Is Elon Musk the Ultimate Scam Artist? with Max Chafkin [VIDEO]

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Speaker 2 I think people sometimes take for granted that a scam artist doesn't necessarily fail, right?

Speaker 2 You know, we were talking to one of my producers earlier, and we're like, 10 years ago today, Elon Musk said, he was like, in 10 years, we will be on Mars. He's like, I'll do it.

Speaker 2 We're going to be on Mars.

Speaker 4 We're still here, baby.

Speaker 2 You know what I mean?

Speaker 2 Okay, Trump's a simple one. What did Trump say? Never forget.
He said, day one, we're going to bring down the price of eggs. They're coming down, folks.
We're going to bring it down.

Speaker 2 They've done nothing. They've done nothing.
Eggs have only gone up since he came into power. And now, what's his story? Biden left me with bad egg prices.
You said day one.

Speaker 2 You said day one. And you said you're going to do this thing.
Not only have you not done it, it's gotten worse. The stock market is taking tanks like you've never seen them.

Speaker 2 This is What Now

Speaker 2 with Trevor Noah.

Speaker 2 Max Chafkin, welcome to the podcast.

Speaker 4 Thank you for having me.

Speaker 2 You know what I love about what you do is, I mean, you're deeply ingrained in the world of reporting around finance and business and tech and everything.

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 2 I'm oftentimes amused and enthralled by people who seem to be in a place where they were well ahead of something before other people saw it.

Speaker 2 And I wonder sometimes if it's luck or if it's them having like a premonition,

Speaker 2 you host a podcast called Elon Inc.

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 2 And I remember the first time I saw the podcast, I was like, huh. I was like, wow, is there going to be enough material? Material? We had the same concern.
No, you did.

Speaker 4 I mean, to some extent, yeah. Or there were definitely people around it who wondered.

Speaker 4 But of course.

Speaker 4 you know, it's turned out, it's worked out. Like you said, like Elon Musk is everywhere right now.

Speaker 4 Even before he was, you know, involved with Donald Trump, we were making this argument like, no, you don't understand.

Speaker 4 He's this big cultural figure.

Speaker 4 He's a mega billionaire. He has more influence than maybe anyone on the planet.

Speaker 4 And then, of course, he became obviously very closely linked to Donald Trump, became his number one campaign donor and de facto senior advisor, or however you want to think of it. It does feel.

Speaker 4 Yeah, like we're ahead of something. On the other hand, I think even people who have been following this man for a really long time, and I met him, I think for the first time in like 2007.

Speaker 4 So I've been covering covering him for many, many years.

Speaker 4 Even so, it's been very surprising to watch the kind of transformation over the last couple of years and then what's happened over the last, you know, four or five months.

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 2 The reason I really wanted to have you on so that we could chat with you today is because I think it's easy to make the conversation about Elon Musk and for us to like hyper focus on it because it's happening right now.

Speaker 2 But what I think, where I think you're uniquely positioned is because of your expertise, I think you can help us paint a picture

Speaker 2 that gives us a larger idea of what we're experiencing. Because you also wrote, many people argue, like the definitive biography on Peter Thiel, right?

Speaker 2 And now I've learned a lot of people, you say Peter Thiel, they're like, what's that?

Speaker 2 Like a lot of people, you say Peter Thial and they go, what is that? And then some people really know the name and some people don't.

Speaker 2 And the people who know it sometimes will say, oh, forget Elon Musk. Peter Thiel is the puppet master who's running all of this.

Speaker 2 So I guess to set the scene for this conversation, when we talk about the technocrats or the tech elites or the tech, like, who are we actually speaking about?

Speaker 2 So it's like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, who would you count in that echelon?

Speaker 4 I would add Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos.

Speaker 4 And then I would throw in some other investors, Mark Andreessen, probably a name that is less familiar to people, but the founder of Netscape, who's now a major venture capitalist, also advising Trump right now.

Speaker 4 And then there's this kind of like larger universe of guys who are connected to Teal, who are involved in politics at the moment. David Sachs, who's like running Trump's AI and crypto initiatives.

Speaker 4 And it's sort of a list of venture capitalists and so on. What actually made this kind of helpful in investigating it is that Teal and his cohort, you know, call themselves the PayPal Mafia.

Speaker 4 They actually like

Speaker 4 self-identify, yeah, as an influence network.

Speaker 4 And Elon Musk, he started a company in the dot-com during the dot-com bubble and then started a company that merged with PayPal effectively, became like a co-founder of PayPal.

Speaker 4 So he was in that PayPal mafia, although he and Teal were kind of like rivals, sort of friends, frenemies,

Speaker 2 over a number of years.

Speaker 4 Teal invested in his companies. Musk invested in Teal's hedge hedge fund.
There's a lot of sort of

Speaker 4 back scratching or whatever going on in this world.

Speaker 4 And the way I see it, Thiel was a prominent backer of Donald Trump in 2016. He was kind of the first tech guy to back Trump, to say like, yeah, this is the guy.

Speaker 4 He spoke at the RNC, the Republican National Convention. He donated a little more than a million dollars in October of 2016.
That was after the Access Hollywood thing.

Speaker 2 Wow.

Speaker 4 And then joined the Trump administration, or joined the transition anyway, with this idea of attacking the quote-unquote administrative state, which is really similar to what Elon Musk is trying to do right now.

Speaker 4 With Doge. Yeah, exactly.
When I wrote that book on Thiel, he had kind of all these secret connections with various like right-wingers. And Thial was operating kind of behind the scenes.

Speaker 4 And you're looking at like, oh,

Speaker 4 did he consort with this extremist or that extremist and and he was sort of playing footsie with the far right yeah musk is just supercharging it right so it's just this kind of like dramatic acceleration of what these tech guys have been up to for a very long time i'd i'd like to go back before you started the podcast why elon why did you what what made what made you feel that this is the guy to dig into

Speaker 4 i mean

Speaker 4 So just at the most basic level, he is, I mean, he's either the world, depending on the day, right?

Speaker 4 He's now far and away the world's richest person, but at various times, he's been like top two, top three. He's one of the wealthiest people on the planet.
He owns.

Speaker 4 two very important companies, Tesla Motors. So

Speaker 4 he's a significant shareholder and Tesla Motors CEO effectively controls company. Tesla is the most valuable car company.
It is

Speaker 4 the leading player in electric cars. So in certain ways, the leading player for the future of cars.

Speaker 4 He also owns this gigantic defense contractor, SpaceX, which is the leading provider of rocket launch services to satellite players and to the U.S. government.

Speaker 4 And he's got a bunch of other little companies. And then he has this, as I said earlier, like this cultural impact.
It's not just that Musk is rich and controls a lot of people's livelihoods.

Speaker 4 People are really into him. I mean, he has a story that has captivated to some extent the world, right? There's like a lot of young people who look up to him and want to be him.

Speaker 4 And then you layer on top of that, of course, his

Speaker 4 penchant for being weird. He's, he's, he's, he has, he has crazy beliefs.

Speaker 4 He has this complicated, very, very complicated and involved personal and romantic life or whatever as a father of, you know, 14 children that we know of, maybe, you know, who knows, perhaps more.

Speaker 4 And he's always been

Speaker 4 you know, right at the edge of doing what is reasonable. People who are coming to it fresh are like, what happened to Elon Musk?

Speaker 4 And people who have been covering Elon Musk for a long time are like, well, like, let me tell you, like, when he like fake aquatic, like did a fake private offer and had a huge fight with the SEC and then, you know, sort of kind of told the SEC to suck Elon's cock.

Speaker 4 And like, you can kind of go back. Like, he's always been this incredibly,

Speaker 4 I don't know, for lack of a better word, like edgy figure.

Speaker 5 Even as far back as 2007 when you first met him.

Speaker 4 Yeah. And I think that's part of why, I mean, there are all sorts of reasons like why he became successful, but I think like Donald Trump, he has a knack for

Speaker 4 like authenticity and for and for being willing to sort of say things that seem transgressive and then using that to his advantage.

Speaker 4 Just like Trump, I mean, he rails against the media all the time, but he got incredible media coverage because during those years, like if you were a reporter, he would, you know, he talked to everybody and he would say crazy stuff.

Speaker 4 He would attack his enemies. He would, now, now, back then, his enemies weren't like George Soros.
They were just like...

Speaker 2 It was like BYD.

Speaker 4 Or, no, it was like the Cars columnist for the Wall Street Journal.

Speaker 2 It's like somebody no, no.

Speaker 4 But so it would just be like somebody, you know, some random blogger or whatever. He'd be mad at.
And so he was always, you know, he's always saying provocative stuff.

Speaker 4 And I think that, you know, contributed to his rise.

Speaker 2 Okay, help me understand this, though.

Speaker 2 Have we missed something in Silicon Valley shift?

Speaker 2 Because it seems like there was a time when Silicon Valley was the bastion of progressivism and liberalism.

Speaker 2 You know, it was Elon Musk himself, he's got like tweets where he's out there proudly being like, and that's why we have LGBTQ

Speaker 2 protections of our workers and we believe in this. And we.

Speaker 2 Silicon Valley seemed like that place. It was the place where people came together and said, we want the world to be a better place.

Speaker 2 I remember when Uber was launching and they were like, hey, and it was correct. We were saying like, yeah, now if you're a black person person or a person with disabilities, this car will pick you up.

Speaker 2 You're not going to now get driven past. And it felt like this utopia crew that was trying to make the world a better place.

Speaker 2 And so because of that, they were often at odds with the people they're in bed with now. You know what I mean?

Speaker 2 They were the ones who were like, we don't like Nazis. We don't want to see SWAT stickers on our websites.
We're going to ban you. And we don't want racism.
And we don't want people separated.

Speaker 2 Like, did we miss something? Did Silicon Valley shift? Or was this something that was always there that is now rearing its head i i don't know which way to look at it um it's both so

Speaker 4 going back to the beginning of the industry silicon valley people talk about the military industrial complex that that phrase like that is silicon valley that's what silicon valley was it was a bunch of companies that were making technology to help the united states win the cold war and like so so you you know you rewind the clock like way back and this was like a conservative place this was not a place um full of progressives.

Speaker 4 It was a place that, you know, a lot of ways was kind of like, you know, pro-military and so on.

Speaker 4 And I think that strain has always been there. The like kind of conservative or even kind of borderline reactionary strain

Speaker 4 has always been in this part of California. But of course, there's also the counterculture and those two things sort of swirl together.

Speaker 4 There was a moment during the like 2000s when, like you're saying, like Silicon Valley seemed very closely allied with the the democratic party and in particular barack obama um you know i listened to your podcast about elon from september yeah and trevor you said and i think you were kidding like obama did this to us and

Speaker 4 i think you're i i think you were right although not exactly i wouldn't i would tell a different story which is that obama

Speaker 4 I'd say more than any politician, maybe more than any cultural figure, is the one who gave us that story about Elon Musk in particular.

Speaker 2 Oh, so

Speaker 4 like

Speaker 4 Obama, you know, this vision of kind of a

Speaker 4 centrist, forward-looking progressivism that embraces tech and the future. Yeah.
He really embraced Elon Musk. He embraced clean technology.
Tesla nearly went bankrupt during the financial crisis.

Speaker 4 Elon Musk got a big loan from the Department of Energy, effectively was saved from bankruptcy by Elon Musk's own admission by Barack Obama, by the Obama administration.

Speaker 2 Can we just pause there for a second and say,

Speaker 2 this is probably one of the things that I find I'm most amused and frustrated by,

Speaker 2 is how many times these guys' stories are littered with them

Speaker 2 being helped by the government that they are telling people they need to dismantle because it helps people.

Speaker 5 Fancy welfare.

Speaker 2 It's the craziest thing ever. Like, listen, literally listen to what you said.
There's more.

Speaker 4 I mean, SpaceX, his rocket company, I mean, basically all of its money early on came from the government.

Speaker 4 And SpaceX, like their big breakthrough, was signing this contract with NASA to provide launch services to the International Space Station. Also an Obama-era thing.

Speaker 4 You know, when you add up the amount of money that they've taken from the government over the years, it's enormous. But it wasn't just that.

Speaker 4 I mean, Obama put Musk kind of at the center of like what... of like his idea for what the future should look like.
And I also think

Speaker 4 Silicon Valley, these venture capitalists, these guys who are thinking about the future, they are really good at picking up the vibes.

Speaker 4 And so like they saw that a lot of people were excited about Barack Obama, that he was filling up stadiums, that young people were excited. Like that's their game.

Speaker 4 And they and they said, oh, you know, let's move there. And I think something kind of similar happened this summer with Donald Trump, where they sort of sensed that this is where the vibe was heading.

Speaker 2 And they also have data that we can't dream of, right?

Speaker 4 Yeah, it's true.

Speaker 4 Although I'm always skeptical like how good the data actually is really how yeah i mean they definitely they're definitely people who are driven by data but i think these guys make decisions pretty much the same way the rest of us do um although when they like turn back and tell the story they've maybe used a little bit oh they'll try and retro okay okay okay so so yeah and and and you know After the election, after this last election, you know, when we had the inauguration and like all these tech guys had better seats than like the governor of Florida.

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 4 A lot of the guys who are associated with Trump Trump now were associated with Obama. Some of the same people were at the inauguration in, you know, 2024 were at the 2008 inauguration.

Speaker 2 See, this is so funny because look at some of the conversations we've had on the podcast, like where Josh says as a joke, but he says it as a real thing. He goes like, Trump is white Obama.

Speaker 2 And he goes like, not a very controversial comment. Yeah, a very controversial comment, but it's like, yeah, but you see, like we talk about the overlapping voters.

Speaker 2 Now you've just thrown in another piece of the puzzle where it's like, oh, the fact that these are the same guys sitting in both, these administrations could not be further apart from each other.

Speaker 2 You tell me any world, you know better than anyone. Like, think about it in African countries.
When they switch a regime, you will definitely not see the same people sitting behind the new leader.

Speaker 2 Because that's a signal that, like, no, no, no, these are my people and these people. But like, the fact that they've done that either tells us that there's an overlap in the Trump and Obama-ness

Speaker 2 that they can resonate with, or it it tells us that their masterminds are getting into somebody, but they weren't sitting with Joe Biden.

Speaker 2 They hated Biden.

Speaker 4 And I think, why? And I think to some extent the feeling maybe was mutual. I mean,

Speaker 4 Biden,

Speaker 2 unlike George W.

Speaker 4 Bush, Obama, and even Donald Trump, did not embrace Silicon Valley and didn't, I mean, he did

Speaker 4 because he's a politician and they have like the most money in the world. Like, but you know, his, his politics was the politics of organized labor and American manufacturing.

Speaker 2 And like when he's an Amtrak man. He's an Amtrak man.

Speaker 4 Exactly. And he actually, he sensed like correctly to some extent that there was a backlash against these tech guys.

Speaker 4 And Trump, too, right? Like Trump was threatening to throw Mark Zuckerberg in prison

Speaker 2 just a few months ago. Shut down Google.

Speaker 4 Biden was,

Speaker 4 you know, was

Speaker 4 more skeptical of the tech people, including Elon Musk.

Speaker 4 And you know, when Biden was promoting EVs, he made this very concerted effort to promote, you know, GM and Ford, the two big American companies. They have Union Labor.

Speaker 4 And that

Speaker 4 really offended Elon Musk.

Speaker 2 So I've always wondered, are you familiar with the story?

Speaker 2 Parts of it. Tell it again.

Speaker 2 I've often wondered if this is part of the reason we have the Elon Musk we have today, because Biden holds a summit at the White House, an EV summit, and he invites all the big car manufacturers to the White House, but he doesn't invite Elon Musk.

Speaker 2 And I don't care what you say about it.

Speaker 5 Was it a deliberate slight?

Speaker 2 I mean, come on, how can it not be?

Speaker 2 And if you look at, I don't care what you say about politics, right? Let's even, let's go back to that time.

Speaker 2 I think that is a terrible move.

Speaker 2 Because

Speaker 2 say what you want, Elon Musk has done more to push EVs than any other human being, right? In terms of like that, that position that he's in.

Speaker 4 Yeah, yeah, but certainly more than like the CEO of the GAAP.

Speaker 2 That's what I mean. Then the CEO of Fortnite.

Speaker 2 And so it was strange to me that he did that.

Speaker 2 But I often wonder if that was the moment, because I remember seeing a shift after that where Elon went from being the guy who's like, I don't get involved in politics.

Speaker 2 And I just think that it's good for us to look at both sides. And Trent find ourselves in a space where we're not exactly looking at like what has happened.
And he was that guy. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Biden doesn't invite him to the White House. This man went full Trump.
I mean, he went, and I, I, you watch it intensely.

Speaker 2 So, as a casual observer, do you think that that was a seminal moment in the Musk that we get today?

Speaker 4 I think that is, that was kind of the beginning of this version of Musk. And of course, there are other stories.

Speaker 4 Like, again, the story that you all talked about, about Musk's, you know, trans daughter and Musk's own, like, sort of his personal, I think all that also applies.

Speaker 4 But in terms of if you're looking for like a political act, that was it. I mean, that was the moment.

Speaker 4 And I do think all of those other personal things on top, also COVID restrictions, you know, Musk got really mad about the closure orders. It was affecting his bottom line, played into it.

Speaker 4 You know, I do understand why Biden did not invite him. The thing Biden was trying to do was bring the rest of the auto industry into EVs.

Speaker 4 And in certain ways, that was what Musk was trying to do, you know, way back in the day.

Speaker 4 There was a version of Elon Musk, you know, 10 or 15 years ago who would have looked at that and said, oh my God, that's great. Like I have achieved my goal.
It's not just Tesla, it's everybody.

Speaker 5 Oh, so you felt that was like an ideological impulse that was maybe environmental. He really believed electric cars are better for the planet.

Speaker 4 That's that, if you had asked me. Yeah, like 10 years ago,

Speaker 4 I mean,

Speaker 4 that was his ideology to the extent that he had an ideology. It was bringing electric cars cars and bringing the industry along with him.

Speaker 4 And, you know, at times he had actually been kind of friendly with people at GM because GM, of course, had also done some electric cars.

Speaker 4 They actually released an electric car in the 90s and then killed it. I think Biden was trying to, I mean, and this is the account that the Biden people.

Speaker 4 have given in explanation to sort of defend themselves from the argument that you're making, which is, you know, there are definitely a lot of people who agree with you, which is like, listen, this was about, this was about Detroit and everything.

Speaker 2 I don't believe that. But yeah, yeah, I mean, I'll be honest with you, I don't believe it.
I think, I think Biden's people were going, We're going to put you in your place

Speaker 2 and we're going to show you that this industry is going to move on without you. And so we're going to bring all these people in to go, like, we got this.

Speaker 2 And then, Elon Musk, if there's one thing I've seen from Elon Musk and what I've heard about, yo, let me tell you something. That man does not take slight well.

Speaker 5 Yeah,

Speaker 2 we're going to continue this conversation right after this short break.

Speaker 2 Maybe we should talk about that a little bit more to like take a step out of the Elon of it all.

Speaker 2 I know the world has often been populated by, you know, you always call them the thin-skinned, powerful men. Yeah.

Speaker 2 I don't know that we've ever been in a time when the men have had this much power and their skins have been.

Speaker 5 And this much wealth. Like this is an unprecedented amount of wealth to accumulate.
It just wasn't this much money to be hoarded by one person.

Speaker 2 Right?

Speaker 4 Yeah. There's an unsensitive person.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 4 Unprecedented wealth and kind of an unprecedented cultural impact and control.

Speaker 4 I mean, Musk had, I used to talk about this with Mark Zuckerberg, you know, Facebook, you know, it's the, it's the biggest media company in history,

Speaker 4 you know, but but that always felt a little bit hard because clearly Mark Zuckerberg wasn't like going through his mentions, like trying to suspend people who were mean to him.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 4 At least not as far as I could tell. Whereas Musk definitely seems to be doing that.
Yeah. And so, like, that feels like the combination of

Speaker 4 like power and control over our cultural lives and money, like, yeah, that feels new.

Speaker 5 Yeah. And how much do you think this is fueled by his ketamine use?

Speaker 2 I mean, he's kind of known.

Speaker 2 That is.

Speaker 2 Don't come from me, Musk. I'm not rich enough to buy that.

Speaker 2 I think you're going to ask that.

Speaker 5 But, like, because people are kind of, you read all these articles and it's always always an anonymous source. He's like, I've never seen him like this before.

Speaker 5 This is the most angry or erratic or, you know, the parade when he went to the White House and he brings his kid.

Speaker 5 You know, like he's doing things that even don't seem typical for somebody who has been known for being pretty eccentric and out there.

Speaker 5 How much do you think his rumored ketamine use is kind of fueling this behavior?

Speaker 4 I mean, he's acknowledged his ketamine use as a treatment for, I believe, depression.

Speaker 4 I think he said he had a, has a prescription. I don't have any special knowledge about his substance use.
I've actually never taken ketamine.

Speaker 4 So it's sort of hard for me to know exactly, like, is that, you know, but I do think

Speaker 4 that

Speaker 4 he is behaving erratically. And I, and for him.

Speaker 2 No, but you get what I'm saying. Yeah, I get what you're saying.
Do you think he's behaving erratically for him?

Speaker 4 That's a question. That's a question because he is, he's different.
And so it's, it is a little bit hard to to to like parse like, well, how much of this is Elon in a dark place?

Speaker 4 And how much is this Elon,

Speaker 4 you know, you know, how much of this is whatever substance Elon's taking and how much of it is just like, he's a, he's an unusual guy.

Speaker 4 And I'm not sure that anybody knows the exact answer to that question, even, even Elon Musk.

Speaker 4 I have to say, though.

Speaker 4 You know, the Walter Isaacson book that came out

Speaker 4 like two years ago, there's a lot in there about his mental well-being and admissions from

Speaker 4 himself and from his own, from people who are very close to him who have been concerned at various points. So I don't think it's totally wrong

Speaker 4 to ask because Musk talks about it himself all the time. I mean, he's somebody who is constantly talking about struggles with demons and darkness.

Speaker 2 And he is, to me,

Speaker 4 that makes him actually kind of relatable. I mean, that's like a lot of us, you know, everybody struggles and to some extent with demons and darkness or whatever.

Speaker 4 It's just unusual that he wears it so on his sleeve, even more so for me than like the rumored drug use or whatever, or the actual drug use, like he did once smoke pot on a Joe Rogan podcast or whatever,

Speaker 4 is just the hours he's keeping, right? Like he seems to be tweeting 24-7.

Speaker 5 By the way, this man has 14 kids. So who's looking after the kids?

Speaker 2 Not him. No, not him.

Speaker 2 You know what it does bring up for me, though?

Speaker 2 We talk about unprecedented wealth.

Speaker 2 there's this idea that i i i've been playing around with in my head and i

Speaker 2 because i'm not a clinical psychologist i'll never say what a person is or isn't but i find it particularly interesting that

Speaker 2 trump

Speaker 2 kanye and elon

Speaker 2 all have very similar trends if you watch like how they are So they have moments where people go, oh, no, they're lovely and they're in person, they're charming, and they're this and then that.

Speaker 2 And then they'll have like these like sort of outbursts and all of them have 3 a.m. tweet rants.
All of them. Yeah.
All of them. And people are like, what is happening right now?

Speaker 5 It's almost manic.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Have you seen what Kanye is saying? Have you seen? And then Kanye will come out and be like, I'm sorry.
And I'm da-da-da-da.

Speaker 2 We also have very seldom been in a society where that goes like unchecked.

Speaker 2 Do you, do you get what I'm saying? So let's talk about manic, right?

Speaker 2 I can talk about like my grandfather. My grandfather was bipolar.

Speaker 2 Everything like that Kanye does, my grandfather did. But my grandfather didn't have billions of dollars.
And I don't know what he would have done had he had billions of dollars because

Speaker 2 broke was the barrier that caught him every time. And then the family would be like, all right, come fetch your grandfather.
He's at the supermarket lecturing people about blah, blah, blah.

Speaker 2 All right, got to go to the supermarket, pick up granddad. And then tomorrow he's a sweet little peaceful man.
But he didn't, you know what I mean?

Speaker 2 There's a barrier that most people in society will experience when they have whatever it is. These men don't have that.

Speaker 2 So to your point, like when Elon's like going, being erratic, when Nikanya is being erratic, we don't know what erratic plus billion equals. And I think we might be experiencing it.

Speaker 2 Do you know what I mean?

Speaker 4 Also, I mean, there is this like ideological thing that we haven't talked about, which is that these guys,

Speaker 4 and you brought it up with Uber, but like they, they have been in various ways, and Teal played a big part of this, but Elon has too, have made this argument that sort of breaking the rules, transgressing, it's not just, it's it's not just acceptable.

Speaker 4 It's like a good thing.

Speaker 4 It's like a thing we need more of. That's their, that to some extent is their ideology.
And like, and so Uber was like breaking the taxi industry

Speaker 4 or breaking the rules. And it wasn't just, it wasn't just okay.

Speaker 4 I think a lot of people prior to this would agree that like, it's okay if a small business doesn't like fill out every single form or whatever, because they're a small business.

Speaker 4 But these guys took it further to say, no, like disruption, breaking things, sticking in the eye of of the establishment like that's how progress happens like that is to the extent that any of these guys have really strongly held beliefs that is the belief that kind of ties them like all together let's let's talk more about peter thiel

Speaker 5 who who is this shadowy figure i find him very scary when i saw when i was like prepping for today i was like this guy shut down gorka yeah he's a scary kind of person but that's like who who is peter thial

Speaker 2 and why do some people consider him the ultimate puppet master for everything that's happening? And not, by the way, I'm not saying in like conspiracy land. I'm not saying like, who is this mystery?

Speaker 2 No, I mean more in the way of like someone going, oh yeah, this is how he helped Trump and this is what he's meant to Elon, et cetera.

Speaker 4 Well, so he is just to start, he is a famous investor. He is, he was the,

Speaker 4 he started, co-founded PavePal, became kind of like the

Speaker 4 big tech investor in the 2000s and 2010s.

Speaker 4 Many of these, many of his friends and colleagues, like Elon Musk, but also Reed Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn, the guys who started YouTube, they all worked together at PayPal.

Speaker 4 They all kind of went out in the world and

Speaker 4 did business together.

Speaker 4 And Teal, in addition to all this, was a very conservative person, somebody who had been essentially one of these like college conservatives, really like before it became so cool.

Speaker 4 So he that, and that, that was really like his first, his first like entrepreneurial venture was this kind of right-wing newspaper at Stanford called the Stanford Review.

Speaker 4 And, you know, they would like rail against, it's basically wokeness, but they, you know, back then they called it like political correctness.

Speaker 2 Yeah,

Speaker 2 culture.

Speaker 4 And, you know, they would sort of like do something that is like right on the line of being racist or sexist or homophobic or maybe all three all at once.

Speaker 4 And then then use that to yeah to their advantage and um and teal kind of combined those two things combined the combined his you know conservative worldview with his his business thing and he's he's sort of bounced between the two and tried to use his political influence to to benefit his companies um beginning with palantir and this is where some of these like puppet master theories start because palantir which is a um it's like a database company that does data mining for for intelligence agencies and corporations.

Speaker 4 And Teal started the company in 2004 and it sort of grew in tandem with his political influence where they were able to get government contracts and so on as he grew. And of course, Palantir

Speaker 4 scares people because databases and data mining,

Speaker 4 there are ways in which you can kind of like surveil somebody without actually surveilling them.

Speaker 4 And like I said, he became really the first tech guy to to go you know all in on trump um and as you what did he like about trump i'd love to know like what he connected to that you know because trump seemed people forget this now

Speaker 2 but i i remember when donald trump was running for president he had no ally right so it was steve bannon yeah

Speaker 2 but trump was the antitheses of the republican party as they saw themselves yeah you know i remember you know whether it was the people running the the RNC or whether it was people who were running against him, they were like, oh, no, no, this guy is a pariah.

Speaker 2 He's a joke. He does not represent our values.
So the establishment Republican Party was not for Donald Trump. The media was not for Donald Trump, right?

Speaker 2 Fox News was also like, meh, who is this guy in that way? The Democrats were not for Donald Trump. Silicon Valley wasn't.
So I'd love to know, like, what did Peter Thiel see in Donald Trump?

Speaker 2 Where he's like, no, no, no, this is my guy.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 4 I mean, that was the mystery that I started with, like, when I got, started writing about him seriously and wrote the book was just like, how does this, you know, he's like a gay immigrant tech guy.

Speaker 4 Yes. Get behind.

Speaker 4 He's born in Germany,

Speaker 4 spent some of his childhood in modern day Namibia,

Speaker 4 I think a short time in South Africa as well. How does this guy, you know, embrace this like, avowed Luddite? Remember, Donald Trump like proudly didn't use email.

Speaker 4 And, you know, and it's talking about this vision of the country that has nothing to do with Silicon Valley. Yes.

Speaker 5 And I think about the miners. Like

Speaker 2 miners.

Speaker 2 Yeah, we're bringing back coal, baby. Yeah.

Speaker 4 And I think the answer was, well, there's like two things, one of which is this political correctness point.

Speaker 4 Like Thiel really does believe left-wing ideas and tolerance and diversity were like holding back America, that that was like a significant problem with our country.

Speaker 4 And that all we needed to do was be able to say, you know, stuff, the stuff that's like maybe borderline racist and get away with it.

Speaker 4 And like that would make things better because then we wouldn't have to hold back or something.

Speaker 4 And I think the fact that Trump was doing that and getting up there and saying stuff that was edgy was a big, like, that was a big part of the appeal. And the other thing is these guys

Speaker 4 want to destroy.

Speaker 4 the old order and and and build their new order and build a technological yeah you know techno future and trump maybe he wasn't super focused on the future, but he was saying, we need to break a bunch of stuff.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 2 And I think

Speaker 5 very tech, move fast and break things, right? Isn't that like kind of the ethos?

Speaker 4 Yeah, that is.

Speaker 4 That slogan is, you know, super associated with Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg has used it.
And of course, Mark Zuckerberg was basically a mentee of Peter Thiel.

Speaker 4 Thial's first big investment was an early bet on Facebook for like one of the best venture capital investments like of all time.

Speaker 4 And so, and then I think the last thing is just these guys are opportunists. And Teal saw, it's not that Teal thought, oh, for sure, Trump is going to win.
He thought he might win.

Speaker 4 And if he does win, and I do.

Speaker 2 It's an investment. Yeah, exactly.
It's an investment. Made an early investment.

Speaker 4 It's a high risk, high reward investment, which is exactly the kind of thing that these tech guys specialize in. But with Musk, I think it was the same thing.
I don't think Musk knew for sure that

Speaker 4 Trump was going to win. But I think he thought, look,

Speaker 4 I've already gone sort of, I've already been red-pilled or whatever. I'm already tweeting right-wing stuff every day.

Speaker 4 What? Am I really gonna harm my brand by putting a couple hundred million dollars behind Trump? Probably not. If he loses, what have I lost?

Speaker 4 And if he wins, then I become the, you know, the right-hand man of the most powerful person in the world.

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Speaker 2 You were getting a concoction and a prayer. Most of the time it was warm water, maybe with some salt, lemon, honey, ginger, and if you were brave, garlic.

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Speaker 2 Because apparently, I guess sicknesses and vampires have the same weaknesses. At that time, I hated it.
I was like, please, just give me something from the pharmacy, please.

Speaker 2 But now, I don't know what changed. Now, I swear by it.
First sign of a cold, and I'm suddenly becoming like a backyard herbalist.

Speaker 2 You know, it's funny how these things stick with you. And what's wild is how different they are.
Like, depending on where you grew up, they completely change.

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Speaker 2 you know we see this played out in a different way in developing nations i find so because it's a lot more blatant and

Speaker 2 there there isn't like like a finesse around it i mean now it's become blatant in america if i would say but like for instance i grew up in a world where you know the and you know what i'm talking about there'd be like there would be this businessman who's about to go to jail or their business is about to there'd always be something that's happening they're losing the mining license or something's happening and they go okay i need to go all in on this candidate.

Speaker 2 Otherwise, my whole world is going to come crumbling down. And then they would back them completely.
And if the candidate won, they got more mining deals. They got more oil deals.

Speaker 2 They got more everything. But if they lost, that was it for you.
You read about it in like old Cold War Russia as well. It was like, okay, who's supporting Yeltsin or who's going after Gorbachev?

Speaker 2 It feels like

Speaker 2 that wasn't America's story.

Speaker 2 It feels like America was the place where people like, yes, there's, you know, there's shaking hands between companies and businesses and government, but that's not what this country does.

Speaker 2 And now it seems like...

Speaker 5 It's very naked, right?

Speaker 2 Yeah, now it seems very direct. But this is, okay, this is what confuses me on, you know, we talk about Peter Thiel in one aspect.

Speaker 2 Elon Musk makes electric cars.

Speaker 2 Donald Trump keeps on smashing electric cars. and going like people don't want these things they're terrible bring oil back baby i

Speaker 2 okay what am i missing Strange betfellows. Yeah, but I want, like, am I missing something? Does Elon Musk think the only thing I've thought of is Elon Musk goes

Speaker 2 if the electric car industry is destroyed,

Speaker 2 the legacy brands will die first in it, and they'll be the first to bail out because they'll panic. So Ford and all of them will be like, okay, we're not making electric cars.

Speaker 2 And then Tester will once again be like the only player. And so I think he's betting that he can weather the storm more than they can.
and then he will have a monopoly in the space.

Speaker 2 And so I think for now, he supports Donald Trump trying to like crush the industry. But I don't know what you think because you're in it so deeply.

Speaker 4 I think that the story you just told is more or less the right story. Like Tesla has the market lead.

Speaker 4 So if Tesla has the best margins, if Donald Trump nixed every subsidy for electric vehicles, it'd be very bad for Tesla, but it'd be worse

Speaker 2 for Tesla's competitors.

Speaker 4 It's kind of like what you're saying. I do think like what you were just describing is like an oligarchy, right? Like

Speaker 4 these business people who are using, who are very powerful, using their business connections to

Speaker 4 influence politics and using that to influence their bottom line. I feel like that is what Elon Musk right now is trying to do.
And people have described Musk and Teal and Bezos as oligarchs.

Speaker 4 And I think there's something to that because the playbooks do feel very similar.

Speaker 4 I don't think we yet know, like we don't know how this story ends. And

Speaker 4 America, like, we may have some oligarchs or some would-be oligarchs, but we still live in a democracy. And

Speaker 4 there's still the possibility

Speaker 4 or even the probability that this won't work, that Musk will not be able to, that, that, that, yes, he, he is buying influence when he, um, when he donates $300 million to Donald Trump, but like, how much influence is he actually buying?

Speaker 4 Can Donald Trump really just write him a check for like $10 billion?

Speaker 4 And I think the answer, I think we're going to learn, and maybe we already are starting to learn that like the answer may be no, that Trump is not able because of Congress and because of all of these, you know, because of the countervailing forces, because of the fact that many people in the United States, including, you know, Donald Trump voters, do not want to live in that world.

Speaker 4 And so I think, so I just don't think we know yet what the payoff is.

Speaker 2 So then maybe, I guess for someone like Teal, it works out because he seems like he's more on the ideological side of it, but Musk seems to be more blow with the wind, but really it's all about the money.

Speaker 2 Just bottom line, bottom line, bottom line.

Speaker 4 I think they're both, they're both about the money.

Speaker 4 But Teal is more ideological. I think that's more of an ideology.

Speaker 5 And maybe you can explain the psychology of these guys. How much more money do they want? They have so much.

Speaker 5 Like, because that doesn't feel like a satisfying explanation when we're talking about the richest man in the world, and we're talking about somebody that made a venture capital investment that is unprecedented, will never happen again.

Speaker 5 What this is for the Facebook IPO.

Speaker 4 It's a great point, and it's actually what some of them have said in sort of saying, How could this be corrupt? I don't need more money. Why would I, as a

Speaker 4 we've seen David Sachs, who's a you know, close friend of Teal and Musk, say this: like, why would a rich person be corrupt? They don't need to be corrupt.

Speaker 2 Brilliant. And um, I love that.
That's brilliant.

Speaker 2 It's despicable, but it's like brilliant things. Wow.

Speaker 4 Um, So, yeah, maybe point taken.

Speaker 4 On the other hand,

Speaker 4 like Elon Musk is worth, I didn't check before I walked in. I'm guessing it's around $300 million.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 4 $300 billion. That's not like $300 billion.
That's not a giant stack of dollar bills. That's $300 billion largely in illiquid assets, Tesla stock, stock in these private companies, primarily SpaceX.

Speaker 4 These companies all do business with one another. So if one were to fall very quickly, then all the others might

Speaker 2 fall.

Speaker 4 So it's not like, like, he is very rich, but it's not like his wealth

Speaker 4 is totally stable.

Speaker 5 Are you saying he's low-key broke?

Speaker 2 Is that what you're trying to do?

Speaker 4 He's definitely not sitting on a ton of cash.

Speaker 2 He's not Pablo Escobar rich.

Speaker 4 But I mean,

Speaker 4 this is not to say he's broke. He can borrow money, and this is like what he did when he bought Twitter.
He basically can take

Speaker 4 some of these stock certificates, give them to a bank.

Speaker 2 It's the biggest scam in the world. And get money out of it.

Speaker 5 So he's kind of over-leveraged now.

Speaker 5 He still was not a good investment.

Speaker 4 He just is not sitting on a pile of cash. And so if these, if some of these stocks were to fall dramatically, he'd still have enough money to have a plane

Speaker 4 and go after his enemies or whatever. But he would not be mega-rich the way he is now.
And so I do think they don't feel as secure

Speaker 4 as we might think we would feel if we were in their their shoes.

Speaker 2 I'll say one thing to that.

Speaker 2 I've met a bunch of these men. I haven't met Elon Musk or Donald Trump, but I've met a bunch of like mega billionaire people.

Speaker 2 And I think we should never take for granted how much their drive is governed by just being invited back to the club. You know,

Speaker 2 it's whoever has the biggest yachts gets the biggest parking spot where, you know, you get to dock your boat.

Speaker 2 There's something that comes with it that goes beyond the money. And sometimes we think of the money because for most people, money is the thing that's governing your life.

Speaker 2 But once it gets beyond that, the money is just a number that determines where you are positioned now in life. So when you have

Speaker 2 half a billion dollars, okay, I'm sure there's like a lot of presidents who will take your call.

Speaker 2 When you have 300 billion dollars,

Speaker 2 they're praying that you take their call.

Speaker 2 Money is now power.

Speaker 2 It's now having the ability to what Max was saying, to shape the world now. Think about how many times we as people go, man, I wish they would.
No, no, no. These people don't wish they would.

Speaker 2 They just do it. They do they would.
So they phone the Department of Education, you know what I mean, the Secretary of Education and go, hey, this needs to change in schools.

Speaker 2 And that person goes, I'll look into it. They go, I don't like that the roads are like this.
They go, I'll look into it. You know, and I think, I think that's what we take for granted.

Speaker 2 but i i would i would love to know this about elon in particular and i know it's like a loaded sentence but i i keep feeling it like my spidey sense maybe i spent too much time in africa i don't know

Speaker 2 it feels like a lot of elon musk is a scam

Speaker 2 and i know that that is a counterintuitive statement because people will go what are you talking about trevor meh man is the richest man in the world he's the company he's every single time he's had a new event he said full self-driving is not it's now it's imminent it's imminent it's imminent it's imminent there is still no full full self-driving.

Speaker 2 And now people are like, but have you seen how they drive? That's not what I'm saying. A lot of the stock price is tied to what he says will be done or is achievable.

Speaker 2 A lot of the valuation is tied to that, but it doesn't get done. And that's where I noticed an overlap between like him and Donald Trump.

Speaker 2 Donald Trump, I think it was Jeff Zucker who said this about him, who used to run NBC. Jeff Zucker, someone asked him once, they said, yo, why do you keep giving Donald Trump the apprentice?

Speaker 2 And they're like, this, this hack failed businessman who's like this goofy dude who's not even a billionaire, who acts like a billionaire. Why do you keep?

Speaker 2 And Jeff Sucker said, can I tell you something? He said, this man is a one-man,

Speaker 2 one-man ratings wrecking ball machine. And he said, because he will go to press events

Speaker 2 and the press will say, how do you feel about the ratings being down for this season on The Apprentice? And Trump will turn and say, this is the biggest rated show of all time.

Speaker 2 And the journalists would go, no, it isn't. It's lost ratings.
And he's like, no, you're wrong. This is the biggest show.
It is watched by more people than ever before.

Speaker 2 The Apprentice is the biggest show. And Jeff Zucker says he'd never seen a human being who could take reality and just butt up against it and force.

Speaker 2 And then he would create the reality that he now said existed. And I feel like Musk and Trump do a similar thing.
So Musk goes, it will work, it will work, it will work.

Speaker 2 It doesn't work, doesn't work, it doesn't work. And then a version of it does work.
And then people are like, aha. And then thank you, 50 billion.

Speaker 4 you know what i know it's like a loaded question i'm obviously asking it in a blunt way yeah i mean is he legit you're saying trevor you're saying the tech emperor has no clothes yeah i'm saying is he legit genuinely you use the word like scam and then the what you described was i think what like a tech silicon valley people would describe as like a reality distortion field and they oh i love that that's the phrase right and it was used memorably around steve jobs people use it to describe elon musk the the tendency for these tech guys to you know kind of like bend reality to their will or to say something.

Speaker 4 And like then the fact of saying it somehow makes it real.

Speaker 4 Now, I'm not saying that the self-driving cars obviously are not real. And he's been promising that, as you said, for a very long time.
And he's.

Speaker 2 And I'm not saying they'll never be real, by the way.

Speaker 5 But they're not real now.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I'm just saying a lot of like the success is based on what people think is going to happen when it is going to happen, but it's not happening.

Speaker 2 But now the very thing that they got into the position for, they're failing at, but then somehow they spin it to not be failure. Do you know what I mean?

Speaker 4 Yeah. I mean, I think that

Speaker 4 maybe that's something that's an insight that like Trump and Elon have about the world that it works now or something. The way I've thought about it is more like as a like a bullshit artist.

Speaker 4 A bullshit artist isn't necessarily scamming. They're just,

Speaker 2 they're just, you know,

Speaker 4 they're just spinning a story or whatever.

Speaker 2 I love that.

Speaker 4 Elon Musk is, I mean, he is an amazing marketer. He's taken a very, it was a very difficult story.
Electric vehicles.

Speaker 4 There were no electric cars really at the time he started doing it.

Speaker 4 He didn't own any car. He didn't have any cars to sell people.
He managed to convince people to give him money.

Speaker 2 This is what I mean, though. You see what I mean?

Speaker 4 Yeah. Yeah.
I mean, like the business model for Tesla was, okay, we're going to make this very expensive car. You're going to give us the money for it.

Speaker 4 Then we will go make it and we will use the extra money left over to make another car. We sell that ahead of time.
He sells all his cars ahead of time when there isn't one.

Speaker 4 He's been basically selling products that don't exist for

Speaker 4 his entire career, and then hopefully most of the time, eventually delivering them. And as long as people

Speaker 4 believe that something is, that it's coming, that there is going to be this next thing,

Speaker 4 it kind of works. And I do feel like we're in this moment where we're going to learn basically.

Speaker 4 like how how how far that goes i think in another life

Speaker 2 elon musk has the ending that Elizabeth Holmes had with the Ranos.

Speaker 5 I was never get out of my head.

Speaker 4 I was thinking, this is what they threw Elizabeth Holmes in jail for.

Speaker 2 It's the same thing. Elon gets money to make a car that hasn't been made and basically says the thing is what it isn't.
Cool.

Speaker 2 Elon is the same guy who then like convinces one car manufacturer that he has gotten funding that he doesn't have and then convinces the bank that the car manufacturer is in when they're not in

Speaker 2 and then gets the deal done. But both sides came to the deal because they both had information that wasn't, in fact, true.
Yeah. And Elizabeth Holmes is in jail.

Speaker 2 And I'm not saying she shouldn't be in jail, but I'm just like, oh, damn, with a bullshit artist, you just need one person to go to Bernie Madoff, you to go, I need my money, Bernie.

Speaker 2 And then all of a sudden, the whole thing falls apart. But if no one asks you for the money, Bernie Madoff could still be around as one of the most successful

Speaker 2 money guys because no one would ask him for the actual money.

Speaker 4 Yeah, there's a fine line between like fake it till you make it and faking it, you know?

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 4 uh when you look at him and and you look at all the ways he's failed to like live up to these promises there are ways that he has succeeded and like and like those car like and again if it's it what's so weird and and kind of maddening if you've followed him for a very long time is He has succeeded beyond his wildest dreams.

Speaker 4 Like he, he wanted to have a mainstream electric car. He wanted to make electric cars, have them everywhere.
And now, and he has it.

Speaker 4 And like, like, if you get an Uber now, like, it's probably going to be a Tesla.

Speaker 2 Many of them are amazing how many of them are. Tesla Model 3 is, right?

Speaker 4 It's like, it's like a Corolla or something, but it's not enough, right? Maybe the thing that allowed him to get to where he is now, it's like he can't stop it or something. And he just has to keep.

Speaker 2 Oh, damn.

Speaker 4 Now we're, you know, now we're doing the cyber cab or something. And at some point, you have to think he's going to, you know, write a check with his mouth that he can't cash.

Speaker 4 And that is sort of like what every Elon person who's skeptical of him, every critic has been waiting for.

Speaker 2 I mean, that's where people have lost a lot lot of money betting against him. 100%.
A lot of people, that's what makes him a paradox. You know me.
I love electric cars.

Speaker 2 Love, love, love, love, love electric cars. So for me, I've always been the guy who's gone, yes, go Elon, do the thing.
Because I love that. I love that concept.
I love the idea of Starlink.

Speaker 2 I think too many parts of the world don't have internet. And this archaic idea of like a cable coming to your house and now you don't have it.
And then infrastructure last mile,

Speaker 2 it's too intensive. It's a fantastic idea.
Yeah, it has downsides with satellites. I get that, but there's you know what I mean.
It's a fantastic idea.

Speaker 2 There's so many elements of Elon where I go, great. But I think what

Speaker 2 you know rubs me the wrong way is like the con man-y side of it. I'll tell you, like the biggest one that got me with Elon

Speaker 2 was him lying about the video games.

Speaker 2 Guys, I no, no, let me tell you something. I've been offended by few things in my life

Speaker 2 more than I have been.

Speaker 2 Yo, let me tell you why. I'll tell you why.
I play a shit ton of video games, right?

Speaker 2 And video games have always always been, for me at least, the bastion of like where you are because nothing else like worked for you.

Speaker 2 We weren't good at video games because we were good at catching a ball. We weren't good at video games because we were the fastest.
We weren't good at video games because we were the best looking.

Speaker 2 We weren't good. No, but that was the place.
It's like my mage was at this level because I wasn't at that level in real life. And I don't know how to explain, but that thing for me,

Speaker 2 it was so insignificant that I was like, why does he need to steal that thing as well?

Speaker 2 I get it when you're doing stock market things. All right.
Yeah, I may not like it, but you know what? I'm sure a lot of other people do it in different ways.

Speaker 2 But when this man came in and stole the valor of video gaming and proclaimed himself one of the top 10 players in the world and talked about how he does it, yo, I remember watching.

Speaker 2 And then I felt like a hater because I watched it. And I said to my friend, I was like, that's impossible.

Speaker 2 I've always said like my whole life, there should only be two modes in a video game, not easy and hard. It should be unemployed and employed.
That should be the mode you play the game in.

Speaker 2 Because if you are unemployed, you play the game at a different level. When you're employed, you can't get the levels that some of these people get, right? For me, that was the biggest red flag.

Speaker 2 And I don't know how to explain it.

Speaker 5 Not all the kids.

Speaker 2 Let me tell you something. I hear that stuff and I understand why.
But Nick Cannon has a lot of kids.

Speaker 5 And he's a red flag.

Speaker 2 Yeah, but I'm saying he's not a red flag for the world for me. For me, Elon Musk lying about the video games and then acting like he didn't lie lie about the video games when he finally got busted.

Speaker 2 Now being like, because when he sat with Joe Rogan, he proudly professed how,

Speaker 2 and he used it to prop up his aptitude, by the way. I think this is what part of the problem I have.
He sat across from Joe Rogan and Joe Rogan was like, you play a lot of vegan.

Speaker 2 You're one of the top in the world. And he's like, yeah, you know,

Speaker 2 they've actually shown, studies have shown that doctors who use, like who play video games,

Speaker 2 they're actually better. They've got more dexterity and they're better at using.
And so, yeah, I find it helps me like solve problems.

Speaker 2 And I can see someone going like, wow, he's also one of the best video gamers, which means his brain, which means his brain. He gets busted.
One of the top gamer streamers or whatever talks to him.

Speaker 2 He goes like, yeah, yeah, of course I get someone in China or whatever to play for me. That's what everyone does.
But it shows that it's never enough for him.

Speaker 2 But that's what I, but that's what I mean. But I'm saying

Speaker 2 I can understand somebody who steals my car.

Speaker 2 I can understand somebody who steals my phone.

Speaker 2 But then there's like somebody who's going to steal the box that my phone came in, even though the two were separate and i'm like

Speaker 2 there's a thief and then there's a kleptomaniac do you get what i'm saying yeah for me that's that's the red flag with elon musk if you can lie about that

Speaker 4 and you've lied about the big things as well what are the other things that we don't know i think you might be on to something honestly we're seeing this And I feel like this is something that the media was like a little bit slow to pick up on.

Speaker 4 You know, Musk has been saying, oh,

Speaker 4 there are these protests going on in front of Tesla dealerships and so on. And Musk is saying, oh, it's Act Blue.
It's George Soros.

Speaker 4 We don't totally know what's driving it. And I do think that the video game thing, both like you're saying, is this kind of like naked deception.
Yes. And one that

Speaker 4 was maybe particularly offensive to his, you know, universe of fans. Yeah.

Speaker 4 To the young men who like, and I think like Musk is becoming this symbol partly because of Trump and maybe partly for other reasons having to do with his extreme wealth and so on.

Speaker 4 And the fact that he did this, you know, thing that looked like a Nazi salute to many people. Like

Speaker 4 he's become a symbol of something very bad for a lot of people. And I do kind of wonder if maybe like maybe the video game thing was the turning point of it.

Speaker 4 You're not the first person who said like, well, that's going to be the thing

Speaker 4 that cooks him.

Speaker 2 Don't go anywhere because we got more. What now after this,

Speaker 5 I'm really curious, because we have a South African here. We haven't spoken much about his South African

Speaker 2 heritage. Even there, by the way, because Peter Thiel, I'm...

Speaker 5 Yeah, all of them have a South African connection. Namibia, like all these guys have...

Speaker 5 some southern African connection and it's particularly apartheid South Africa and white South Africans and Trump's mission to help the very desolate, struggling white South Africans who need to be taken to America because of all the prejudice they're facing in South Africa right now.

Speaker 5 What do you think about

Speaker 5 spending his formative years?

Speaker 2 That was a joke, by the way, for anyone. Some people will be like, no, Gianna believes it.

Speaker 5 Yeah, they're having a bad time. They've heard it's really bad for them.

Speaker 2 It's actually funny. I was, yeah, I was at a golf club talking to them about it.
And I was like, how are things? And they're like, yeah, it's really tough. Really, really tough.
I felt for them.

Speaker 2 All of those

Speaker 5 and five houses all of those guys but what do you make of because his father has kind of become like a yeah there's all of these characters you've got grimes you've got his eccentric mother you've got like the woman that worked with him that has three children for him now like he the it's not just musk for me because maybe i'm into celebrity gossip it's all the like the parade of characters that come with him and i think south africa is the backdrop to a lot of that what do you make of like spending his time there how it informs his ideology how it informs how he's engaging with trump and some of of the policy informs.

Speaker 4 I don't feel like an expert in the politics of like the modern day Afrikaner movement.

Speaker 4 And I don't, I'm not sure that Elon even is. I kind of think some of what's going on is he's just like drinking in the far right, you know, social media stream.

Speaker 4 And like there's some far-right people talking about, you know, white racism in South Africa.

Speaker 4 But what you're saying, though, I mean, there has to be some part of the South African-ness that is informing this. And I thought about this a lot with Teal.

Speaker 4 He was born in Germany, family moved to the United States, and then he spent a couple of years, as I said, first in South Africa and then in modern day Namibia. His father worked at a uranium mine.

Speaker 4 If you're working at a uranium mine in Namibia, which at the time was like basically a colony, a client state of South Africa, an apartheid state, you are like as complicit in the apartheid system as you could possibly be.

Speaker 4 You are making, you are producing, you're not only like dealing with a labor structure that is benefiting from apartheid, but you're trying to produce nuclear weapons so that you can defend that system from the world that is trying to shut you down.

Speaker 4 And like all these guys who had family connections in South Africa,

Speaker 2 which is very old.

Speaker 4 Yeah. And they went to American college campuses.
And

Speaker 4 in Teal's case, it's the 1980s. apartheid was like the cause on the left.

Speaker 2 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 4 And I think what I think was a political statement by the anti-apartheid activists, you know, at Stanford in the 80s, but you process it as a personal attack.

Speaker 2 Attack me and my family.

Speaker 4 My family. And like I did some reporting talking to people who went to college with him and where he would get into these arguments.

Speaker 4 He's denied, I should say, supporting apartheid or expressing pro-apartheid views, but there are certainly classmates of his who remember him doing so.

Speaker 2 Can I just interject and tell you something? And this is something that really plagues me.

Speaker 2 i have yet to meet someone who supports it apartheid it's really weird guys are you being is this are you being serious i've i have i am yet to meet a person it really worries me because it's almost like apartheid just happened by itself

Speaker 2 i'm being no everything you're saying yeah let me tell you something now i have yet to meet a person

Speaker 2 anywhere in the world who was in apartheid for instance and who goes like yeah no trevor i didn't want those blacks and white no i have yet every person i'll talk to everyone free mandela they'll go like i was totally against it then i'm like huh everyone was against it huh so who was for it because it seems like there were a lot of people for it seems like a lot of people didn't want the thing to stop a lot of people benefited from it it seems like a lot of huh for a thing that nobody wanted to end but anyway forgive me i just anyway yeah what's weird though is when i first started talking to elon he made apartheid part of the reason he wanted to come to north america he said i i left south africa because i was so against apartheid.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 he's always very careful.

Speaker 2 Wait, how old was he when he left?

Speaker 4 He was like 17 or something. Okay.
That's the story he told. And of course, you know, he's the story has shifted a little bit.
I mean,

Speaker 4 now he's very concerned, as, you know, as you're saying, about the, you know, the property rights of the white farmers around.

Speaker 2 Yes, yes, yes.

Speaker 4 And, and so, so I don't know like what, what the truth of, what the truth of it is there, but I do think there might have been a sense of like feeling attacked and then reacting you know in a in a sort of extreme way so i don't know that this is correct at all but i've been trying to sit and figure out what it could be and i i think some of it is this

Speaker 2 i think a lot of these people a lot of these tech leaders who came through like south africa and like were you know in and around apartheid at the time

Speaker 2 they witnessed something that is very unique to countries like south africa And that is the proximity between business and government and how the two work hand in hand to further each other's goals, right?

Speaker 2 So apartheid is not a free system. Apartheid is not a world where the best company wins.
Apartheid is not a world where the best speech is accelerated.

Speaker 2 No, apartheid is a system where the government says, will you help us to turn coal into oil because we've been oil embargoed? Yes, you have the business. We will give you all the resources you need.

Speaker 2 to give us all the oil we need. And then all the anti-apartheid companies, they left South Africa, right?

Speaker 2 But the system is set up in such a way where there's like a direct, it's very, very similar to like Cold War Russia. You know, it's like you help the government, the government helps you.

Speaker 2 You help the government, the government helps you. And then these people come to America where that's like frowned upon.
It's almost like, oh, oh, no, no, no, no, no.

Speaker 2 Church and state, things are separate here. You don't do that.
But I think they still have this idea where they go like, no, no, no, hey, government, we help you and you help us.

Speaker 5 And they have the racism too.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 And I think, for instance, when you talk about ideologies, if you look at Elon's like plight against South Africa, again, I'm not sure this is perfect, but I saw it start when he wasn't able to launch Starlink in South Africa, because in South Africa, the government says they want to make sure that you have minority ownership when you launch a company.

Speaker 2 And the reason the government did this, and they haven't done it perfectly, by the way.

Speaker 2 I'm never going to say it's the poster child, but what they were trying to do is they were going, guys, we've learned that money gets closed off.

Speaker 2 So if we don't make sure that companies have representation in terms of who owns the companies, the money's never going to be.

Speaker 5 And when you say minority ownership, South Africa's a black majority country.

Speaker 2 No, no, what I mean is like, sorry, now what we say minority here.

Speaker 2 So I'm saying

Speaker 2 people of color. Yeah, yeah, people of colour.

Speaker 5 So that explains the anti-DEI thing he has.

Speaker 2 This is like, oh, the plane crashes. Elon,

Speaker 2 Elon, I think there went, you're not going to let me open this. And not only did they not let him, they then banned Starlink.

Speaker 2 And then now Starlink, you can't use it in South Africa. Even though it's a satellite thing, they don't enable it in South Africa.

Speaker 2 And I think Elon now, again, was personally, he was like, oh, I'm going to find a way to break this system.

Speaker 2 And one thing I've heard about Elon from everyone who's worked in and around his orbit is he is supremely talented at finding the right lever to pull and he will pull it.

Speaker 2 It doesn't matter what he's trying to do. But Elon will go, oh, this is...
That's the lever. I need to get people working harder.
That's the lever. I need to get these people doing this.

Speaker 2 That's the lever. To start businesses that break things and don't follow the rules.
What do you need? You need the people who make the rules to lose some of their power.

Speaker 2 What's the best way to get those people to lose some of their power? You find the people who are the least happy. You find the people who have the most hate fomenting.

Speaker 2 And you encourage that and you grow it and you nestle. And so what you,

Speaker 2 essentially, I love that you said it in the beginning with Peter Thiel. These guys are essentially investing in disruptors all around the world.

Speaker 5 They're just, so they're very opportunistic.

Speaker 2 They're seed funding everywhere. They're using the same principles of like money.
They go, Christiana, tell me about your movement. Huh? You believe that governments shouldn't exist?

Speaker 5 You want an idea now?

Speaker 2 You know what? This sounds like a good company. Yeah, they go, this is a great company.
You know what? It might be a risky bet, but it's nothing in the greater scheme of things.

Speaker 2 I'm just going to throw you a bone and I'm going to throw you a bone and I'm going to throw you a bone. And as we see it growing around the world, you just need a few unicorns.

Speaker 2 for all your bets to pay off. You need a few billion-dollar companies to make up for every like $100,000 you've invested.
And I think that's what he's doing there.

Speaker 2 I think that's what he's doing in Germany. Because again, Germany, people forget this.
People are like, why is Elon involved?

Speaker 2 Which place makes some of the like most expensive and most important cars in the world? Germany.

Speaker 2 If Germany collapses and if the German car economy collapses, seems like there's a big winner somewhere.

Speaker 2 His name is Elon Musk. Places that he doesn't care about, it's because they don't in some way, shape, or form benefit him.
Do you know what I mean?

Speaker 4 Yeah. I think you're right.

Speaker 2 I think there's always an angle with him and like all often a business angle.

Speaker 4 Like I don't think he's ever, I mean, he is, he does obviously have some ideology, but, but like you said about

Speaker 4 the apartheid system and this idea of like

Speaker 4 becoming sort of a client of the government or something like that. Like he has been so freaking good at getting the government to give him money.

Speaker 2 Yeah, brilliant.

Speaker 4 Finding, like you said, finding these levers.

Speaker 4 And those levers can be, they can be like reaching regular people and saying, like, here is this awesome product. But they also are often and have often been like political levers.

Speaker 4 And like, I agree, I don't fully understand the dynamics of German politics and what exactly he's doing with the AFD, which is the far-right party in Germany.

Speaker 4 But it definitely, everything I know about Elon tells me. there's an angle there.

Speaker 4 And whether it's something having to do with the auto industry, you know, he has union issues in Germany, or perhaps, you know, Europeans have a space agency.

Speaker 4 They compete with SpaceX, maybe looking for more contracts there or whatever. But he's trying to find an in.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 it's just, you know, there's obviously there's collateral damage sometimes

Speaker 4 when that's your modus operandi.

Speaker 2 I know we're going to have to let you go. So

Speaker 2 it's a terrible question to ask you because we are finding you in the middle of a story. This is a book that hasn't concluded.

Speaker 2 But if you were to try and not necessarily predict what you think will happen,

Speaker 2 but maybe a more interesting one for me would be, what do you predict their end goal and their aim is?

Speaker 2 Because, you know, sort of to what Christiana was saying, they have the money or they have the access to the money, they have the valuation, they have, you know, the power, et cetera. But

Speaker 2 is there an end goal? Like, does Peter Thiel rest when something is achieved? Does Elon Musk rest when something is achieved?

Speaker 2 Or are there, as you said, like a fusion reaction that is now powering itself infinitely?

Speaker 4 I think with Thiel,

Speaker 4 there is a more calculating approach. He has not gone all in with Trump.

Speaker 4 And there were a lot of people around him and in the kind of right-wing Silicon Valley world saying, like, oh, what a huge mistake. I mean, he was the earliest Trump supporter.

Speaker 4 Like, why is he not supporting Trump? But I think like we are living, as you said, in that moment.

Speaker 4 And we're, and there has been, been, you know, as we're talking, like this kind of high of Trump support and Trump's power. And that won't last.

Speaker 4 And I think Thiel has set himself well, set himself up well in case it doesn't last because he has a very close relationship with J.D.

Speaker 4 Vance, who's Trump's, you know, Trump's vice president and who Thiel basically.

Speaker 4 helped him start his political career, was his main donor to Vance's Senate campaign. So if Vance

Speaker 4 becomes the Republican candidate in 2028, as I think he's probably the favorite to do, Teal has an end. Musk, I think,

Speaker 4 is somebody who needs this kind of endless crisis, a sort of endless series of, I don't know, like games or something.

Speaker 4 What he wants, his end game is he sells all the cars, he sells all the rocket launches, he's worth way more money.

Speaker 4 He's even said this, you know, he thinks Tesla, his car company, should be worth $30 trillion or something. And if it's worth $30 trillion, Elon is going to be worth,

Speaker 4 I don't know, like $6 trillion, $7 trillion more, probably.

Speaker 4 So for him, it's just like

Speaker 4 way more dominance, being able to sort of

Speaker 4 essentially run the world.

Speaker 2 Yeah, God King. That's what it sounds like to me.

Speaker 4 I don't think that is the most likely scenario.

Speaker 4 But I do think that is the, that's like what he is pushing for.

Speaker 4 And I think to some extent, you know, it's up to voters and democracy to

Speaker 4 try to restrain him.

Speaker 2 Damn. Wow.
Well, here's hoping, Max. Here's hoping.
And I say this, I hope you take this in the best way possible. I hope that your podcast becomes less relevant as time goes.
Fair enough.

Speaker 2 And I hope the people who listen now are now just like interested in business.

Speaker 2 And like, you know, and I hope it has like not as much of a broad appeal because right now, I think Elon Inc., it is like the hub of everything.

Speaker 2 And so, yeah, man, thank you for taking the time and coming and sharing a bit of the universe with us. Appreciate it.

Speaker 4 Thank you both for having me.

Speaker 2 What Now with Trevor Noah is produced by Spotify Studios in partnership with Day Zero Productions. The show is executive produced by Trevor Noah, Sanaz Yamin, and Jodi Avigan.

Speaker 2 Our senior producer is Jess Hackle. Claire Slaughter is our producer.
Music, Mixing, and Mastering by Hannes Brown. Thank you so so much for listening.

Speaker 2 Join me next Thursday for another episode of What Now.