If Books Could Kill - Elon Musk Part 2

00:00:00.000 Michael. Peter. What do you know about the period of Elon Musk's life starting in 2018?

00:00:06.060 All I know is that I appreciate his dedication to setting up a website where everyone says

00:00:10.540 that whites are the master race and shows that that's not the case at all.

00:00:13.740 elon musk by walter isaacson part two part two peter's first part two they said that i 0.99

00:00:33.260 was constitutionally incapable of doing it and for a very long time they were right

00:00:38.300 In part one, we centered our discussion around Tesla and SpaceX and some of his like offshoot

00:00:47.460 companies. And I left it on a cliffhanger. Oh, yeah. About 2018. What's going to happen?

00:00:53.100 Which Walter Isaacson frames as a tumultuous year for Elon Musk. And it's really the year

00:01:01.480 where the media's fawning coverage of Elon starts to grind to a halt. 1.00

00:01:09.400 You can only be a huge piece of shit for like 10 or 15 years before the media really catches on. 0.97

00:01:14.700 So there was one seminal event that really flipped popular perceptions of Elon on their head. 1.00

00:01:21.380 The Thai cave incident. 0.91

00:01:23.860 Pedo guy. 0.97

00:01:24.720 Yes.

00:01:24.980 Yes.

00:01:25.440 I am going to send you a bit from the book.

00:01:27.560 Also, as soon as you say seminal event, it makes me think we're going to talk about his

00:01:30.860 like 12 kids.

00:01:32.000 I don't like that.

00:01:32.640 Too many seminal events.

00:01:33.820 I don't like that you said that.

00:01:36.800 That's on you, man.

00:01:37.900 No, no, it's not.

00:01:40.500 I'm blaming you.

00:01:41.620 Don't just hear the word seminal and be like, you know what that made me think of?

00:01:45.520 And then blame me.

00:01:47.740 So Isaacson says, Musk was scrolling through Twitter and stumbled upon a message from an

00:01:51.920 unknown user with very few followers saying, hi, sir, if possible, can you help in any

00:01:56.820 way to get the 12 Thailand boys and their coach out of the cave. He was referring to a dozen Thai

00:02:02.480 soccer players who had been trapped by a flood while exploring a cave. Then his action hero

00:02:07.480 impulse kicked in. Working with engineers at SpaceX and the Boring Company, he began building

00:02:12.460 a pod-like mini submarine that, he thought, could be sent into the flooded cave to rescue the boys.

00:02:18.540 Sam Teller got a friend to let them use a school swimming pool for testing that weekend,

00:02:22.420 and musk began tweeting pictures of the device oh his action hero impulse action hero impulse no

00:02:28.860 dude this is a delusional savior complex right i know dude just give money or something people

00:02:35.560 don't need you to design things you know one of the themes of part one was like there are a few

00:02:40.600 areas in which i actually think elon shines and they were on display at tesla and spacex in like

00:02:50.060 his early work there and what he was able to accomplish from a business perspective.

00:02:53.960 But now they've been buried under snow drifts of cocaine.

00:02:56.880 It then leads to this man with this incredibly outsized view of himself.

00:03:01.120 Yeah, yeah.

00:03:01.500 And he's like, I'm the smartest guy in every room.

00:03:04.460 Right.

00:03:04.680 Right.

00:03:04.960 So like you have a bunch of experts working on this situation and he's like, I'm going

00:03:09.600 to make a submarine.

00:03:11.140 I would not say this is an action hero impulse.

00:03:13.160 No.

00:03:13.300 I would say this is an egomaniac impulse.

00:03:15.400 So eventually the kids are rescued.

00:03:17.020 The sub was not needed and it would not have worked because the cave's passages were too narrow.

00:03:23.140 Like, they wouldn't have made it through.

00:03:24.520 You needed the kids to actually, like, move their way through themselves.

00:03:28.100 Also, that's, like, such classic Elon where he just, like, rushes through to provide some technological fix to something.

00:03:33.260 100%.

00:03:33.500 And he skips the part where you actually understand the problem at hand.

00:03:36.200 Dude, if you could fit, like, an eight-foot submarine tank through the passage, like, do you think it would be really difficult to get him out of whatever? 0.99

00:03:43.920 Yeah, they would have rescued the fucking kids by then.

00:03:45.620 A 63-year-old English cave explorer named Vernon Unsworth, who had advised the rescuers on the scene, gave an interview to CNN where he described Musk's efforts as a PR stunt that had no chance of working. 0.98

00:04:01.920 And then he said that, quote, he can stick his submarine where it hurts.

00:04:06.500 Taking a stab at Elon on television, and if you know Elon, you know that he is not going to take that lightly.

00:04:14.480 That's his action hero impulse.

00:04:16.200 He responds with a bunch of tweets going after this guy. 0.53

00:04:19.920 And then at one point says, sorry, pedo guy, you really did ask for it. 0.93

00:04:25.160 So then a Twitter user says, hey, are you calling Unsworth a pedophile? 0.90

00:04:29.460 And Musk says, bet you a signed dollar.

00:04:32.340 It's true.

00:04:33.060 Nice.

00:04:33.460 So this guy sues Elon for defamation.

00:04:38.340 Send you a bit.

00:04:39.620 This is from Isaacson.

00:04:40.880 When Ryan Mack of BuzzFeed asked Musk for a comment,

00:04:43.860 Musk prefaced his email response by saying it was off the record.

00:04:47.140 But BuzzFeed had never agreed to that stipulation and so printed the barrage that followed.

00:04:51.240 I suggest that you call people you know in Thailand,

00:04:53.540 find out what's actually going on, 1.00

00:04:54.980 and stop defending child rapists, you fucking asshole, Musk began. 1.00

00:04:58.900 He's an old, single, white guy from England who's been traveling to 1.00

00:05:01.840 or living in Thailand for 30 to 40 years, mostly Pattaya Beach,

00:05:05.700 until moving to Chiang Rai for a child bride who was about 12 years old at the time.

00:05:09.460 There's only one reason people go to Pattaya Beach.

00:05:12.140 It isn't where you'd go for caves, but it is where you'd go for something else. 0.76

00:05:15.700 Chiang Rai is renowned for child sex trafficking.

00:05:18.520 The statement about Unsworth's wife was untrue.

00:05:21.200 And Musk's allegation did not help bolster his claim that the phrase pedo guy was simply

00:05:25.120 a random insult rather than a specific allegation. 0.82

00:05:28.200 Yeah, so basically this guy lives in Thailand, therefore he's a pedophile, and then just 0.93

00:05:30.920 like a bunch of lying. 0.98

00:05:32.360 That's basically it, right?

00:05:33.400 Yeah.

00:05:33.580 So, Isaacson does not cover the trial, but the basic story is that Elon has a very talented

00:05:39.960 lawyer, Alex Spiro, who runs circles around Unsworth's lawyer, who is Lynn Wood.

00:05:47.720 If that name sounds familiar to anyone, Lynn Wood is like a 2020 election denier.

00:05:54.600 And like a Trump, weird Trumpy guy. 0.89

00:05:56.340 Yeah, like a known conspiracist freak.

00:05:58.660 This is a couple of years before 2020, but Wood is not a great choice here.

00:06:04.800 He assessed damages at like $190 million, which made people think it was like a big cash grab.

00:06:11.860 He didn't seem to understand Twitter in a big way that Elon's lawyer makes the case

00:06:17.920 is basically by saying like on Twitter, like the boundaries of jokes are a little more fuzzy

00:06:23.920 than they are in other situations.

00:06:25.580 Oh, that was the defense?

00:06:26.440 I mean, the defense was that it was unserious, right?

00:06:29.120 That it was sort of a joke.

00:06:30.400 Right.

00:06:30.600 None of that's actually really true.

00:06:32.820 Yeah, yeah.

00:06:33.220 He just had a way better lawyer.

00:06:35.340 One of the world historical bag fumbles, this guy's choice of a lawyer.

00:06:39.460 100%.

00:06:39.780 100%.

00:06:40.280 Yeah, I mean, he should have at least gotten a few million bucks out of this.

00:06:42.740 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:06:43.440 Said a lot of court, whatever, yeah.

00:06:45.000 So then there's another controversy in 2018.

00:06:47.740 Musk tweets, quote, am considering taking Tesla private at $420, funding secured.

00:06:54.860 This was half true.

00:06:56.420 He was, in fact, considering taking Tesla private, possibly even around that price,

00:07:02.120 even though doing it at $420 is simply an incredibly hilarious joke.

00:07:06.720 You're so cool, Elon.

00:07:08.240 Oh, my God, $420, he knows what it means.

00:07:09.880 He's just like us.

00:07:10.880 At the end of the day, he's just cool.

00:07:12.600 He's just flat out cool.

00:07:14.440 Next, he's going to say nice after he hears the word 69.

00:07:17.020 Dude. 0.97

00:07:17.300 Wow, man, got it.

00:07:19.020 Me at home, just cheering.

00:07:20.940 Get him, Elon.

00:07:22.160 Use those jokes.

00:07:22.960 so the part of this that's not true is the funding secured part which makes this all 0.95

00:07:29.340 potentially fraud it is wild how much like just openly illegal shit he's done these like 0.51

00:07:33.980 consecutive scenarios are very formative for him in the sense that after this he very much acts 0.90

00:07:39.820 untouchable yeah from a legal perspective because he's just like oh there aren't consequences i can

00:07:43.960 just call a guy a pedo this is why i've always said that we actually do need broken windows 0.97

00:07:47.680 policing for elites yeah any of this shit like you spend a night in jail you pay like a meaningful 0.99

00:07:52.540 fine. It's like, even once you let little things slide, because these are crimes of calculation, 0.98

00:07:57.560 right? They're not crimes of passion. I think like two weeks in Rikers.

00:08:01.360 Or that. All right, here we go. I'm going to send you this.

00:08:04.040 In order to avoid a federal lawsuit for misleading investors, Musk's lawyers worked on a deal with

00:08:08.660 the SEC to settle the charges. He would remain CEO of Tesla, step down as chairman, pay a $40

00:08:13.520 million fine, and put two independent directors on his board. Musk would not be allowed to make

00:08:18.320 public comments, or tweets about any material information without getting clearance from a

00:08:22.420 company monitor. Gracias and Tesla's CFO pushed hard for him to accept these terms and put the

00:08:27.460 controversy, and perhaps his months of meltdown, behind him. But Musk surprised them by abruptly

00:08:32.380 rejecting the proposed deal. On the night of September 26th, the SEC filed a lawsuit seeking

00:08:37.500 to ban him for life from running Tesla or any other public company. So this causes Elon to fold.

00:08:43.980 And Tesla's stock plummets 17% in a day.

00:08:47.900 Yeah.

00:08:48.260 And eventually he accepts the deal.

00:08:51.320 Tesla's stock recovers.

00:08:52.860 Everyone takes a deep breath.

00:08:54.200 It's weird how people respond when they experience consequences.

00:08:56.800 That's the thing is he's like, well, I don't need to worry about this.

00:09:00.240 $40 million, fine. 1.00

00:09:02.040 Like, go fuck yourself. 1.00

00:09:03.060 And then they make a move to prevent him from running any public company ever again. 1.00

00:09:09.060 And he's like, oh, fuck. 0.99

00:09:10.000 All right. 1.00

00:09:10.260 Yeah.

00:09:10.520 You hit him where it hurts and he caves.

00:09:11.760 Then Musk gives a weird, very erratic interview with the New York Times.

00:09:17.200 The interviewer asks him at one point if he was on drugs when he sent that tweet.

00:09:22.500 And he says no, but he's so like exhausted and weird sounding in the midst of this interview

00:09:27.880 that the interviewer asks him, quote, are you okay?

00:09:33.560 So here's Elon.

00:09:35.260 Should I speak only out of the front of my mouth?

00:09:37.320 You got to keep your mouth small.

00:09:39.000 it's not been great actually musk said i've had friends come by who are really concerned

00:09:44.760 then he paused for a long time overcome by emotion there were times when i didn't leave

00:09:49.200 the factory for three or four days days when i didn't go outside he said this has really come

00:09:54.440 at the expense of seeing my kids oh we're gonna do like a sympathetic portrait now right peter

00:09:59.680 this guy doesn't see his kids he's 18 kids the new york times story says mr musk alternated

00:10:04.820 between laughter and tears. He said he had been working up to 120 hours a week recently and not

00:10:10.880 taken more than a week off since 2001 when he was bedridden with malaria. And then like other

00:10:15.980 organizations are picking up this story. The headline in Bloomberg is erratic NYT interview

00:10:21.360 raises alarm about Tesla chief's health. So these stories are piling up. They're building into this

00:10:27.140 like meta-narrative that Elon is like unwell, unstable, right? So his people try to combat

00:10:35.740 that. I'm going to send you a bit. It says, in the wake of stories about his precarious

00:10:40.380 psychological condition, Musk's public relations consultant, Julianna Glover,

00:10:44.160 recommended that he clear up the issue by giving a long interview.

00:10:48.200 Who does he have advising him? Yeah. Let's have you in public more, Elon.

00:10:52.280 The people are going to want to see more of you, Elon.

00:10:54.500 mom. This is like Tom Cruise after the Scientology interview. Just like, let's lock this motherfucker

00:11:01.440 up. Do not give another interview for the rest of your life. They're like, put, uh, yeah, put him 1.00

00:11:05.840 on Oprah. Try to act like a normal human being who loves a lady. We just need to kill this nonsense

00:11:11.020 speculation around your mental state. She wrote, she said she would come up with options that 0.99

00:11:15.140 present you at length, leading the companies in charge, droll and self-aware. She added a warning

00:11:20.780 In no universe is it okay for you to continue to contemplate the sexual predilections of a Thai diver who insulted you. 1.00

00:11:27.660 Let's get you out in public more and don't do the things that you do when you're out in public. 1.00

00:11:32.840 You know how every thought that comes into your head is fucking dumb as hell? 0.99

00:11:37.300 So the solution, the strategy, of course, go on Rogan. 1.00

00:11:42.540 Oh, God.

00:11:43.600 This is when he smokes weed on the show.

00:11:45.960 Yeah, yeah, with like big blunts together.

00:11:47.740 He offends like the stiffs by doing drugs. 0.99

00:11:50.780 And then he offends cool people by looking like a big fucking dork while he's doing it. 0.99

00:11:56.120 During this period, there's a rupture with Kimball, his brother. 0.99

00:12:00.380 Various top executives are leaving his companies.

00:12:03.360 This is followed with the announcement of the Cybertruck the next year.

00:12:08.480 We talked about the failure of the Cybertruck the last episode.

00:12:12.200 Right.

00:12:12.380 It's important to understand it not just as a business failure, but one of like the early

00:12:18.040 cracks in his public image, right? 0.99

00:12:20.380 Because it used to be like, okay, he's quirky, he's kind of an asshole, but he has all these 0.99

00:12:24.280 successes technologically. 1.00

00:12:26.020 Right.

00:12:26.200 But the Cybertruck was just like a failure on every level, like aesthetically, culturally,

00:12:30.440 financially.

00:12:31.260 A lot of the public had this view, it's very similar to what Isaacson pushes, and we talked

00:12:35.380 about last episode, it's like, yeah, he's a weirdo, but this is the cost of genius.

00:12:39.800 Yeah, yeah, yeah. 0.99

00:12:40.440 And then you see that stupid truck, and you're like, actually, I'm gonna send you a little 0.99

00:12:44.780 bit here. 0.99

00:12:45.360 On November 21st, 2019, the truck was driven onto a stage in the design studio for a presentation

00:12:50.320 to the press and invited guests. There were gasps. Many in the crowd clearly couldn't believe that

00:12:55.200 this was actually the vehicle they'd come to see, CNN reported. The Cybertruck looks like a large

00:13:00.020 metal trapezoid on wheels, more like an art piece than a truck. There was also an unexpected surprise

00:13:05.960 when von Holhausen tried to show the toughness of the truck. He swung at the body with a sledgehammer,

00:13:11.140 which didn't make a dent. Then he threw a metal ball at one of the armor glass windows to show

00:13:15.640 it wouldn't break this surprise it cracked oh my fucking god musk said well maybe that was a little 0.98

00:13:20.960 too hard i heard my favorite description of it was someone someone said it looked like a playstation 0.98

00:13:27.100 one asset yeah yeah yeah not enough polygons for sure sending you the next bit afterward he took

00:13:34.000 grimes for a spin in the prototype to nobu restaurant where the valet parkers just stared

00:13:39.400 at it without touching on the way out pursued by paparazzi he drove over a pylon in the parking lot

00:13:45.400 with a no left turn sign and turned left that's also just like watch this and then just like

00:13:53.300 spins out yeah there are these moments when you're wondering if isaacson is cool you know what i mean 0.97

00:13:59.100 you're like isaacson is too much of a journalist to ever talk the amount of shit yeah i would like 0.90

00:14:05.880 him to talk but i am sort of like fascinated by these moments when it seems like it's revealed 1.00

00:14:11.480 that isaacson does sort of understand that elon is a little bit of an idiot or he's such a loser 0.98

00:14:17.260 that like it's impossible to write about him without that peeking through sometimes right 0.99

00:14:21.360 that lands us if you're paying attention to the chronology here in 2020 yeah and uh as you might

00:14:27.840 imagine things are about to unravel very quickly both in elon musk's brain and across the world

00:14:33.320 the pandemic hits and two things are happening at once one stay-at-home orders in california

00:14:40.240 are keeping musk's factories from operating at least for the first part of 2020 two he's on 0.95

00:14:45.500 twitter getting his brain fucking fried dude if you went to his feed at this time he was tweeting 0.99

00:14:51.560 like hundreds of times a day like this rich guy sitting there on his fucking phone this is i think 0.99

00:14:56.960 this is when his belief that he's the smartest person in every room yeah and he can like easily 0.98

00:15:01.800 solve every problem it's really looming large because society has a very big problem at this

00:15:07.920 point right and and he like he believes that he could figure this out like just put elon in charge

00:15:13.200 right of course yeah one of the big misfires of the book and it's a severe one is that isaacson

00:15:19.440 compresses politics into a single chapter out of over 90 wait really there's just one chapter

00:15:25.860 titled politics what it covers covid musk's conflict with the biden administration a little

00:15:32.800 bit, some Ukraine stuff, and like his obsession with wokeness. But it's just a few pages.

00:15:38.140 That's wild. Because that's like the story of Elon in the last five years. Like he's completely

00:15:41.540 lost his mind and become obsessed with this shit. 1.00

00:15:43.640 This is the story of part two. You know, Isaacson, starting in 2021, is in the room for a lot of this. 1.00

00:15:52.240 And he's telling the story that he wanted to tell, which is his great man biography about

00:15:58.820 this complicated guy who gets shit done yeah and at the same time he's missing the big story which

00:16:07.340 is about the radicalization of the richest man on earth and like i feel like there was also this 0.95

00:16:11.600 weird press at the time where like the new york times wrote an article of like his ideology is

00:16:15.620 not left or right as he's becoming just like a total like run-of-the-mill right-wing psycho i

00:16:22.160 think this is the single biggest problem with isaacson's book he had an incredible story yeah 1.00

00:16:27.560 He was sitting in the room while Elon Musk was losing his fucking mind. 0.99

00:16:32.800 Yeah. 0.99

00:16:33.240 And he relegates it to like a C-plot.

00:16:36.060 Right.

00:16:36.380 Isaacson is also, I think, not like savvy enough to understand Elon's anti-union activity

00:16:42.240 or worker safety stuff as being part of his politics, right?

00:16:46.740 Yeah, yeah.

00:16:47.140 He also doesn't see any through lines between Elon's childhood in an apartheid state and

00:16:51.620 his modern political views.

00:16:53.100 Also, I feel like the pedo guy thing is also telling, right?

00:16:56.140 Where he sees some random guy giving him an insult.

00:16:59.980 Yeah.

00:17:00.140 He can't just be like, ah, just some random guy.

00:17:01.600 I'll move on.

00:17:02.460 He has to fire back and he has to escalate.

00:17:04.040 And that's also like part of the political radicalization.

00:17:06.520 Like it's all resentment based.

00:17:07.760 So Isaacson is in the room starting in like September 2021.

00:17:11.600 So a little after the period we're talking about right now.

00:17:13.780 But like that makes it almost less excusable.

00:17:16.460 Yeah.

00:17:16.640 Because at that point you had a lot of information about Elon's early radicalization.

00:17:22.940 And you still don't think that's the story, right?

00:17:25.860 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:17:26.400 Isakson says, quote,

00:17:27.860 Musk had never been very political.

00:17:29.600 Like many techies, he was liberal on social issues, but with a dollop of libertarian resistance to regulations and political correctness.

00:17:36.680 He contributed to the presidential campaigns of Barack Obama and then Hillary Clinton, and he was a vocal critic of Donald Trump in the 2016 election.

00:17:43.680 He tells a story of how Elon goes to meet Trump after he's elected. And Trump is like too stupid to understand what Elon does exactly and starts talking about getting NASA going again, even though like Elon is a competitor with NASA. 0.93

00:17:58.360 So like Elon's just like, OK, yeah, I wouldn't say that Musk had never been very political. 0.99

00:18:04.460 He had donated just like a little bit over a million dollars before he really gets going

00:18:10.380 in 2022.

00:18:11.600 And it's really targeted.

00:18:13.420 It looks a lot like lobbying local politicians, right?

00:18:16.280 He's trying to win over people in California.

00:18:19.380 He's trying to win over people in Texas once he moves his factories there.

00:18:24.380 The idea that he was like liberal before, it doesn't really seem true.

00:18:28.360 Right. He had some alliances with Democrats, but they were alliances of convenience. They

00:18:33.200 weren't ideological. Yeah. Isaacson does cover some of Elon's early pandemic meltdowns,

00:18:40.260 but it's very telling what he omits. So in early March, Elon tweets, the coronavirus panic is

00:18:49.380 dumb. He then sends out an email to the whole company saying, quote, I'd like to be super clear

00:18:55.120 that if you feel the slightest bit ill or even uncomfortable, please do not feel obligated to

00:18:59.700 come to work. I will personally be at work. My frank opinion remains that the harm from the

00:19:04.620 coronavirus panic far exceeds that of the virus itself. Isaacson does not mention Musk's various

00:19:11.300 predictions about the pandemic. On March 19th, 2020, Musk tweeted, quote, based on current trends,

00:19:19.500 probably close to zero new cases in US by end of April. Nailed it. Killer, dude. You're so smart.

00:19:24.900 current trends oh he's uh it's like it's like fucking rain man in his brain he's he's analyzing 0.96

00:19:30.140 the current trend also the current turn at the time was like a giant hockey stick upward 0.93

00:19:34.640 the current trend was just so much more covid every week in september 2020 he said that he

00:19:43.100 would not take any vaccine uh he seemed to later backtrack on that he he took the vaccine but then

00:19:48.460 he expressed skepticism about boosters after having a bad reaction to the vaccine isaacson

00:19:53.600 ignores that too. I don't entirely know why I sort of wonder whether it just interferes too much with

00:19:59.980 the narrative of Elon as the guy who is like the master of any expertise that he sets his mind to

00:20:06.820 mastering. It's also weird like this, the I feel like the radicalization to the right of these all

00:20:12.120 these Silicon Valley guys kind of at the same time is one of the biggest political stories of the

00:20:16.100 last decade. But most of the media seems reluctant to tell it. It's like, oh, they're quirky. You're

00:20:20.700 like oh it doesn't fall easily onto left or right you know shut up and dribble you know whenever 0.97

00:20:25.320 when athletes are talking about politics yeah fox news types were like shut up and dribble 0.99

00:20:29.260 yeah i feel like we kind of need that for these guys it's like ship me my fucking package dude 0.99

00:20:35.660 you know what i mean just shut your mouth and get to work so in august 2021 joe biden hosts some of 0.99

00:20:45.200 the great American automakers at the White House. But he seems to snub Tesla. The reason given was

00:20:52.400 that the automakers he hosted were all big employers of United Auto Workers. And Tesla,

00:20:58.760 of course, hadn't unionized. Musk, of course, takes this quite personally.

00:21:03.040 It's funny, there's no situation in which you'd imagine him going, huh, maybe I should just like

00:21:06.880 hire some union labor. And that'll fix the problem. No, you know, he's just gonna like

00:21:11.540 have a little fucking tantrum. And then things get a little bit worse. I'll just send you 0.99

00:21:16.140 something. It says Biden went even further that November when he visited a GM factory in Detroit

00:21:21.380 with CEO Mary Barra and members of the UAW leadership. Detroit's leading the world in

00:21:26.480 electric vehicles, Biden said. Mary, I can remember talking to you way back in January about the need

00:21:30.960 for America to lead in electric vehicles. You changed the whole story, Mary. You electrified

00:21:35.600 the entire automobile industry. I'm serious. You led and it matters. In fact, GM had started to

00:21:41.520 lead the way to electric vehicles in the 1990s, but it had pulled the plug on the effort. When

00:21:45.980 Biden made this statement, GM had only one electric vehicle, the Chevy Bolt, which had

00:21:50.160 been recalled and was not being produced at the time. Say what you want. This is a snub. Yeah,

00:21:55.360 this is wrong. Yeah. There is only one name, especially at this time, that's like really

00:22:01.080 revolutionized the industry. Also, my parents drove a Chevy Bolt and we tried to take it to

00:22:06.860 my grandma's house in tacoma like an hour away and it broke down in factoria and we had to call

00:22:12.540 a tow truck so maybe elon was right all along maybe it is worth it peter i would have made it

00:22:18.320 to tacoma that day yeah or you might have died in a battery fire or that until someone by the way

00:22:24.180 until someone has like a very clear solution to the battery fire problem i'm i don't know that i 0.98

00:22:29.900 can i could ever buy like a tesla like someone new someone someone woke as fuck could take over

00:22:34.640 company and i don't know that i could do it i think it's cool that uh cars turn into saw scenarios

00:22:39.640 uh while you're driving on the freeway i think that's great that would be a cool in a situation

00:22:43.420 where there's a battery fire if they could program it so that jigsaw's face comes up on the screen

00:22:47.480 in december 2021 elon starts tweeting about quote the woke mind virus uh terminology that he uses

00:22:56.960 to this day um here's isaacson musk had taken up the cause of battling what he considered to be the

00:23:02.360 excesses of political correctness and the woke culture of progressive social justice activists.

00:23:07.100 When I asked him why, he responded, unless the woke mind virus, which is fundamentally anti-science,

00:23:12.260 anti-merit, and anti-human in general is stopped, civilization will never become

00:23:17.020 multi-planetary. Good point, Elon. Good point. I've always said that.

00:23:22.760 Muscular action was partly triggered by his daughter Jenna's transition, her embrace of

00:23:26.740 radical socialist politics, and her decision to break off relations with him. He feels he lost

00:23:31.240 a son who changed first and last names and won't speak to him anymore because of this woke mind

00:23:36.000 virus, says Jared Birchall, the manager of his personal office. He is a firsthand witness on a

00:23:41.080 very personal level of the damaging effect of being indoctrinated by this woke mind religion.

00:23:46.780 So it's actually worse. It's actually a personal animus against his own daughter.

00:23:50.980 You might think that this is political, but it's actually, he just hates his trans daughter. 0.98

00:23:55.840 In fairness, he hates his children. 0.98

00:23:57.940 So yeah, Vivian Jenna Wilson. I think she goes by Vivian Moore in the book. Isaacson says, 0.95

00:24:04.060 Jenna, I'm honestly not sure which is her preference, but I'm going to send you a little

00:24:09.180 bit more about her. It says, Musk had made peace with Jenna's transitioning, even though he had not

00:24:14.940 embraced the protocols about listing one's pronouns. He believed that she was rejecting

00:24:18.920 him because of her political ideology. It's full on communism and a general sentiment that if you're

00:24:23.880 Rich, you're evil, he said.

00:24:25.440 It was all very jangling for Musk.

00:24:27.340 We are simultaneously being told that gender differences do not exist and that genders

00:24:31.300 are so profoundly different that irreversible surgery is the only option, he tweeted that

00:24:35.360 week.

00:24:35.620 Now, does this sound like someone who has made peace with his daughter transitioning?

00:24:41.300 Right.

00:24:41.520 Isaacson is like very credulous of just like, look, yes, he accepts his daughter is trans.

00:24:48.260 He's just a little bit confused.

00:24:49.660 Yeah. Again, Isaacson is not familiar enough with right wing ideology to recognize that Elon's acceptance of Vivian is disingenuous. Right. Yeah. He mocks pronouns. He makes these sorts of like, oh, I just don't understand it comments about trans people, which like if you're tuned into the right wing, you would very quickly clock as someone who is hiding their transphobia. Right. But Isaacson cannot seem to read between the lines here.

00:25:17.400 And so if you read this book, you might be confused about why Musk now openly deadnames

00:25:23.560 his daughter and like calls for the criminalization of gender affirming care, right?

00:25:27.760 He accepted his daughter's conversion to Judaism. 0.98

00:25:30.160 Then he did tweet about how Jews are lizard people.

00:25:33.520 If I was in the room as Musk's radicalization was happening, I would ask him about his news

00:25:37.580 sources because these are like very clearly far right talking points from like far right

00:25:41.920 websites that he's reading.

00:25:42.900 Vivian spoke about the book publicly and said Isaacson never reached out to her.

00:25:46.800 No way, really.

00:25:47.920 Very indicative of his failures here because he's only really interested in this as it

00:25:51.960 impacts Elon's arc, right?

00:25:54.580 He has no interest in the people who Elon hurts.

00:25:56.800 Because to say that they made peace without talking to her.

00:26:00.120 What he said is Elon made peace with the transition, right?

00:26:03.640 Not that he made peace with her.

00:26:04.960 Right.

00:26:05.160 Not that they're in contact or they have a positive relationship.

00:26:08.200 It's, I mean, it's just outrageous. 1.00

00:26:09.620 I'm fine with my daughter marrying a black guy. 1.00

00:26:11.480 We just don't talk. 1.00

00:26:12.700 And I'm just like tweeting slurs about black people constantly. 1.00

00:26:15.100 But like I made peace with it.

00:26:16.220 that reminds me very vaguely i think i told you once about my experience in portland maine a few

00:26:21.520 years back where it was a somehow a lesbian town during the day and then also the most reactionary 0.79

00:26:27.020 place on earth during the night when all the all like the white boy townies came in and you got 0.95

00:26:31.580 called an f-slur because of your sweater i got called an f-slur because i was dressed good and 0.95

00:26:36.060 at one point we were like sharing a cigarette with some kid who to this point had seemed perfectly

00:26:41.460 reasonable and he was like i had to get out of the house uh my sister's husband's there and we 0.98

00:26:47.160 were like oh he sucks or something he's like well he's black which and then there's like a pause and 0.98

00:26:52.960 we're like okay okay and he's like he's like which like i don't have a problem with and then he just 0.99

00:26:57.760 trailed off and we were like oh also peter can we sell the sweater that got you called an f-slur

00:27:06.700 in our merch store. Can we steal the IP? If you want to get called a faggot in Maine,

00:27:11.260 here's a sweater you can buy. If there's a way to make money off of being called a slur, 1.00

00:27:15.280 I will do it. So let's think on it. Back to Elon's sort of fixation on wokeness. Here's Isaacson.

00:27:22.180 On a more mundane level, he had become convinced that wokeness was destroying humor.

00:27:26.400 His own jokes tended to be filled with smirking references to 69, other sex acts, body fluid,

00:27:31.840 pooping, farts, dope smoking, and topics that would crack up a dorm room of stoned freshmen.

00:27:36.700 So he's eight.

00:27:37.960 Once a fan of the satirical news site, The Onion, he switched his loyalty to the Babylon

00:27:42.760 Bee, a Christian conservative site, and gave them an interview at the end of 2021.

00:27:47.720 Wokeness wants to make comedy illegal, which is not cool, he contended.

00:27:51.780 Trying to shut down David Chappelle?

00:27:53.600 Come on, man.

00:27:54.340 That's crazy.

00:27:55.440 Do we want a humorless society that is simply rife with condemnation and hate and no forgiveness?

00:28:00.520 At its heart, wokeness is divisive, exclusionary, and hateful.

00:28:03.980 It gives mean people a shield to be mean and cruel, armed with false virtue.

00:28:08.840 That's why I have disowned my trans daughter, because I'm against being mean. 0.99

00:28:13.140 Well, that's that.

00:28:13.780 It's very funny to be like the like woke police are trying to sort of govern what's funny.

00:28:18.900 And also, I don't think the onion is funny anymore.

00:28:22.280 All right, dude.

00:28:23.500 So at this point, he's very primed to become a full on reactionary.

00:28:28.840 And then he gets sort of pushed into it.

00:28:30.940 Here's a little bit.

00:28:31.920 By wokeness? Are you about to say wokeness did run amok in 2020?

00:28:34.620 Like Thomas Kudler?

00:28:35.280 No, no, this is a little more classic rich guy radicalization arc.

00:28:41.780 In May 2022, Musk got a call from Business Insider, which was about to run a story saying that he exposed himself to a flight attendant on his private jet and asked for a handjob.

00:28:51.060 In return, the story went, he would buy her a pony because she loved horses.

00:28:56.240 Musk denied the claims and noted that he had no flight attendants on his jet.

00:28:59.840 But documents showed that Tesla had paid the woman $250,000 in severance in 2018.

00:29:05.180 When the story appeared, the company's stock fell 10% and Musk's political resentments

00:29:09.180 were further inflamed.

00:29:10.440 He believed that the story was leaked by a friend of the woman who was, in his words,

00:29:14.240 an activist, woke, far-left Democrat.

00:29:17.200 Wow, I guess jokes really are illegal.

00:29:19.060 I mean, that is classic comedy. 0.97

00:29:20.800 Jerk me off and I'll buy you a pony.

00:29:22.780 So Isaacson says, as soon as he heard the story was about to run, Musk tried to inoculate

00:29:28.080 himself with a tweet casting it in political terms quote in the past i voted democrat because

00:29:34.120 they were mostly the kindness party but they have become the party of division and hate so i can no

00:29:39.840 longer support them and will vote republican now watch their dirty tricks campaign against me 0.99

00:29:45.320 unfold dude right when people fall for this shit every time it's so it's so funny it's so funny 0.99

00:29:50.160 that like someone's like hey they're about to tell the story of when you uh tried to get a hand job 0.99

00:29:55.280 for a horse and then he's like keep your eye out for democratic dirty tricks against me 0.99

00:30:00.000 and no one on the right gives a shit they'll just embrace it with open arms 1.00

00:30:04.440 like yeah yeah this guy's a huge piece of shit whatever if anyone if any public figure ever 0.99

00:30:08.500 tweets like i've angered the deep state so whatever you hear about me is just them trying 1.00

00:30:14.880 to get back at me right that person did it for sure whatever is about to drop is real as shit 0.98

00:30:20.380 they're gonna say i killed a bear and left it in central park just because i killed a bear and 0.99

00:30:24.520 left it in Central Park. So this is the era where Musk's political transformation becomes more

00:30:29.180 obvious. He publicly announces that he voted for a Republican congressional candidate in the summer

00:30:34.320 of 2022, which Isaacson doesn't mention. He also says that independent voters should vote Republican

00:30:40.080 in 2022 because Democrats are in power. Yeah, that's also the thing of everyone wants to

00:30:44.800 fucking support Republicans without just saying they're a fucking Republican. Yeah. Only because 1.00

00:30:48.200 they're out of power. Isaacson does not mention that either. He is pretty clearly aware of this

00:30:52.800 political shift he just doesn't really discuss it in any depth that is insane to cover all this in 0.92

00:30:57.060 one fucking chapter around the same time musk is hobnobbing with a lot of the uh paypal guys right 0.94

00:31:02.460 who range from like ideological libertarians to just fascists one of them is david sachs who 0.95

00:31:09.420 isaacson describes as quote not rigidly partisan guys now in 1995 sachs co-authored a book with

00:31:16.700 peter thiel titled uh the diversity myth which was like a screed against political correctness

00:31:22.240 It is true that Sachs had sort of bounced around politically at times.

00:31:27.180 He supported Romney.

00:31:28.260 Then he supported Hillary.

00:31:29.680 But by the time Isaacson is writing this, he's very distinctly right wing.

00:31:34.140 He was a leading figure behind the campaign to recall Chesa Boudin in San Francisco, right?

00:31:39.540 The progressive DA.

00:31:40.660 He called him a Soros DA.

00:31:44.320 Impossible to say where he lands on the ideological spectrum, though.

00:31:47.940 He was also running a pack that donated six figures to DeSantis.

00:31:51.560 Yeah.

00:31:51.960 So yeah, Isaacson, again, just sort of blind to this type of reactionary ideology, which

00:31:57.440 is wild because, again, he once ran CNN.

00:32:00.920 And by the way, Saxon now works in the Trump administration, not rigidly partisan.

00:32:05.480 This is like my parents.

00:32:06.800 My dad walked in on me making out with a girl when I was in like ninth grade or something.

00:32:11.540 And he coasted on that for like years.

00:32:13.760 It's like all this other evidence that I was gay was like viling up.

00:32:17.400 And my dad was like, but you made out with that girl.

00:32:19.120 I was like, yeah, that was like 10 years ago, dad.

00:32:21.080 I asked for a Barbie dream house for Christmas when I was like seven years old.

00:32:25.600 You can just ignore the one piece of evidence against it, dad. 0.98

00:32:30.420 It's like a scale and on the right is like sucked 10 dicks and on the left is kissed 0.99

00:32:35.020 one girl when 14 and they're just they're dead even in your dad's mind. 0.99

00:32:39.000 There's a clinging on to that.

00:32:40.600 But the girl when I was 14.

00:32:42.300 Now to take a pause from politics for a bit, there is one big famous error in this book

00:32:47.840 big enough that he had to edit it in future editions.

00:32:52.280 It is about Starlink.

00:32:54.200 Starlink is a subsidiary of SpaceX.

00:32:56.920 They provide internet service through satellites.

00:32:59.740 Okay.

00:33:00.020 So there's a piece in the book that says that

00:33:01.520 Musk ordered the shutdown of Starlink

00:33:04.500 during a Ukrainian attack on Russian naval forces in Crimea.

00:33:10.180 So here's the passage.

00:33:11.880 Throughout the evening and into the night,

00:33:13.500 Musk personally took charge of the situation,

00:33:16.080 Allowing the use of Starlink for the attack, he concluded, could be a disaster for the world.

00:33:20.440 So he secretly told his engineers to turn off coverage within 100 kilometers of the Crimean

00:33:24.640 coast. As a result, when the Ukrainian drone subs got near the Russian fleet in Sevastopol,

00:33:29.660 they lost connectivity and washed ashore harmlessly.

00:33:32.260 So this excerpt is published by CNN and the Washington Post before publication of the book.

00:33:38.420 And a lot of people flag it as questionable.

00:33:41.140 Really? Okay. I didn't know about this.

00:33:42.520 So first of all, what's the source for this?

00:33:44.700 There was no reporting on Ukrainian subs washing ashore anywhere.

00:33:48.400 It's also a very weirdly active role for Musk in this war, right?

00:33:52.620 Like he supplied Starlink capability, but now he's actively deciding that a specific attack shouldn't happen.

00:33:58.540 This circulates and Elon goes to Twitter to dispute it.

00:34:02.560 He says, no, what happened is the opposite of the opposite.

00:34:06.420 There was no Starlink service in that region.

00:34:10.080 Ukrainian authorities requested we provide Starlink services for an attack.

00:34:14.240 and we declined because they thought that would be too active of a role in the war effort for

00:34:20.160 Starlink. So they're sort of like, no, we're not doing that. We're not going to provide

00:34:25.260 additional services for attacks. Isaacson responds saying, quote, to clarify on the Starlink issue,

00:34:32.520 the Ukrainians thought coverage was enabled all the way to Crimea, but it was not. They asked

00:34:38.560 Musk to enable it for their drone sub attack on the Russian fleet. Musk did not enable it because

00:34:43.260 he thought probably correctly that would cause a major war. Based on my conversations with Musk,

00:34:48.260 I mistakenly thought the policy to not allow Starlink to be used for an attack on Crimea

00:34:52.540 had been first decided on the night of the Ukrainian attempted sneak attack. 0.91

00:34:56.800 That's a huge fuck up. 0.73

00:34:57.980 Isaacson frames this as a misunderstanding. 0.98

00:34:59.980 Yeah.

00:35:00.420 But you look at the passage and like, where did the imagery of the Ukrainian subs washing ashore

00:35:06.860 come from?

00:35:07.600 Because he wasn't getting it from news reports, obviously, because there were no news reports.

00:35:09.800 And if Musk declined to turn on Starlink coverage for this region, the subs wouldn't have been out there to begin with, right?

00:35:16.380 Yeah.

00:35:16.600 So this is one of those things that really highlights how bad Isaacson's actual journalism is, right?

00:35:23.920 To the extent it was a misunderstanding, it could have been addressed by looking for sources besides Elon himself, right?

00:35:30.720 Like this is the problem with an unreliable primary source.

00:35:33.580 Also, it's interesting that he twists this to make Elon look worse, which is not something he does throughout the rest of the book. 0.86

00:35:39.280 Yeah, I think it's a kind of a crazy position to be put in either way, you know, to sympathize with Elon, but like, like fucking Ukraine is like, hey, can you help us with this attack? And you're like, Jesus Christ, I'm in a fucking war now. 0.98

00:35:50.340 So the point of this episode is that Elon is falsely accused of having right wing ideology, but he's actually standing in between. 0.97

00:35:56.140 He's a hero.

00:35:56.720 Both sides have a problem.

00:35:57.480 So where we land next is the Twitter saga.

00:36:02.560 During the COVID era, he has become steadily radicalized and, like many conservatives,

00:36:08.960 obsessed with the idea that Twitter is stifling free speech and censoring conservative voices,

00:36:14.920 right?

00:36:15.340 Part of this is like his woke mind virus thing and the idea that wokeness spreads on social

00:36:20.800 media.

00:36:21.400 And also just the general right-wing victimhood complex.

00:36:23.680 During COVID, the stock market heats up, especially in tech.

00:36:27.340 Tesla's stock is going nuts.

00:36:29.640 Elon cashes out some stock and he is flush, right?

00:36:32.940 He has his people start buying up shares of Twitter.

00:36:36.420 He doesn't initially have a clear plan.

00:36:39.520 He's just trying to exert leverage over Twitter.

00:36:43.100 This leads to Twitter offering him a board seat, but he eventually becomes convinced

00:36:48.540 that a board seat is not enough here.

00:36:50.560 If you remember, I had mentioned that during the initial PayPal debacle, he sort of,

00:36:56.760 left that realizing that he needed full control over these companies. Like he's not satisfied

00:37:01.720 without control. And the robot army. Yes. That's right. You want control. So he makes an offer to

00:37:06.340 buy Twitter and take it private for $44 billion, a 38% premium over where shares were trading the

00:37:13.100 prior day, which for a company like this, which has struggled with growth from a financial

00:37:18.440 perspective, it's a slam dunk. So they accept. Isaacson actually has a relatively coherent

00:37:23.760 an interesting thesis for Elon's reasoning here. I think this is worth reading.

00:37:30.340 I believe there was a psychological, personal yearning. Twitter was the ultimate playground.

00:37:35.380 As a kid, he was beaten and bullied on the playground, never having been endowed with

00:37:38.940 the emotional dexterity needed to thrive on that rugged terrain. It instilled a deep pain and

00:37:43.560 sometimes caused him to react to slights far too emotionally, but it also is what girded him to be

00:37:48.240 able to face the world and fight every battle fiercely. When he felt dinged up, cornered,

00:37:52.720 bullied either online or in person, it took him back to a place that was super painful where he

00:37:57.040 was dissed by his father and bullied by his classmates. But now he could own the playground.

00:38:01.860 I think this is giving him way too much credit. Probably gives him a lot of credit, but I think

00:38:04.820 the owning the playground thing is an interesting framework and feels right to me. Everyone's

00:38:11.700 jabbing at each other on Twitter and he just wants to own the whole thing. He wants to be

00:38:16.020 in control of it. I think he's experiencing emotional pain at people being mean to him

00:38:20.120 and people not liking him or laughing at his jokes or whatever.

00:38:22.860 Like, he's bad at posting.

00:38:24.320 Yeah, yeah.

00:38:24.560 And so instead of, I don't know, in any way internalizing,

00:38:27.160 they'd be like, I should be better at posting. 0.95

00:38:28.460 Or like, I should fucking solve world hunger 0.96

00:38:30.280 or do something to make people like me. 1.00

00:38:31.800 He's just like, fuck you. 1.00

00:38:32.760 I'm going to buy this. 1.00

00:38:33.600 I'm going to make you like me.

00:38:34.840 I think a lot of it is like resentment-based

00:38:37.120 or like a kid kicking over a sandcastle

00:38:39.940 because somebody else built one better than him.

00:38:41.940 He believes that he can quintuple Twitter's revenue by 2028.

00:38:46.820 He wants to do user subscriptions and data licensing.

00:38:50.120 as the primary drivers of revenue. And he also has this idea that he will recreate X.com as he

00:38:57.500 envisioned it in 1999. He has only had one idea in his entire life that he wants to implement it now.

00:39:03.020 But also the scale of it is a little bit preposterous, which we talked about last time.

00:39:06.940 It's just like, oh, what if every payment in the world was going through my app? Wouldn't that be

00:39:10.880 sick? And then also you can call someone the N-word. At this stage, Musk has not formally

00:39:16.220 bought the company, right? He's made an offer and it's been accepted. He pretty quickly seems to

00:39:20.320 have regrets and he tries to wriggle out of it. So just a couple of weeks later, he tweets,

00:39:25.640 Twitter deal temporarily on hold, pending details, supporting calculation that spam

00:39:30.160 slash fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of users. This wasn't meaningfully true.

00:39:36.460 He had made an offer. It had been accepted. The deal was not on hold in any legal sense.

00:39:41.820 His people yell at him and he tweets, still committed to acquisition shortly after.

00:39:45.960 But he latches onto this idea that Twitter is obscuring its bot problem.

00:39:50.820 There are a couple of things here that Isaacson skirts around a little too much for my taste.

00:39:55.400 One is that Elon doesn't actually have a factual basis for this.

00:39:58.900 He's just sort of convinced himself that something is amiss, that 5% sounds too low.

00:40:02.940 That's what Twitter told him.

00:40:04.260 It seems like he wants this to be true so that he can back out or like has some kind of reason for backing out.

00:40:09.340 And he convinces himself that it must be true.

00:40:11.300 The other thing here, which Isaacson doesn't mention at all, is that as part of his offer,

00:40:16.200 Musk waived due diligence, meaning people look through the finances and so forth.

00:40:20.860 The seller would be obligated to help the buyer with it, provide them with documents,

00:40:25.140 et cetera.

00:40:26.140 Elon waived that.

00:40:27.720 Isaacson, again, doesn't talk about this.

00:40:29.080 I'm not sure why.

00:40:30.380 He is willing to talk about Elon as reckless and impulsive, including in the context of

00:40:35.200 this.

00:40:35.780 Maybe Isaacson just doesn't get it. 0.96

00:40:37.080 Or maybe he thinks those people saying pussy in bio in his mentions are real. 0.96

00:40:40.800 Ultimately, Musk is, of course, compelled to buy Twitter. 0.93

00:40:43.620 Isaacson receives a text from Elon at 3.30 in the morning that says, quote,

00:40:48.360 I am very excited about finally implementing X.com as it should have been done using Twitter as an accelerant

00:40:53.840 and hopefully helping democracy and civil discourse while doing so.

00:40:58.260 And free speech has been protected ever since.

00:41:00.020 And that's the end, folks. Free speech for everybody.

00:41:02.240 I love to see cats getting tortured when I go on like a nice social media website where I go to find sports scores.

00:41:07.520 i hate having to search for uh the most disgusting pornography on earth i want to just see it at the

00:41:13.280 top of my page when i log in do you remember the day that he arrived at the twitter hq dude the 0.99

00:41:17.560 sink the fucking sink thing he brought he brought a physical sink and then just tweeted let that 1.00

00:41:23.500 sink in let that sink in so annoying just shoot shoot me with yeah god shotgun the whole fucking 1.00

00:41:32.860 thing right in the middle of the forehead dude there was like the sinking feeling when you saw 1.00

00:41:35.840 that. And then it's also just gotten so much worse from there. That's like the best thing

00:41:38.980 he did. Twitter was like this dumb joke. Yeah. In retrospect, you're like, good joke, Elon. 0.99

00:41:43.080 Yeah. It's all been downhill. That was the funniest thing he's done in years.

00:41:49.180 Twitter is so responsible for the radicalization of so many public figures,

00:41:51.920 but he bought the platform and then turned it even more into an engine to radicalize him further.

00:41:58.560 Yeah. It's like, I'm drinking too much alcohol. I know what I'll do. I'll buy the liquor store

00:42:03.100 so that I can have even more alcohol.

00:42:05.940 It's like you're taking this thing that is poisoning you

00:42:08.200 and you're making it more poisonous. 1.00

00:42:10.080 Let's hear from a 14-year-old in India

00:42:14.000 who's posing as a Nazi in upstate New York.

00:42:19.100 Let's hear what they have to say.

00:42:20.440 All right, so the big initial story for Isaacson

00:42:23.240 is the culture clash.

00:42:24.780 Musk likes to run his companies leanly. 0.99

00:42:27.480 He does not like employee comfort shit. 0.99

00:42:30.080 There are some vignettes in the book 0.99

00:42:31.320 of musk wandering the twitter offices which are very like 2010s tech culture and just getting

00:42:37.220 pissed off at everything he sees so here's here's a little bit musk seemed amazed as he wandered

00:42:43.360 around twitter's headquarters which was in a 10-story art deco former merchandise mart built

00:42:48.080 in 1937 it had been renovated in a techno hip style with coffee bars yoga studio fitness room

00:42:54.000 and game arcades the cavernous ninth floor cafe with a patio overlooking san francisco city hall

00:42:59.220 served free meals ranging from artisanal hamburgers to vegan salads.

00:43:03.700 The signs on the restroom said, 1.00

00:43:05.300 gender diversity is welcome here.

00:43:07.020 And as Musk poked through cabinets filled with stashes of Twitter-branded merchandise,

00:43:11.020 he found t-shirts emblazoned with the words,

00:43:13.220 stay woke, which he waved around as an example of the mindset

00:43:16.520 that he believed had infected the company.

00:43:18.620 Twitter had allowed for mental health days and like work from home.

00:43:21.760 And the common buzzword they used is psychological safety.

00:43:26.080 So here's Musk's reaction to that.

00:43:28.460 musk let loose a bitter laugh when he heard the phrase psychological safety it made him recoil

00:43:33.540 he considered it to be the enemy of urgency progress orbital velocity his preferred buzzword

00:43:38.980 was hardcore discomfort he believed was a good thing it was a weapon against the scourge of

00:43:44.040 complacency vacations flower smelling work-life balance and days of mental rest were not his

00:43:50.300 thing you know when there's like some someone rolls their eyes at the idea of therapy and that

00:43:54.660 person is also the person who needs therapy more than anyone you've ever met in your life it's like 0.83

00:43:59.120 that's how i feel when when musk is like oh no like psychological safety is terrible it's like

00:44:05.460 bro you need yeah you don't know how badly you need to introduce these concepts into your 0.97

00:44:10.280 fucking life also he's like why do you need psychological safety as he's like melting down 0.99

00:44:13.520 about a t-shirt with a phrase he doesn't like just fucking popping ketamine and getting mad 0.99

00:44:18.140 at everything he sees are you triggered libs yeah so he gets very focused on the idea that 0.96

00:44:24.120 the culture was lazy and unproductive, and that they should be trying to identify the company's

00:44:30.220 best engineers and lay everyone else off. One thing Isaacson says about Musk is that he views

00:44:36.440 everything as an engineering problem. This is the only way that he knows how to operate, which is

00:44:41.460 like you strip everything down to the bone, and then you just sort of step back and see what

00:44:45.960 breaks. Which is now what the government is fucking doing. But yeah, there are several rounds 0.99

00:44:49.360 of layoffs. All of them center around sort of retaining the most fanatical engineers. In

00:44:56.600 mid-November 2022, he sends an email to all employees saying, going forward to build a

00:45:02.700 breakthrough Twitter 2.0 and succeed in an increasingly competitive world, we will need

00:45:07.020 to be extremely hardcore. This will mean working long hours at high intensity. If you are sure that

00:45:11.880 you want to be part of the new Twitter, please click yes on the link below. Anyone who has not

00:45:16.240 done so by 5 p.m eastern tomorrow will receive three months of severance the hardcore thing is

00:45:20.940 so annoying it's so corny like we have to go x games mode it must be extremely hardcore

00:45:24.720 between people leaving and several rounds of layoffs the workforce is cut from 8 000 to 2 000

00:45:32.560 in the span of a few months that is wild there were some early hiccups like he very hastily

00:45:37.520 moved the servers early on which caused a bunch of outages and that led to a lot of like chatter

00:45:44.220 online that the website was falling apart but eventually it stabilized and i think you can say

00:45:49.340 with some certainty now that the doomsayers about like the ability of the website to just stay

00:45:54.680 online have been proven wrong right but also he he also cut a lot of kind of invisible

00:45:59.420 infrastructure like i remember after this happened people were uploading entire movies like somebody

00:46:04.020 uploaded like i think it was the avengers endgame just like the whole movie right and then i went on

00:46:09.240 there at one point and saw like a video of a cat being tortured like there's there's actual like

00:46:13.640 abuse materials that were being uploaded and like you don't notice the fact that as an internet user

00:46:18.480 you don't come across fucking animal torture because like there's lots of people working on 0.68

00:46:22.720 making sure that doesn't happen there's a period there were footage of people and animals being 0.99

00:46:27.320 tortured of um child sexual abuse yeah yeah was just like getting through at record rates right

00:46:34.320 and that's the price you pay for ripping out the infrastructure and backfilling it now it's all 0.99

00:46:39.580 just like race science garbage. Yeah, no. Now you will never see child sexual abuse material. 0.99

00:46:45.260 You will only see someone who privately has a ton of it being racist online. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:46:51.900 There were some other big debacles early on. The first was the blue check system. Twitter had a

00:46:57.620 system where public figures could get a blue check mark by their name, right? And that would

00:47:02.740 indicate that they had verified their identity. A lot of journalists got it and conservatives

00:47:07.920 resented this because the blue checks had some cachet that was also the most tedious thing

00:47:14.220 like oh the blue checks like blue checks don't want to admit like using blue checks as a slur 0.99

00:47:18.840 it's bizarre so cringe you're complaining about something that's verified by this fucking like 0.86

00:47:23.300 jalopy of a website so musk wants to remove this feature and replace it with a system where anyone 0.90

00:47:28.640 could get the check for a fee that was the beginning i think of many normies being like 0.99

00:47:33.960 oh, this guy's dumb. Like you don't understand the purpose of the blue check system. Is it like 0.99

00:47:38.720 if you can buy one, then the whole system fucking breaks down. There's no point in the system 0.98

00:47:43.100 anymore. All right. Sent you this. This was one of Musk's core ideas for Twitter. Making people

00:47:47.540 subscribe using their credit card and cell phone number would be a way to verify and authenticate

00:47:51.660 their identity. The algorithm could favor those users who would probably be less likely to engage

00:47:56.120 in scams, bullying, and spreading what they knew to be lies. It might reduce how quickly any

00:48:01.460 discussion degenerated into comparing people to nazis ah yes comparing people to nazis the real

00:48:07.100 problem on twitter right such a beautiful insight into the right-wing mind like the prime the

00:48:11.920 primary problem on twitter was that people would be called nazis too much throwing around the nazi

00:48:17.680 slur the initial rollout of the new blue check system is a disaster this is isaacson he says

00:48:24.240 there was a tsunami of fake accounts with blue checks pretending to be famous politicians and

00:48:29.300 worse yet big advertisers yeah one purporting to be the drug maker eli lily tweeted quote we are

00:48:35.620 excited to announce insulin is free now the company's stock price fell more than four percent 0.97

00:48:41.920 in an hour yeah they have to freeze the rollout to figure the shit out it's funny how predictable 0.88

00:48:47.000 this is you're like what could go wrong anybody can get a blue check like yeah man of course it's 0.99

00:48:50.640 the first thing that happens on a fucking website with millions of people musk is out very out of 0.98

00:48:55.440 his depth in a social media space because what he is actually the worst at is understanding and 0.99

00:49:01.820 connecting with other human beings. He also in a million years would never think of something

00:49:05.660 funny. And the Eli Lilly thing is so funny. It's so good. You know, people are going to start doing

00:49:10.300 this, like set up an account. It's like Tom Cruise and be like, Scientology is fake. Like,

00:49:13.480 you know, people are going to do this. If you have any sense of humor, you're like the chaos

00:49:16.840 this is going to unleash. Like he's an engineer. All he can do is figure out what gets clicks and

00:49:22.060 then just try to promote that shit. And that's why now Twitter is a click-driven shithole. 1.00

00:49:27.000 Yeah, it's unbelievable how bad it is. The real big issue early on, and what continues,

00:49:31.080 of course, to haunt the platform in various respects, is content moderation, right?

00:49:35.660 Yeah. Musk goes into this kind of occasionally describing himself as a free speech absolutist.

00:49:41.460 Which nobody is. Nobody is. Everyone who says that is lying, yep.

00:49:44.340 He establishes an early alliance with Yoel Roth, the head of trust and safety at Twitter.

00:49:50.040 Roth is a liberal gay dude with very different political sensibilities, but they actually do agree on some stuff and sort of like partner up early on.

00:49:59.180 Previous Twitter had been a little more aggressive about deleting and banning offensive speech, but Roth wanted to lean more on warning messages and lowering visibility as a tactic.

00:50:11.720 Elon liked that.

00:50:13.000 Early on, there's like a racist troll campaign and Elon tells Roth to just nuke it.

00:50:19.320 And so Roth is kind of pleasantly surprised.

00:50:21.620 He's like, okay, maybe Elon is not the free speech freak that I thought he was.

00:50:26.120 This starts to unravel pretty quickly.

00:50:29.800 I'm going to send you a bit.

00:50:30.860 There was a tweet by Musk about an attack by the hammer-wielding intruder on Paul Pelosi,

00:50:35.320 the 82-year-old husband of the Speaker of the House.

00:50:37.800 Hillary Clinton had posted a tweet that blamed people who spread hate and deranged conspiracy

00:50:41.800 theories for such violence.

00:50:43.340 Musk responded by linking to a right-wing conspiracy site that falsely suggested, without 0.66

00:50:47.380 offering any evidence that Pelosi might have been hurt in a dispute with a male prostitute.

00:50:52.300 Musk commented, there is a tiny possibility that there might be more to the story than meets the

00:50:57.040 eye. He quickly deleted the tweet, apologized, and later said privately that it was one of his

00:51:01.840 dumbest mistakes. That's actually surprising. He never does that anymore. Isakson does not talk 0.94

00:51:06.320 about the internal reaction to this tweet, but here's an excerpt from Character Limit, which is

00:51:13.660 a book about the Twitter takeover by Kate Conger and Ryan Mack. This is an exchange between a data

00:51:21.660 scientist and Elon. The data scientist is speaking. I'm resigning today. I was feeling excited about

00:51:28.060 the takeover, but I was really disappointed by your Paul Pelosi tweet. It's really such obvious

00:51:32.240 partisan misinformation and it makes me worry about you and what kind of friends you're getting

00:51:35.940 information from. It's only really like the 10th percentile of the adult population who'd be

00:51:40.040 gullible enough to fall for this. The color drained from Musk's already pale face. He leaned

00:51:44.700 forward in his chair. No one spoke to him like this. And no one, least of all someone who worked

00:51:48.840 for him, would dare to question his intellect or his tweets. His darting eyes focused for a second

00:51:53.420 directly on the data scientist. Fuck you, Musk growled. Dude fucking cooked him. He's like, 1.00

00:51:59.840 one out of every 10 people is dumb enough to fall for this, you fucking schmuck. 1.00

00:52:04.020 The dumbest 10% in the fucking country. 1.00

00:52:06.500 the satisfaction he must have felt in that moment just telling elon you're a fucking dumbass only 1.00

00:52:11.720 an idiot would fall for this yeah oh it must have been so good it must have been so good i would 1.00

00:52:16.880 also immediately reach out to authors of this book and be like look i just want you to know 1.00

00:52:20.080 that i did cook this guy in person absolutely fried his ass but like yeah i i think that it 0.98

00:52:25.480 was sort of embarrassing for him right i think that he he got called out as a dipshit by enough 0.99

00:52:32.000 people where he was like, oh, this was like, this was embarrassing, whether or not he processed 0.95

00:52:37.480 that. Right. But also, it sounds like what he's gone through in the years following this is the

00:52:41.600 process of getting rid of every person who would ever speak to him like this. Yes, absolutely.

00:52:45.660 It's fucking wild. People are still on that website. Honestly, you still have like Sesame 0.97

00:52:48.880 Street has like a fucking Twitter account and like various like, I don't know, movie studios 0.84

00:52:53.420 and like companies like people are still there. And it's fucking psychotic. When when Elmo said 1.00

00:52:57.720 the 14 words. I thought that was too far. Very interesting, again, that Isaacson can't read the

00:53:03.140 situation here. He seems to believe that Elon sincerely regrets the Pelosi tweet, right? But

00:53:09.680 then just a couple of pages later, he explains that when ad sales fall, as a result, Elon is

00:53:15.580 out there blaming everyone else, right? Musk tries to like frame the ad collapse as being an

00:53:20.280 orchestrated effort to, quote, destroy free speech in America, right?

00:53:24.100 A sign of a well-working mind.

00:53:26.520 Absolutely, it's a conspiracy against you.

00:53:28.380 Are those the actions of someone who was actually remorseful in some meaningful way?

00:53:32.140 Yeah, yeah. 0.99

00:53:32.560 Between this shit and the Twitter blue rollout, Yoel Roth is fed up and resigns. 0.99

00:53:38.500 The next big thing is reinstatements. 0.99

00:53:40.900 There had been all these people who were suspended by Twitter.

00:53:43.460 Jordan Peterson, the Babylon Bee, had both been suspended for misgendering a trans person.

00:53:48.500 They're reinstated.

00:53:49.440 Kathy Griffin had been suspended for impersonating Elon.

00:53:52.460 She's reinstated.

00:53:54.100 Isaacson says, oh, actually, I'll send this to you.

00:53:57.000 He drew the line at Alex Jones, the conspiracy theorist who claimed that the 2012 Sandy Hook

00:54:01.280 elementary school shooting was a giant hoax.

00:54:03.720 Musk said Jones would stay banned.

00:54:05.660 My firstborn child died in my arms, Musk tweeted.

00:54:08.180 I felt his last heartbeat.

00:54:09.620 I have no mercy for anyone who would use the deaths of children for gain, politics, or fame.

00:54:14.160 Do I even need to check if Alex Jones is on there now?

00:54:16.220 Oh, he is.

00:54:17.180 Isaacson does not mention that this is actually a lie.

00:54:19.380 elon did have a child who died of sids but his first wife justine tweeted after this that elon

00:54:25.400 made up the part about holding him as he died yeah keep in mind he's tweeting i have no mercy

00:54:30.340 for anyone who would use the deaths of children for gain i know and he's literally as he made up 0.98

00:54:35.960 a story about the child dying in his arms that is so fucking sociopathic and yeah he uh reinstated

00:54:42.460 alex jones in 2023 so he does have some mercy for people who use the deaths of children for 0.96

00:54:47.580 gain politics or fame. Also, it's again, his weird thing about like lying and embellishing

00:54:51.120 everything. He did lose a child, which is a huge fucking deal. But it's like he has to make it like 0.99

00:54:55.200 even more of a cinematic story. Awful things can happen to awful people. And it's an awful thing

00:55:00.140 that happened to him. But it just goes to show. It did nothing to build his character as a human

00:55:05.520 being. So the big reinstatement is, of course, Donald Trump. He makes the decision via a Twitter

00:55:11.320 poll. Isaacson says, I asked him right afterward, whether he had a sense in advance of how the

00:55:17.360 poll would turn out. No, he said. And if it had gone the other way, would he have kept Trump banned?

00:55:22.580 Yes. I'm not Trump's fan. He's disruptive. He's the world's champion of bullshit.

00:55:27.640 Again, a very consistent belief that he continues to hold to this day. Absolutely. 1.00

00:55:33.000 Musk would like keep doing polls for this sort of thing. And like Isaacson doesn't even mention

00:55:37.160 that like these polls are put out by Elon himself. So they select for his followers who are going to

00:55:42.120 be more ideologically right wing. And to this day, he makes decisions based on them and acts like

00:55:47.100 it's like some democratic principle he's upholding. It's just so stupid. There are a few other 1.00

00:55:52.120 moderation meltdowns, and the big one is the Elon Jet account. Elon Jet was an account run by a

00:55:59.740 young guy that published real-time data about the takeoffs and landings of Elon's private jet

00:56:05.940 based on public flight information. Here's Isaacson. Musk had long been infuriated by the

00:56:12.620 Elon Jet account, which he thought was doxing and endangering him. In April, when he was first

00:56:16.740 thinking of buying Twitter, he discussed it at a dinner of friends and family in Austin,

00:56:20.800 and both Grimes and his mother argued strongly that he should ban it. He agreed, but once he

00:56:24.940 took over Twitter, he decided not to. My commitment to free speech extends even to not banning the

00:56:29.900 account following my plane, even though that is a direct personal safety risk, he tweeted in early

00:56:34.420 November. Okay, so when did he ban it? Like a couple months later? So first of all, it's later

00:56:39.020 revealed that Musk had actually visibility filtered the account. So while he's bragging

00:56:44.080 about his commitment to free speech he's actually trying to suppress the account yeah then a long 0.92

00:56:50.180 time grimes stalker followed a car that had musk and grimes stupidly named child x something in it

00:56:58.200 isaacson says musk believed that the stalker had been able to find where he and grimes were staying

00:57:03.120 because of elon jet the connection was murky musk had landed in los angeles the day before but grimes

00:57:08.840 said that is when she started noticing the stalker's car lurking outside elon then creates a

00:57:14.780 new policy about doxing someone's location and bans the account and he also bans multiple

00:57:21.100 journalists who had reported on the situation claiming that they violated the policy too

00:57:26.760 even though most of them just linked to the account which was like right then suspended

00:57:30.720 right isaacson says it does seem that musk had acted partly out of peak retaliating against

00:57:36.480 journalist whose stories had been critical

00:57:38.480 of him. Musk has a private conversation

00:57:40.560 about this with Barry Weiss who

00:57:41.940 as we'll discuss was doing the Twitter

00:57:44.480 files at the time.

00:57:46.260 She reaches out to see what's

00:57:48.440 going on. Ask him how he's doing

00:57:50.260 and he says quote, they doxed my plane.

00:57:52.960 They attacked my son.

00:57:57.240 You remember Denzel

00:57:58.580 an American gangster. They tried to kill

00:58:00.620 my wife.

00:58:02.680 They tried to dox my plane. 0.98

00:58:04.720 I also, I just love that all these people are fucking texting each other constantly. 0.96

00:58:09.900 All these people are like, oh, I have no ideological dog in this fight. I'm just like 0.98

00:58:14.420 calling balls and strikes. They're all fucking in group chats together. 1.00

00:58:17.000 Here's a little bit from Isaacson. 0.99

00:58:18.840 Sitting in the hotbox conference room one evening with Barry Weiss,

00:58:22.140 some of her colleagues, and James, he started poking fun of the practice of people posting

00:58:26.320 their preferred pronouns. Someone made a joke that Musk should, oh God, someone made a joke

00:58:30.960 that musk should be prosecute slash fauci there were a few nervous laughs weiss admits to not

00:58:36.840 wanting to challenge musk at that moment and musk started cackling he repeated the joke three times

00:58:42.300 then at around 3 a.m he impulsively tweeted it out my pronouns are prosecute slash fauci

00:58:48.200 that's not even his joke it's a bad joke it's not even his beautiful vignette god like someone

00:58:53.240 makes a completely incoherent joke psychotic joke yeah musk loves it starts repeating it to everyone

00:59:00.160 in the room right where it was originally made by someone else like someone else in the room

00:59:07.060 made this joke and he's just repeating it yeah and then he tweets it out as if it's his own it's 0.88

00:59:12.180 so good and also barry weiss being too chicken shit to say anything even though this is like 0.97

00:59:15.560 completely fucking nuts yeah so this irritates a lot of people including his brother kimball 0.98

00:59:19.580 but he leans into it after the fauci tweet robert f kennedy jr posts quote fauci purchased omerta 0.98

00:59:27.680 among virologists globally with a total of $37 billion in annual payoffs in research grants.

00:59:34.180 Oh, yeah.

00:59:34.440 With the paymaster gone, the orthodoxies will unravel. Musk replies to this precisely.

00:59:43.360 Be careful, Peter. I've been sexting RFK Jr. for nine months now,

00:59:47.120 and I'm ready to finally talk about it.

00:59:48.520 Well, it's irresistible. Is there a journalist not compromised by their sexual entanglements

00:59:54.100 with one rfk jr this is also around the time where uh dave chappelle at one of his shows

01:00:00.860 invites elon on stage and everyone boos him god that felt so good there's a lot of reporting that

01:00:07.000 this like really shook up elon yeah i know i love it he like posted about it in a very defensive

01:00:12.340 way that was like it was actually only 10 percent boos and 90 percent cheers but you know and there

01:00:18.120 was reporting that he was just like secluded for days after this just like staring in the middle

01:00:22.740 distance while like the sound of silence plays isaacson doesn't write about that part uh but

01:00:28.100 anyway this is like it's damaging his psyche isaacson is like very clearly aware of musk's

01:00:35.820 hypocrisies when it comes to twitter like coming in as a free speech absolutist and then abandoning

01:00:40.940 it right doing all of these things that he once complained about it right where like you're doing 0.79

01:00:45.920 different types of visibility filtering and stuff like that but isaacson is not really interested in

01:00:50.640 that i think he views it again it's just like another element of elon's grandiosity on one

01:00:56.900 hand and like eccentricity on the other of course it's an actual sign of his radicalization where

01:01:00.940 he's right stating all these lofty principles and immediately violating them within like days

01:01:05.240 slash weeks of taking over this website he never either he never believed them in the first place

01:01:09.260 or he's like completely lied himself into this position where he has to be like this radical 1.00

01:01:13.100 fucking white supremacist psycho online he's being hypocritical in the way that every other 1.00

01:01:19.080 right winger is right but isaacson doesn't understand politics well enough to see this 1.00

01:01:25.060 right yeah he knows enough to know that elon is absorbing some right wing shit but that's really 0.51

01:01:28.860 it he doesn't even get into like the specifics of elon's early promises like elon initially said 0.69

01:01:34.440 that he was going to allow for all legal speech on the platform which he obviously abandons very

01:01:39.220 very quickly right isaacson also does a chapter on the twitter files which i you know we'll we

01:01:46.100 won't spend too much time here. That could be a fun bonus episode just because that's such a

01:01:50.260 nothing burger. There's nothing there. Yeah. So Musk is talking to David Sachs about what he views

01:01:55.080 as like the misfeasance of the previous Twitter ownership, which he thought, of course, censored 0.99

01:02:00.240 conservatives and favored liberals and all that shit. Sachs tells him to talk to Matt Taibbi. 0.97

01:02:04.820 Isaacson describes Taibbi as, quote, a former writer for Rolling Stone and other publications

01:02:10.240 who was difficult to pigeonhole ideologically. 0.99

01:02:13.660 Of course, every fucking time. 0.99

01:02:15.760 Dude, Isaacson has never met a right winger. 0.99

01:02:17.980 Like Isaacson has no idea what a right winger is. 0.99

01:02:21.120 The thinnest veneer of like, I'm a liberal, but is enough to fucking fool these people. 0.89

01:02:25.580 So Musk gives Taibbi access to old emails and Slack messages concerning content moderation 0.87

01:02:31.240 with the basic mission of exposing any wrongdoing or bias.

01:02:36.200 And the only condition, he says, is that they have to post it on Twitter, right?

01:02:41.200 They have to post their findings on Twitter.

01:02:42.920 Musk tweets, this is a battle for the future of civilization.

01:02:46.440 If free speech is lost even in America, tyranny is all that lies ahead.

01:02:51.580 He's such little babies. 1.00

01:02:52.760 Like, save your shit. 1.00

01:02:53.600 Don't worry, I'm saving free speech by giving the internal Twitter Slack messages to Matt 1.00

01:02:58.480 Taibbi.

01:02:59.060 And also this weird catastrophizing over, like, internet moderation. 0.96

01:03:02.500 Like even if Twitter is censoring fucking stories about Hunter Biden or something, this is not like a battle for the soul of civilization.

01:03:09.980 Isaacson is kind of vague about what Taibbi actually uncovers. 0.91

01:03:13.220 He says that he exposed the fact that Twitter had looked for an excuse to ban the Hunter Biden laptop story.

01:03:19.160 And Twitter executives would later say they made a mistake about that.

01:03:22.240 You know, for people who don't remember, the Hunter Biden laptop story initially looked like it might be fake.

01:03:27.420 And so there was a lot of concerns about misinformation.

01:03:30.080 It was right before the election.

01:03:32.040 And yeah, he also notes that the files revealed a lot of voluntary cooperation between Twitter

01:03:36.560 and government agencies and political figures.

01:03:39.380 Also true, but Taibbi didn't find anything that looked like government coercion.

01:03:44.420 Right.

01:03:44.540 It's also worth noting, this is the Trump FBI.

01:03:46.200 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:03:46.680 This is not the Biden FBI, even though it sort of gets framed as a liberal thing.

01:03:50.160 They kept casting it as like some sort of smoking gun that they had a sort of like a

01:03:53.460 caseworker or whatever at the FBI that they were in ongoing contact with.

01:03:57.140 But like, yeah, you're running a website with millions of people.

01:03:59.060 People post libel on there.

01:04:00.040 People post revenge porn on there. 0.98

01:04:01.240 people post child sex abuse material on there. Like law enforcement is relevant to things that

01:04:05.960 get posted on the website. So you're going to have an open relationship with law enforcement.

01:04:10.340 There's basically no way to run a website of Twitter's scale without doing this. And Isaacson

01:04:14.860 does not mention that Elon has not stopped this practice, right? Twitter under Elon started

01:04:20.500 approving a higher number of government censorship requests, especially from right-wing governments in

01:04:25.280 Turkey and India. Shocking twist. There's a report that found that they fully complied with 83% of

01:04:30.300 requests and at least partially complied with nearly 99% of requests. The prior regime was

01:04:36.580 fully complying with like 50%. Also, there's a gap between a government requesting that something

01:04:43.500 be taken down and a government saying, hey, this is illegal to post in our country, right?

01:04:49.340 And sometimes Twitter, previous Twitter, would take those governments to court saying, no,

01:04:55.120 we're not going to take this down, a practice that Musk has abandoned. Here's the last thing

01:04:59.440 he says about Taibbi. Taibbi's revelations illustrated the problematic but unsurprising

01:05:03.740 fact that the moderators at Twitter were biased in favor of suppressing stories that would help

01:05:07.940 Trump. More than 98% of the donations made by people at the company went to Democrats.

01:05:12.940 That's it. A couple of anecdotes and donation data does not prove that moderation was biased

01:05:18.420 against Trump. You're a fucking journalist and you're just going to say this with a straight 0.99

01:05:22.200 face? Right, because the political donations, that 98% figure would be company-wide. That 1.00

01:05:26.740 wouldn't necessarily be people on the moderation team. And also, if the issue is moderation,

01:05:31.940 then you'd want evidence regarding moderation. Just the fact that there's lots of left-leaning

01:05:36.060 people at a company is not remotely the outcome that you're looking at.

01:05:39.520 Some additional drama that happens in this time period is Yoel Roth, the former head of trust and

01:05:45.720 safety, publishes a op-ed in the New York Times. I'm going to share it here.

01:05:52.880 He says,

01:05:53.200 platform policies are shaped by the preferences of a small group of predominantly American tech

01:05:57.800 executives. Steve Jobs didn't believe porn should be allowed in the app store, so it isn't allowed.

01:06:02.080 Stripped bare, the decisions have a dismaying lack of legitimacy. It's this very lack of legitimacy

01:06:06.340 that Mr. Musk, correctly, points to when he calls for greater free speech and for the establishment

01:06:10.580 of a content moderation council to guide the company's policies. But even as he criticizes

01:06:15.120 the capriciousness of platform policies, he perpetuates the same lack of legitimacy through

01:06:19.400 his impulsive changes and tweet-length pronouncements about Twitter's rules. In appointing himself

01:06:23.780 the chief twit, Mr. Musk has made clear that at the end of the day, he'll be the one calling the

01:06:29.460 shots. Yeah, this was always the issue with all this fucking free speech meltdown. It's true that 0.99

01:06:34.140 it's really fucked up how much of ideological policing we've turned over to people like 0.99

01:06:38.440 fucking Mark Zuckerberg and now Elon Musk. That is a real problem. And yeah, I think this points 0.99

01:06:43.620 this out, right? That like Musk is identifying what in some ways is a real problem, like the

01:06:49.280 arbitrariness of content moderation on social media. But the right wing solution is just for

01:06:55.520 them to control the arbitrariness. It's presented as an argument about fairness, but it's actually

01:07:01.060 about who gets control. And there was never really any evidence that it was conservatives

01:07:04.560 were overly affected by this, unless you just acknowledge that conservatives are more likely

01:07:09.400 to lie. And stuff like anti-vax conspiracy theories, Holocaust denial, the kind of stuff

01:07:13.940 that really was taken offline is almost exclusively associated with the right. So to the extent that

01:07:18.880 it's like right-wing bias, it's like, well, yeah, they're more likely to lie. They're more

01:07:22.520 likely to believe in conspiracy theories. Someone on Twitter finds Roth's PhD thesis

01:07:27.760 about Grindr, which talks about the need to provide safe access to dating services for

01:07:32.360 teenagers to protect them. I don't know about teenagers on Grindr. I don't know if that's

01:07:37.880 where i would no no that's not the hill that i would die on no no i think that i think the point

01:07:41.560 was like if you don't provide a safe dating service for teenagers they will then use adult

01:07:50.000 services like right where they're unprotected right i think that's the point yeah yeah so

01:07:54.360 anyway someone finds that distorts it just like you did right now and uh and calls him a pedo 0.99

01:08:00.320 which musk boosts and uh yeah roth harassment death threats has to move it's a fucking nightmare 0.96

01:08:06.880 At this point, the book sort of trails off, which I mentioned in the last episode, too. 0.86

01:08:12.260 Like, Isaacson is in the room from September 2021 through the beginning of 2023. 0.91

01:08:19.660 And the story he writes is about this eccentric rich guy who's a volatile jerk on one hand, 0.94

01:08:24.060 but he makes great things happen on the other hand. 0.94

01:08:26.580 And the story that's actually happening in front of him is that the richest man in the

01:08:30.900 world is becoming a right wing nut job.

01:08:33.940 Yeah.

01:08:34.080 And he's not even noticing it.

01:08:35.300 And he's producing fewer and fewer great things at this point, right? 0.99

01:08:38.680 I mean, all he does is sit on his phone on fucking Twitter all day. 0.99

01:08:40.740 Robot army, dude. 1.00

01:08:41.840 It's coming. 0.98

01:08:42.700 In two years, we're all going to be getting jerked off by robot butlers, and you're telling 0.97

01:08:46.120 me that he's not creating anything beautiful? 0.83

01:08:48.580 So I was curious about Isaacson, about his politics, right?

01:08:53.220 And they're sort of hard to find because he's a journalist, right?

01:08:57.200 He's not someone who, like, comes out there and talks about his own politics or whatever.

01:09:00.440 He wouldn't deign to have, like, values or, like, moral beliefs.

01:09:03.000 There's some reporting from 2001, when he first took the helm at CNN.

01:09:08.560 I'm going to send you something from FAIR, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting.

01:09:11.880 It was originally reported in Roll Call.

01:09:14.260 It says,

01:09:15.240 Early this month, new CNN chairman Walter Isaacson met with top Republican lawmakers in Washington, D.C.

01:09:20.360 to discuss how to improve relations between the cable news network and conservative Republicans.

01:09:24.860 I was trying to reach out to a lot of Republicans who feel that CNN has not been as open to covering Republicans,

01:09:29.940 and I wanted to hear their concerns.

01:09:31.300 One GOP aide told Roll Call that Isaacson said, give us some guidance on how to attract conservatives.

01:09:36.600 He said he wanted to change the culture at CNN.

01:09:39.540 God, these guys are so easy to work.

01:09:41.420 Tale as old as time, dude.

01:09:42.500 Yeah.

01:09:42.860 A guy heading up a major news organization wants to do outreach to conservative audiences

01:09:47.680 because conservative audiences complain that the organization is too liberal.

01:09:52.060 Yeah.

01:09:52.160 So again, hard to tell where Isaacson stands, 0.97

01:09:54.260 but he he does have at least a 25 year old record of being an absolute sucker for reactionary 0.98

01:10:02.300 bullshit and taking at good faith this stuff of like i'm being censored online and like what 0.99

01:10:06.080 you're being censored about is like take fucking horse paste what happens to elon in the next few 0.99

01:10:09.520 years as a matter of public record we did consider doing a part three here but i want to come i'm 0.87

01:10:14.620 sticking to the book you know i want to keep it in the context of the book because if you try to

01:10:18.080 do a comprehensive elon musk thing you're going to lose your mind and yeah frankly he says so much

01:10:23.340 insane bullshit every single day that you couldn't possibly compile it in a way that felt 0.98

01:10:29.040 comprehensive. But there are a couple of things that we can't really skip past. Elon, of course, 0.98

01:10:36.040 turning further right in 2023, he expresses interest in the Ron DeSantis primary campaign.

01:10:42.300 And in May, he helps DeSantis announce the campaign on Twitter spaces, which glitches out

01:10:48.280 severely. The whole thing crashes. I remember this. In 2024, Musk creates a PAC, America PAC,

01:10:54.860 which he uses to funnel something in the realm of $250 million in support of the Trump campaign.

01:11:00.940 Hard to categorize his ideology. Hard to say. Toward the end of the campaign, of course,

01:11:04.200 he becomes an active element. He's speaking at Trump rallies. We're going to watch a very quick

01:11:09.520 video. Oh, are we? For fuck's sake. Oh, yeah. I hate watching him, dude. I hate watching him.

01:11:14.440 Well, guess what? I thought it's funny. So we're going to be watching several videos of

01:11:18.120 uh musk are we yep you thought this was almost over you thought this was almost over and it

01:11:23.440 should be but look i want a way i want a way to soften the the landing here and we're gonna do 0.67

01:11:30.720 it by making fun of him okay we're gonna get the government off your back and out of your pocket

01:11:36.800 vote what does that mean and america is just not not just going to be great america is going to

01:11:47.200 reach heights that it has never seen before the future is going to be amazing peter

01:11:54.800 why are you doing this today hold on we're getting we're getting to the best part

01:11:59.360 I forgot how long the short is.

01:12:05.800 They're chanting Elon.

01:12:10.900 You guys are awesome.

01:12:12.140 Honestly, this is like...

01:12:16.140 Peter.

01:12:20.900 Yeah.

01:12:22.980 I mean, this is the kind of positive energy

01:12:27.720 that america is all about i like physically can't watch him i almost was made you watch

01:12:35.040 the entire waluigi skit yeah

01:12:38.220 usa usa

01:12:42.840 why are we watching this yes all right we can stop i just wanted to do the usa chant

01:12:55.620 why does he have such an unnatural usa chant he's so unsettling usa usa it's so bizarre

01:13:04.040 you could cut that i just wanted to show you those kids did not bully him enough he's he's

01:13:08.920 you know he's often seen doing little weird jumps at the rallies and just sort of

01:13:14.280 yeah he's acting less human than you'd like to see um but the real thing we need to talk about

01:13:18.720 i think at least briefly is that musk joins the government of course yeah as part of doge

01:13:24.380 unofficial government agency the department of government efficiency a full list of doge's

01:13:30.080 crimes would be impossible to fit into this episode there are a couple things we should

01:13:34.620 touch on though one is that doge was involved with cutting funding to usa id which handles

01:13:40.640 foreign aid a ucla study found that if these cuts persist it will cost 14 million lives worldwide

01:13:48.800 over the next five years.

01:13:51.260 Yeah, that's insane.

01:13:52.140 Dude was in the government for three months 0.70

01:13:54.140 and put up Hitler numbers. 0.76

01:13:55.880 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. 0.79

01:13:56.880 It's wild, bro.

01:13:58.420 Yeah.

01:13:58.720 The amount of monstrousness.

01:14:01.660 Yeah.

01:14:01.980 The other thing I want to talk about in a little more detail

01:14:04.260 right before we wrap, and we will wrap after this.

01:14:06.660 Thank God.

01:14:07.160 Is the ostensible social security fraud, right?

01:14:11.840 Oh, yeah.

01:14:12.040 Because I think it's a great encapsulation 0.91

01:14:14.580 of both the myth and reality of Hitler, right? 0.92

01:14:18.800 He's brought in to bring his private sector efficiency know-how to the federal government 0.81

01:14:25.500 and then also sort of expose all the fraud and waste that conservatives have always believed

01:14:30.780 was there, right?

01:14:32.120 Right.

01:14:32.420 Also, his efficiency in the private sector is like firing 80% of people.

01:14:36.060 It's like all that surgical.

01:14:37.740 So one of the things that happens is that he tweets that there are 150-year-olds in

01:14:43.080 the social security database who are listed as alive, right?

01:14:46.060 Here's a little bit of AP coverage about that.

01:14:48.600 On Wednesday, Social Security's new acting commissioner acknowledged recent reporting

01:14:52.800 with a number of people older than age 100 who may be receiving benefits from Social Security.

01:14:57.000 The reported data are people in our records with a Social Security number

01:15:00.180 who do not have a date of death associated with their record.

01:15:02.960 These individuals are not necessarily receiving benefits.

01:15:06.180 This like Social Security fraud thing comes up in right-wing media on like four-year cycles.

01:15:11.960 They'll always be like, 150,000 people are scamming Social Security.

01:15:15.180 And then you look at the actual numbers and it's like a 0.05% error rate.

01:15:19.420 The AP notes that part of the confusion comes from Social Security's software system using the COBOL programming language, which has a lack of a date type, which means that entries with missing or incomplete birthdates will default to a reference point.

01:15:36.540 And that reference point is over 150 years ago.

01:15:39.440 So everyone who doesn't have a birthdate will show up as super old.

01:15:43.380 There was also a July 2024 report from Social Security's inspector general that states from fiscal years 2015 through 2022, the agency paid out almost $8.6 trillion in benefits, including $71.8 billion or less than 1% in improper payments.

01:16:05.920 Boom.

01:16:06.200 Most of those erroneous payments are overpayments to living people.

01:16:11.160 Yeah.

01:16:11.240 So like, yeah, there are audits.

01:16:13.380 we look at this stuff, right? The idea that like these agencies themselves don't give a shit about 0.97

01:16:17.560 fraud when we've had this fucking ideology of like benefit cheats for three decades, four decades 0.98

01:16:22.660 now, the eligibility criteria to get onto these programs is difficult. And like, they're not just 0.98

01:16:27.500 like, Oh, you're alive. Here's some money. Like that just isn't how it works. I'm going to show

01:16:30.980 you an interview from not super long ago this fall. Uh, this is Rogan and Elon content warning.

01:16:37.720 We won't watch it for too long, but this, this is what they're talking about.

01:16:40.220 so we found for example people who were you know 300 years old in the social security

01:16:46.620 administration database now i thought that this was a mistake of not registering their deaths

01:16:53.720 that people were born like a long time ago and it had defaulted to like a certain number

01:16:59.660 and so that after time those people were still in the system it was just an error rogan's on

01:17:05.380 the right track here yeah so um well that's not true so there's or at least one of two things

01:17:12.860 must be true um the there's a there's a typo or or some mistake in the computer or it's fraudulent

01:17:20.520 so either it matters or it doesn't matter so that's not true or uh actually let me rephrase

01:17:27.600 this either it's true or it's not yeah that's that's what he said yeah it's incredibly hollow 0.86

01:17:33.660 but I think that the way he talks tricks certain types of dumb people into believing that he's 0.93

01:17:39.140 insightful. I mean, the one thing that is good about Joe Rogan is he will actually like ask 0.94

01:17:42.960 basic follow-up questions, but it just shows again that like Elon is not subject to people

01:17:47.880 being like, sorry, what do you mean? Like, does it matter that people are 300 years old? Are they

01:17:51.140 receiving benefits? He's not getting these kinds of questions. I think it's so interesting that he

01:17:54.820 just fires back to that with, that's not true. And it makes it very clear that he actually doesn't

01:17:59.400 know, right? He's like, well, one of two things. Either there's an error or people are on the

01:18:06.920 rolls fraudulently. And it's like, yeah, dude, that's...

01:18:09.580 That's the entire distinction.

01:18:13.320 It's like something happened and Elon's like, either it was an accident or it was on purpose.

01:18:19.240 It's like, right, Elon, that's true of actually all things. So do you have any information here?

01:18:25.040 Here's another short clip. This is the last one that you will have to watch.

01:18:28.520 Yeah, so there was like, I think, something like, I don't know, 20 million people in the Social Security Administration database that could not possibly be alive if their birth date is, like, based on their birth date, they could not possibly be alive.

01:18:47.500 And then to be clear, 20 million people that were receiving funds?

01:18:52.180 A bunch of, most of them were not receiving funds.

01:18:56.580 Some of them were receiving funds.

01:18:57.740 Most were not receiving funds.

01:18:59.440 So let me tell you how the scam works.

01:19:00.820 It's a bank shot.

01:19:02.560 So the Social Security Administration database is used as the source of truth by all the other databases that the government uses.

01:19:10.760 So even if they stop the payments on the Social Security Administration database, like unemployment insurance, small business administration, student loans, all check the Social Security Administration database to say, is this a legitimate, alive person?

01:19:25.540 and uh and if the social security database will say yes this person is still alive even though

01:19:31.080 they're 200 years old um but forget to mention that they're 200 years old it just says it just

01:19:35.600 returns uh uh when when the computer is queries it says yes this person is alive and so then they're

01:19:43.560 able to exploit the entire rest of the government ecosystem so fake then you get fake student loans

01:19:49.400 then you get fake unemployment insurance then you get fake medical payments and this doesn't have to

01:19:54.160 be tied to an individual where there's an address where you can check on this person.

01:19:58.440 He can't even convince Rogan.

01:20:00.280 If you just did any check at all, you would stop this.

01:20:05.240 I'm so concerned about 129-year-olds getting student loans, Peter.

01:20:08.520 Do you know how many 129-year-olds get Pell Grants every year?

01:20:11.440 So I actually think this clip is a very good example of Elon's style of dishonesty.

01:20:15.780 You can see that Rogan is trying to pin him down on some specifics here, right? 0.95

01:20:19.840 Rogan is, I think, too dumb to realize that he's being bullshitted, but he is asking the 0.98

01:20:24.220 right questions. 0.98

01:20:25.280 How many of those people were receiving benefits?

01:20:27.420 How much fraud did you actually uncover, right?

01:20:30.180 And Elon very consistently dodges the question or provides like this rambling answer.

01:20:35.740 So Joe asked how many of those 20 million people who based on their age couldn't be

01:20:39.620 alive were actually receiving benefits.

01:20:41.360 And Elon says most of them were not, but some were.

01:20:45.120 And it's like, okay, well, how many, right?

01:20:46.540 Yeah, that's the issue in question, Elon. 0.99

01:20:48.740 We don't care how many people are in the fucking database. 0.97

01:20:51.420 So I do think Elon is getting a couple of numbers mixed up. 0.99

01:20:54.700 He says 20 million people who couldn't be alive are in the database.

01:20:57.480 Doge says they found 20 million over 100 and 12.3 million over 120.

01:21:02.640 Because some of those people over 100 are alive.

01:21:04.000 So yeah.

01:21:04.400 Yeah, right.

01:21:05.220 So in terms of people in the database over 120 who are receiving benefits, my guess is

01:21:10.820 that the answer is zero or near zero because a law was passed in 2015 that, generally speaking,

01:21:16.240 halts payments when someone hits 115.

01:21:18.340 So at the very least, if there were a notable number of people over 120 receiving money,

01:21:23.920 I imagine that Elon would say the actual number.

01:21:27.100 But I am relatively confident, based on what I understand about the law, that the number

01:21:31.520 is zero.

01:21:32.160 Also, it's so telling about the right-wing media ecosystem that they come up with this 1.00

01:21:36.300 dumb fucking talking point of people over 120. 0.99

01:21:38.720 It sounds like the government passed a law saying, OK, at 115, your benefits turn off. 1.00

01:21:43.100 Does right-wing media stop spreading that myth?

01:21:45.040 No, they just spread it anyway.

01:21:46.100 So that report I mentioned earlier, the Inspector General Report, which spanned 2015 to 2022,

01:21:53.000 found that 0.1% of benefits went to people over the age of 100.

01:21:57.220 So that's about right.

01:21:58.020 It's probably how many people in the population are over 100. 1.00

01:22:00.120 There's no like epidemic of these extra old people, which by the way, if you were doing 0.99

01:22:05.720 social security fraud or any type of fraud, why would you have the identity of someone 0.98

01:22:09.840 who is like 150?

01:22:12.200 Wouldn't that be the most easily discoverable?

01:22:14.300 Whatever.

01:22:14.680 Exactly.

01:22:15.020 The idea that like these obvious things that people work in the Social Security Administration aren't being caught. 0.86

01:22:19.800 It's like, I'm sure you can just do a fucking query and be like, OK, how many people are over 120? 0.96

01:22:23.600 Let's check it out. 0.99

01:22:24.220 Like this is so fucking obvious. 0.96

01:22:26.060 You know, Rogan basically says, isn't there some kind of check? 0.96

01:22:29.120 Yeah.

01:22:29.360 Elon says they do literally they don't do any checks and any check would reveal all of this.

01:22:33.960 And it's like, that's not true.

01:22:35.360 And also the number of 120 year olds getting unemployment insurance would also be pretty fucking easy to check out.

01:22:40.560 But it's like as close to zero as you can meaningfully get.

01:22:43.420 One thing lurking behind this conversation is that the number of Social Security recipients and the payment amounts, the payment totals, are public information.

01:22:51.900 The SSA posts them online.

01:22:54.200 So you can see that the number of recipients now is higher than it was in January, which means that Doge has not purged any particularly large amount of fraud in Social Security itself. 0.85

01:23:06.560 Also, thank God they didn't just purge a bunch of random ass people. 0.89

01:23:09.000 Right. 0.98

01:23:09.100 Yeah, that's great.

01:23:09.620 Later, Rogan asks him how much the fraud was costing, and Elon finally gives something like an actual number saying hundreds of billions. 0.98

01:23:18.300 But if it's that much, where the fuck is it? 0.98

01:23:21.480 Yeah, yeah. 0.98

01:23:21.800 Where is it?

01:23:22.440 Where is it?

01:23:23.040 Where are the prosecutions?

01:23:24.560 Right.

01:23:24.760 Presumably, if you busted hundreds of billions of dollars in fraud, we're talking about massive criminal rings, right?

01:23:33.120 Huge deal.

01:23:33.560 I just – I think I wanted to talk about this because it's like this is the central myth of the great American entrepreneur, right?

01:23:42.000 Yeah.

01:23:42.220 You're a master of efficiency.

01:23:44.100 Yeah.

01:23:44.280 The government is so inefficient and so incompetent that if only we got someone like Elon in there.

01:23:50.520 This is like what right-wingers have been talking about for decades.

01:23:53.860 Totally.

01:23:54.180 And it happens.

01:23:55.200 And what happens?

01:23:57.060 First of all, we barely even know.

01:23:58.420 There's no vision, right?

01:23:59.820 There's no like report published that has data.

01:24:02.760 Right. 0.98

01:24:03.160 You get Elon talking on Rogan and clearly bullshitting, clearly bullshitting.

01:24:08.120 You could argue that like Isaacson should have written his book about the way that this myth

01:24:12.880 ended up feeding Elon's worst tendencies and potentially America's worst tendencies.

01:24:17.520 But instead, he just repeats the myth.

01:24:19.340 Yeah.

01:24:19.560 Even as he's like three years too late for the myth to be relevant.

01:24:23.360 I mean, I get that he didn't write this, you know, maybe if he wrote a couple of years

01:24:26.240 later, it would be too undeniable.

01:24:27.720 I genuinely believe that if it had been a couple of years later, he wouldn't have written

01:24:32.420 the book because he only writes

01:24:34.460 this type of book. This is like

01:24:36.340 what he's interested in. It was

01:24:38.240 obvious by early 2023 0.99

01:24:39.880 that shit was changing. Because it could have been 0.99

01:24:42.320 about like the downfall of Elon and all of the things

01:24:44.340 throughout his life that could have been

01:24:46.300 clues to this or the way that he was enabled

01:24:48.380 by various systems to 1.00

01:24:50.240 become this fucking monster. But like 1.00

01:24:52.280 it sounds like he just quite deliberately

01:24:54.160 ultimately missed that story. It's really

01:24:56.480 hard to tell what exactly is going on

01:24:58.480 with Isaacson himself. He's just

01:25:00.520 He's not a super public figure in that way.

01:25:03.240 I don't think he has the chops to do the analysis that was necessary.

01:25:07.380 But it also seems like he didn't have the interest. 0.99

01:25:09.500 And that's like deeply shameful shit because you had it right there, man. 0.96

01:25:14.440 I think the problem, maybe the core problem is that he set out to write a great man biography. 0.99

01:25:17.880 And he never asked, is this really a great man?

01:25:20.460 Self-explanatory.

01:25:21.620 To someone like this, the fact that Elon is rich and successful.

01:25:26.640 Of course he's a great man.

01:25:28.600 That's what it is.

01:25:29.420 That's what being a great man is.

01:25:30.780 I do think it's like profoundly bad for a person to be this wealthy and have this much

01:25:34.700 power where you just don't have genuine relationships anymore.

01:25:37.180 But there's only one way to find out.

01:25:39.420 Someone gives me $1 billion.

01:25:41.560 Elon, if you're listening, for only 144th the price of Twitter, you can have a podcaster.

01:25:47.320 There's no way I don't get worse.

01:25:48.920 Your house will be made entirely of beverage centers.

01:25:51.620 That's right.

01:25:52.340 Like bricks.

01:25:53.080 There are like a million other awful and offensive and bizarre things that Musk has done recently.

01:25:58.480 like his ai chatbot grok has been programmed to be more conservative at times it has described

01:26:04.940 itself as mecca hitler i hate how funny that is but it's also very elon because it's like a like

01:26:12.300 nerd hitler yeah yeah i am mecca hitler like of course of course that's the the the hitler that

01:26:18.800 elon produces he split with trump in the summer and like briefly floated the idea of funding a

01:26:24.340 new political party before he backed off of it i was like please elon please do it please split

01:26:28.820 the right-wing vote please there is nothing i wanted more just just to watch him be humiliated

01:26:34.320 yeah yeah you couldn't possibly list off everything he's done um so i was i was wondering like how

01:26:39.780 okay how do you end this episode we talked about his his flailing incompetence in the governmental

01:26:45.560 context i i actually think that the best way to sum up elon musk is with a joke and i know that

01:26:51.940 you've heard this before oh no was this the clip you sent me of elon musk trying to tell a joke on

01:26:56.740 joe rogan yeah yeah all right so here you go dude i can like barely watch this no it's it is so funny

01:27:04.060 and i love watching it and i watch it every day it makes my skin crawl dude sent you the link i

01:27:08.740 want to die you're gonna watch it this is my episode okay also this is only it's like a minute

01:27:14.300 long it's fine only a minute long oh god it feels so much longer than that i too i remembered this

01:27:19.900 has a three-minute clip.

01:27:21.080 Yes, same, same, same, same, same.

01:27:22.240 And then I opened it.

01:27:23.340 It was like, oh, it's a minute.

01:27:24.540 But yeah, brace yourselves, folks.

01:27:26.140 This is going to be a long minute.

01:27:29.320 So the joke is there's two economists

01:27:32.160 going on a hike in the woods. 1.00

01:27:35.440 They come across a pile of shit. 1.00

01:27:39.220 And one economist says to the other, 1.00

01:27:41.020 I'll pay you $100 to eat that shit. 1.00

01:27:43.460 It's already funny. 1.00

01:27:44.040 It's so funny. 1.00

01:27:44.580 The economist eats the shit, gets the $100. 1.00

01:27:47.080 They keep walking. 1.00

01:27:47.880 Then they come across another pile of shit, and the other economist says, now I'll pay 1.00

01:27:53.620 you $100 to eat the pile of shit. 1.00

01:27:56.200 How can you not like this? 1.00

01:27:58.480 So he pays the other economist $100 to pile of shit. 1.00

01:28:02.940 Then they said, wait a second, we both just ate a pile of shit, and we don't have any 1.00

01:28:14.460 more extra money. 1.00

01:28:15.460 Like, we both just gave the $100 back to me, and we both ate a pile of shit. 0.99

01:28:20.480 This doesn't make any sense. 0.99

01:28:22.240 And they said, no, no, but think of the economy, because that's $200 in the economy.

01:28:27.480 Explain it more.

01:28:28.260 Explain it more. 0.99

01:28:28.760 Basically, eating shit would count as a job. 0.99

01:28:39.180 This is to illustrate the absurdity of economics. 0.99

01:28:45.460 the best part of that is at a point where it makes absolutely no sense to laugh joe rogan

01:28:52.640 hitting him with the pity laugh yeah like the joke has been over for for five seconds and

01:28:59.800 elon is now explaining it i know rogan's like oh i got oh it's over i gotta laugh it's like as if

01:29:04.900 poop is eating poop is a job like that's not really what the joke is that's not what the

01:29:09.200 joke is it's very bizarre that you think that the joke is that the funniest part about it

01:29:14.540 aside from the fact that he cannot speak a sentence like a normal human being is that

01:29:19.100 like as soon as he starts talking about poop he is losing it you can tell he thinks the joke is

01:29:23.920 about just like eating poop being funny right like that's what's funny to him there's no joke

01:29:27.720 about eating poop that he does not think is funny you know it's so funny to me that he had this pr

01:29:32.780 advisor who was like we need to get you out in front of the camera more elon just don't be weird

01:29:37.180 we need to get you on camera honey the world is gonna love what they see do you have any more

01:29:44.060 jokes elon like surely he's like this in private you're like don't put this guy on camera this can

01:29:48.400 only happen when you're this rich yeah if you are not rich and you're not funny i promise you that 0.99

01:29:54.920 you know yeah yeah but elon has had people laughing at his dumb fucking bad jokes for so long that he 0.96

01:30:02.880 i think genuinely believes that he's funny in some way i wonder if he hasn't heard a non-pity laugh 0.99

01:30:09.540 in so long that he thinks that's just what a laugh is.

01:30:12.240 Everyone always laughs five seconds after the joke is over while you're explaining it.

01:30:17.580 As I'm explaining it.

01:30:18.880 That's how you know a joke is really good.

01:30:20.400 Dead silence.

01:30:21.460 And you're like, as if eating poop is a job, and then people laugh.

01:30:24.480 The absolute funniest thing I read, and I encountered a ton of Elon speaking, 1.00

01:30:30.080 is that one data scientist being like, you're in the dumbest fucking 10% of this country. 1.00

01:30:35.440 That's comedy. 1.00

01:30:36.700 That's comedy, dude. 1.00

01:30:37.700 Looking at a billionaire in the fucking face and being like, the dumbest motherfuckers 1.00

01:30:41.180 in the country believe this thing you just said. 1.00

01:30:42.880 Do you know, there's something like, there's so many, there's so many like powerful people 1.00

01:30:47.320 who you just like, you never have the opportunity to be like, you'd have to be a fucking dipshit 1.00

01:30:52.360 to believe this. 1.00

01:30:53.220 To put it in terms that he would understand, it's like eating shit is a job. 0.99

01:30:56.640 And that's what you're doing right now. 1.00

01:30:58.080 Just eating shit because of what I just said to you. 0.99

01:31:07.700 We'll be right back. 1.00

If Books Could Kill - December 18, 2025

Elon Musk Part 2

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Transcript