It's fine.


Michael: Is it only a minute long? Oh, God, it feels so much longer than that.


Peter: I too, I remembered this as a three-minute clip. [laughs] 


Michael: Same, same thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. 


Peter: And then I opened it. It was like, “Oh, it's a minute.” But brace yourselves, folks. This is going to be a long minute.


[video clip starts]


Elon: So, like, the joke is like, there's two economists going on a hike in the woods. [laughs] They come across a pile of shit. And one economist says to the other, "I'll pay you $100 to eat that shit."


Michael: It's already funny. It's so funny.


Elon: So, the economist eats the shit, gets the $100 and they keep walking. Then they come across another pile of shit. And the other economist says, "now I'll pay you $100 to eat the pile of shit." [laughs] 


Peter: How can you not like this?


Elon: So, he pays the other economist, $100 for the pile of shit. Then the way I said, they said, "Look, wait a second. We both just ate a pile of shit. And we don't have any more extra money. You just gave the $100 back to me and we both ate a pile of shit. This doesn't make any sense." And they said, "No, but think of the economy, because that's $200 in the economy."


Michael: Explain it more. Explain it more.


Elon: Basically, eating shit would count as a job. [Joe Rogan and Elon laugh] This is to illustrate the absurdity of economics.


[video clip ends]


Peter: The best part of that is at a point where it makes absolutely no sense to laugh. Joe Rogan hitting him with the pity laugh.


Michael: Yeah, totally. [laughs] 


Peter: Like, the joke has been over for five seconds and Elon is now explaining it.


Michael: I know.


Peter: And Rogan's like, "Oh, I got-- Oh, it's over. I got to laugh."


Michael: It's like, as if poop is-- eating poop is a job. Like, that's not really what the joke is.


Peter: That's not what the joke is. [laughs] And it's very bizarre that you think that the joke is that. The funniest part about it, aside from the fact that he cannot speak a sentence like a normal human being, is that, like, as soon as he starts talking about poop, he is losing it.


Michael: You can tell he thinks the joke is about just like eating poop being funny.


Peter: Right, right.


Michael: Like, that's what's funny to him.


Peter: There's no joke about eating poop that he does not think is funny.


Michael: It's so funny to me that he had this PR advisor who was like, "We need to get you out in front of the camera more, Elon. Just don't be weird." [laughs] 


Peter: We need to get you on camera, honey. The world is going to love what they see.


Michael: Do you have any more jokes, Elon? Like, surely, he's like this in private. You're like, "Don't put this guy on camera."


Peter: This can only happen when you're this rich.


Michael: Yeah, yeah, yeah. 


Peter: If you're not rich and you're not funny, I promise you that, you know?


Michael: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.


Peter: But Elon has had people laughing at his dumb fucking bad jokes for so long that he, I think, genuinely believes that he's funny in some way.


Michael: I wonder if he hasn't heard a non-pity laugh in so long that he thinks that's just what a laugh is.


Peter: Everyone always laughs five seconds after the joke is over while you're explaining it.


Michael: As I am explaining it. [laughs] That's how you know a joke is really good. Dead silence. And you're like, "as if eating poop is a job." And then people laugh.


Peter: The absolute funniest thing I read and I encountered a ton of Elon speaking is that one data scientist being like, "You're in the dumbest fucking 10% of this country." [laughs] 


Michael: That's comedy. That's comedy.


Peter: That's comedy dude.


Michael: Looking at a billionaire in the fucking face and being like, "the dumbest motherfuckers in the country believe this thing you just said.” [laughs] 


Peter: Do you know there's something like-- there are so many-- there's so many, like, powerful people who you just, like “You never have the opportunity” to be like-- you'd have to be a fucking dipshit to believe this.


Michael: To put it in terms that he would understand. It's like eating shit is a job, and that's what you're doing right now, [Peter laughs] eating shit because of what I just [unintelligible 01:31:10].


[music]


[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]

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Michael Hobbes

Host
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Peter Shamshiri

Host