Elon Musk: Part 2

In the second episode of our series on Elon Musk, we chart his freakish ascent to financial superstardom and tell the stories of all the people who had to be stepped on, racially abused and sexually harassed to bring his many obsessions and vanity projects into being. 

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Transcript

In episode 1 we discussed Musk’s early years growing up in an abusive but filthy rich family with at least 2 fervently Nazi relatives and how despite his early cock-ups he was lifted to the pinnacle of wealth by the winds of the dot com boom entering the right industry by pure luck at exactly the right time. 

So if you’ve somehow arrived here without listening to that, go back and start from the beginning, trust me it’s worth it. 

Today we’re going to start off an examination of the companies Musk used to sell his false vision of progress and amass a giant cultish following by taking a look at the cuckoo. 

Many varieties of cuckoo are something called brood parasites. 

They’re birds that lay their eggs in the nest of another species and the other bird incubates and feeds the parasitic chick often at the expense of their own offspring. 

But when the cuckoos grow big enough they evict the host’s chicks from the nest and sometimes even eat them. 

With that out of the way, let's begin our second episode on Elon Musk. 

Welcome to Cabinet of Curiosities

In the early 2000s Musk set his sights on a small electric vehicle start-up, investing his way in before cuckooing  its founders Martin Eberhart and Marc Tarpenning out of the nest and falsely crowning  himself with the title yet again. 

It was Eberhart who came up with the idea of a sporty electric car after getting divorced and seeing the Iraq war being fought over oil amid the looming threat of climate change. 

As the journalist Paris Marx points out, the first electric cars were actually developed in the late 1800s, but these were quickly eclipsed thanks to the higher speeds and lower fuel prices of their gas-guzzling counterparts. 

The oil industry also played a role, using lobbying, patent acquisitions and marketing schemes to maintain petrol’s dominance. Electric cars were painted as feminine because they didn’t need to be publicly cranked like the loud, manly petrol alternative.  

Eberhart’s innovation was to make a sexier EV than the Toyota Prius. But despite the fact he came up with the name, the style and the business model, it’s Musk who is credited for the electric vehicle boom. Something even he admitted to Walter Isaacson in a moment of modesty, saying, “Building mass-market electric cars was inevitable. It would have happened without me”.   

But Musk lost it when the papers branded Eberhart “Mr Tesla”, especially when the New York Times mistakenly said he was the chairman, the board position Musk filled. Elon was incensed at being relegated to “an early investor”. 

And this seems to have been the inciting incident that triggered Musk into taking over the company. 

And while it is true that Musk did have some input to the car's design, his forays into this area were a disaster. According to Isaacson the first model was initially meant to cost $50,000 to build, enabling the company to make a healthy profit to develop the next, more affordable one. But Musk’s changes steadily ballooned the costs, which eventually peaked at $140,000. 

Once in charge, Musk led the company’s first funding round in 2004, and ousted Eberhart in 2007. He managed to hold on to the CEO position unopposed this time because Tarpenning walked away the following year. 

After Musk began publicly attacking him in 2008 Eberhart sued him for libel and in the court filing accused him of trying to “rewrite history”. And despite a non-disparagement clause in Eberhart’s settlement Musk continues to attack him on Twitter, he can’t help himself. 

The original founder had to be ground into dust to soothe Musk’s ego. Eberhart was sorrowful when Isaacson interviewed him saying, “This is the richest man in the world beating on somebody who can’t touch him.” 

But Musk’s initial funding was dwarfed by the cost of his “genius”. The company soon got into difficulty and allegedly Musk immediately resorted to wildly unethical means of sustaining it.

 R&D director Peng Zhou anonymously leaked to Valleywag in 2008 saying Tesla only had $9 million in the bank and was hemorrhaging customer money. He wrote, “We have over 1,200 reservations, which means we've taken multiples of tens of millions of cash from our customers and have spent them all. 

“Meanwhile, we only delivered less than 50 cars. I actually talked a close friend of mine into putting down $60,000 for a Tesla Roadster. I cannot conscientiously be a bystander anymore and allow my company to deceive the public and defraud our dear customers.”  

In fact, Tesla had to raise the price of its roadsters even for customers who’d already paid, partially as a result of Musk’s ill considered meddling. But they told customers the car had simply proven more expensive to make than they’d foreseen.

All of this meant that the fledgling company was close to bankruptcy. Eberhart told Mother Jones in 2013 that Tesla could’ve probably raised more money, but doing so would’ve diluted Musk’s shares, weakening his control on the company. So Musk was holding out for a loan. 

In a 2008 email to EPA director Lisa Jackson days before Christmas obtained by conservative website The Free Beacon, he wrote that: “Tesla struggled for its life over the past year.” while begging her to intervene to provide him a certificate he needed for a huge government loan. 

So Musk brought his marketing trickery to bear on what, these days, might seem like unlikely allies: the state of California and the Federal government.

Clip: Mrs Doubtfire saying ‘help is on the way, dear’.

In February of 2009 Musk emailed customers to calm their fears (and perhaps put pressure on the government) falsely claiming the Department of Energy would be disbursing their $350 million loan in the next few months. 

The DOE had actually just rejected the loan application the previous December and Tesla didn’t resubmit it until May. Maybe Musk really had been given “verbal approval” as he claimed or maybe this was a tactic to strong-arm the government reminiscent of his father’s marriage proposal. 

In March, to convince the government, Tesla released a video of their prototype model S semi-obscured by rocket debris. Credulous media described the car as the lovechild of an Aston Martin and a Maserati. 

But it was fake news, what Tesla had actually done was attached pieces of a body kit to a Mercedes CLS frame using magnets,   keeping onlookers at a distance that made it impossible to see through the ruse. 

It was this and the dubious claim the company had made $1 million in profit in the month of July (2009) after what appeared to be a sudden spike in sales that Paris Marx says proved to the DOE that Tesla, “had solid foundations and deserved the loan.”    

This was just one of a series of generous legs up the Bush and then Obama administrations gave Musk. As The Washington Post makes clear, US industrial policy, in the Obama administration in particular, has a lot to answer for. In early 2010 Tesla was granted a $465 million low-interest loan enabling it to buy its Fremont California plant and produce the now ubiquitous Model S. 

A former high level employee told The Post that, quote: “Tesla would not have survived without that loan.” They asked to remain anonymous out of fear of retaliation but said it was, “a critical loan at a critical time”. 

Other handouts also swelled Tesla’s coffers. The federal government gave consumer subsidies of $7,500 per sale for Tesla’s cars. Then there are billions in rebates and carbon tax credits the company received from the state of California. 

In fact, The Post writes that the sale of carbon credits to Tesla’s gas-guzzling competitors make up around a third of their profits since 2014. This revenue was essential for making Tesla profitable in its crucial 7 year growth period. In 2020, the company’s first full year of profitability, it posted a profit of $862 million. 

That may sound impressive, but if you subtract those carbon credits, Tesla would’ve lost more than $700 million. 

This wave of state aid helped Tesla to flourish. And The Post report as of the present day Musk’s companies had been granted at least $38 billion dollars in government welfare. Helping Musk to become immensely wealthy. 

But he’s been extremely nonchalant about this aid. Recently, he has spoken about the need to cut consumer subsidies, because Tesla no longer needed the handout. But Musk, when asked in July 2024 about the effect this might have on his business, let the cat out of the bag saying while it might hurt Tesla in the short term it would be quote: “devastating to our competitors”.

Show me a more textbook example of climbing up a ladder and then trying to pull it up after you, but this is classic Musk. And Sam Altman, fellow tech hypebeast and Musk enemy, once said Elon only wants the world to be saved if he can be the one doing the saving. 

With the government subsidies in place, Musk quickly transitioned Tesla to a more reliable source of funding: tech overhype. The Department of Energy loan prevented Musk from making grand promises about the future, and in this period the stock stayed relatively flat.

But then Musk refinanced the loan, enabling him to make increasingly grandiose, undeliverable predictions. The stock soared. Within 2 years of taking Tesla public in 2010 Musk was a billionaire.  

Tesla currently dominates the EV market thanks to its first mover advantage, but it has begun to slip as other manufacturers become more competitive. 

And while he was inflating Tesla, Musk repeated the same play with another company: SpaceX. A company he’d actually founded all by himself in 2002.

Much like Tesla, SpaceX also got its start thanks to federal generosity. DARPA, the pentagon’s research department began funding it in 2003 after the company lobbied and sued its way into an aerospace market monopolised at the time by Boeing and NorthrupGrumman. This funding continued throughout SpaceX’s early years, allowing the company the runway to blow up one rocket after another. 

In fact, in 2006, before the company had demonstrated any ability to reach space, NASA awarded it a $276 million contract to ferry supplies to the international space station — the floating lab which Musk spitefully declared should be prematurely deorbited after a recent Twitter spat with Danish astronaut Andy Mogenson who he called “retarded”.

Then, in 2008, just months after SpaceX’s first successful launch, NASA awarded the company a $1.6 billion contract in 2008.

This gave SpaceX the ability to build and launch the new rockets on behalf of NASA and other clients, laying the groundwork for its ability to create Starlink, an internet-providing satellite ‘mega-constellation’ which now provides the company with the lions share of its revenue according to The Post’s analysis.  

That is despite ruining astronomical observations, constantly raining satellites down from space and threatening to create something called Kessler Syndrome where cascading collisions create an uncontrolled chain reaction taking out every satellite in orbit and creating so much debris it makes all future launches and low-earth orbit impossible. 

SpaceX’s ability to hoover up government contracts was even the envy of Musk’s billionaire competitors. In 2016, Jeff Bezos (Amazon founder and owner of SpaceX competitor Blue Origin) told the Washington Post (which he also owns) quote: “Elon’s real superpower is getting government money”. 

It’s easy to laugh at one billionaire whining about the unfair opportunities of another, but Bezos does have a point. SpaceX, thanks to its head-start in R&D is capable of reusing its rockets, meaning it can massively undercut the competition.   

SpaceX’s President, Gwynne Shotwell, now claims the company earned that money fair and square by providing the government with great products, but in a 2013 interview she admitted NASA’s early funding was crucial, saying SpaceX would still “probably be limping along” without its support. 

And this is just what we know about. There is also an unknown amount of funding from the US government’s black budget. Many SpaceX launches carry classified defense and intelligence cargo, making the profits from these secret contracts difficult to quantify.

The Post report quote: “SpaceX has been developing spy satellites for the National Reconnaissance Office, the Pentagon’s spy satellite division, according to the Reuters news agency. The Wall Street Journal reported that the contract was worth $1.8 billion, citing company documents.”

And Musk’s juicy position siphoning funds from the state has also enabled him to pursue wackier, more hare-brained (or should I say monkey-brained) ventures. 

These include subterranean single-lane tunnels drilled by his Boring company, and more drilling, this time into the skulls of macaque monkeys, to implant them with brain computer interface chips made by his venture Neuralink. 

These strange business proposals could be easily dismissed as the eccentric dreams of the nerdy child we know Elon to be, but that is almost certainly being too generous. Much like with Elon’s constant promises to take humanity to Mars, he says them not because he necessarily believes them too much, but because they inflate his stock.

Take the Boring company as an example. Musk’s proposal to drill single lane holes linking major cities didn’t emerge on its own, but was a response to a government proposal in the early 2010s to build a high-speed rail link between LA and San Francisco. This would have impacted Tesla sales.

Elon’s play to prevent this is buried in Ashlee Vance’s fawning biography of all places, he writes, quote: “Musk told me that the idea originated out of his hatred for California’s proposed high-speed rail system. … He insisted the Hyperloop would cost about $6 billion to $10 billion, go faster than a plane, and let people drive their cars onto a pod and drive out into a new city. At the time, it seemed that Musk had dished out the Hyperloop proposal just to make the public and legislators rethink the high-speed train. He didn’t actually intend to build the thing. … With any luck, the high-speed rail would be canceled. Musk said as much to me during a series of e-mails and phone calls leading up to the announcement.”

High-speed rail, which is crucial for the transition to a more environmentally sustainable economy, is opposed by conservatives and special interests in the aviation and automotive industries because it threatens their bottom line. And Elon, as a car maker, is no different. 

As Paris Marx writes, quote: “Musk never had any intention of building the Hyperloop. He only needed it to help kill or substantially delay the high-speed rail project and the alternate vision of sustainable collective transportation it offered. It threatened his interests as an automaker and his elite vision of “individualized” mobility that simply worked better for him.”

After initially proposing double-decker roads as a potential solution to Nevada’s traffic, Elon turned to burrowing under the earth, promising he could dig tunnels at a much faster rate. He couldn’t. The company’s boondoggle bored slower than the standard technology and the tunnels were much narrower. 

Musk’s, pardon the pun, derailment plan soon broke containment: Spreading to Canada, India, France and elsewhere. 

Every single one of these proposals, according to Marx, amounted to nothing — many of the companies went under after interest rates rose, turning off free money spigot. As for The Boring Company and Musk’s loop. It left 2 underused tunnels wide enough for just a single car. 

The tunnel underneath the Las Vegas Convention Centre is licensed as an amusement park ride, I’ll give you one guess what The Clark County Commission gave the Boring company a 50 year lease to operate – According to transportation journalist Alissa Walker it's listed as a monorail. 

But that doesn’t matter, making a workable public transit system was never the point, Elon stopped the insidious threat to his wealth posed by high-speed rail. At least he mostly did. While Musk was distracting people with bullshit, China, Japan and parts of Europe invested in cutting edge high speed rail networks. 

As for Neuralink, which has recently filed to trademark telepathy and telekinesis, stories of horrific animal abuse began circulating after a non-profit called the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine sued the University of Davis, California – which hosted the company for 3 years – for access to their records. 

They allege at least 12 of the company’s lab monkeys died agonising deaths from “crude surgeries” resulting in “extreme suffering” which included septic shock and brain swelling as well as having parts of their brains destroyed by an unapproved substance called Bioglue. 

Just listen to this account from Wired: “The tan macaque with the hairless pink face could do little more than sit and shiver as her brain began to swell. The California National Primate Center staff observing her via livestream knew the signs. 

“Whatever had been done had left her with a “severe neurological defect,” and it was time to put the monkey to sleep. But the client protested; the Neuralink scientist whose experiment left the 7-year-old monkey’s brain mutilated wanted to wait another day. And so they did.

“As the attending staff sat back and observed, the monkey seized and vomited. Her pupils reacted less and less to the light. Her right leg went limp, and she could no longer support the weight of her 15-pound body without gripping the bars of her cage. 

“One attendant moved a heat lamp beside her to try to stop her shaking. Sometimes she would wake and scratch at her throat, retching and gasping for air, before collapsing again, exhausted.

“An autopsy would later reveal that the mounting pressure inside her skull had deformed and ruptured her brain. A toxic adhesive around the Neuralink implant bolted to her skull had leaked internally. 

“The resulting inflammation had caused painful pressure on a part of the brain producing cerebrospinal fluid, the slick, translucent substance in which the brain sits normally buoyant. The hind quarter of her brain visibly poked out of the base of her skull.”

Only when the Neuralink scientist was satisfied was she put out of her misery. Despite this being a clear violation of animal welfare law neither the University or Neuralink could be charged because they’d proactively reported it, maybe because it was being live streamed to witnesses. 

A former Neuralink employee interviewed by Wired said: “If you want to split hairs, the implant itself did not cause death. We sacrificed her to end her suffering.” We sacrificed her? The Wired journalists noted the quasi-religious language, writing that “After an animal was “sacrificed” few if any records were created.”

Another employee they interviewed said the survival rate was abysmal for some due to “poor planning and poor procedure” and that early operations were done without employing crucial personnel who should have been present. 

The University is home to a colony of 5,000 monkeys and has been trying to block the release of pictures from its time hosting Neuralink. Their lawyers claim the pictures should remain secret because the public would misunderstand them. Yet the reason the US passed the Animal Welfare Act in the first place was the public outcry when Life magazine published pictures of what they labelled “concentration camps for dogs” more than 60 years ago. 

Neuralink has now brought their experiments in-house – away from prying eyes and public disclosure laws along with all video evidence from their time at Davis. 

The Physician’s committee's research advocacy coordinator Jeremy Beckham said: “The documents reveal that monkeys had their brains mutilated in shoddy experiments and were left to suffer and die, it’s no mystery why Elon Musk and the university want to keep photos and videos of this horrific abuse hidden from the public."

Following a request by the nonprofit claiming Musk had lied to investors, the SEC reopened an investigation into Neuralink for securities fraud after he wrote on X in 2023 quote: “no monkey has died as a result of a neuralink implant”. He went on to claim they’d only chosen terminally-ill primates. 

Not only was this untrue,but the company's overall body count was already significantly higher. Reuters reported the previous year that Neuralink had killed around 1,500 animals such as pigs and sheep. 

Many of these deaths were due to avoidable mistakes as Musk constantly pressured staff to make faster progress — telling them on multiple occasions to imagine they were working with a bomb strapped to their heads. 

Fortune magazine quoted a former employee who said of Neuralink and Musk’s other companies: "Everyone in that whole empire is just driven by fear". And employees said the culture of blame and fear led to a high turnover of even senior staff. 

What’s even worse, all of this suffering was likely completely needless. PCRM’s director of research advocacy Ryan Merkley said without more evidence it's unclear if Neuralink has achieved anything new in the field, but, quote: “..we do know that Neuralink has a troubling history of sloppy science and illegal activity.” 

One human has so far received a Neuralink transplant, Noland Arbaugh, a man who was paralyzed from the neck down after a swimming accident in Northeastern Pennsylvania. Following his surgery, things looked on the up for Arbaugh, the implant enabling him to control a mouse cursor with his mind and even play Mario Kart. 

But his good fortune didn’t last, in the weeks that followed 85 percent of the device’s tendrils slipped off the surface of Arbaugh’s brain, losing much of its functionality. Neuralink advised Arrbaugh against surgery to remove the disintegrating  mesh from his brain. Undeterred and unpunished for this mishap, Neuralink is now preparing a second human subject for its procedure.

But just how much Musk really cares about restoring mobility to people with debilitating conditions is up for debate. Researchers elsewhere have had success using non-invasive techniques for this purpose. 

The real mission of Neuralink is more ideologically transhumanist. Partially inspired by the concept of “Neural Lace” from a series of science fiction novels by Ian M Banks, Musk says he wants to merge the human consciousness with AI.

To supposedly help humans “stay relevant” in a world dominated by artificial intelligence. The Guardian quotes Musk’s claim that AI will turn humans into “house cats” and lead to mass unemployment.  

Horsing around at Tesla

But that’s enough about Elon Musk the businessman, how does Musk perform as a bossman these days? Well, if you were going to say ‘good’, you’d be in for a surprise. 

In March last year Tesla settled a long-running lawsuit with a black employee of their Fremont plant who said he suffered severe racial harassment. The man, Owen Diaz, said he faced daily abuse such as racial slurs and drawings of swastikas and that Tesla had ignored his complaints. 

That plant in particular sounds like a hotbed of extremism. In fact, 6,000 black workers have already brought a class action lawsuit to bear against Musk for racial discrimination. 

The action snowballed from a 2017 case brought by former assembly line worker Marcus Vaughn who alleged that in addition to the slurs and racist graffiti – nooses were hung at their workstations, in communal areas and even draped over cars coming off the production line.  

Tesla continues to claim it doesn’t tolerate racial discrimination and has fired employees who engaged in this behaviour, but the sustained complaints over time suggest a more endemic problem. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission sued Tesla in 2023 alleging it had broken federal law in allowing the “widespread and ongoing racial harassment” and by retaliating against the employees who spoke up about their treatment. 

The black workers said they’d faced open racial hostility in the high-traffic areas of the factory. And the Nation report in the 42 legal filings they reviewed, a consistent pattern emerged, where even leaders and supervisors were using extreme racist language. 

And black workers were consistently given more physically demanding tasks than their white colleagues. In fact, they claim the Fremont factory was racially segregated with black workers being paid less. The company’s leadership was disproportionately white and black workers said they were denied the same opportunities for promotion. California Civil Rights Law Group attorney Lawrence Organ told CNBC, quote: “Tesla is supposed to be the factory of the future. But this conduct is from the Jim Crow past.”

There was also serious sexual discrimination. One woman alleged her supervisors used the words “bitch” and “cunt” in addition to the N-word. 

Another complained of a coworker hitting on her “approximately 100 times”, making lewd comments and despite her asking to be left alone began stalking her. Her supervisor initially told her “that’s just how people are”, when she complained again after it got more serious she was fired that evening for allegedly not meeting the company’s “integrity standards”. 

Another woman was fired after not showing up to work after male co-workers began repeatedly rubbing their groins against her butt. This later escalated into an incident where one of them forcibly spread her legs with one of his while she was clocking out, leading her to have a panic attack.  

Turley said she believed the company’s culture was set from the top down. There are almost identical allegations coming out of the plant in Sparks, Nevada. And it’s not just the factories. Female white-collar workers at Tesla have also complained sexual harassment went unaddressed and that they were passed over for promotion and paid less than men for the same roles. 

SpaceX reportedly has a similar problem with 7 former employees coming forward with the same concerns. They were fired after writing an open letter that was critical of Musk’s behaviour – on top of this, former SpaceX employee Michelle Dopak said the company retaliated against HER after she reported her manager for forcing her into a “quid pro quo sexual relationship”.        

Business Insider reported the coercive relationship led to Dopak getting pregnant. In 2020, Dopak said that the manager, who was married, offered her $100,000 to get an abortion. When she declined, she alleges the company colluded with him to transfer $3.7 million in SpaceX stock out of his name so he could “evade child support payments”.

Dopak also says she received ongoing harassment and discrimination after reporting the pregnancy, saying they tried to force her to quit by, “piling on work and ignoring her workplace accommodations”. 

SpaceX was also fighting a class action lawsuit filed in 2023 that alleges they underpaid women and minorities and another suit alleging the company discriminates against refugees and asylum seekers. 

A number of employees across his companies laid the blame with Musk, saying his tweets were often parroted by employees, many of whom “saw him as a god”. One woman said, “If he talks like that, they know they can, too”. 

Journalist Steven Rodrick writes in Rolling Stone that although there’s no evidence Musk knew what was happening in the Fremont factory until the lawsuits. It’s strange for someone who claims to be so hands-on — Musk actually said he was sleeping at the Fremont plant at the same time. 

But Musk is no stranger to sexual harassment allegations himself. Business Insider reported in 2022 SpaceX paid an unnamed woman $250,000 for her silence after an incident you’ve probably heard about.   

The woman who was employed as a flight attendant on SpaceX’s corporate jet fleet was encouraged to get a massage license so she could provide the billionaire with rub downs while he was on board. 

To add insult to injury she had to train her own time and pay for it herself, with the company implying she’d get more work if she was a fully qualified masseuse.  

Once she was trained Musk summoned her to his private room onboard the jet for a “full body massage”. She found him totally naked but for a sheet covering his… rocket. During the massage he reportedly exposed his erect penis to her and began rubbing her thigh, saying he’d buy her a horse if she would “do more” in a less-than-subtle request for a happy ending. She refused.

But then her work began to dry up. Initially, she said she was happy for the job opportunity — seeing Musk as “someone to look up to” — but the incident left her “full of anxiety” as she realised she was being pushed out for rejecting Musk’s advances. 

Elon claims there’s a lot more to the story and that if he’d been prone to this kind of thing it would have come out before now. But the alleged incident took place in 2016 and it would not be the last time he’d make the news for getting on like a creepy little weirdo. The next story, although less serious, is somehow even worse. 

In the early 2010s, The Wall Street Journal reported that he had a brief fling with a recent college grad while she was interning at SpaceX, which involved flying her out to Sicily.

The relationship ended but in 2017 Musk reached out to her about a full time position. When she arrived in California, Musk invited her out for drinks and, according to her friends who say she told them at the time, he came on to her and touched her breast, saying, “Oh, I’m so bad. I shouldn’t be doing this.” 

The woman says she broke off the fling before starting at the company, leading to some awkwardness. But she and Musk  reportedly remained “friends”. She was installed as an executive tasked with finding problems with the company and fixing them. 

But former employees said that, despite the fact she was a talented engineer, they found it odd that someone so junior was given such a high profile job so close to the boss. 

The answer to that question may lie in a text conversation the woman’s friends shared with The Journal, QUOTE: “He would text her, like a lot,” said one of the friends. When she didn’t respond to a nighttime invitation to come over to his house, Musk texted her name repeatedly, the friend recalled.

About half a year into her job, the woman received another invitation from Musk to come to his house, according to a text exchange reviewed by the Journal.

“Come by!” he wrote. When she didn’t respond, he peppered her with more texts: 

“Look, it’s either me or 6am [exercise] :)”

“Just finished the Model 3 production call. It’s def going to be hell for several more months.”

“Are you coming over? If not, I will probably tranq out. Too stressed to sleep naturally.”

When she still hadn’t responded, he wrote, “Probably best if we don’t see each other.”

The woman texted him in the morning. “Oh man. I’m sorry, I’d already fallen asleep. I’ve been a late night person most of my life but have been trying to switch over because it seems responsible. Tbh. Sorry I crashed last night,” she wrote.

The article continues with the woman texting her friends, quote: 

“Dude not gonna lie the fact that I have mild society[sic] anxiety resulting from imposter syndrome definitely makes this job harder, And that’s definitely exacerbated by Elon’s behavior.”

“I was wondering about that,” her friend responded.

“So badly,” she said.

“I mean if hanging out with him stresses you out about work maybe you might want to let things chill? I dunno.”

“Well I mean I think he broke up with me this morning. If I interpreted that last text 😆,” she wrote.

The woman said in an email provided by her lawyers that her last message was a joke that didn’t correspond to a real relationship. 

According to one of the affidavits sent to The Journal the pair texted often, as the woman had apparently supported Elon through his divorce with Riley. 

And the woman’s lawyers, who she shares with Musk, perhaps unsurprisingly disputed aspects of the WSJ’s story and claimed she’d “never had sexual relations” with Musk. 

But The Journal records another woman who was pushed out of SpaceX after a relationship Musk made her keep secret went south. The cause of collapse? Another missed bootie call. 

Included in the report are the claims made by a separate woman at the company, who Musk was not in a relationship with but who he allegedly badgered repeatedly about having his babies. 

…..

Musk’s employment practices at Tesla, meanwhile, are well documented. He claims employees are free to unionise whenever they want but The Guardian report that a culture of fear persists with those who remain after some employees who were trying to organise were fired. 

31-year-old Dezzimund Vaughn had been having meetings about forming a union at his home after the company started introducing strict, inhumane policies which involved a system where points would be deducted if they clocked in late or took a day off. 

Vaugn’s supervisor who had been lining him up for promotion due to his excellent performance record told him senior management were trying to fire him and The Guardian report they went so far as to doctor his performance reviews so they could point to 2 negative scores in a row to prove that he’d been fired for “failure to meet performance standards”. 

Crystal Guardado at the plant in California who has a medical marijuana card was fired according to a Tesla spokesperson for breaking the substance abuse and testing policy. But she says her attempts to provide management with the mitigating documentation were ignored and insists it was because she started speaking up about unsafe working conditions which included exposure to (toxic?) chemicals she said would make her eyes hurt. 

“Some of my most vivid memories are asking questions about the union to colleagues and being told to shut up or I’d get fired,” Guardado told The Guardian. The article continues, quote: “Interviews with current Tesla employees suggest these alleged union busting and intimidation tactics are still being implemented by middle and upper management at Tesla factories.

Another employee told the paper: “Pro-union people are generally fired for made-up reasons. There’s a culture of fear because if you don’t comply, you will be fired.” 

“He added that management quickly finds reasons to fire employees who tout their efforts to form a union and those who are fired are pushed to sign non-disclosure agreements before receiving their last paycheck.”

And the Centre for Investigative Journalism found Tesla had failed to report serious accidents at its Fremont, CA factory in order to claim their injury rate was in line with other car makers. 

Safety lead Justine White said working on cutting edge tech and Elon’s world saving vision was a draw but what she and some of her colleagues  found was, quote: “...a chaotic factory floor where style and speed trumped safety. Musk’s name often was invoked to justify shortcuts and shoot down concerns, they said.”

When she brought her unease about bone-crushing injuries on a shop floor where employees work alongside huge red robots – some of which are named after X Men characters – and where forklifts and tuggers speed by on an area demarcated from walkways by a different shade of grey, to her boss she was told “Elon doesn’t like the colour yellow”.

And if you’re wondering why it seems Musk has so much time to tweet every day, play video games and hang out at the White House, a clue could be found in something a former Tesla manager told journalist Fred Lambert.

Lambert tweeted on 15th April 2024 saying the recently-fired manager described Elon Musk as a “pigeon CEO”, quote: “He comes in, shit all over us, and goes.”

Weird IVF Kids  

Now what could a guy like Musk want more of in life? Himself, of course. Elon is an avowed breeder, and has offered his own sperm to multiple friends and acquaintances — some of them over dinner: such as the former independent vice-presidential candidate Nicole Shanahan, and some by public invitation: such as Taylor Swift.

A quick aside on Shanahan, a consummate embarrassment to her Irish ancestors. Anyway it’s amazing to me Shanahan didn’t take him up on the offer. She was RFK Jr's running mate and she became a billionaire after divorcing Google co-founder Sergey Brin following an alleged affair with Elon. 

The Daily Beast reports that in her lifetime she’s gone from Catholic school girl to converting to Judaism because she married a Jewish man (but then immediately traded up for Brin). She’s “flirted with Druidism” and is now a Jew for Jesus after being baptised in her backyard swimming pool by a “part-time prison chaplain recommended to her by her Mayan-Mexican masseuse” called “Ade”. 

I think technically it should be masseur because he’s a man but that’s what the article said. But even funnier is that apparently unprompted he whispered prayers while massaging her which, I don’t know about you, but sounds incredibly creepy! But she decided they were helping more than the massages and asked him if he knew anyone who could perform an exorcism on her to keep away “bad energy” from her divorce.

The final detail in a totally baffling article is the most American thing I’ve ever heard, get this, the husband and wife duo, Apostle Peter and Bishop Diane Robinson, who baptised her, beat the local Catholic diocese for the contract to be the prison chaplains. Which suggests there's some kind of tender process where religious organisations can bid for the presumably lucrative privilege of proselytizing to the inmates. 

She’s now threatening to use her money to primary anyone who opposed RFK Jr’s senate confirmation, warning about “lucifarian influence” on the government and recording videos claiming aeroplane contrails are part of a sinister conspiracy.  

Anyway back to Elon, I hope you’ll agree the digression was worth it.  

Why exactly Elon wants so many children is something of a mystery. That’s not because he’s been unclear about his ostensible reasons — he says he’s just doing “his part” (possibly an unironic reference to  the Starship Troopers meme) to combat western population collapse (I bet he doesn’t realise that movie is a satire) — this is a reference to his pronatalist worldview which we’ll come back to later. Suffice it to say, his mother also chipped in encouraging people to have more children even if they can’t afford them. 

Perhaps he has a breeding fetish, maybe he wants his own Genghis Khan-sized footprint on the future human genome, or maybe, like many narcissists, he just wants to make mini-me versions of himself to dress up and parade about: That is, until they grow minds and personalities of their own. 

Whatever his motives, it may not be sex. At least nine out of Elon’s 14 children were made by IVF while his current brood mare was… Occupied. That's right, the majority of Elon’s family was masturbated into existence.  

And they often have unfortunate names, as if they weren’t already at heightened risk of bullying. The first crop with his ex-wife Justine Wilson was relatively normal considering, the most eyebrow raising being a triplet named Saxon.  

But the one everyone knows is his first with Grimes being named some kind of maths equation featuring lots of Xs — that letter again. A theory I find compelling is that he’s using this one, which is reportedly one of his normally conceived children, X Machina (or whatever he’s called), as a portable human shield. 

But my personal favourite name is his youngest with Grimes – a 2-year-old called Techno Mechanicus.

Buzzfeed among others reported he had a secret 13th baby with a MAGA influencer called Ashley St Clair, an online troll who made her name posting thirst traps with right wing propaganda in the captions. 

This baby mama, who’d seemingly been trying to have Musk’s baby for years, publicly sold a Tesla Musk had gifted her recently in the latest episode of a public spat which has devolved into a court battle which involves her suing him for sole custody and to establish that he is the father after he cast doubt on whether the baby was his. 

But a series of text messages revealed in New York’s Supreme Court appear to show Musk writing: “can’t wait to knock you up again” and “well, we do have a legion of kids to make”.  

But St Clair alleges Musk has had virtually no contact with this son seeing him on only 3 short visits. And one court filing alleges he “directed” them to move from Texas to New York where she now lives in an apartment she says Musk bought her in lieu of romance. 

And St Clair claims she was forced to stay isolated inside it while she was pregnant supposedly out of security concerns but which she believes was an attempt to keep the baby a secret. 

MAGA provocateur and conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer responded to St Clair’s public car sale. Loomer, who's no stranger to a shameless publicity stunt, once chained herself to one of Twitter’s double doors to protest getting banned for hateful conduct. 

But the protest failed because staff were still able to enter the building using the other door and after being left to tire herself out eventually asked the police to cut her free.

She also once created an ISIS fan club while at university in a poorly thought out attempt to bait leftists into getting kicked out but nobody joined but her leading to her expulsion. She enjoyed a brief moment in the sun during Trump’s campaign after engineering a chance meeting by hiding in the bushes at Mar-a-Lago which led to rumours of an affair.

Anyway she called St Clair a gold digger and professional gaslighter. (Isn’t it terrible when the girls fight…). And while Loomer is a ridiculous person who’s been kicked out or banned from practically everywhere she’s ever been including Uber and Lyft she’s not wrong. 

But be that as it may, Buzzfeed report, Musk replied to her saying: "I don’t know if the child is mine or not, but am not against finding out. No court order is needed. Despite not knowing for sure, I have given Ashley $2.5M and am sending her $500k/year."

To which St Clair responded: "Elon, we asked you to confirm paternity through a test before our child (who you named) was even born. You refused. And you weren’t sending *me* money, you were sending support for your child that you thought was necessary… until you withdrew most of it to maintain control and punish me for 'disobedience.' But you’re really only punishing your son."

And that’s the real point of all of this, does St Clair need all of that money to raise one child, no. But as of whether Musk is a deadbeat, the answer is a resounding yes. 

A video of him storming off and appearing to abandon his young son X as he descended the stairs of Air Force One recently went viral and Grimes says she has pleaded with him to keep their child out of the public eye. 

During the Ashley St Clair baby mama drama Grimes publicly begged Elon on X to get in contact or designate one of his staff to do so because she couldn’t get through to him because their child was in the middle of a health emergency. 

Grimes previously tried to take the kid away from Musk but he apparently vanished leading to a nationwide manhunt, during which he reportedly evaded the people she hired to serve him with the papers more than a dozen times, as they visited businesses, and other properties he owns including a horse farm, to try and track him down.  

And Musk fought to try and keep the eventual court documents secret. But Business Insider obtained them and discovered X was “only absent from California over [Grimes’] objection” 

Musk once called X his “emotional support human” after bringing him to a meeting with Turkey’s authoritarian leader Erdogan. And has also referred to him as his “cuteness prop”. And when Musk biographer Walter Isaacson posted a picture of Elon, X and his latest child vessel Shivon Zilis, Grimes commented in a now-deleted post "let me see my son or plz respond to my lawyer." Saying she hadn’t even seen a photo of him until that point. 

But maybe the strangest thing prior to that is that they’re (almost) all male. Historian Quinn Slobodian says he’s genetically selecting to make sure they’re all male using IVF. There are 2 cis gender girls among the brood but the other 12 including the trans one were born male.

This eugenic attitude, and clear desire to flood the gene pool with his progeny, is pretty disturbing but not unique to Musk. Jeffery Epstein of all people had a similar plan to impregnate 20 women at a time. It seems to be a common back-up plan for transhumanists who fail to achieve their own immortality. 

Keeping up with the Musklets is a full-time job, it seems. Since I wrote this section, Neuralink executive Shivon Zillis has announced her fourth Elon baby, bringing the memeking’s highscore to 14. Zillis announced her infant was, quote: “Built like a juggernaut, with a solid heart of gold,” although that’s probably just more tech industry overhype. 

This 14th is, unsurprisingly, a boy, called Seldon Lycurgus — but let’s pause to take this one in. The first name, Seldon, is a reference to Hari Seldon, a fictional scientist in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series who was able to predict the future — including the collapse of the galactic empire he belonged to and help it chart a quicker path back to prosperity.. 

If you think that on its own sounds like some really nerdy fascism, the second name, Lycurgus, comes from a debatably mythical ancient Greek politician credited with creating Sparta’s insanely militaristic society. He’s also said to have encouraged procreation as a civic duty (now we’re getting Musky) and promoted a rudimentary form of eugenics. 

The Daily Beast report academic research around Lycurgus says he was idolized in Nazi propaganda for his militant reforms and familial views. In a 1929 speech Hitler praised Spartan eugenics and selective infanticide for creating “the purest racial state in history”.  

And the parallels don’t stop there, pronatalism which encourages “the right people” to breed is not new and the idea that high IQ elites should have as many children as possible to promote their worldview bears a striking resemblance to Nazi eugenics. 

In particular the theory behind their Lebensborn policy which heavily discouraged abortion, encouraged SS men and “biologically valuable” “aryan” women to have large families to supplement Nazi Germany’s “racial elite”. 

But here’s the thing, scientists are far from convinced that IQ is a heritable trait. And while pro-natalists often share certain ideas about making it easier to have a family with people on the left, their real concerns tend to drift in a different direction. 

As Politico reported from a convention called NatalCon, the speakers hinted at their worries for the West complaining about divorce, gender integration and the decline in genetic ‘quality’.  

Funnily enough, and much like most of the incoherent patchwork you could call Elon’s philosophy, baby 14’s two names are in conflict with each other. 

Here’s Isaac Asimov, writer of Seldon, commenting on Lycgurgus’s creation, Sparta: “In art, literature, music, love of life, all that makes it worthwhile to be on the earth, Sparta contributed nothing. She had only a cruel, inhuman way of life to offer, dependent on a brutal slavery of most of her population, with only a kind of blind animal courage as a virtue and her way of life soon became more show than substance.”

But then this wouldn’t be the first time Elon has lacked the self-awareness to fully understand or outright misinterpreted a book he claims to treasure. He selectively pulls from Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy which he says he adopted as his bible after finding all of the organised religions unpersuasive and specifically German philosophers depressing. But core to Adams’ book is a satire of people just like Musk. 

Adams is stingingly critical of the wealthy who he paints as narcissistic, status obsessed and too egotistical to recognise the consequences of their actions. In Chapter 5 a sex worker who propositions the protagonist asks if he’s rich, telling him she has a very special service for them.  

When he asks what it is, she says, “I tell them it’s okay to be rich”. 

As Elon was becoming the main character on Twitter he learned one of his male offspring, Xavier, was transgender and now wished to be known as Vivian Jenna Wilson. With the vicious culture war targeting one of the most vulnerable minorities now banging at his door, Musk had a choice to make. Was he going to turn his back on his upbringing and support his child but risk alienating his increasingly extreme fanbase? Of course he wasn’t. 

Ever the consummate deadbeat dad, Musk threw his child to the wolves to be torn apart, it’s fine don’t worry he’s got plenty more.. He announced on Jordan Peterson’s show that his son, Xavier,  was dead —  killed by the “Woke Mind Virus”. 

That’s Musk speaking to Jordan Peterson on his Daily Wire show during what I can only describe as a blizzard of misinformation. 

Practically everything in that clip is a lie. Puberty blockers are not sterilisation drugs, they kinda do what they say on the tin, block puberty temporarily to allow the child more time to decide and their effects are considered reversible by major US medical organisations. 

And there’s a large body of evidence to back that up because they’ve been safely used to treat children who have early onset puberty since 1981. 

And a detail that’s particularly grim in all of this is that Musk actually did lose his first child to sudden infant death syndrome.  

Wilson, who’s very much alive, told NBC news that despite Musk’s claims to have been tricked into signing the paperwork, he knew very well what he was authorising when she began her treatment. 

In a damning portrayal of her “absent” father Wilson told the interviewer, “He’s very quick to anger. He is uncaring and narcissistic.”

Wilson also says when she was in the 4th grade he once took her on what she thought was a road trip, but it turned out she was actually a prop in a promo for one of his new Tesla models. During the trip she says Elon constantly yelled at her in a way she described as cruel because her voice was too high. 

She said he would harass her as a child for exhibiting feminine traits and pressured her to deepen her voice while she was still in elementary school. 

She also disputed Musk’s claims that she exhibited gay stereotypes like saying ‘fabulous!’ and loving musicals at age 4, writing on Threads: “He doesn’t know what I was like as a child because he quite simply wasn’t there, and in the little time that he was I was relentlessly harassed for my femininity and queerness.” 

This moment is pivotal in the story Musk tells about himself. In that interview with Peterson he melodramatically proclaimed, “I vowed to destroy the woke mind virus after that”. 

But Paris Marx suggests that this may also be tied to Musk’s pronatalism. The fact Vivian had given up her ability to reproduce made her worthless to his genetic project. But you’ll have to wait til next week for that story. 

<Vivian on Musk’s ideological transformation>

But according to Higgins, Musk’s descent began earlier, quote: “In July 2018 Musk embarrassed himself in front of the entire world by offering to construct a ridiculous and unworkable submarine to rescue children stuck in a Thai cave. 

“After British caver Vern Unsworth refused his help, Musk called Unsworth a paedophile.” 

Unsworth told a TV interviewer that Musk could stick his submarine where it hurts because the dive was complicated and required the divers to go round a tight bend which was impassable for a rigid sub. 

Unsworth was a hero and successfully rescued the stranded boys in an operation that required the divers to take off their oxygen tank to get through this gap which was so dangerous one of the Thai navy seals helping him was killed in the process. 

The Tortoise investigative series Elon’s Spies examined what happened next – as Musk, desperate to find something to support his allegation, doubled down even after the Tesla board had forced him to apologise, telling Buzzfeed’s Ryan Mac that Unsworth might even be a “child rapist”. 

Musk had hired private detectives to dig up dirt on Unsworth but one of the PIs who’d later go to prison for fraud fed the billionaire what he wanted to hear, that Unsworth was a predator who frequented sex tourism hotspots and was known to be a creepy “manther” – an older man who liked younger women. 

None of it was true and Unsorth tried to sue Musk for defamation in a US court where the bar is extraordinarily high and even though he was innocent he had to live with the repulsive label after Musk’s lawyer successfully argued it was just a joke. 

But in playing to the gallery on Vivian’s transition, Musk received positive reinforcement from a welcoming community on the far right due to their hatred for transgender people, who make up less than 1% of US society. The scientific consensus on transgenderism is clear: it is determined genetically, as a representative 2018 study illustrates. 

The Hudson Centre for Medical Research found after analyzing the DNA of 380 trans people that, “certain ‘versions’ of 12 different genes were significantly overrepresented in transgender women, compared to non-transgender males.” 

But trans people have long provoked a repulsion borne of ignorance which has been inflamed recently as the far right began to use them as a political wedge issue. 

Which incidentally is precisely what the Nazis did, because of course they did, the famous photo of a Hitler Youth member at a book burning was taken in 1933 as the Nazi SA immolated the research of a famous Jewish doctor named Magnus Hirschfeld who was studying the phenomenon and in they process set back our understanding of it by decades. 

But thanks to this feedback loop, Musk, by indulging his Twitter habit, was spiralling further into the darkness. The more performative cruelty he could dispense, the bigger the outrage he would provoke, and the more praise he would receive from his new online tribe. 

Vivian wrote a post on Threads that appears to confirm something we mentioned earlier, that Elon was paying to have his children assigned male at birth quote: "My assigned sex at birth was a commodity that was bought and paid for. So when I was feminine as a child and then turned out to be transgender, I was going against the product that was sold. That expectation of masculinity that I had to rebel against all my life was a monetary transaction. A monetary transaction. A MONETARY TRANSACTION," she continued. "How the fuck is this legal."

….

At the same time Elon’s drug use had begun to come under scrutiny. Despite Musk’s lawyer telling the WSJ that he’s regularly drug tested at SpaceX and always pisses clean, Musk himself has admitted to using ketamine. 

He told Don Lemon that he’s got a doctor who prescribes him ketamine for depression. Why do I feel like this story is going to end with him shitting himself to death on the toilet like Elvis. Anyway Shyla Love writes in the Atlantic that large amounts of ketamine can make anyone feel like they can rule the world. 

And despite the denials his use of the substance is well documented. Ronan Farrow in his New Yorker profile said Musk associates had begun to worry about it as early as 2023, they thought ketamine quote: “alongside his isolation and his increasingly embattled relationship with the press, might contribute to his tendency to make chaotic and impulsive statements and decisions.” 

Ketamine is a dissociative drug and Love writes, “Frequent, heavy recreational use — say, several times a week — has been linked to cognitive effects that last beyond the high, including impaired memory, delusional thinking, superstitious beliefs, and a sense of specialness and importance.”

 What’s not included in her article is the other side effect of long-term ketamine use,  the destruction of the bladder lining which can eventually result in the loss of bladder control. 

A process you would expect to be well under way if Musk had been abusing the substance for years; unless his doctor has found some way to prevent it.

And it might not just be ketamine. As of Jan 6th 2024, the Wall Street Journal reported that Musk’s drug use also included cocaine, LSD, ecstasy, and magic mushrooms, and had begun to spook  executives at his companies. 

Musk’s response to the Ronan Farrow profile is just one of countless  examples that appear to show delusional thinking. Replying to a tweet he wrote: “Tragic that Ronan Farrow is a puppet of the establishment and against the people.” In his conception he, the richest man in the world, represents the people against the establishment. 

Musk’s behaviour in business has always been volatile but SpaceX execs who’d been with him for years say they noticed a change late in 2017. It was at an all hands on deck meeting, hundreds had gathered in anticipation of Musk but he was AWOL. He arrived nearly an hour late. 

From The Journal: “When he finally took the stage, Musk was strangely incomprehensible at times. He slurred his words and rambled for around 15 minutes, according to executives in attendance, and referred repeatedly to SpaceX’s Big Falcon Rocket prototype, which was known as BFR, as “Big F—ing Rocket.” 

“SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell ultimately stepped in and took over the meeting.

“It couldn’t be learned if Musk was under the influence that day. But after the meeting, the SpaceX executives privately talked about their worries Musk was on drugs. One described the event as “nonsensical,” “unhinged” and “cringeworthy.”

Their concerns deepened the following year when Musk smoked weed with Joe Rogan, perhaps unfairly this caused the Tesla stock to take a hit but the executives had their reasons to be worried. Not only did illegal drug use violate company policy, they were concerned it could lead to a health crisis. Whats more, it could harm the business. 

The Journal Report: “Illegal drug use would likely be a violation of federal policies that could jeopardize SpaceX’s billions of dollars in government contracts. Musk is intrinsic to the value of his companies, potentially putting at risk around $1 trillion in assets held by investors, tens of thousands of jobs and big parts of the U.S. space program.”

This is not to say ketamine therapy is bullshit, studies have found it can help with mental health conditions from anxiety to PTSD. But the effects of long term, unsupervised, use are murkier. According to a 2010 study led by Celia Morgan, now a psychopharmacology professor at the University of Exeter, even infrequent users (they count infrequent as 3 times a month, which seems pretty frequent) scored higher on a delusional thought scale than ex users and people who use other drugs or don't use drugs at all.  

And the more often they used the drug the more pronounced this effect was, quote: “People believed that they were the sole recipients of secret messages, or that society and people around them were especially attuned to them. The psychological profile of a frequent ketamine user, Morgan and her team concluded, was someone who had “profound” impairments in short- and long-term memory and was “distinctly dissociated in their day-to-day existence.””

Add to this Elon’s increasingly far right ideology and his claims he doesn’t sleep much. A normal adult needs between 7 and 9 hours of sleep per night to stay healthy. Musk told CNBC he’d tried to sleep less but it gave him “brain pain” so now he tries to get 6 hours. For what it’s worth Grimes claimed he stayed up all night playing Elden Ring when it came out – which, you’re 50 years old and supposedly run five companies dude, what’s going on?  

6 hours might be okay in the short term or if he has a specific genetic mutation that allows people to get better quality sleep but chances are it's contributing to a slow burn of negative health effects. The guy is visibly not in great shape, in a strange shape for anything but a frube being squeezed at one end, or maybe a french bulldog. 

Sleep deprivation has been linked to a plethora of health conditions from depression and obesity to increased risk of heart attacks, high blood pressure and even psychosis. And being awake for too long, “causes your body to mimic the impairments of being drunk”. 

In fact, it has a profoundly negative effect on brain function as sleep affects how well people learn and remember and studies have linked sleep deprivation to the development of Alzheimer's disease.  

It’s natural to speculate whether the effect of all of this might be more pronounced on a man who’s been experiencing difficulty distinguishing reality from fantasy from a young age and has displayed delusions of grandeur for years which were inflated by a willing media. 

Throw in high-profile social media addiction and extremist ideology, and you have the perfect recipe for completely losing your goddamn mind.  

And what a head loss it’s been. Since Trump’s election, Musk has seized the reins, turned the White House into a car showroom, undermined key agencies that maintain both the American empire abroad and the country’s stability at home while tanking the stock market. And we will cover all of that and much more in the second part of our series on Elon next Monday.

Stay tuned. 

Next week on Cabinet of Curiosities we’ll see how Elon poisoned the most influential social media platform and pick apart the weird, esoteric patchwork of his ideology. 

You can find an episode transcript with all of our sources on our website. 

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Research, editing and production by yours truly with additional research, editing and fact checking by Bentada Gigas. 

And all of our music is by Max Fraser.