00:04:10.900So what we're here today to examine is what was it exactly?
00:04:15.600Was it Grimes leaving him and allegedly briefly dating a trans woman?
00:04:19.780Was it having a trans daughter who he refused to accept?
00:04:23.300Was it the COVID lockdowns temporarily preventing his Tesla employees from going to work?
00:04:28.900Was it the 18-year-old guy who tracked and published publicly available information about
00:04:33.520Elon Musk's private jet usage to a Twitter account called Elon Jet?
00:04:38.420What was it that sent Elon down this far-right spiral, or at least made it so he could no
00:04:43.540longer hide it from the rest of the world?
00:04:45.120Today, to examine the possibilities therein, I am joined by Ryan Mack and Kate Conger, who are both journalists at the New York Times, who recently wrote a book called Character Limit, How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter.
00:05:01.860Ryan and Kate, welcome to A Bit Fruity.
00:05:06.780It's an interesting time. I feel like a lot of the things that we're seeing play out now with
00:05:14.040Doge and his relationship with Trump sort of call back to the takeover of Twitter and the way that
00:05:19.040he was acting then and the kinds of decisions that he made in that process. So it feels almost
00:05:25.240like deja vu a little bit. We're ramping. I mean, our day job is New York Times reporters. So we're
00:05:30.980ramping up to cover essentially his every move and in some ways he's he's never been more powerful
00:05:36.820you know he controls an internet platform he has the ear of the person who's going to be in the
00:05:41.440white house you mentioned his net worth he controls multiple companies in spacex and tesla
00:05:47.460um so we're about to be very very busy i guess yeah i am super excited to have ryan here because
00:05:54.880i mean i'm so excited to have but not kate to be clear i'm so excited to have both of you here
00:06:00.960But the thing is, Ryan adds to the very, very, very teeny tiny arsenal of cisgender heterosexual men who have been on the A Bit Fruity podcast.
00:06:23.360But to your point, I mean, I always ask myself before I start making or, you know, outlining or researching for an episode on this podcast, I'm like, okay, what's the point? Why am I making an episode like this? And I really do like to examine, if you've been listening to this podcast for a while, you know, I like to examine the rabbit holes that especially powerful people who have the, you know, resources, money, education to know better.
00:06:50.460I'm interested in these spirals that they take.
00:06:53.160I did an episode that was structurally similar to this one with Natalie Nguyen about J.K.
00:11:35.460What I want to first ask you guys about is something that I don't actually know that
00:11:38.920much about, which is Elon Musk's childhood and where he comes from before he arrives
00:11:43.860here in the US and with Tesla and all of this stuff.
00:11:46.380Kind of the greatest insight I have into Elon Musk's childhood is actually when Azealia Banks, who we could do a different episode about, called him Apartheid Clyde, which I don't, I have no affinity for Azealia Banks, but every now and then she yields, she yields a gem of a term and Apartheid Clyde maybe was one of them.
00:12:06.360She really has, I mean, a way with words.
00:12:58.060There's that meme of, you know, an emerald mine, which is always discussed when it comes
00:13:02.820to his early net worth, which his father did have a stake in.
00:13:06.960Yeah. Can you explain that? The emerald mine situation?
00:13:09.780I think I think it first of all, I think it goes back to this idea. What base did he start off in in life? Is is does he have the Horatio Alger, like pull yourself up by your bootstrap story to start from zero? And the short answer is, is no, there was there was some, you know, family wealth. It wasn't like he was destitute in any way or lower class, but he had a pretty middle to upper class upbringing.
00:13:35.360You know, his parents were successful. His father ended up contributing to a lot of his early startups and giving them kind of some funding there. But the Emerald Mine is something that just becomes up over and over again, just to show that, you know, he had this upbringing, you know, and it's something that's talked about regularly online when someone argues, you know, oh, he had the success because he had, you know, he started on second base, basically.
00:14:01.620I would quibble with that a little bit in the sense that, you know, not everyone on second base builds two multibillion dollar companies.
00:14:09.020But, yeah, there was there was some privilege that has to be considered when you when you talk about his early history.
00:14:15.200But, you know, grew up in South Africa, came or moved to Canada and eventually to the U.S. to go to school.
00:14:21.880He goes to the University of Pennsylvania and then moves to California to start a graduate program at Stanford.
00:14:27.840that he actually never begins, you know, and that he instead goes into founding a company
00:14:34.220kind of dot-com era, pre-dot-com era called Zip2.
00:14:47.360He invests in Tesla and then takes over that company.
00:14:49.940So that's kind of his progression through life in his early years.
00:14:53.040You know, his telling of his origin story is that his childhood abuse really shaped his character and who he is today.
00:15:01.540And he's talked a little bit about undergoing more like verbal, emotional abuse from his dad and then also being bullied in school, getting beat up at school, stuff like that.
00:15:10.760And I think what's interesting, you know, there's kind of two routes that you can take from an abuse experience.
00:15:17.340there's like I want to heal from this and not pass it on and sort of like move down a new path
00:15:24.720and then there's a second path that I think Musk has been more active in pursuing and in taking
00:15:30.320that negative experience and turning it into a superpower for himself so instead of kind of
00:15:36.060trying to distance himself from it he's like I was bullied it made me strong it made me who I am
00:15:41.280so I'm going to bully the people around me I'm going to push the people around me I'm going to
00:15:44.920give them a taste of that same experience. And if they can, can rise to my level and push through
00:15:50.900that, then those are the kind of people I want to be around. So instead of really kind of like
00:15:55.160pushing the experience away, he's made it really core to his identity and to the way that he
00:15:59.920operates his businesses. Yeah, it's kind of a deeply untherapized way to go about your trauma.
00:16:06.940He also says, you know, I don't have empathy, you know, and it's like a justification for
00:16:11.800all the bad behavior. If you read a certain book by a biographer, Walter Isaacson, you know,
00:16:17.620he starts his biography with Elon Musk being bullied and like everything flows from there,
00:16:23.100which is exactly the story that Elon wants to tell. But, you know, you have plenty of people
00:16:26.980who are bullied in life that don't end up becoming unempathetic or, you know, abusing their employees
00:16:32.760or what have you, you know. So I think it's oversimplified in a way, but it's the story
00:16:37.260he certainly likes to tell well absolutely i mean i have empathy for elon musk for being bullied but
00:16:42.680also like he now tweets 60 times a day about just absolutely crushing under his boot you know trans
00:16:50.680people who are some of the most regularly bullied people in schools across america and so you know
00:16:55.960i don't i don't know i don't i don't i don't think that's compelling yeah using the platform to lash
00:17:00.700out at his own child right and and talk about how she's essentially dead to him how she's been
00:17:06.760stolen by the woke mind virus because she's transitioned. And so you really see him kind of0.70
00:17:11.700like passing on that sort of like verbal abuse in a really public way. I want to talk about Elon
00:17:17.200Musk's early years having a political affiliation as like a liberal because I did not really know
00:17:24.120this about him. I wasn't I mean, I wasn't aware of Elon Musk like during the Obama era. I wasn't
00:17:29.260aware of a lot of things during the Obama era. I was a depressed high schooler, a senior child
00:17:33.140psychologist but but i didn't know that he was like a total lib like there are like these photos
00:17:40.660of him with obama he endorsed hillary can you talk about that yeah i think the way to think
00:17:47.280about elon in those years is sort of kind of stereotypical silicon valley executive you know
00:17:54.040he had he had become very rich you know he he sells paypal to ebay makes a lot of money there
00:17:59.720plunges that into spacex as well as tesla and is kind of seen at the time as a quirky guy like who
00:18:06.400wants to get people to getting people to mars is like a very central thing to him um and for most
00:18:11.640people in the valley that's kind of like a what are you talking about you're you're weird man
00:18:15.320kind of thing um and this was like early 2000s up until like the first obama presidency he was
00:18:21.160kind of obsessed with the mars thing he still is but you know he was a quirky kind of socially
00:18:27.100liberal maybe fiscally conservative type person with some libertarian tendencies you know there's
00:18:33.600libertarian there's a big libertarian streak in the valley it's just like my worst nightmare
00:18:38.660guy who is socially liberal fiscally conservative with libertarian tendencies aka like the worst guy
00:18:45.560you've ever met at a bar but this is that's that's how a lot of silicon valley was built
00:18:52.940You know, and these are the personalities that drove these companies into existence.
00:18:58.060And he was he was somewhat close or pretty close with the powers that be at the time.
00:19:03.900You know, people like Gavin Newsom, who were ascendant in California and was was fairly liberal.
00:19:09.300I remember like digging into some of his his charitable giving at the time he gave to some Democratic politicians.
00:19:15.820At one point, his foundation gave to the Transgender Law Center.0.89
00:19:22.940He was supporting a lot of causes. He was he was in support of gay marriage, I think, you know, socially liberal causes that were accepted in a place like San Francisco and in Silicon Valley.
00:19:33.860But it also wasn't very public about his politics. Like, it's not like he like obviously now he's tweeting about how you need to vote Republican to save the country.
00:19:44.300And there was nothing like that. He wasn't like out stumping for politics.
00:19:47.040He was so focused on building his companies that there wasn't really time for, you know,
00:20:12.640And so, you know, I think if you don't have a really strong political view of your own, and then you have one party that's like praising you and welcoming you in, you're going to gravitate to that. And I think that's the story of Musk and a lot of other folks in tech. And it's I think it's almost hard to conceptualize that now, because we've moved into an era of so much tech criticism. But at the time, I mean, these people were like, very, very praised in in government circles, Obama was considered like the first tech president, he did a lot of campaigning on Facebook.
00:20:42.640Yeah. I mean, it was just sort of this like mutually beneficial, very praising relationship. You know, even if you think back to Trump's first election and the intense backlash to that in the tech industry, you know, one of Trump's first actions was to try to enact this Muslim ban.
00:21:02.540And you saw Sergey Brin, one of the founders of Google, show up at San Francisco Airport and demonstrate against that and like join a protest.
00:21:09.360And there are all these companies in the valley signing on onto the friends of the court briefs to challenge that ban in court.
00:21:15.920Then this sort of era of tech skepticism rolls in, right?
00:21:19.380You have the 2017 revelations of Cambridge Analytica and like how tech had sort of been manipulated and used to manipulate the vote.
00:21:28.500You know, you have sort of like the fall of Travis Kalanick in there and all the criticism that came of that of Uber and a lot of criticism of the culture of these companies that were espousing ideas of diversity and really still remaining dominated by white men and not really opening up the ranks to other people to come in and work in these companies.
00:21:49.380So there's a steady drumbeat of criticism, I think, that started to build and intensify during the Trump years. And you see a lot of people in tech talk about that, where they feel like they sort of embraced the Democratic Party. And then they were criticized by it. They were like, cut down by it. And now they've turned and swayed themselves more to the place where they're getting praise and they're getting acceptance. And that's coming more from the right these days.
00:22:14.180And tracing Musk through that period, he became very decently close with Obama. You know, he invited Obama to SpaceX launches. He was visiting the White House and the Oval Office to talk about space policy and push for the privatization of certain launches, you know, and space activity, which he eventually gets and becomes effectively like the main way that the US government gets things into space.
00:22:40.300You know, he was laying that groundwork by getting close to Obama in that period.
00:22:44.860And he actually he taught if you look at how he talks about Obama these days, it's still in a very like nostalgic, very friendly demeanor.
00:22:54.680He it's actually used to contrast with how his relationship with Biden has gone.
00:22:59.440It's like, you know, I I used to be a Democrat, you know, I used to support Democratic causes.
00:23:05.620But now look at how where the Democratic Party has gone.
00:23:08.860This is what has pushed me towards the right, you know, and I guess it can't be understated how strong his connection or how, you know, or his personal views of Obama were in that time.
00:23:18.680Elon Musk also like one of the through lines to me and you tell me how accurate this is, but he just has seemed forever very preoccupied with looking cool, even before he took this like right wing nosedive.
00:23:32.520And like during the Obama era, Democrats were cool.
00:34:40.960But one does run out of time to do, you know, other things that you need to be a person
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00:36:00.660for sponsoring today's episode and let's get back to the show all right 2018 wow it really is a long
00:36:08.780timeline uh 2018 is according to my i love calling like reading people magazine listicles research
00:36:16.380but according to my research 28 this is around the time that he starts dating grimes so they
00:36:23.320they meet actually on twitter they start corresponding and the met gala of that year
00:36:28.400i believe is when they they make a public appearance as a tradition on this podcast i
00:36:32.880always give a little bit of backstory to everyone that i introduce there's a good chance if you're
00:36:37.420in the demographic of people listening to this podcast that you're at least a little familiar
00:36:40.980with grimes but grimes is like an alternative indie artist famously just like really kooky
00:36:48.100wacky like she's always very like brittly thin and has kind of like wispy pink hair she was one
00:36:55.160of the reigning queens of like alt gay tumblr music she like famously her her album uh what's
00:37:04.700the album called visions visions i think she like did a bunch of drugs and like locked herself into
00:37:10.760a room for two weeks or something and the album which is a perfect alternative album came out of
00:37:16.780that time her music has been a kind of all over the place since then but it is an incredible body
00:37:22.800of work that she made you know at this point over 10 years ago and i remember when they started
00:37:27.660dating because at this point elon was really coming into public consciousness it was just
00:37:31.460like okay what is what why is my tumblr queen this is how i felt like why is my tumblr queen
00:37:36.320dating a tech billionaire totally well and it was also such a deviation i think for him because
00:37:42.020up until that point he had been dating actresses who are sort of in the blonde bombshell category
00:37:48.640amber heard he had just dated amber heard and so there was like this very specific
00:37:53.420typecasting of like the kind of person that he would date and then for him to suddenly pivot from
00:37:58.980like blonde bombshell to like alt elf was a really weird switch up for him yeah that's a good
00:38:05.700description alt elf very unexpected couple there's this insane picture from kim kardashian's 2019
00:38:12.820holiday party well it's just it's another it's another piece of the puzzle here that can really
00:38:19.660only have ever have ever existed at this like very specific point in time but it's
00:38:24.820kim kardashian kanye west uh elon grimes is that asap rocky quavo quavo yeah it's it's just
00:38:34.820this photo feels like a visual maglip i mean at the time yeah but now i mean kanye and elon have
00:38:42.140been homies for a long time kim kardashian is like loving their her cyber truck and like putting up
00:38:48.380videos with those robots in some ways like associating yourself with elon was like sort of
00:38:53.480cool like he right he has this kind of futuristic car company that that is is you know is a liberal
00:39:01.240cause and in you know helping to save the environment he's trying to get people to space
00:39:06.020right he's kind of quirky he'd sort of been in the mainstream tech whatever and now suddenly
00:39:11.900he's around you know some of the most influential culture creators of that era and and being seen as
00:39:18.560one of them that like that that you know the things that he's doing are not just businesses
00:39:23.300but like cultural status symbols i think so tesla goes from being like oh a cool ev to like
00:39:28.920oh i have a tesla you know do you have any insights into like the gist of their relationship
00:39:34.060which which lasts about four years they have three kids uh also if you know how to pronounce
00:39:39.380the kids names that would be cool too they bonded over a discussion over ai so elon is a is a big
00:39:45.780what would they call a doomer you know this idea that ai will reach sentience and will ultimately
00:39:53.680like destroy its creator in humans and as i understand it they they bonded over this interest
00:40:01.040in ai and this kind of doomerism and so they talk about ai they end up meeting in person you know
00:40:08.100for Grimes, I think someone like Elon is very fascinating. This is a guy that wants to make
00:40:13.900humans multi-planetary and is pretty smart and well-read and like knows about AI and is a mover
00:40:20.000and shaker in technology. And I think a lot of her brand is like on this kind of like techno0.99
00:40:25.960utopianism, techno futurism, but, you know, associating herself with that, someone like
00:40:32.260that is, is, is cool. So they meet through Twitter. It kind of, I think is the seed of
00:40:36.920musk's idea that twitter could be made into a dating app someday which is another feature he's
00:40:41.520talked about adding to x and has has yet to do how can how can we make this even more miserable
00:40:47.180i mean it was a successful dating app for him so who knows i wrote a piece when i think after
00:40:55.460the takeover about people are kind of like mourning the loss of what twitter once was
00:41:00.080and i interviewed a couple of other people who met their spouses on twitter so apparently this
00:41:04.120is a thing people do they're sliding into the dms on twitter but yeah so they have three kids
00:41:09.360together um the first is x and then they have these two kids after the fact so what's interesting
00:41:16.360here is i believe x is the only kid that grimes had via like a natural birth and then the second
00:41:24.720two exa and techno mechanicus sorry i i know i know the name thing is is kicking a horse while
00:41:32.280it's down but like exadark side rail and tech tech tech tech no my can i get okay sure yes so
00:41:40.280she has these kids via surrogate and she tries to keep them completely secret i don't know if it's
00:41:45.520a privacy thing necessarily or she's just trying to protect the kids from media scrutiny but these
00:41:51.460kids she tries to keep very secret and we find out about them in a crazy way she's on a zoom interview
00:41:58.120i think with like a vanity fair journalist or something and the journalist hears a baby crying
00:42:02.780in the background it's like is there a baby in your house and she's like oh yeah i have these
00:42:06.840secret babies that no one knows about oh wow that's crazy like they're kind of stashed away
00:42:13.720um and by the time that she has these second two kids her relationship with elon is kind of
00:42:20.040falling apart while her surrogate is pregnant he also decides to have children with one of his
00:42:26.600employees at neuralink uh which is another one of the companies that he runs wait elon does yes
00:42:32.760oh wait did that child come to fruition yeah oh i didn't know two two children they're twins
00:42:39.340he has twins with his employee at the same time as grimes is having her second two children and
00:42:47.520he keeps the twins a secret from grimes so grimes doesn't know that he's made this decision to have
00:42:53.880kids via IVF with one of his employees and him and you're talking about the funny names him and
00:43:00.180Grimes had originally picked out the name Valkyrie for Exa so for her daughter she wanted to call her
00:43:04.940Valkyrie and his twins with his employee were actually born prior to Grimes's second two kids
00:43:11.900and he gives the name Valkyrie to one of those twins and sort of steals the name from Grimes
00:43:19.020and gives it to these other kids so she finds out about all of this and of course is really upset
00:43:24.040like she's picked out this name for her daughter all of a sudden these secret children are in the
00:43:27.960picture and one of them has her daughter's name um and so she actually she wrote like a poem or
00:43:35.740lyrics about it and posted it online and it's sort of referencing the name and talking about
00:43:40.880uh her her like suffering and pain as a mother that this has happened to her
00:43:46.060And so I think that that's kind of like really the point of falling out between between Grimes and Elon.
00:43:52.460God, I should say it. It should be. Oh, my God. I didn't know about this.
00:43:57.160Yeah. And, you know, they had their relationship hasn't recovered to this day.
00:44:00.940You know, they co-parent, but they're certainly not together.
00:44:03.340I think it's a really telling incident for how Elon views people and how interchangeable everyone is around him, even down to his own children.
00:44:12.320right like two children could bear the same name and then you know they're kind of interchangeable
00:44:16.960with each other the women who are in his life and he's having kids with are sort of interchangeable
00:44:22.340um and i just think it's like very it's a very revealing incident into how he thinks about the
00:44:27.820people around him do you think that this kind of i don't know tumultual relationship with this like
00:44:34.360queer coded well i don't know if i can call grimes queer coded i don't really know anything
00:44:38.660about her sexuality but like sort of adjacent to like queer culture and like kind of this whole0.54
00:44:44.700world that grimes orbited before they were together like do you think the rocky relationship
00:44:48.680and ultimate falling out like had a bearing on his politics or his like his own culture warrior-ness
00:44:54.600i'm not sure because people like to say that yeah yeah and i think that's simplified but i think you
00:45:02.000have to take into account everything else that was happening in elon's life and it's not just about
00:45:07.700you know his relationship with grimes and where she was at politically or so let's rewind a little
00:45:12.060bit to to 2020 um and the covid years you beat me to it um so you know we have this tweet of his in
00:45:21.5402018 where he's supporting lgbtq culture um i think you on your outline you have him saying
00:45:28.740he's a moderate he was tweeting around this time like i'm a moderate just to clarify i'm not a
00:45:33.960conservative like he was saying that stuff outright uh the only other thing i want to add
00:45:38.560about the lgbtq kind of allyship tweet which i think is interesting is that a lot of times people
00:45:44.640with within like the lgbtq world a lot of times adults who previously have like no connection
00:45:51.580to the community or the political cause that like you know lgbtq people are faced with a lot of
00:45:58.380times having a child who is queer draws parents into the fold of fighting for that cause and0.57
00:46:05.760what's so interesting is that he at least on like you could be totally cynical and say that this0.94
00:46:11.200lgbtq kind of like flaunting his friendliness was like a total pr move but even still he went from
00:46:17.900that to then having a trans daughter who we'll talk about in a little bit but like it radicalized
00:46:22.900him in the other direction which is just really interesting and and kind of uncommon but should
00:46:27.580we talk about covid first yeah i mean the timeline is yeah he's he's openly moderate he's he's yeah
00:46:32.720we talked about this earlier he's socially liberal he's you know pro l lgbt sorry i don't know i don't
00:46:38.920know if he's the t part i don't know but he was no yeah he he did he he even had the q yeah yeah
00:46:44.360on there yeah true true yeah he's he he believes in climate change and has a company that's
00:46:50.080combating that he's very socially liberal causes and he's meeting with obama and so that's that's
00:46:55.900how he was politically heading into 2020, you know, and in the valley, that's pretty common,
00:47:00.740you don't want to like necessarily stake, like, I'm a Democrat, I'm Republican. But here are my
00:47:05.800values. I'm an independent thinker, I can think for myself. And you know, I'm somewhere in the
00:47:11.620middle. And you want to you want to make the Democrats and Republican politicians kind of
00:47:15.640fight over who can be nicer to you. Sure. And with but with also a libertarian streak or
00:47:20.400conservative streak around fiscal spending and taxation, especially as you are getting more and
00:47:26.220more wealthy. But 2020 rolls around and COVID happens. And you have this tweet here, the
00:47:31.520coronavirus panic is dumb. This is like peak scare, basically, right? This is end of February,0.93
00:47:38.240early March. It's starting to, the virus is starting to come over to the states. And he
00:47:43.180stakes his position that the coronavirus panic is dumb. And he's defended that in the past of0.75
00:47:49.180saying like the panic itself is dumb and not he's not saying the virus is dumb the panic is dumb0.81
00:47:54.220but he begins to feed into this idea that you know maybe we shouldn't take this virus as seriously as0.96
00:47:59.960everyone thinks we should you know this contrarian thinking that kate talked about earlier and then
00:48:03.880starts to go really far down that that path he has a tweet later on where he says you know there's
00:48:10.200going to be no new covid cases by the end of april he starts to position himself as sort of a covid
00:48:17.160denier. And when you think about it, it kind of makes sense, right? He is someone who is dependent
00:48:22.440on his factories being open at Tesla, being able to produce cars at a certain rate to keep the
00:48:29.260stock price up and his investors happy. And if there are these lockdowns or these shutdowns of
00:48:35.180operations that aren't essential, that directly hurts him as a businessman. So he starts to rail
00:48:40.840against California and its shelter in place orders. He calls the state fascists and the
00:48:47.460government fascists at one point. He goes on this rant during an earnings call and also starts to
00:48:52.800downplay the severity of COVID. I remember one email that I got when I was reporting at the time
00:48:57.400where he told employees that you're actually more likely to die in a car crash than of COVID,
00:49:02.820which is hilarious for a guy who runs a car company.
00:49:06.520i was gonna say i mean is that the statistic you want to use to make your point yeah maybe
00:49:13.480use like shark attack or like bees or something but right vending machine falling on you um
00:49:18.800struck by lightning but you know he used cars you know he he's just thinking about cars killing
00:49:23.400people all the time he's like you're more likely to die for that other thing that i do
00:49:27.120and so he strikes his position out as like covid is not bad and even if you get it you're not going
00:49:33.320to die. It starts to turn people against him. You remember the climate at that time, people just
00:49:39.940being really unhappy with people, with others who didn't take this seriously. And among those was
00:49:46.480a supposedly liberal businessman or a businessman that stood for liberal causes. And that was in
00:49:52.660some ways a fissure for a lot of folks in terms of their adoration for him. I'd like to take a
00:49:58.720quick break from the show to thank the sponsor of today's episode, Blueland, who, along with
00:50:05.580my supporters over on Patreon, make it possible for me to spend 12 hours a day going down right
00:50:12.560wing online rabbit holes, which you know what, when I put it that way, maybe we should all stop
00:50:17.600enabling this behavior. Maybe we need to stop. Blueland is on a mission to eliminate single
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00:50:27.220know those dishwasher pods that we all use? I thought those just like dissolve completely
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00:50:43.160BlueLand dishwasher tablets, which just like everything else in their line, both in the
00:50:47.200product and the packaging and the delivery system has no single use plastic. You know, I feel like
00:50:52.460sometimes when you switch over to like the eco-friendly or sustainable version of an
00:50:56.600everyday product, a lot of times you're sacrificing on quality. But I now live in a basically entirely
00:51:03.020Blueland household. And I will tell you, my dishes are as white as they've ever been. My clothes are
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00:51:25.560But I will say having an entirely Blueland household, it is kind of nice to go to my
00:51:33.420cleaning supply drawer and everything is in these like beautiful pastel tins and bottles
00:51:41.800It really does beat all of the, you know, garish drugstore stuff.
00:51:46.140There are so many reasons to love Blueland.
00:51:48.140If you would like to try it out, you can go to blueland.com slash fruity for 15% off your
00:51:55.140first order. Again, that is blueland.com slash fruity. Thank you, thank you, thank you to Blueland
00:52:01.480for sponsoring this show. And now let's get back to it. I mean, I want to talk a little bit to you
00:52:08.400about his experience with having a trans daughter, because I think you're right that this is sort of0.78
00:52:13.340a point of radicalization for him, but it doesn't come right away. And I think that's really
00:52:17.960interesting. So there's like two very divergent stories of how this happens, right? One is Musk's
00:52:22.960story and one is vivian's story should i introduce her because we haven't really talked about vivian
00:52:28.440yet well actually i actually have a transition if you want to get there oh no pun intended
00:52:33.580thanks guys for laughing you know i'm no longer the first the the straight guest you're you're
00:52:40.580no longer the second yeah ryan transitioning on the pod the first the first person to transition
00:52:45.500on the pod okay yes provide your transition what i was going to say about covid is it
00:52:52.560exposes him to criticism online from a from a group of people that he sees as progressive or
00:52:58.380liberal to progressive and starts to label as this kind of woke mind virus it's something he had seen
00:53:05.100earlier actually which which we we didn't really discuss but tesla has had a lot of issues with
00:53:10.440regards to unionization and labor it's not a unionized place there were lawsuits around
00:53:17.380racism at his factories. And so a lot of progressives criticize Elon for this. And so
00:53:24.780when COVID comes around, he groups all these things against his companies as this quote-unquote
00:53:31.560woke mind virus. Wokeness is some undefined term at this point that really has no meaning.
00:53:38.780But for him, it was this idea of everything against him. Anything that stood against him
00:53:44.900and his factories and his success and human progress, because he groups himself as the
00:53:51.040champion of human progress, is the woke mind virus. And so you get to the point where his
00:53:57.000daughter starts a transition during this time. And he sees that kind of as one in the same
00:54:01.000of the woke mind virus kind of affecting someone who is in his family, his very own kid.
00:54:07.200That is a good transition. That's a good transition to the transition.
00:54:09.900Right around the start of COVID, Elon Musk's daughter, who he had with his, I think his first wife, his marriage to Justine Wilson, began transitioning to female.
00:56:45.800You know, it's like a parent and their child.
00:56:47.900But again, to go back to this quote unquote woke mind virus,
00:56:51.740which he likes to cite so often, all these things are the same.
00:56:55.100These things stacking up against him, you know, causing his child to transition,
00:56:59.560causing his child to question his power and his and his wealth. You know, that's all stems from
00:57:07.100the progressive beliefs being fed to her at her schools. And, you know, by the people that surround
00:57:14.780her. And so this is kind of amorphous enemy, this virus that he talks about is the root cause of all
00:57:21.060evil in his mind. And it's interesting, because the first public manifestation of this quarrel
00:57:26.220that he's having privately with his child is when elon tweets on july 24th 2020 very memorably
00:57:33.340pronouns suck this as far as i'm aware is like one of the first times he really talks about
00:57:40.720trans people and it's just such a confusing tweet like what does that even mean clearly it's about0.96
00:57:47.400trans people and about like the you know kind of move to like address and talk about people's
00:57:52.740pronouns whether they're trans or cis but it comes out in this really just like nonsensical way0.86
00:57:58.940and grimes famously responds i love you but please turn off your phone and give me a doll
00:58:05.520meaning she mistyped call i cannot support hate please stop this i know this isn't your heart
00:58:11.880and this is still i mean in kind of the earlier years of their relationship they would have
00:58:16.680multiple kids after this tweet exchange but i just remember i remember that happening and just
00:58:20.840being like very confused like what does he even mean by this so muskett by that point been signaling
00:58:25.920his his distaste i guess for this the woke mind virus i remember one story where we wrote at
00:58:32.300buzzfeed where i worked at the time he used the phrase that buzzfeed is the mind virus and this
00:58:37.320was i think it was 2018 2019 so he had started to like to i guess form these ideas that there
00:58:42.960was some kind of paranoia or some symptom among people who classified as liberal progressive so
00:58:49.820So the pronouns thing stems from that, but like pronouns are just like a, they're just
00:58:54.360a stand in for, they're just an easy way to attack trans people in a way.
00:58:58.460I think it's interesting because this is also sort of what ties into Musk's belief around
00:59:03.200free speech and where he's going to go down the road with the Twitter acquisition.
00:59:07.760But one of his big complaints about being asked to use someone's pronouns is that he
00:59:14.020feels it's an infringement on his own speech, his own free speech rights.
00:59:18.120He should be able to say whatever he wants, call anyone whatever he wants.
00:59:22.840And the fact that people are trying to tell him, no, you can't, you have to refer to someone
00:59:26.920the way they want to be referred to is like taking away his free speech in some way.
00:59:32.920And he even, I think, tweeted something at one point where he said he didn't mind referring
00:59:38.620to people by their pronouns if he felt visually they read as male or female.
00:59:44.340But if he was confused by their appearance or felt like they appeared more male, he wanted to be able to refer to them with those pronouns and not receive pushback about that.
00:59:54.380It cuts to the core of what I think is flawed about his version of free speech, which is, I can say what I want, but you cannot correct me.
01:03:47.020he tweets take the red pill rose emoji to which notably ivanka trump quote tweets taken
01:03:55.180and lily wachowski the trans woman creator of the matrix movie where the red pill metaphor0.97
01:04:00.980originated responds fuck both of you this is my favorite exchange in the history of twitter.com0.98
01:04:09.580isn't the isn't the red rose that's a socialist thing right it is a socialist thing yeah all right0.99
01:04:14.900Well, just mixing metaphors and pills and whatever.
01:04:19.380And from the point that Elon tweets, take the red pill, that's basically it for him as far as his leap to conservative politics officially, as far as I understand.
01:04:29.620Well, what's interesting about this is like he's also in 2020 still indicating he's a centrist, he's a Democrat, whatever, even though he's also saying take the red pill.
01:04:40.060And then in 2021, he gets in this fight with Joe Biden because he's excluded from an electric vehicle summit that Biden hosts at the White House.
01:04:50.180And from there on out, he's just posting pretty much nonstop negative stuff about Biden.
01:04:56.440Right. I also think like with Elon, it's it's so hard to tell what to take seriously.
01:05:02.720I mean, yes, in retrospect, with hindsight bias, maybe we can say that was the point where he starts to realize he's a conservative.
01:05:11.540But at the time, take the red pill when he said it.
01:05:30.100But this is, you know, I think the thing with Elon is he puts stuff online that you're not sure what it's in reference to.
01:05:35.860In hindsight, the take the red pill tweet is where everything starts going south.
01:05:39.280It was May 18th, 2022, actually two years later, where he officially comes out as conservative in the words of Abby Shapiro, Ben Shapiro's trad wife, influencer sister.
01:05:50.920She famously came out as conservative.
01:05:53.600He tweets, in the past, I voted Democrat because they were mostly the kindness party.
01:05:59.280But they have become the party of division and hate, so I can no longer support them and will vote Republican.
01:06:06.200Now, watch their dirty tricks campaign against me unfold.
01:06:11.480Right before that, that's when he makes his bid for Twitter, which we wrote a whole book on.
01:06:15.220But he makes his bid for Twitter as he is publicly signaling that he is moving rightwards.
01:06:21.140That midterm election, he is publicly advocating for people to vote Republican.
01:06:25.180And I mean, since 2022, his Twitter has been made up of the stuff that I feel like now most people are familiar with him for as long as far as like the political front is concerned.
01:06:35.860I mean, he tweets about anti-white racism.
01:06:38.300He's very obsessed with cisgender being a slur.
01:06:42.280So, I mean, there's so many things in this time period where he's really calcifying into his opposition of trans people.
01:06:50.360One of his big gripes about Twitter's former management was that they had suspended the account of the Babylon Bee, which is this right-wing satirical website, sort of like a right-wing version of The Onion, because the account had violated Twitter's then policy against misgendering.
01:07:11.960And one of the first things he asked when he bought Twitter and came into the building was to reinstate the account of the Babylon Bee.
01:07:18.400He really wanted to sort of right that perceived wrong. And then, you know, going into the acquisition, all of a sudden he declares that the phrase cis or cisgender are considered slurs on the platform. And that continues to this day. I mean, I haven't tested it recently, but the last time I did, you know, if you if you try to tweet the word cisgender, your post is is blocked, basically, and hidden from other users on the platform.
01:07:46.540he said that it is targeted harassment nice we should be harassing cis people more0.58
01:07:52.780level the playing field no please don't please don't i face enough every day in my daily life
01:07:59.540on the basis of being cis yeah i can't walk out the door without being abused we live in a world
01:08:06.720you know just plagued with systemic anti-cisphobia cisphobia pro-cisphobia anti-cisphobia0.64
01:08:14.300Like this is the priority, right? At a time of like rising hate and harassment against transgender people where, you know, multiple states across the country are legislating against trans rights, that his priority is making sure that people can't say the words cisgender on Twitter.
01:08:33.960That's kind of his on on ramp into the far right conservatism, conservatism that we see him consistently associate with now.
01:08:45.020He goes into immigration and talks about the crisis at the southern southern border.
01:08:49.380He goes and visits the border at one point and does a live stream from there.
01:08:53.300He starts to talk about voter fraud and the problem with mail in ballots.0.62
01:08:58.220And eventually comes this idea that Democrats are allowing for illegal immigration to change the voter makeup of this country and ensure that Democrats are always going to be in power because these supposedly illegal immigrants will always will be legalized and will vote Democrat.0.81
01:09:16.800You know, that's that's the great replacement theory.0.51
01:09:19.000That is not just like great replacement theory adjacent.
01:09:21.780It is the actual great replacement theory.
01:09:23.540He starts to associate with Tucker Carlson.
01:09:27.120And so these these issues have become part and parcel of who he is now. And it's just kind of fascinating to watch him speed run that in the last two years. You know, we just went through the timeline. It doesn't take him very long to get there. Right. I mean, his positions are incredibly radical considered. I mean, compared to what would have been the modern Republican platform, you know, eight years ago.
01:09:52.260You can't really untangle what is Musk and what is Twitter at this point. I think he's someone who spends all his time on the platform. He finds these conspiracy theories and these sort of pieces of fringe content and reads them, amplifies them. He doesn't have other media sources that he engages with.
01:10:11.820And so, you know, he's really a product of his own rabbit hole that he's built.
01:10:16.440And, you know, I think a lot of people are searching for an answer of like, what are his politics?
01:10:22.880And I think he's a creature of the platform.
01:10:25.160I have a couple of questions as like kind of a wrapping up sort of situation.
01:10:29.980A heaviness that I feel and that I think so many people feel is like these are the most powerful people in the world.
01:10:37.520The decisions that they make and like the thought spirals and disinformation spirals that they go down and then regurgitate to the masses have so much material impact on the way that everyday people live their lives.
01:10:51.800I mean, I was just at the Supreme Court this week for the hearing on gender affirming care for trans youth.
01:10:59.880Like he's become this product of this machine that he participated in and then created in his own image.
01:11:04.980and it's like I don't I don't think that there's hope for de-radicalizing Elon Musk necessarily
01:11:09.940but I guess do you did you come out of your process writing this book with any sort of optimism
01:11:15.340I think one of the big questions that we embark to answer in writing this book is what does
01:11:21.360accountability look like for someone like Elon Musk who is you know the richest person in the
01:11:25.600world arguably one of the most powerful we spend a lot of time looking into the various accountability
01:11:30.800metrics that exist for this, right? So some of it is from regulations, some of it is from courts,
01:11:38.120some of it is from lawmakers. And we saw over and over again, Musk kind of bump up against these
01:11:44.500apparatuses of accountability and escape from them. And so, you know, I think that we have yet
01:11:51.420to see any system really be able to hold him to account. And I think that, you know, his new
01:11:59.280position in the Trump administration just kind of accelerates that and puts him further outside of
01:12:04.100the bounds of accountability. You know, at the time where we were finishing this book, the election
01:12:08.900hadn't happened yet. And it seemed like the most sort of promising avenues for accountability for
01:12:17.520him were going to come from outside the United States. You know, the EU has been pursuing
01:12:21.400regulation against social networks like X. And there's maybe some enforcement actions that they
01:12:28.300could take there. But I think especially now that Musk has successfully aligned himself with Trump,
01:12:34.240there's really not a lot of restraint on his behavior within the United States.
01:12:39.240Yeah, I don't know. That's, I mean, that's our role as journalists, right? We can only
01:12:43.200point out that there is this extreme accumulation of power going on here.
01:12:49.960We've written this book, and we continue to report in the New York Times that, hey,
01:12:53.820there's this guy out here that runs all these companies. He's amassed this amount of wealth.
01:12:58.100he's been able to essentially place the candidate he wants into the White House,
01:13:02.680like maybe we should be aware of that. Maybe we should ask some questions about how that was able
01:13:07.340to happen. You know, how was a single man able to accumulate enough worth to spend $44 billion
01:13:13.220on his social platform like it was a plaything, you know, that like it was a sports car or a yacht
01:13:20.280or something? Yeah, I think we, you know, we'll have to continue doing that for the next four
01:13:24.100years and beyond that because i i don't see him getting any less powerful his net worth went up
01:13:29.680how much after donald trump's election after he spent a quarter of a billion dollars getting him
01:13:35.280into the white house like that that just kind of shows that his his every move has been right in a
01:13:41.040way for himself and that he'll be continue to be rewarded for those for those actions i'm thinking
01:13:46.500about what kate said we need people outside the u.s brazil brazil do something brazil
01:13:53.020i'm always you know everyone always gets the comments like come to brazil but i'm kind of
01:13:59.740sending that back to you guys brazil come to us come to us come to our rescue and then kind of
01:14:06.060my last question and maybe i don't know maybe this is a dismal place to end but it's also something
01:14:09.920i'm genuinely curious about like what does elon musk want well i think one of the things that
01:14:15.900we've seen him want really consistently throughout his career is praise and acceptance um and you
01:14:22.080know we talked about that earlier how he was kind of finding that from the democratic party obviously
01:14:26.860now he's found that to an extreme on the right and within the maga movement um he's very very
01:14:33.000popular with young men he's very popular with trump he's very popular with other conservatives
01:14:37.980uh he was posting online yesterday a bunch of photos of his meetings with republican senators
01:14:44.020so he has this big new audience that um it's really championing champion that's championing
01:14:50.560him and supporting him. And I think that that's something that's really important to him. And I
01:14:55.140think power and influence are really important to him as well. You know, he, we didn't talk about
01:14:59.400this, but he previously was under more than 20 federal investigations. And I think it's reasonable
01:15:05.280to expect that a lot of that goes away as Trump comes into office and starts appointing new
01:15:09.820leaders to those agencies. What does he want? He wants to be seen as a hero. You know, I mean,
01:15:18.460yes, light to be light. But he often talks about himself as like the hero of his own missions. You
01:15:24.860know, he is the guy who is going to make space multi planet or sorry, he's going to be the guy
01:15:29.380that makes humanity multi planetary. He's going to make space multi planetary. He's going to throw
01:15:34.980some new he's going to throw some new planets in there. Yeah, exactly. He's going to exactly he's
01:15:38.920he's creating new galaxies as we speak. He's going to save the environment by electrifying vehicles.
01:15:44.100He's going to save free speech by buying Twitter. And now he'll save the U.S. government by working with Donald Trump and with Doge to cut and make us more prosperous. You know, that's always been central to how he sees himself. It goes back to him reading science fiction as a kid, you know, these hero stories. And that's what he wants is to be seen and remembered as a hero.
01:16:10.320i mean who among us on some you know albeit much smaller level doesn't want that i think
01:16:16.740the film paris is burning about how did i bring paris paris is burning into the elon musk episode
01:16:24.080honestly let's go let's turn this into a paris is burning pod ryan do you know what paris is
01:16:29.680burning is i don't second second straight guy on the pod everyone well ryan has homework you
01:16:37.620have to watch paris is burning after this what is it oh god is am i gonna get wrecked online now
01:16:42.940no no no but matt make your point about it i'm very curious what where this is going paris is
01:16:48.160burning is a documentary from the 90s about harlem ballroom culture oh okay king sorry i'm
01:16:56.840still an ally you know you are you are ally card given back but it's it's about a harlem ballroom
01:17:02.760culture, which was championed by Black and Brown queer people. And it ends with Dorian Corey,
01:17:08.900who was this queen who would perform in the balls. And all of these people, you know, they were0.66
01:17:15.160impoverished. A lot of them experienced homelessness at different points in their lives,
01:17:19.460did sex work for survival. You know, they had hard lives. This was being, you know, a Black
01:17:25.900queer person in the 90s. Dorian Corey, who's, you know, middle-aged queen, is sitting in the mirror0.99
01:17:32.540putting on her makeup and her lashes and she's talking about the impact that she wants to leave
01:17:39.060on the world and she's basically says and i'll insert it here let's we'll see if youtube
01:17:43.720copyrights me or not i always had hopes of being a big star
01:17:47.280then i look as you get older you you aim a little lower and i just say well yeah you still might
01:17:57.940make an impression everybody wants to leave something behind them some
01:18:01.900impression some mark up on the world then you think you left a mark on the
01:18:08.740world if you just get through it and a few people remember your name then you