How Did Elon Musk Get Like This?

actually wait can i show you guys one more thing before we start recording i was really taken this morning did you guys see the gwen stefani prayer app advertisement that sounds like a charades it's a very 2024 sentence just speaking of like pipelines can i show you this the season has always been my favorite time of the year it's a season that we get to celebrate the birth of our lord this year i'm excited to share that i've partnered with this amazing prayer meditation and music app called hallow on their 25 day prayer challenge leading up to christmas called advent pray 25 join me and millions of other christians around the world as we celebrate together the truth that god so loved the world that he gave us his only son download hallow and join me in praying every day god bless you know what the funny thing about that app is it's backed by peter teal it's backed by oh it's h-a-l-l-o-w right that's it yeah yeah h-a-l-l-o-w peter teal funded my app i mean this does kind of tie into our episode not that elon musk was ever like an icon of culture uh for gays or anybody else but like you just you die young or live long enough to see your faves start shilling weird shit she's from orange county though right so like she's all there's always been she's always been kind of on but i wonder how much of that is the what's that guy that she's married to blake shelton yeah i wonder how much is the blake shelton prayer influence the blake shelton decontification effect i mean it's more likely than you think he does not really serve hello hello and welcome to a bit fruity the podcast where we love the woke mind virus elon musk is the most influential right-wing culture warrior of our time with a net worth hovering in the 300 billions though before we started recording my guest corrected me that it is right around 350 billion right now he is the richest man alive through his allyship with donald trump he secured himself a spot in the next executive administration of the united states leading the department of government efficiency ironically led by two different people he owns one of or perhaps the most important and influential platform for user-generated content and news twitter where he tweets an average of 60 times a day usually about trans people the woke mind virus whatever that is long rants about civilizational suicide where he claims women have been brainwashed against their innate joy which is motherhood alongside painterly photos of white families that eerily resemble nazi propaganda about the aryan race but was elon musk always like this some cynics would say yes and that any life he had before his current incel flavored iteration was simply spent trying to hide the fact that this is always who he's been deep down i'm open to that interpretation we'll consider it but i'm also not so sure a tweet went viral recently by someone who wrote i think people forget that he wasn't always like this grimes left him once the brain rot took over where they attached a photo of him and his ex-wife grimes the beloved hey matt i'll stop you there they were never married uh ex-partner or girlfriend yeah all right well this is why i have you fuck ex whatever they had going on grimes who who uh was queen of tumblr gays way back when and and also a photo of a screenshot of a tweet that elon musk made in 2018 where he was bragging about tesla scoring a 100 in lgbtq equality so i think it's safe to say that if elon wasn't always like this he was very committed to hiding that he was but that time is over so what we're here today to examine is what was it exactly was it grimes leaving him and allegedly briefly dating a trans woman was it having a trans daughter who he refused to accept was it the covid lockdowns temporarily preventing his tesla employees from going to work was it the 18 year old guy who tracked and published publicly available information about elon musk's private jet usage to twitter to a twitter account called elon jet what was it that sent elon down this far right spiral or at least made it so he could no longer hide it from the rest of the world today to examine the possibilities therein i am joined by ryan mack and kate conger who are both journalists at the new york times who recently wrote a book called character limit how elon musk destroyed twitter ryan and kate welcome to a bit fruity thank you so much for having us how are you guys feeling it's an interesting time i feel like a lot of the things that we're seeing play out now with doge and his relationship with trump sort of call back to the takeover of twitter and the way that he was acting then and the kinds of decisions that he made in that process so it feels almost like um deja vu a little bit we're ramping i mean we're our day job is new york times reporters so we're ramping up to cover essentially his every move and in some ways he's he's never been more powerful you know he controls an internet platform he has the ear of the person who's going to be in the white house you mentioned his net worth he controls multiple companies in spacex and tesla um so we're about to be very very busy i guess yeah i am super excited to have ryan here because i mean i'm so excited to have but not kate to be clear i'm so excited to have both of you here but the thing is ryan adds to the very very very teeny tiny arsenal of cisgender heterosexual men who have been on the a bit fruity podcast let's go not not quite the first but i think the second so that's huge happy to be a follower i tread in the in the in the footsteps of a pioneer so exactly exactly but to your point i mean i always ask myself before i start making or you know outlining or researching for an episode on this podcast i'm like okay what's the point why am i making an episode like this and i really do like to examine if you've been listening to this podcast for a while you know i like to examine the rabbit holes that especially powerful people who have the you know resources money education to know better i'm interested in these that they take i did an episode that was structurally similar to this one with natalie winn about jk rowling and i think jk rowling and elon musk have a lot in common in the sense that they're both very interested in utilizing their platform to sort of remake fundamental concepts about the world whether that be like the way we exchange information or what gender looks like in society they're very interested in using all of their resources and power to like make those concepts in their image and they are also and this is maybe something we get into later on they are completely unable to ever concede that they're wrong about anything would you say that's accurate of elon musk i mean that's very core to who he is as a person he is the smartest person in the room he doesn't like to be challenged especially when it's online you know he's gonna he's gonna double down and i mean we can get into this but it's always been core to who he is he has this innate self-belief in himself to challenge him or to prove that he's wrong is like an affront in a lot of ways so he'll go out of his way to fight you or argue with you or you know prove that the thing he believes is right was actually right and he'll try and force things through sheer force of will to make them true you know and we see this time and time again this kind of characteristic play out in his in his decision making in his life and i feel like that's a very important thing human thing right i mean who doesn't like being right but i feel like they take it especially given like the amount of influence that they have like people like elon musk or jk rowling they take it to like a pathological extent where it's like you are so unwilling to ever accept any diversion from your pre-existing belief that you just continue to surround yourself with people who i mean right it's the whole echo chamber thing you continue to surround yourself with people who are yes manning you until i mean i don't even i mean it's every day on twitter he's like espousing nazi stuff i think there's this idea that is really popular in silicon valley of contrarianism right so sort of like seeing where the public discourse is going seeing what sort of the mainstream belief is and then skewing from that and it's been part of the foundation of how a lot of these big tech companies are built it's the idea of everyone said doing a mass market electric vehicle would be impossible elon said i think it can happen and then he built tesla made it happen same thing with spacex you know people didn't think that the space industry could be privatized he said you know what i think it can i think we can reuse rockets uh and he did that with spacex so there's this idea of kind of like zagging against conventional wisdom that has been key to the success of not just his businesses but a lot of businesses in the valley so you see a lot of people i think specifically in tech trying to apply that thinking that contrarianism to other areas of their life and i think it's responsible in elon musk's case and a lot of other people in the valley for sort of driving them down these right-wing rabbit holes they see the conventional wisdom the mainstream wisdom especially in the bay area which is pretty liberal skewing in one direction and they think that like the core of their intelligence and what's made them successful what's made them smarter than everyone else around them is defying conventional wisdom and so very quickly you know at the start of 2020 and the pandemic you saw a lot of people in the valley kind of trying to find alternative explanations for the pandemic a lot of people were embracing kind of conspiratorial lab leak theories and going against the science really and saying you know as musk did this is all going to be over by april 2020 uh children aren't going to be infected by this virus just really kind of going against the grain um and i think that that the valley kind of encourages that kind of thinking because it is tied to business success so i don't know if that's the case with jk rowling but it certainly is with musk and a lot of other people in tech they kind of want to pursue contrarian thinking and it leads them into a lot of these sort of like right-wing conspiratorial views that is such a fascinating insight right off the back applying this fundamental way of thinking that might work for like entrepreneurship to politics and science in a way that it doesn't work at all so the way that i've structured this episode at least in my outline is i have made a timeline of basically elon musk's life but mostly through his tweets and we are going to examine basically significant life events of elon musk starting from his early childhood but then mostly in the last couple of years and then we're going to talk about some of the things that have happened in the last four or five years to try to understand where everything went a little wild and how we got here today what i want to first ask you guys about is something that i don't actually know that much about which is elon musk's childhood and where he comes from before he arrives here in the u.s and with tesla and all of this stuff kind of the greatest insight i have into elon musk's childhood is actually when azalea banks who we could do a different episode about called him apartheid clyde which is kind of like a little bit of a which i don't i have no affinity for azalea banks but every now and then she yields she yields a jam of a term and apartheid clyde maybe was one of them she really has i mean a way with words but yeah ryan i don't know do you want to kind of walk through his his upbringing yeah he grew up um elon musk grew up in south africa you know coming out of apartheid he's the oldest of three from his parents who had kind of a contentious marriage they ended up splitting you know he spends time with his father there are variations of the story where the father is apparently abusive psychologically you know and that weighs on him um he talks about being bullied in school and that being sort of formative for him but also was was fairly bright you know he read a lot of science fiction he was into computer programming and building uh games on his computer you know there's a discussion of like how privileged and how wealthy he was and how he was able to was growing up there's that meme of you know an emerald mine which is always discussed when it comes to to his early net worth which his father did have a stake in yeah can you explain that the emerald mine situation i think i think it first of all i think it goes back to this idea what base did he start off in in life is is does he have the horatio alger like pull yourself up by your bootstrap story to start from zero and the short answer is is no there was there was some you know family wealth it wasn't like he was destitute in any way or lower class but he had a pretty uh middle to upper class upbringing you know his his parents were successful his father ended up uh contributing to a lot of his early startups and giving them kind of some funding there but the emerald mine is is something that just becomes up over and over again just to show that you know he had this this upbringing you know and it's something that's talked about regularly online when when someone argues you know oh he he he had the success because he had you know he started on second base basically i would quibble with that a little bit in the sense that you know not everyone on second base builds two multi-billion dollar companies but yeah there was there was some privilege that has to be considered when you when you talk about his early history but you know grew up in south africa came or moved to to canada and eventually to the u.s to go to school um he goes to the university of pennsylvania and then moves to california to start a graduate program in the university of pennsylvania and he's at stanford but he actually never um begins you know and then he instead goes into founding a company kind of dot-com era pre-dot-com era called zip2 and that's his first company and then just starts to build from there goes to form the precursor to paypal um and then spacex uh he invests in tesla and then takes over that company so that's kind of his progression through life and his early years yeah you know his telling of his origin story is that you know he's been in the um his childhood abuse really shaped his character and who he is today and he's talked a little bit about undergoing uh more like verbal emotional abuse from his dad and then also being bullied in school getting beat up at school stuff like that and i think what's interesting you know there's kind of two routes that you can take from an abuse experience there's like i want to heal from this and not pass it on and uh sort of like move down a new path and then there's a second path that i think must be taken and that's the first path that i think must be taken and that's has been more active in pursuing and in taking that negative experience and turning it into a superpower for himself so instead of kind of trying to distance himself from it he's like i was bullied it made me strong it made me who i am so i'm going to bully the people around me i'm going to push the people around me i'm going to give them a taste of that same experience and if they can can rise to my level and push through that then those are the kind of people i want to be around so instead of really kind of like pushing the experience away he's made it more to his identity and and to the way that he operates his businesses yeah it's kind of a deeply untherapized way to go about your trauma he also says like you know i i don't have empathy you know and it's like a justification for all the bad behavior if you if you read a certain book by a biographer walter isaacson you know he starts his biography with elon musk being bullied and like everything flows from there which is exactly the story that elon wants to tell but you know you have plenty of people who are bullied and you know you have a lot of people who are bullied in life that don't end up becoming unempathetic or yeah you know abusing their employees or what have you you know so i think it's oversimplified in a way but it's the story he certainly likes to tell well absolutely i mean i have empathy for elon musk for being bullied but also like he now tweets 60 times a day about just absolutely crushing under his boot you know trans people who are some of the most regularly bullied people in schools across america and so you know i don't i don't know i don't i don't i don't think that's compelling yeah using the platform to lash out at his own child right and and talk about how she's essentially dead to him how she's been stolen by the woke mind virus because she's transitioned and so you really see him kind of like passing on that sort of like verbal abuse in a really public way i want to talk about elon musk's early years having a political affiliation as like a liberal because i did not really know this about him i wasn't i mean i wasn't aware of elon musk because i didn't know he was a liberal and i didn't know he was a liberal i didn't know that he was like a total lib like there are like these photos of him with obama he endorsed hillary can you talk about that yeah i think the way to think about elon in those years is sort of kind of stereotypical silicon valley executive you know he had he had become very rich you know he he sells paypal to ebay makes a lot of money there plunges that into spacex as well as tesla and is kind of seen at the time as a quirky guy like who wants to get people to getting people to mars is like a very central thing to him um and for most people in the valley that's kind of like a what are you talking about you're you're weird man kind of thing um and this was like early 2000s up until like the first obama presidency he was kind of obsessed with the mars thing he still is but you know he was a quirky kind of socially liberal maybe fiscally conservative type person with some libertarian tendencies you know there's libertarian there's a a big libertarian streak in the valley it's just like my worst nightmare guy who is socially liberal fiscally conservative with libertarian tendencies aka like the worst guy you've ever met at a bar but this is that's that's how a lot of silicon valley was built you know and these are the personalities that drove these companies into existence and he was he was somewhat close or pretty close with the powers that be at the time you know people like gavin newsom who were ascendant in california and was was fairly liberal um i remember like digging into some of his his charitable giving at the time he gave to some democratic politicians um at one point his foundation gave to the transgender law center yeah crazy i think that was like in 2012 he was supporting a lot of causes he was he was in support of gay marriage and he was in support of gay marriage and he was in support of gay marriage i think you know socially liberal causes um that were accepted in in place like san francisco and in silicon valley but it also wasn't very public about his politics like it's not like he like obviously now he's tweeting about how you need to vote republican to save the country and there was nothing like that he wasn't like out stumping for politics he was so focused on building his companies that there wasn't really time for you know this political stumping and like even if he was doing that he was still in support of gay marriage and he was in support of gay marriage that no one would pay attention to them. He wasn't like a known quantity at the time he was a kind of a quirky figure in in silicon valley and i would say at that time period too i like a lot of folks in tech were just not very politically aware politically involved you know and they're also very much embraced by the democrats and so you know i think if you don't have a really strong political view of your own and then you have one party that's like praising you and welcoming you in you're going to gravitate to that and i think that's the story of musk and a lot of other folks in tech and it's i think it's almost hard to conceptualize that now because we've moved into an era of so much tech criticism but at the time i mean these people were like very very praised in in government circles obama was considered like the first tech president he did a lot of campaigning on facebook yeah i mean it was just sort of this like mutually beneficial very praising relationship you know even if you think back to trump's first election and the intense backlash to that in the industry you know one of trump's first actions was to try to enact this muslim ban um and you saw sergey brin one of the founders of google show up at san francisco airport and demonstrate against that and like join a protest and there are all these companies in the valley signing on onto the friends of the court briefs to challenge that ban in in court then this sort of era of tech skepticism rolls in right you have um the 2017 revelations of cambridge analytica and like how tech had sort of been manipulated and and used to manipulate the public opinion of the public opinion of the vote you know you have sort of like the the fall of travis kalanick in there and all the criticism that came of that of uber a lot of criticism of of the culture of these companies that were espousing ideas of diversity and and really still remaining dominated by white men and not really opening up the ranks to other people to come in and work in these companies so there's a steady drumbeat of criticism i think that started to build and intensify during the trump years and you see a lot of people in tech talk about that where they feel like they sort of embrace the democratic party and then they were criticized by it they were like uh cut down by it and and now they've turned and swayed themselves more to the place where they're getting praise and they're getting acceptance and that's coming more from the right these days and tracing musk through that period he became very decently close with obama you know he invited obama to spacex launches he was visiting the white house in the oval office to talk about space policy and push for the privatization of certain launches you know and and space activity which he eventually gets and becomes effectively like the main way that the u.s government gets things into space you know he was laying that groundwork by getting close to obama in that period and he actually he taught if you look at how he talks about obama these days it's still in a very like nostalgic very friendly demeanor he it's it's actually used to contrast with how his relationship with biden has gone it's like you know i i used to be a democrat you know i used to support democratic causes i used to be really close with obama but now look at how where the democratic party has gone this is what has pushed me towards the right you know and i guess it can't be understated how strong his connection or how's you know or his personal views of obama were in that time elon musk also like one of the through lines to me and you tell me how accurate this is but he just has seemed forever very preoccupied with looking cool even before he took this like right wing nosedive and like during the obama era democrats were cool like obama was cool there was like social clout there's no social clout and being pictured next to joe biden yeah i guess but like there there's a central desire by elon to be liked but i think we should go back to like understanding how he was online from the very beginning which was which was what in terms of like using twitter he starts using twitter in like 2010 2011 he initially doesn't really like the platform he's posting like very normie things about you know going to the ice rink with his kids or you know hanging with kanye at the spacex factory which in retrospect maybe wasn't so normie i mean i guess one of those things is still more likely to happen than the other which is that he's much more likely to hang out with kanye west again today than he is to you know go to the ice rink with his children exactly but like there was a tweet we used we said in the book of like you know i don't get this twitter thing you know i don't know if i can i can do this it's kind of dumb to me why i'm i'm putting my thoughts online but he continues to do it he puts like book recommendations and thoughts on news articles and he starts to like develop this like very interesting like posting like habit i guess and he uses it eventually to start pushing back on on media narratives that he likes stories that he doesn't like to you know combat some belgian blogger who he read at 3 a.m. who got something wrong about tesla and so he he becomes uh like a kind of master of the medium where he is always online but he's also like very transparent you know and gains a lot of followers because he's real you know he is not he's not being pushed through a meat grinder of pr people and and public policy folks and whatever being you know having his views cut up and censored or whatever but it's just him he's not being pushed through a meat grinder of pr people and and public you know posting at all hours relatable and like that for him was was eye-opening right he gets to to be liked he gets immediate reaction he gets to develop a fan base and that's kind of where like we start to see him develop his online presence and really fall in love with twitter and bear in mind like in the 2015-2016 time frame like people knew who elon musk was but he he wasn't like a everyday top of mind type character. He was like a businessman in Silicon Valley who was running these companies who were kind of struggling, you know, you didn't know if they were going to be successful. But he was always online, like he was tweeting pretty regularly. And so that like quality of being liked, essential to that playing to his fan base or talking to his the followers of SpaceX and Tesla, or making sure that that media story that got that detail wrong is corrected, because that could affect his image. It's around this time, we're getting to like the mid late 2010s, that he does have this kind of notable, I mean, so much of this timeline can only exist at the exact time that it happened, like this tweet, where he's, he's just bragging about how high Tesla scored on LGBTQ equality. And he follows that up with don't buy our car. If that's a problem, people should be free to live their lives where their heart takes them. And then a bunch of rainbow hearts and a sparkly heart and a rainbow emoji. It's just like, it's like, it's a tweet that is so far gone, despite it being only six years old, that it like, it looks like a like a cobbled together fake screenshot. I mean, if you saw him post something like that today, I think your assumption would be that his account had been hacked. Absolutely. Vivian, what have you done? His trans daughter got into Elon HQ. Yeah, she got the DeLorean and went back in time and changed his tweets. But I actually I hadn't seen this tweet before. And it is it is stark. And I'm, you know, 2018 is that's like an interesting time. That's it's an interesting year for him, actually 2018. But like, yeah, he's still if you're if we're using the terminology of Elon, infected with the woke mind virus here, because this is hell, yeah, you know, the hearts, the hearts really make this thing. Can you imagine just him? Like on like on his phone with like the heart emojis, like red heart emoji? Yes. Orange heart emoji. Yellow heart, you know, this this tweet took a lot of crafting. You know, this is a this is a this is a bespoke tweet, you know, right? It's it's not even like a liberal like it's not even like a Mark Cuban type like lib tweet. Like this is like a flamboyant pro gay tweet. He's an ally is what I'm saying here. Totally, totally. And it's 2018. Like that's not that long ago. This is an interesting time for him. Because this is kind of when he's really undergoing intense pressure at Tesla, like Tesla is on the verge of bankruptcy. He's sleeping in the factory trying to make it work trying to get production to go according to plan. You know, this is also the time where, you know, I think he probably took less time on this tweet than typing out all the rainbow heart emojis. But this is the time frame where he tweets out that he's going to take Tesla private for for. $120 a share, and says that funding is secured. And of course, you know, this has been thoroughly litigated and funding was not in fact secured. But he's he's in this really intense kind of pressure cooker moment during this during this period of time. And politically where he's at, let's remember he was on a year before he was on a Trump Business Council. And he ends up removing himself from these business councils because the Trump administration pulls out of the Paralympics. There's climate accords. It's not, you know, he was open to working with the Trump administration from a business standpoint, eventually realizes it's it's too toxic for him or his image or his companies, and pulls out. So he's, he's by no means a Trump fan at this time. In fact, he is signaling a sort of resistance against what Trump stands for, especially climate wise, because you know, Tesla, where it is in terms of pushing the EV revolution, making for a cleaner environment. And so yeah, 2018. 2018 rolls around, he's in this pressure cooker, he can't make enough model threes, he wants to take Tesla private, you know, take it off the public market. Because of that pressure. 2018 is also when he does the pedo guide tweet if if you remember what that was the what oh all right we got to extend this podcast by like 30 minutes because wait i'm googling pedo guy tweet elon pedo guy tweet elon famous hold on i'm pulling up the tweet do you remember in 2018 when these kids in thailand get stuck in a cave they go hiking in the in some rainforest they get stuck in a cave the water rises they're trapped in this like underground pocket but they can't get out because you they can't swim out it becomes like an international news story and in my view these tweets come out of a you know he's in the factory he's like kind of searching for acceptance and being liked especially during this very tough time period business-wise yeah he's being hammered on the public markets he's being hammered by investors hammered by doubters of tesla who don't think he's going to make enough cars so he's looking for a little a little love out there he's just a little guy he's just a little guy you know he's not sure if he's going to make it which you know tesla was always on this kind of verge of like will it make it will it not make it until it it did make it and it is what it is now but even even six years ago it was in a precarious place and so elon decides to get involved in this cave rescue by building a submarine to get these kids out of the cave he he has his spacex engineers develop it test it and then they fly it over to thailand to get these kids out of the cave okay long story short it's not used they use divers get these kids out and the people who are involved with the rescue get really upset because they think elon musk took advantage of an international rescue to bring himself notoriety and get some attention right and so one of the rescuers goes on cnn and says you know i'm paraphrasing you can stick the submarine up your ass it didn't work it would have never worked it he was seeking attention and elon musk goes on and calls the guy a quote-unquote pedo guy you know he's drawing off of the worst stereotypes of you know this guy's a british expat living in thailand you know the worst stereotypes of thailand and people who live there or go there you know the sex tourism and calls him a pedophile essentially jesus christ and so that that moment actually is very telling for him because it shows for the first time for a lot of people this kind of acidic side to him this side that he is willing to do battle and destroy it and he's going to destroy it and he's going to destroy it and he's going to destroy anyone who comes in his path including a literal hero who just saved these kids out of this very sticky crisis situation long story short the the guy ends up suing him for defamation nice they go to court elon ends up winning the case oh not nice and so i think a lot of that stems like a lot of kind of elon's confidence in himself stems from winning that case and him learning that he can say whatever he wants online because if he fights he can say whatever he wants any repercussions he'll come out on top and so that's a long divergence to say that he was going through a lot of shit in 2018 pedo guy yeah i'm surprised you didn't know about that's like a it's like elon lore okay well i'm surprised you didn't know about the gay tweet that's elon that's elon lore on my side of the internet ryan when i did the jk rolling episode we were reading her different tweets like her kind of like most iconic like transphobic spiral tweets and now adalie referred to them as the book of rolling and that is kind of what we're doing here it's like which uh which parts of the book of elon do you have memorized someone asked me like what are his what are your favorite tweets of his and there's just so many my personal favorite though is when he said he would put rockets on a car and make the car fly because i i hadn't seen it and then someone showed it to me and i was like this is made up like well he said that he would merge like spacex and tesla and put rocket thrusters from spacex onto teslas to make them fly and this is in the context of him yeah making like extreme promises with his products at one point he said the cyber truck would be a boat one day there's one where he said like psy haven't had sex in ages which i have saved on my desktop that's relatable though i mean there's there's a trumpian quality to him in that there's a tweet for literally everything you know i do this whole operation myself i research and film and edit this podcast i do all the social media stuff it's all me it's it's all me and i'm not complaining i love my job i do but one does run out of time to do you know other things that you need to be a person like cooking and so i would like to thank factor not only for sponsoring today's episode but also just you know for being a part of this podcast and for being a part of this podcast and for being a part of this podcast no shade to the gym bros who cook grilled chicken to eat for a month straight really no shade if i could i would but i can't so i don't if you would like to try factor head over to factor meals.com slash fruity 50 and use the code fruity 50 for 50 off your first box and 20 off your next month that's factor meals.com slash fruity 50 with the code fruity 50 thank you so much to factor for sponsoring today's episode and let's get back to the show all right 2018 wow it really is a long timeline uh 2018 is according to my i love calling like reading people magazine listicles research but according to my research 28 this is around the time that he starts dating grimes so they they meet actually on twitter they start corresponding and the met gala of that year i believe is when they make a public appearance as a tradition on this podcast i always give a little bit of backstory to everyone that i introduce there's a good chance if you're in the demographic of people listening to this podcast that you're at least a little familiar with grimes but grimes is like an alternative indie artist famously just like really kooky wacky like she's always very like brittly thin and has kind of like wispy pink hair she was one of the reigning queens gay tumblr music she like famously her her album uh what's the album called visions visions i think she like did a bunch of drugs and like locked herself into a room for two weeks or something and the album which is a perfect alternative album came out of that time her music has been a kind of all over the place since then but it is an incredible body of work that she made you know at this point over 10 years ago and i remember when they started dating because at this point elon was really coming into public consciousness it was just like okay what is what why is my tumblr queen this is how i felt like why is my tumblr queen dating a tech billionaire totally well and it was also such a deviation i think for him because up until that point he had been dating actresses who are sort of in the blonde bombshell category amber heard he had just dated amber heard and so there was like this very specific type casting of like the kind of person that he would date and then for him to suddenly pivot from like blonde bombshell to like alt elf was a really weird switch up for him yeah that's a good description alt elf very unexpected couple there's this insane picture from kim kardashian's 2019 holiday party it's just it's another it's another piece of the puzzle here that can really only have ever have ever existed at this like very specific point in time but it's kim kardashian kanye west uh elon grimes is that asap rocky quavo quavo yeah it's it's just this photo feels like a visual maglip i mean at the time yeah but now i mean kanye and elon have been homies for a long time kim kardashian is like loving their her cyber truck and like putting up videos with those robots in some ways like associating herself with elon was like sort of cool like he right he has this kind of futuristic car company that that is is you know is a liberal cause in in you know helping to save the environment he's trying to get people to space all right he's kind of quirky he's sort of been in the mainstream tech whatever and now suddenly he's around you know some of the most influential culture creators of that era and and being seen as one of them that like that that you know the things that he's doing are not just businesses but like cultural status symbols i think so tesla goes from being like oh a cool ev to like oh i have a tesla you know do you have any insights into like the gist of their relationship which which lasts about four years they have three kids uh also if you know how to pronounce the kids names that would be cool too they bonded over a discussion over ai so elon is a is a big what would they call a doomer you know this idea that ai will reach sentience and will ultimately like destroy its creator in humans and And as I understand it, they bonded over. this interest in AI and this kind of doomerism. And so they talk about AI, they end up meeting in person. You know, for Grimes, I think someone like Elon is very fascinating. This is a guy that wants to make humans multi-planetary and is pretty smart and well-read and like knows about AI and is a mover and shaker in technology. And I think a lot of her brand is like on this kind of like techno-utopianism, techno-futurism. But, you know, associating herself with that, someone like that is cool. So they meet through Twitter. It kind of, I think, is the seed of Musk's idea that Twitter could be made into a dating app someday, which is another feature he's talked about adding to X and has yet to do. How can we make this even more miserable? I mean, it was a successful dating app for him. So who knows? I wrote a piece when I think after the takeover about people are kind of like mourning the loss of what Twitter once was. And I interviewed a couple of other people who met their spouses on Twitter. So apparently this is a thing people do. They're sliding into the DMs on Twitter. But yeah, so they have three kids together. The first is X and then they have these two kids after the fact. So what's interesting here is I believe X is the only kid that Grimes had via like a natural birth. And then the second is the second kid that Grimes had and then the third kid that Grimes had. And then the third kid I know, I know the name thing is is kicking a horse while it's down. But like X a dark side rail and tech tech tech. Techno. Techno. Okay, sure. Yes. So she has these kids via surrogate and she tries to keep them completely secret. I don't know if it's a privacy thing necessarily, or she's just trying to protect the kids from media scrutiny. But these kids she tries to keep very secret. And we find out about them in a crazy way. She's on a zoom interview, I think with like a Vanity Fair journalist or something. And the journalist hears a baby crying in the background. It's like, is there a baby in your house? And she's like, Oh, yeah, I have these secret babies that no one knows about. Like, they're kind of stashed away. And by the time that she has these second two kids, her relationship with Elon is kind of falling apart. While her surrogate is pregnant. He also decides to have children with one of his employees at Neuralink, which is another one of the companies that he runs. Wait, Elon does? Yes. Oh, wait, did that child come to fruition? Yeah. Oh, I didn't know. Two children. They're twins. He has twins with his employee at the same time as Grimes is having her second two children. And he keeps the twins a secret from Grimes. So Grimes doesn't know that he's made this decision to have kids via IVF. With one of his employees. And you're talking about the funny names. Him and Grimes had originally picked out the name Valkyrie for Exa. So for her daughter, she wanted to call her Valkyrie. And his twins with his employee were actually born prior to Grimes' second two kids. And he gives the name Valkyrie to one of those twins. And sort of steals the name from Grimes and gives it to these other kids. So she finds out about all of this. And of course, is really upset. This name for her daughter, all of a sudden, these secret children are in the picture. And one of them has her daughter's name. And so she actually she wrote, like a poem or lyrics about it and posted it online. And it's sort of referencing the name and talking about her like suffering and pain as a mother that this has happened to her. And so I think that that's kind of like really the point of falling out between between Grimes and Elon. God, I should say it. It should be. Oh, my God, I didn't know about this. Yeah. And, you know, they had their relationship hasn't recovered to this day. You know, they co-parent, but they're certainly not together. I think it's a really telling incident for how Elon views people and how interchangeable everyone is around him, even down to his own children, right? Like two children could bear the same name. And then, you know, they're kind of interchangeable with each other. The women who are in his life and he's having kids with are sort of interchangeable. And I just think it's a very revealing incident into how he thinks about the people around him. Do you think that this kind of, I don't know, tumultual relationship with this like queer coded? Well, I don't know if I can call Grimes queer coded. I don't really know anything about her sexuality, but like sort of adjacent to like queer culture and like kind of this whole world that Grimes orbited before they were together. Like, do you think the rocky relationship and ultimate falling out like had a bearing on his politics or his like his own culture warrior-ness? I'm not sure. Because people like to say that. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that's simplified, but I think you have to take into account everything else that was happening in Elon's life. And it's not just about, you know, his relationship with Grimes and where she was at politically or. So let's rewind a little bit to 2020 and the COVID years. You beat me to it. So, you know, we have this tweet of his in 2018, where he's supporting LGBTQ culture. I think on your outline, you have him saying he's a moderate. He was tweeting around this time, like, I'm a moderate, just to clarify, I'm not a conservative. Like he was saying that stuff outright. The only other thing I want to add about the LGBTQ kind of allyship tweet, which I think is interesting, is that a lot of times people within like the LGBTQ world, a lot of times adults who previously have like no connection to the community or the political cause, they're like, I'm not a conservative. I'm not a conservative. I'm not a that like you know lgbtq people are faced with a lot of times having a child who is queer draws parents into the fold of fighting for that cause and what's so interesting is that he at least on like you could be totally cynical and say that this lgbtq kind of like flaunting his friendliness was like a total pr move but even still he went from that to then having a trans daughter who we'll talk about in a little bit but like it radicalized him in the other direction which is just really interesting and and kind of uncommon but should we talk about covid first yeah i mean the timeline is yeah he's he's openly moderate he's he's yeah we talked about this earlier he's socially liberal he's you know pro l lgbt sorry i don't know i don't know if he's the t part i don't know but he was no yeah he he did he he even had the q yeah yeah on there yeah true true yeah he's he he believes in climate change and has a company that's combating that these are very socially liberal causes and he's meeting with obama and so that's that's how he was politically heading into 2020 you know and in in the valley that's pretty common you don't want to like necessarily stake like i'm a democrat or i'm republican but here are my values i'm an independent thinker i can think for myself and you know i i'm somewhere in the middle and you want to you want to make the democrats and republican politicians kind of fight over who can be nicer to you sure and with but with also a libertarian streak or a conservative streak around fiscal spending and taxation especially as you are getting more and more wealthy but 2020 rolls around and covid happens and you have this tweet here the coronavirus panic is dumb this is this is like peak scare basically right this is end of february early march it's starting to the virus starting to come over to the states and he stakes his position that the coronavirus panic is dumb and he's defended that in the past of saying like the panic itself is dumb and not he's not saying the virus is dumb the panic is dumb but he begins to feed into this idea that you know maybe we shouldn't take this virus as seriously as everyone thinks we should you know this contrarian thinking that kate talked about earlier and then starts to go really far down that that path he has a tweet later on where he says you know there's going to be no new covid cases by the end of april he starts to position himself as sort of a covid denier and when you think about it it kind of makes sense on his factories being open at Tesla, being able to produce cars at a certain rate to keep the stock price up and his investors happy. And if there are these lockdowns or these shutdowns of operations that aren't essential, that directly hurts him as a businessman. So he starts to rail against California and its shelter in place orders. He calls the state fascist and the government fascist at one point. He goes on this rant during an earnings call and also starts to downplay the severity of COVID. I remember one email that I got when I was reporting at the time where he told employees that you're actually more likely to die in a car crash than of COVID, which is hilarious for a guy who runs a car company. Yeah, I was gonna say, I mean, is that the statistic you want to use to make your point? Yeah, maybe use like shark attack or like bees or something. Right, vending machine following. Struck by lightning. But, you know, he used cars, you know, he's just thinking about cars killing people all the time. He's like, you're more likely to die for that other thing that I do. And so he strikes his position out as like, COVID is not bad. And even if you get it, you're not going to die. It starts to turn people against him. You remember the climate at that time, people just being really unhappy with people with others who didn't take this seriously. And among those was a supposedly liberal, liberal businessman or a businessman that stood for liberal causes. And that was in some ways a fissure for a lot of folks in terms of their adoration for him. I'd like to take a quick break from the show. to thank the sponsor of today's episode, Blueland, who, along with my supporters over on Patreon, make it possible for me to spend 12 hours a day going down right-wing online rabbit holes, which, you know what? When I put it that way, maybe we should all stop enabling this behavior. Maybe we need to stop. Blueland is on a mission to eliminate single-use plastic by reinventing cleaning essentials that are better for you and the planet. So you know those dishwasher pods that we all use? I thought those just, like, dissolve completely, because it looks like they do. But actually, they leave hundreds of microplastics that end up back in the water supply. I didn't know this. Maybe that makes me dumb. I recently switched over to Blueland dishwasher tablets, which, just like everything else in their line, both in the product and the packaging and the delivery system, has no single-use plastic. You know, I feel like sometimes when you switch over to, like, the eco-friendly or sustainable version of an everyday product, a lot of times you're sacrificing on quality. But I now live in a basically entirely Blueland household, and I will tell you, my dishes are as white as they've ever been. My clothes are as clean as they've ever been. You're really not sacrificing on quality. And you're really not paying an arm and a leg either, because with Blueland's really efficient refill system on all of their products, you're not only taking on a more sustainable way to keep your home clean, but you're also saving a good amount of money over time. And I know this isn't really the point, but I will say, having an entirely Blueland household, it is kind of nice to go to my cleaning supply drawer and everything is in these, like, beautiful pastel tins and bottles, looking uniform, looking chic. It really does beat all of the, you know, garish drugstore stuff. There are so many reasons to love Blueland. If you would like to try it out, you can go to blueland.com slash fruity for 15% off your first order. Again, that is blueland.com slash fruity. Thank you, thank you, thank you to Blueland for sponsoring this show. And now let's get back to it. I mean, I want to talk a little bit to you about his experience with having a trans daughter, because I think you're right that this is sort of a point of radicalization for him, but it doesn't come right away. And I think that's really interesting. So there's like two very divergent stories of how this happens, right? One is Musk's story, and one is Vivian's story. Should I introduce her? Because we haven't really talked about Vivian yet. Well, I actually have a transition if you want to get there. Oh, no pun intended. Thanks, guys, for laughing. You know, I'm no longer the first, the straight guest. You're no longer the second. Yeah, Ryan's transitioning on the pod. The first person to transition on the pod. Okay, yes, provide your transition. What I was going to say about COVID is it exposes him to criticism online from a group of people, and they see it as progressive, or liberal to progressive, and starts to label as this kind of woke mind virus. It's something he had seen earlier, actually, which we didn't really discuss. But Tesla has had a lot of issues with regards to unionization and labor. It's not a unionized place. There were lawsuits around racism at his factories. And so a lot of progressives criticize Elon for this. And so when COVID comes around, he groups all these things against his companies as this quote unquote, woke mind virus. Wokeness is some undefined term at this point that really has no meaning. But for him, it was this idea of everything against him, anything that stood against him, and his factories and his success and human progress, because he grouped himself as the champion of human progress. What I think is really interesting about this is the woke mind virus. And so you get to the point where his daughter starts to transition during this time. And he sees that kind of as one in the same of the woke mind virus kind of affecting someone who is in his family, his very own kid. That is a good transition. That's a good transition to the transition. Right around the start of COVID, Elon Musk's daughter, who he had with his, I think his first wife, his marriage to Justine Wilson, began transitioning to female. She goes by Vivian. I pulled this quote from the Elon Musk biography written by Walter Isaacson that you mentioned. He wrote, when Musk found out he was genuinely sanguine, but then she became a fervent Marxist and rejected him. His disagreements with Jenna, he says, became intense when she went beyond socialism to being a full communist and thinking that anyone rich is evil. Okay. This is what I think is so interesting about this, right? He's initially, I think, supportive of her transition. And signs off with her doctors for this to happen. But then in his telling, his telling to his biographer, it's when she questions him on business that he becomes opposed to what she's doing in her personal life, which I think is fascinating. It's not the transition necessarily that might have set him off, but her challenging him or questioning him about his businesses, about the way that they operate, that really creates a fissure. Elon's version of it. And I think that's really interesting, you know, that when it comes to criticism of what he's doing with his wealth, that is what is really intolerable. Obviously, there's flaws in his telling of this, right? I mean, he even, he gets her name wrong in the biography. Oh, yeah, he misgenders her the whole way through. And Vivian, Vivian has spoken at this at length. She's been very unhappy with her portrayal, the fact that Isaacson apparently didn't reach out to her to talk to her about this, which I think any journalist would agree with. And I think that's especially in a contentious situation, like she want to try and at least talk to both sides. So Musk's version of this is like, that he is alienated from her when she calls his businesses into question. Vivian's version of this is quite different, right? Her telling of this is that like Musk has always been a very cold and distant father who's like never particularly supportive of her, right? You know, who criticized her when she was young for being effeminate, and then was not supportive of her transition later on. And someone that she doesn't want to associate with. So her telling is like, he's a bad parent, I don't want to deal with that. His telling is, I was a supportive parent, I was a supportive dad, up until my wealth and my businesses were called into question. So their stories conflict, but there's very interesting versions going on. Yeah, and even his own story is kind of incriminating. It is. It's sort of sad. You know, it's like a parent and their child. But again, to go back to this quote, unquote, woke mind virus, which he likes to cite, so often, all these things are the same, these things stacking up against him, you know, causing his child to transition, causing his child to question his power and his and his wealth. You know, that's all stems from the progressive beliefs being fed to her at her schools. And, you know, by the people that surround her. And so this is kind of amorphous enemy, this virus that he talks about is the root cause of all evil in his mind. And it's interesting, because the first public manifestation of this quarrel that he's having privately with his child is when Elon tweets on July 24 2020, very memorably, pronouns suck. This, as far as I'm aware, is like one of the first times he really talks about trans people. And it's just such a confusing tweet. Like, what does that even mean? Clearly, it's about trans people and about like, the, you know, kind of move to like, address and talk about people. People's pronouns, whether they're trans or cis. But it comes out in this really just like nonsensical way. And Grimes famously responds, I love you, but please turn off your phone and give me a doll. Meaning she mistyped call. I cannot support hate. Please stop this. I know this isn't your heart. And this is still I mean, in kind of the earlier years of their relationship, they would have multiple kids after this tweet exchange. But I just remember I remember that happening and just being like, very confused. Like, what is he doing? And then he's like, what does he even mean by this? So Musk had by that point been signaling his distaste, I guess, for this, the woke mind virus. I remember one story where we wrote at BuzzFeed, where I worked at the time, he used the phrase that BuzzFeed is the mind virus. And this was I think it was 2018, 2019. So he had started to like, to, I guess, form these ideas that there is some kind of paranoia or some symptom among people who classified as liberal progressive. So the pronouns thing stems from that. But like, pronouns are just like a, they're just a stand in for, they're just an easy way to attack trans people in a way. I think it's interesting, because this is also sort of what ties into Musk's belief around free speech and where he's going to go down the road with the Twitter acquisition. But one of his big complaints about being asked to use someone's pronouns is that he feels it's an infringement on his own speech, his own free speech rights, like he should be able to say whatever he wants, call anyone whatever he wants. And the fact that people are trying to tell him, no, you can't, you have to refer to someone the way they want to be referred to, is like taking away his free speech in some way. And he even, I think, tweeted something at one point where he said, he didn't mind referring to people by their pronouns, if he felt visually they read as male or female. But if he was confused by their appearance, or felt like they appeared more male, he wanted to be able to refer to them with those pronouns. So I think it's interesting to see that there's a lot of pushback about that. It cuts to the core of what I think is flawed about his version of free speech. free speech which is i can say what i want but you cannot correct me my speech is more important you can't speak back and and it's so telling to where twitter ends up as a platform and the kinds of speech rules that he enforces once he takes over and it's you know it's such like a argument against like political correctness too you're forcing me to be politically correct well fuck you i'm gonna i'm gonna say what i want and in fact i'm gonna use my platform to rail against the very thing that you want me to do there's also this kind of like complex about masculinity that i feel being an undercurrent through a lot of this which is just like you can't tell me what to do i really like how you define the woke mind virus as anything that's against him because there's so much um conversation now around like well what do they mean when they say woke and i think that's a really actually great description of what woke means now which is anyone who disagrees with me i wonder if i could get like a big prager you podcasting contract if i start calling everyone woke mind virus so elon has said all sorts of frankly like horrifying and disgusting shit about his own daughter uh he went on jordan peterson's podcast and said as far as i'm concerned my son is dead and and vivian has combated a lot of this or at least attempted to through her own postings on other websites she notably does not use twitter but i just want to highlight one because vivian has a sharp tongue she is gifted with wit and uh at one point elon is tweeting a about her and writes i knew that from when he was four years old and he would pick out clothes for me to wear like a jacket and tell me it was fabulous in quotes as well as his love of musicals and theater but he was not a girl i'm just going to read a little bit of vivian's response because i do feel like she deserves a voice anytime we discuss the way that elon talks about her she writes this is entirely fake like literally none of this ever happened ever i don't even know where he got this from my best guess is that he went to the milo yiannopoulos school of gay stereotypes just picked some at random and said eh good enough in a last-ditch attempt to garner sympathy points when he is so obviously in the wrong even in his own fucking story i did not have a love of musicals and theater when i was four because you know i was fucking four i did not know what these things were my earliest real experiences with musicals was when my twin brother had a hamilton phase in eighth or ninth grade relatable and overplayed it so much in the car to the point where for a long time i swore off the entire genre i never picked out jackets for him to wear and i was most certainly not calling them fabulous because literally what the fuck i did not use the word fabulous when i was four because once again i would like to reiterate i was four so she's just she likes she likes a jab later on she writes as for if i'm not a woman sure jan whatever you say i'm legally recognized as a woman in the state of california and i don't concern myself with the opinions of those who are below me obviously elon can't say the same thing i'm not a woman i'm not a woman i'm not a woman i'm not a woman because in a ketamine fueled haze he's desperate for attention and validation from an army of degenerate red pilled incels and pygmies who are quick to give it to him go touch some fucking grass i wanted to include that because i love a queen who claps back yeah she really lit him up on this one and so anyway at around the time vivian starts transitioning in early 2020 elon musk officially takes the red pill he tweets i'm losing my mind you gotta do you gotta you gotta do it in the morpheus voice come on do you want to offer that to us ryan you could be the take the red pill that was good that was good he tweets take the red pill rose emoji to which notably ivanka trump quote tweets taken and lily wachowski the trans woman creator of the matrix movie where the red pill metaphor originated responds fuck both of you this is my favorite exchange in the history of twitter.com isn't the isn't the red rose that's a socialist thing right it is a socialist thing yeah all right well just mixing metaphors and pills and whatever and and from the point that elon tweets take the red pill that's basically it for him as far as his leap to conservative politics officially as far as i understand well what's the point what's interesting about this is like he's also in 2020 still indicating he's a centrist he's a democrat whatever even though he's also saying take the red pill and then in 2021 he gets in this fight with joe biden because he's excluded from an electric vehicle summit that biden hosts at the white house and from there on out he's just posting pretty much non-stop negative stuff about biden right i also think like with elon it's it's so hard to tell what to take seriously i mean yes in retrospect with hindsight bias maybe we can say that was the point where he starts to realize he's a conservative but at the time take the red pill when he said it i was like is that a is that a joke is that a reference to something is he literally watching the matrix like what is what does that mean and what is it in reference to and it's not like his his personal life is also playing out publicly right it's not like we know about his his daughter at the time right but this is you know i think the thing with elon is he puts stuff online that you're not sure what it's in reference to in hindsight the take the red pill tweet is where everything starts going south it was may 18 2022 actually two years later where he officially comes out as conservative in the words of abby shapiro ben shapiro's uh trad wife influencer sister she she famously came out as conservative he he tweets 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 popcorn emoji right before that that's when he makes his bid for twitter which we wrote a whole book on but he makes his bid for twitter as he is publicly signaling that he is moving rightwards that midterm election he is publicly advocating for people to vote republican and i mean since 2022 his twitter has been made up of the stuff that i feel like now most people are familiar with him for as long as as far as like the political front is concerned i mean he tweets about anti-white racism he's very obsessed with uh with with cisgender being a slur so i mean there's so many things in this time period where he's really calcifying into his opposition of trans people one of his big gripes about twitter's former management was that they had suspended the account of the babylon b which is the right-wing satirical website sort of like a right-wing version of the onion because the account had violated twitter's then policy against misgendering and he was really opposed to that and one of the first things he asked when he bought twitter and came into the building was to reinstate the account of the babylon b he really wanted to sort of write that perceived wrong and then you know going into the acquisition all of a sudden he declares that the phrase cis is not a right-wing satirical website which is sort of like a right-wing version of the or cisgender are considered slurs on the platform and that continues to this day i mean i haven't tested it recently but the last time i did you know if you if you try to tweet the word cisgender your post is is blocked basically um and hidden from other users on the platform he said that it is targeted harassment nice we should be harassing cis people more level the playing field no please don't please don't i face enough every day in my daily life on the basis of being cis yeah i can't walk out the door without being abused we live in a world you know just plagued with systemic anti-cis phobia cis phobia pro-cis phobia anti-cis phobia like this is the priority right at a time of like rising hate and harassment against transgender people where you know multiple states across the country are legislating against trans rights that that his priority is making sure that people can't say the word cisgender on twitter that's kind of his on on ramp into the far-right conservatism conservatism that we see him consistently associate with now you know he starts to play the hits he goes into immigration and talks about the crisis at the southern southern border he goes and visits the border at one point and does a live stream from there he starts to talk about voter fraud and the problem with mail-in Eventually comes this idea that Democrats are allowing for illegal immigration to change the voter makeup of this country and ensure that Democrats are always going to be in power because these supposedly illegal immigrants will be legalized and will vote Democrat. You know, that's the great replacement theory. That is not just like great replacement theory adjacent. It is the actual great replacement theory. He starts to associate with Tucker Carlson. He goes on his shows. And so these these issues have become part and parcel of who he is now. And it's just kind of fascinating to watch him speed run that in the last two years. You know, we just went through the timeline. It doesn't take him very long to get there. I mean, his positions are incredibly radical, considered, I mean, compared to what would have been the modern Republican platform, you know, eight years ago. You know, you can't really untangle what is mask and what is Twitter. at this point, I think, you know, he's someone who's spends all his time on the platform, he finds these conspiracy theories and these sort of pieces of fringe content, and reads them, amplifies them, he doesn't have other media sources that he engages with. And so, you know, he's really a product of his own rabbit hole that he's built. And, you know, I think a lot of people are searching for an answer of like, what are his politics? How did they get this way? And I think he's a creature of the platform. I have a couple questions as like, kind of a wrapping up sort of situation. A heaviness that I feel, and that I think that I think so many people feel is like, these are the most powerful people in the world, the decisions that they make, and like the thought spirals and disinformation spirals that they go down and then regurgitate to the masses, have so much material impact on the way that everyday people live their lives. I mean, I was just at the Supreme Court this week for the hearing on gender affirming care for trans youth. What hope do we have? Like he's become this product of this machine that he participated in and then created in his own image. And it's like, I don't I don't think that there's hope for de-radicalizing Elon Musk necessarily. But I guess do you did you come out of your process writing this book with any sort of optimism? I think one of the big questions that we embarked to answer in writing this book is what does accountability look like for someone like Elon Musk, who is, you know, the richest person in the world, arguably one of the most powerful. We spent a lot of time looking into the various accountability metrics that exist for this, right. So some of it is from regulations, some of it is from courts, some of it is from lawmakers. And we saw over and over again, Musk kind of bump up against these apparatuses of accountability and escape from them. And so, you know, I think that we have yet to see any system really be able to hold him to account. And I think that, you know, his new position in the Trump administration just kind of accelerates that and puts him further outside of the bounds of accountability. You know, at the time where we were finishing this book, the election hadn't happened yet. And it seemed like the most sort of promising avenues for accountability for him were going to come from outside the United States. You know, the EU has been pursuing regulation against social networks like X. And there's maybe some enforcement actions that they could take there. But I think especially now that Musk has successfully aligned himself with Trump, there's really not a lot of restraint on his behavior within the United States. Yeah, I don't know if that's, I mean, that's our role as journalists, right? We can only point out that there is this extreme accumulation of power going on here. We've written this book, and we continue to report in the New York Times that, hey, there's this guy out here that runs all these companies. He's amassed this amount of wealth. He's been able to essentially place the candidate he wants into the White House. Like, maybe we should be aware of that. Maybe we should ask some questions about how that was able to happen. You know, how was a single man able to accumulate enough worth to spend $44 billion on his social platform like it was a plaything, you know, that like it was a sports car or a yacht or something? Yeah, I think we, you know, we'll have to continue doing that for the next four years and beyond that. Because I, I don't see him getting any less powerful. His net worth went up how much after Donald Trump's election, after he spent a quarter of a billion dollars getting him into the White House like that, that just kind of shows that his his every move has been right in a way for himself and that he'll be continue to be rewarded for those for those actions. I'm thinking about what Kate said. We need people outside the US Brazil. Brazil do something. Brazil. Brazil. I was, you know, everyone always gets the comments like come to Brazil. But I'm kind of sending that back to you guys, Brazil, come to us, come to us, come to our rescue. And then kind of my last question. And maybe I don't know, maybe this is a dismal place to end. But it's also something I'm genuinely curious about. Like, what does Elon Musk want? Well, I think one of the things that we've seen him want really consistently throughout his career is praise and acceptance. And, you know, we've seen him do a lot of great things in his career. And I think, you know, we've seen him do a lot of great things in his career. And I think, you know, we've seen him do a lot of great things Obviously, now he's found that to an extreme on the right and within the MAGA movement. He's very, very popular with young men. He's very popular with Trump. He's very popular with other conservatives. He was posting online yesterday, a bunch of photos of his meetings with Republican senators. So he has this big new audience that is really championing champion that's championing him and supporting him. And I think that that's something that's really important to him. And I think power and influence are really important to him as well. You know, he, we didn't talk about this, but he previously was under more than 20 federal investigations. And I think it's reasonable to expect that a lot of that goes away as Trump comes into office and starts appointing new leaders to those agencies. What does he want? He wants to be seen as a hero. You know, I mean, yes, like to be liked, but he often talks about himself as like the hero of his own missions. You know, he is the guy who is going to make space multi-planet or sorry, he's going to be the guy that makes humanity multi-planetary. He's going to make space multi-planetary. He's going to throw some new, he's going to throw some new planets in there. Yeah, exactly. He's going to exactly. He's, he's creating new galaxies as we speak. He's going to save the environment by electrifying vehicles. He's going to save free speech by buying Twitter. And now he'll save the U S government by working with Donald Trump and with Doge to cut and make us more profitable. You know, that's always been central to who he's, how he sees himself. It goes back to him reading science fiction as a kid, you know, these hero stories and that's what he wants is to be seen and remembered as, as a hero. I mean, who among us on some, you know, I'll be at much smaller level. Doesn't want that. I think the film Paris is burning about how did I bring Paris? Paris is burning into the Elon Musk episode. I don't know. Let's turn this into a Paris is burning pod. Ryan, do you know what Paris is burning is? I don't. Second, second straight guy on the pod, everyone. Well, Ryan has homework. You have to watch Paris is burning after this. What is it? Oh God. Is, am I getting it wrecked online now? No, no, no. But Matt, make your point about it. I'm very curious about where this is going. Paris is burning is a documentary from the nineties about Harlem ballroom culture. Oh, okay. King. Sorry. I'm still an ally. You know, you are, you are ally card given back, but it's, it's about a heart Harlem ballroom culture, which was championed by black and Brown queer people. And it ends with Dorian Corey, who was this queen who would perform in the balls and all of these people, you know, they were impoverished. A lot of them experience homelessness at different points in their lives, did sex work for survival. You know, they had hard lives. This was being, you know, a black queer person in the nineties, Dorian Corey, who's, you know, middle-aged queen is sitting in the mirror, putting on her makeup and her lashes. And she's talking about the impact that she wants to leave on the world. And she's basically says, and I'll insert it here. Let's we'll see if YouTube copyrights me or not. I always had hopes of being a big star. Then I look, as you get older, you aim a little lower. And I just say, well, yeah, you still might make an impression. Everybody wants to leave something behind them. Some impressions, some markup on the world. Then you think you left a mark on the world. If you just get through it and a few people remember your name, then you left them all. So you don't have to bend the whole world. I think it's better to just enjoy it. Pay your dues and enjoy it. If you shoot an arrow and it goes real high, hooray for you. We all want something to be remembered for. We all want to be liked. We all want, in the world whether it's you know like colonizing mars or like having meaningful relationships in your personal life i don't know it's i think everybody has their version of this and something i try to do on this podcast a lot is like find my shared humanity with people i really don't like and people who i think are destructive like elon musk or jk rowling or any of these people because i don't know i think it brings the whole thing back to earth no pun intended Elon so much of what I hear and what you're saying about the psychology of Elon Musk is just stuff that like honestly and I hate to like I'm not trying to be cute but it's like this is stuff like these are the reasons we go to therapy you guys it's like the need to be liked the need to be cherished and like even like worshipped you know this is like stuff that you work out it's stuff that you work out for your whole life and if you never work it out and you accrue billions and billions of dollars, then like, I don't know, I feel like those unresolved qualms that you have with yourself can just be taken out on the rest of the world. Yeah, I mean, I think that's the fascinating for both of us about Elon is that he is just very human. And he's not afraid to express that and kind of let his insecurities show in a way that like a lot of other people in his position, you know, they build this sort of buffer of protection around themselves through lawyers, through PR reps, through other spokespeople, you know, to insulate themselves. And he doesn't do that. He kind of just like lets it all hang out. But I think it's also like he misses the sense of scale on this stuff, right? And I think, like, yes, you're absolutely right. Everyone desires to be liked and loved. And for him, it's like, he doesn't just want to be liked and loved by people he loves, you know, or like people he respects, but it's like, everyone, everyone must like and love. And, and I think that's so interesting. And it kind of goes back to like the pedo guy incident, right? It's like, some random man on the other side of the world said something rude about him, who has no power. Over him, who has no sway, who has no influence, who, if not for Musk's involvement, would be completely anonymous. And he can't let it go. It's like, that guy has to like me, not just like my family, my friends, my kids, my president. But that guy over there, too. It's this sort of like universal need that he has. And a lack of a sense of scale of like, it doesn't matter if some random Twitter troll doesn't like me. He's like, no, that matters. So in the end, I think we've learned today that it wasn't Grimes. It wasn't Vivian. It wasn't COVID. It was pedo guy. Well, maybe just the internet, honestly. Thanks for joining me today, guys. Aye, aye, aye. If you have made it this far, God, it's kind of an arduous task sometimes talking about these people, because I know it isn't always fun, but we try to make it fun or at least entertaining. I appreciate you so much. It's not an easy time. But I hope you have a great But hopefully, like I said, by like deconstructing these kinds of topics and bringing them back down to earth, we can make it feel a little more human. Kate and Ryan, thank you so much for sitting down with me. And also, thank you for really taking on the task of spending years documenting someone who does not hide the fact that he does not like to be documented or scrutinized in any type of way. And you wrote a whole book about it, which is no small feat. Well, thank you so much for spending time with us and spending time with the book. It really means a lot to us. And yeah, we're happy to chat about this, because like you said, we do spend a lot of time thinking about it. We're about to spend a lot more time thinking about him, too. So yeah, I guess the next time we come on. Hell yeah, which could be tomorrow. Yeah, exactly. When is what's the date of the inauguration? I'll see you guys on the 21st. And with that, I love you all so much.