transcript
So at the beginning, Elon Musk’s department of government efficiency or doge? Doge Doge. What is Doge going to do. Seem to have ended up with a fairly narrow mandate. You can look at the Trump executive order creating it, and it says the purpose is modernizing federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity. In the last couple of weeks, it’s become clear that Musk’s role is a whole lot larger than that. Elon Musk, right now involved in almost every agency and corner of the United States government, offering all federal employees a buyout to resign. Musk and his team have access to at least 11 agencies, and the count is growing every day. Elon Musk seized control of USAID. People getting fired, people getting furloughed in droves. They are raiding the government. We don’t pledge allegiance to Elon Musk. What’s the plan. What’s the plan. And as I’ve watched all this unfold, I’ve been wondering how Elon Musk has evolved in the way he has. How did he go from conventional Obama era liberal, worried about climate change, and who wanted to go to Mars to right wing conspiratorial meme Lord working to elect the far right in Germany. The future of civilization could hang on this election and shred the federal government in the United States Yes What led to this transition, this evolution for Elon Musk. And what actual strategies is he bringing to the government that he now seems to have quite a lot of control over. To talk about all this, I want to invite Kara Swisher on the show. Kara is one of the great tech reporters of the age. He’s been covering Musk for many, many years, along with many of the other tech CEOs who’ve become such key political figures now. She is, of course, the host of the great podcast on with Kara Swisher and pivot, which she co-hosts with Scott Galloway. As always, my email at nytimes.com. Stockholm Kara Swisher. Welcome back to the show. Thank you. I’ve never been here, but you’ve been on my show before. Not Yes, you have. We’re going to. I’m going to go. I’m going to go back and share with you. Oh, that’s because I suggested you do podcasting. You’ve done rather well, I would say a masterclass in interviewing from Kara Swisher. It was called. Wow, I must have forgotten it. I can’t it was such a seminal moment. Well, it’s good to see you. Good to see you. How would you describe the role Elon Musk has been playing in the federal government in the first weeks of Donald Trump’s second term. Well, a little more a little more strongly than the New York Times’ did. They’re treating it like, isn’t this an interesting person walking through. I think, he’s a one man wrecking ball, really. And he’s being used by Trump for that purpose. There’s lots of ways you could use metaphors. You could say junkyard dog. He’s the one taking all the flak going in and breaking things. And you could be funny and call it wreck-it Ralph. I don’t think it’s particularly funny or the right way to do it or constitutionally sound, but that’s the kind of thing he’s going in there like he does with his companies and doing the exact same thing he’s got. He’s got a series of moves that he makes every single time, and he’s doing them writ large on the federal government. Walk me through the moves. What is his playbook. Well, it’s changed and morphed over the years, but always drama, always a massive amount of drama centered on him. That tends to be the thing he does when he’s in his. He can be very dramatic in a very poignant way. Like one time we were there was a period where he was very worried about the fate of Tesla, if you remember. And he was sleeping on the floor there. And he gave a really he actually gave an interview to the New York Times’ where he seemed to cry. He seemed very emotional. And at one point when we were talking, this was, I think, off camera. He said, if Tesla doesn’t survive, the human race is doomed, which I felt was a little dramatic. And I thought, Wow, this is what man in his 40s who thinks that he’s the center of the universe. And so it always has that element of drama. Like it has to be that and he has to be at the center. I think he’s greatly informed by video games. And so that’s he’s someone described him to me as Ready Player 1, and everybody else is an MPC, which is a non-player character. So he always has to be the hero or the person who matters the most. And sometimes he does and sometimes he’s engineered it. So just getting the founder role when he’s not actually the founder or rewriting history or using PR to make himself the founder. So he understands the hero’s journey kind of thing really rather well. He also it has to the stakes have to be very high. And if it doesn’t work, we’re doomed kind of thing. So he uses language like that of doom. He tends to overstate the problems when most companies have problems. But everything is a disaster here. And I’m here to fix it, or everything sucks and everybody previously is criminal or evil. Pedophiles word he likes to use a lot, but he uses the terms like evil. And in one tweet he called Yoel Roth, who was head of trust and safety at Twitter, who he did like until he quit, and then he became evil. In one tweet, he called him evil and I was seething with hate, which is really dramatic and ridiculous. I’m not seething with hate. Very Trumpian. Yeah, that kind of thing. I think he means it, though. I think Trump sometimes is just doing it for show showman, a reality show thing. So there’s a story that Musk tells is dramatic story. It’s him against the evildoers. But there’s also mechanics, right. He has people lieutenants fan out to keep points. One thing we’re seeing right now with what Musk is doing, the federal government, is an identification of choke points of information and money, the Treasury payment system, the Office of Personnel Management, which is a place where Musk has installed trusted aides. And they’re using that as a way to fan out across the federal workforce. So tell me a bit beneath the story. Musk tells the Grand narrative when he takes things over and what he’s brought from that to the federal government. What does he actually have the people under him do. What is the theory of action. He has people around him that are just enablers there. They’re all these Silicon Valley people do. And all his minions and their minions, they’re all lesser than he is in some fashion. And they all look up to him. They’re typically younger. They laugh at his jokes. Sometimes when he apologizes for a joke, which is not very often, he said people around me thought it was funny. Well, they all do, because they’re like, to be in the room is to watch it happen. I was when he was being interviewed at code once. He had a couple of them there and he told a really bad joke and they all went like that. And I was like, that’s not funny. I was like, I’m sorry, did I miss the joke. And, they looked at me like I had three heads. And what they do is it’s not that hard to figure out choke points. This is where we need to be. And then they go into it in this way that is, violating of typical rules. And I don’t mean necessarily laws, although I suspect many laws may have been broken here, but not caring about breaking laws. And so they go in full force and question, let me see your code. Let me why can’t we get in. We’re getting in. We have the law. We have federal Marshals, let’s see what they’ll do. And that is a really big quality that he has. Let’s say things and wait for them to sue us or wait for them to stop us. They won’t stop us. And again, very much like Trump, the people don’t stop you. We just operate on a set of polite rules and society and they just barrel right through them. I want to Zoom in on that breaking of rules, because I think something Musk understands, Trump has understood in different ways. Is it at high levels of society, the recourse for breaking a law. Breaking a rule is legal. You don’t get frogmarched out. Typically, what happens is somebody sues you. They need to have standing. It works its way through the courts. You have lawyers as well, and it moves slowly. And so a lot of law following and rule following is just a norm at that level that you follow the laws and you follow the rules. If you don’t, you can move much faster than the courts are likely to move. Or they can fire all these people, many of them potentially illegally given civil service protections. And what they’re going to sue over the course of that is 6 to nine months or four years and maybe get some back pay. Corporations do this against people organizing unions all the time. They do. But as an insight that a lot of what has constrained other executive branches is not actually a constraint, because by the time the legal system catches up, you’ve already achieved what you want to achieve. That’s correct. It’s a pretty profound insight. Yeah it is. And if he gets caught, he feels he’s willing to pay. Like he’s willing to go toe to toe legally. And I think what a lot of people are is I don’t want to fight this guy. He has unlimited money. Have to think twice if you’re going. I mean, journalists have to think twice. It’s very similar to these media companies settling. CBS has done nothing wrong in this Kamala Harris situation, yet they’re going to pay. It’s pretty clear that Meta did nothing wrong with Trump. And yet you’re going to pay. You do it to make it go away or you don’t do it at all because of the exhaustion. And he understands that. He understands that he can wear them down. And so it is true if you go if you blow lights, you mostly get away with it. You don’t always get caught or if you don’t pay bills or in his business life, let’s blow up 90 rockets because the 91st will work. And that’s his attitude towards pretty much everything I can tell. Although, to be fair to him, it led to some amazing rockets. It did. But who else gets to look. And then he insults Nasa, which is not allowed to break to blow up rockets. Nasa can’t blow up rockets because then they’d blow up one rocket. That’s the end of it, right. And so it’s a real advantage to be able to blow up rockets and then keep going. That Thomas Edison quote, there’s a famous quote that they all quote back to me that I have not failed. I’ve found 10,000 ways that don’t work. Whatever and then you eventually get to it. And so it’s part of the ethos of tech. It’s that there’s no such thing as failure. There’s only it didn’t work that time. And I’ll get the right one next. But this gets to I think the deeper question here because there are all these tactics and strategies. But towards what. When he’s blowing up rockets, he is trying to make rockets at work in a certain way. And eventually he did. And I think the world, frankly, is better off for him doing it. Tesla had many failures, but really did make better electric cars than anybody else made, and helped the electric vehicle transition happen. What does he want now, though. What is this all in service of. What is the vision, in your view, that he’s trying to effectuate with all this power that he now wields in the government. It’s not money. Money is not. Money is not. I hate to say this. I hate it, but it’s not that important to many of them. That It’s not money. Some of them really like money, that’s for sure. But it’s not money. It’s the power that money brings. And it’s power to decide. And I think it started off was it started off. I have some good ideas. And I’d like to put them into place. And now it’s I have all the ideas on every topic and therefore what I say goes, it’s a very King like attitude towards things or that philosopher they like of that we should have a functional CEO running our country that gets to decide everything and screw Congress, screw, screw the courts. We should have a King, essentially a CEO that has unlimited power. He also does have a really weird sense of mortality in a way that he wants to be legendary. Again, go back to video games, but I think he wants the glory of it. He has those images in his head, and that’s not by way of excuse. It’s by way of explanation that this is how he looks at himself is on a Grand journey of the hero. He’s not a hero, by the way. Let me be clear. But I think this gets at what to me is one of the mysteries of Musk, because the idea is that he seems committed to have changed. Peter Thiel, who is contemporary, they co-founded PayPal together. But Thiel has always been pretty far. You can go back to things he was writing at Stanford. Musk you go back to say, the Obama era. He’s a kind of standard Obama era liberal. He has a series of companies that are solving problems that are important to Obama era liberals. Those companies survive off of Obama era policies, from government contracts to electric vehicle subsidies. Loan guarantees. Tesla saved by an Obama loan guarantee. And I mean and even in 2017 he joins an advisory board with Trump for. For Trump. And then he gets back off of it when Trump pulls out of the Paris Climate Accords. So you have someone who is running public private partnerships, working endlessly with the government, working on things like climate change. And within a very compressed matter of years, moves very, very far to the right. So I agree that he wants power for his ideas, but it has always been a little bit mysterious to me. What led to this striking radicalization? You’re right. And during Obama, he was supportive when he joined that. We texted a lot during that period. He was on the Trump thing, and he was like, they’re trying to do an anti-gay thing. I’m going to get in there and stop them. Like he was very much I need to be here to change Trump’s mind. I can change it kind of thing. He wasn’t anti-trump, but he certainly wasn’t pro-trump. I can tell you that. He was very much in the he’s kind of a con man school of thought with him around COVID. I saw a lot of changes, around. I talked to him quite a lot. And people give me a hard time for having done that. I get it. But he wasn’t that off the beaten track before. I mean, he was megalomaniacal. He was typical of a tech person, but doing more interesting things. But there was a real shift during COVID. I noticed it, he got very upset. He got very like overly upset and overly dramatic. Look, if you think your company is critical for the future of the human race and then California closes it down because of COVID, you start to get in that mode. That’s one I definitely he got very unreasonable. And in one interview I did with him, he started saying only a few thousand people or whatever. I don’t remember precisely, we’re going to die from COVID. And he had read all the studies and he knew and I didn’t. He’s never liked unions or the government or regulation. That’s that goes way back for all these people. And so it became more profound during COVID. This idea, I think, the issues around his trans daughter seemed to affected him quite profoundly. I’ve noticed that in a number of tech people who have trans children. The second thing I think the Wall Street Journal has correctly reported on is his use of ketamine and other drugs. So I think that was another thing that seemed to have changed him. But although they all use drugs, I know a lot of people use ketamine. They don’t tend to turn that far politically. I think he was doing it himself. He was like the world’s expert. It was also staying up late at night. He has this weird proclivity to be up at 3:00 in the morning and obsessively. He’s got an obsessive personality, we all have that element to us, but he’s got it in spades. And the one thing that I think people I keep saying this to people, and I said it at the time when Biden did not invite him to that EV summit and invited Mary Barra instead and treated him shabbily, he was very upset, very I talked to him a lot about it, or he texted me and other people did too. Other people noticed it too. And this was a summit that Biden had, and he couldn’t invite him because of the Union issues. He was very virulently anti-union, so they didn’t invite him. And he was very upset, personally upset wounded almost. And I even went as far as to call Steve Ricchetti, who works for Biden. And I said, boy, have you made a mistake that you should have you should bear hug this guy. I wouldn’t be, he’s really mad. And Steve Ricchetti, he’s a nice guy. And he’s like oh, it’s the unions. He should understand. He’s a big boy. And I was like, no, he’s not a big boy. The Biden people are all very relational for them to have missed what a relational snub like this could do to somebody with his ego is it’s a mistake at the kind of politics that they were supposed to be. So good at. Well, the thing is, and Steve, again, a lovely guy, I actually ran into him at a movie premiere for wicked, and he goes, guess you were right. I’m like, guess. So the way he takes slights is really strange. I’d seen it in action petty anger and slight slights, and that one really stuck hard. And they kept the Biden people kept tweaking him. And I found that to be a mistake. I mean, you could be like, so what. I’m like, why would you do that. He actually does deserve the he does deserve the accolades around Tesla, right. So why not just give him that. And I never understood why they wouldn’t despite the union stuff. There’s a factor haven’t mentioned here, which is Twitter. So yeah, the Wall Street Journal has a piece from years ago where it just is tracking his number of tweets year by year 2012, 2013, 2014. You begin to see it really explode. 2016 2017 it gets really big. 2018 and I mean, then he’s really off to the races. Yeah, and there’s a lot going on in his use of Twitter. And obviously he eventually buys Twitter and we’ll talk about that. But clearly he becomes very influenced by some quite radically right subcultures on Twitter. Something some the part of Twitter he ends up falling into, whether he looks for it or just gets into it. I don’t know what the chicken and the egg is here, but he doesn’t become a normal Republican. He doesn’t become, in some ways a normal MAGA Republican. He’s not like Steve Bannon or something. No, he falls into a world of Twitter Anons and well, it started off with joking stuff like he liked all those memes, dank memes. He loves dank memes. It’s he’s I always felt when I him so much better than I do. I don’t know him very well at all, but I always felt when I left his presence a couple of times I have been around it. And this was years ago, before he was who he is now. I would tell people he was the smartest 15-year-old boy in the world. Yeah, that’s a very good way to put it. Yeah and so he got really into the memes and this was always a real door into a dark right wing on that particular. It always is. I have experiences with my own son like he loves dank memes he always sends me dank memes or whatever. And you can fall down it. And I think that’s what attracted him to Twitter for sure. And then it took off into a much more a darker place that the other things impacted it. But you know he’s an addictive personality clearly like whether it’s to work or hard core is one of his favorite words, which I find to be hustle porn. So he’s attracted to addiction. And so his Twitter use is you can watch it like you can see it. It’s manic and he’s a manic person. And I think it’s again, not an explanation, not an excuse, but an explanation. He has a manic personality. So there’s also a reality that in a way that is unusual among people of his class, he’s really good at it, good at social media, good at social media, and the way young people are not in the way Barack Obama is. You get I don’t think he’s good the way my kids are cringe. They’re always like, cringe. No, fair enough. But there is an official voice of social media. The voice Mark Zuckerberg used to have before he became an Elon Musk imitator online. The voice that would get from Obama or Bill Gates. Yeah and Musk isn’t in that voice. He’s constantly responding to small follower accounts, and he really does build up an attentional power that he didn’t have before it. He begins to really trade in this coin of attention. He loves attention. He loves attention. But he uses it to drive meme coins higher. He begins, I think to understand in a way other people don’t because he’s experimenting with it what you can turn attention into. What set him apart from some of the other people who superficially looked like him, that made him temperamentally suited to doing that well. His manic nature. It’s got a manic, addictive quality to it. And he does have a sense of humor. It’s not my sense of humor. And people will hate me for saying this, but it can be rather charming. Like when he was on Saturday Night Live. Look, I know I sometimes say or post strange things, but that’s just how my brain works. To anyone I’ve offended, I just want to say I reinvented electric cars. And I’m sending people to Mars in a rocket ship. Did you think I was also going to be a chill, normal dude. He was so awkward that it was charming. And other people are going to say Kara loves him. I don’t care. Go watch it. It is just the way you really have all these people in your life who are surprised that when you brought her, you made him. Oh, Yes. Oh my God. I have to tell you, sometimes the left is so ridiculously censorious. It’s kind of like, I don’t want to use censorious. That’s not there. Just like scold ish. I don’t want to use. They’re not censoring in any way. But Yes, I get a lot of made him like you didn’t know it. Well, I didn’t know how he was treating his kid. I’m sorry. I didn’t know that. And if had I known, I would have also. Did it make him. The car company was successful because the cars were. I was covering him as a car manufacturer. Look, that Silicon Valley is. I’m not going to make an excuse. Silicon Valley has a million people like him. He was very typical, except he was doing more interesting things than other people. So getting back to how he’s good at it, I think the people that are very good, and I once wrote a column about in the times when I was writing for the Times about the two people I thought were very good, which is AOC and Trump. They’re genuine to themselves. Or Kim Kardashian is another person who’s like this. You don’t have to any of these people, but boy, are they good at channeling themselves as an image online. And it feels genuine. It feels like them doing it, and it is them doing it. It feels like it’s their voice, if that makes sense. People love when someone that famous reacts to them and then it creates a sensation around them, right. And so then you get a lot of acolytes Oh my God, Elon Musk responded to me and he feeds off of that too. And again, he combines the humor. He initially combined humor with that or insights to interesting things. And then it very quickly twisted into stuff he doesn’t know anything about. And he just pontificates. And that’s his favorite thing, is to say all manner of nonsense and inaccuracies about things. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about. I remember being at code years ago, and you all had Musk on the stage, and he talked through that. He believed in the simulation hypothesis, which is a hypothesis that you should expect that a sufficiently advanced civilization will begin running simulations of the world. There will be more simulations than there will be base realities. And so by a simple matter of arithmetic, we are likelier to be living in a simulated world than the real world. And Musk said, he bought this and thought there was a pretty. He said there’s a non-zero chance. And it fascinated him again. Well, that’s what I was going to get at, not the simulation. I think people can make too much of whether or not that idea matters. But he has a mind, as always, I think had a mind that is attracted to unusual ideas that the things that most people believe are probably wrong. What you can and can’t do, what isn’t true. And I mean, he has been proven right a number of times, in very, very big, profound ways. Now he’s the richest man in the world. I mean, he has the most attention in the world from where you start to end up there. That’s going to change your psychology. And one thing that then seems true, though, is that he doesn’t just get attracted to unusual ideas, but he gets more conspiratorial as I watch him on Twitter. And I’m curious how you understand that dimension of him. Well Kevin Roose did a great thing about that. You go down this rabbit hole, it really is. It can really be, did this or everybody is subject to it with the way social media works. That’s a mind of technology people. They’re like, this could happen. We could go to the moon. You have to have that element to if you’re going to do very difficult things. And so you have to start with that personality. And therefore anything, every single thing is open to question why do we do it this way. Why do we do it this way. And it’s a personality trait I like. But what it happens is when you start to get out to Ukraine or vaccines or whatever, they have to question everything and posit themselves, I call it. I always joke about it with my wife. Oh, yet another bold truth teller. Like, I’m so tired of them. Like I’m here to boldly tell you the truth without any actual information or reporting. And so he’s attracted to that idea the simulation why can’t we live on Mars. Not everybody does that. And I think when it starts from that, it starts off from a good place. But often in the social media world, as Kevin correctly put out in that podcast he did, is it goes down into the conspiracy theory Avenue really quickly. But it’s a very specific kind of conspiracy theory he gets into. So you have him he responds to someone who tweets at Jews, quote, have been pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them. And Musk replies, you have. You have said the actual truth. In July of 2024, just before he came out in support of Trump, he accused Democrats of quote, trying to import as many illegal voters as possible. And in this way, I think what is going on with him is a little bit distinct from a lot of the people who superficially have similar politics, because I think he’s really bought into a lot of great replacement theory. Yes, a lot of so have a lot of people in Silicon Valley. Let me say he’s not alone. No he’s not. He’s got a cut like this Curtis yarvin stuff. They’ve all been taken by these very it’s almost religious if you think about it. And so one of the things that I think it goes back to and I hate to say this is sad, little boy wasn’t loved enough as a child is searching for meaning, right. Or searching for love searching for. And again, not an excuse because I think he’s become a terrible person and he should get therapy. But when there’s easy answers like that. Oh, this is why you’re so unhappy. Oh, this is why the world is the way it is. These right wing conspiracies do scratch an itch for these people. It’s a religion. It’s their answer to the world. Well, I mean, it’s also a politics. So Musk is South African. Peter Thiel spent much of his childhood in South Africa. David Sacks is South African, and there’s a very distinctive experience there is to being somebody born in or who lived in South Africa during apartheid and also then saw apartheid dismantled, saw South Africa change. I’ve never quite known myself how much weight to put on this interpretation, but it seems relevant. It seems interesting, relevant, and certainly teal, Musk and sacks who are three of the most significant figures in the Silicon Valley embrace of Trump have this. Yeah, a very, very distinctive political experience of watching South Africa’s white minority move from being in control of the country to a frightened minority in the country. I mean, there is that element to a lot of these people. And the same thing with Silicon Valley people. Again, when you merge that with the ideas around Silicon Valley, which is highly male, highly, we have all the answers. Why are these silly people in our way. And with the South African thing, I don’t know what happened there that created this group of people. But you could say that about people who come from Russia or China or there’s an element of a whole bunch of people who emigrated from India. So they bring with them the whatever culture happened there. And in South Africa, you can go one of two ways, right. You can go the Athol Fugard way, or you could go in this more like I this way of longing for past times, I guess, in some fashion. So Musk goes and buys Twitter. It’s a unusual acquisition. He tries to get out of it while it’s happening, but he does buy it and he comes in and he immediately does this huge cutting, just like slashing right through it. And people talk about this as headcount reduction. They talk about it as cutting waste. They talk about it as cutting bone. But I think when you look back on it now, what it both was in reality and also and you would know more about this than me. But what it becomes culturally in Silicon Valley is the reassertion of control. That’s of a CEO over an annoying and overly empowered, absolutely liberal employee base. CEOs loved it. Yeah talk a little bit about not exactly just what he did, but what the cultural effect of what he did was on his cohort. Well, I think what was really interesting is a lot of these guys, I use this in the Chinese have tiny Dick energy. I don’t know what else to say. They just they want they want to be big swinging dicks. And they won’t do it, right. They won’t go there because they’re worried about what people will say or everyone watching each other, and this guy goes in and just does it. Silicon Valley. The employees run the show like they really do. They like to get their lunches. They like to get their cars, their dry cleaning. They like to speak up. And by the way, they started it. Like Google, starting with having the employees talk back every Friday. What do you think was going to happen. They’re going to the kids Facebook having a Friday meeting where Mark Zuckerberg answers employee questions I hear you. And they all create the internal chat software, right. Everybody has Slack and teams where it allows employees to be speaking in a way that they can organize that speech even without unions. They gave power to their employees. And I had a discussion. I don’t think it was Mark where I was like, now they’re talking back. I’m like, what did you think they were going to do. You indulge and you indulged children for long enough and give them sugar all day long. They’re going to become terrible people like what I mean. And so that they were surprised by this is what happened when they created these cultures I’m always surprised by. So they have all these employees that annoy them. So they let them say whatever they wanted, and then they said whatever they wanted. And then they were annoyed by them saying whatever they wanted. And they found it very hard to push back because their talent is at a premium in Silicon Valley. So you have to let everybody be themselves. And it got annoying for a lot of these people, because they had effective control over things. But with Musk, when he did it, you could see everybody in Silicon Valley. They wanted to be him. Oh, he gets to do that. I don’t get to do that. I have to listen to my diversity, equity, inclusion. People like oh, I hate those people but he doesn’t have to. He can do whatever he wants. And when he did that and cut people, they wanted to do that too. This feels to me like part of the COVID era radicalization that happened to the Silicon Valley CEO class, that something happening during COVID, during the rise of various reckonings of MeToo of Black Lives Matter. I really think it has a lot to do with the rise of Slack and teams and things like that. I think it’s a very underrated dimension of what changed the relationship between irritating between the bosses and their employees. It feels to me like a lot of the CEOs just hated their employees, and what radicalized them was that they had lost control of their companies. And they wanted that control back. And that as much as anything, feels to me like the theory Musk is importing now to the government, it’s not. He’s talked about cutting spending and cutting waste. What he’s trying to get for Trump or for him is control. It’s the rid me of this annoying priest kind of thing rid me of these people. Again, it’s like a King thing. The way they set up their companies is a kingship Mark Zuckerberg has complete control. He can’t be fired. He’s there for life, dictator for life, or whatever the joke you want to make. And so they like that. But it’s not in practice. It doesn’t work that way because he’s got reporters annoying him like irritating reporters. He’s got his staff. He’s got to at least give a nod to diversity, or else he gets shamed. And he doesn’t have the he doesn’t have the fortitude that Musk has in that regard. And so they themselves are trying to assert themselves in what they consider a man. This is the definition of what a man is. A lot of them were not considered manly when they were in high school, or revenge of the nerds kind of thing. So they are trying to hold on to all these kind of manly cosplaying, I guess, with Mark, it’s the stupid chain and the t-shirt, which good luck. It’s fine. I think it looks ridiculous, but fine. He likes it or the MMA. Like I can feel like a man, they hold on or I’m going to hydrofoil or I’m going to do or work out. I’m going to show off my muscles. That’s what Bezos is doing. Like, here’s my muscles, here’s my pretty fiance kind of thing. They have. They’re trying to cosplay a version of a man that I think it seems pathetic to me, but I think it gives them great comfort. One of the Rosetta stones to me of the intellectual shift happening among this class was I forgot now exactly when this was. But when Musk and Zuckerberg were talking about having a fight in a cage. And this is all I mean, this has its own funny subthemes, where Zuckerberg is taking it all incredibly earnestly, and Musk is clearly mocking him the whole time. Totally and so there’s a whole dynamic where they don’t have the cage match, which Zuckerberg would win, but actually Musk wins because what he was doing was making fun of Mark Zuckerberg. But they didn’t like each other. Just to be clear, they didn’t like each other. But then there’s a third here. So there’s an Allen and company conference, one of these big CEO tech conferences, and Andreessen is asked about it, and he ends up sending out his answer on his Substack. And he basically says, I think it’s great if they fight because we’ve lost all the masculine virtues of the Greeks, and if it was good enough for the Greeks, it’s good enough for us. And one of the things happening, it seems to me, in the right wing intellectual subculture these guys are increasingly part of but also among them is a sense that the world has feminized and that the masculine virtues of aggression, of combat, of conflict, of daring, of risk, of just making decisions and to hell with it has been diminished. And that the thing that is needed is some kind of correction, that modernity is going off the rails because we are becoming womanly and soft. And I guess this class of VCs and tech founders is going to show us our way back to. Well, they don’t like women to start with. Come on. They don’t like them to start with. So this is not a shouldn’t be a surprise that don’t like the ladies kind of thing. Well, they intellectualized it is what I think becomes interesting here. What’s interesting about what you’re saying and it’s absolutely true. Let’s start. They don’t have women in their midst. I wrote a piece once say the men and no the men and no women of Facebook. And Mark got hurt by it. And I like, what. I’m just putting up pictures of your management. I don’t know what to tell you. Like you hired them. They’re very fixated on what a man is and how to behave. And what’s really interesting, especially Marc Andreessen. I mean, if he could jog like 10 feet, I’d be surprised. Like talking about the manly virtues. Give me a break. I mean, when he said that, I’m like, I could beat him up in five seconds. Like, I don’t even understand where this comes from. But they know he’s going to challenge me to a fight. Whatever so so it’s a concept of what a man is. That is not what a man is. But they’ve decided it is now of all these people, Elon didn’t cosplay a lot like that. Like he didn’t, except now he’s starting to wear the cowboy hats and that whole nonsense that he’s doing. But he actually didn’t as much as they did. And now they take all their cues from his aggression, which is kind of interesting. Yeah, that was the thing I was going to get at with Zuckerberg, too. When I think back on that fight, they were going to have. And Zuckerberg for a minute seemed to be positing himself as the Elon foil. He would challenge him to a fight. He was having threads Elon had x And now you see Zuckerberg copying him. I mean, the way he engages on Threads is the way Elon engages on Twitter. Yeah soccer is such a beta. He’s such AI love saying that. But there is this deep way in which Musk seems to have reset the culture, or at least been the signal that allowed a lot of the people who weren’t quite ready to come out and say how they’ve been feeling themselves to move. He led a lot of the flood towards Trump of tech leaders. And now is like showing oh, you can actually turn this into political power in a way that I think nobody quite realized you could do directly. I mean, Peter Thiel, I think for better or worse, gets a lot of credit for he supported Trump early. He made his bets. But Thiel didn’t try to wield the power himself. Thiel makes bets and watches them pay off or not. But Musk is going in and showing. Oh, it could just be. You could not only have all this power as a technology CEO, you could be one of the most important celebrities in the world, and you could be functionally shadow president Oh, you didn’t figure this out. I figured it out. Yeah Zuckerberg hid from the attention. Zuckerberg never liked the he liked the acclaim, but he never liked the shit that went with it. And so that’s why he didn’t push all the way through. And that was interesting. And Musk does have this guts to do that. I’m going to do it no matter what. But if I get attacked, in fact, I eat my attackers for breakfast, right. I love my attack. Well, this is Trump’s personality, too. I mean, the thing they seem to me to be is temperamentally, actually quite similar. It takes a very unusual personality to be shameless at that level. The amount of genuine hatred you need to absorb there is a decision they both made that if you want to really wield power, you have to be willing to be hated. And one of the things most of us are not willing to do is to be truly hated, and most CEOs are not willing to be truly hated. It seems like bad business, if nothing else, that disinhibition is, to me, central to their alliance. Well, they do care though. Underneath they Trump wants nothing more than to have the New York Times’ love him. Like you can feel it. Like you the sense of victim. Say this. I don’t buy it anymore. Maybe he did once. I don’t buy it anymore, I do. I think they both care quite a bit of what people think. I think they care almost too much what people think. And so I think it fuels their rage in a lot of ways. I think they will never not. There is a little piece of them that is never not going to care about what people think of them, and they become more and more emboldened by that. It fuels it’s the center of their rocket fuel, I think. I mean, there might be some truth to that as rocket fuel for them. I just think that at a certain point, you lose a belief that these people are even friends you still want to have. And that’s I think, what real radicalization is. Absolutely radicalization, I think, often takes just the normal, pluralistic give and take. We’re all in this together off the table. It becomes an all out war. And I do think Trump and a very and in a different way, but in some ways, a more I think intellectualized way. Musk now see this as all out war. And you have to gain control if you don’t. I mean, he was on Rogan’s show saying that there would be no more elections if Trump didn’t win this time. I mean, Musk has really gone into the civilizational battle, right. He clearly believes in some level of great replacement theory. He’s now trying to get the far right AFD elected in Germany, try to get labor out of power in the UK. He said that the other day and this to me gets it a way that I’m curious if you think he’s changed for a very long time. The line on Musk was that everything is backwards from his belief that eventually the human needs to be a interplanetary species. He does think that and well, I’m sure he does think that but he sure seems to be more concerned with the demographic balance of the United States and a handful of Northern European countries. Well, look at all his children like he manifests himself by having so many children and seemingly not spending time with them, except for one. He wants to he wants to have children, not necessarily be a parent, which I think is an interesting thing to plumb at some point. So what is the goal that now motivates him. Do you really believe it’s still the interplanetary thing, or is it a view that these countries are losing their cultures. And if you lose those cultures, then everything is lost. I do think it does manifest from the need to get off this planet. I do, I do. I think that’s everything that is the one consistent thing since I met him, which is this idea that civilization is doomed and therefore we need to get off this planet. I think at their heart, they do believe the version of themselves is the greatest version of man. Which would be a white guy Supreme kind of thing. I think they actually believe that at their heart. And so you’re going to see that manifested in these statements that he makes all the time, which are very clearly like I forget what he said, but essentially we need more South Africans here in this country or something like that. And he’s always pulling in that direction. I have never heard him express any kind of what I would consider. I’ve heard different CEOs express racism. His is a different kind. It’s more around social engineering and the idea that the best people are being replaced. I think that’s really where he lives, which is also racist, of course. So to you, the synthesis of these positions is that Musk is still motivated by the desire to become interplanetary, but he just believes that we are corroding the civilizational virtues and genius that you would need to do that by with DEI and the woke mind virus. Everything is in the way of our getting somewhere else because the lesser people are in charge or the lesser people. He does talk about this a lot of at one point he was tweeting about cesarean sections. Did you see that tweet where he said, if you have a cesarean, you have a better brain because your brain comes out better because you’re not going through the vaginal canal. This whole thing he was talking about. And I’ve had a cesarean. So I was like, sit down, sir. Don’t know what you’re talking about. But he that was a really interesting thing. Everyone passed people by, but I was like oh, he thinks you have to preserve the birth. Like he’s eugenics, almost like what I mean. Like, it was such a weird thing for him to go down that Avenue, but he has these theories about human brains and development. Obviously, he’s involved with Neuralink, so he’s always been interested in the idea of machine people merging together. That’s certainly an area that hasn’t been plumbed enough. His Neuralink stuff. And so if you put all this together and bring it back to the government, it sounds to me like if I pull out what you’re saying here, what you have is someone who, in order for humanity to achieve its long term goals, you need people like Elon Musk in control of a federal government that is responsive to people like Elon Musk, purged of the forces that were not responsive, that slow down a person like Elon Musk in a polity that isn’t infected by these modern, progressive ideas of equity, of consensus, of doing all these things that are just slow and burdensome and regulatory and soft and don’t allow for the risk and the daring that allow you to blow up 90 rockets. And so that is that your view of the put it all to together that he’s trying to functionally make the federal government, something that can be effectively controlled by people like him to get to the goals he wants to get to. Yeah, I think he thinks they’re in the way. This goes back to Peter Thiel. Peter Thiel is everyone’s like Oh, they want to reform it. I go, no, no, no. They want to burn it down and start again. Like that is if you read if you spend time reading Peter Thiel, that is what he’s saying. Democracy doesn’t work. It doesn’t work. We’re going to start with something else. And so they don’t want. And that is of the ethos move fast and break things. Which is a software term they want to break. They don’t want to build, they want to break and they can’t build until you break. And that’s disruption. Think of all the words they use. It’s all about destruction. And it’s not creative destruction. It’s let’s wipe the slate clean and then we will build the civilization we want. And let us, let us show you the way of how we can get back to glory kind of thing. And, it’s just that theory. But they burnish it with this techno utopianism that is really techno authoritarianism. If you break it down that they know best. And that is we just listened to them. The world would be a better place for everybody to try to be generous to it as a theory of governmental reform, which I know you like to do, that I try. I think democracy has worked pretty fucking well, but go ahead. So Musk has said regulations basically should be default gone, not default. They’re default gone. If it turns out that we missed the mark on a regulation, we can always add it back in. And so if you take the view that we have a long time stable government, it is there’s a lot of cost, a lot of bureaucracy that the theory here, which I guess is also theory from Twitter is like, Yes, you read it, you turn things off, you turn them back on cut hugely. And if there’s a problem, then you go fix a problem later. But better to cut deeper and then be able to rebuild in a cleaner way than to cut not deep enough to only get a quarter loaf. And politics is normally does not go that far in reform. It’s very, very hard to reform institutions. And there are real problems from that. I mean, San Francisco works quite poorly. Much of the federal government leaves something to be desired. So is there a case to be made here for Musk that he is doing what normal political reformers won’t do and taking risk in order to do it. But this is actually the only way to actually create a federal bureaucracy that is not quite so sclerotic. No, I think it’s not. Not at all. I think I’m a reformed person. Obviously, everything’s not going to happen at once. There is an ease to tearing it all down, isn’t there. And it has to be a willingness to sacrifice people. We’re going to sacrifice this group of people, this young, these young women, these young. They don’t care about that. And one of the things I say over and over again. They’re like, I have a lot of people like, how can they do this. How can do this. I’m like, they don’t care. They don’t care for you. They don’t think about. You are nothing. And I remember one time we were. Musk was the earliest person to talk to me about AI. AI has been around forever, but he was really concerned about the impact of AI on the humanity. That was another thing. He was the first person to raise those alarms. To me, at least when he started OpenAI with Sam and the rest of them. First he was like, AI is going to kill us. It’s going to kill like the Terminator idea. It’s going to become self-aware in 20, whatever. And then it’s going to turn around and bomb us and kill us and start again. And we got to stop that. That was his theory. Next time I saw him, he thought it was. I thought he came up with a much more sophisticated idea of it, which was, they’re not going to kill us. They’re going to treat us like house cats. We’re house cats, and they’re fine with us here, and they’re going to build everything around us. But we’re not in danger. We’re in danger in the way house cats are. As long as they like house cats, we’re fine. Like they don’t think of us as anything more. Then the next time I saw him, he had. He had evolved into this idea that I was more like building highways. The way we build highways across the country and humanity is a bunch of anthills, and we go across anthills without thinking when we’re building roads. We don’t know that the anthills are there. We just do it. I thought the progression was really interesting to me, that’s how he was looking at it, and to me, that’s how he I thought he was expressing how he operates. These things are anthills. I don’t have to think about them because we never think about them. And so to me, that was a really interesting progression of first. The first one cares about what happens to humanity. The last one doesn’t. I like that progression of metaphors, because very classically, what you put into the metaphor reveals what you can see and not see out of the metaphor. And I think the dominant comparison for what Musk is doing is Twitter, where he came in and used in some ways, a very similar playbook to cut through it and take control of it. But during that period, Twitter broke down terribly. Its advertising collapsed. It’s still a much jankier platform than it used to be. I mean, it has things it didn’t have before rock, but the search doesn’t work. One thing that just strikes me when I look at what Trump is outsourcing to Musk right now is I wonder if they have really thought about the risk they’re taking on. No, because I’ve never seen an administration come in and so completely own everything bad that might happen that the federal government does or is supposed to regulate in the coming years. If you imagine something like the terrible plane crash that happened just recently, happening in a year when pushed retirements have happened, have come through the FAA. And Musk had already pushed the administrator of the FAA to be on leave or resign. You would get a lot more blame for that. But bad things happen all the time that the federal government is supposed to stop financial crises and on and on and on. They’re coming with this ax to the government pushing indiscriminate resignations, reassigning people, pushing out very talented career staff. Anything that goes wrong, they are truly going to own. Yes, but they won’t. They will not. They will not. They will say it is not them. It was. We’re cleaning up from the previous right. They will not take control because one. Ezra, you think they care about consequences. One of the messages in my book. I think they care about power. They don’t care about the consequences of damage. They do not care. They don’t anticipate it. You write about Twitter. It’s a lesser business. The only way he’s getting advertisers is by threatening them. Like they’re just doing these lawsuits and of course, these advertisers are going to go back just to act, to acquiesce to him. I mean, now he has power. Not a better way to pay him off. Tesla’s not a better business than what it was because they haven’t innovated the cars that stock may be going up, but the sales are going down because the cars aren’t as good. They just aren’t. So he doesn’t care about the actual thing. These people don’t care about the actual thing. They care about laying waste to it. And then we’ll build something better. But I don’t know what they’re going to build better if you press them. And a lot of these same thing with the media that goes with it. It’s never about solutions, is it. It’s about how everything sucks and we have to get rid of it. They never tell you what their replacement is for any of it because they don’t have any. They don’t have a theory of building. They have a theory of destruction. Trump just with the water thing. He just like, we got to get the water flow. What a disaster. That was what he just did. Like in California, he’s wasting water opening reservoirs for no reason, no reason to fight fires going on. And then the whole group of people going, sir. Well done. I’m like, are you fucking like, who is not standing there among the media going, are you fucking kidding me with this. Like not going, well, sir. People say I’d be like, that’s why they don’t let me in the White House. I’m like, are you fucking kidding me. That was a disaster. Like what you just did, you idiot. I think back to To Twitter on the control question because Musk buys Twitter, he breaks a lot of Twitter. He breaks the business of Twitter. Clearly, he’s overpaying at $44 billion. And so, I would have told you, a year ago, 18 months ago that didn’t work out. But what he did actually do is he made Twitter a channel for him personally. That’s right. And he turned all of its attention and influence into something he could control. And I don’t know if the power he’s getting out of that or will get out of that is worth $44 billion, I don’t think I don’t think it’s exactly the way to measure it, but I actually think it’s worth more than that. I don’t think it would be possible for Musk to play this role in both domestic and now international politics, if he didn’t do that. We don’t know how to value attention. It’s the best investment he made. It’s exactly. Except for except for investing in Trump that $280 million. Let me tell you the only person when he bought it, we were all, what in the world. Why is he paying so much. What an idiot. Everybody was saying that was the. Well, he was too. He tried to get out of it. He tried to get that it was overvalued. Stupid, right. Because he wasn’t anticipating what he could use it for. He didn’t realize he had a really big gun there, right. He thought it was a knife or whatever. The only person who called me was Mark Cuban. And he says, Kerry, he’s not buying it. Like, maybe he doesn’t know he’s doing this, but when he goes in a room internationally as the head of Tesla or Starlink, I mean, he gets a meeting just like the head of GM or Lockheed gets. And world leaders, et cetera when he goes in as the owner of Twitter, he has enormous power globally from an influence point of view. He goes, this is not a US play. This is a global play. And I was like. I think Mark was 100 percent right. He bought it and it gave him an he’s the Twitter guy and also Tesla and also but he gets no one else has that right. And maybe back in the day Rupert Murdaugh. I guess. And that’s what he’s done. But bigger, better, stronger, more influential. Rupert Murdaugh would never think of sitting with Trump cutting this stuff. Well, Murdaugh didn’t want to be the main character of his own platform, but he is kind of Rupert Murdaugh now, right. I totally agree with that. Murdaugh, who likes to do shit, I’ve said the same thing. I think that’s the absolutely correct comparison. But that, I think then brings us to the government, which is he may not know what he wants to build after it, but what I think that at least the Twitter experience probably taught him is if you break it, you can control it, you can make it a vehicle for you. And if it’s filled with the old people who were in it, and they’re unafraid and they have power and there are power centers, then you’re opposed. I don’t know what if even he knows what he wants to do with the government, but the degree to which he wants everybody to see that it is him doing it. I thought it was so telling that in the email they sent out to federal employees, persuaded trying to tell them you could get money and do nothing until September if you would just retire that he gave it the same subject line as the email I sent out to Twitter employees during that buyout. He wanted everybody to know it was him. Exactly right. He wants to be the main character of the whole thing, as you said at the beginning. As you said that. I Thank God you said that because all the media is look at this interesting thing. I’m like, he wants you to know it’s a signature. It’s me. Fredo I know it was, Fredo. Like, he totally wanted people. Everything he does, he wants you to know. Because, again, he is a desperate attention sponge, and he just needs constant, constant. Why would you stay up at night talking to people, named cat turd? Why I’m not a psychologist, but boy, does he have a big old hole right in the center of himself. And so what I think is very telling about both of these people is they do not have solutions. They only tell us what the problem is, and they don’t have a vision. Even Ronald Reagan had a vision like they all have. What is your vision. What do you want to make. Except get out of my way and let me do what I want to do. That’s really the vision that I can tell. I haven’t heard what they want to make at all. He does seem a bit, there’s this idea of the sin eater in fantasy novels. I forget exactly where it comes from, but. But, it’s the character that consumes sin and then can be purged. You can purge that figure, and then the sins are gone. It’s a sacrificial character. It’s Jesus, I think. And in a way, it. Musk I wonder a bit about that in terms of the pain of the administrative war that Trump and the people around him wanted to do. I mean, when I think about when this starts to go bad, assuming this starts to go bad, Musk taking so much credit for it all makes him so usefully sacrificial. Totally when the people in Moscow are more careful and quiet, the Susie Wiles is the Russ votes, the rest of them who are not. Have you noticed that they’re all leaking. We don’t have control of him. Yeah, there’s a lot of leaking already that we can’t control. Musk such that the moment he becomes more liability than asset, you can get rid of him. He’s like, well we went too far right. Elon Musk got out of control. That wasn’t us. I don’t know that it happens. And he has leverage he can bring to a fight like that. But it doesn’t seem impossible that it happens. And you can see people setting up that escape route as we speak. Utterly Trump’s life is full of those people. And now he’s got the greatest one ever. Michael Cohen, was that the fixer? So there’s always a fixer in Trump’s life who does these things, who’s willing to go to the mat and for their boss, for the boss. Which he likes to be called, apparently. So Musk is that writ large. It’s just that he’s much more protected because he’s so wealthy. He has so much means that he almost is more powerful than he’s not a minion. He’s a super minion or something. How real do you think the affection between the two of them is. Donald Trump is like he has what, three emotions. A, BC like I don’t think he’s very complex in that regard. I did think they were going to fight and I know he’s irritating to Trump. You hear that from a lot of people. And I think it’s absolutely true. He probably is irritating at the same time. Trump loves money. So really that seems that’s at the heart of him. I think he’s useful. I think Donald Trump finds him useful and he is useful to Donald Trump. He’s a useful junkyard dog. And so I think he’ll and he has a lot of money. So if he has a cudgel against these senators, he’s going to give me money to take you out like I’ve got a bank, a bank that never ends, essentially. He also knows he needs him to hold on to power, because what does it look like when they fight. What does that look like. You don’t want Elon Musk outside the tent. That’s a really bad place for Elon Musk to be. And angry because he’s shown he has an ability to fight back at people. So ultimately it could go on for a while, and he could do more and more outlandish things and behave in more and more outlandish ways. Trump has an endless capacity for Oh, did he say a racist thing I don’t care. So I think it could go on for a very, very long time. I’ve been struck, though, to see Trump already talking about trying to make clear that Elon is under his control. I told him what he said. He said, quote, Elon can’t do and won’t do anything without our approval and we’ll give him the approval where appropriate. We’re not appropriate. We won’t. And then there’s this endless leaking from inside the administration that nobody’s actually in control of him. Trump is not paying attention to what he’s doing. And I think not. I think both things are actually true, that Trump could say no to him, but actually Trump doesn’t care. And so the danger for both of them, in a strange way, is that Musk, who is hyper empowered and has a very, very, almost endless appetite for risk, takes a risk that blows up for all of them. What could. What could that be. What is he like. Detonate a nuclear bomb. You break the. You break the government, and things are going to break. I mean, you have to have a very. I’m not saying you do, but. But you have to have a very dim view of government to believe that if you get rid of this many talented people in it, that when bad things begin to happen in the world and they happen constantly. I mean, there is a pandemic in Trump’s first in his first term, but Trump in his first term had this real interesting capacity to always seem like he was outside of the state that he in theory, ran. That’s right. He spoke as if he was up in the balcony jeering at the opera. He was watching. And that always gave him this strange ability to separate himself from how a government that he didn’t worked. That was the whole political utility of the deep state. But this they’ve torched that. I mean, I know they might still try to claim it. But when you do this kind sound of a bulldozer tactic. And it’s this public and you are absorbing all this risk and pushing these people out. Then when things break and people go back and they look and they say, well, a bunch of the people here, they actually took the buyout. They took your fork in the road. Ellen, I could be wrong. It could all work out great for them. But they are taking they are taking a lot of risk. You think you’re operating on the idea they care about the pain. They don’t care. They won’t take responsibility for it. Have you heard Mark Zuckerberg take responsibility for any of this. I think Trump cares about pain, though. I mean, look at how quickly he backed off on his tariffs of Canada and Mexico when the markets began to move. You can lose midterm elections really badly. And then all of a sudden the investigations are coming for you. Which is probably what will happen. That’s the likeliest scenario here. I mean, one of the things that he’s got to keep Musk around for that is the money on these things to manipulate things to really flood the zone with all kinds of money and efforts to win that midterms. But again, they don’t care. He has done the damage as long as he destroys it and you can’t come back is what they’re doing in Musk’s mind. My guess is that he thinks this is the only way to do it is to get rid of everything. They’re hoping you focus so much on the destruction that you’re not going to notice you’re living in a destroyed place, and I know you think there’s bigger implications, but you won’t. You’ll see. They’ll be all over the place. They’ll be so all over the place. It’ll be hard to figure out what actually has been destroyed or to feel a sense of anger. What’s going to happen is people are going to feel a sense of just nihilism, right. I think that’s what’s going to happen. I mean, I do think that’s often the emotion that they are attempting to provoke. I want to ask you, before we end a question about the broader Silicon Valley tech culture here, you’ve had this big, almost Herd like movement towards this. I forgot what you called it, a techno, a techno authoritarian authoritarianism. Yeah and it’s been so fast and so intense among the leaders, the cultural leaders of Silicon Valley. The people with the biggest social media accounts. And they’re all at the Trump inauguration. Do you see a counterforce when you think of the cultural currents there. Is it all just moving this direction, or are the employees moving in this direction. Are the people coming up like, what is the contrarian bet in terms of this intellectual culture, which I mean was very different 10 years ago than where it is now when everybody was pro-obama. They weren’t pro-biden, I can tell you that they were not pro-biden and they hated it, but they hated Donald Trump in 2016, with the exception of teal. So it moves very fast. And so whenever it moves as fast and as far as it has now, it makes me wonder where it’s going to be in four years. I’m curious if you have a sense of who you’re watching as signals of that. There’s a few people. Reed Hoffman was just on the podcast. This week. I sense fear in him. He funded the Eugene Carrel thing. He’s a very lovely person and he’s very, even handed all the time to almost to a fault. I don’t think he’s going to be as aggressive. And he certainly was right. But he’s got to be thinking, what do I do. I’m very exposed, right. You have a Mark Cuban who I think, presents a different alternate. He claims to me he doesn’t want to run for president. I think he has a real opening Oh, come on, this is not the way we are. I don’t think everyone’s moved there. I think most of the there’s these loudmouths like Musk and David Sacks and and that gang and even Peters not that loudmouthed these days, which is interesting, I find interesting. But you have the loudmouths and but I don’t think everyone is on this ticket. Like if you noticed didn’t see Tim Cook in the front row. That was the greatest feat of engineering in history, was somehow he didn’t have to be in that picture. I have never thought Silicon Valley was liberal. I thought they were utilitarian. I guess I thought they were tolerant socially, but didn’t really care. Didn’t think about it much. I think these people just want to do their business. I don’t think they support Trump. I think it’s like a vague right, whether you’re Bob Iger or whether you’re anybody you’ve got to pay the vig or you don’t have a choice right now. I don’t think there’s a deep well of support for Trump. I think it’s just there’s a bunch of loudmouths that have that, and everyone else just shakes their head. So when that’s the case, there tends to be a countervailing force of these guys are shakedown artists, right. When they say, as you say, disaster will come and this will be a big fucking mess, they will line up in that direction because it’s good for them and for their shareholders. So whatever it takes for shareholders to do better, they will. If Trump tanks the stock market, if Trump tanks this, they’ll be on the opposite side instantly because they have no real values. They just don’t. Elon has more values than most of them in a weird way, even though they’re warped and twisted. So I think they’ll just go whatever way the financial markets go. That’s my feeling. I think that’s a good place to end. Our final question what are three books you would recommend to the audience. Oh, God, interesting I can’t. One of them, I can’t say. Well, there’s a memoir coming out from a very well-known media person that once it publishes, you should read. I’m reading it right now, and I can’t say who it is because he gave it to me on the sly. I think it’s wonderful. I love the book North Woods by Daniel Mason, which came out last year, which is about a house, the history of a house, and the people who lived in it. And it’s haunting me. I think it’s the most beautiful book. And I love Daniel Mason. I’m reading the piano tuner right now. I’m reading all his stuff. But this book just it’s about one of the things that comforts me in this very difficult time. I have four kids. I’m a gay person. It’s nerve wracking right now. I thought this was all over and here we are again. But it gives me comfort that we’ll all be dead someday. Like, I know it sounds crazy, but life goes on over the period. And so I really like that book. And then I recently interviewed him and I think he’s terrific. Tim Snyder. I think he’s a really important person talking about where tyranny goes and stuff like that. I read a lot more nonfiction. I should read more fiction. And I’m sorry. I’m going to give one more. Geraldine Brooks, who is a wonderful writer. She won, I think the Pulitzer or whatever her book, she’s mostly done fiction. She’s written a book about the death of her husband. That is incredible. Tony Horowitz, who is a friend of mine, Geraldine is a friend of mine. He wrote confederates in the attic, and it’s a beautiful rumination on mortality and history. I don’t just a wonderful book. Kara Swisher Thank you very much. O.K, good.
This is an edited transcript of an episode of “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the conversation by following or subscribing to the show on theNYT Audio App,Apple,Spotify,Amazon Music,YouTube,iHeartRadioorwherever you get your podcasts.
At the beginning, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency seemed to have a fairly narrow mandate. The Trumpexecutive ordercreating it says that the purpose of D.O.G.E. is “modernizing federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity.”
But in the last couple of weeks, it has become clear that Musk’s role is a whole lot larger than that. He has gained access to information technology systems, dismantled the U.S. Agency for International Development and unleashed a fire hose of attacks on his platform, X, accusing the bureaucracy of various conspiratorial crimes.
And so far, at least, Musk’s patron, Donald Trump, seems to be on board.
Archived clip of Donald Trump:I think he’s doing a great job. He’s a smart guy, very smart, and he’s very much into cutting the budget of our federal government.
As I’ve watched all this unfold, I’ve been wondering how Elon Musk has evolved: How did he go from a conventional Obama-era liberal who worried about climate change and wanted to go to Mars to a right-wing conspiratorial meme lord, working to elect the far-right in Germany and shred the federal government in the United States?
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What led to this evolution for Elon Musk? And what actual strategies is he bringing to the government that he now seems to have quite a lot of control over?
To talk about all this, I wanted to invite Kara Swisher on the show. Kara is one of the great tech reporters of this age. She’s been covering Musk for many years, along with many of the other tech chief executives who have become such key political figures now. She’s, of course, a host of the great podcasts “On With Kara Swisher” and “Pivot,” which she co-hosts with Scott Galloway, as well as the author of “Burn Book: A Tech Love Story.”
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