Elon Musk: Somebody That I Used to Know - On with Kara Swisher

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Hello, I'm Kara Swisher.

Today we've got an episode of On, my other favorite podcast.

It's about my history with Elon Musk and his turn from innovator to troll.

Enjoy.

From New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is On with Karis Wisher.

And I'm Kara Swisher with 20% fewer fucks given.

Just kidding, I'm Naima Ruzza.

I probably give like 20% more fucks.

Why did you take my job?

You're like all about Eve.

I am.

And now you're supposed to say you're Karis Wisher in case people don't know.

I am Kara Swisher, and it's going to be a bumpy night, Naima.

Oh, I'm very excited.

Do you get the reference?

You don't get the reference.

I do.

It's a whole black and white film.

Oh, my God.

So, Kara, there is an avalanche of news coming out of Twitter right now, including big news last week that Yoel Roth, who is head of trust and safety, has left the company.

Obviously, a huge and a very visible loss.

Absolutely.

He's been sort of the reasonable guy, and now he's out.

He was the front person for Elon for the last week or so.

The people they kept pushing to is everything is fine here.

And now, apparently, it's not fine.

It wasn't just him.

It was a lot of people in privacy and compliance.

And for a brief second, the last advertising person standing seems to have quit, and then they somehow alert her back.

This is Robin Wheeler.

Yes.

You know, amongst this like sea of chaos, what we'd like to do today is to pull back out of the news and interview you to help make sense of Elon.

Because

you've had this unique 20-year reporting relationship with Elon and lots of long interviews with him over a decade.

Yeah.

I mean, I've known him for a long time.

I actually, you made me go back and look at some emails and our emails are very funny.

They're interesting.

He's a very challenging person sometimes, but I had forgotten how much we talked about stuff.

And it's interesting to see what he's morphed into now.

But yeah, I've covered him since 1999.

Since the last century.

Yeah, last century.

Yeah.

And you've kind of gone in your coverage and analysis from supportive of Elon to less supportive, particularly these days.

Yeah.

But in this conversation, I want to understand that shift and whether you've changed, he's changed, or the circumstances have changed.

I call him as I see him.

I'll support him when he's doing great things, and I will tell him when he's being an asshole.

It's how I do parenting.

I don't know what to say.

I'm not his mama, like I always say, but you know, I'm going to tell him what I think.

I always have.

And if he doesn't like it, whatever, sir.

You don't have to listen, but I'm telling you the truth.

And let me just say, you've been covering Elon more as an investor and a tech pioneer, more so than covering closely his specific companies like SpaceX or Tesla.

Well, I've been covering the EV space quite a bit.

You know, yes, yes, a little bit more, but I'm interested in the business.

And you've really, you have covered very, I think, very thoroughly Elon's rise and influence in Silicon Valley, especially since the death of Steve Jobs.

Right.

I think he was, you know, he has sort of inherited that mantle a little bit, although he certainly is not living up to that right now.

So you've been covering this unique personality for decades, and you've covered Twitter from the very start.

I mean, social media was very much your beat.

And so.

What we're experiencing now is the intersection of a person you've reported on, observed, understood over decades with a company you've covered from its inception, Twitter.

From before it was Twitter.

It was called

Odeo.

I mean, I remember bringing a pie to the headquarters and there were like four people there.

You know, it was really small in on, I think it was Bryant Street, if I recall correctly.

And so I've been covering Twitter from the get-go.

So you're a major user on Twitter.

You have 1.4 million followers.

You tweet a lot.

You're extremely engaged.

It's my hobby.

It's your hobby.

It's like stamp collecting.

It's my addiction.

Yeah, kind of.

Yeah, addiction is a good word for it.

Oh, hobby.

I like it.

I enjoy it.

It's also a medium.

It's like an art, right?

A craft.

I'm always like, I'm a professional Twitter.

Kind of make you a business card.

Yeah.

I think people do want to understand what's your opinion, what's your analysis, what's reporting, and how these elements intertwine, right?

Because you have a lot of history that informs your perspective on Elon.

People forget I was a beat reporter for many, many, many years.

And everyone's like, you don't know what you're talking about.

Like someone today was like, you don't understand this.

I was like, are you kidding me?

I know this company and all its players.

very well and all the different people who've tried to come at it and the board members.

I just, I think I could stand up next to anybody to talk about the history of this company and where it's been going.

Yeah.

And our full episode is going to be unpacking your reporting.

And I want to take a walk down memory lane of the Kara Elon situationship.

Well, you know, I'd like to say at the start, I really have been very supportive of Elon, even when he's acted badly sometimes.

And because I really do believe, you know, especially around Tesla and

SpaceX and some of his other stuff, I think he's really visionary.

So I've always been someone who's been much more supportive than other reporters.

And I think I get dragged a lot for that.

But there's a guy who had a rug store in Palo Alto and he ended up taking shares of people's startups rather than money for his rug.

Shares or chairs?

Because he has a rug store.

He's shares of these startups.

And he got very rich and he became a very good, a very smart, savvy investor.

He said, Silicon Valley is full of really smart people working on small ideas.

Yeah.

And I was like, big people working on small.

It always stuck with me for years and years.

That stuck with me.

And Elon Musk was a big mind working on big ideas.

And so I always appreciated that for sure I agree with when I was in the valley um at Stanford someone said this I think Silicon Valley has a problem problem because everyone was like we're fixing the laundry problem we're we're fixing the dry cleaning problem we're fixing the scooter problem it's like right what's the actual fucking problem right i used to say san francisco was um assisted living for millennials you know that's what they were solving all those dumb problems and elon wasn't they were these are big issues and and he was uh passionate and he was uh emotional and um very approachable We're going to get to the beginning of your relationship in a minute.

You know, we'll get to all those early encounters.

But before we go down memory lane, I want to snapshot so people understand as they're listening where your relationship with Elon is today.

He's not speaking to me.

So one word to describe it.

I'm an asshole.

He emailed me this recently.

Yes.

So let's talk about your last email exchange.

You know, before this, I had asked him for an interview for Aunt, and we had a great back and forth about what should be done at Twitter.

And I was explaining what we had done with Twitter spaces.

And he said, I'd love your thoughts.

And I love to come on the show, this and that.

And I was like, oh, great.

This is great.

In early October, I was on some of those emails chains with you and Elon Trading.

And what he said is...

He said he's going to come talk to us when the dust settles.

Yes, that's correct.

And then I tweeted something that he didn't like.

I tweeted this Washington Post article, which cited an anonymous U.S.

defense official talking about Starlink.

The official said, Elon's going to Elon.

And I wrote on Twitter, Elon's going to Elon kind of says it all.

So, this is this mid-October reporting from Washington Post where Elon was at the time kind of wavering on whether or not he was going to keep funding Starlink.

But I didn't agree with this defense official.

I think they should pay Elon.

And I said that.

And so, the next couple of tweets was like, I think he should be paid.

He does have them over the barrel and can say what he wants because they, I think it was the Defense Department's problem.

And then on October 17th at 9:45 p.m.

Eastern, you get an email from Elon.

Yeah, late.

It's always late.

Up at night having chocolate sandwiches.

I don't know what's happening.

And the subject says?

Just says you're an asshole.

And a screenshot.

Yeah, the screenshot was there,

which is fine.

And in this case, I was supporting him, which is really kind of ironic.

And it's also weird that he doesn't follow you on Twitter, but he's aware of your tweets.

Yeah, that's his brother.

I'm sure.

That's the only way I can think about it is one of his minions or his brother.

His brother responded saying, no good deeds.

And I go, indeed.

I don't know.

Who knows?

Did you write him back at the email?

I did.

I was like, are you kidding me?

Like, I was, I wrote him back saying, I actually was supporting you here.

You obviously are getting bad information.

I wasn't being obsequious anyway.

I'm like, what are you talking about?

First of all, whatever.

He can call me an asshole.

I don't care.

Did you hear back?

No.

No.

I explained it.

I said, this is what I've been supportive of you.

Here, here, here, and here.

I don't know what you're talking about.

You can attack me for other things.

You don't agree with me.

And I thought it was super thin-skinned.

I just said it was wrong and thin-skinned at the same time.

But no response.

So does this feel different to you?

This kind of maddie lot.

Is it different?

No.

No, I've had, I've been on the receiving end of this many times.

I think he has people around him that people agree and people who know him.

You saw Chris Sokka having that long tweet about that.

Saka's thread was really about how isolated Elon seems to have become.

Do you think he's isolated right now?

I think he's got, you know, apparently goes to a lot of Hollywood parties now, you know, showed up and he looked kind of good in that outfit that he had on, the whatever the...

the warrior outfit he was wearing, the Japanese warrior.

I think he's, you know, I think as you get that rich and people tell you what a genius you are, you start to really believe it.

And you don't like people around you who disagree.

And even if people think they're disagreeing around him, they're really not.

They're not risking their relationship.

They, you know, one of the things I've heard from inside Twitter, which is interesting, and I've heard this about him before, when he wants to do something, he wants to do it.

And apparently he down to like Oxford commas on in text, in like communications texts and stuff, and ads and things like that.

He likes the Oxford comma, whatever.

Yeah.

That's the, that's the extra comma that I hate, actually.

But Elon likes it.

He likes it.

And someone was like, you know, that's not how we do it.

And he said, well, I'm the law here.

That's what he said to them.

I'm the law.

He said it to several people.

So I know it's true.

I'm the law.

It's true he is, but God, saying it, yikes.

So now I want to hit rewind.

I want to go back in time.

So it's like what?

The late 90s, early aughts.

You haven't yet had 100 kids and you're living in San Francisco back then.

And you're at the journal or all things D when you first met Elon?

I think I was at the journal.

I covered him.

I covered X.com,

which was, I can't find those stories.

He loved cars and he

was quirky and interesting.

And I liked him better than a lot of the others.

The PayPal guys included Peter Thiel and David Sachs and I didn't like them so much.

And, you know, ultimately, as a reporter, you're supposed to not think, but you know, you don't like people.

You don't like them.

You're like, oh, that guy.

So I met him around then, and he merged.

He had other founders there at X.com and he merged it into PayPal.

And I covered that.

Yeah, with Peter Thiel's Confinity to become PayPal.

They closed that by 2000.

But, you know, they didn't like each other, X.com and PayPal.

Elon got removed as CEO of PayPal because he was made CEO of PayPal, right?

And then he was removed.

The board replaced him with Peter Thiel.

I think it was when he was on honeymoon, by the way.

Oh, really?

They didn't get along.

So he was part of the PayPal Mafia, which included, of course, Peter Peter Thiel, but also Reid Hoffman, who went on to found LinkedIn, Jeremy Stoppelman, who founded Yelp.

Yep.

Keith Raboy of Square and Opendoor fame.

How did Max Levschin was better?

Max Levchin was lovely, of course.

Lovely guy.

Lovely, lovely.

Ukrainian.

Yeah.

How did Elon stand out in this crowd, if at all?

Not particularly.

Reid Hoffman was really the

Peter sort of made himself the center of attention, and then he went off and did all his different investment funds and Facebook most obviously.

That was a great investment.

But he didn't particularly.

He was sort of just one of the startup guys.

There was lots of people like Elon back then, lots of people.

So he was just like a Jeremy Stoppelman, for example.

You kind of blink and miss him in the group.

Yeah.

Well, yeah, you know, I knew who he was, but there were lots of them.

They were all over the place.

They were crawling all over San Francisco.

How did he emerge out of that pack to be the richest and most powerful?

I mean, that's a very powerful little bunch of guys.

Yeah, it was.

They've all done very well, by the way.

They have.

I'm not crying for any of them.

No, some better than others.

So So I, you know, I ran into all of them.

And so I was always attracted to Elon's stuff because it was different.

It was sure different.

You know, the stuff he did in Tesla and the rockets.

I'm particularly fixated on the rockets.

Yeah.

By 2002, he'd moved on to SpaceX.

And then in 2004, he jumped into Tesla.

That's right.

That someone else started it.

He was not the founder, exactly.

And you knew him during this time.

You talked to him during this time, right?

Not a lot.

Not a lot.

You were kind of in his orbit, yet you couldn't get an on-stage interview with him until 2013.

Why?

Yeah, um well we didn't pursue it that much, you know what I mean?

We asked him, but he wasn't at the top of our list.

We were interviewing Steve Jobs and Bill Gates.

The interview that you finally got in 2013 wasn't easy to book.

It took literal legwork from you and your former business partner at All Things D,

of course, longtime Wall Street Journal columnist Walt Mossberg.

You and Walt track down Elon at South by Southwest.

Here's how Walt starts to tell it because I spoke to him the other day.

Okay.

You know, we were walking down the street

at South By, and it was very funny, actually.

this part has nothing to do with Elon but

people were like

yelling to us and saying hi hi to us every minute walking down the street like we were like

celebs you know and we were together so it was very funny and I said so what are we gonna do and she said well he's at a private dinner

that we're not invited to, but we're gonna go, we're gonna walk into the dinner and we're gonna try to persuade him.

And she said, and I can't do it by myself.

I haven't succeeded so far.

So I need you.

And the two of us together will do this.

So I said, well, not my style to crash people's dinners, but sure, I'll do it.

By the way, first of all, everybody was looking at Walt, not me.

Walt was a real star, like Elvis at CES.

It was like, here's Elvis.

Like, I can't explain to you how famous Walt was among techies.

But we went to this dinner and I remember what the restaurant had a window and, you know, everyone's jammed in and they were having dinner and Elon was there.

And I sent Walt in because I had been nagging Elon.

And you guys went and cornered him, right?

You literally put him in a corner.

We cornered him and we stood on either side.

And I said, I brought in the big guns now, Elon.

You have to say yes.

And so he said yes to Walt.

He did not say yes to me, but he did say yes to Walt.

And he did it.

And it was a great, great, great interview.

So.

His big idea in 2013 back then was about electric vehicles.

And specifically, you know,

he kind of went from doing yellow pages and and payments to space and, you know, autonomous vehicles, which was a huge jump for him.

And you guys asked him about that in the interview.

Let's play a clip from this 2013 conversation.

You'd asked him why did he want to do this of all things?

The reason for Tesla was not because I thought that the...

there was some huge opportunity in electric cars or that I thought it was some rank-ordered best way to

get a return on investment or something like that.

In fact, I think starting at a car company, particularly the electric car company, would have to rank as one of the dumbest things you could possibly do on that scale.

He goes on for a while, but ultimately he lands at this kind of idea that even though it was dumb, even if he wasn't the best fit for it, no one else was going to do it.

Let's hear that.

The easiest thing for me to have done after PayPal would have been to start a new internet company.

That would have been like falling a blog.

I mean, quite really easy.

And

so

the reason I did it was because it was clear that we were not going to see electric cars from the incumbent manufacturers.

So, I mean, what does it sound like to hear him now?

You probably haven't heard that clip in a long time.

I haven't.

Wow.

Well, I liked him.

I was like, good for you.

I literally was surrounded by people pitching me the stupidest, stupidest, stupidest startups, and they were making a fortune.

And part of me hated them.

for that because this was a chance to change humanity.

I got into this because I love tech and I think tech has these amazing great breakthrough qualities.

He was the of, I can't think of another person who was talking like this.

And he was talking about cars, which were important and a big problem with clay.

He was talking about climate change very early,

space, and not in a stupid way, in a really like, we have to become a multi-planetary species.

And I wasn't taken in by.

the hype.

I thought it was, they were big ideas and there was no way not to be excited by it.

When I hear that clip, I hear shades of why he might want to have bought Twitter, you know?

Yeah.

A consumer social app.

He has no past experience.

It would have been easier for him now to do a product, like a consumer product, but he suggests he knows very little about how to do this, but no one else is going to make it better.

That's kind of what we saw in some of his texts with people.

Do you, do you hear something similar in that?

Yeah.

You know what?

Honestly, when he, when he started going after it, I thought, this is the best person.

Yeah, he could do it.

Like, yeah, I think I said that.

And a lot of people were like, no way.

I was like, you know what?

He is.

There's very few people that could bring together the kind of people needed to make this thing better.

We're going to get to Twitter a little bit later, but do you think he like he gets off on being an underdog?

Yeah.

I mean, that's okay.

I don't mind.

Someone had to do it.

It should be me.

I will go in and save.

So what, what drives him?

Is it the, I mean, this is opinion based on your reporting and relationship with him.

What do you think motivates him more?

The

desire to do something big or the desire to disprove people who are naysayers?

Well, you know, all really good entrepreneurs are contrarians.

They just are by nature.

So, and he's taken it to an extreme in lots of ways.

But I would say if on good days, I think he really, and I'm using a Steve Jobs term, he wanted to make a dent in the universe.

He does.

He does.

He thinks at one time I caught him when he was very emotional after he had a very difficult period with Tesla, another interview I did later.

And he was almost crying because he said that the earth is going to die.

Like, and if I heard that from most people, I'm like, get out of here.

You're a liar.

You are.

So in the best case, I think he wants to make a debt, death in the universe.

In the worst case,

massive narcissism, but they sometimes go hand in hand.

Yeah.

And he's rising at the time where jobs is gone.

Yeah.

But Elon was very emotional.

And in 2013, he had a very complicated relationship with the press.

There's a big backstory here, but he got upset by this bad review of the Tesla Model S in the New York Times.

Do you remember that?

Oh, yeah.

I asked him about that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And he claimed that that reporting, that article was fake.

And it went back and forth.

The public editor, who is Margaret Sullivan, who you just interviewed,

got involved and weighed in.

So you asked him about that in 2013.

Here's the clip.

Is that why you hit back so hard at the times?

I mean, we joke about it and stuff like that, but many people don't do that.

What was the reasoning?

I know you've said a lot about this, but

what was your reasoning?

It's like, you're not going to take this?

Or are you?

Yeah,

well.

I thought about it a fair bit before actually responding.

So it wasn't sort of just a totally off-the-cuff thing.

But when the article was published, we saw a significant decrease in sales, particularly in the New York Times sort of main readership area, sort of northeast, particularly in cold areas.

He said it wasn't off the cuff.

It wasn't.

He thought about it.

So what do you think now?

I mean, this is early on in his friction with the press.

Obviously, these days he's tweeting about the Times like Trump was.

He was very strategic in that regard.

I mean,

nobody punches back like he does, and he punches it back very similar to Trump in that regard.

But he felt he was wronged.

Like, he had more data than the journalist driving the car.

That was part of his argument.

He did, but it was the beginning of not tolerating real feedback around issues around Tesla.

One thing I did think was unfair was, look, there's accident, car accidents every day because of car makers or because of people driving them or whatever.

And every time there was a problem with an electric car, the press.

piled on like one and there were thousands of accidents.

But that's covering a new technology.

That is responsible.

Correct.

It was overdone, just like when websites first came along.

I think I wrote 10 stories.

So Discovery has a new website.

Wow.

Yeah.

He's been working very hard on this, and I think he didn't agree with him.

Now,

he went a little personal.

You know, on the most part, I think he's gotten very fair coverage.

I think he's gotten a lot of slavish coverage, a lot of slavish coverage, and a lot of unfair coverage.

and mostly fair coverage, I think.

But he only sees the stuff that's unfair.

He seems to be fighting, like he seems to be justifying his emotion with rationality.

He's saying, I have this data and you are driving down sales.

So he's like an engineer approaching an emotional problem.

Is that a fair way to characterize him?

I guess.

I just think he's much more emotional than you think.

It's just that you don't think these people are emotional.

But does he let himself be that?

Yeah, it's clear.

He gets mad.

Why would you write a me, you're an asshole?

No, nobody does that.

Like, not because they're scared of me.

It's just like, just take a minute, right?

And so he didn't ever take many minutes.

And he just sort of, and he loves communicating.

Like you can see it.

You can see it.

Twitter became his, his vehicle in that regard.

But he seems to feel like he's right because he's armed with some kind of data that makes him right.

Yeah.

Right.

Yeah.

That's a little what's different about him.

Cause other people, you might say, you and I could argue and I could say, I'm very emotional about this.

No, everybody, lots of Silicon Valley people are like this.

If you understood, Kara.

Yeah.

If, you know, I'm very rich, Kara, in this area and therefore I'm an expert in this area.

I mean, every one of them.

Every one of them.

Jeff Bezos is particularly bad that way.

He says that to you a lot in interviews, Elon does.

You're not understanding me.

You don't understand.

You don't get it.

You don't get it.

Okay.

Well, then explain it to me like I'm stupid.

That's what I often say to these people.

Yeah, which is a great way to get the answer out.

They assume malevolence when you're just like, huh?

Explain it to me.

They don't like that.

And he has not liked it more and more as time has gone on.

In that interview, you kind of, you mentioned that you guys had laughed about it, I think, earlier in the interview.

And there was, there was a sense of comedy about about the spectacle Elon was creating about this coverage.

But do you think you were understating something that seemed like maybe a one-off, but became more problematic in Elon?

Do you think you recognized at that moment just how big a deal this pushback against press was?

I didn't mind him doing that.

No, I didn't mind him doing it.

He should, he should be able to do what he wants.

I'm often like, do what you want, but reap the rewards.

So if he wanted to push back, I mean, you know, there are some people who think that reviewers had too much power, not just car reviewers, but all kinds of reviewers.

And so it's okay to say, hey, just a minute.

And, you know, Walt, speaking of people who had real influence, Walt could make or break products.

And so if he was wrong, you know, Jobs used to call him or Gates would call him after he reviewed a product and, you know, started yelling at him.

Yeah, I'd asked Walt about those kind of interactions with Steve Jobs and Bill Gates.

Let's hear a clip.

You've talked about Steve Jobs and Bill Gates having heated discussions and arguments with people like Steve and Bill,

when you wrote things that were critical of them or, you know,

what would they do, not respond to your calls or write you a huffy email?

What would they do?

Bill would write me an email complaining and

Steve would

get me on the phone and complain.

And then, you know, a week later, we'd be okay, you know.

Yeah.

It was it was normal.

Oh, they'd call right away.

We all know when the column dropped because it would be like 11, whatever at night

in the old days.

And

he got a call in two seconds from Jobs or Gates.

Yeah.

He said Jobs would always call and Gates would write him an email.

Yes, probably.

Angry.

Type, type, type, type.

Well,

he has a case you made because Walt's reviews of Microsoft was, well, that sucked.

Well, that didn't suck so bad.

Well, I thought it would suck and it was okay.

That was pretty much all of Walt's reviews of Microsoft products.

But Apple was like, I thought this was going to be even better.

It's only kind of great.

And Steve would be angry.

You know, he would argue with me.

I mean, I could argue with Steve Jobs, and I don't think he particularly,

we didn't have a, you know, we knew each other pretty well, but not like him and Walt.

And not like you and Elon.

Yeah, sort of.

Okay, let's take a quick break and we'll be back in a minute.

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So Elon does get powerful between, so you interview him in 2013 and then he comes back in 2016.

Again, now it's code conference.

This conversation was important and also nerdy.

It was mostly about space and AI and whatnot.

But there's one moment that's very curious around the elections because back then we were in primaries with Hillary and Trump.

And you guys asked him, or you asked him, Kara, are you backing either of the candidates?

Let's play the clip.

Are you backing either of the candidates at this point?

I'm trying to stay out of this situation.

Because

I don't think that's the finest moment in our democracy.

Well, given that it's not the finest moment in our democracy, do you think the best thing is to stay out?

Or

to get in and

what I could do to head off the worst.

I'm not sure how much influence I could have as one person on the outcome.

So

I mean, if I think I could make a difference, I would probably do something.

But

like I said, I think I'm just glad that

being the U.S.

president is like being captain of a large ship with a small rudder.

And so there's just a limit to how much good or bad a president can actually do.

Yeah.

Large ship with a small rudder.

He's right.

And he's right.

He's not unwrong.

He's not unwrong.

Does he have a large ship with a small rudder right now?

No, he's got a large ship with a big rudder.

And he's

so yeah.

He was being coy or being genuine.

Because when Trump won, Musk served on his Economic Council Advisory Board with leaders like Travis Kalanik and others from Silicon Valley.

Did you talk to Elon around that time about Trump?

Yes, a lot, a lot, quite a lot.

He didn't like Trump.

He thought he was the immigration thing was terrible.

He thought the gay and lesbian stuff was terrible.

We'd go back and forth on phone and texts and emails.

And one of the things I said when he went to that Trump meeting that I broke the news about, which was in December of 2016, all the tech leaders went.

Most of them ran running from me when I found out about it.

And they didn't want anyone to know they were going.

They really wanted to.

Yeah, it was like Cheryl Sandberg, Jeff Fezeus, and Jared was there.

Jared was there.

Everybody was there.

And it was organized by Peter Thiel.

Elon was going back and forth on whether to go, actually.

Was he asking you for advice?

On whether to go?

Or do you remember?

What do you think?

And I was like, oh, God, you have to say something about immigration.

You're an immigrant.

You know, I was really struck by the immigration stuff for tech, that Trump was really vile about immigration.

And I said, there's going to be a Muslim ban.

And he's like, no, there's not.

We can convince him.

I can convince him.

And I go, all right, Jesus.

Sure.

I called him Jesus a lot.

You know, like,

right.

I'm like, you can't.

You can't.

This guy is a died in the wall racist.

And so I, you know, he did ultimately go because he thought he could make a difference.

The same thing about joining on the council.

When a bunch of anti-gay stuff was, executive orders were coming up, he was on the phone with them.

I know he was, but he was, he tried to make changes.

He did.

He would call them.

He said, I'm on it.

Like I would bug him.

And at one point, you know, when he, when the Muslim ban happened, I had told him before that, once he does it, you're going to write me an email and call yourself an idiot.

And

he kind of did.

He's like, oh, I guess you were right.

I was in Silicon Valley at the time.

And I remember that was also a time where there was just this big move for the rationalist movement, a big movement.

You know, there was Me Too was happening.

And people felt like it was swinging too much in one direction.

And Peter Thiel and others were.

pushing back and becoming more conservative, right?

They were.

Yeah, he was not.

He was not.

He wasn't particularly political.

I would not say he was.

You'd be surprised.

He voted.

He loved Obama.

I remember.

He didn't like Hillary.

And later he didn't like Biden.

Why didn't he like Hillary?

A lot of people didn't like Hillary.

It was one of these, I'll look at the candidate and then decide.

He wasn't an ideologue.

So after two interviews that you and Walt did in 2017, this is a year later from your last interview, Walt was retiring.

And you and Lauren Goode at the time were putting together a kind of goodbye episode for this podcast you had.

It was called Too Embarrassed to Ask, right?

The

Goodbye for Walt.

Yeah.

Because Walt was retiring.

And

lots of people came on and asked these kind of personal, it was like Bill from Redwood or whoever, I'm making this up, but who joined the people?

Mark Cuban, I think, did.

Bill Gates, Cheryl Sandberg did it, Susan Wojewski.

And they were doing like, hi, I'm Bill from Redmond or I'm Cheryl from wherever she lived at the time, Menlo Park or Palo Alto.

But Elon from Los Angeles or Austin wasn't there.

Why didn't yeah, I wanted him to do it.

Why didn't he show up?

This was really weird.

So he, you're getting all the stuff that's going to be in my book, but okay.

Get the scoop, Karen.

He

was angry about a tweet that Walt did.

What did Elon respond to you?

Yeah, he wrote back, and I'm going to just paraphrase it.

He was like, you know, is this the Walt who attacked me on Twitter?

And I was like, huh?

It was not an attack.

And there was no, doesn't this suck?

Wow, Tesla's a loser company.

How could it be?

None of that.

And lots of people did that.

Walt never did things like that.

And so I was like, what are you talking about i spoke to walt the other day i asked him to remember that quote-unquote attack which was pretty much a mundane tweet here's walt talking about that tweet my

feeling about market cap

i

don't believe market cap is an important measure of a company's value uh

because i think the stock market is is

kind of out of sync with the real economy in many cases or the real performance of a company that the way to value a company is what really are their earnings what really are their is their profit margin what really are you know what

products do they have and I still believe that yes but one day

there was a tweet about

Tesla I think it was

reaching a certain like a market cap bigger than GM that day or something

and

I jumped in and said, I really admire, I wish I had the tweet in front of me.

I really admire

Tesla and SpaceX and everything done, but I don't think market cap is the best way to measure value.

And so I didn't attack him.

What I attacked was using the concept of market cap.

He then responded to me and said, etu Walt?

Etu Walt.

That's an etu brute reference, a Brutus reference from Julius Caesar, which for those who don't speak Latin basically means, why did you fuck me, my friend?

Yeah, essentially.

You know, it was so weird because it was supposed to be lovely.

Like Walt is a legend.

And gosh, Walt was so nice to him to all the interviews.

I was tougher during interviews than Walt was.

Walt was a big admirer of Elon's in many ways and was always very supportive.

And again, this one tweet bothered him.

And

I don't know what was going on.

He goes up and down in these moods.

And it's really, if you get get him at the wrong time, you're going to get sort of angry, Elon.

And it was so wrong.

I was like, this is not what he said.

So did you stand up for a while in the chain?

I did.

And he didn't.

He was mad at me.

Don't ever email me again.

He said, I was like, what do you, I was like, do you know what he said here?

Are you paying attention?

I just, you got that wrong, bro, you know?

And he wouldn't.

Listen, it was weird.

It was so weird.

We didn't talk for a year or more.

Yeah, that was May of 2017.

What I find remarkable is like for someone who seems to value loyalty around, because I mean, he has a lot of sick fans in his tribe.

And for someone who seems to value facts and data,

he, here you are with facts and data standing up for your partner.

Of course.

And Elon's like, don't ever email me again.

He doesn't respect those values in you that he seems to value in himself.

Well, it was, it was, yes.

I just, I was angry because it was the end of Walt's career and I thought he deserved better from all the people that he wrote about.

And he just could have been a bigger man.

I just don't.

But he shouldn't have have been mad at him, by the way.

Yeah.

He was wrong.

How long did you get the cold shoulder?

How, how did, and how did you and Elon eventually kiss and make up?

We didn't kiss.

We never have kissed.

Thank you, Kara, for clarifying that fact.

He wrote me or something.

Like, how's it going?

Like, I think he forgot.

Like, he forgot.

He forgot.

That's what it was.

I must have because I asked him to come to an event and he said yes.

Yeah.

And in 2018, I think actually you interviewed him in person.

Yeah.

He was already a huge super user of Twitter at this time, but a lot's going on with Elon in 2018.

This This is when we start to see the dumpster fire of Elon's Twitter start to happen.

And you wrote this New York Times column in fall of that year, 2018.

The headline was, Elon Musk is the id of tech.

At the time, he was big on Twitter.

So talk about that.

Yeah, he was like, what was interesting, I had done an online interview with Jack Dorsey and he said Elon was his favorite Twitter user, which was interesting.

This was all online on Twitter, which was like a GOAT rodeo.

Jock didn't want to face me in person, which was very typical of him.

And so I just thought Elon really was the id.

He loved the product.

Boy, did he love the product?

Like I did.

But talk about what he was tweeting because he was tweeting crazy.

He's calling someone a pedo.

I mean, can you just talk a little bit about what was happening back then?

The funding is secured.

So this is, just give us some contact.

He was, he was going through some personal things, I think.

And he said the funding is secured.

He was a public company.

a person and he was talking about selling the company was against SEC rules, I think.

Then he attacked, there was a whole thing in Thailand with those kids that were stuck in that cave, underwater cave, and he was trying to help.

And then he got in a beef with the guy who was really running the pro thing and he called him a pedo like it was so um

hair trigger he was just tweeting anything and at the same time he was tweeting funny stuff memes and pictures and you know some of it's quite delightful but then every now and then he'd drop a piece of shit in there what do you think that elon found on twitter that he didn't have elsewhere or what did

I don't know, reaction, instant reaction, a way to outlet.

He's a very joking person.

He tells a lot of jokes and he likes,

he does a lot of jokes.

Because he

Well, he likes to like, he's, he's so smart, it must be, um,

he's just got a lot of energy.

And so it has to have an outlet.

If you look at some of the timestamps, they're one after the next.

I get that way too.

So, and it's, and Twitter is addictive.

And so I just think he wants to talk.

He wants to talk.

He just wants to, I have to say, it must be lonely, even though he has a million kids in the position these people are in.

Their worlds get smaller and smaller.

They have more and more minions around them, and

it's more and more comfortable.

I've been taken to call it recently a cashmere prison is what it is.

And so he wants an outlet.

This is his outlet to real people who he can spark with.

In this New York Times column, you wrote, is Elon Musk the id of tech?

And it starts with this kind of question.

A lot of people have been asking me for my take on what's going on with Elon Musk these days.

But what they're really asking is obvious.

Is he crazy?

Not crazy like a fox, but crazy as a loon.

And then you answer it.

Why don't you read that, actually?

Yeah, I got it right here.

Let's see.

No, he's not.

Not at least in my various encounters with him over nearly two decades, including recently, in which he has been alternately funny, rude, compelling, obnoxious, accessible, easy to deal with, hard to deal with, always on, outspoken to a fault, even when he might be at fault, angry, charming, intense, and also strikingly confident, which is a long way of saying deeply human with all the positive and negative characteristics that suggests.

And that is why, to me, Elon Musk has become the id of tech, but his desires and needs are never unconscious or hidden.

They are all there in the brightest technicolor for all to see.

In the oddest of ways, he is transparent, so utterly direct that is unsettling and even painful at times to those around him.

I think that was pretty accurate.

I'm a good writer.

Did you hear from him after that column?

I think maybe.

He liked that one, I think.

I thought it was fair.

I think he thought it was fair.

Maybe.

I don't remember.

Maybe it warmed it because it's a year after he threw the trolleys out of the pram.

Yeah.

By November 2018, he comes to your Recode Decode podcast.

And he does.

And you ask him about kind of how he,

this new ecosystem of Twitter followers that love him and journalists who he feels are attacking him slash reporting on him.

Yeah.

And how he kind of swirls this into a maelstrom.

Yes, he does.

Let me just say, we did it at Tesla headquarters.

It was on Halloween night.

We did the interview.

Me and Eric.

Did you wear a costume?

No, I was wearing all black.

I have a picture that we look great together, actually.

It's a really nice picture.

But, you know, I was there.

It was very empty.

He was there working away and he had gone through, he was trying to save Tesla.

It was in real trouble.

And it was, he's, you know, the whole sleeping on the floor of the factory, et cetera.

But he was really beside, had been beside himself.

So in a lot of ways, I kind of, I understood what was happening when he sort of had that

get upset.

At one point, he said, the world's existence hangs in the balance, something like that.

And I was like, whoa, he really did genuinely believe this.

It was,

you just could see it all on his face.

He didn't hide it.

So many people are good at hiding their emotions.

He was not.

And I think he was genuinely exhausted.

I think he wasn't taking care of himself.

He was trying to save his company.

And he thought his company's destiny was linked to the destiny of humanity.

He really did.

He really, you know, we need to move to electric cars.

We're going to kill ourselves.

Climate change, climate change was top of mind for him.

He says that year was the worst year he'd ever had.

And he,

you could see it.

You could see it.

Yeah.

I know that experience, by the way, when you go to, when you have like a friend who's in a really dark hole or when you're in a really dark hole and then someone comes and sees your house or what you're living in, and

like the dungeon, the den.

You asked him a question about this

new army of kind of Twitter fans around him and how he mobilizes them and kind of his reactions on Twitter.

Let's play a clip.

Do you think you're particularly sensitive?

No,

of course not.

All right.

Count how many negative articles there are and how many I respond to.

1%, maybe.

Right.

But the common rebuttal of journalists is, oh, my article's fine.

He's just thin-skinned.

No, your article is false and you don't want to admit it.

Right.

Do you take criticism to heart correctly?

Yes.

Such as, give me an example of something.

How do you think rockets get to orbit?

That's a fair point.

Yeah, not easily.

Yeah.

Physics is very demanding.

If you get it wrong, the rocket will blow up.

Right.

Cars are very demanding.

If you get it wrong, a car won't work.

Right.

Truth in engineering and science is extremely important.

Right.

And therefore.

I have a strong interest in the truth.

All right.

And you are.

Much more than journalists do.

But are you, but what I'm trying to get to is you want to acknowledge when you do this, it does set off like

people beyond you that listen to you.

You have a fan base that's quite rabid, I would say.

No, I wouldn't say that.

No?

I think they're great.

Okay.

All of them?

No, not all of them.

I mean, not all of them.

Right.

Yeah.

That was a good exchange.

Wow.

You're giving him leash.

Are you impressed with your own interview skills, Karen?

I am.

Wow.

That was good.

I haven't listened.

I don't listen to interviews after I do them.

That was a good interview.

That was a good interview.

I really liked that interview.

That exchange captures not just his frustration with the press, but like how he's like, I'm on to bigger things.

I got big thing.

I'm putting rockets into space and into orbit.

Oh, no.

He was like, if I am stopped by these press people, I shall, humanity shall die.

That was sort of the idea.

And I do believe he believed it.

And he was very emotionally involved with his company.

He was giving it his all.

He was exhausting himself from a health point of view.

It wasn't good.

So you could see, you could start to see the anger.

And of course, blaming the press, like that's the problem.

It's not his problem.

They're not hindering him.

And he really began to really focus on the press in a way that was really odd and kind of creepy, I thought.

That kind of like, I have to save the earth and you're in my way, that reminds me of, you know, working in the Middle East and,

you know, having worked around people like Muammar Gaddafi or others who had kind of saved the country at some point.

They had done something heroic at some historical juncture.

But they felt like their, the world's success or the country's success was tied to them.

Yeah, he was the, he's the hero of his story, for sure.

The hero and the dictator.

Your next interview with Elon happens in the pandemic.

It's September 2020.

You interview him again.

This time I was there.

It was for our old podcast, Sway, at the New York Times.

And I remember that because it was a Saturday.

He only took interviews on Saturday.

So he had a press person back then.

But when we first, when he first got on the line, there were these cats going around.

He was on the laptop.

People were setting it up around him and there had been headphones.

And Elon's like, do you want to do the interview or do you want me to wear headphones?

You pick.

So we did the interview without headphones.

It seemed like a reasonable give.

And it was going just fine until you asked him about COVID because he had wanted to keep his factory open and you were asking specifically about the concerns that Tesla factory employees might have had.

He had national security perfume.

He really didn't believe in COVID.

So he threatens in the midst of this COVID conversation to end the interview again.

Let's listen to that moment.

Oh, God.

Do you feel a duty to pay them and make sure they're okay, despite the fact that you don't agree with how they feel about COVID versus how you feel about it?

Just move on.

Just move on.

That's what you want to do.

Cara, I do not want to get into a debate about

the situation.

Okay.

All right.

Okay.

I want to finish up talking about

in the podcast.

Now we can do it.

Okay.

What do you say?

No, we don't.

I don't want to end it.

I just want to understand where you've got, but I do.

I feel like I understand where you are.

So one of the things.

I should say, we've also spent quite a lot of time with the Hobbit epidemiology team doing antibody studies.

Tesla makes the vaccine machines for CureVac.

Gates says something about me not knowing what Corn is doing.

It's like, hey, Knucklehead, we actually make the vaccine machines for Curavac, that company you're invested in.

Seems like you have a lot of passion around this topic, like that you feel this has been blown and that there are better ways to do it, which is what you do in your other parts of your life, correct?

Whether it's Tesla or SpaceX, that the rockets aren't being reused, the cars aren't electric, the way we address viruses is irrational.

It's very irrational.

I probably should allocate some time to this.

I mean, I have allocated some time to this, but only less than 1%.

So maybe it should be more than 1%.

What do you think of your interviewing skills in that moment?

I think I calmed him down very nicely, didn't I?

I was like, whoa, whoa, little horse.

You were nervous for a second.

Well, I've been through it with him.

You know, I was like, whoa.

And I think I got some answers out of him, right?

Like, he was, he could have stalked off.

He could have easily stalked off.

He's like, let's move on.

Let's move on.

And you're like, okay, let's move on.

He's like, but let me answer your question.

Yeah, exactly.

That's right.

That's what I was getting at.

I think that was an interesting exchange.

And of course, he's like, we make the machines.

Of course, that wasn't exactly true either, a lot of the stuff.

But,

you know, he had opinions about COVID.

He thought it wasn't a big deal.

It turned out to be he was wrong.

But

you sounded like his shrink there or his hostage negotiator.

I don't know.

What do you feel that was?

I didn't want him to leave over something so stupid.

He was obviously, it was a sensitive thing and he didn't like the attacks he was getting for saying things that might have not been completely true.

And so he was not comfortable talking about it.

And so I wanted to at least get a sense and move him to, that's why I mentioned Tesla and other, oh, you've done this before, Elon.

You've been in this situation.

I wanted to make him feel comfortable enough to be able to answer and get him down from the tree.

He was like a cat that ran up the tree.

So we'll be back in a minute.

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I remember at some point we asked SpaceX for an interview with Gwen Shotwell, who's the president and COO, and we got back this answer like, Kara interviews Elon, doesn't interview Gwen.

Which is funny.

Why do you think that?

Because there's something about I'm his, I guess.

I don't know.

Who knows if he thought that?

I don't.

Sometimes people also think you're like the go-to person for Elon.

I've interviewed him more than anybody else extensively.

So yes, I suppose I am.

And do you, are you like that kind of like chief Elon psychologist?

Do you think you have like a PhD?

Or what is that?

No, I want to talk to him.

I wish I was talking to him now.

I wish we were talking because I have a lot of things to say about Twitter.

And he asked and then got mad about a dumb Twitter.

If you interviewed him today, what would be your first question?

What are you doing?

What are you doing?

You're better than this.

What are you doing?

I can sort of see the good parts of what you're doing.

Some of the moves he's making are correct, but the way he's doing it, the cruelty about people leaving, the dragging people, what are you doing?

When Mark Zuckerberg looks like a classier guy than you, you're doing something wrong in terms of these layoffs.

Mark Zuckerberg did a great job.

That seems like an answer, not a question, Kara.

Well,

what are you doing?

What's going on here?

Yeah.

And I would want to know when he changed his mind.

I want to to know

what is it about what disagreement gets through his high fence.

I don't know now.

I don't know.

I have less hope than I ever did.

He usually does listen, and now he doesn't need to.

When you interview him, it's funny.

He seems fickle at being uncomfortable.

And then he kind of reflects.

Like we saw that in the COVID clip.

Do you think he's reflective?

Do you think he's capable of change?

Yes.

I wouldn't.

Yes, of course.

Of course.

He's very thoughtful.

He just has this layer of

just completely, and it's gotten worse and worse over time as he's gotten richer.

He's thoughtful until he's not.

Well, it's just the adulation and the money.

I don't know the money.

I don't think he spends that much.

I mean, I don't think he's particularly than anyone else, but

the adulation from the fanboys has gotten out of time, including the ones around him.

That's my only doubt.

You've seen that change over time.

You think you've seen him become more and more encircled, more and more powerful, more and more.

They get isolated, isolated, isolated, and their circles become ever smaller.

They never meet real people, except online.

That's not real.

I think in that regard, you and Elon are very different.

I would never say that you're an isolated person.

But do you think that there are certain things that you share in common with Elon?

Oh, I certainly much more risk taper than I am.

I was offered jobs at all the internet companies and I didn't take them.

I don't think we're very much alike.

Curious, wanting better, wanting better.

I think if I had to say a positive thing, we both want better for tech.

Yeah.

And a negative thing that we're both a lot alike, we get tweaked pretty easily.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You're both addicted to Twitter.

Yes, we are.

You don't like to have assistance and other people.

We don't like assistance.

We don't have to do it.

You like to have your own control.

Yeah.

Yep.

Yep.

Do you empathize with him?

Because you've known him for a long time.

I feel sorry for him right now, even though I think he's being a jerk, too.

I know people will say, Kara, you need to attack him.

Dark Kara is the better Kara.

It's not.

It's not the better Kara.

I feel sorry for him right now.

I do.

I don't know why.

And And I think he could be the one to fix it.

So it's killing me in that regard.

Maybe he will.

The Paul Pelosi tweet.

Yeah.

This fake news source that he shared.

That has really soured you on him.

Really?

Yeah, there was enough little stuff happening.

There was a lot of stuff happening and I was defending him.

And then I was starting to feel really bad about defending him.

And I'm like, he'll pull it out.

He'll pull it out.

Right.

It's like sometimes having a kid who turns out to be like James Spader in in some kind of wonderful, the jerk.

And then you're like, oh my God, my kid's a jerk.

Oh, my God.

But I still love my kid.

I don't love Elon, but you know what I mean?

Like you're like, oh, wow.

You see, you see people you care about.

And I'm not saying that in a, you've devoted time to thinking about and think are important.

And they, they're doing incredibly jerky things.

And you wonder if that's what they've become, right?

And so I feel sorry.

Do you think that's what he's become?

I don't know.

He is capable of such great things and he indulges, he's so indulgent with so many stupid things.

And I don't know why he can't stick with the good things.

Yeah.

Let me go to the Pelosi thing.

That's why it was too far.

I want to talk to you about that.

So I believe he is a trans kid for one.

He said several things about trans people.

One of his many children is trans.

From what I understand, I've read about it.

I've never met these kids.

And

I couldn't believe he was doing some trans things.

I did have some knowledge of that before it got out.

I was like, how could you?

I mean, I think it did strike in with me.

My mom was really terrible to me when she found out I was gay.

And I, if she had had Twitter and done it, oh my God, I would have just, I was already hard enough in a one-to-one setting.

And so I think it probably set off those feelings.

Like, why are you saying mean things about trans people?

Your kid is trans.

Like, don't do it.

Like, what are you doing?

And then this Paul Pelosi tweet.

And then he did that.

And I was like, these are the tropes from when I was coming out about gay people, that it was like, there were so many depictions of gay people that, oh, it's a gay lover thing.

This isn't, and by the way, I know Paul Pelosi.

So it was even worse.

I like Paul Pelosi,

not via his wife, through a lot of other ways.

What a lovely man he is.

Let me just say, Paul Pelosi

has had problems.

And he had been attacked in his own home.

And he was attacked in his own home.

And then he uses an anti-gay trope.

I was like, there's so much levels of bad here.

It broke.

It broke me.

It broke me.

I was like, no, this is not acceptable.

How dare you?

How dare you?

And then also, you didn't apologize when you were so obviously wrong when all this stuff came.

And it was one of his first acts as CEO.

I was like, no, you can't do that.

That's enough.

That's enough.

I've been tolerating all your ridiculous hijinks for long enough, and I haven't liked a lot of them, but boy, don't I like this.

You guys are going back and forth, him supporting, you know,

same-sex marriage, same-sex, you know, right?

100%.

I'm not a particularly sensitive gay person, but you cannot do that.

He can do it, but boy, does he have to pay the price for doing it.

And I'm not, I just was like, what an irresponsible, terrible thing to do in one of your first acts as CEO of this site is to talking about misinformation.

By the way, I'm also angry at misinformation and the impact.

So misinformation, anti-gay, plain mean to a guy who got attacked.

Everything about it was loathsome.

And I just, that's enough.

That's how I've had it.

I've had enough, enough.

A little break from Elon and insight into Kara because, like, maybe I am to you, what you are to Elon, observing things about you.

But people often ask me, how come Kara is so woke, quote unquote?

You'll say, you know, here you are, a young woman of color, and Kara's taking the more liberal perspective than you.

And I, there's a moment we had, a conversation we had, Kara,

where I forget something had happened.

It was something around trans rights.

And he said it was just like what they did to the gays.

It was the Josh Hawley conversation with the woman who testified and he said, this is what they did in the 80s.

They come in these small ways.

And I think that experience has really shaped how you see the world.

100%.

It was terrible.

And, you know, I've done better because of it.

It makes you stronger, et cetera, et cetera.

I don't think I'm particularly woke.

I just don't like bullies.

I really hate bullies.

And I hate bullies for, I just hate bullies.

I hate them.

I hate them.

I can't stand it.

And I think it's unfair.

I think people would be surprised how conservative I am about lots of things.

I think people like to put

labels on you.

They just want to like put you in a box.

Yeah.

Keith Ruboy, for example, is like the advertisers are woke.

I'm like, no, the advertisers would advertise.

Stop using it as a lazy term because you don't have any other good arguments.

Maybe they're not advertising because he's being a jerk.

Maybe that's it.

Maybe they don't feel safe and they're capitalists.

This woke thing is why Elon bought.

Twitter in some way.

It was surprising when he bought Twitter because

this is a market change for him.

In 2018, when you asked him, he wasn't interested in buying a media company.

He wasn't.

Or really buying anything at all.

So let's hear that clip.

And just for context, Jeff Bezos had recently purchased the Washington Post right before.

Yes.

You're not buying a newspaper, are you?

No.

I don't generally acquire things.

Yeah.

Just curious.

I create companies, but I don't really acquire them.

Right.

So

I wouldn't,

I have no plans.

It just seems to be like popular these days.

It is.

It is.

Benioff bought one.

Yeah, yeah, totally.

Yeah.

Why do you believe he wanted to buy this company?

He loves it.

Why'd he try to back out?

I like the shaver so much I had to buy the company.

That's Victor Kayam way back when.

Because the market conditions deteriorated so drastically.

When he first intimated that he would be buying Twitter in late April, you said that given Twitter's untapped business potential and its influence, quote, it's a business opportunity at a relatively low price.

That's what you said, a 54.20 share.

share.

At the time.

Yeah, at the time, yeah, it was.

But things changed.

And you had high hopes on him.

I did.

I thought he,

if you had to press me to think of one person who could do this, he'd be on the top of the list, the one number one on the list.

Early on, you and I, when we started making this show, I used to think you were a bit soft on him, like both in your expectations of how he would transform Twitter and also about his commentary on

Ukraine, but also just.

internationally like him him not disclosing his own interests because i think twitter is really important but i think it's all the more important for people in the rest of the world because it helps shine a light on stories that otherwise would get no traction.

And I thought he was corralling his band in a certain way.

Yes.

I thought you were too soft on him in the beginning.

I think he can say what he wants.

Everybody knows his interests.

They know he has things in China.

We're all aware.

We're all going to learn more about it because there might be a Syphius review.

Biden is saying it's worth looking into.

Whatever.

He's an American citizen, so I'm not sure.

Well,

with the investors.

Not that there weren't problems already.

I think he should be able to say what he wants.

I think what he says is stupid, but he should be able to say his stupid foreign policy pronouncements.

That's fine.

I don't care.

If he wants to say dumb things about what should happen in Ukraine, he can say dumb things.

What do you think is more important to Elon?

Doing good for the world or doing good for Elon?

I think they're intertwined.

For him.

Hopelessly intertwined.

But intertwined for him or intertwined and for us.

I think it's very easy to say this son of a bitch, he's a narcissist, malevolent narcissist.

I think that's way too easy for this guy.

I think he does want to,

like I said, make a dent in the universe.

I think he really cares.

And I think that there's, it's much more complex than just what an asshole.

You've written about how Elon kind of filled this void after Steve Jobs' death of being the iconic person that everyone could get behind because, you know, Mark was too nerdy, Larry and Sergei were too weird.

Jeff was too in Seattle.

Oh, Jeff is sort of up there, but go ahead.

But you ended one of your columns saying you're giving him advice.

And you say, quote, it's a huge waste of time when what he has to do is to seal his status, is actually to build a strong and stable company that is not just revolving around his aura and a team that does its best work with or without him.

And of course, delete that Twitter app off his phone.

After all, can you imagine Steve Jobs tweeting?

No, neither can I.

Yep, neither can I.

You could have written that same column today.

I could.

That sounds pretty good, aren't I?

Do you think it's the end of an internet era that these guys have become the way they are?

You know, Elon becoming, Elon letting the mission go, this big ideas, this big ideas guy.

No.

No, I think he's in there.

He's one of the biggest thinkers in Silicon Valley.

He's also has become

more narcissistic than I thought possible.

And

I think it's in him to do great things.

I think what he's doing now is indulgent the way he's behaving.

I think he should bring in the best people and he should listen to them and he should find new, fresh ways of doing something here.

And if he doesn't, he's going to lose a lot of money.

I don't think he cares about money the way you and I do, but I mean, he has so much, he doesn't need to care.

A question you always ask people: Are you hopeful or hopeless about Elon?

Can I be both?

Pick one, Kara.

Today,

hopeless.

Um,

he's capable of great things here.

He's behaving.

He's disappointing in how he's handling himself.

And in the midst of all this disappointment, there's all these really good ideas.

It's just so bossy.

I'm the law.

It's so narcissistic.

And that the thing the other day, the advertising thing, someone asked about the difference between Twitter and Elon Musk.

Yeah.

They're the same thing.

He can't pretend.

He likes to, these wealthy people like to pretend they're not powerful.

It drives me crazy.

He's very powerful.

What he says matters.

He can hurt people if he wants to, even if he doesn't mean to.

And so he's got to have a greater sense of care.

around what he's doing and just slightly more kindness.

He doesn't, he can still be puckish and rude and funny, just like I said.

He's like all these things, like funny, rude, compelling, obnoxious, accessible, easy to deal with, hard to deal with, always on, outspoken to a fault, angry, charming, intense, and also strikingly confident.

You can be all those things.

That means you're a human being.

But I mean this in the nicest way, Elon.

I'm not the asshole.

You want to finish that thought?

That's my thought.

I'm not the asshole.

Okay.

I thought there was a second sentence coming.

No.

Okay.

I won't do it.

How much does Twitter even matter to Elon's life?

Or how will Elon be remembered?

And how much does Twitter even matter to his overall legacy?

In 100 years,

Elon Musk.

It'll be a blip.

Cars, cars.

Cars.

Cars in space.

Cars and space, yeah.

Still the most important things.

And I'm always impressed by that.

So something you really care about on this earth is going to be a blip in his overall legacy.

It's going to be a blip in all our like, I've been through so many internet companies, Naima, over 30 years.

They come and go.

Remember, AOL was big?

Yeah.

Not just, everyone points to MySpace, but some of them were astride the world and then they weren't.

But shouldn't it be, should it be bigger?

I mean, it's like it touches democracy.

Mark Zuckerberg's whole legacy will be be defined not by creating, you know, poke for Harvard kids, but for.

It could.

There are better worlds.

Don't you think he should care?

I actually want you to rethink of this question because there is a world in which what he does with Twitter really impacts his legacy.

I don't know.

I think Twitter's a small company and he's making it.

smaller right now and not in size, although everyone's sort of looking at it.

So you're saying it'll combust before he can do too much damage?

I think they all do in the end.

There's a book, The Trial, that's one of my favorite books by Franz Kafka.

I'm sure if this quote was in it, but I find that to be a hopeful book.

It's about trying to find

divinity.

It is.

It's not about fascism.

And this is a quote that I think Elon should think about.

And I think about it all the time, which was from Franz Kafka, the meaning of life is that it stops.

So

you don't have that much time.

Cut the shit.

Stop it.

That's your hopeful quote?

That's my hopeful quote.

Because guess what?

We don't have time.

We don't have time for this.

It could be, you you could do a good thing, or you could just be a not-so-merry prankster.

I don't know if the thing Elon needs now is more urgency.

The urgency seems to be driving him into a spin.

I guess.

He needs clarity.

He needs perspective.

He could do some great things here.

Why doesn't he?

That's what I say.

That would be a good question.

That would be a good first question for Elon.

See, I still like him, even though he doesn't like me.

I still like him.

I still like him, but he has to apologize for the gay fake news thing that he put up, and we're not speaking ever again.

And I have never said that to him.

He's got to apologize for that.

Well, sounds pretty hopeless.

I hope he does it.

All right, Kara, thanks for taking the time.

Thank you.

It was great.

What should we call this episode, the Kara Elon Situationship?

A lesbian love story.

A lesbian, call it a lesbian love story.

That'll be perfect.

We have never kissed.

Let's be clear.

Okay, Naima, why don't you read us out?

Because I got to go and you seem to be taking over everything slowly and rather sneakily.

But it's actually in plain sight.

I know.

Hidden in plain sight.

Here I am reading us out.

Today's show is produced by Blakeney Schick, Christian Castro-Roussel, Rafaela Seward, and yours truly, Naima Ruzza.

Our engineers are Fernando Aruda and Rick Kwan.

Our theme music is by Trackademics.

Special thanks to Andrea Lopez-Crusado.

If you're already following the show, you get a great check, or maybe you get a blue check.

You get a check.

If not, you also get a check.

You don't get a check.

I don't know what is worse, but just go follow the show wherever you listen to the podcast.

Search for On with Karis Wisher and hit follow.

It's going to be called On with Neymaraza.

I'm just kidding.

But thanks for listening to On with Karis Wisher from New York Magazine, the Vox Media Podcast Network, and us will be back on Thursday with more.

By the way, Kathy Griffin just wrote to me, I'm going to be on Kimmel tonight as Elon.

Oh, ha ha ha ha.

Parody.

That's another thing.

Come on.

Everyone's now a parody.

There's nine, like he's like threw her off.

There's thousands of them right now.

Everyone could have anticipated what was going to happen here.

This month on Explain It To Me, we're talking about all things wellness.

We spend nearly $2 trillion on things that are supposed to make us well.

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But what does it actually mean to be well?

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That's this month on Explain It To Me, Me, presented by Pureleaf.

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