Amber | Elon's Spies Ep3

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Speaker 18 Tortoise

Speaker 17 Last time on Elon's spies.

Speaker 19 Musk now needs to reveal exactly what surveillance he used on me, which firms, and what methods. The pedot guy defamation still hangs over me six years later.

Speaker 17 What was your uh, were you involved in arranging for uh a personal investigator to follow uh mr. uh tripp? Yes, do you think the investigation into Martin Tripp

Speaker 17 was

Speaker 17 normal?

Speaker 20 It's interesting. I

Speaker 17 looking at it now,

Speaker 17 knowing what I know about what they really did,

Speaker 17 no, it wasn't normal.

Speaker 21 It was nuts, like it was

Speaker 18 it was one of the craziest periods of my life.

Speaker 17 It's 8am.

Speaker 17 The rain is drizzling down, but the view from the balcony is so beautiful it doesn't matter. And the birds chirping away in the background, they don't seem to mind.

Speaker 17 From where I'm sitting on my sofa late one night, staring into a computer screen, it looks like another world. And it may as well be.

Speaker 17 The Gold Coast of Australia is about as far away from London as you can get. It's also pretty much the last place I expected to find a story about Elon Musk.

Speaker 18 I'm Sally Coates.

Speaker 18 I grew up in the country in New South Wales, but moved to the Right Lights of the Gold Coast when I was 18 for uni. Studied journalism.

Speaker 17 Today, Sally works as a strategist. But in 2017, her job was a little different.

Speaker 18 A couple of years after I graduated, I got a job at the Gold Coast Bulletin which is just the local newspaper.

Speaker 17 The Gold Coast is a small city in Eastern Australia south of Brisbane. It's famous for its many beaches including Surfers Paradise.

Speaker 18 The Bulletin covered a lot of pretty regular local news stories, you know, local crime, local politics, a lot of council stories, you know, just...

Speaker 20 Yeah, like a proper local newspaper.

Speaker 18 Yeah, the usual.

Speaker 17 If you're a local newspaper reporter, whether on the Gold Coast or in Bristol or in Memphis, it's the same sort of work.

Speaker 17 Local journalism is all about covering the community, planning applications, new restaurant openings, that sort of thing. Celebrity gossip usually doesn't play a big part.

Speaker 17 But on the Gold Coast, things are a little different.

Speaker 18 There's been a... a bunch of movies filmed there.

Speaker 17 Now it's not Hollywood, but the city has a reputation as a location for filming big movies. Films like Ticket to Paradise with George Clooney and Kong Skull Island.

Speaker 18 I always think it's a little bit like a mini LA.

Speaker 17 The crew and actors often stay locally.

Speaker 18 Like Tom Hiddleston, Michael Fassbender, like Matt Damon. Over the years there'll be kind of a celebrity cameo on the Gold Coast and everyone goes nuts.

Speaker 17 Manor from heaven for a local newspaper. And that's why when Amber Heard flew into town, Sally knew all about it.

Speaker 18 So Amber would have arrived around April 2017.

Speaker 17 Now, you know how I mentioned that sometimes stories have a way of coming back to you. You think you've finished with them and then something happens to drag you back in.

Speaker 17 Well, last year I'd spent months looking into the trial between Amber Heard and Johnny Depp for a podcast called Who Trolled Amber.

Speaker 17 Great podcast, by the way, I really recommend it.

Speaker 17 To be honest, I didn't expect Amber to cross my path again. But I'd forgotten one thing.
A year after divorcing Johnny Depp, she'd started a new relationship.

Speaker 18 It was when all the Elon Musk Amber Heard madness started very briefly.

Speaker 17 When Amber Heard arrived in Australia, she was dating... Elon Musk.
Sally was in for a surprise too.

Speaker 17 She'd thought she'd write a few stories about Amber turning up at parties, getting spotted on the beach, that sort of thing.

Speaker 17 She didn't know it then, but a few months later, she'd be at the center of a bizarre mystery, and she'd learn something about Musk that, together with evidence we've uncovered, reveals just how far one of the world's most powerful men might have been willing to go to keep tabs on his partner.

Speaker 17 I'm Alexei Mostrus and this is Elon Spies,

Speaker 17 episode 3,

Speaker 17 Amber.

Speaker 1 Hey friends, it's Nikayla from the podcast Side Hustle Pro.

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Speaker 17 In 2017, Amber Heard is about to start filming Acraman. She's playing the character Mira.

Speaker 17 Was there taparazzi? Were people kind of interested in the fact that she was around?

Speaker 18 Yeah, people were interested, but

Speaker 18 she was pretty out and about. Like, it was kind of awesome.
You know, she went out to a nightclub and, you know, just was kind of in with the rabble.

Speaker 18 And it seemed like she was really enjoying herself. We don't really have...

Speaker 18 like

Speaker 18 a huge kind of paparazzi detail here again.

Speaker 17 When she's not filming, she's spotted in town. There's photos of her at a luxury hotel, at a bar, at a party.

Speaker 17 Musk flies over from America, an 18-hour flight to see her. They're pictured visiting a bird sanctuary together.

Speaker 17 But when it comes to where Amber's living, no one knows the location

Speaker 17 until August the 4th, 2017, when someone blows up her privacy.

Speaker 18 One day, when Amber was still here, we got an anonymous tip

Speaker 18 that said essentially there's a young football player who's being spotted leaving Amber Heard's rented accommodation. And I'll never forget this.
It said looking like the cat that got the cream.

Speaker 18 But we were like, where the heck has this come from?

Speaker 17 Sally's newspaper, the Gold Coast Bulletin, receives a mysterious anonymous message.

Speaker 18 And so we were like, like,

Speaker 18 you know, you get tips, but it's usually like, my neighbor built a fence on my land. Because like we're still a regional newspaper like this.

Speaker 17 Now, at every news company I've worked for, there's always been a way for readers, listeners, whoever, to get in touch with journalists if they have a story.

Speaker 17 To be honest, a lot of these tips are garbage. But occasionally, you get a nugget that becomes the start of something bigger.
This is a nugget.

Speaker 17 Just to be clear, what was the message suggesting?

Speaker 18 The anonymous tip was suggesting that Amber

Speaker 18 had a frequent visitor who was a local football player and he was leaving her house

Speaker 18 looking like the cat that got the cream.

Speaker 17 And the message revealed her private address.

Speaker 18 Yes. Yeah, it did.
And we didn't have that previously.

Speaker 17 The message says is spending many nights a week at Amber Heard's house on

Speaker 17 the

Speaker 17 and leaving early in the morning looking like the cat that swallowed the canary.

Speaker 17 Basically, it's a tip that Amber is seeing an Aussie rules football player and that he's been spotted leaving her place on a number of occasions.

Speaker 17 Sally says that the message immediately stood out to her because Amber's address was previously secret information. No one knew where she was staying.

Speaker 17 Whoever sent the tip not only knew that information but had apparently been at the address in the morning and in the evening and on multiple days too.

Speaker 17 If the message was to be believed, they were also close enough to see the look on the face of the footballer as he left the house.

Speaker 18 So it had to be someone who had eyes on him.

Speaker 17 And when you first got this message, who did you think may have been behind it?

Speaker 18 We thought it potentially could have just been a neighbour. It did cross my mind that potentially it could have been him sending it in for a bit of attention.

Speaker 17 Sally thinks maybe the footballer has leaked the information to the newspaper himself to boost his own profile. But he strongly denies it.
Maybe it's a neighbour, but that doesn't really seem to fit.

Speaker 17 So Sally and her colleagues get technical.

Speaker 18 Like they are anonymous, but

Speaker 18 you can track the IP address, which we usually wouldn't bother doing because, you know, a tip's a tip, but we were like, where the heck is this come from?

Speaker 17 The reporters look into the metadata behind the message. That's the underlying code that can tell you things like where the message was sent from.

Speaker 18 So we trace your IP address and it quite clearly came up as SpaceX, California.

Speaker 17 Never underestimate the tenacity of journalists at a local paper. It's quite a twist, isn't it? Everything points to the message originating from inside one of Elon Musk's own companies.

Speaker 17 And the experts on IP the newspapers speak to, they agree. So the Gold Coast Bulletin writes up the story.

Speaker 17 It reports just the facts, the anonymous tip, the tracing to SpaceX, the fact that Musk declines to comment.

Speaker 17 The paper doesn't really try to answer the question at the center of my mind, which is, if someone at SpaceX was responsible for sending the tip to the newspaper, then they must have placed Amber under surveillance.

Speaker 17 Because how else could they have got that information? Without sitting outside her house day after day, night after night? And if that's right, what are the implications of that?

Speaker 17 But instead, the paper reports the story and then moves on.

Speaker 17 Fair enough, local reporters have to write several stories a day, they can't spend months thinking about just one of them.

Speaker 17 And it stays like this until Sally gets a call out of the blue from Elon.

Speaker 17 A day after someone from SpaceX sends the anonymous tip to the Gold Coast Bulletin, Amber and Musk announce that their relationship is over.

Speaker 17 And then the very

Speaker 18 next

Speaker 18 day after it was announced globally that they had split up, I went to a cafe and I was having a meeting just with a totally other source about other stories.

Speaker 17 And

Speaker 18 in walk, Amber and Elon, side by side,

Speaker 18 it was kind of mid-morning on a weekday. Cafe was pretty empty.

Speaker 17 And

Speaker 18 I just said to the person I've seen, I was like, I'm really sorry. I could pretend to listen to you, but I'm not listening to you.

Speaker 17 I have to

Speaker 18 like do this. They are really broken up and now they are here.

Speaker 17 Now, Elon Musk is not known for taking holidays. In fact, he told his biographer, vacations will kill you.
But here he is, back on the Gold Coast, seeing Amber for the second time in four months.

Speaker 17 And as a complete coincidence, Sally happens to be in exactly the same cafe.

Speaker 17 Like any good reporter, she's not going to let a chance like that slip by.

Speaker 18 They are apparently broken up and now they are here.

Speaker 18 And so

Speaker 17 I

Speaker 18 went up to them

Speaker 17 and

Speaker 18 just said like, hey guys, oh Ricardo, I can't believe you're here. Can I get a photo of you two?

Speaker 18 And they both gave each other this like awkward look and were like, uh

Speaker 18 maybe not.

Speaker 18 We can take photos of you.

Speaker 18 And so Amber took a photo of of me and elon and elon took a photo of me and amber like separately like clearly in the same backdrop sally gets the photos and writes up the story elon and amber's relationship seems to be back on they run it

Speaker 18 my bosses at the paper very lamely labeled it an intergalactic exclusive um it was like on the front page of like the gold coast bullshit i know first of its kind.

Speaker 17 But then she panics because she receives an email from Sam Teller at SpaceX.

Speaker 17 Teller is Musk's chief of staff. He says he wants to connect her to Musk, but he doesn't say what it's about.
Her colleagues joke that it was nice knowing her. She waits anxiously.

Speaker 18 Like the number on my phone is like this like American mobile number and I was like, hi, how'd you go? It was like, Sally, it's Elon.

Speaker 17 And I was like, what the hell?

Speaker 17 Elon is calling Sally to tell her that the couple are working on their relationship. And he's determined to defend Amber.

Speaker 17 He says, all relationships have their ups and downs, especially ones in the public eye. Fair enough, but Sally wants to know about the anonymous tip.

Speaker 17 Was it sent by someone in SpaceX as the IP address suggested? Musk says that he doesn't know about the message himself and that sometimes other agendas are at work.

Speaker 17 Sally asks him the obvious question.

Speaker 17 What other agendas?

Speaker 18 He said that

Speaker 18 there were people acting on his behalf that were trying to look out for him.

Speaker 17 You mean people working for him? Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 18 Because

Speaker 18 it came out of SpaceX.

Speaker 18 So that was like, that was the explanation for that.

Speaker 17 Sorry to butt in, but he accepted that someone working for him had sent the tip to the paper, and Musk confirmed that.

Speaker 18 Yes.

Speaker 17 Musk tells her that he's not going to discipline anyone for sending the tip because, quotes, I don't know exactly which team member it was.

Speaker 17 People sometimes act on my behalf, he says, sometimes with my interests in mind, sometimes not.

Speaker 17 What Musk is telling her is pretty extraordinary. He's not denying that a member of his team sent the anonymous tip.
In fact, he's saying they did just without his knowledge.

Speaker 17 And to me, that comes close to an admission that someone on Musk's team spied on Amber Heard.

Speaker 17 It makes sense to conclude that someone working on behalf of Elon Musk procured that information and passed it back to him.

Speaker 18 I can't say for sure, like from my experience, but if you lay out the pieces

Speaker 18 and, you know, form a logical conclusion,

Speaker 18 all signs point to

Speaker 18 either someone was watching and feeding information back or there was some sort of surveillance.

Speaker 17 When the call ends, Sally has formed her own opinion about who sent the tip.

Speaker 18 My personal belief is he definitely sent it. And I think with the,

Speaker 18 you know, knowing

Speaker 18 how sort of fast and loose he can be with online communication, I think it wouldn't be hugely out of character. I think at the time, it just seemed a bit more out of character.

Speaker 18 I mean, you know, walks like a duck, quacks like a duck. I just can't really see anyone, any of his members of staff, caring enough to, or knowing, like, how would they know?

Speaker 18 How does anyone know?

Speaker 17 When Sally agreed to speak to us, I hadn't realised that she'd had a personal call with Musk.

Speaker 17 I thought she was going to help us bring the Gold Coast to life and add some colour to another part of the investigation.

Speaker 17 Part of the investigation we'd already been working on. A couple of months ago, I got on a call with a source.

Speaker 17 Someone who suggested that if I was looking into Musk and the way he uses private investigators, I might want to look at what happened on the Gold Coast.

Speaker 17 This source told me that Amber Heard was placed under surveillance when she was filming Aquaman between April and October 2017.

Speaker 17 The source said that Musk's team, acting through one of his security officers, a guy called Andrew Lanu, contracted with an Australian firm of private investigators who specialised in exposing marital infidelities.

Speaker 17 The source said that the surveillance on Amber was extensive, that it went on for weeks, if not months, at a cost that ran into hundreds of thousands of Australian dollars.

Speaker 17 The Australian company is said to have used six or seven operatives to spy on Amber every night, followed her in multiple cars and pretended to be paparazzi if they were caught.

Speaker 17 They even used infrared cameras and drones. And all because, apparently, Musk wanted to keep an eye, or several eyes, on Amber.
He suspected her of being unfaithful.

Speaker 17 When I put this to Musk and to Amber, both declined to comment, so did the firm of investigators in question.

Speaker 17 But taken together with Sally's story, a disturbing picture was beginning to emerge, an insight into how Musk thinks and acts.

Speaker 17 Musk and Heard's relationship broke down in December 2017. When he spoke to his biographer Walter Isaacson about this period, Musk described it as one of unrelenting insanity.

Speaker 17 It was mind-bogglingly painful, the most concentrated pain I've ever had.

Speaker 17 And it is noticeable that many of the incidents we've covered in this podcast happened during this timeframe between 2017 and 2018.

Speaker 17 It was a time when Musk was going through months of unrelenting stress. This is what he wrote on Twitter in 2017.
The reality is great highs, terrible lows. What I do is just take the pain.

Speaker 17 So I'm thinking,

Speaker 17 is this whole investigation essentially historic? Is the Elon Musk of 2024 a changed man? The Musk of today is more certain of his position, even richer and more powerful.

Speaker 17 Would Musk 2.0 have spied on Amber Heard, or employed a fraudster to dig into Vernon Unsworth, or set private investigators on Martin Tripp?

Speaker 17 As we were writing this episode, Musk posted a tweet. It was a picture of Jim from the office, the US Comedy, holding up two boards.

Speaker 17 How do you know who's telling the truth? one board said. The second board gave the answer.
The ones trying to silence other people are the ones lying.

Speaker 17 If we take Musk's post at face value, he's setting his face against anyone trying to silence another person.

Speaker 17 Against anyone trying to stem the free flow of information. Except, it could be argued, that's exactly what he's done himself.
Not just in 2017 and 2018, but right up until the present day.

Speaker 18 I'm Christina Ballen.

Speaker 18 I'm well known worldwide as the stubborn woman engineer who dared to stand up against the almighty Elon Musk.

Speaker 17 Christina Ballant has been fighting with Elon Musk for more than a decade. She used to work as an engineer for Tesla.

Speaker 17 She was such a star that her initials were engraved on the batteries inside thousands of their electric cars. But after raising a safety concern about a design flaw, she claims she was pushed out.

Speaker 17 Christina won a wrongful dismissal case against Tesla, but was then publicly accused by the company of theft and embezzlement. So she took them to court again.

Speaker 17 She wanted to clear her name, and she didn't know how long she had to do it.

Speaker 18 My biggest concern during cancer

Speaker 18 was, my God, my little one will always have.

Speaker 18 Sorry, I'm being emotional.

Speaker 18 My little one, who for him, I'm the hero, I'm the mommy who designs airplanes and

Speaker 18 cars.

Speaker 18 My memory of me for him will be always questioned.

Speaker 18 Was he or was not

Speaker 18 a thief at the criminal?

Speaker 17 And

Speaker 18 even if he knows the truth, even if I have the evidence,

Speaker 18 I couldn't have a chance

Speaker 18 to show the world how disgusting Elon Musk really is.

Speaker 18 How disgusting a company like Tesla really is and

Speaker 18 what a bunch of hypocrites they are to know that they are lying and still

Speaker 18 not have a heart, not have a decency to say she can die. She's fighting the most aggressive type of cancer.
It's time for us to just say, I'm sorry, she didn't do any of those crimes.

Speaker 17 Despite battling an aggressive form of cancer, Christina wanted to fight her case in open court. But Musk and Tesla seem determined that that won't happen.

Speaker 17 Like other Tesla employees, including Carl Hansen and Sean Guthrow, the two security guys from episode two, Christina has been forced to defend herself against Tesla in private arbitration proceedings.

Speaker 17 Proceedings which might never be made public, even if she wins.

Speaker 18 So what Tesla did a few months later,

Speaker 18 they went and appealed to have my case public. And the Court of Appeal

Speaker 18 told them that they are right. And every single person

Speaker 18 who ever signed an arbitration agreement, they are bound for life

Speaker 18 in going to arbitration.

Speaker 20 So they reversed the decision of the first judge. Correct.
And so that put you back into this private arbitration.

Speaker 18 Correct.

Speaker 17 To me, this is hard to justify. Why should Tesla be allowed to accuse Christina of a crime in public and then compel her to defend herself behind closed doors?

Speaker 17 Particularly when Musk, Tesla's boss, publicly states that he's against anyone trying to silence anyone else.

Speaker 17 In May 2023, a group of US senators wrote to Musk saying that they were incredibly troubled by Tesla's use of forced arbitration clauses.

Speaker 17 The politicians accused the company of ignoring reportedly deplorable and discriminatory conditions and of using arbitration agreements to limit regulatory authorities' ability to protect Tesla customers and employees.

Speaker 17 Far from fighting against those who seek to silence information, In his corporate life at least, Musk continues to do the opposite.

Speaker 17 By the way, during this period that she was battling Tesla, Christina also alleges that she was subject to surveillance.

Speaker 20 During either of the legal battles that you had with Tesla, did you see evidence of private investigators or unlawful surveillance?

Speaker 17 Yes.

Speaker 18 From the time that I

Speaker 18 I filed my lawsuit in January 2019, I encountered quite a few vehicles that was following me around.

Speaker 17 People following you. Yeah.

Speaker 17 A note was even pinned to her door.

Speaker 18 I had a very scary

Speaker 18 note taped on my door

Speaker 18 in which

Speaker 18 they said if you care about your son

Speaker 18 you will drop your lawsuit.

Speaker 18 And sadly, I don't have the evidence of that because

Speaker 18 my,

Speaker 18 let's say,

Speaker 18 my reptilian brain of a mother,

Speaker 18 when I saw that, I just went and take it out and rip it to pieces because my little one was behind me.

Speaker 17 I can't say that Musk or his investigators had anything to do with the note.

Speaker 17 I've spoken to Christina's ex-partner who remembers her seeing it, but it might have been put there by an ardent Tesla fan, of which there are many, or by someone else entirely. Still,

Speaker 17 it leaves a chill.

Speaker 1 Hey friends, it's Nikayla from the podcast Side Hustle Pro.

Speaker 4 I'm always looking for ways to keep my kids entertained without screens, and the Yoto Mini has been a total lifesaver.

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Speaker 17 Hi, guys.

Speaker 20 Hey, how's your day of Parliament?

Speaker 17 Yes, all good. Just very, very busy as parliamentary days happen to be, but less busy than if I was on the front bench having to answer lots of questions, so small mercies.

Speaker 17 This summer, SpaceX helped make history when four private citizens who had orbited Earth in a SpaceX capsule went on to complete the first all-civilian spacewalk.

Speaker 17 Another impressive feat for Elon Musk. But earlier this summer, his attention on social media was elsewhere.

Speaker 17 After the murders of three young girls at a Taylor Swift themed dance class, riots broke out in parts of the UK.

Speaker 17 Misinformation swirled on social media. Elements of the far right became convinced, incorrectly, that the killer was a Muslim refugee.

Speaker 17 Musk predicted that civil war would break out in the UK, and he criticised the Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, saying Britain was turning into the Soviet Union.

Speaker 17 He also rekindled an old spat with the former First Minister of Scotland, Hamza Youssef.

Speaker 20 How did

Speaker 20 your relationship, if I can characterise that with Elon Musk all begin? How did it all start and when?

Speaker 17 Well

Speaker 17 to be honest I can't say I have a relationship with Elon Musk. I've never met the individual but we've of course had interactions and really it took me by surprise.

Speaker 17 Back in 2020 Hamza made a speech to the Scottish Parliament.

Speaker 17 At the time he was Justice Secretary and he told his fellow politicians that Scotland had a clear issue with structural racism.

Speaker 17 When Elon Musk saw an edited video of that speech, he took to Twitter to brand the politician as a blatant racist. Humzer hit back, accusing Musk of racism, something he stands by.

Speaker 20 Would you go so far as to say he's racist?

Speaker 17 I don't doubt for a moment that

Speaker 17 he absolutely is a racist, has racist sympathies, amplifies racists, believes in white supremacist

Speaker 17 conspiracy theories. I mean, we could be little doubt on that given the various interventions he's made over the years.

Speaker 17 Tension between the pair has bubbled away for years. But it was during the riots when they boiled over.

Speaker 17 Humzer called Musk one of the most dangerous men on the planet, prompting Musk to describe the politician as a super racist.

Speaker 17 But this time, just as he's done in the past, Musk took it a step further.

Speaker 20 The tweets that he sent you that really caught my eye included ones that said, I dare that scumbag to sue me, go ahead, make my day.

Speaker 20 And then, this is the important one, legal discovery will show that however big a racist he's been in public communications, he is vastly worse in private communications.

Speaker 17 It's an attempt to threaten and intimidate me, and let me be clear. Elon Musk could have trillions, let alone billions, and he wouldn't be able to shut me up.

Speaker 17 I'm going to continue to call out his racist, far-right, white supremacist tendencies.

Speaker 17 But that caught me by surprise, and I started to wonder what it was he was possibly talking about.

Speaker 17 And thought, well, okay, this is somebody who obviously has access to Twitter DMs or X DMs. By the way, that should ring alarm bells for people.

Speaker 17 You know, is your those private conversations you have in your DMs, how secure are they or will they be used by this multi-millionaire sociopath megalomaniac who is aligned to the far right?

Speaker 17 Musk's tweet about Humza's private communications could be interpreted in a few ways. It could be purely speculative, but it has a sinister feel to it.

Speaker 20 But do you suspect that he might have accessed your messages on Twitter?

Speaker 17 Oh, I'm certain. Oh, I'm certain he absolutely does.
And I'm certain he scours anybody who he scours the private messages of those that he sees as a threat.

Speaker 17 In fact, I'm certainly as a whole team of people who are now looking at any information that they can gather on me

Speaker 17 and try to use it

Speaker 17 to try to besmirch, as I say, my reputation. And they'll use any nefarious tactics in order to do that.

Speaker 20 You said that in a kind of blase way that you went back and you looked through your private messages to see if there was anything kind of incriminating.

Speaker 20 But, like, if you look at, I mean, if I look at it, uh, I find it absolutely extraordinary that you felt worried enough to do that.

Speaker 17 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 17 And again, it was more out of just complete and utter confusion about what the heck he was talking about. Like, what's kind of a very pointed accusation that he's trying to make.

Speaker 17 And most people, you know, who commented underneath it are saying the same thing. Well, you know, Goan Elon releases Twitter DMs.
And I'm thinking, well, what is that?

Speaker 17 I mean, I've been on Twitter for a long time. And, you know,

Speaker 17 have I made

Speaker 17 an off-colour joke? Have I said something in a private communication?

Speaker 17 So I thought I better do the belt and braces thing. And as I say, there was nothing there.

Speaker 17 And unsurprisingly so, but here is somebody who's basically saying to me, by the way, you know, you better watch out. I'm going to release stuff on you and it's going to make your life hell.

Speaker 17 Hamza is concerned enough to spend time scrolling through his old messages. Was there anything he could have said that Musk could use against him?

Speaker 17 As I was listening to Humza talk about this, I kept thinking: this is not a great look for democracy. Hamza was the first minister of Scotland.
He was a powerful guy, a democratically elected leader.

Speaker 17 And yet, here he is searching through his private messages on Twitter because he's concerned that the platform's owner could gain access to them.

Speaker 20 Do you think that his reference to private communications might refer to messages outside Twitter?

Speaker 17 That's the fear. That is genuinely the fear.
Is that here is somebody with almost unlimited amounts of wealth.

Speaker 17 I mean, I saw a report a couple of days ago that he could be the world's first trillionaire in the next few years.

Speaker 17 And

Speaker 17 I have no doubt that he would use that wealth in the most nefarious ways possible if he thought somebody was a threat

Speaker 17 or took a dislike to them as he has to me. And

Speaker 17 what I noticed from your

Speaker 17 when you reached out to me is that there is a pattern of behavior. Look, I'm very concerned about Elon Musk.

Speaker 17 I've described him and I repeat this charge that he's one of the most dangerous men on the planet.

Speaker 17 He's unaccountable, one of the wealthiest, by some accounts, the wealthiest man and individual on the planet. He does what he wants, says what he wants, and does not care about the consequences.

Speaker 17 There is no evidence to suggest that Musk has accessed Humzer's messages or any of his other private communications. I asked Musk about this, but he didn't respond to requests for comment.

Speaker 17 We understand he denies ever accessing private messages on Twitter.

Speaker 17 When Walter Isaacson's book on Musk came out last year, it was reviewed by The Guardian. The headline, which still makes me laugh a bit, was, Elon Musk, Pillock, Genius, or both?

Speaker 17 Having spent a few months looking into Musk's life, it's clear to me that the answer is both.

Speaker 17 Musk is a man with the geopolitical power to sway wars, to swing public opinion behind one politician or another, to put humans on Mars, to save us from a fossil-fuel future.

Speaker 17 He's a man who can transform reality simply through the force of his own will. It makes me think back to what Jim Cantrell, Musk's old SpaceX buddy, told us.

Speaker 23 I would have to say he's the most brilliant man I've ever met, the most ambitious man I've ever met, and the one person that you don't ever want to fight with or underestimate.

Speaker 17 Musk has a force in him that lets him build companies and machines that no one thought possible. That's admirable.

Speaker 17 But to me, it's this same force, this same desire to control the world around him rather than let it control him, that explains why he targets whistleblowers, why he spies on his critics, and why, allegedly, he put his then partner under surveillance.

Speaker 17 When I started this investigation, I had three main questions.

Speaker 17 Does Musk use private investigators in both his public and his private life?

Speaker 17 Does that show a pattern of behaviour that tells us something about his character?

Speaker 17 And finally, is there evidence that Musk or people acting for him were willing to push the boundaries when it came to how that information was obtained?

Speaker 17 Speaking with Vernon, digging through the documents from Martin Tripp's case, and hearing about what happened with Amber Heard,

Speaker 17 I can say that the answer to these questions is yes.

Speaker 17 The thing that lingered from Bash's investigation last year, it was the start of something bigger.

Speaker 17 As I write this, we're almost exactly a month out from the US presidential election. A moment of global consequence.

Speaker 17 But the more I think about it, the importance of this investigation doesn't hinge on whether Donald Trump or Kamala Harris wins.

Speaker 17 Musk has grown so big, he doesn't need the ear of a president to expand his power and influence over how we all live. His Starlink company gives him control over large swathes of the global internet.

Speaker 17 More than half the satellites in space belong to him. That alone embeds Musk in the fabric of geopolitics and global communication.
And that's not counting SpaceX and its contracts with NASA.

Speaker 17 It's not counting Tesla or X or companies like Neuralink.

Speaker 17 Whether you choose to engage with him or not, Musk is shaping your world and mine.

Speaker 17 So it matters how he does that, how he controls information, how he seeks to shape his own reality behind the scenes when no one else is looking.

Speaker 17 Elon Spies is presented by me, Alexei Mostris. It's co-written by me and Gary Marshall, who is also the series producer.
Original composition and sound design by Tom Kinsella.

Speaker 17 Podcast artwork is by John Hill. This episode was fact-checked by Chloe Hajimatheo.
The executive producer is Kerry Thomas.

Speaker 17 Tortoise.

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