Dissecting Elon Musk’s Hostile Takeover with Anne Applebaum, Eoin Higgins & Ryan Mac

Speaker 2 Hi, everyone, from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network. This is on with Kara Swisher, and I'm Kara Swisher.

Speaker 2 We're currently in the middle of a hostile takeover of the federal government, orchestrated by Elon Musk. He's bringing his Twitter destruction playbook to the U.S.

Speaker 2 government, and unfortunately, much of the mainstream media is covering it with a big shrug as if it's just another Tuesday. It is not.

Speaker 2 And it's really important that the media step up and really understand what's happening at each of these federal agencies, which are being run roughshot over by Elon Musk and his team at Doge.

Speaker 2 So I've gathered three of the sharpest journalists I know to begin unpacking this unprecedented government takeover, which is still unfolding, as I said.

Speaker 2 Ann Applebaum is a staff writer at The Atlantic and a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian. Her latest book is Autocracy Inc., The Dictators Who Want to Run the World.

Speaker 2 Owen Higgins is a reporter with IT Brew who covers cybersecurity, IT jobs, and government tech.

Speaker 2 He's just published a book called Owned, How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left.

Speaker 2 And Ryan Mack is a New York Times reporter who covers corporate accountability across the global technology industry. His book is Character Limit, How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter.

Speaker 2 And it's required reading if you want to understand what Musk Musk is doing to the federal government right now. So stick around.

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Speaker 2 And Owen Ryan, thanks for coming on on.

Speaker 8 Thanks for having us.

Speaker 5 Thank you.

Speaker 1 Thanks, Kara.

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 2 So it's obviously a lot of news happening. This weekend was kind of crazy.
So let's get to it.

Speaker 2 On Friday, after Elon Musk began to lock career staff out of the Office of Personal Management out of the system, I posted, this is a hostile takeover of the federal government by a private citizen of unlimited means with no restrictions and no transparency.

Speaker 2 Welcome to the deep state. I think I was underselling it.

Speaker 2 Since then, his band of young engineers and acolytes have done the same to the General Services Administration or GSA, taking control of payment systems at the Treasury Department or threatening death to the U.S.

Speaker 2 Agency for International Development or USAID. Just the beginning, I assume.
I'd love your top line assessment so far and what's next. Ryan, then Ann, then Owen.

Speaker 1 I'm going to talk my book up a little bit here, literally and figuratively. But yeah, I mean, we've seen this playbook before.

Speaker 1 This is what he did with the Twitter takeover, and he is implementing that playbook now with the federal government.

Speaker 1 He's coming in with kind of a

Speaker 1 low knowledge background of how things work, but a high confidence in that he can be the expert or is the expert in a lot of these things. He's the expert cutter.

Speaker 1 He's someone who prioritizes engineering above everything. And he's deploying those tactics now across, you know, OPM or GSA or any three-letter agency.
So yeah, that's kind of my top line.

Speaker 2 All right, Dan?

Speaker 8 I would describe it as a hostile ideological takeover of the U.S. government.
He has a different view of the world. He's not an American patriot.
He doesn't believe in the rule of law.

Speaker 8 He doesn't believe in the Constitution. He's attempting to impose another, very different ideology on how the government works.

Speaker 8 I hate to say it with my, I won't tout my books, but my background in Soviet history, the first thing I thought of was the way that Stalin took over the Soviet Communist Party was by controlling personnel, famously.

Speaker 8 Personnel management, management of the cadres.

Speaker 8 This is a famous way by which you take over and transform a political institution or party to make it do what you want and to change what it was doing before. And that's what this looks like to me.

Speaker 3 Owen?

Speaker 5 Yeah, I mean, I think that the lack of accountability here is also a large part of the problem. That's probably my main takeaway.

Speaker 5 I've spoken with a couple people in different departments of the federal government, and they're all kind of describing a situation where there's been so many people cut or people, or either their jobs have been cut or they're cut out of the decision-making process that now we're in a situation where nobody really knows like what's going on and how that is all going to play out.

Speaker 5 I think

Speaker 5 my two biggest fears here are one, that there are going to be, I've heard from a couple people in different agencies that there are AI recording software that's being used for just every meeting that they're having.

Speaker 5 That's one.

Speaker 5 And then, two, I mean, I'm afraid not only with that, but just in general, with a lot of this private personal information, whether it's individuals or sensitive information within any of these agencies, that Musk is going to do something maybe like the Twitter files and hand it over to a friendly journalist or hand over some kind of curated amount of this information and

Speaker 5 push out public, some public information that should be public, sure, but then I'm more afraid that there'll be information that he will kind of curate and put out there to attack his political enemies.

Speaker 2 Yeah, that works so well with the Twitter files.

Speaker 3 Right, right.

Speaker 2 It was a little bit of an egg on his face. So let's start with the OPM.

Speaker 2 And Ryan, why don't you address this, which sent an email to all federal employees offering them the generous, possibly illegal exit package if they resigned and all the hallmarks of Elon's, as you said, Twitter tactics, right down to the subject line, which read Fork in the Road.

Speaker 2 I think he purposely did that to say it was me.

Speaker 2 On top of that, government tech workers have been called into meetings and forced to explain their coding to very young Doge people with Gmail addresses who won't even identify themselves.

Speaker 2 They've done the same with GSA, staffing it with musk loyalists like Steve Davis and his wife, Nicole Hollander,

Speaker 2 who's who don't seem to have any expertise in this, as you said. Ryan, you wrote the book about Elon's Twitter takeover.

Speaker 2 Explain the parallels.

Speaker 1 Yeah, so we'll start with that email. Fork in the Road was an email he sent during the Twitter takeover.
He offered these sort of buyout packages to employees.

Speaker 1 Basically, you take this, you can leave with a couple months' pay, no questions asked. But if you don't take this package, you are opting in to become a quote-unquote extremely hardcore employee.

Speaker 1 You are, you know, working for me around the clock. We're going to build some great things and we're going to transform this company.

Speaker 1 And it was kind of a very pivotal moment in the Twitter takeover, you know, a couple weeks after he had finalized his deal to buy the company, where he was kind of, you know, drawing a line in the sand and saying, you know, we're going to separate the people that want to be here from the people that are just hanging on.

Speaker 1 And so, you know, he sent that same email to federal employees last week. The subject line is the same, although there was one key characteristic in that

Speaker 1 With Twitter, he made people opt into staying, which caused a lot of problems. You know, you have to directly say, you know, you want to stay here and work with me.

Speaker 1 In this case, with federal employees, you have to opt in to resigning, essentially.

Speaker 1 And there's a lot of questions over whether that's legal, whether he has the authority to do that, whether there is even funding

Speaker 1 to provide people with these kinds of, I guess they're delayed resignations. But the hallmarks are all there and we can see the

Speaker 1 parallels.

Speaker 2 So obviously the government's a different creature. And their argument is that they're trying to make the government more

Speaker 2 like the private sector, essentially. That's their biggest argument, or that brings Silicon Valley management style to it.
But what it feels a little bit like, Anne, is Eastern European feel to it.

Speaker 2 Doge is getting access to incredibly sensitive information, including the Treasury Department's payment system.

Speaker 2 That includes information on government contractors that are competing with Elon's companies, as well as sensitive data about people's finances.

Speaker 2 It caused the department's top career official to resign.

Speaker 2 Talk about the obvious conflicts of interest here, Anne. Does it compare to some of the kleptocracies and governments you saw in Eastern Europe after the fall of the Iron Curtain?

Speaker 2 What does this portend in that regard?

Speaker 8 Yeah, so to be clear, there is no precedent in American history for a private businessman having this kind of influence over the very intimate

Speaker 8 elements of the U.S. government.
Of course, rich people have always been influential before, sometimes very influential. They've shaped legislation, they've influenced presidents and so on.

Speaker 8 But to have a private businessman who has no government position, who's not been confirmed by Congress, who the people who are working for him are not government employees, or it's unclear what their status is, they don't have any right to this information, they don't have security clearances.

Speaker 8 This breaks so many lines of illegality that, as I said, it looks much more like a hostile takeover by an outside power.

Speaker 8 I mean, so this is these are people trying to substitute their version of reality or their version of how the world should work on top of government officials whose jobs, whose salaries, whose programs

Speaker 8 have all been approved by elected U.S. government officials.
Right.

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 2 In this case, he's saying that they have permission from the president, and he noted that several times.

Speaker 8 Permission from the president is completely meaningless.

Speaker 2 Meaningless, exactly. But I'm noting that he's saying that.

Speaker 8 Congress has control over spending. Congress allocated the money for these programs.

Speaker 8 This is illegal at a new level. And you're right, in that sense, it looks much more like, as I said,

Speaker 8 the Communist Party taking over the Polish state in 1944, 1945.

Speaker 8 It's imposing a different set of rules,

Speaker 8 literally a different ideology, a belief that one person gets to decide everything, that this isn't a,

Speaker 8 that voting doesn't matter, Congress doesn't matter, the Constitution doesn't matter, and the legal system doesn't matter.

Speaker 2 Right. So Doge is already getting dogged by reports that it was set up to skirt around government transparency laws.
For example, they're apparently using Signal to communicate.

Speaker 2 Owen, in your book, Owned, you wrote about the Twitter files, which was sold as an exercise in free speech and transparency.

Speaker 2 In reality, Elon controlled access to all the data, as you notice, and doled out what might have been cherry-picked files to writers he chose. He obviously did.

Speaker 2 Talk about that process and what it says about Elon's supposed commitment to transparency, because he kind of just gave it to friendlies who then wrote what he wanted and twisted a lot of what was in there.

Speaker 2 Several times there were meetings where management was dealing with something and they said, Can you believe management dealt with this? Which is what the job of management was, in my opinion.

Speaker 2 But not that I particularly trust anybody in Silicon Valley, but it seemed a little cooked.

Speaker 5 Yeah, I mean, I think that with the Twitter files, I mean, here you had Musk coming in.

Speaker 5 He took a company that was relatively successful and he instituted all of these changes, as Ryan was saying, you know, cutting staff, slashing the workforce. There was some bad press around that.

Speaker 5 But he also wanted to kind of get back ideologically at

Speaker 5 this kind of idea of the liberal,

Speaker 5 both the deep censorship state that he thought existed in the federal government and the elements of Twitter that he believed were kind of going along with this and making things too, quote unquote, woke.

Speaker 5 So

Speaker 5 he found

Speaker 5 Matt Taibbi. He was recommended, Matt Taibbi, by David Sachs, a fellow billionaire, reached out to him, said, hey, you know, you can have access to some of these files.
Taibbe went in.

Speaker 5 From what we understand, this was, I mean, heavily curated. He didn't have access to everything.
It only went up until, you know, until Musk took over.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 what I think the problem is, and I think that this is what bodes kind of ill here for how he's going to manage the so-called Department of Governmental Efficiency and whatever he does with the federal government, is that he makes a lot of noise about being committed to free speech and being committed to all of these

Speaker 5 lofty ideologies. But in reality, Musk really only cares about one thing, which is himself and his material profit.

Speaker 5 And so when it comes to something like the Twitter files, he's putting out all this information because it pushes forward.

Speaker 2 To benefit himself.

Speaker 5 To benefit himself and to push forward an ideological vision that he believes is going to then wrap around and benefit himself again. So

Speaker 5 with him having access to all of this information and all of this data, all of this.

Speaker 2 Who knows what he'll pick?

Speaker 5 Who knows what he'll pick?

Speaker 2 Yeah, I always say every accusation these people make is a confession most of the time. But so, Ryan's senior officials from the U.S.

Speaker 2 Agency for National Development were placed on leave after they tried to block members of Doge from accessing USAID's security system and personnel files.

Speaker 2 Earlier this weekend, according to the Washington Post, a group of about eight Doge officials entered the USAID building Saturday and demanded access to every door and floor, despite only a few of them having security clearance, according to Senate Democratic staffer who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the incident.

Speaker 2 When USAID personnel attempted to block access to some areas, Doge officials threatened to call federal marshals, the aide said.

Speaker 2 The Doge officials are eventually given access to, quote, secure spaces, including the security office.

Speaker 2 Elon responded to the showdown between Doge and USAID officials in a tweet storm against USAID, including the post on exit said, USAID is a criminal organization, time for it to die.

Speaker 2 Another one accused it of funding bioweapon research, including COVID-19, that killed millions of people.

Speaker 2 Recording this on Monday, and Trump must now say they're in the process of shutting down the agency.

Speaker 2 There is zero proof for anything he's tweeting, which is sort of just another Tuesday for Elon Musk. But explain what he does here and what's the tactic.

Speaker 1 The tactic here is, you know, he needs to create enemies. And he is someone who views himself as a hero, you know, a hero of his own making and a hero with millions of followers around the world.

Speaker 1 And he needs to constantly create opposition to that.

Speaker 1 And so when you see him tweet things like such and such is evil or such and such is a criminal organization, which he's say someone's heart is seething with hate.

Speaker 2 That's me. But go ahead.
Keep going.

Speaker 1 Karraswisher is evil.

Speaker 2 Yeah. No, I'm not evil.
Yoel Roth is evil. So is USAID.
My heart is seething with hate.

Speaker 1 You know, it's hard to keep track. But, you know, he's done this with former Twitter executives when he denied their golden parachutes when he fired them from the company for cause.

Speaker 1 You know, this language repeats itself over and over again.

Speaker 1 It's a you know, us versus them kind of tactic. He needs to be able to justify what he's doing and why he's doing it.

Speaker 1 And the simple, you know, kind of baseline answer to that all is, you know, everyone against Elon is evil.

Speaker 2 Is it a tactic or does he actually believe it from your perspective, having interviewed a lot of people? You know, I think he believes it.

Speaker 1 I think he believes it as well.

Speaker 1 And he kind of gets lost in his own sauce. You know, he tweets it into existence in a way.

Speaker 1 You know, we talk about these reality distortion fields with these, you know, supposed great men that run these tech companies.

Speaker 1 People like Steve Jobs, for example, was talked about having a reality distortion field. In some ways, you know, this is Elon's reality distortion field.

Speaker 1 He tweets something into existence and he believes it. And he gets millions of people around the world to believe it as well.

Speaker 2 We'll be back in a minute.

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Speaker 2 So, Ann, you've spent your career reporting on Eastern Europe and the fall of communism.

Speaker 2 Talk about the significance of USAID in that region where it's seen as a lifeline for many formophobia states, because we did our own thing going in there and helping.

Speaker 2 And what's the interest of malevolent foreign players like Russia and China in this situation?

Speaker 2 Because we've spent enough time trying to burnish our reputation through USAID, which was started by John Kennedy, for people who don't know.

Speaker 8 Yeah, let me actually take a step back and say that it looks to me like what he's doing isn't just about himself and his power, although, of course, it is additionally about that.

Speaker 8 But there is a pattern to what he attacks and particularly what he's doing in the last few days. He's attacked USIAD,

Speaker 8 he's attacked the National Endowment for Democracy. You know, this goes along with his support for the German far right, for the British far right.

Speaker 8 He's attacking organizations and institutions that talk about and promote democracy. and talk about, and maybe democracy is even the wrong word here.

Speaker 8 They promote the rule of law, they promote checks and balances, they promote rights, the idea of rights, they promote the idea of justice. These are really fundamental elements of

Speaker 8 what the United States has been, at least since 1945. Probably

Speaker 8 you could make the argument for the last hundred years. These are the elements of our foreign policy, of our national definition.
This is who we are.

Speaker 8 If you go to Moldova, if you go to

Speaker 8 Indonesia, I mean, if you go anywhere in the world, you'll find people who've been trained by the USAID or trained by other U.S. programs.

Speaker 8 They've been taught what is an independent judiciary, you know, how is the legal system supposed to work.

Speaker 8 This has been a package of ideas we've been promoting for many decades. And Musk's attack on these institutions and these organizations, I would say, again, this has an ideological edge.
You know,

Speaker 8 these are the institutions that

Speaker 8 Musk and the tech billionaires and others around him need to eliminate and get rid of if they are to enjoy absolute power and

Speaker 8 if they're to help create a different kind of political system.

Speaker 8 I don't know that they're going to succeed in creating a different kind of political system, but if that's what they were trying to do, this is what they would do.

Speaker 8 They would attack those institutions.

Speaker 2 Owen, you've written that tech leaders often try to deceive the public by presenting their beliefs as general libertarianism.

Speaker 2 But in fact, their political project is best described, I think, as techno-authoritarianism.

Speaker 2 Talk about what you mean by techno-authoritarianism and how that plays out, out, following what Anne was saying.

Speaker 5 Yeah, I mean, I think that the libertarianism comes from this desire, I think, on their part to see themselves as the result of a meritocracy and to see the development of their businesses

Speaker 5 and the increase in their wealth as the result of their work and how well they've done in Silicon Valley and how

Speaker 5 they are driving the world economy.

Speaker 5 But that leaves out an important aspect to this, which is that their

Speaker 5 fame and their fortunes and their businesses have really been propelled by government spending, government investment, and government subsidization.

Speaker 5 And at some point down the line, they decided that that was good for them, but not good for anyone else. They didn't want their money going to other people,

Speaker 5 you know, whether it's foreign or domestic. And the net result of this has been

Speaker 5 a feeling, I think,

Speaker 5 on the part of these tech leaders that there's somewhat of an unfairness in how they're being treated, particularly by elements of the government, particularly by

Speaker 5 Democrats.

Speaker 2 Sure, sure. They are the world's greatest victims, that's for sure.

Speaker 5 Right, yeah, but they see themselves as that. And I think that then

Speaker 5 you see them

Speaker 5 kind of taking this throwing the spaghetti against the wall approach to further grievances for how they feel.

Speaker 5 Like, you know, this is the fault of government investment in woke or this is the fault of government investment in USAID, as Anne was saying, or any number of government spending programs that don't directly benefit the tech companies then become evil and bad and, you know, something to attack and they become the victims of this, as you're saying.

Speaker 5 And that's, and again, like. still somewhat par for the course for for any industry.
The problem is that once you start to control the discourse through social media and

Speaker 5 through their work on kind of subverting media, as I write about in the book,

Speaker 5 then it starts to become a problem for more of us than just

Speaker 5 the industry and the regulators. And then you get to the point, I think, where you have this kind of techno-authoritarianism ideology that kind of builds out of that and then starts to

Speaker 5 Like it's like a perpetual motion machine. It just adds to itself and radicalizes.

Speaker 3 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 So as I'm going to branch out from Elon's. He's not alone among tech tie.
He's just the most irritating in embracing Trump. Larry Ellison, Mark Andreessen, the OG, Peter Thiel,

Speaker 2 are in that group. There's also a group of Tech COs that didn't necessarily endorse Trump nor like him, but has made a show of bending the knee to Trump after he won.

Speaker 2 That includes people like Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg, who apparently now do like him when they didn't before.

Speaker 2 Bill Gates, though, donated $50 million to former Vice President Harris's campaigns, and he recently said of Silicon Valley, the fact that now there is a significant right-of-center group is a surprise to me.

Speaker 2 It's not a surprise to me, since I never thought they had any opinions on anything except themselves, which sort of dovetails into the current Republican Party.

Speaker 2 But is Tech's embrace of Trump surprising Ryan, then Ann, then Owen?

Speaker 4 I don't think so.

Speaker 1 I mean, these guys,

Speaker 1 their best interests are their business.

Speaker 1 It doesn't matter what political party is in power. They're going to do what's best for their business.
That's always been the guiding light for Elon.

Speaker 1 You know, if you look back at his relationship with Barack Obama, for example, there were very favorable policies to SpaceX and Tesla under Obama.

Speaker 1 So he had this great relationship with the Obama White House.

Speaker 1 And you see that start to shift with Biden, you know, when he doesn't get invited to the EV summit, you know, that was obviously bad for his business. And he turns.

Speaker 1 These guys are all similar. You know, it's, it's, I don't think it's a surprise to me.
And I was actually surprised by that Bill Gates quote.

Speaker 1 You know, it's these guys aren't exactly hiding it by anybody.

Speaker 2 Yeah, he asked me that, and I'm like, what are you talking about? Like, they're like this all that there's such a bunch of fucking babies.

Speaker 2 Ann?

Speaker 8 I think I am surprised. And given that

Speaker 8 all of these people, one way or the other, have been the beneficiaries, as you've just said, of U.S. government subsidies, in some cases, of excellent American education.

Speaker 8 They're workers, the people who have money, the people who work for them are educated in the United States.

Speaker 8 They're beneficiaries of the political culture and the economic freedom that we have in the United States, loans, money,

Speaker 8 capital markets,

Speaker 8 investment. I mean, all those things, it's not an accident that those companies were created in the U.S.

Speaker 8 at a particular moment,

Speaker 8 in a time and place. And what surprises me is the revelation of their lack of patriotism.

Speaker 8 that they don't value the systems that created them, that they are turning on their own political system, that they've become entranced by, I mean, I'm not sure what we're calling it yet, techno-authoritarianism is good enough, you know, neo-monarchy, you know, not, maybe that, maybe that's a, that's a good system too.

Speaker 8 I mean, I feel like we're just at the beginning of understanding this, maybe we don't have the right words yet, but they are turning away from the political system that created them, that nurtured them, that helped them, and that

Speaker 8 gave them the possibilities in order to create something else.

Speaker 8 I really can't stress enough. I see this

Speaker 8 you know, I'm not saying they will succeed, but it's pretty clear to me that they're trying to break and change the political system that we have and lead us to something else.

Speaker 8 And yes, I'm surprised by it. Okay.

Speaker 3 Owen?

Speaker 5 I mean, I think it depends on who you're talking about.

Speaker 5 I probably tend more toward Ryan's interpretation here that these guys are mostly just interested in their bottom line, and that's the thing that kind of motivates them.

Speaker 5 But I do think that it's worth noting that

Speaker 5 while

Speaker 5 people in business may tilt right or left for whichever reason, and that may be somewhat fluid when it comes to someone like Zuckerberg, certainly Elon

Speaker 5 was very happy to flip kind of back and forth politically from the right to the left. Someone like Peter Thiel has had a far-right

Speaker 5 political project for decades.

Speaker 5 He has not made a secret of it. And Trump, in

Speaker 5 many ways, may be a more vulgar expression of what Thiel believes in, but he like the far-right ideology that is behind Trump is not something that is,

Speaker 5 I think,

Speaker 5 alien

Speaker 5 to Thiel. Right.
And you know, Mark Andreessen, you know, for over 10 years has been headed in this direction pretty consistently. So I do think that

Speaker 2 I'll tell you 20 years. If you ever have breakfast with him.

Speaker 5 Yeah, I guess what I'm saying is that

Speaker 5 if you're looking at tech people like, especially like Musk and Zuckerberg, you're going to see people who have the kind of flexible and fluid ideology depending on who's in power, because that's who can help them immediately.

Speaker 5 That's who can

Speaker 5 keep funneling

Speaker 5 the government dollars toward them, while someone like Tila Andreessen is more

Speaker 5 hardcore. And I would also say that Bezos

Speaker 5 making the decision to not have the Washington Post endorse in the presidential election, you know, a week or two before

Speaker 5 voting, I think that's an interesting point because I think Bezos is also ideologically flexible in the same way that these guys are. But he made a very clear calculation that

Speaker 5 if he did this, he wasn't going to face any consequences

Speaker 5 from the Democrats.

Speaker 5 But that if he didn't do this and Trump did win, he might face consequences for

Speaker 5 him. And when you have, when there are billions and billions of dollars in public contracts for Amazon web services, that's the kind of thing that you want to make sure that all of them are.

Speaker 2 Yeah, he didn't mind going against them before, though. I think it's a life change he's going through.
And honestly, he was one of the more conservative ones. He's from Wall Street.

Speaker 2 People forget that Jeff was an adult from Wall Street when he started. So he had much more conservative.
personality. So one of the

Speaker 2 first group that you're talking about Andreessen, and also also Elon and Peter Thiel to an extent have complained about DEI wokeness, what they see as censorship.

Speaker 2 They also have, as you said, financial reasons for backing a candidate who promises tax cuts and thinks they can get a more hands-off approach to regulation on everything from AI and crypto to antitrust.

Speaker 2 Just briefly, I'd like each of you to talk about the culture war issues versus deregulation and the different roles that played in motivating them to get behind MAGA. Anne, why don't you start?

Speaker 2 What do you think their biggest issue is? Personally, I think it's self-interest always to their core. And typically, a very problematic childhood.

Speaker 2 I don't know what else to say, or just a personality development that is broken in some fashion.

Speaker 8 Yeah, I mean, you know, you know these guys better than me, so

Speaker 8 I'll go with what you think.

Speaker 2 I do call Mark Andreessen baby Huey, but and I've thought that for 20 years, but go ahead.

Speaker 8 It's always seemed to me that, you know, there is a real issue around what we're calling woke and some of the arguments inside the Democratic Party that weren't useful or some forms of identity politics that weren't useful.

Speaker 8 But it seemed to me that these guys were willing to use propaganda to create and

Speaker 8 blow up and enlarge that culture war for their own purposes.

Speaker 8 You know, they looked for issues that bothered Americans or that they could exaggerate or play up in order to divide Americans in a way that was advantageous for Trump and for them.

Speaker 8 And they used it in that sense. And what they actually believe, I mean, I really have no idea.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Oh, and you write about this in the book, this attention to the media.

Speaker 2 They've been very interested in the media forever, like very, and manipulating it. Mark was one of the most egregious manipulators of media over the years.

Speaker 2 Such an enormous gossip for people who don't know.

Speaker 2 drops dimes on everybody, right and left, for his own business interests. But they do understand the power of that.
So let's get to the group of second tech leaders.

Speaker 2 They didn't donate to the campaign. They've been openly trying to curry favor with them ever since.
Tim Cook is probably the only CEO in the bunch who already had a relationship with Trump.

Speaker 2 Ryan, many of these Titans of Industry personally donated to his inauguration, appeared on the dais as props, I think, visited him at Mar-a-Lago, fawned over him on social media.

Speaker 2 Mark Zuckerberg just settled a spurious lawsuit to $25 million to get inside the tent.

Speaker 2 What is the role here of these larger billionaires?

Speaker 2 What do you sense has has shifted here?

Speaker 1 I think we, you know, I've been comparing it a lot to what happened in 2016, 2017. You know, you get that famous Trump Tower meeting where you have all those leaders

Speaker 1 making those faces in those photos, sitting around the table with Trump and Peter Thiel and just looking miserable. And, you know, I don't think they got anything out of that.

Speaker 1 You know, they were the face of the resistance for a couple months and then they kind of faded And, you know, they went back to business as usual. And I think that tactic didn't work well for them.

Speaker 2 Well, they weren't that resistant. They were there and they got their tax breaks and they got their repatriated money.
And I happened to break that story. So

Speaker 2 they were embarrassed to say they were there.

Speaker 1 And you also had Sergei Brin at the SFO protesting the Muslim ban protest. And you had Sundar

Speaker 1 holding

Speaker 1 a very kind of energetic

Speaker 1 all-hands at

Speaker 1 Google, you know, saying, We're not going to support these immigration policies. We stand with you,

Speaker 1 our fellow employees. And you fast-forward eight years later, and Sindar is standing right behind Trump, you know, next to Bezos and Elon Musk.

Speaker 1 You have Sergei a little bit further in the back, one of the back rows next to Vivek Ramaswamy.

Speaker 1 This is a guy who said, you know, we don't know.

Speaker 2 You notice he was in the back rows, though. They were trying to be in the back rows.
Sure. One of them called me the single greatest engineering feat of all time to be in the back row.

Speaker 2 I was like, courage. You're so courageous.

Speaker 1 Anyway, sorry. And so I don't know.
It's as simple as currying favor.

Speaker 1 It's as simple as, you know, if you, if I show up here at this inauguration, maybe the Trump administration won't pursue me and my companies. And I don't think it's any more complicated than that.

Speaker 2 All right. And

Speaker 2 as you said, the CEOs are doing their job, look after shareholders.

Speaker 2 Even if being obsequious to Trump is good for business in the short term, In the long run, it's not going to be good for businesses because this is a kleptocracy that is being built.

Speaker 2 And people are throwing on the word oligarch quite a lot.

Speaker 2 What happens here in these instances when people are sort of doing, closing lawsuits that they never would have done,

Speaker 2 vying for proximity, which was one thing, looking like props like they did at the inauguration?

Speaker 8 So you are absolutely right.

Speaker 8 This historically and in other countries that you can look at around the world, this doesn't end well.

Speaker 8 When you no longer have a political system where there's separation between business and politics,

Speaker 8 at least formally,

Speaker 8 where you create the idea that people who are close to the leader prosper and people who are not close to the leader do not, then sooner or later you will also get a system where the leader begins to pick winners.

Speaker 8 So, you know, what happened when Putin took over in Russia? He got rid of the first group of oligarchs who were there at the time and he replaced them with his own oligarchs.

Speaker 8 What happened in Viktor Orban's Hungary? He's gotten rid of almost every independent businessman at a high level that exists, and he's replaced them with, I mean, in some cases, literally, you know,

Speaker 8 his family and people who are close to him. So the temptation for

Speaker 8 an autocratic leader to use that power to decide who prospers and who doesn't is going to be very, very strong.

Speaker 8 And so it is a pretty profound mistake that they are making by demonstrating this kind of strange fealty. You know,

Speaker 8 it's not going to be advantageous to them in the long term and not going to be advantageous to the American economy.

Speaker 8 I mean, the Hungarian economy is now, depending on how you count, is the second or third poorest in Europe. Russia is now, you know, has been led down this path to destruction and disaster

Speaker 8 and more.

Speaker 8 You know,

Speaker 8 these are not political systems that end well for business.

Speaker 2 We'll be back in a minute.

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Speaker 2 So, oh, and after January 6th, all the major platforms kicked Trump off, Apple, Google, Amazon basically killed Parler after its CEO said on my New York Times podcast, Sway, I don't feel responsible for any of this and neither should the platform.

Speaker 2 That was not a good interview for him. But Parler's back under new ownership, and Trump is obviously back on all the platforms.
What happens if it seems like Trump incites violence again?

Speaker 2 Can you imagine any of these CEOs doing anything about it?

Speaker 5 No.

Speaker 5 I think we're so far beyond

Speaker 5 any kind of

Speaker 5 normal consequences at this point for Trump, especially from the private sector, that it is hard for me to see what it would take for them to take action.

Speaker 5 I mean, I do think that if it became politically unpalatable and impossible,

Speaker 5 and they were seeing

Speaker 5 a major threat to their bottom line, they might do something

Speaker 5 to take them off the platforms for inciting violence or any kind of, I mean, basically my mind just went to a bunch of even worse things that I, you know, won't, won't put out there, but, you know, anything that he could possibly do, it's very hard to see them taking that action.

Speaker 5 Also, I think it's important to remember that when they took that action, it was after the election was certified that was going to mean that he wasn't going to be the president in the case.

Speaker 3 Right, right, correct.

Speaker 5 He was a two-week lame duck. I mean, this wasn't some act of great courage against someone in a lot of power.
You know, them to do something like this now,

Speaker 5 why would they do that? The consequences could be quite effective. And I just want to go back to something that Anne was just saying about how

Speaker 5 these

Speaker 5 picking winners and losers.

Speaker 5 you know, every administration is going to, you know, be favorable to the people that supported them and like a little disfavorable to the people that don't.

Speaker 5 That's kind of the ebb and flow of politics. But what we're talking about here is something

Speaker 5 much more intense. So I think that it's important to contextualize whether or not they would take some sort of action against Trump

Speaker 5 within that context.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I think the answer is they would not. And they weren't that brave before.
You're absolutely right.

Speaker 2 So, Trump, speaking of which, Ryan, obviously, there's lots of gimmies and things like that for all these people.

Speaker 2 One

Speaker 2 is ignoring a bipartisan, Trump is ignoring the bipartisan bill banning TikTok.

Speaker 2 He's working on a potentially illegal deal that could be creation of a joint joint venture between ByteDance and American investors like Oracle and Microsoft.

Speaker 2 To be clear, both of those were involved in the last time Trump wanted to ban before he didn't want to ban it. And now, whatever.
Anyway, he was for it until he was against it.

Speaker 2 What are the downstream consequences to companies in Silicon Valley, Microsoft, Oracle, or Elon Musk owning TikTok? It's like sort of a grab bag of oligarchs here.

Speaker 2 And what happens if there's no deal and everybody goes to RedNote?

Speaker 2 Give me an example here. Use this TikTok thing as an example.

Speaker 1 It's kind of a mad lib scenario. You know, anything could happen.

Speaker 1 And I think that is, that is just kind of what we're going to see in these next couple of years where, you know, could Elon Musk buy it?

Speaker 5 Sure. Like,

Speaker 1 like, who am I to say? You know, and

Speaker 1 that's just the reality of it. And that, you know, I'm sure Mark Zuckerberg doesn't love it, you know, that TikTok is still in the picture, but how is he going to speak up?

Speaker 1 You know, he's already kind of made his bed. He's donated to the inauguration.
He is becoming buddy-buddy with the Trump administration. So like, he's just going to take it.

Speaker 1 And I think that is what we're going to see over the next four years, where you could get, you know, a lot of benefiting of Trump's allies.

Speaker 1 And, you know, Zuckerberg is going to want to be there for when something else comes into play. You know, maybe it's not TikTok.

Speaker 1 I think they've just learned that there's no benefit in becoming the resistance or a kind of a barrier to Trump. And so they're just going to wait in line and see.

Speaker 2 So, Anne, what are the calculations are foreign leaders making right now with regards to what's happening?

Speaker 2 Your latest piece, The Atlantic, makes a point that social media exists outside the legal system.

Speaker 2 That's true in the U.S., because the immunity granted by Section 230 in any country that doesn't have its own laws specifically regulating social media until recently, most didn't.

Speaker 2 Talk about what they do elsewhere, because there are other places, the EU, which are capable of reining in platform excesses and the excesses of these tech oligarchs or billionaires.

Speaker 2 I'm not sure if I should call them oligarchs yet, also. I'd love to know what you think.
So what are the calculations that other countries are making?

Speaker 2 The non-autocrats, I guess. The autocrats are thrilled, but go ahead.

Speaker 8 Yes, no, no. First of all, I'm fine with the word oligarch.

Speaker 8 I think it applies really well. An oligarch is somebody who has both political and economic power, and that's clearly what certainly Musk now has.
So this is a really interesting question.

Speaker 8 You know, there are a lot of other democracies on the planet, and they have their own rules about elections, about funding, about,

Speaker 8 you know, they have rules about limits on funding, limits on advertising, political advertising. All of those rules can now be got around on the tech platforms.

Speaker 8 And a great example of this was a recent election in Romania, where

Speaker 8 a kind of wacky conspiracy theorist candidate won the first round of the election after someone spent more than a million dollars advertising him on TikTok, even though he had declared that he had spent no money on the campaign.

Speaker 8 He broke the system election laws, that the court wound up nullifying the election, but of course, that's a catastrophe for Romanian democracy as well. So it suddenly brought to light the threat to

Speaker 8 European, but also any other democracy that wants to set its own rules about elections, about conversations, and so on.

Speaker 8 And this has created that plus Musk's advocacy for the German far-right party, the AFD,

Speaker 8 which has created a kind of crisis in Germany because he has so much greater reach on X than any normal German media.

Speaker 8 It's created this moment where the European Union is now looking seriously at what it can do to regulate.

Speaker 8 I mean, they're particularly interested not in tech broadly, but in the social media platforms, obviously.

Speaker 2 Right. They have a make, he has Make Europe Great Again, mega, which they have turned into Make Elon Go Away,

Speaker 2 which is funny. They did protest.
They did. The Germans did have 100,000 people, right? Correct? Huge amounts of people showing up to protest his support, his support particularly.

Speaker 8 Yes, it's a huge issue, especially in Germany, but not only in Germany. I think pretty

Speaker 8 every country in Europe and other democracies as well are also looking at this.

Speaker 8 And let me just say briefly: I mean, Europe can do this. They have something called the Digital Services Act.

Speaker 8 And the primary thing that it could do would be to force social media platforms to create greater transparency.

Speaker 8 So this is not about restricting speech or censorship or anything like any of the language, the fake language that Musk and others use.

Speaker 8 This is about giving people who use use the platform greater access to information, making more obvious how the algorithms work,

Speaker 8 giving outside researchers and others access to the algorithms. Obviously, the companies are resisting this really, really hard.
And it may even be a part of the reason why they have supported Trump.

Speaker 8 I mean, for example, why Zuckerberg supported Trump, because he wants Trump

Speaker 8 in

Speaker 8 fighting the EU. And again, it's not an accident that the groups and people, a lot of them that Musk is supporting, are people who are explicitly anti-EU and anti-European.

Speaker 8 So this may also be part of their propaganda campaign to break up Europe or weaken Europe so that it's unable to regulate these companies. I think this is a really important moment.

Speaker 8 It's a kind of make-or-break moment.

Speaker 8 Is it possible for other democracies to have their own rules, to have sovereign elections, and to regulate media that is essentially coming from the United States?

Speaker 2 Or getting infected. It sounds like Canada's all united against Elon Musk, it sounds like, and the rest of them.
It's interesting. People that didn't agree in in Canada.

Speaker 2 We'll see if it has an effect to strengthen things like those parties in Germany, the right-wing parties, or to hurt them, which will be interesting.

Speaker 2 Owen, in your book, owned, it is an attempt to show how two of the most popular journalists on the left basically are corrupted by platforms run by tech billionaires. And

Speaker 2 how they shifted Glenn Greenwald and Matt and the others was really something to see. Do you worry that this playbook is going to work for other journalists, say on the left?

Speaker 2 It might be ultimately corrupted by the platform. And can a journalist on the left reach an audience of the scale today using a tech platform?

Speaker 2 What are the outlook if you, since they own these platforms now and run them, they have enormous power over them?

Speaker 5 Yeah, I mean, I think that journalism is in a pretty precarious position right now

Speaker 5 in general.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 I think for, I mean, in the book, I detail like my journey through this, right? Like I took money from Colin, from David Sachs.

Speaker 5 I was approached by Rockfin, which is like another like, you know, kind of like a right-wing alternative to Twitch kind of that offered me, you know, money, but it was in cryptocurrency. So no, but,

Speaker 5 and, you know, I think that the, the temptation is there. Um, feeling like you can do your work independently with financial backing that doesn't really ask you for much is a really appealing thing.

Speaker 5 And so

Speaker 5 I think that that's okay.

Speaker 5 And I think that that's good. And I think that alternative media and independent media are good.
And I think, you know, that's how I came up.

Speaker 5 And I think that that's, you know, like those are positives.

Speaker 5 Where it starts to make me feel a little uncomfortable is once you kind of get into these right-wing networks that have a lot of financial backing and are willing to give you money.

Speaker 5 And the way that that can, you know, kind of manifest itself is,

Speaker 5 you know, I talk about Glenn in the book.

Speaker 5 He leaves the intercept. He goes to Substack.
He doesn't get paid to go to Substack, but he starts making a lot of money there. Then

Speaker 5 Peter Teal and J.D. Vance invest in Rumble.
And then a couple months later, Rumble gives a paid deal to Glenn, where he kind of moves everything over, consolidates it over there.

Speaker 5 They pay him a lot of money. And he's now

Speaker 5 working

Speaker 5 for Rumble, which again is invested in by Teal. But it's not only that, right? It's also

Speaker 5 speaking at conferences like the Network State Conference. You know, these are allies of

Speaker 5 Teal and Andreessen and all of these right-wing guys. So once you're kind of in this world, then you have the opportunity to continue to make money.

Speaker 5 And the kind of the implicit trade-off, certainly from the outside, appears to be that then you kind of, you know, talk about the things that they want to talk about, or maybe more importantly, you don't talk about the things that they don't want you to talk about.

Speaker 5 And I think that that

Speaker 5 is a very

Speaker 5 appealing

Speaker 5 thing to independent journalists, certainly. And while at any publication, there are going to be interests that determine, you know, what you cover and what you don't.

Speaker 5 And that's not, you know, I'm not being conspiratorial here. Like that's just like, you know, like you have to make coverage decisions.

Speaker 5 Having those decisions be unduly influenced by a small cohort of extremely wealthy men who have

Speaker 5 an ideological project and an economic project. I think that is the kind of thing, that's the part of it that unsettles me.

Speaker 5 And I think that often maybe people don't really even see what's happening as it's happening.

Speaker 2 Oh, we see it.

Speaker 2 Brian, you wrote a piece about how Elon and X used X to woo these right-wing leaders around the world and in this country and then push them to embrace policies that benefit him and his companies.

Speaker 2 Do you think he'll be able to maintain the relationship over the next four years with Trump? And if he can't, what are the consequences for Tesla, SpaceX, X, the rest of his companies?

Speaker 1 I think that's the million-dollar question, right?

Speaker 5 I think a lot of

Speaker 1 the trillion-dollar question, you know,

Speaker 1 a lot of folks were wondering, you know, these are two big egos. When are they going to fall out?

Speaker 1 It's a question I ask pretty regularly. And, you know, I get the sense that they actually get along pretty well right now.

Speaker 1 You know, whether that'll last for four years is, again, the question. But for now, they have a mutual kind of dependence on one another.
You know, Trump gets a lot of value

Speaker 1 out of having Elon around him.

Speaker 2 He's his junkyard dog.

Speaker 1 He takes a lot of heat off of him, for example.

Speaker 1 We're writing about how Musk is taking over government entities right now justifiably, but we're not talking about Trump. We're talking about Elon.
And

Speaker 1 I think the only thing standing in the way of that are their egos.

Speaker 1 If one of them gets annoyed that

Speaker 1 the other is getting too much credit or vice versa, you know, it's that that seems to be the only impediment here. But for now, they seem to be enjoying each other's companies,

Speaker 1 you know, what they, and they, and they benefit each other.

Speaker 2 Who is the stronger character here?

Speaker 1 Oh, man.

Speaker 1 I don't know if I could answer that.

Speaker 1 Musk.

Speaker 3 Why is that?

Speaker 2 Because I think they're using Trump as a vehicle. And I think ultimately Elon Elon has the power because he has the money, he has the influence, the relationships.
And

Speaker 2 Trump is older. And at the end of it, you know, they need him for so long.
I think. So in that way, I think Elon's much more powerful.

Speaker 2 But I don't know. He is the president, but

Speaker 2 I don't know if that's as good a job as it used to be.

Speaker 1 I watched a clip last week that was very interesting.

Speaker 1 And it was Trump being interviewed in the White House. And it was during these reports that there were being changes being made to government websites.
And if they weren't being made,

Speaker 1 they would get taken down. And he's being asked about it.
And he, like you said, doesn't know. He says,

Speaker 1 hey, that sounds like a good idea.

Speaker 1 I support that happening. But that clearly wasn't his call, or at least he wasn't read in on it.
And I thought that was mind-blowing, you know? And maybe it's a tactic. I don't know.

Speaker 1 Maybe there's some 3D chess I don't know about going on here.

Speaker 2 Well, that's what's happening there.

Speaker 2 All right. So on on a scale of one to 10, each of you, how scared are you of these billionaires?

Speaker 3 And I don't mean fearful

Speaker 2 or maybe fearful of the impact they're having right now. Anne, you go first.

Speaker 8 So I'm not personally fearful, but

Speaker 8 my autocracy detection radar is very, very high. And I would say I'm up to nine or 10.

Speaker 2 Nine or 10. And the possibility of pushing them back, where is that?

Speaker 8 You know, we'll see what happens happens in the next few days and weeks. I mean, we do still have a legitimate political opposition in the United States.
We have courts.

Speaker 8 There are tools available. And I think there will be a pushback.
But whether it

Speaker 8 can succeed

Speaker 8 given the nature of the current administration, I just don't know yet.

Speaker 3 Ryan?

Speaker 1 4.20.

Speaker 5 Why? No, I'm kidding.

Speaker 1 That was a 420 joke.

Speaker 3 Oh, ha ha.

Speaker 1 You know, 4206.

Speaker 2 Got it.

Speaker 1 Okay. I don't like thinking about things in being terms of like fearful.

Speaker 1 I just think of things in terms of accountability and there's no accountability. You know, there, he is completely unfettered.
He has no opposition.

Speaker 3 All of them.

Speaker 2 Elon in particular.

Speaker 1 And,

Speaker 1 you know, I'll keep writing about it and we'll keep reporting on it at the New York Times, but

Speaker 1 I don't know.

Speaker 1 There's just no accountability here. And that's, I think, what

Speaker 1 the biggest takeaway is for me. You know, that there's just nothing in the way.

Speaker 3 Owen?

Speaker 5 Yeah, I mean, I fluctuate.

Speaker 5 The tactic that they're using right now of just going full speed ahead. And this is, you know, Trump is doing this as well.

Speaker 5 So it's kind of hard to like see how it can be stopped, but it does fluctuate because I'm pretty...

Speaker 5 At my core, I'm pretty optimistic. And I just don't think that this can continue like this

Speaker 5 in this country specifically with the national character of this country.

Speaker 5 It can take people a long time

Speaker 5 to motivate and to take action and to like push back, but it does happen eventually. And

Speaker 5 I guess that my hope is that it happens, you know, sooner, sooner than later.

Speaker 5 Because again, you know, you can, how, how fast is the train going to go before it goes off the rails? And how how many things is it going to destroy on the way?

Speaker 5 So that's kind of a mixed metaphor, but I think you guys know what I'm saying there. Like,

Speaker 5 it's disturbing. And I think probably what I'm most scared of is like, what's going to happen

Speaker 5 before it stops.

Speaker 2 On with Kara Swisher is produced by Christian Castro-Rousselle, Kateri Yoakum, Jolie Myers, Megan Burney, and Kaylin Lynch. Nishat Kirwa is Vox Media's executive producer of audio.

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