Bonus: The Discourse | The Bro-ligarchs Take Washington
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Hello, Slate Plus listeners. It is Lizzie O'Leary. You probably know that if you're listening to this. Welcome to the discourse from What Next TBD. Every episode, I sit down with smart, extremely online people to talk about one big thing in the online conversation from the week.

This is available exclusively to Slate Plus members, so to those in our very special club, we say thank you and welcome. This week, I am joined by Slate staff writer, Nitish Pawar, also extremely online Slate staff writer, Nitish Pawar. Welcome. Thanks, Lizzie. Happy to be here. Is it a source of pride or shame to be extremely online?

At this point, I think I just accept it. Like, it just is. Like, I grew up in this space. I still remember going on the dial-up. So I just, I don't know. I'm sort of like the James Woods in Videodrome. You know, I'm merging with the TV or with the computer, as it were.

All right. So the big thing that we're going to talk about from this week was the inauguration. But for our purposes, it's more about who got to sit front and center and bring their spouses. So, OK, we had Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai, TikTok CEO Shuji Chu, all featured really close to the new president. We got to start with the rest.

Right hand, right arm guy, Elon Musk. Okay. So he had this moment at the inauguration where he did, what are we going to call it? Nazi salute? Roman salute? Enormous troll? That is a great question. I mean, I think...

it's worth just calling it like we saw it and not just how we saw it, but how the intended audiences saw it. You know, you saw a lot of people, um, of a more, uh, far right or a white supremacist leaning, uh, nature, the guy who runs the social network gab for one, uh, celebrating the gesture. A lot of people saying, you know, I,

I don't care if it was a mistake. I'm just so happy we're so back. Just general sentiments like that. So when I see, you know, when I see like Jewish activists saying that this is what it is, and when I see the far right saying this is what it is, I think I'm inclined to believe them. Yeah. And I think that this is one of the things about

the way Musk sometimes positions himself is that when you get sucked into the debate over the thing that you saw with your own eyes, you actually have to step back and say, okay, what did the neo-Nazis think? The neo-Nazis thought it was a signal to them. And for all intents and purposes, that's the thing that at least I'm going to pay attention to because I think the rest is noise. Exactly. And

It's just such an indicator of how not just far right that Trump himself has gone with, you know, all the campaign promises for mass deportations. I mean, they're already sending ICE agents around some of my old neighborhoods in New York and such. But I mean, you...

You see this extremely online far-right contingent now being appealed to. I mean, J.D. Vance's pick was also all about that. He...

interacted with a lot of these guys online after the election. He proudly followed Andrew Tate on X. And yeah, no matter what, we are going to be run by guys with very open sympathies for these types of folks. And it's a little scary. If you are Tim Cook, you're Sundar Pichai,

What are you thinking in this moment? You just like sat in the audience with this guy. Are you thinking, I really don't love that picture? Or are you thinking, I'm here to protect my company, man. That's it.

I think it's the latter, for sure. And I think there's also the star element. I mean, one thing we've definitely learned about Silicon Valley types is that they love surrounding themselves with celebrities. And I think in was it in The Washington Post, one of the big newspaper live blogs, they were mentioning that like Sundar Pichai was completely like,

at seeing Carrie Underwood in the crowd at Capital One Arena, which, I mean, to be fair, I mean, I probably would have been too. But they...

I think really relish at least having this, uh, up close and personal relationship with power. And, um, that's probably what's a foremost on their minds, even as, um, Trump, uh, talks about all this other stuff. I mean, you saw this with a Sam Altman tweet recently too, you know, they announced that big AI infrastructure investment and, um, Stargate, um, which, uh, did not make Musk very happy. We can get into that later, but, um, uh,

Sam tweeted something to the effect of, you know, when you spend a lot of time with President Trump, you actually get like a different perspective on him. Whereas I used to fall into the NBC non-playable character Gambit and which is a very interesting

striking thing for him to say after I remember in early 2017, he wrote a blog post about how the tech industry needs to stand up to Trump, you know, despite what Peter Thiel says. So but again, what does Sam Altman need? He needs a lot of money. He needs a lot of investment. So he's going to do what he needs to do.

If you want to hear the full episode of our new bonus series, The Discourse, subscribe to Slate Plus. You can join Slate Plus directly from the What Next TBD show page on Apple Podcasts and Spotify or visit slate.com slash TBD Plus to get access wherever you listen.