Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
I know every operating system like the back of my hand. I have 25 years of experience and have worked with several people from your company. I've been recognized for my passion. My team is everything. LinkedIn delivers candidates who rise above the rest. With an up-to-date view into shared connections, skills, and interests you won't find anywhere else. See why 86% of small businesses who post a job on LinkedIn get a qualified candidate within a day. Post a job for free at LinkedIn.com slash achieve.
LinkedIn, your next great hire is here. The PC gave us computing power at home, the internet connected us, and mobile let us do it pretty much anywhere. Now generative AI lets us communicate with technology in our own language using our own senses. But figuring it all out when you're living through it is a totally different story. Welcome to Leading the Shift.
a new podcast from Microsoft Azure. I'm your host, Susan Etlinger. In each episode, leaders will share what they're learning to help you navigate all this change with confidence. Please join us. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Just a heads up that we start this episode with a discussion of a fatal car crash. You might not want to listen with kids. Okay, here's the show. On March 23rd of 2018, Walter Huang dropped his son off at preschool.
Wang was 38. He worked as a software engineer for Apple, and he'd recently purchased a Tesla Model X. He liked his car so much that he joined a Facebook group about it.
And he was a devoted fan of Tesla and autopilot. I write in the book that he would, you know, watch videos, you know, about Tesla and autopilot in his spare time. That's Washington Post reporter Fez Siddiqui. And the book he's talking about is one he just wrote, Hubris Maximus, The Shattering of Elon Musk.
Walter Pang trusted Tesla. He trusted autopilot to the extent that, you know, one day after dropping his child off at school, he sets his Tesla to autopilot on his way to work. And he sort of drifts off or becomes overly trusting of it. As investigators later concluded, he fires up a video game on his phone and
He's on the 101 in California. The autopilot maintains its set speed. It keeps its distance behind other vehicles, but eventually it loses its lane. And the car, as I write in the book, does what it's programmed to do. You know, once it's in that sort of no man's land, it's lost its lane. It speeds up to match what it,
anticipates might be the flow of traffic. And this car speeds up and ends up crashing into a highway barrier. The car was traveling at 71 miles per hour. When it hit the barrier, it spun counterclockwise and the front part of the car separated from the back. The crash ripped open the Tesla battery compartment, causing it to burst into flames. Bystanders found Walter Huang still strapped into the driver's seat.
He was taken to Stanford Hospital and pronounced dead at 1.02 p.m. In a situation like this, the National Transportation Safety Board steps in. And usually, whatever company's involved, a car company, an airline, is party to the investigation. Generally because they understand their products and technology better than the government does. This is the spring of 2018, and...
Elon gets on the phone with Bob Sumwalt, who is a highly respected member of the NTSB, former chair. Can you tell me about their phone call?
Yeah. So it's a 27 minute, very heated phone call. As you mentioned, you know, cooperation is necessary in this instance because Tesla is pretty high tech. So the investigators really require the buy in of a company like Tesla, which has access to all of this proprietary data.
And so NTSB has this party system where, you know, they cooperate, you know, with the manufacturer on getting to the bottom of what happened, you know, just in the interest of advancing safety. But when a company's party to an investigation, it has to play by the NTSB rules. And Tesla wasn't. The company put out statements essentially blaming Walter Huang for his own death.
So over this 20 minute, 27 minute phone call, Elon Musk is fuming. He says, you know, more people are going to die because what you're doing, which is essentially, you know, scrutinizing the autopilot system and, you know, looking into the way that this system may have contributed or played into this man's death. You know, he says, you know,
he doesn't want to be removed. Tesla doesn't want to be removed as a party to the investigation. Already by this point, Tesla has started to essentially spin its own narrative on the crash, feed information that the NTSB would consider investigatory information. And ultimately, Musk says, you know,
I don't want to be removed as a part of this investigation. Sumwalt says it's too late for that. And, you know, Musk insists, I don't want to be removed. Ultimately, he hangs up on the chairman of the NTSB. I'm asking you about this story because as you write in the book, it seems to be a part of a pattern. Something happens.
Elon Musk is involved. And then what? He disclaims responsibility, blames someone else, says they're getting in the way of his grander goals.
Yeah, there's a sense that Tesla's mission is right, that Elon is on the correct moral path. He's talked about how at the point at which you believe autonomy increases safety, you have a moral obligation to deploy it. So what does that mean? Well, if Tesla is at that point, anyone who's getting in the way of deploying that autonomy is
is actually making things more dangerous. And, you
you know, 2018, it's hard to say if Elon or Tesla believed, you know, they were at that point, but they certainly felt that their ambitions were being stymied by individuals who their perspective was, you know, who were they to stand in the way? Like they didn't have the expertise. What had they built? You know, not the system that Tesla had. And yeah, this is just sort of a
recurring sort of theme that you'll find with Musk, which is that these guardrails that were established to prevent overreach or to prevent rogue actors from deploying, let's say, dangerous software, that these guardrails were not necessarily always effective and beyond that could sometimes get in the way. Today on the show, a portrait of Elon Musk in power.
Mercurial, aggrieved, believing the rules don't apply to him. I'm Lizzie O'Leary, and you're listening to What Next TBD, a show about technology, power, and how the future will be determined. Stick around.
This podcast is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever find yourself playing the budgeting game, shifting a little money here, a little there, and hoping it all works out? Well, with the Name Your Price tool from Progressive, you can be a better budgeter and potentially lower your insurance bill too. You tell Progressive what you want to pay for car insurance, and they'll help find you options within your budget.
Try it today at Progressive.com, Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Price and coverage match limited by state law. Not available in all states. Today's episode is sponsored by NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast. Life comes with big money questions, like are target date funds a smart or lazy way to invest? Should you pay off debt or invest extra cash? Can you deduct your dog as a home security system on your taxes?
NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast has the answers. There, finance journalists break down investing strategies, tax planning, and smart ways to build wealth and navigate big financial decisions. Work smarter, not harder, on your finances this year. Follow NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast wherever you listen. And stay tuned at the end of this episode to hear the Smart Money trailer. ♪
What sets Fez's book apart from the many others about Elon Musk is that it is explicitly about power and how Musk wields it. I want you to think back to the spring of 2020. It's the start of the COVID pandemic. California was enacting widespread shelter-in-place orders at the same time that Tesla's Fremont plant hit production snags on the Tesla Model 3.
So the automotive president of Tesla, a man named Jerome Guillen, needed to talk to Elon Musk. And for quite some time, he couldn't track him down. Calls, texts, emails, all went unanswered. Musk made himself unreachable. Guillen himself could not reach Musk to the point that he had to appeal to his brother, Kimball, to sniff Musk out during this period. Musk is just sort of
Both he's fuming over the closure and he also enacts a strategy of preventing the outflow of funds from the company by making himself unreachable. So if you have a big expense that needs the approval of the boss, you're not going to get him on the phone. This was still early in the pandemic. No vaccines, not a lot of information about the disease.
When Guillen finally got Musk on the phone, Musk told him to reopen the plant. And a standoff ensued between the two men. Musk is somewhat unyielding. He has this Tesla as an earnings call where Musk goes into this, you know, expletive-laden rant. If somebody wants to stay in their house, that's great. They should be allowed to stay in their house and they should not be compelled to leave. But to say that they cannot leave their house and they will be arrested if they do,
This is fascist. This is not democratic. This is not freedom. Give people back their goddamn freedom.
It gives a sense of or a taste of, you know, how he's feeling at the time. Ultimately, Musk wins out. They reopen the factory and they get the backing of President Trump ultimately in reopening the factory in defiance of county orders in California. Later data showed that hundreds of COVID cases were tied to the Tesla plant. As for Guillen...
He was reassigned to president of heavy trucking. And, you know, so that's no longer that perch where you're in control of automotive and then ultimately finds that he is out of the company. And an additional indignity is he's asked to return some of his shares in the company, which he refuses to do.
So Musk in that moment was able to send workers back to Tesla, but he also told them that if they were worried about COVID, they could take unpaid leave. Did he ever follow through on that promise?
So I went on to report on the cases of certain workers who opted to do so. And some of those workers found that contrary to what they were promised, they received termination notices for opting to take that leave. Let's talk a bit about their Twitter takeover. One key thing about
Twitter and Musk's purchase of Twitter is that it ended up in Delaware Chancery Court and court equals public records. Um,
What did you learn from court records, from his conduct during that period that you think is crucial in understanding how he wields power now? I think it's important to know how much pull he has. I mean, how quickly the man can secure billions of dollars in commitments, you know, in this case to buy a social media site. But you have this group of, you know, what seem like sycophants around him.
around you who will applaud and, you know, cheer on anything that you'll do to the point that they're willing to pull out their pocketbook for it. And what does that say? I mean, if people wonder, how does somebody like Musk, how is he so successful, but like can make these giant blunders at times? Well,
It's not like he has like a completely and who does, but like it's not like he has this like completely objective group of, you know, folks around him who are willing to tell him to his face like, hey, this might not be the best path you want to go down. And, you know, second, like when people...
you know, opt to do that when they do raise their voices or when they do, you know, weigh in or disagree. Those people find themselves outside of the circle. Do you think the people around him have absorbed that lesson? I think it stands to reason that, you know, they wouldn't be around him if they hadn't.
One of the strange ironies of the Delaware Chancery Court is that the same judge who presided over the Twitter case and basically said, yeah, you got to buy the company, also presided over a case about Elon's Tesla pay package that was brought by shareholders. And in your book, you titled this particular chapter, The Techno King Has No Clothes. What do you mean? So this was a time when
Musk was there. There were a couple of things happening. So Musk buys Twitter. He does not want to sit for a deposition. Clearly, like it just seems like that that.
that was put off repeatedly in that case. And then the same judge is presiding over his pay package decision, which doesn't go his way. So a couple of things have happened, you know, adversely for Elon. And he is at this time now where he's
not aiding his company. He's not helping Tesla with some of his behavior, some of his erratic behavior. You know, Tesla stock is in free fall and Musk is tweeting and he's not necessarily doing what investors want him to do, which is focus on the company. You know, why spend so much of your day railing against undocumented immigrants when you run a
publicly traded company and you have a responsibility to your shareholders and that stock is in free fall. And so Musk's eye is off the ball, at least as far as his businesses are concerned. But this gets us to the period where he starts to become much more involved in politics. And obviously, we see where that ends up. But this is a time when he is
officially, you know, filed with the SEC, the techno king of Tesla. He has renamed himself. His CEO title is now techno king. He names himself that on March 15th, the Ides of March. And what is the techno king of the company doing? He's certainly not helping the company. This also seems to be a period where
Elon alienates some longtime allies. I'm thinking of investor Ross Gerber. So in November of 2023, not long after the October 7th attacks, some person on X tweets, Jewish communities have been pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them. And Elon responds, you have said the actual truth.
There were ramifications for that tweet.
Absolutely. A line has been crossed and people want to pull their money out of Tesla. And it's another sort of techno king has no clothes moment where is what you're doing, obviously beyond being patently offensive, is what you're doing in service to the company. Like, who is this for and what is this for? The company that you have a fiduciary duty to. Of course. And, um,
And, you know, there's an investor and very prominent investor who cheers Elon on, Ron Barron, who I talk about in the book at one point in 2018 said, you know, if something's bothering you, you know, don't tweet, go get an ice cream cone. You know, that's not my exclusive reporting. I just think it's such a, you know,
valuable insight into how investors feel about this kind of thing. And this is another one of those moments where it's like, is this really the reputation that you want to have? And maybe I'm not discounting the idea that he wants to be unrestrained or unfiltered because anyone else in his view might be an NPC, a non-player character. And that's
that's a horrible thing to be, right? Like you don't want to be generic. You don't want to be boring. Of course, it's occurred to me lately that, you know, if people had their pick of what car might be an NPC car, Elon might be flying a little close to the sun on that point. When we come back, Elon spends $300 million and goes to Washington.
This episode is brought to you by Discover. It's smart to always have a few financial goals, and here's a really smart one you can set. Earning cash back on what you buy every day. With Discover, you can. Get this. Discover automatically matches all the cash back you've earned at the end of your first year. Seriously. All of it. Discover trusts you to make smart decisions. After all, you listen to this show. See terms at discover.com slash credit card.
This podcast is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Fiscally responsible. Financial geniuses. Monetary magicians. These are things people say about drivers who switch their car insurance to Progressive and save hundreds. Because Progressive offers discounts for paying in full, owning a home, and more. Plus, you can count on their great customer service to help you when you need it. So your dollar goes a long way.
Visit Progressive.com to see if you could save on car insurance. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states and situations.
At Sephora, we've got what you want. Because you're obsessed with your skin, and we're obsessed with what it needs. Sephora has the best products to help you get beautiful, glowing, radiant skin. With an extensive, inclusive range of results-driven formulas and in-store beauty advisors to help you find exactly which are right for you, the best skincare is only at Sephora. Sephora. For all your skincare.
Were you surprised when you saw Elon start campaigning with President Trump?
I was surprised at how deliberate and overt the shift into politics was. I took Elon at his word on the point that, you know, he'd prefer to stay out of politics. And it's not to say like he was never going to align himself with a politician who could, you know, benefit himself for his business empire. Yeah.
you know, or usher in the future that he wants to see. I think all of that would be unsurprising to me. But the sort of overt alignment with a political party, with a political candidate, you know, stumping for the person, that was something that I hadn't seen from Elon. And that beyond that, I felt strayed from
his emphasis on his companies and, you know, pouring all of his money back into his companies and, you know, doing what he thinks is best to preserve them and unleash them, you know, for the furtherance of humanity's ambitions. He would argue that this was actually directly in line with those goals. He seemed to identify, though, that, like, he needed people
Donald Trump. You know, he went on Tucker Carlson's show and agreed with Tucker and said, like, if he loses, I'm fucked. I think that had to be in the back of his mind because there was obviously there was this scrutiny. There was this years of scrutiny of autopilot and Tesla full self-driving. There was a feeling that, you know, post-COVID that
or, you know, during COVID that it was the Democrats who had done the most to imperil the way that things worked, you know, from Tesla's ability to manufacture and sell its cars to just
how society operated. And then there was this snub. There was, you know, Tesla being left out of the splashy electric vehicle event hosted by the Biden administration. God, it all goes back to that event.
I think there was an opportunity to feel slighted and he took it. And maybe it justified a lot of other things. But, you know, that event was pivotal.
Here we are now with the so-called Department of Government Efficiency. And I think you could make a couple of different arguments about it. I feel like you kind of make the argument that Doge was a risk for Musk. Is it a risk for him or was it the only thing he could do because he, you know, quote, tweeted as his empire burned?
I think it's a great question and it's like a very fair one. I think the risk has been borne out. You know, he had to go back. He had to go back to Tesla because Tesla has faced such massive blowback. And the company's stock, again, is, you know, which underpins so much of what Musk does. The company is getting hammered. And Musk...
needs to set it back on its footing. And he needs to prove that, you know, Tesla has management that is willing to intervene and that also is just paying attention to this. But yeah, I take the point that like he felt like this was maybe his only option. I'm just not convinced that that was the case. I'm not convinced that these
these investigations were weighing on him or that, you know, he cheekily alludes to in that Tucker Carlson interview. I'm not necessarily convinced that those were be all end all type investigations. I think Musk was being scrutinized the way that any
anyone in his position might be, but, you know, as the world's richest person, um, but maybe with a little extra because of Musk's tendency, um, uh, proclivity for, you know, skirting guardrails. So I don't know. I see a little bit of both there. I see, um,
that he inevitably was going to need to return his attention to Tesla, as always happens. It happens throughout this book, you know, when he's focused on X, they're like, just please pay attention to Tesla. Please go run Tesla. And so, yeah, I see a little bit of both. Before I came in to talk to you, I did like a quick count of the lawsuits against Doge. And I think there are 30. Based on your reporting over the years, like I wonder where Elon...
sits vis-a-vis these lawsuits, because if we look at his history, he has a tendency to just settle and pay people to go away. But I don't know if he can do that here. A theme in the book is sort of the pain tolerance and the tolerance for risk. And with
The Tesla lawsuits, I mean, they had a great track record of winning those lawsuits or, you know, they would generally, cases would generally go to arbitration. It was very hard to beat that company. I imagine, you know, if you're using that as your point of reference, which I imagine is
is something Elon would do given his great familiarity with the legal system through that company, there might be an impulse to just stick it out and see if, you know, obviously you're going to see how things are playing out. The Twitter case is a good example of this. You know, it seemed like the momentum was not going their way and they ultimately, Elon and his investors bought the company. But... They overpaid.
They definitely overpaid at the time. I think other CEOs, other groups of people might cut their losses and settle or they might, you know,
take the path of least resistance. This is not, in a business context, this is not the approach that Musk and his partners take. Obviously, you know, this is a different animal. You know, we're talking, you know, we're talking about Doge and Dogecoin
you know, inquiries into its government work. That is not a business lawsuit that you can, you know, settle and have it go away. So it sort of remains to be seen, like, what is their tolerance for, what is their pain tolerance? What is their pain threshold for this kind of thing? But as we've seen, uh,
it has hardly impacted Doge's general approach. There's a part of your book near the end when you're writing, I think you're writing in December of 2024, um,
There's little disagreement on one point. The Musk of today is distracted from the pursuits that had once won him admiration around the world. He's fueled by grievance. He believes he's being treated unfairly. He's consumed by the same extremist politics that have overtaken the political right wing as a supposed counterweight to the identity politics of the left. He believes he is in an existential fight.
And one thing that seems to come up again and again in this book is his tendency to conflate whatever he's going through with an existential fight. Why does he do that?
So the pattern in the book shows that those existential threats are used to justify, you know, all manner of bets, you know, whether it's buying Twitter, you know, it's an existential fight against, you know, people clamping down on free speech. In this instance, Musk identifies that fight as the quote unquote woke mind virus. And if you
have identified something as existential, then it,
is justifiable to shift your attention from the things that, you know, your investors think matter. So, you know, Tesla, there's this idea that, you know, if there is no America due to the woke mind virus, what are the riches of the Tesla investors going to matter? You know, and so once you've identified, once you've pegged something as
you know, a life or death, I think you can justify all sorts of behavior from there. And yet now, 65% of Americans say he has too much influence on the federal government.
That, to me, feels like whatever he wants out of the Trump administration, be it funding for some dream of autonomous taxis or a contract for Mars travel or the ability to create a data lake that has everybody's immigration status. That all feels like it could be placed at risk if people don't like him.
Yeah. I mean, this is new territory for Elon. I mean, he's not having to answer to investors. He's not having to calm and placate his shareholders. He has to convince the public at large that his...
ideas that his direction is right for the country. And that is a very different mission from running a company. When you're running a company, you can be briefly or momentarily unpopular up until earnings come and investors see why all that pain might have been necessary. I think that
pain threshold is much shorter, much more limited in electoral politics. I want to go all the way back to the beginning of the book. You have a
a tweet that you quote from journalist Peter Kafka. This is during the Twitter takeover. And he says, I'm increasingly less interested in the future of Twitter. It's been clear for some time. More interested in this question. What happened to Elon Musk? And if the answer is this is who he always was, then how did he make Tesla and SpaceX? How do you answer that question? Without completely oversimplifying. This is...
largely who he was. And that is exactly how, you know, you see examples of him overruling the experts or imposing his will on the company in ways that really paid off. I mean, I talk about in the book how, you know, a rival auto executive is envious of the power that Musk has, you know, to...
usher in his goals his way because this is a person who presumably has to answer to dozens if not more you know people beneath him who are weighing in with all kinds of you know expertise research and you know they they their input
has to be taken into account. So the same way that Musk was able to build those companies and to achieve the heights of success, it should not be surprising when those methods ultimately imperiled the whole operation. If this is who he was all along, you know, and the techno king has no clothes, but he has this much money, like, is...
Is he still a techno king? Has he endangered his own reputation so much that he's just a very, very rich person now? I'm not going to take away from him his ability to anoint himself the techno king. Did people consider him the techno king at the time? I don't know. Everyone pretty much still kept calling him the CEO of Tesla. But I'm not going to take techno king away from him.
Fez Siddiqui, thank you so much for this book and for talking with me. Thank you so much for having me. Fez Siddiqui is a reporter for The Washington Post and the author of Hubris Maximus, The Shattering of Elon Musk. It's a great book, and I recommend you check it out.
And that is it for our show today. What Next TBD is produced by Patrick Fort and Evan Campbell. Our show is edited by Rob Gunther. Slate is run by Hilary Fry, and TBD is part of the larger What Next family. And if you like what you heard, the number one way to support us is to join Slate Plus. You get all your Slate podcasts ad-free, as well as exclusive bonus content. Just head on over to slate.com slash whatnextplus to sign up.
We will be back next week with more episodes. I'm Lizzie O'Leary. Thanks so much for listening. Today's episode is sponsored by NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast. Money can be confusing. Should you invest in ETFs, get a travel rewards credit card, buy a house, or just build a really fancy pillow fort? That could work. No shame in pillow fort game. Or you could just tune in for clear, research-backed financial insights.
I'm Sean Piles, a certified financial planner professional. And I'm Elizabeth Ayola. We're the hosts of NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast, where you bring the money questions and we bring trustworthy information backed by NerdWallet's expert analysis, without the jargon or the sales pitch.
Plus, we keep it real. No lectures, no judgment. Just tips and tools you can use to build wealth and take control of your finances.
Think of us as your financial GPS, helping you navigate your money decisions and avoid expensive wrong turns. Whether you're planning for retirement, weighing a big purchase, or just want to make your money work harder for you, we've got insights that you can use in real life. So if you want practical, straightforward, and actually useful financial knowledge, plus a little bit of fun along the way, follow NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast on your favorite podcast app. Trust us, future you will thank you.
Now at Verizon, we're locking in low prices for three years, guaranteed on MyPlan. And you can get a single line for just $45 a month when you switch and bring your phone. That's our best price ever on unlimited welcome, with auto pay plus taxes and fees, guaranteed for three years. Because at Verizon, we got you. Visit your local DC Verizon store today. $20 monthly promo credits apply to over 36 months with a new line on unlimited welcome. In times of congestion, unlimited 5G and 4G LTE may be temporarily slower than other traffic. Domestic data roaming at 2G speed.
Price guarantee applies to then current base monthly rate. Additional terms and conditions apply.