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 charade.

It's a very 2024 sentence.

Just speaking of like pipelines, can I show you this?

Christmas season has always been my favorite time of the year.

It's the 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 Thiel.

It's backed by

H A L L O

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 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 decuntification 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 flavor 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,

ex-partner or girlfriend, yeah.

All right.

Well, this is why I have you.

Fuck.

Ex-whatever they had going on.

Grimes,

who was queen of Tumblr gays way back when.

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 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 deja vu a little bit.

We're ramping, I mean, we're our day job as New York Times reporters, so we're ramping up to cover essentially his every move.

And in some ways, 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.

So we're about to be very,

very busy, I guess.

I am super excited to have Ryan here because,

I mean, I'm so excited to have both of you here.

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 quite the first, but I think the second.

So that's huge.

Happy to be a follower.

I tread

in the footsteps of a pioneer.

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 spirals that they take.

I did an episode that was structurally similar to this one with Natalie Wynne about J.K.

Rowling.

And I think J.K.

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 going to 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.

And we see this time and time again, this kind of characteristic play out in his decision-making and his life.

And I feel like that's a 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 J.K.

Rowling, they take it to like a pathological extent, where it's like you are so unwilling to ever accept 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, 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 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 in 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.

Children aren't going to be infected by this virus, just really kind of going against the grain.

And I think 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 J.K.

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 bat.

Like 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 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 US and with Tesla and all of this stuff.

Kind of the greatest insight I have into Elon Musk's childhood is actually when

Azealia Banks, who we could do a different episode about, called him apartheid Clyde, which I don't, I have no affinity for Azealia Banks, but every now and then she yields, she yields a gem of a term and apartheid Clyde maybe was one of them.

She really has, I mean, away with words.

But yeah, Ryan, I don't know.

Do you want to kind of walk through his upbringing?

Yeah, he grew up, 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 mom and his father.

There are variations of the story where the father is apparently abusive

psychologically, you know, and that weighs on him.

He talks about being bullied in school and that being sort of formative for him, but also was fairly bright.

You know, he read a lot of science fiction.

He was into computer programming and building games on his computer.

You know, there's a discussion of like how privileged and how wealthy he was growing up.

There's that meme of, you know, an emerald mine, which is always discussed when it comes 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?

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 some, you know, family wealth.

It wasn't like he was destitute in any way or lower class, but he had a pretty middle to upper class upbringing.

His parents were successful.

His father ended up contributing to a lot of his early startups and giving them kind of some funding there.

But the Emerald Mine is something that just becomes up over and over again just to show that

he had this upbringing,

and it's something that's talked about regularly online when someone argues, oh,

he had this success because

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 some privilege that has to be considered

when you talk about his early history.

But, you know, grew up in South Africa, came or moved to Canada and eventually to the US to go to school.

He goes to the University of Pennsylvania and then moves to California to start a graduate program at Stanford that he actually never begins, you know, and that 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, and then SpaceX.

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 his childhood abuse really shaped his character and who he is today.

And he's talked a little bit about undergoing more like verbal emotional abuse from his dad and then also being bullied in school, getting beat up at school, stuff like that.

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 sort of like move down a new path.

And then there's a second path that I think Musk has been more active in pursuing 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 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 really core to his identity 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, you know, I don't have empathy, you know, and it's like a justification for all the bad behavior.

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 in life that don't end up becoming unempathetic or, 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 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 like during the Obama era.

I wasn't aware of a lot of things during the Obama era.

I was a depressed high schooler, a senior child psychologist, but

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 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 he getting people to Mars is like a very central thing to him.

And for most people in the Valley, that's kind of like a, what are you talking about?

You're weird, you're weird, man kind of thing.

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 big libertarian streak in the valley.

That'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 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 fairly liberal.

I remember like digging into some of his charitable giving at the time.

He gave to some Democratic politicians.

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 in support of gay marriage, I think, you know, socially liberal causes that were accepted in places 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, no one would pay attention to them.

He wasn't like a known quantity at the time.

He was a kind of a a quirky figure 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 or politically involved.

You know, and they were 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 tech industry.

You know, one of Trump's first actions was to try to enact this Muslim ban.

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 Friends of the Court briefs to challenge that ban in court.

Then this sort of era of tech skepticism rolls in, right?

You have the 2017 revelations of Cambridge Analytica and like how tech had sort of been manipulated and used to manipulate the vote.

You know, you have sort of like the fall of Travis Kalinek in there and all the criticism that came of that of Uber, and a lot of criticism of the culture of these companies that were espousing ideas of diversity and really still remaining dominated by white men and not really opening up the ranks to other people to come in and work in these companies.

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 embraced the Democratic Party and then they were criticized by it, they were like

cut down by it, and now they've turned and swayed themselves more to the place where they're getting praise and they're getting acceptance, and that's coming more from the right these days.

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 and the Obama office to talk about space policy and push for the privatization of certain launches, you know, and space activity, which he eventually gets and becomes effectively like the main way that the 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,

if you look at how he talks about Obama these days, it's still in a very like nostalgic, very friendly.

demeanor.

It's actually used to contrast with how his relationship with Biden has gone.

It's like, you know,

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 where the Democratic Party has gone.

This is what has pushed me towards the right.

And I guess it can't be understated how strong his connection 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 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 in being pictured next to Joe Biden.

Yeah, I guess.

But like 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 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 normy 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 normy.

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 cited in the book of like, he, he says, like, you know, I don't get this Twitter thing.

You know, I don't know if I can do this.

It's kind of dumb to me why 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 develop this very interesting, like posting habit, I guess.

And he uses it eventually to start pushing back on media narratives that he likes, stories that he doesn't like, to combat some Belgian blogger who he read at 3 a.m.

who got something wrong about Tesla.

And so he becomes

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's not being pushed through a meat grinder of PR people and public policy folks and whatever being, you know, having his views cut up and censored or whatever, but it's just him, you know, posting at all hours.

Relatable.

And like that for him was eye-opening, right?

He gets to be liked.

He gets immediate reaction.

He gets to develop a fan base.

And that's kind of where 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 timeframe, like people knew who Elon Musk was, but 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 the followers of SpaceX and Tesla or making sure that that media story that got that detail wrong has 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 a, he, 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.

So,

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.

I actually, I hadn't seen this tweet before, and it is stark.

And,

you know, 2018 is, that's like an interesting time that's a it's an interesting year for him actually 2018 but like yeah he is 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 yes 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 $420 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 in this really intense kind of pressure cooker moment

during this period of time.

And politically, where he's at, let's remember, he was on a couple of the 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 Paris Climate Accords.

It's not, you know, he was open to working with the Trump administration from a business standpoint, eventually realizes it's too toxic for him or his image or his companies and pulls out.

So 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 rolls around.

He's in this pressure cooker.

He can't make enough Model 3s.

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 guy tweet, if you remember what that was.

The what?

Oh, God.

All right.

We got to extend this podcast by like 30 minutes.

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 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 they can't swim out.

And so 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 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 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 has his SpaceX engineers develop it.

test it and then they fly it over to Thailand to get these kids out of a 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.

He was seeking attention.

And Elon Musk goes on Twitter 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

with sex tourism.

And calls him a pedophile, essentially.

Jesus Christ.

And so 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 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 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 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 it.

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 Rowling episode, we were reading her different tweets, like her kind of like most iconic, like transphobic spiral tweets, and Natalie referred to them as the Book of Rolling.

And that is kind of what we're doing here.

It's like, which

parts of the book of Elon do you have memorized?

Someone asked me, like,

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 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 Cybertruck would be a boat one day.

There's one where he said, like,

Cy haven't had sex in ages, which I have saved on my desktop.

That's relatable, though.

I mean, there's a Trumpian quality to him in that there's a tweet for literally everything.

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And let's get back to the show.

All right, 2018.

Wow, it really is a long timeline.

2018 is, according to my, I love calling like a reading people magazine Listicles research, but according to my research,

this is around the time that he starts dating Grimes.

So 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 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 of like alt gay Tumblr music.

She like famously,

her album,

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, 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

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 another, it's another piece of the puzzle here that can really only

have ever existed at this like very specific point in time.

But it's Kim Kardashian, Kanye West,

Elon Grimes.

Is that ASAP Rocky?

Cuavo.

Cuevo, yeah.

It's just...

This photo feels like a visual magleb.

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 her cyber truck and like putting up videos with those robots.

In some ways, like associating yourself with Elon was like sort of cool.

Like he,

he has this kind of futuristic car company that that is, you you know, is a liberal cause in helping to save the environment.

He's trying to get people to space.

He's kind of quirky.

He'd sort of been in the mainstream tech, whatever, and now suddenly he's around

some of the most influential culture creators of that era.

And it's being seen as one of them.

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.

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 big, what would they call it, doomer, you know, this idea that AI will reach sentience and will ultimately like destroy its creator in humans.

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 who 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 was the only kid that Grimes had via like a natural birth.

And then the second two, Exa and Techno Mechanicus.

Sorry,

I know the the name thing is kicking a horse while it's down, but like Exa Dark Side Rail and Tech Tech Tech

Techno Mech

Technomchanicus.

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.

Oh, wow.

That's crazy.

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.

Like she's picked out 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 um 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 uh her her like suffering and pain as a mother that this has happened to her um 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 it you know they had their relationship hasn't recovered to this day.

You know, they co-parent, but they're certainly not together.

And 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 like very, 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-coated, well, I don't know if I can call Crimes queer-coated.

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.

So let's rewind a little bit to 2020 and the COVID years.

You beat me too late.

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 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 kind of uncommon.

But should we talk about COVID first?

Yeah, I mean, the timeline is, yeah, he's openly moderate.

We talked about this earlier.

He's socially liberal.

He's pro-L LGBT.

Sorry, I don't know if he's the T part.

I don't know, but he was.

No, yeah,

he even had the cue.

Yeah, he had been too.

Yeah, true, true.

He believes in climate change and has a company that's combating that.

These are very socially liberal causes.

He's meeting with Obama.

And so that's how he was politically heading into 2020.

And in the Valley, that's pretty common.

You don't want to necessarily stake, I'm a Democrat or I'm a Republican, but here are my values.

I'm an independent thinker.

I can think for myself.

And

I'm somewhere in the middle.

And you want to make the Democrats and Republican politicians kind of fight over who can be nicer to you.

Sure.

And 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 And you have this tweet here: the coronavirus panic is dumb.

This is like peak scare, basically, right?

This is the end of February, early March.

It's starting to, the virus is 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, but 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 um sort of a covid denier and when you think about it it it kind of makes sense right he is someone who is dependent 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.

You know, 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 covet which is hilarious for a guy who runs a yeah car company i was gonna say i mean

is that the statistic you want to use to make your point

yeah maybe use like shark attacker like bees or something but like right vent vendor vending machine falling on you um struck by lightning but you know he used cars you know he 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: 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 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, Blue Land, 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.

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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.

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 straight guess.

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 that he sees 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 groups himself as the champion of human progress, is the woke mind virus.

And so you get to the point where his daughter starts a 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, you know, and signs off with her doctors for this to happen.

But then in his telling, right, 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 like 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.

That's 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 gets her name wrong in the biography.

Oh, yeah, he misgenders her the whole way through.

And 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 should do, especially in a contentious situation like this.

You 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 just 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 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 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 24th, 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's pronouns, whether they're trans or cis, but it comes out in this really just like nonsensical way.

And Grimes 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 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 was 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 and not receive pushback about that.

It cuts to the core of what I think is flawed about his version of free speech, which is I can say what I want,

but you cannot correct me.

My speech is more important.

You can't speak back.

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 an argument against like political correctness, too.

You're forcing me to be politically correct.

Well, fuck you.

I'm going to say what I want.

And in fact, I'm going to 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 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 Prague or you podcasting contract if I start calling everyone who disagrees with me like the woke mind virus.

So Elon has said all sorts of frankly like horrifying and disgusting shit about his own daughter.

He went on Jordan Peterson's podcast and said, as far as I'm concerned, my son is dead.

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 at one point, Elon is tweeting 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 because, in a ketamine-fueled haze, he's desperate for attention and validation from an army of degenerate red-pilled incels and pick me's 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,

sorry, I'm losing my mind.

You got to 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 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 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 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 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 joke?

Is that a reference to something?

Is he literally watching The Matrix?

Like, what does that mean?

And what is it in reference to?

And it's not like his personal life is also playing out publicly, right?

It's not like we know about 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 18th, 2022, actually two years later, where he officially comes out as conservative in the words of Abby Shapiro, Ben Shapiro's trad wife, influencer sister.

She famously came out as conservative.

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 far as the political front is concerned.

I mean, he tweets about anti-white racism.

He's very obsessed 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 Bee, which is this right-wing satirical website, sort of like a right-wing version of The Onion,

because the account had violated Twitter's then-policy against misgendering.

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 right that perceived wrong.

And then, you know, going into the acquisition, all of a sudden he declares that the phrase cis or cisgender are considered slurs on the platform and that continues to this day i mean i haven't tested it recently but the last time i did you know if you if you try to tweet the word cisgender your post is is blocked basically 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-cisphobia.

Cisphobia.

Pro-cystphobia.

Anti-cisphobia.

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 his his priority is making sure that people can't say the words cisgender on Twitter.

That's kind of his 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 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 ballots.

And eventually comes this idea that Democrats are allowing for illegal immigration to change the voter makeup of this country and ensure that Democrats are always going to be in power because these supposedly illegal immigrants will always 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 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 Musk and what is Twitter at this point.

I think, you know, he's someone who spends all his time on the platform.

He finds these conspiracy theories and these sort of pieces of fringe content and reads them, amplifies them.

He doesn't have other media sources that he engages with.

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 think that there's hope for de-radicalizing Elon Musk necessarily.

But I guess, did you come out of your process writing this book with any sort of optimism?

I think one of the big questions that we embark 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 spend a lot of time looking into the various accountability metrics that exist for this, right?

So some of it is from regulation, 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 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.

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 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 every move has been right in a way for himself and that he'll continue to be rewarded for those actions.

I'm thinking about what Kate said.

We need people outside the U.S.

Brazil.

Brazil, do something.

Brazil!

Brazil!

I'm always, 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 talked about that earlier, how he was kind of finding that from the Democratic Party.

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, liked 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-planetary, 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 planets in there.

Yeah, exactly.

He's going to, exactly.

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 prosperous.

You know, that's always been central to

how he sees himself.

It goes back to him reading science fiction as a kid, you know, these hero stories.

And that's what he wants, is to be seen and remembered as a hero.

I mean, who among us on some, you know, albeit much smaller level doesn't want that?

I think the film Paris is Burning about

how did I bring Paris is burning into the Elon Musk episode.

Honestly, Elon Musk.

Let's turn this into a Paris is burning pod.

Ryan, do you know what Paris is burning is?

I don't.

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, am I getting it wrecked online now?

No, no, no.

But Matt, make your point about it.

I'm very curious where this is going.

Paris is Burning is a documentary from the 90s 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 about a 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 experienced 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 90s.

Dorian Corey, who's, you know, a a 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 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 you say, well, yeah, you still might make an impression.

Everybody wants to leave something behind them, some impression, some mark upon 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 a model.

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 purpose 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 J.K.

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.

But so much of what I hear and what you're saying about the psychology of Elon Musk is just stuff that like, honestly,

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 thing that's always been so 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 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.

Oh, and maybe just the internet, honestly.

Thanks for joining me today, guys.

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 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 them, too.

So, um, yeah, I guess

the next time we come on, hell yeah, which

yeah, could be tomorrow, yeah,

exactly.

It's it's uh,

when is what's the date of the inauguration?

I'll see you guys on the 21st.

And with that,

and with that, I love you all so much.