Elon Wins
30:32 Share

They're been they're great. Everybody up here is great. Everybody appears very special.

as don't trump was praising people on election night at marylou. The listening crowd wanted to make sure he mentioned one person in particular.

You can you say. That tell we have a new star, a stars born on that .

same night.

fox news's bret bear said elan mask might be the future of the republican party. We've covered musk a lot in this election, his campaign appearances for trump, his fundraising and his political action committee, amErica pack. But today we wanted to tell a slightly different story about how elon joined the trump orbit in the first place. That's why we called up. So we shuffle to take us back a few years.

We could definitely see his kind of political transformation. And I think in retrospect, CT IT does make a lot of sense for him because he just has so much to gain by aligning himself with their republican party.

So he wrote a fantastic book about mosques twitter takeover called extremely hard core. And he knows Better than most people that the road to election day was not a straight and predictable one.

And I think, well, it's easy to assign a lot of strategy to what elan has done in buying twitter and transforming into a political influence Operation will ensure will get into I think in reality, he just does pretty well with the cards that he's dealt. And he makes impulsive decisions and then is like look at the fallout of these decisions. I've been to capital lize on this and then we got a situation where, yes, he's apparently the future the republic lan party.

Today on the show how elon took over twitter and then the top and the lary and you're listening to what next TVB show about technology, power and how the future will be determined. Stick around.

This podcast is brought you by progressive insurance. You chose to hit play on this podcast today. Smart choice. Progressive loves to help people make smart choices.

That's why they offer a tool called auto quote explored that allows you to compare your progressive car insurance quote with rates from other companies, so you save time on the research and can enjoy savings when you choose the best rate for you. Give me a try after this episode at progressive dot com, progressive casualty insurance company and affiliations not available in all states of situations. Prices vary based on how you by.

Your team members spend over half their time writing, and we all know how that happens when confusing email turns to to twelve confuse replies than a meeting to get a line gravy is a trusted A I writing partner that saves your company from this communication and all the waste time and money that goes with IT when every word your team rights is clear conscience and on brand, everything gets Better. Four out of five professional stage gram helps them gain buying and action through their communication primarily helps you improve the substance, not just the style of your writing, by identifying exactly what is missing. Teams that communicate Better with grammar's report, twenty five percent faster time to resolution for support tickets and fifty two percent less time writing sales emails, saving nineteen days per year per employee, primarily works where you were from dogs to messages to emails.

IT interest seamlessly across five hundred thousand apps and website. No cutting, no pasting, no context switching. Equip your team with the gold standard of responsible AI.

Fifteen years of experience, just about every I. T. Certification, and never sells your data. Join seventy thousand teams and thirty million people who trust grammar to get results on the first try, go to gram y dot com slash enterprise to learn more friendly.

enterprise ready ai.

We're going to start with january eight, twenty twenty one, two days after the interaction of the capital, the day the former leadership of twitter decided to be in former president trump from the platform. So he says that yan, who absolutely loved tweet, saw this moment is massive over each, and found IT deeply, personally radical zing.

And I think on some level he had fear, you know, there's very little in elon musk life that he doesn't have control over, but to take the place for that he is completely addicted to. That gives him a rush of dopamine every second of every day, essentially. And to say, well, if they could do that to Donald trump, they could do that to meet.

They could take away this toy that I love and a doors so much. And that's an outcome that i'm simply not OK with. And I have to do something about around the same time, he kind of conveniently has ten billion dollars like burning a hole in his pocket, which is in the situation.

Many of us are custom to that for him. He was kind of trying to figure out what to do with all that money. What he ends up doing is quietly buying up twitter shares.

He starts buying up these shares, and then he makes a move to actually buy the platform. Do you think he win in with some ground plane? Or was he just like, I like this thing, it's shiny. Let's do IT .

the latter for sure. Yeah, I I don't think that he had a long term strategy in mind and and that's really born out by my reporting where when you talk to people close to him, he was going back and forth on this decision constantly all through the spring of twenty two uncertainly into the summer, even after he had made offer to buy.

Do you try .

exactly? And I really do think, you know, in some moments he would think now I should just build a twitter rival. And he had all these kind of wild schemes around twitter, but put IT on the block chain or twitter, but make a doge coin would be like a integral part of the platform.

And but then twitter basically finds out that he's suddenly their largest shareholder and the company panics. And the executives actually come to him and say, like, well, wow, wow. What about a board seat? Like, what if we do this? And he really did entertain that idea for a while. But again, he has people around him and people close to him saying, elan, you're not like a board room canna dude, you're not gonna the influence that you want to have if you just sit on the board and make suggestions.

And so he actually started testing out that theory, specifically with paragua wall, the C. E. O of twitter.

He starts making, let's cup up suggestions, saying things like, hey, there's an account that tracks my private jet. I don't like that account like maybe you should do something about that account and parade was like, no, but thank you for the suggestion on another one was that iran really wanted to fire the jagoda, who was the head of policy and the legal team. And he called her kind of like the chief sensor of twitter.

But SHE and prague had a really good relationship. He had a really good reputation internally. And so again, he kind of stands up to elon and says no. And at that point, elon like, okay, clearly you're not gonna a puppet that I can control, so I need to either buy IT or walk away and he decides to buy IT.

One of the things that you did so much reporting on is the amount of change and th Epace a t w hich I T h appened a t t witter. Now x once musk took IT over um at the time, IT really seemed like he was filing that the platform might collapse. Decisions seem to be becoming fast and furious. And I wonder when you look back at that period of time, if you think or there's a thread running through this or IT really was these events are coming around on a lazy Susan and i'm just responding to them.

Um I would think that somewhere in the middle this I mean, certainly the thread at the time was cut costs as rapidly as possible in buying twitter. He had strapped IT with all of this dad and he was really conscious of how much money the platform was hammering in average le. That and obviously headcount was a big part of the and so immediately walking in the door, he's like, let's get rid of as many people as possible as quickly as possible.

IT also was very continued that he did not come in with a stance of like these twitter employees seem really a passionate about the platform. They would ve worked on this problem for many, many years. What can I learn from them? IT was very much like, these people are lazy, woke idiots. Ds, and they need to like leave and shut up as quickly as possible.

Um I think also like there was someone of a misunderstanding on the media side about what the fallout of his decisions would be again, he like axes half the company within a week of taking over, including a ton of engineers who had really important roles kind of keeping twitter up and running at the same time. Anyone who's worked at a big tech company and i'll tell you like they spend years and invest millions of dollars trying to make the platform as stable as possible. So that one in a big event happens when the platforms flooded because of the super bowl and people are posting videos or there's an attack from a foreign adversary or what have you like IT can at least stay online.

IT might be glitch. Er, there might be problems, but like IT will stay up and running, having the media looked at all of his decisions and we're like, I don't know if you remember there was kind of that night in december, web room was like, this is the last night that twitter will be online by and IT was like, that was never really going to happen. If I go down for a while, IT might have a lot of problems, but like I would be able to weather the storm. And I think particularly for elon, like the amount of money he has just allows him to paper over a lot of mistakes, and he has made a lot of mistakes along the way. But ultimately, IT hasn't really mattered .

during the takeover. One of the points he made was that he wanted the platform to be devoid of political affiliation. That is clearly not what IT is now. And yet this election kind of turned IT into a megahed for the trump campaign. I guess the question that I have, and I don't know how to measure in a quantity ways how effective ex became at getting the trump message job yeah.

I don't think we know that yet. But I mean, I think there's no question that x has become a political influence pop form like now its purpose is was you know to get Donald trump elected and now it's become a complete mack phone of the republican party like that seems quite obvious. What is the impact of that change? Like it's a little hard to say, but I think that there is no question that elan played a very big role in this election. And he's also kind of changed the landscape of tech in general when we look at things like content moderation related to election misinformation, like x has set the floor so low that IT makes IT very easy for other platforms. Youtube, tiktok, what meat, all of meta platforms to kind of walk back some of their earlier stances on content moderation, on planning, certain types of political misinformation, and still look far Better than x currently looks.

Elan had a post on thursday that was very interesting to me. He said, for anyone, whether in amErica or other countries, who finds this result shocking, they, they should reconsider where they get their information. This trend was obvious on x for months, but almost all the legacy mainstream media pushed a completely false reality.

They lie to you. I have a vested interest. I do not believe that the media lied to voters. But when I look at this line of thinking, what seems both really interesting and also kind of impossible to tease out is where x is the source of information, where IT is a platform for boosting trump, where IT is its own ecosystem that exists in some I don't know that diagram in between the two. How would you describe IT as a platform?

Now it's such a tough question .

because I think what elan is saying is x is a reflecting reality. And I think an open question that many journalists have is, is x actually creating a new reality? And I don't know the answer to that yet.

I certainly do think that like elan and trump have both tapped into, they have like a clear IDE understanding of an aspect of human nature that perhaps a lot of people do not want to see. And it's a perspective that has become very pervasive on x. But I think that it's a very convenient math for elan to say, like everyone else is lying to you and this is the reality. And in fact, he's making decisions that make that reality more and more likely.

Yeah is x of pipeline to amErica pack or they separate things?

I mean, it's also intricately linked to with elon mask and actually he made the decision um someone early in the pax formation to say that I could be tied to his personal brand and access, of course, intrinsically tied to brand at this point as well that I think there's all they're all very.

very intermixed. AmErica clearly played a massive role. Here was essentially the thump campaign ground game.

Islam muss has said, i'm not done with politics yet. What is the future of amErica bank? I think that .

this is a really interesting question, and I do think that he's been serious like he's not done the fact that his campaign was so successful that you we've seen now or you can or money to politics and I can be effective, not always, but in this case, IT most certainly was to some degree. I think, you know, that's again another drug that elon mask will be very unwilling to give up.

And I think that his ambitions extend far beyond the trump White house. And so we're going to see him trying influence the court's regulations um a lot of IT in the name of benefiting his companies more than they've already benefit from the U. S. Government um but I think also in pushing his increasingly radical political agenda.

When we come back, how long can iron mask and donal trump co exist without turning on each other?

Have you heard about double nomics? It's okay if you haven't. It's extremely niche and practice by discover. Here is an example. Discover automatically doubles the cash back earned on your credit card at the end of your first year with cash back match.

That means with discover, you could turn one hundred fifty dollars cash back to three hundred dollars IT pays to discover, see terms and discover dot com slash credit card. Innovation is important to the future of many businesses, and processes need to be clear, fast and ultimately more productive. Take a big step to solving these problems with the innovation workspace from muro.

The innovation workspace comes a loaded with A I enabled tools to help teams get from idea to output faster mirrors. Innovation workspace will help your teams accelerate through the full innovation development cycle, helping them to be faster, more productive and ultimately more effective. Its new AI powered tools and features can visualize tasks ahead, condense documents to produce summaries and seconds, and even create complex diagrams and flow charts using natural language.

It's designed to compliment and sink with existing apps and platforms to use everyday like era and asia. So everything Operates smoothly and everyone's on the same page to rapidly innovate, iterate, develop and ship, whether you work in innovation, product design, engineering, ux, adult or I T bring your teams to mirror s revolutionary innovation workspace and be faster from idea to outcome. Go a miro dot com to find out how that's M I R O dot com.

Have you heard about double non mics? It's okay if you haven't. It's extremely niche and practice by discover. Here is an example. Discover automatically doubles the cashback earned on your credit card at the end of your first year with cash back match.

That means with discover, you could turn one hundred fifty dollars cash back to three hundred dollars IT pays to discover c terms at discover dot com lash credit card. We've also seen this flourishing various writting sort of micro media influences podcasts. They've done well.

They bought ads on x or they exist on x and I don't know where that he's out. Like is is X A door that was opened so that these other places could walk through? Or is that the other way around like was not going to happen anyway and they just conveniently happen to feed on each other?

Yeah, I mean, I think we're still teasing this out and we're really close to IT. So it's not hard to say, but I think let's just look at the twitter files. So going back to you know this political campaign that elon mask started shortly after he took over the company, he gives journalists like tae b and um less credible people access to twitter internal files.

And he says, like sunlight is the best disease factor like less open our jaws, look around, see you like what CD history we can uncover and share with the masses. In terms of twitter's relationship with the U. S.

Government, I think that it's very clear at this point that they were going in with a specific narrative in mind and looking for documentation to back that up. And in fact, when we looked at the documentation that was being published, like wasn't clear that IT was as a furious as they were claiming. But what happened after the twitter files, we see jim Jordan and house republicans starts the pinning people who were named in the files.

And those serpens become the basis of lawsuits. And those lawsuits are covered in the media. And these people who are publishing the twitter files on sub stack are a massine, millions of dollars, millions of followers. And so we can see that whether or not the information of the core of this is accurate or honest in a journalistic sense, IT almost doesn't matter because the impact is like so great and it's um it's a feather from x to a political machine to illegal machine that kind of forces the reality on all of us.

One of the things that really stands out in your work when you talk about this forced reality is not the focus on elon musk, but the companies and people around him. And so I look at this promised department of governmental efficiency. Ha ha, those joke, if there even happens, right? Would we don't know yet.

What can you? Someone who has watched ill's effect on multiple people in companies to what that might mean in, you know, cuts across the federal government. And yeah.

I mean, that has been one of the most interesting parts of this. I never suspected that Ellen's behaviour when he took over twitter would actually become kind of a selling point in his qualifications for mission position with the U. S. government. Like they're really citing like this.

I think trump at one point said he's the cutter and chief like he's so it's really seen um as a positive the fact that he could come in and uttley ly fire people and yes to all break but like ultimately we're going to save all of this money and in fact must cut said, oh, I think we could save about two trillion dollars from the federal budget know he's throwing around this kind of wild figure. It's scary because, again, like having watched the twitter takeover very, very closely, yes, like the platform of twitter now, x stayed online. IT stayed somewhat functional.

But IT really was held together with dark tape at various points. And IT was going down. IT was going dark, like things.

There were such massive glitches for a platform that had not had glitches like that in years and years. And the impact on the people who worked there was really great. People are getting kind of like ruthlessly fired.

And, you know, masks, cronies were calling them men, asking them if they would please come back to fix this one thing because ubs, we've fired too many people. Like it's one thing to have a situation like that when we're talking in about a social as important as x was um in the culture at that point. It's a complete other thing to think about those principles applied to the Better the government.

I don't think we want a federal government that held together with scotched tape and is going dark, whatever that means at various points. And where more than half of the people who work there um who are somewhat in political are like losing their jobs and the people who are being hard to replace them are complete. It's like the faithful that's the um bar fer he's qualified at this point. So yeah, I think that that's it's a really grim prospect.

IT also has tremendous human costs. You read about some of the people who were fired from twitter and then docker.

this is the thing about mask, is that he, while people have a lot of loyalty to him, he does not have loyalty toward anyone else and people who worked closely with him and work well with him would leave the company usually because he'd asked them to do something that they did not feel morally comfortable with. And he would get really fine dict once they were out the door.

And in some cases, we could think of the former head of trust and safety, you well rah. He, you know, claims that rah, who's n't openly gay man as a pedophile, and he has to row us to flee his home. He eventually actually up selling his home because the level of vitro, the death threats that lobed at him, are so scary, incredible, that he goes into hiding.

So yeah, I mean, even beyond to that, there is just this dynamic of twitter employees, like many of them wanted to give elan a chance. They had similar grapes that he had in terms of the company being kind of like slow and inefficient, and they wanted to help him succeed. But he had so little respect for them and so little essentially used for them in his mind, that he was willing to let a lot of people go. And a again, I think that doing that at twitter had like serious ramifications for individuals. By doing that with government is going to have serious ramifications like potentially for all of us.

You talked about the way his relationship with people are incredibly inconsistent, and it's very hard for me not to wonder if he and long term will turn on each other.

Yeah, this is something that i'm very, very curious to watch. You know at this point, they have so much to gain from being in relationship with each other. And I know you've covered this on the podcast before, a Blake, just in terms of all of the regulators that are looking in to masks companies right now, he is in a position to actually regulate those regulators that obviously very attractive to him.

Just yesterday, teslas shares surge, like fifteen percent of he added, like twenty billion dollars not worth. And then for trump, of course, like having the richest men in the world, poor all this money into your campaign, be backing you, be high up all of his supporters um for your benefit. Like there's real kids met there.

And I think it's IT makes sense that there are on each other others' teams right now. At the same time, anyone who is close to tram will tell you he is incredibly sensitive to looking like he is a puppy and someone else is pulling the strings. And I think that that will be a line that elon must cost to walk very, very carefully because he is seen as smarter and in some way is more powerful. Ban trump and he cannot run for president himself because he's not from the united states. And so I think the idea that he's kind of a shadow ruler using trump as a proxy is going to be very dangerous for him because trump will be so sensitive to that.

Have you ever seen anything that effectively stops you on mosque when he wants .

something that's such a good question? no. I mean, again, he is such an impulsive decision maker that I just don't think they were so I mean these are such like little examples but there were times where he was in meetings with people um you know high ranking executives at twitter and he would say, oh, should I ask people if we should bring Donald trump back onto the platform and this is when he is trying to like court advertisers because again is like camera ging money and the executives would say, like, no.

Please, please don't ask or like now, right now, don't do that. And then they leave the meeting and realized that as he was asking them the question, he was actually tween IT out to everyone. So like, I think he can admit at times when he is wrong and try and on some level, get someone else to like, clean up his my friend, he realizes he's made a mistake, but I think the mistake at that point husband made. I don't think there's anyone who can stop him in the moment.

So if ever, thank you so much for your reporting and for talking with me.

Of course, thank you so much for having me.

Zi chaffer is the incoming director of business and industry at wired. She's also the author of extremely hard core inside elon mosques. Twitter you to check IT out, and that is IT for our show today.

What next? T V D is produced by evon cambell Patrick ford chanot analysis junk Perry, our show is edited by page osberne. Alesha gi is vice president of audio of for late, and T B D is part of the larger what next family, if you like, would you hurt today?

The best way to support us is by joining slate plus get all your slave podcast add free as well as exclusive bonus content. Like what next? The surge, which unpacks all the crazy political stories surrounding this election, alright, will be back on sunday with another episode. I'm lusia lary. Thanks for listening.