Elon Musk Part 2

Michael Peter, what do you know about the period of Elon Musk's life starting in 2018? All I know is that I appreciate his dedication to setting up a website where everyone says that whites are the master race and shows that that's not the case at all Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson, part two. Part two, Peter's first part two. They said that I was constitutionally incapable of doing it and for a very long time, they were right. In part one, we centered our discussion around Tesla and SpaceX and some of his like offshoot companies and I left it on a cliffhanger, about 2018. What's going to happen? Which Walter Isaacson frames as a tumultuous year for Elon Musk, and it's really the year where the media's fawning coverage of Elon starts to grind to a halt. You can only be a huge piece of shit for like 10 or 15 years before the media really catches on. So there was one seminal event that really flipped popular perceptions of Elon on their head. The Thai cave incident. Pedo guy, yes. I am going to send you a bit from the book. Also, as soon as you say seminal event, it makes me think we're going to talk about his like 12 kids. I don't like that too many seminal events. I don't like that you said that. That's on you, man. No, no, it's not. I'm blaming you. Don't just don't just hear the word seminal and be like, you know what that made me think of and then blame me. So Isaacson said. Musk was scrolling through Twitter and stumbled upon a message from an unknown user with very few followers saying, "Hi sir, if possible, can you help in any way to get the 12 Thailand boys and their coach out of the cave?" He was referring to a dozen Thai soccer players who had been trapped by a flood while exploring your cave. Then his action hero impulse kicked in. Working with engineers at SpaceX and the boring company, he began building a pod like mini submarine that he thought could be sent into the flooded cave to rescue the boys. Sam Teller got a friend to let them use a school swimming pool for testing that weekend and Musk began tweeting pictures of the device. Oh, his action hero impulse. Action hero impulse. No, dude. This is a delusional savior complex, right? No, dude, just give money or something. People don't need you to design things. You know, one of the themes of part one was like, there are a few areas in which I actually think Elon shines and they were on display at Tesla and SpaceX in like his early work there and what he was able to accomplish from a business perspective. But now they've been buried under snow drifts of cocaine. It then leads to this man with this incredibly outsized view of himself. And he's like, I'm the smartest guy in every room. You have a bunch of experts working on this situation and he's like, I'm going to make a summer read. I would not say this is an action hero impulse. I would say this is an egomaniac impulse. So eventually the kids are rescued. The sub was not needed and it would not have worked because the caves passages were too narrow. Like they wouldn't have made it through you know, the kids to actually like move their way through themselves. Also, that's like such classic Elon where he just like rushes through to provide some technological fix to something. 100% and he skips the part where you actually understand the problem at hand. 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. Yeah, they would have rescued the fucking kids by then. 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 musks efforts as a PR stunt that had no chance of working. And then he said that quote, he can stick his submarine where it hurts. Taking a stab at Elon on television. And if you know Elon, you know that he's not going to take that lightly. That's his action hero impulse. He responds with a bunch of tweets going after this guy. And then at one point says sorry, peto guy, you really did ask for it. So then a Twitter user says, hey, are you calling unsworth a pedophile? And musk says bet you a signed dollar. It's true. Nice. So this guy sues Elon for defamation. Send you a bit. This is from Isaacson. When Ryan Mack of Buzzfeed asked musk for a comment, musk prefaced his email response by saying it was off the record. But Buzzfeed had never agreed to that stipulation. And so printed the barrage that followed. I suggest that you call people you know in Thailand, find out what's actually going on and stop defending child rapists you fucking asshole musk began. He's an old single white guy from England who's been traveling to or living in Thailand for 30 to 40 years, mostly pataya beach. Until moving to Changri for a child bride who was about 12 years old at the time. There's only one reason people go to pataya beach. It isn't where you'd go for caves, but it is where you'd go for something else. Changri is renowned for child sex trafficking. The statement about unsworth's wife was untrue. And musk's allegation did not help bolster his claim that the phrase peto guy was simply a random insult rather than a specific allegation. Yeah, so basically this guy lives in Thailand and therefore he's a pedophile and then just like a bunch of lying. Basically it, right? So Isaacson does not cover the trial, but the basic story is that Elon has a very talented lawyer, Alex Spiro, who runs circles around unsworth's lawyer who is Lin Wood. If that name sounds familiar to anyone, Lin Wood is like a 2020 election denier. And like a Trump weird Trumpi guy. Yeah, like a known a known conspiracist freak. Yeah, this is a couple years before 2020, but you know, Wood is not not a great choice here. He assessed damages at like 190 million, which made people think it was like a big cash grab. He didn't seem to understand Twitter and a big way that Elon's lawyer makes the case is basically by saying like on Twitter, like the boundaries of jokes are a little more fuzzy than they are in other situations. That was the defense. I mean, the defense was that it was unserious, right, that it was sort of a joke. None of that's actually really true. Yeah, yeah. He just had a way better lawyer. One of the world historical bag fumbles, this guy's choice of a lawyer. 100%, 100%. I mean, he should have at least gotten a few million bucks at once. Yeah, yeah. So a lot of court, whatever. Yeah. Another controversy in 2018, Musk tweets, quote, "Em considering taking Tesla private at $420, funding secured." This was half true. He was, in fact, considering taking Tesla private, possibly even around that price, even though doing it at 420 is simply an incredibly hilarious joke. You're so cool, Elon. Oh my god, 420. He knows what it means. He's just like us. At the end of the day, he's just cool. Yeah, he's just flat out cool. He's going to say nice after he hears the word 69. Wow, man, got it. Me at home, just cheering. Get a meal on. Use those jokes. So the part of this that's not true is the funding secured part, which makes this all potentially fraught. It is wild how much, but just the openly illegal shit he's done. These like consecutive scenarios are very formative for him in the sense that after this, he very much acts untouchable from a legal perspective 'cause he's just like, "Oh, there aren't consequences. I can just call a guy a peto." This is why I've always said that we actually do need broken windows policing for elites. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, you spend a night in jail. You pay like a meaningful fine. It's like, even once you let little things slide, 'cause these are crimes of calculation, right? They're not crimes of passion. I think like two weeks and rikers. Or that. All right, here we go. I'm gonna send you this. In order to avoid a federal lawsuit for misleading investors, Musk's lawyers worked on a deal with SEC to settle the charges. He would remain CEO of Tesla, stepped down as chairman, pay a $40 million fine, and put two independent directors on his board. Musk would not be allowed to make public comments or tweets about any material information without getting clearance from a company monitor. Gracias and Tesla CFO push hard for him to accept these terms and put the controversy and perhaps his months of meltdown behind him. But Musk surprised them by abruptly rejecting the proposed deal. On the night of September 26, the SEC filed a lawsuit seeking to ban him for life from running Tesla or any other public company. So this causes Elon to fold. Tesla's stock plummets 17% in a day and eventually he accepts the deal. Tesla stock recovers. Everyone takes a deep breath. It's weird how people respond when they experience consequences. That's that's the thing is he's like, well, I don't need to worry about this $40 million fine. Like go fuck yourself and then they make a move to prevent him from running any public company ever again. And he's like, oh fuck, all right. Yeah, you hit him where it hurts and he caves. Then Musk gives a weird, very erratic interview with the New York Times. The interviewer asks him at one point if he was on drugs when he sent that tweet. And he says no, but he's so like exhausted and weird sounding in the midst of this interview that the interviewer asks him, quote, are you okay? So he's Elon. Should I speak only out of the front of my mouth? You got to keep your mouth small. It's not been great actually. Musk said, I've had friends come by who are really concerned. Then he paused for a long time overcome by emotion. There were times when I didn't leave the factory for three or four days. Days when I didn't go outside, he said, this has really come at the expense of seeing my kids. kids. We're going to do like a sympathetic portrait now, like Peter. He's got to listen to his kids, his 18 kids. - The New York Times story says, Mr. Musk alternated between laughter and tears. He said he had been working up to 120 hours a week recently and not taken more than a week off since 2001 when he was bedridden with malaria. And then like other organizations are picking up this story, the headline in Bloomberg is, erratic NYT interview races alarm about Tesla chief's health. So these stories are piling up. They're building into this like meta narrative that Elon is like, unwell, unstable, right? So his people try to combat that, I'm gonna send you a bit. - It says, in the wake of stories about his precarious psychological condition, Musk's public relations consultant, Julianne Glover, recommended that he clear up the issue by giving a long interview. (laughs) Who does he have advising him? - Yeah. - Let's have you in public more, Elon. - The people are gonna wanna see more of you, Elon. - Ugh, this is like Tom Cruise after the Scientology interview. (laughs) You're just like, you're like, lock this motherfucker up. Do not give another interview for the rest of your life. - They're like, put, yeah, put him on Oprah. - Yeah, try to act like a normal human being who loves a lady. - We just need to kill this nonsense speculation around your mental state, she wrote. She said she would come up with options that present you at length. Leading the company's in charge, drool and self-aware, she added a warning. In no universe, is it okay for you to continue to contemplate the sexual predilections of a Thai diver who insulted you? - Let's get you out in public more and don't do the things that you do when you're out in public. - You know what, every thought that comes into your head is fucking dumb as hell. (laughs) So, the solution, the strategy, of course. Go on Rogan. - Oh God, again. - This is when he smokes weed on the show. - Yeah, like big blunts together, yeah. - He offends like the stiffs by doing drugs and then he offends cool people by looking like a big fucking dork while he's doing it. - God, during this period, there's a rupture with Kimball, his brother, various top executives are leaving his companies. This is followed with the announcement of the cyber truck the next year. We talked about the failure of the cyber truck, the last episode. - Right. - It's important to understand it not just as a business failure, but one of like the early cracks in his public image, right? - Because it used to be like, okay, he's quirky, he's kind of an asshole, but he has all these successes technologically. - Right. - But the cyber truck was just like a failure on every level, like effectively, culturally, financially. - A lot of the public had his view very similar to what Isaacson pushes and we talked about last episode. It's like, yeah, he's a weirdo, but this is the cost of genius. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - And then you see that stupid truck and you're like, actually. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - I'm gonna send you a little bit here. - On November 21st, 2019, the truck was driven onto a stage in the design studio for a presentation to the press and invited guests. There were gasps. Many in the crowd clearly couldn't believe that this was actually the vehicle they'd come to see, see an end reported. The cyber truck looks like a large metal trapezoid on wheels more like an art piece than a truck. There was also an unexpected surprise when Von Holthausen tried to show the toughness of the truck. He swung at the body with a sledgehammer, which didn't make a dent. Then he threw a metal ball and one of the armor glass windows to show it wouldn't break. To surprise, it cracked. Oh my fucking god, Musk said, well, maybe that was a little too hard. (laughs) I heard my favorite description of it was someone, someone said it looked like a PlayStation one asset. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - Not enough polygons, yeah. - For sure, sending you the next bit. - Afterward, he took grimes for a spin in the prototype to Nobu Restaurant, where the valet parkers just stared at it without touching. On the way out, pursued by Paparazzi, he drove over a pylon in the parking lot with a no left turn sign and turned left. (laughs) - That's also just like, watch this and then just like spin something. - Yeah, yeah. There are these moments when you're wondering if Isaacson is cool. Do you know what I mean? You're like, Isaacson is too much of a journalist to ever talk the amount of shit. Yeah, I would like him to talk, but I am sort of like fascinated by these moments when it seems like it's revealed that Isaacson does sort of understand that Elon is a little bit of an idiot. - Or he's such a loser that like, it's impossible to write about him without that peeking through some of them. - Right, that lands us if you're paying attention to the chronology here in 2020. - Yeah. - And as you might imagine, things are about to unravel very quickly. Both in Elon Musk's brain and across the world, the pandemic hits and two things are happening at once. One, stay at home orders in California are keeping Musk's factories from operating, at least for the first part of 2020. Two, he's on Twitter, getting his brain fucking fried. If you went to his feed at this time, he was tweeting like hundreds of times a day. Like this rich guy sitting there on his fucking phone. - This is I think, this is when his belief that he's the smartest person in every room. - Yeah. - And then he can like easily solve every problem. It's really looming large, because society has a very big problem at this point, right? And he, like he believes that he could figure this out, like just put Elon in charge, right? - Of course. - Yeah. - One of the big misfires of the book, and it's a severe one, is that Isaacson compresses politics into a single chapter out of over 90. - Wait, really? - There's just one chapter titled politics. - What? - It covers COVID, Musk's conflict with the Biden administration a little bit, some Ukraine stuff, and like his obsession with wokeness. But it's just a few pages. - That's wild. 'Cause that's like the story of Elon in the last five years, like he's completely lost his mind and become obsessed with this shit. - This is the story of part two. - You know, Isaacson starting in 2021 is in the room for a lot of this. And he's telling the story that he wanted to tell, which is his great man biography about this complicated guy who gets shit done. And at the same time, he's missing the big story which is about the radicalization of the richest man on earth. - And like, I feel like there was also this weird press at the time where like New York Times or an article of like his ideologies not left or right as he's becoming just like a total, like run of the mill right wing psycho. - I think this is the single biggest problem with Isaacson's book. He had an incredible story. He was sitting in the room while Elon Musk was losing his fucking mind and he relegates it to like a C plot. - Right. - Isaacson is also I think not like savvy enough to understand Elon's anti-union activity or worker safety stuff as being part of his politics, right? - Yeah, yeah. - He also doesn't see any through lines between Elon's childhood in a part-time state and his modern political views. - Also, I feel like the pedo guy thing is also telling, right? Where he sees some random guy giving him an insult. He can't just be like add to some random guy I'll move on. He has to fire back and he has to escalate. And that's also like part of the political radicalization like it's all resentment based. - So Isaacson is in the room starting in like September 2021 so a little after the period we're talking about right now. But like that makes it almost less excusable. Because at that point you had a lot of information about Elon's early radicalization and you still don't think that's the story, right? - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - Isaacson says quote, "Musk had never been very political." Like many techies, he was liberal on social issues but with a dollop of libertarian resistance to regulations and political correctness. He contributed to the presidential campaigns of Barack Obama and then Hillary Clinton and he was a vocal critic of Donald Trump in the 2016 election. He tells the story of how Elon goes to meet Trump after he's elected and Trump is like too stupid to understand what Elon does exactly and starts talking about getting NASA going again even though like-- - Sure. - So he's a competitor with NASA, right? And so like Elon's just like, okay, yeah. I wouldn't say that Musk had never been very political. He had donated just like a little bit over a million dollars before he really gets going in 2022. And it's really targeted. It looks a lot like lobbying local politicians, right? He's trying to win over people in California. He's trying to win over people in Texas once he moves his factories there. The idea that he was like liberal before, it doesn't really seem true. He had some alliances with Democrats but they were alliances of convenience. They weren't ideological. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - Isaacson does cover some of Elon's early pandemic meltdowns but it's very telling what he omits. So in early March, Elon tweets the coronavirus panic is dumb. He then sends out an email to the whole company saying quote, "I'd like to be super clear that if you feel the slightest bit ill or even uncomfortable, please do not feel obligated to come to work. I will personally be at work. My Frank opinion remains at the harm from the coronavirus panic far exceeds that of the virus itself." Isaacson does not mention Musk's various predictions about the pandemic, right? On March 19th, 2020, Musk tweeted quote, "Based on current trends probably close to zero new cases in US by end of April." - Nail it. - Killer, dude. You're so smart, current trends. Oh, it's like it's like fucking rain man in his brain. He's analyzing the current trend. Also the current trend at the time was like a giant hockey stick on court. - The current trend. - The current trend was just so much more COVID every week. In September, 2020, he said that he would not take any vaccine. He seemed to later backtrack on that and he took the vaccine but then he expressed skepticism about boosters after having a bad reaction to the vaccine. Isaacson ignores that too. I don't entirely know why. I sort of wonder whether it just interferes too much [BLANK_AUDIO] the narrative of Elon as the guy who is like the master of any expertise that he sets his mind to mastering. - It's also weird, I feel like the radicalization to the right of all these Silicon Valley guys kind of at the same time is one of the biggest political stories of the last decade, but most of the media seems reluctant to tell it. It's like, oh, they're quirky, you're like, oh, it doesn't fall easily on to left or right. - You know, shut up and dribble, you know, when I think sort of talking about politics, Fox News types were like, shut up and dribble. - Yeah. - I feel like we kind of need that for these guys. It's like, shit me, my fucking package dude, you know what I mean? Just show your mouth and get to work. (laughing) So in August 2021, Joe Biden hosts some of the great American automakers at the White House, but he seems to snub Tesla. The reason given was that the automakers he hosted were all big employers of United Auto Workers and Tesla of course hadn't unionized. Musk of course takes this quite personally. - It's funny, there's no situation in which you'd imagine him going, huh, maybe I should just like hire some union labor and that'll fix the problem, no. You know, he's just gonna like have a little fucking tantrum. - And then things get a little bit worse. I just sent you something. - It says, Biden went even further that November when he visited a GM factory in Detroit with CEO Mary Perra and members of the UAW leadership. Detroit's leading the world in electric vehicles, Biden said. Mary, I can remember talking to you way back in January about the need for America to lead in electric vehicles. You changed the whole story, Mary. You electrified the entire automobile industry. I'm serious, you led and it matters. In fact, GM had started to lead the way to electric vehicles in the 1990s, but it had pulled the plug on the effort. When Biden made this statement, GM had only one electric vehicle, the Chevy Bolt, which had been recalled and was not being produced at the time. What do you want? This is a snub. - Yeah, this is wrong, yeah, yeah. - There is only one name, especially at this time that's like really revolutionized the industry. - Also, my parents drove a Chevy Bolt and we tried to take it to my grandma's house in Tacoma like an hour away and it broke down in factoria and we had to call it a drug. So maybe Elon was right all along. Maybe it is worth it, Peter. I wouldn't need it to come out that day. - Yeah, or you might have died in a battery fire. (laughs) - Or that. - Until someone fades by the way. Until someone has like a very clear solution to the battery fire problem, I don't know that I could ever buy it like a Tesla. Like someone new, someone woke his fuck, could take a flight company and I don't know that I could do it. - I think it's cool that cars do into saw scenarios while you're driving on the freeway. I think that's great. - That would be a cool, in a situation where there's a battery fire if they could program it so that Jigsaw's face comes up on the screen. - In December 2021, Elon starts tweeting about quote, "The woke mind virus," terminology that he uses to this day. Here's Isaacson. - Musk had taken up the cause of battling what he considered to be the excesses of political correctness and the woke culture of progressive social justice activists. Wanna ask him why? He responded, "In less the woke mind virus, which is fundamentally anti-science and I merit and anti-human in general is stopped, civilization will never become multi-planetary." - Good point, Elon. Good point. - I've always said that. - Musk's correction was partly triggered by his daughter, Jenna's transition, her embrace of radical socialist politics and her decision to break off relations with him. He feels he lost a son who changed first and last names and won't speak to him anymore because of this woke mind virus, says Jared Birchhal, the manager of his personal office. He is a firsthand witness on a very personal level of the damaging effect of being indoctrinated by this woke mind religion. So it's actually worse. It's actually a personal animus against his own daughter. - You might think that this is political, but it's actually-- - It's actually-- - He just hates his trans daughter. - In fairness, he hates his children. - See, Vivian Jenna Wilson, I think she goes by Vivian Moore in the book. Isaacson says, "Jenna, I'm honestly not sure which is her preference, but I'm gonna send you a little bit more about her." - It says, "Musket made peace with Jenna's transitioning, even though he had not embraced the protocols about listing one's pronouns. He believed that she was rejecting him because of her political ideology. It's full on communism and a general sentiment that if you're rich, you're evil," he said. It was all very jangling for Musk. We are simultaneously being told that gender differences do not exist and that genders are so profoundly different that irreversible surgery is the only option he tweeted that week." - Now, does this sound like someone who has made peace with his daughter transitioning? - Right. - Isaacson is very credulous of just like, "Look, yes, he accepts his daughter, his trans." He's just a little bit confused. Again, Isaacson is not familiar enough with right-wing ideology to recognize that Elon's acceptance of Vivian is disingenuous, right? He mocks pronouns. He makes these sorts of like, "Oh, I just don't understand it." Comments about trans people, which like, if you're tuned into the right-wing, you would very quickly clock as someone who was hiding their transphobia, right? But Isaacson cannot seem to read between the lines here. And so if you read this book, you might be confused about why Musk now openly dead names his daughter and calls for the criminalization of gender-affirming care, right? - He accepted his daughter's conversion to Judaism, then he did tweet about how Jews are lizard people. If I was in the room as Musk's radicalization was happening, I would ask him about his new sources because these are like very clearly far-right talking points from far-right websites that he's reading. - Vivian spoke about the book publicly and said Isaacson never reached out to her. - No way, really. - Very indicative of his failures here because he's only really interested in this as it impacts Elon's arc, right? He has no interest in the people who Elon hurts. - 'Cause to say that they made peace without talking to her. - What he said is Elon made peace with the transition, right? - Not that he made peace with her. - Right, not that they're in contact or they have a positive relationship. - It's just, I mean, it's just average. - I'm fine with my daughter marrying a black guy. We just don't talk and I'm just like tweeting slurs about black people constantly. But like I made peace with it. - That reminds me very big, Lee. I think I told you once about my experience in Portland, Maine a few years back, - Oh yeah. - It was somehow a lesbian town during the day and then also the most reactionary place on earth during the night when all the white boy townies came in. - And you got called an F-slur because of your sweater? - I got called an F-slur because I was dressed good. And at one point, we were like sharing a cigarette with some kid who to this point had seemed perfectly reasonable and he was like, oh, I had to get out of the house. My sister's husband's there and we were like, oh, he sucks or something. He's like, he's black, and then there's like a pause and we're like, okay, okay. And he was like, what's like, I don't have a problem with and then he just trailed off and we were like, oh. - Also, Peter, can we sell the sweater that got you called an F-slur in our merch store? Can we steal the ID? If you want to get called a faggot in Maine, here's a sweater you can buy. - If there's a way to make money off of being called a slur, I will do it. So let's think on it. Back to Elon sort of fixation on wokeness. Here's Isaacson. - On a more mundane level, he had become convinced that wokeness was destroying humor. His own jokes tended to be filled with smirking references to 69 other sex acts, body fluid, pooping, farts, dope smoking and topics that would crack up a dorm room of stone freshmen. So he's eight. Once a fan of the satirical news site, the onion, he switched his loyalty to the Babylon B, a Christian conservative site and gave them an interview at the end of 2021. Wokeness wants to make comedy illegal, which is not cool, he contended, trying to shut down David Chappelle. Come on, man, that's crazy. Do we want a humorless society that is simply rife with condemnation and hate and no forgiveness? At its heart, wokeness is divisive, exclusionary and hateful. It gives mean people a shield to be mean and cruel armed with false virtue. That's why I have disowned my trans daughter because I'm against being mean. - Well, that's, that's, it's very funny to be like, the wokeness are trying to sort of govern what's funny. And also, I don't think the onion is funny anymore. (laughing) All right, dude. So at this point, he's very primed to become a full-on reactionary. And then he gets sort of pushed into it. Here's a little bit. I woken, sorry, everybody say wokeness did run a muck in 2020, like Thomas Shatchel. - I learned from Thomas Shatchel. - No, no, this is it. It really did go far. - This is a little more classic rich guy radicalization arc. - In May, 2022, Musk got a call from business insider, which was about to run a story, saying that he exposed himself to a flight attendant on his private jet and asked for a hand job. In return, the story went, he would buy her a pony because she loved horses. Musk denied the claims and noted that he had no flight attendants on his jet. But documents show that Tesla had paid the woman $250,000 in severance in 2018. When the story appeared, the company's stock fell 10% and Musk's political resentments were further inflamed. He believed that the story was leaked by a friend of the woman who was, in his words, an activist woke far left Democrat. Well, I guess jokes really are illegal. - I mean, that is classic comedy. Jerk me off and I'll buy you a pony. - Yeah. - So Isaacson says, as soon as he heard the story was about to run, Musk tried to inoculate himself with a tweet casting it in political terms. Quote, in the past, I voted Democrat because they were mostly the kindness party, but they have become the party of division and hate. So I can no longer support them and will vote Republican. Now, watch their dirty tricks campaign against me unfold. - Dude, right wing people fall for this shit every time it's so funny. - It's so funny. - It's so funny that like someone's like, hey, they're about to tell the story of when you tried to get a hand job for a horse And then he's like, "Keep your eye out for democratic dirty tricks again." (laughing) - And no one on the right gives a shit. They'll just embrace it with open arms. They're like, "Yeah, yeah, this guy's a huge piece of shit." Whatever. - If anyone, if any public figure ever tweets like, I've angered the deep state. So whatever you hear about me is just them trying to get back at me. - Right. - That person did it for sure. Whatever is about to drop is real as shit. - They're gonna say I killed a bear and left it in Central Park. Just because I killed a bear and left it in Central Park. - So this is the era where Musk's political transformation becomes more obvious. He publicly announces that he voted for a Republican congressional candidate in the summer of 2022, which Isaacson doesn't mention. He also says that independent voters should vote Republican in 2022 because Democrats are in power. - Yeah, that's also the thing of everyone wants to fucking support Republicans without just saying they're a fucking Republican. - Yeah. - Only because they're out of power. - Isaacson does not mention that either. He is pretty clearly aware of this political shift. He just doesn't really discuss it in any depth. That is insane to cover all of this in one fucking chapter. - Around the same time, Musk is hobnodding with a lot of the PayPal guys, right? Who range from ideological libertarians to just fascists. One of them is David Sachs, who Isaacson describes as quote, "not rigidly partisan." - Guys. - Now, in 1995, Sachs co-authored a book with Peter Thiel, titled The Diversity Myth, which was like a screed against political correctness. It is true that Sachs had sort of bounced around politically at times. He supported Romney, then he supported Hillary. But by the time Isaacson is writing this, he's very distinctly right-wing. He was a leading figure behind the campaign to recall Chesa Budin in San Francisco, right? The Progressive DA. He called him a Soros DA. (dog barking) - Impossible to say where he lands on the ideological spectrum, though. - He was also running a pack that donated six figures to DeSantis. - Yeah. - So yeah, Isaacson, again, just sort of blind to this type of reactionary ideology, which is wild, because again, he once ran CNN. - Right. - And by the way, Sachs now works in the Trump administration. Not rigidly partisan. - This is like my parents, my dad walked in on me making out with a girl when I was in like ninth grade or something, and he coasted on that for like years. It's like all this other evidence that I was gay was like viling up. And my dad was like, "But you made out of that girl." I was like, "Yeah, that was like 10 years ago, dad." I asked for a Barbie dream house for Christmas when I was like seven years old. (laughing) - You could just ignore the one piece of evidence against it, dad. - It's like a scale, and on the right is like, sucked 10 dicks, and on the left is kissed one girl, when 14, and they're just, they're dead even. - Yeah, that's mine. - There's a clinging onto that. But the girl when I was 14. - Now, so take a pause from politics for a bit. There is one big, famous error in this book. Big enough that he had to edit it in future editions. - Interesting. - It is about Starlink. Starlink is a subsidiary of SpaceX. They provide internet service through satellites. So there's a piece in the book that says that Musk ordered the shutdown of Starlink during a Ukrainian attack on Russian naval forces in Crimea. So here's the passage. - Throughout the evening and into the night, Musk personally took charge of the situation, allowing the use of Starlink for the attack he concluded could be a disaster for the world. So he secretly told his engineers to turn off coverage within 100 kilometers of the Ukrainian coast. As a result, when the Ukrainian drone subs got near the Russian fleet in Sevastopol, they lost connectivity and washed ashore harmlessly. - So this excerpt is published by CNN and the Washington Post before publication of the book. And a lot of people flag it as questionable. - Really? Okay, I didn't know about this. - So first of all, what's the source for this? There was no reporting on Ukrainian subs washing ashore anywhere. It's also a very weirdly active role for Musk in this war, right? Like he supplied Starlink capability, but now he's actively deciding that a specific attack shouldn't happen. This circulates and Elon goes to Twitter to dispute it. He says, no, what happened is the opposite. There was no Starlink service in that region. Ukrainian authorities requested we provide Starlink services for an attack and we declined because they thought that would be too active of a role in the war effort for Starlink. So they're sort of like, no, like we're not doing that. Like we're not gonna provide additional services for attacks. Isaacson responds saying, quote, "To clarify on the Starlink issue, the Ukrainian's thought coverage was enabled all the way to Crimea, but it was not. They asked Musk to enable it for their drone subattack on the Russian fleet, Musk did not enable it because he thought probably correctly that would cause a major war. Based on my conversations with Musk, I mistakenly thought the policy to not allow Starlink to be used for an attack on Crimea had been first decided on the night of the Ukrainian attempted sneak attack." - That's a huge fuck up. - Isaacson frames this as a misunderstanding, but you look at the passage and like, where did the imagery of the Ukrainian subs washing a shoreline from? - 'Cause he wasn't getting any from news reports obviously 'cause there were new news reports. - And if Musk declined to turn on Starlink coverage for this region, the subs wouldn't have been out there to begin with, right? So this is one of those things that really highlights how bad Isaacson's actual journalism is. - Yeah. - To the extent it wasn't misunderstanding, it could have been addressed by looking for sources besides Elon himself, right? Like this is the problem with an unreliable primary source. - 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. - Yeah, I think it's a kind of a crazy position we put in either way, you know what I'm saying? - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - That's a sympathized with Elon, but like fucking Ukraine is like, "Hey, can you help us with this attack?" And you're like, "Jesus Christ, I'm in a fucking war now." - So the point of this episode is that Elon is falsely accused of having right wing ideology, but he's actually standing in between. - He's a hero. - Both sides have a problem. - So where we land next is the Twitter saga. During the COVID era, he has become steadily radicalized and like many conservatives obsessed with the idea that Twitter is stifling free speech and censoring conservative voices, right? Part of this is like his mind-virus thing and the idea that woken his spreads on social media. - And also that just the general right wing victimhood complex. - During COVID, the stock market heats up, especially in tech, Tesla's stock is going nuts. Elon caches out some stock and he is flush, right? He has his people start buying up shares of Twitter. He doesn't initially have a clear plan. He's just trying to exert leverage over Twitter. This leads to Twitter offering him a board seat but he eventually becomes convinced that a board seat is not enough here. If you remember I had mentioned that during the initial paypal debacle, he sort of left that realizing that he needed full control over these companies. Like he's not satisfied without control. - And the robot army, yes. - That's right. - So he makes an offer to buy Twitter and take it private for $44 billion. A 38% premium over where shares were trading the prior day. Which for a company like this, which is struggled with growth from a financial perspective, it's a slam duck. So they accept. Isaacson actually has a relatively coherent and interesting thesis for Elon's reasoning here. I think this is worth reading. - I believe there was a psychological personally yearning. Twitter was the ultimate playground. As a kid, he was beaten and bullied on the playground. Never having been in doubt with the emotional dexterity needed to thrive on that rugged terrain. It instilled a deep pain and sometimes caused him to react to slights far too emotionally, but it also is what girded him to be able to face the world and fight every battle fiercely. When he felt dinged up, cornered, bullied, either online or in person, it took him back to a place that was super painful where he was disted by his father and bullied by his classmates. But now he could own the playground. I think this is giving him way too much credit. - Probably gives him a lot of credit, but I think the owning the playground thing. - It is an interesting framework and feels right to me. Everyone's jabbing at each other on Twitter and he just wants to own the whole thing. He wants to be in control of it. - I think he's experiencing emotional pain at people being mean to him and people not liking him or laughing at his jokes or whatever. Like he's bad at posting. And so instead of, I don't know, in any way, internalizing that it would be like, I should be better at posting. You're like, I should fucking solve world hunger or do something to make people like me. He's just like, fuck you, I'm gonna buy this. I'm gonna make you like me. Like I think a lot of it is like resentment based or like, a kid kicking over a sandcastle because somebody else built one better than him. - He believes that he can quintuple Twitter's revenue by a 2028, he wants to do user subscriptions and data licensing as the primary drivers of revenue. And he also has like this idea that like, he will recreate x.com as he envisioned it in 1999. - He has only had one idea in his entire life. - Well, but also the scale of it is a little bit preposterous, which we talked about last time. It's just like, oh, what if every payment in the world was going through my app, wouldn't that be sick? And then also you can, you can call some of the N word. At the stage, Musk has not formally bought a company, right? He's made an offer and it's been accepted. He pretty quickly seems to have regrets and he tries to wriggle out of it. So just a couple of weeks later, he tweets, Twitter deal temporarily on hold, pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of users. This wasn't meaningfully true. He had made an offer and it had been accepted. The deal was not on hold in any legal sense. His people yell at him, any tweets, still committed to acquisition shortly after. But he latches on to this idea that Twitter is obscuring its bot problem. There are a couple of things here that Isaacson skirts around a little too much for my taste. One is that Elon doesn't actually have a factual basis for this. He's just sort of convinced himself that something is a miss that 5% sounds too low. That's what Twitter told him. It seems like he wants this to be true so that he can back out or like has some kind of reason for backing out and he convinces himself that it must be true. The other thing here which Isaacson doesn't mention at all is that as part of his offer, Musk waived due diligence, meaning you have people look through the finances and so forth. The seller would be obligated to help the buyer with it, provide them with documents, etc. Elon waived that. Isaacson again doesn't talk about this. I'm not sure why he is willing to talk about Elon as like reckless and impulsive in the context of this. Maybe Isaacson just doesn't get it. Or maybe he thinks those people saying pussy and bio in his mentions are real. Ultimately, Musk is of course compelled to buy Twitter. Isaacson receives a text from Elon at 3.30 in the morning that says quote, "I am very excited about finally implementing x.com as it should have been done using Twitter as an accelerant and hopefully helping democracy and civil discourse while doing so." And free speech has been protected ever since. And that's the end folks free speech for everybody. I love as he cats getting tortured when I go on like a nice social media website where I go to find sports scores. I hate having to search for the most disgusting pornography on earth. I want to just see it at the top of my page when I log in. Do you remember the day that he arrived at the Twitter HQ? Dude the sink, the fucking sink thing. He brought a physical sink and then just tweeted, "Let that sink in, let that sink in." Just unwavering. Just shoot. Shoot me with it. Yeah, God. The whole fucking thing in the middle of the forehead dude. There was like a sinking feeling when you saw that and then it's also just gotten so much worse from there. That's like the best thing he did. It was like this dumb joke. Yeah and retrospect you're like good joke Elon. Yeah. It's all done downhill. That was the funniest thing he's done in years. Twitter is so responsible for the radicalization of so many public figures. But he bought the platform and then turned it even more into an engine to radicalize him further. Yeah. It's like I'm drinking too much alcohol. I know what I'll do. I'll buy the liquor store so that I can have even more alcohol. It's like you're taking this thing that is poisoning you and you're making it more poisonous. Let's hear from a 14 year old in India who's posing as a Nazi in upstate New York. Let's hear what they have to say. All right. So the big initial story for Isaacson is the culture clash. Musk likes to run his companies leanly. He does not like employee comfort shit. There's some vignettes in the book of Musk wandering the Twitter offices which are very like 2010s tech culture and just getting pissed off at everything he's used. Here's a little bit. Musk seemed amazed as he wandered around Twitter's headquarters, which was in a 10 story art deco former merchandise mark built in 1937. It had been renovated in a techno hip style with coffee bars, yoga studio, fitness room, and game arcades. The cavernous night floor cafe with a patio overlooking San Francisco City Hall served free meals, ranging from artisanal hamburgers to vegan salads. The signs on the restroom said gender diversity is welcome here and as Musk poked through cabinets filled with stashes of Twitter branded merchandise, he found t-shirts emblazoned with the words stay woke, which he waived around as an example of the mindset that he believed had infected the company. Twitter had allowed for mental health days and like work from home and the common buzz word they used is psychological safety. So here's Musk's reaction to that. Musk let loose a bitter laugh when he heard the phrase psychological safety. It made him recoil. He considered to be the enemy of urgency, progress, or orbital velocity. His preferred buzz word was hardcore. Discomfort he believed was a good thing. It was a weapon against the scourge of complacency. Vacations, flowers milling, work-life balance, and days of mental rest were not his thing. You know when there's like someone rolls their eyes at the idea of therapy and that person is also the person who needs therapy more than one you've ever met in your life? It's like that's how I feel when Musk is like oh no like psychological safety is terrible. It's like bro you need you don't know how badly you need to introduce these concepts into your fucking life. Also he's like why do you need psychological safety as he's like melting down about a t-shirt of the phrase he doesn't like? Just fucking popping ketamine and getting rid of everything you see. Are you triggered libs? Yeah. So he gets very focused on the idea that the culture was lazy and unproductive and that they should be trying to identify the company's best engineers and lay everyone else off. One thing Isaacson says about Musk is that he views everything as an engineering problem. This is the only way that he knows how to operate which is like you strip everything down to the bone and then you just sort of step back and see what breaks. Which is now what the government is fucking doing but yeah. There are several rounds of layoffs. All of them center around sort of retaining the most fanatical engineers. In mid-Ov. 2022 he sends an email to all employees saying going forward to build a breakthrough Twitter 2.0 and succeed in an increasingly competitive world we will need to be extremely hardcore. This will mean working long hours at high intensity. If you are sure that you want to be part of the new Twitter please click yes on the link below. Anyone who has not done so by 5 p.m. Eastern tomorrow will receive three months of severance. The hardcore thing is so annoying. It's so corny. It's like we have to go x games mode. It must be extremely hardcore. Maybe hardcore. Between people leaving and several rounds of layoffs the workforce is cut from 8,000 to 2,000 in the span of a few months. That is wild. There were some early hiccups like he very hastily moved the servers early on which caused a bunch of outages and that led to a lot of chatter online that the website was falling apart but eventually it stabilized and I think you can say with some certainty now that the doomsayers about like the ability of the website to just stay online have been proven wrong. He also cut a lot of kind of invisible infrastructure like I remember after this happened. People were uploading entire movies like somebody uploaded like I think it was Avengers Endgame just like the whole movie and then I went on there at one point and saw like a video of a cat being tortured like there's there's actual like abuse materials that were being uploaded and like you don't notice the fact that as an internet user you don't come across fucking animal torture because like there's lots of people working on making sure that doesn't happen. There's a period there were footage of people and animals being tortured of child sexual abuse. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Was just like getting through at record rates right and that's the price you pay for ripping out the infrastructure and backfilling it. Now it's all just like race science garbage. Yeah no no no you will never see a child sexual abuse material. You will only see someone who privately has a ton of it being racist online. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There were some other big debacles early on. The first was the blue check system. Oh. Twitter had a system where public figures could get a blue checkmark by their name right and that would indicate that they had verified their identity. A lot of journalists got it and conservatives resented this because the blue checks had some cache. That was also the most tedious thing we're like oh the blue checks like blue checks don't want to admit like using blue checks as a slur. It's bizarre. It's bizarre. You're complaining about those who is verified by this fucking like gelopy of a website. So Musk wants to remove this feature and replace it with a system where anyone could get the check for a fee. That was the beginning I think of many normies being like oh this guy's dumb. Yeah. Like you don't understand the purpose of the blue check system. Is it like if you can buy one then the whole system fucking breaks down there's no point in the system anymore. Right and sent you this. This was one of Musk's core ideas for Twitter. Making people subscribe using their credit card and cell phone number would be a way to verify and authenticate their identity. The algorithm could favor those users who would probably be less likely to engage in scams, bullying and spreading what they knew to be lies. It might reduce how quickly any discussion degenerated into comparing people to Nazis. Yes comparing people to Nazis is a real problem on Twitter. You're right. Such a beautiful insight into the right wing mind. Like the primary problem on Twitter was that people would be called Nazis. Too much throwing around the Nazis slur. The initial rollout of the new blue checks system is a disaster. This is Isaac's and he says there was a tsunami of fake accounts with blue checks pretending to be famous politicians and worse yet big advertisers. One purporting to be the drug maker Eli Lilly tweeted quote we are excited to announce insulin is free now. The company's stock price fell more than 4% in an hour. Yeah. They have to freeze the rollout to figure this shit out. It's funny how predictable this is. You're like what can go wrong anybody can get a blue check like yeah man of course this is the first thing that happens on a fucking website with millions of people. Musk is out very out of his depth in a social media space because what he is actually the worst at is understanding and connecting with other human beings. He also in a million years would never think of something funny and the Eli Lilly thing is so funny. It's so good. You know people are going to start doing this like set up an account is like Tom Cruise and be like Scientology is fake like you know people are going to do this. If you have any sense of humor you're like the chaos that this is going to unleash. Like he's an engineer all he can do is figure out what gets clicks and then just try to promote that shit. Yeah. That's why now Twitter is a click driven shithole. Yeah it's unbelievable how bad it is. The real big issue early on and what continues of course to haunt the platform in various respects is content moderation right. Musk goes into this kind of occasionally describing himself as a free speech absolutist. Which nobody is. Nobody is. Everyone who says that is lying yeah. He establishes an early alliance with YoL Roth the head of trust and safety at Twitter. Roth is a liberal gay dude with very different political sensibilities but they actually do agree on some stuff and sort of like partner up early on. Previous Twitter Eleanor had been a little more aggressive about deleting and banning offensive speech, but Roth wanted to lean more on warning messages and lowering visibility as a tactic. Elon liked that. Early on, there's like a racist troll campaign, and Elon tells Roth to just nuke it. And so Roth is kind of pleasantly surprised. He's like, okay, maybe Elon is not the free speech freak that I thought he was. This starts to unravel really quickly. There was a tweet by Musk about an attack by the hammer wielding intruder on Paul Pelosi, the 82-year-old husband of the speaker of the house. Hillary Clinton had posted a tweet that blamed people who spread hate and deranged conspiracy theories for such violence. Musk responded by linking to a right-wing conspiracy site that falsely suggested without offering any evidence that Pelosi might have been hurt in a dispute with a male prostitute. As commented, there is a tiny possibility that there might be more to this story than meets the eye. He quickly deleted the tweet, apologized, and later said privately that it was one of his dumbest mistakes. That's actually surprising. He never does that anymore. Isaacson does not talk about the internal reaction to this tweet, but here's an excerpt from Character Limit, which is a book about the Twitter takeover by Kate Conger and Ryan Mac. I was feeling excited about the takeover, but I was really disappointed by your Paul Pelosi tweet. It's really such obvious partisan misinformation, and it makes me worry about you and what kind of friends you're getting information from. It's only really like the 10th percentile of the adult population who'd be gullible enough to fall for this. The color drain from Musk's already pale face. He leaned forward in his chair. No one spoke to him like this. And no one, least of all someone who worked for him, would dare to question his intellect or his tweets. His darting eyes focused for a second directly on the data scientist. Fuck you. Must growl. Dude, fucking cook them. He's like one out of every 10 people is dumb enough to fall for this. You fucking schmuck. The dumbest 10% in the fucking country. The satisfaction he must have felt in that moment, just telling Elon you're a fucking dumbass only an idiot would fall for this. Oh, it must have been so good. It must have been so good. I would also immediately reach out to authors of this book and be like, look, I just want you to know that I did cook this guy in person. Absolutely. Fry his ass. But like, yeah, I think that it was sort of embarrassing for him, right? I think that he got called out as a dipshit by enough people where he was like, oh, this was embarrassing. Whether or not he processed that, right? But also, it sounds like what he's gone through in the years following this is the process of getting rid of every person who would ever speak to him like this. Yes. You're fucking wild people are still on that website, honestly. You still have like Sesame Street as like a fucking Twitter account and like various like, I don't know, movie studios and like companies like people are still there and it's fucking psychotic. When, when Elmo said the 14 words, I thought that was too far. Very interesting. Again, that Isaacson can't read the situation here. He seems to believe that Elon sincerely regrets the Pelosi tweet, right? But then just a couple of pages later, he explains that when ad sales fall as a result, Elon is out there blaming everyone else, right? Musk tries to like frame the ad collapse as being an orchestrated effort to quote, destroy free speech in America, right? A sign of a well working mind. Absolutely. It's a conspiracy against you. Are those the actions of someone who was actually remorseful in some meaningful way? Yeah. Yeah. Between this shit and the Twitter blue rollout, uh, UL Roth is fed up and resigns. The next big thing is reinstatements. There had been all these people who were suspended by Twitter, Jordan Peterson, the bablon B had both been suspended for misgendering a trans person. They're reinstated. Kathy Griffin had been suspended for impersonating Elon. She's reinstated. Isaacson says, Oh, actually, I'll send this to you. He drew the line at Alex Jones, the conspiracy theorist who claimed that the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting was a giant hoax. Musk said Jones would stay banned. My first born child died in my arms, Musk tweeted, "I felt his last heartbeat. I have no mercy for anyone who would use the death of children for gain, politics or fame. Do I even need to track if Alex Jones is on there now?" Oh, he is. Isaacson does not mention that this is actually a lie. Elon did have a child who died of SIDS, but his first wife, Justine, tweeted after this that Elon made up the part about holding him as he died. Keep in mind, he's tweeting, "I have no mercy for anyone who would use the death of children for gain." I know. And he's literally, as he made up a story about the child dying in his arm. And he's so fucking sociopathic. And yeah, he reinstated Alex Jones in 2023. So he does have a sum mercy for people who use the death of children for gain, politics or fame. Also, it's again his weird thing about like lying and embellishing everything. He did lose a child, which is a huge fucking deal, but it's like he has to make it like even more of a cinematic story. Paulful things can happen to awful people and it's an awful thing that happened to him, but it just goes to show. It did nothing to build his character as a human being. Yeah, no, no. The big reinstatement is, of course, Donald Trump. He makes the decision via a Twitter poll. Isaacson says, "I asked him right afterward whether he had a sense in advance of how the poll would turn out." No, he said. And if it had gone the other way, would he have kept Trump banned? Yes. I'm not Trump's fan. He's disruptive. He's the world's champion of bullshit. Again, a very consistent belief that he continues to hold to this day, absolutely. Musk would like keep doing polls for this sort of thing. And Isaacson doesn't even mention that these polls are put out by Elon himself. So they selected his followers who are going to be more ideologically right-wing. And to this day, he makes decisions based on them and acts like it's some democratic principle. He's upholding. It's just so stupid. There are a few other moderation meltdowns and the big one is the Elon jet account. Elon jet was an account run by a young guy that published real-time data about the takeoffs and landings of Elon's private jet based on public flight information. Here's Isaacson. Musk had long been infuriated by the Elon jet account, which he thought was doxing and endangering him. In April, when he was first thinking of buying Twitter, he discussed it at a dinner of friends and family in Austin. And both Grimes and his mother argued strongly that he should ban it. He agreed. But once he took over Twitter, he decided not to. My commitment to free speech extends even to not banning the account following my plan, even though that is a direct personal safety risk, he tweeted in early November. Okay. So when did he ban it? Like a couple of months later. So, first of all, it's later revealed that Musk had actually visibility filtered the account. So while he's bragging about his commitment to free speech, he's actually trying to suppress the account. Yeah. Then, a long-time Grimes stalker followed a car that had Musk and Grimes stupidly named child, the ex-something in it. Isaacson says Musk believed that the stalker had been able to find where he and Grimes were staying because of Elon jet. The connection was murky. Musk had landed in Los Angeles at day before, but Grimes said that is when she started noticing the stalker's car lurking outside. Elon then creates a new policy about doxing someone's location and bans the account. And he also bans multiple journalists who had reported on this situation claiming that they violated the policy, too, even though most of them just linked to the account, which was then suspended. Isaacson says it does seem that Musk had acted partly out of peak, retaliating against journalists whose stories had been critical of him. Musk has a private conversation about this with Barry Weiss, who, as we'll discuss, was doing the Twitter files at the time. She reaches out to see what's going on, ask him how he's doing, and he says quote, they doxed my plane, they attacked my son, he never densed out an American gangster, they tried to kill my wife, they tried to dox my plane, I also, I just love that all these people are fucking texting each other constantly, all these people are like, oh, I, I have no ideological dog in this fight. I'm just like calling balls and strikes, they're all fucking in group chats together. Here's a little bit from, from Isaacson sitting in the hot box conference room one evening with Barry Weiss, some of her colleagues and James, he started poking fun of the practice of people posting their preferred pronouns. Someone made a joke that Musk should, oh God, someone made a joke that Musk should be prosecute slash Fauci. There were a few nervous laughs, Weiss admits to not wanting to challenge Musk at that moment, and Musk started cackling. He repeated the joke three times, then at around 3 a.m., he impulsively tweeted it out. My pronouns are prosecute slash Fauci. God, it's not even his joke, it's a bad joke, it's not even his. Beautiful of an yet, like someone makes a completely incoherent joke. Psychotic joke, yeah. Musk loves it. Starts repeating it to everyone in the room, where it was originally made by someone else, like someone else in the room made this joke, and he's just repeating it, yeah, and then he tweets it out as if it's his own. It's so good. And also Barry Weiss being too chicken shit to say anything, even though this is like completely fucking nuts. So this irritates a lot of people, including his brother Kimble, but he leans into it. After the Fauci tweet, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. posts quote, "F Fauci purchased Umerta among virologists globally, with a total of $37 billion in annual payoffs in research grants." Oh yeah. "With the paymaster gone, the orthodoxies will unravel. Musk replies to this precisely." Be careful, I've been sexting RFK Jr. for nine months now, and I'm ready to finally talk about it. Well, it's irresistible. Is there a journalist not compromised by their sexual entanglements with one RFK Jr.? This is also around the time where Dave should pet him. that one of his shows invites Elon on stage and everyone booze him. - That felt so good. - There was a lot of reporting that this like really shook up Elon. - Yeah, I know, I love it. - He like posted about it in a very defensive way that was like, it was actually only 10% booze, and 90% cheers, but you know. And there was reporting that he was just like, secluded for days after this. - Just like staring in the middle distance about like the sound of silence plays. - Isaacson doesn't write about that part. - But anyway, this is like, it's damaging his psyche. Isaacson is like very clearly aware of musk's hypocrisies when it comes to Twitter, like coming in as a free speech absolutist and then abandoning it, right? Doing all of these things that he once complained about it, right, where like you're doing different types of visibility, filtering and stuff like that. But Isaacson is not really interested in that. I think he views it. Again, it's just like another element of Elon's grandiosity on one hand and like eccentricity on the other. - Of course, it's an actual sign of his radicalization where he's stating all these lofty principles and immediately violating them within like days, slash weeks of taking over this website. He never, either he never believed them in the first place or he's like, completely lied himself into this position where he has to be like this radical fucking white supremacist psycho online all of a sudden. - He's being hypocritical in the way that every other right-winger is, right? But Isaacson doesn't understand politics well enough to see this, right? He knows enough to know that Elon is absorbing some right-wing shit, but that's really it. He doesn't even get into like the specifics of Elon's early promises, like Elon initially said that he was going to allow for all legal speech on the platform, which he obviously abandons very, very, very quickly. Isaacson also does a chapter on the Twitter files, which I, you know, we won't spend too much time here. - That could be a fun bonus episode just because that's such a nothing burger. There's nothing there. - Yeah, so Musk is talking to David Sachs about what he views as like the misfeasence of the previous Twitter ownership, which he thought of course censored conservatives and favored liberals and all that shit. Sachs tells him to talk to Matt Taiby. Isaacson describes Taiby as quote, a former writer for Rolling Stone and other publications who was difficult to pigeonhole ideologically. - Of course, every fucking time. - Dude, Isaacson has never met a right-winger. Like Isaacson has no idea what a right-winger is. - The thinnest veneer of like I'm a liberal, but is enough to fucking fool these people. - So Musk gives Taiby access to old emails and Slack messages concerning content moderation with the basic mission of exposing any wrongdoing or bias and the only condition he says is that they have to post it on Twitter, right? They have to post their findings on Twitter. Musk tweets, this is a battle for the future of civilization. If free speech is lost even in America, tyranny is all that lies ahead. - Such little babies. - Like save you shit. Don't worry, I'm saving free speech by giving the internal Twitter Slack messages to Matt Taiby. - And also this weird catastrophizing over like internet moderation. Like even if Twitter is censoring fucking stories about Hunter Biden or something, this is not like a battle for the soul of civilization. - Isaacson is kind of vague about what Taiby actually uncovers. He says that he exposed the fact that Twitter had looked for an excuse to ban the Hunter Biden laptop story. And Twitter executives would later say they made a mistake about that for people who don't remember the Hunter Biden laptop story initially looked like it might be fake. And so there was a lot of concerns about misinformation. I was right before the election. And yeah, he also notes that the files revealed a lot of voluntary cooperation between Twitter and government agencies and political figures. Also true, but Taiby didn't find anything that looked like government coercion. - Right. - It's also worth noting this is the Trump FBI. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - This is not the Biden FBI, even though it sort of gets framed as a liberal thing. - They kept casting it as like some sort of smoking gun that they had as sort of like a case worker or whatever the FBI that they were in ongoing contact with. But like yeah, you're running a website with millions of people who post libel on there, people post revenge porn on there, people post child sex abuse material on there. Like law enforcement is relevant to things that get posted on the website. So you're going to have an open relationship with law enforcement. - There's basically no way to run a website of Twitter's scale without doing this. - Yeah. - And Isaacson does not mention that Elon has not stopped this practice, right? Twitter under Elon started approving a higher number of government censorship requests, especially from right-wing governments in Turkey and India. - Shocking twist. - There's a report that found that they fully complied with 83% of requests and at least partially complied with nearly 99% of requests. The prior regime was fully complying with like 50%. Also, there's a gap between a government requesting that something be taken down and a government saying, hey, this is illegal to post in our country, right? - Right, right. - And sometimes, Twitter, previous Twitter, would take those governments to court saying, no, we're not going to take this down. A practice that must cause a van. - Right, right, right. - Here's the last thing he says about Tayyibi. - Tayyibi's revelations illustrated the problematic, but unsurprising fact that the moderators of Twitter were biased in favor of suppressing stories that would help Trump. More than 98% of the donations made by people at the company went to Democrats. - That's it, a couple of anecdotes and donation data does not prove that moderation was biased against Trump. You're a fucking journalist, and you're just going to say this with a straight face. - Right, because the political donations that 98% figure would be company-wide, that wouldn't necessarily be people on the moderation team. And also, if the issue is moderation, then you'd want evidence regarding moderation. Just the fact that like, there's lots of left-leaning people at a company is not remotely the outcome that you're looking at. - Some additional drama that happens in this time period is UL Roth, the former head of trust and safety, publishes a op-ed in the New York Times. I'm gonna share it in here. - He says, "Platform policies are shaped by the preferences of a small group of predominantly American tech executives." Steve Jobs didn't believe porn should be allowed in the App Store, so it isn't allowed. Stripped bare, the decisions have a dismaying lack of legitimacy. It's this very lack of legitimacy that Mr. Musk, correctly, points to when he calls for greater free speech and for the establishment of a content moderation council to guide the company's policies. But even as he criticizes the capriciousness of platform policies, he perpetuates the same lack of legitimacy through his impulsive changes and tweet-length pronouncements about Twitter's rules. In appointing himself the chief twit, Mr. Musk has made clear that at the end of the day, he'll be the one calling the shots. Yeah, this is always the issue with all this fucking free speech meltdown. Is it like, it's true that it's really fucked up how much of like ideological policing we've turned over to people like fucking Mark Zuckerberg, and now Elon Musk, like that is a real problem. And yeah, I think this points this out, right? That like, Musk is identifying what in some ways is a real problem, like the arbitrariness of content moderation on social media. But the right-wing solution is just for them to control the arbitrariness, right? Exactly, yeah. It's presented as an argument about fairness, but it's actually about who gets control. And there was never really any evidence that it was conservatives were overly affected by this, unless you just acknowledge that conservatives were like the ally and stuff like anti-vax conspiracy theories, Holocaust denial, the kind of stuff that really was taken offline is almost exclusively associated with the right. So to the extent that it's like right-wing bias, it's like, well, yeah, they're more likely to lie. They're more likely to believe in conspiracy theory. Someone on Twitter finds Roth's PhD thesis about Grindr, which talks about the need to provide safe access to dating services for teenagers, to keep them to protect them. I know about teenagers on Grindr. That's where I would-- No, not the hill that I would die on. No, no, I think that point was like, if you don't provide a safe dating service for teenagers, they will then use adult services like Grindr, right? OK. Where they're unprotected, right? I think that's the point. So anyway, someone finds that, distorts it, just like you did right now, and calls him a peto, which musk boosts. And yeah, Roth gets harassment. Death threats has to move. It's a fucking nightmare. Of course. At this point, the book sort of trails off, which I mentioned in the last episode too, like, Isaacson is in the room from September, 2021, through the beginning of 2023. And the story he writes is about this eccentric rich guy, who's a volatile jerk on one hand, but he makes great things happen on the other hand. And the story that's actually happening in front of him is that the richest man in the world is becoming our right wing nut job. And he's not even noticing it. And he's not producing fewer and fewer great things at this point, right? I mean, all he does is sit on his phone and fucking put it in the day. Robot Army, dude, it's coming. In two years, Roy had been getting jerked off by robot butlers, and you're telling me that he's not creating anything beautiful. So I was curious about Isaacson, about his politics, right? And they're sort of hard to find, because he's a journalist, right? He's not someone who, like, comes out there and talks about his own politics or whatever. He wouldn't dare to have, like, values or, like, moral beliefs. There's some reporting from 2001, when he first took the helm at CNN. I'm going to send you something from fair fairness in accuracy in reporting. It was originally reported in roll call. It says, early this month, new CNN chairman Walter Isaacson met with top Republican lawmakers in Washington, D.C. to discuss how to improve relations between the cable news network and conservative Republicans. I was trying to reach out to a lot of Republicans who feel that CNN has not been as open to covering Republicans, and I wanted to hear their concerns. One GOPA told roll call that Isaacson said, "Give us some guidance on how to attract conservatives." He said he wanted to change the culture at CNN. God, these guys are so easy to work. - Tale is all this time, dude. - Yeah. - A guy heading up a major news organization wants to do outreach to conservative audiences because conservative audiences complain that the organization is too liberal. So again, hard to tell where Isaacson stands, but he does have at least a 25-year-old record of being a part of the world. an absolute sucker for reactionary bullshit. - And taking a good faith, this stuff of like, I'm being censored online and like, what you're being censored about is like, take fucking horse-paste. - What happens to Elon in the next few years as a matter of public record? We did consider doing part three here. But I wanna come, I'm sticking to the book, you know, I wanna keep it in the context of the book 'cause if you try to do a comprehensive Elon Musk thing, you're gonna lose your mind. And frankly, he says so much insane bullshit every single day that you couldn't possibly compile it in a way that felt comprehensive. But there are a couple of things that we can't really skip past. Elon, of course, turning further right in 2023. He expresses interest in the Ron DeSantis primary campaign. And in May, he helps DeSantis announce the campaign on Twitter spaces, which glitches out severely, holding crashes. - I remember this. - In 2024 Musk creates a pack, America Pack, which he uses to funnel something in the realm of $250 million in support of the Trump campaign. - Hard to categorize his ideology, hard to say. - Towards the end of the campaign, of course, he becomes an active element. He's speaking at Trump rallies. We're gonna watch a very quick video. - Oh, are we for fuck's sake? - Oh yeah. - I hate watching him, dude. I hate watching him. - Okay, well guess what? I thought it's funny. So we're gonna be watching several videos of Musk. - Are we? - Yep, you thought this was almost over. I did. - I thought this was almost over. And it should be. (laughing) - But. - Look, I want a way to soften the landing here. And we're gonna do it by making fun of him. Okay. - We're gonna get the government off your back and out of your pocket, both. - What's it mean? - And America is just not gonna be great. America is gonna reach heights that it has never seen before. The future is gonna be amazing. Peter, what are you doing this today? - Hold on, we're getting to the best part. - Yeah. - We've got how long to short this. They're chanting Elon. - You guys are awesome. This is like, this is like, Peter. - Yeah. - I mean, this is like, this is like kind of positive energy that America is all about. - I like physically can't watch him. - I almost was, made you watch the entire Waluigi skit. - Yeah. - USA, USA, USA, USA, USA, USA, USA, USA. - Why are we watching this? - Yes. - All right, we can stop. I just wanted to do the USA chant. Why does he have such an unnatural USA chant? - He's so unsettling. - He's like, USA, USA, it's so bizarre. You can cut that, I just wanted to show you. - Those kids did not believe him enough. He's, he's often seen doing little weird jumps at the Rattles and just sort of, he's acting less human than you'd like to see. But the real thing we need to talk about, I think, at least briefly is that Musk joins the government, of course, as part of Doge, on an unofficial government agency, the Department of Government Efficiency. A full list of Doge's crimes would be impossible to fit into this episode. There are a couple things we should touch on though. One is that Doge was involved with cutting funding to USAID, which handles foreign aid. A UCLA study found that if these cuts persist, it will cost 14 million lives worldwide over the next five years. - And it's insane. - Dude was in the government for three months and put up Hitler numbers. - Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. - It's wild, bro. The amount of monstrousness. The other thing I want to talk about in a little more detail right before we wrap, and we will wrap after this, is the ostensible social security fraud, right? Because I think it's a great encapsulation of both the myth and reality of either one, right? He's brought in to bring his private sector efficiency know-how to the federal government and then also sort of expose all the fraud and waste that conservatives have always believed was there, right? - Also, his efficiency in the private sector is like firing 80% of people. I don't know if that's like all that surgical. - So one of the things that happens is that he tweets that there are 150 year olds in the social security database who are listed as alive, right? Here's a little bit of AP coverage about that. - On Wednesday, Social Security's new acting commissioner acknowledged recent reporting with a number of people older than age 100 who may be receiving benefits from Social Security. The reported data are people in our records with a Social Security number who do not have a date of death associated with their record. These individuals are not necessarily receiving benefits. This like Social Security fraud thing comes up in right wing media on like four year cycles but always like 150,000 people are scamming Social Security and then you look at the actual numbers and it's like a.05% error rate. - The AP notes that part of the confusion comes from Social Security's software system using the co-ball programming language, which has a lack of a date type which means that entries with missing or incomplete birth dates will default to a reference point and that reference point is over 150 years ago. So everyone who doesn't have a birth date will show up as super old. There's 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. Most of those Heronious payments are over payments to living people. So like, yeah, there are audits. - Yeah, exactly. - Like when we look at this stuff, right? - The idea that like these agencies themselves don't give a shit about fraud, when we've had this fucking ideology of like benefit sheets for three decades, four decades now, the eligibility criteria to get onto these programs is difficult and like they're not just like, "Oh, you're alive, here's some money." Like that just isn't how it works. - I'm gonna show you an interview from not super long ago, this fall, this is Rogan and Elon content warning. We won't watch it for too long, but this is what they're talking about. (bright music) - So we found, for example, people who were, you know, 300 years old in the Social Security Administration database. - Now I thought that this was a mistake of not registering their deaths. The people were born like a long time ago and it had defaulted to like a certain number. And so that after time, those people were still in the system. It was just an error. - Rogan's on the right track here. - Yeah, so that's not true. So there's, or at least one or two things must be true. There's a typo or some mistake in the computer or it's fraudulent. (bright music) - So either it matters or it doesn't matter. So that's not true, or actually let me rephrase this. Either it's true or it's not. - Yeah, that's what he said. It's incredibly hollow. But I think that the way he talks, tricks certain types of dumb people and to believe in that he's insightful. - I mean, the one thing that is good about Joe Rogan is he will actually ask basic follow-up questions. - Yeah. - But he shows, again, that Elon is not subject to people being like, sorry, what do you mean? Like does it matter that people are 300 years old? Are they receiving benefits? He's not getting these kinds of questions. - I think it's so interesting that he just fires back to that with, that's not true. - Yeah. - And it makes it very clear that he actually doesn't know, right, that he's like, well, one of two things. Either there's an error or people are on the roles fraudulently. - Right. - And it's like, yeah, dude, that's-- - That's the entire distinction. That's like the, it's like something happened. And Elon's like, either it was an accident or was on purpose. It's like, right, Elon, that's true of actually all things. - So are-- - Do you have any information here? Another, here's another short clip. This is the last one that you will have to watch. - Oh God. (phone ringing) - Yeah, so there was like, I think, something like, on a 20 million people in the Social Security Administration database that could not possibly be alive. If they're both dead is, like, based on their birth date, they could not possibly be alive. - And then to be clear, 20 million people that were receiving funds. - A bunch of-- - Most of them were not receiving funds. Some of them were receiving funds. Most were not receiving funds. But so let me tell you how the scam works. It's a bank shot. So the Social Security Administration database is used as the source of truth by all the other databases that the government uses. So even if they stopped 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, a livid person? And if the Social Security database will say, yes, this person is still alive, even though they're 200 years old. But forget to mention that they're 200 years old. It just says, it just returns when the computer is queries, it says, yes, this person is alive. And so then they were able to exploit the entire rest of the government ecosystem. So then you get fake student loans, then you get fake unemployment insurance, then you get fake medical payments. And this doesn't have to be tied to an individual where there's an address we can check on this person. He can't even give it to Rogan. if you did, if you just didn't any check at all, you would stop this. I'm so concerned about 129-year-olds getting student loans, Peter. Do you know how many 120-year-olds get telegrams every year? So I actually think this clip is a very good example of Elon's style of dishonesty. Yeah. You can see that Rogan is trying to pin him down on some specifics here, right? Rogan is, I think, too dumb to realize that he's being bullshitted, but he is asking the right questions. How many of those people were receiving benefits? How much fraud did you actually uncover, right? And Elon very consistently dodges the question or provides, like, this rambling answer. So Joe asked how many of those 20 million people who based on their age couldn't be alive. We're actually receiving benefits. And Elon says most of them were not, but somewhere. And it's like, okay, well, how many? Yeah, that's the issue in question, Elon. We don't care how many people are in the fucking database. So I do think Elon is getting a couple of numbers mixed up. He says 20 million people who couldn't be alive are in the database. Doge says they found 20 million over a hundred and 12.3 million over one to one. Because some of those people over 100 are alive. So yeah, yeah, right. So in terms of people in the database over 120 who are receiving benefits, my guess is that the answer is zero or near zero. Because a law was passed in 2015 that generally speaking, halts payments when someone hits 115. So at the very least, if there were a notable number of people over 120 receiving money, I imagine that Elon would say the actual number. But I am relatively confident based on what I understand about the law that the number is zero. Also, it's such a, it's so telling about like the right wing media ecosystem. They come up with this dumb fucking talking point of like people over 120. It sounds like the government passed a law saying, okay, at 115, your benefits turn off. Does right wing media stop spreading that myth? No, they just spread it anyway. So that that report I mentioned earlier, the inspector general report, which spanned 2015 to 2022, found that 0.1% of benefits went to people over the age of 100. So that's about right. It's probably how many people in the population are over 100. There's no like epidemic of these extra old people, which by the way, if you were doing Social Security fraud or any type of fraud, why would you have the identity of someone who is like 150? What's happy the most easily discovered or whatever? Exactly, the idea that like these obvious things, I mean, working Social Security Administration aren't being caught. It's like, I'm sure you can just do a fucking query. I'd be like, okay, how many people are over 120? Let's check it out. This is so fucking obvious. You know, Rogan basically says, isn't there some kind of check? Elon says they do literally, they don't do any checks. And any check would reveal all of this. And it's like, that's not true. And also the number of 120-year-olds getting unemployment insurance, would also be pretty fucking easy to check. But it's like as close to zero as you can meaningfully get. One thing lurking behind this conversation is that the number of Social Security recipients and the payment amounts, the payment totals, are public information. The SSA posts them online. So you can see that the number of recipients now is higher than it was in January, which means that Doge has not purged any particular large amount of fraud in Social Security itself. Also, thank God they didn't just purge a bunch of random ass people. Yeah, that's great. Later, Rogan asks him how much the fraud was costing. And Elon finally gives something like an actual number saying hundreds of billions. But if it's that much, where the fuck is it? Where is it? Where is it? Where are the prosecutions? Presumably, if you busted hundreds of billions of dollars in fraud, we're talking about massive criminal rings, right? Huge deal. I think I wanted to talk about this. And because it's like, this is the central myth of the great American entrepreneur, right? You're a master of efficiency. The government is so inefficient. And it's so incompetent that if only we got someone like Elon in there. This is like what right wingers have been talking about for decades. Totally. And it happens. And what happens? First of all, we barely even know. There's no vision, right? There's no report published that has data. You get Elon talking on Rogan and clearly bullshitting. Clearly bullshitting. You could argue that like Isaacson should have written his book about the way that this myth ended up feeding Elon's worst tendencies and potentially America's worst tendencies. But instead, he just repeats the myth, even as he's like three years too late for the myth to be relevant. I mean, I get that he didn't write this. You know, maybe if he wrote a couple of years later, it would be too undeniable. I genuinely believe that if it had been a couple of years later, he wouldn't have written the book because he only writes this type of book. This is like what he's interested in. It was obvious by early 2023 that she was changing. Because it could have been about like the downfall of Elon and all of the things throughout his life that could have been clues to this or the way that he was enabled by various systems to become this fucking monster. But it sounds like he just quite deliberately ultimately missed that story. It's really hard to tell what exactly he's going on with Isaacson himself. He's just he's not a super public figure in that way. I don't think he has the chops to do the analysis that was necessary. But it also seems like he didn't have the interest. And that's like deeply shameful shit because you had it right there, man. I think the problem, maybe the core problem that he said after a great man biography, and he never asked, is this really a great man? Self-explanatory, self-explanatory. To someone like this, the fact that Elon is rich and successful, of course, he's a great man. That's what it is. That's what being a great man is. I do think it's like profoundly bad for a person to be this wealthy and have this much power when you just don't have genuine relationships with him anymore. But there's only one way to find out. Someone gives me one billion dollars. Elon, if you're listening, we're only 144th, the price of Twitter. You can have a podcaster. There's no way I don't get worse. Your house will be made entirely of beverage centers. That's right. Like bricks. There are like a million other awful and offensive and bizarre things that Musk has done recently. Look, his AI chatbot, Grock, has been programmed to be more conservative. At times, it has described itself as mecca Hitler. I hate how funny that is. But it's also very Elon because it's like a nerd Hitler. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I a mecca Hitler, of course. Of course, that's the Hitler that Elon produces. He's split with Trump in the summer and briefly floated the idea of funding a new political party before he backed off of it. I was like, please, Elon, please do it. Please split the right wing vote. Please. There's nothing I wanted more, just to watch him be humiliated. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You couldn't possibly list off everything he's done. So I was wondering like, okay, how do you end this episode? We talked about his flailing incompetence in the governmental context. I actually think that the best way to sum up Elon Musk is with a joke. And I know that you've heard this before. Oh no, this is the clip you sent me of Elon Musk trying to tell a joke on Joe Rogan. Yeah, yeah. All right, here you go. Dude, I can like barely watch this. No, it's, it is so funny and I love watching it. And I watch it every day. It makes my skin crawl, dude. Sent you the link. I want to die. You're going to watch it. This is my episode, okay? Also, this is only, it's like a minute long. It's fun. It's only a minute long. I got it feels so much longer than that. I too. I remembered this as a three minute clip. Yes, same, same, same, same. And then I opened it. It was like, oh, it's a minute. But yeah, brace yourselves first. This is going to be a long minute. So like, like the, the joke is like, there's two economists going on a hike in the woods. And it's like, come across a pile of shit. And one economist says the other, I'll pay you $100 to eat that shit. It's already fun. It's so funny. The economist eats the shit, gets $100, like they keep walking. Then the other economist, they're going to come across another publisher and the other economist says, now I'll pay you $100 to eat the pile of shit. How can he not like this? So he pays the other economist, a hundred dollars pile of shit. Then, then, then, then, then, then, the way it says, they said, well, wait a second, we both just ate a pile of shit. And we're no, and, and, and we're no, we, we, we, we, we, we don't have any more extra money. Like, like, like, we both, you just gave the $100 back to me, and we both ate a pile of shit. This doesn't make any sense. And they said, no, no, but think of the economy. Because that's $200 of the, in the economy. Explain it more, explain it more. That means, then, measure eating, eating shit would count as a, as a, as a, as a job. This is, this is to illustrate the episode of, of, of, of, of economics. The best part of that is at a point where it makes absolutely no sense to laugh. Joe Rogan hitting him with the pity laugh. Yeah, like, the joke has been over for, for five seconds. And Elon is now explaining it. I know. And Rogan's like, oh, I got, oh, it's over. I got to laugh. It's like, as if poop is eating poop is a job. Like, that's not really what the joke is. And that's not what the joke is. It's very bizarre that you think that the joke is that the funny is porn about it. Aside from the fact that he cannot speak a sentence like a normal human being, is that, like, as soon as he starts talking about poop, he is losing it. You can tell he thinks the joke is about just like eating poop being funny. Right, right. Like, that's what's funny to him. There's no joke about eating poop that he does not think is funny, you know? It's so funny to me that he had this PR advisor who was like, we need to get you out in front of the camera more, Elon. Just don't be weird. We need to get you on camera, honey. The world is gonna love what they see. Do you have any more jokes, Elon? Like, surely he's like this in private. You're like, don't put this guy on camera. This can only happen when you're this rich. Yeah, yeah, yeah. If you were not rich and you're not funny, I promise you that you know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But Elon has had people laughing at his dumb fucking bad. jokes for so long that he, I think genuinely believes that he's funny in some way. I wonder if he hasn't heard a non-pity laugh in so long that he thinks that's just what a laugh is. Everyone always laughs five seconds after the joke is over while you're explaining it. I thought you know what joke is really good. Dead silence. And they're like, as if eating poop is a job and then people laugh. The absolute funniest thing I read, and I encountered a ton of Elon speaking is that one data scientist being like, you're in the dumbest fucking thing in this country. That's comedy. That's comedy, dude. Looking at a billionaire in the fucking face and being like, the dumbest motherfuckers in the country believe this thing. You do know? There's so many like powerful people who you just like, you never have the opportunity to be like, you'd have to be a fucking dipshit to believe this. To put it in terms that he would understand, it's like eating shit is a job and that's what you're doing right now. You're eating shit because of what I just had you.