The Charlie Kirk Show - Why is Elon Doing This? with David Sacks and Mike Davis

00:00:00.000 Hey everybody, today in the Charlie Kirk Show, we have Mike Davis from the Article 3 Project that joins us, and then David Sachs, who talks about Elon Musk and all of the terrific and important work that Elon is doing.

00:00:12.000 Email us your thoughts, freedom at charliekirk.com.

00:00:15.000 Come to AmericaFest, Phoenix, Arizona, December 17th, December 18, December 19th, December 20 at amfest.com, A-M-F-E-S-T.com.

00:00:24.000 Buckle up, everybody, here.

00:00:26.000 We go.

00:00:26.000 Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.

00:00:28.000 Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus.

00:00:30.000 I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.

00:00:34.000 Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.

00:00:37.000 I want to thank Charlie.

00:00:38.000 He's an incredible guy.

00:00:39.000 His spirit, his love of this country.

00:00:41.000 He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created.

00:00:46.000 Turning point USA. 0.65

00:00:47.000 We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.

00:00:56.000 That's why we are here.

00:00:59.000 Brought to you by Andrew and Todd at Sierra Pacific Mortgage.

00:01:02.000 For personalized loan services you can count on.

00:01:04.000 Go to andrewandtodd.com, the wonderfulandrewandtodd.com.

00:01:12.000 The British Empire and the French Republic, linked together in their cause and in their need, will defend to the death their native soil, aiding each other like good comrades to the utmost of their strength.

00:01:26.000 We shall go on to the end.

00:01:28.000 We shall fight in France.

00:01:31.000 We shall fight on the seas and oceans.

00:01:34.000 We shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air.

00:01:40.000 We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be.

00:01:44.000 We shall fight on the beaches.

00:01:46.000 We shall fight on the landing grounds.

00:01:49.000 We shall fight in the fields and in the streets.

00:01:53.000 We shall fight in the hills.

00:01:55.000 We shall never surrender.

00:01:57.000 And if, which I do not for a moment believe, this island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British fleet, would carry on the struggle until in God's good time, the new world with all its power and might step forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.

00:02:28.000 Winston Churchill, we will never surrender.

00:02:31.000 Email us freedom at charliekirk.com and subscribe to the Charlie Kirk Show podcast.

00:02:36.000 It has been illuminating for me to read the emails during the break.

00:02:43.000 There's a lot of people that are cynical and no longer going to vote.

00:02:50.000 I understand the sentiment.

00:02:52.000 I do not sympathize with the action.

00:02:56.000 Do not allow your actions to be captured by negativity or cynicism or hopelessness.

00:03:03.000 Joining us now is Mike Davis from the Article 3 Project to talk about the recent news at Twitter.

00:03:09.000 Mike, welcome to the Charlie Kirk Show.

00:03:12.000 Thank you for having me.

00:03:13.000 Mike, tell us about James Baker.

00:03:14.000 So we got a bunch of Twitter files last week.

00:03:17.000 Turns out they were incomplete because the then Twitter counsel was actually also worked with the FBI.

00:03:23.000 Walk us through it.

00:03:25.000 Yeah, Jim Baker's a bad dude.

00:03:26.000 He was an Obama Justice Department senior appointee.

00:03:32.000 And then Comey hired him as the general counsel of the FBI.

00:03:38.000 He was up to his eyeballs and the Russian collusion hoax to try to take out President Trump in 2016.

00:03:47.000 He showed up just in time to do that.

00:03:49.000 He was there for a long time.

00:03:51.000 Chris Ray fired him from the FBI.

00:03:54.000 He went over as the deputy general counsel of Twitter.

00:04:00.000 And lo and behold, he was involved again in another hoax, this time to work with the FBI to de-platform the New York Post, one of America's oldest newspapers, for their accurate reporting on the Hunter laptop story right before the 2020 election, where it showed that President Biden, his son Hunter,

00:04:24.000 his brother James were on the Chinese and Ukrainian payrolls, clear foreign corruption that no doubt would have affected the outcome of the 2020 election.

00:04:35.000 So Jim Baker was at Twitter when they de-platformed, censored, not only censored, they made it where you couldn't even post a link of the New York Post story.

00:04:44.000 It was the most egregious censorship imaginable.

00:04:47.000 And then when Elon Musk, the new owner of Twitter, is trying to get to the bottom of this, his lawyers are supposed to be working for him.

00:04:55.000 And instead, it appears this Jim Baker was working against him to hide this material that would have implicated Jim Baker in this scandal instead of doing his clients' work.

00:05:06.000 So you may have an ethics violation with Jim Baker here, but Elon Musk correctly fired him.

00:05:12.000 So have the new and updated Twitter files now been posted by Taibbi that were not intercepted by Baker?

00:05:19.000 I haven't seen those yet, but I don't think they have, Charlie.

00:05:24.000 So that'll be interesting to see kind of what they are.

00:05:27.000 Let's go to cut 38, Twitter.

00:05:29.000 Tucker reports on the general counsel of Twitter.

00:05:31.000 He's been vetting the Twitter files.

00:05:33.000 I'm glad Elon caught this.

00:05:34.000 Play Cut 38.

00:05:36.000 This weekend, Matt Taibbi and Barry Weiss, who's helping him do this reporting, found out that the general counsel of Twitter, that would be the former FBI general counsel, James Baker, had been vetting the documents before Taibbi and Weiss could see them.

00:05:50.000 In other words, removing the ones that might incriminate him or the feds.

00:05:55.000 So, Mike, this is the most important aspect of the Twitter file story, in my opinion, is how entrenched the federal government has been in Twitter and Facebook.

00:06:09.000 What do we know?

00:06:10.000 Yeah, I mean, remember, it was these 51 former Intel agents who came out and said that this was a Russian disinformation campaign, the Hunter Biden laptop reporting by the New York Post.

00:06:22.000 This is egregious what they've done.

00:06:25.000 And it shows that there is so much corruption at the FBI, the Intel communities, and big tech.

00:06:31.000 And we need a house cleaning at all of those places at the FBI, Maine Justice, Intel communities, Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple.

00:06:39.000 It seems like Elon's doing it at Twitter, but we shouldn't have to rely on a benevolent billionaire doing the right thing here against all odds in order to do this.

00:06:49.000 The richest man in the world is up against headwinds exposing this.

00:06:53.000 That shows you how powerful the left is and how entrenched they are with every institution in America.

00:06:59.000 Yeah.

00:07:00.000 And so it's the ramifications of this go even beyond elections, but let's focus on that.

00:07:07.000 How significant was the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story?

00:07:10.000 I mean, I think it delegitimizes the entire 2020 election.

00:07:14.000 Well, it shows, if you look at polling, if you ask focus groups in polling, if they would have changed their votes if they had known the laptop from hell, if they had known about that, if big tech and big government didn't collude to eliminate it from the American people's viewpoint before the election in 2020, it absolutely would have changed the outcome in the election.

00:07:39.000 There's no question.

00:07:39.000 That's why they did it.

00:07:40.000 That's why they had to do, that's why they had to go to such extreme measures.

00:07:44.000 They de-platformed the oldest newspaper in America.

00:07:49.000 Not only did they censor the link, they didn't just put a warning on the link.

00:07:52.000 They made it impossible to open the link from the New York Post.

00:07:56.000 Yeah, so I mean, this is such a rep, it's so much repetition.

00:08:01.000 Did they break any laws?

00:08:03.000 Did Twitter break any laws?

00:08:06.000 Well, if they're working with the FBI to censor reporting, yes, that's a civil rights violation.

00:08:13.000 That's a First Amendment violation.

00:08:15.000 That's a 1983 violation for the FBI, for government to work with private players to censor other private players, right?

00:08:25.000 That's a First Amendment violation.

00:08:26.000 They're doing it at the behest of the FBI.

00:08:30.000 And so if you're doing it at the behest of the FBI, that's a First Amendment problem.

00:08:34.000 That's a First Amendment violation.

00:08:36.000 And who would be investigating that?

00:08:39.000 I mean, I don't think the Biden Department of Justice is going to run into the arena to look into that.

00:08:47.000 Well, I'll tell you that my former boss, Chuck Grassley from Iowa, along with Senator Ron Johnson, have been on this from day one.

00:08:54.000 They just did Senator Grassley just in a floor speech today and put out more reports.

00:08:58.000 House Republicans will now have subpoena power in January, and the state attorneys general have been looking at this.

00:09:04.000 There have been lawsuits by state attorneys general that have been exposing this.

00:09:10.000 This is not going to go away.

00:09:11.000 This is a massive scandal that's not going away.

00:09:14.000 This is one of the biggest scandals we've had since Watergate.

00:09:17.000 You have the FBI working with big tech to censor one of our oldest newspapers in America so they can throw the election for their preferred candidate.

00:09:27.000 It doesn't get more CCP than that.

00:09:30.000 I just don't think they care in the sense of they knew what they were doing when they were doing it.

00:09:38.000 And they did it because they knew if they didn't do it, Joe Biden would not have become president.

00:09:44.000 And so they sucked it up, did what was necessary, ends justify the means, very Machiavellian for them.

00:09:51.000 And they basically said, look, eventually this might come out.

00:09:55.000 It might not come out, but we got what we wanted.

00:09:58.000 We robbed the bank.

00:09:59.000 We pulled it off.

00:10:00.000 The heist has been done and there will be no undoing it.

00:10:05.000 It's one of the great things.

00:10:07.000 In the meantime, they're using the full force of the Justice Department, including the FBI, to go after every Trump supporter, every Trump advisor, even President Trump for non-crimes.

00:10:18.000 And so we absolutely have two systems of justice in America, one for the left and one for the rest of us.

00:10:25.000 And until we start getting smart and serious about winning elections, winning election season, this is going to keep happening.

00:10:33.000 We need to win elections.

00:10:35.000 It's well said.

00:10:39.000 Hey, everybody, Charlie Kirk here.

00:10:40.000 Our great country was founded on the principle that all men are created equal.

00:10:45.000 But far too many of our nation's colleges and universities, including those Ivy League schools, continue to insist on using race as a factor of admission.

00:10:53.000 The Supreme Court is deciding a case on this right now.

00:10:56.000 But there's a unique American college that does not discriminate based on race.

00:10:59.000 It never has and never will.

00:11:00.000 It's Hillsdale College.

00:11:02.000 Hillsdale was founded in 1844 to educate all people, irrespective of nationality, color, or sex.

00:11:07.000 It continues the policy today, admitting students on their strength of their character, ability, and intentions, not their heritage or background.

00:11:15.000 My friend Larry Arn, the president of Hillsdale College, recently published an article explaining Hillsdale's colorblind policies and its related refusal of government funding, even indirectly inform a federal student aid.

00:11:26.000 Read it for yourself at charlie4hillsdale.com.

00:11:29.000 After you read it, you may want to support Hillsdale with a year-end gift.

00:11:32.000 So go please read Dr. Larry Arn's article at charlie4hillsdale.com, charlie4hillsdale.com.

00:11:41.000 Mike, let me ask you, there is a rather underreported story here, which is the Supreme Court wrestles with Republican bid to transform U.S. elections.

00:11:52.000 I'm not sure how read up you are on this, but it is a Supreme Court.

00:11:57.000 Let me get the exact name of the Supreme Court case.

00:11:59.000 It is about whether or not state legislatures are going to be able to have any say.

00:12:06.000 I'm not sure what the name of the case is.

00:12:07.000 Are you familiar with what I'm talking about?

00:12:09.000 I am.

00:12:10.000 It's the Harper case that's being heard today in the Supreme Court.

00:12:14.000 And basically, the case is this.

00:12:16.000 Under the U.S. Constitution, the state legislatures decide the time, place, and manner of federal elections.

00:12:26.000 That's the elections clause, along with state legislatures determine how the president is elected.

00:12:33.000 That's the electors clause.

00:12:34.000 So elections clause and electors clause.

00:12:36.000 That is set in the Constitution for the state legislatures.

00:12:42.000 Democrats don't like that because Republicans control a majority of state legislative seats and state legislative houses around the country.

00:12:52.000 And so they want to have their Democrat-appointed state Supreme Court justices and their Democrat-appointed commissioners around the country redraw house races, redraw house seats after redistricting or determine that the election rules, like for example, using COVID to unconstitutionally change election laws around the country and go to all-male ballots or just change the rules generally.

00:13:18.000 In order to change the election rules for federal elections, it has to be done by the state legislatures or Congress, and that's it.

00:13:26.000 And so that's what this court, that's what this case is finally going to decide.

00:13:30.000 How do you anticipate it being ruled?

00:13:33.000 I think it's going to be six to three with the six Republican appointed justices.

00:13:38.000 It should be nine to nothing, but the left-wing justices are pure results-oriented partisans.

00:13:44.000 And so they'll want to go, they'll rule the way that gives Democrats more power.

00:13:48.000 But if you look at the constant, the Democrats call this the state.

00:13:52.000 They call it the state, what the state legislative theory, some theory.

00:13:58.000 They call it a theory, which is nonsense.

00:14:00.000 It's the elections clause in the Constitution.

00:14:02.000 This should be nine-nothing.

00:14:04.000 This is not hard.

00:14:05.000 I mean, it's in the Constitution. 1.00

00:14:08.000 Yeah, it's only Republican-appointed judges who are stupid and fall on their sword over principle. 1.00

00:14:13.000 It never happens with Democrat-appointed judges. 1.00

00:14:16.000 They always get the right result for the Democrats.

00:14:18.000 Yeah, so let's talk about that for a second, a couple of minutes remaining in our segment.

00:14:23.000 Talk about, I mean, you've dealt a lot on the Supreme Court.

00:14:26.000 You were kind of the ombudsman that guided Gorsuch through, if I'm not mistaken, through Congress.

00:14:33.000 Why is it that at times Republicans capitulate to mainstream media wishes?

00:14:40.000 I'm sorry, maybe it was Kavanaugh.

00:14:42.000 Maybe I'm misremembering.

00:14:44.000 But why is that sometimes people on the right or constitutional justices capitulate and people like Katangi Brown Jackson never do?

00:14:52.000 Well, I've worked on five of the six Republican-appointed justices.

00:14:55.000 I worked on Roberts and Alito when I worked in the Bush 43 White House.

00:15:00.000 I clerked for Justice Gorsuch and helped him get through the process.

00:15:03.000 And I was the Senate staff leader for Justice Kavanaugh.

00:15:06.000 There you go.

00:15:06.000 So you're across the board.

00:15:08.000 Yeah, an Article 3 project I did helped with the Barretts from the outside. 1.00

00:15:16.000 So here's the deal.

00:15:17.000 There are justices who have stronger backbones than others.

00:15:22.000 And I think what we need to remember when we appoint these judges is their job is to follow the law.

00:15:28.000 Their job, they have lifetime appointments.

00:15:32.000 They have pay protection.

00:15:33.000 They are insulated from the politics.

00:15:35.000 They're supposed to have backbones of steel so they can make the tough decisions because they need to keep the political branches in check under our Constitution.

00:15:44.000 I just, it's just so interesting because on these kind of what should be nine-nothing cases, Democrats just you have this immovable block of Katangi Brown Jackson, of um, so do my or Kagan.

00:16:02.000 Yes, that's right.

00:16:04.000 So I suppose 30 seconds remaining.

00:16:06.000 News last night, you know, the Republican Party was unable to win a very winnable Georgia Senate race, now 5149.

00:16:14.000 Supreme Court would be merely speculation.

00:16:17.000 Circuit court is not.

00:16:19.000 How is Joe Biden doing filling the circuit court bench with radical Marxists?

00:16:23.000 30 seconds.

00:16:24.000 He's doing a great job.

00:16:25.000 So President Trump, we set the all-time records for the appointments of federal judges.

00:16:31.000 I worked with my boss chairman Chuck Grassley on the Senate Judiciary Committee along with Mitch McConnell.

00:16:36.000 That's the one thing where we all work together and set records on the Supreme Court, the lower federal courts, we transformed it.

00:16:43.000 President Biden has a very good chance of transforming the federal appellate courts back.

00:16:48.000 And if we lose any Supreme Court justices over the next two years, we could see a sea change in federal law.

00:16:55.000 But hey, 700,000 people in Georgia had something better to do yesterday.

00:16:59.000 Remember that.

00:17:00.000 700,000 Trump voters, they had something more important than vote for the future of America.

00:17:06.000 Mike Davis, thank you so much.

00:17:10.000 Hey, everybody, Charlie Kirk here.

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00:18:12.000 Twitter has retaken its place as a public square, as a fun and exciting company.

00:18:20.000 But everyone told us that Twitter's going to fall apart if that electric car guy is going to take over.

00:18:24.000 They'll help us navigate that.

00:18:26.000 And also the ever-intriguing FTX story is David Sachs, incredibly smart man, very successful.

00:18:34.000 And I really enjoyed seeing him on Tucker.

00:18:36.000 David, welcome back to the program.

00:18:36.000 I think it was last week.

00:18:38.000 Good to be with you again, Charlie.

00:18:40.000 Okay, so David, everyone said that Twitter was going to die, and it actually looks as if users are up and it's fun.

00:18:45.000 It's exciting.

00:18:47.000 What is your take kind of just on Elon's courage to take over Twitter?

00:18:52.000 And at least in the immediate, it seems as if success and momentum.

00:18:56.000 Yeah, well, you remember that the week before Thanksgiving, you saw all these media pundits and commentators.

00:19:04.000 They were all tearfully saying their goodbyes on Twitter.

00:19:06.000 They were predicting the site's imminent demise.

00:19:09.000 Apparently, the servers would basically melt down because of neglect.

00:19:13.000 All this was triggered because Elon first did a riff at the company, and then he offered the remaining employees a voluntary three-month severance, 50% more than he had to, a generous severance, if they didn't want us to return to the office and work hard.

00:19:28.000 And simply for doing that, again, there was this total meltdown and hysteria and predictions that Twitter would imminently go down.

00:19:40.000 And we're now a few weeks later and the site's running just fine.

00:19:43.000 In fact, it seems to be running better and it's faster.

00:19:47.000 It's more interesting.

00:19:48.000 And so none of these predictions have amounted to much.

00:19:52.000 Yeah.

00:19:53.000 And so, I mean, Elon hasn't structurally changed a lot yet.

00:19:58.000 But what he has done is liberated the platform, which of course makes the mainstream media and kind of the censorship bureau extremely upset.

00:20:07.000 But just from a purely, and this is just somewhat subjective, I just think the platform is a lot more fun right now.

00:20:14.000 And because the internet has just become an overly censored, very serious place.

00:20:20.000 You can't make it, it's just now Twitter is now a place for legitimate content distribution.

00:20:24.000 And Elon, I want to get your insight into this why he's doing this.

00:20:28.000 I think he's doing it because it's the right thing, but it also isn't making him any friends or favors with the American ruling class.

00:20:36.000 Why is he leaking all these Twitter file documents?

00:20:38.000 I mean, Elon very well could have just pressed control, alt, delete and got rid of them.

00:20:44.000 He's going right up against the most entrenched power sources in our country.

00:20:50.000 What is your calculation here?

00:20:51.000 What do you think his calculations?

00:20:53.000 Yeah.

00:20:53.000 Well, this is all a downside for him.

00:20:56.000 He's being threatened by some of the most powerful people in the country.

00:21:00.000 And they're not just threatening Twitter, but they're threatening his other companies.

00:21:04.000 So he's put himself at tremendous risk to do this.

00:21:08.000 And I think the reason is very simple.

00:21:10.000 It's what he said.

00:21:11.000 He wants Twitter to be transparent.

00:21:14.000 He wants to restore free speech to Twitter.

00:21:20.000 And I think fundamentally he just believes in fair play.

00:21:22.000 He just thinks that the rules need to apply to everyone equally.

00:21:26.000 And I think that on a very basic level of values, he was offended by the idea that Twitter's former management would suppress a perfectly true story by a reasonably respected publication, the New York Post, in cahoots with operatives from one political party and the security state.

00:21:49.000 So I think that he feels like bringing transparency to what went wrong is part of the reset here.

00:21:56.000 But ultimately, I think this is just about his belief in free speech, transparency, and fair play, because there's nothing in it for him except restoring those values to social media.

00:22:08.000 Ironically, I don't get the appearance that he's purely focused on making this a very profitable company.

00:22:18.000 But ironically, I actually think it's going to become one because he's so mission-driven, because there really isn't a place where free speech and heterodox ideas are able to exist online, where all the kind of quote-unquote cool kids are able to discuss and have online conversation.

00:22:36.000 I mean, I don't want to get too speculative here, but I mean, Elon has either joked or been very serious.

00:22:41.000 You're never more serious than when you're joking, that he's worried that he's going to get suicided.

00:22:46.000 I mean, he's said that a couple of times that he's not suicidal and that he needs to increase his security.

00:22:51.000 Let's just put that aside.

00:22:52.000 But what he's really getting at is, and this should just be alarming for any onlooker, is you have to worry about your personal safety because you want people to speak freely.

00:23:02.000 He's offending a lot of powerful people right now by exposing what happened.

00:23:08.000 Remember, we had the Son or Biden story came out the month before the election in 2020, and a lot of powerful people told us that that story was Russian disinformation and hacking.

00:23:22.000 And as it turns out, it was a perfectly accurate story.

00:23:26.000 And yet, Twitter and other big tech platforms in cahoots, and at the behest of the Democratic Party, as well as these sort of current and former deep state operatives, they suppressed that story.

00:23:38.000 I mean, you literally could not post a link to that New York Post story.

00:23:43.000 So, not only did the New York Post get shut out of their account, I remember the Trump campaign spokeswoman Kaylee McInerney, she got shut out of her account for just talking about it.

00:23:54.000 And then, if you were just an average Twitter user, it literally would not post your tweet if you tried to link to that New York Post story.

00:24:00.000 So, this was a comprehensive attempt at suppression the month before the election.

00:24:08.000 Again, at the behest of Biden's campaign.

00:24:12.000 I mean, I don't know how you justify that.

00:24:14.000 I don't know what the possible justification for that could be.

00:24:18.000 I mean, that is election interference, isn't it?

00:24:21.000 The justification is these people are so evil.

00:24:24.000 This is how we would, this is how we, this is what we do to the Third Reich. 1.00

00:24:26.000 That's that's what that is what they say to themselves internally on their Slack channels. 0.95

00:24:31.000 They're Nazis. 0.61

00:24:31.000 We must do whatever we possibly can. 0.61

00:24:33.000 And right.

00:24:34.000 So, in order to protect democracy, in their view, they have to engage in the very kind of election interference that they accuse the Russians of.

00:24:43.000 But it wasn't the Russians, it was them. 1.00

00:24:43.000 Yes. 1.00

00:24:46.000 They become the beasts that they're telling us they're trying to prevent.

00:24:50.000 Yeah.

00:24:50.000 So, in any event, I think, you know, look, Elon was joking around in a Twitter space.

00:24:54.000 I don't think that, you know, I don't think that he's worried about his safety that way, but it was sort of a joke.

00:25:03.000 But there's no question that he is threatening to expose powerful people.

00:25:07.000 And you look at the media reaction to this.

00:25:10.000 The media, you know, always prides itself and congratulates itself on bringing transparency and supposedly exposing the lies of powerful people.

00:25:21.000 But in this case, the lies that are being exposed are their own.

00:25:24.000 I mean, it was their own participation in this cover-up.

00:25:29.000 You know, they basically ran with this idea, this phony idea that the story was Russian disinformation.

00:25:35.000 It wasn't.

00:25:36.000 And so, you know, all of a sudden now they want to pretend like this isn't a story. 0.99

00:25:40.000 They're saying things like, well, this is really about, you know, Hunter Biden's dick pics. 0.99

00:25:45.000 That's not what this is about. 0.99

00:25:45.000 It's not. 0.99

00:25:47.000 Or they're saying this is old news.

00:25:49.000 Well, how can it be old news if you never acknowledge the story in the first place?

00:25:54.000 It's only old news for those of us who actually understood the story to be true two years ago.

00:25:59.000 But the people who suppressed it never acknowledged its truth.

00:26:02.000 So how can they now say that, oh, well, we knew this all along?

00:26:06.000 Well, really?

00:26:07.000 Where's your acknowledgement of the story?

00:26:09.000 And they're still not acknowledging it.

00:26:12.000 That's really well put.

00:26:14.000 And it's such gaslighting.

00:26:15.000 Like, oh, this is old news.

00:26:17.000 You guys never reported it as news in the first place.

00:26:19.000 No, you call this conspiracy theorists.

00:26:22.000 And so now it's like an old conspiracy theory?

00:26:24.000 Exactly.

00:26:25.000 It doesn't make sense.

00:26:25.000 So I want to get your take also.

00:26:28.000 I do want to talk about FTX, but I have one final question here just on the Elon thing, which is, you know, somebody asked me the other day, they said, Charlie, what does a courageous person look like?

00:26:35.000 I said, Elon Musk looks like a courageous person.

00:26:38.000 I mean, it's just he is putting so many business contracts, government contracts seemingly at risk to allow, you know, some sort of liberation of conversation.

00:26:48.000 Do you get that as well?

00:26:49.000 I mean, do you view this as, you know, kind of a modern day technological courageous crusade?

00:26:55.000 I don't think there's any other way to look at it.

00:26:57.000 Yes, I think it's brave, and that's why he must be supported.

00:27:00.000 Yes.

00:27:01.000 You know, like I said, there's nothing in it for him.

00:27:03.000 I mean, all he's doing is not only putting himself and Twitter at risk with a lot of powerful people, he's also putting his other companies at risk.

00:27:13.000 You're already seeing threats made by various senators that Tesla needs to be investigated or SpaceX based on what he's doing at Twitter.

00:27:23.000 It's quite extraordinary.

00:27:25.000 So, I think that when somebody steps up like this, and again, he's not doing this because he's a conservative.

00:27:30.000 He's not a conservative.

00:27:31.000 I mean, Charlie, if you made a list of issues that, you know, that you would like check the box on in order to be what you would consider a conservative, I don't think Elon would qualify on the vast majority of them.

00:27:43.000 You know, this is not being motivated by a partisan bias or an ideological bias.

00:27:49.000 He just believes in free speech and he believes in fair play and transparency.

00:27:54.000 And I think that the way that this platform was previously run for the benefit of one side in the debate and one political party was offensive to those ideals.

00:28:05.000 And I think he's resetting it.

00:28:06.000 And I think it's a great thing for democracy.

00:28:09.000 I think it'll ultimately be a good thing for Twitter.

00:28:12.000 By the way, I mean, in terms of making Twitter a better, more profitable company, he's going to bring back a lot of product innovation.

00:28:18.000 So this isn't only about speech policy.

00:28:21.000 It's also about restoring innovation to the company because the company has been incredibly, you know, uninnovative for years.

00:28:29.000 And I think he's going to fix that problem.

00:28:31.000 And that's what's going to make it a much better business.

00:28:32.000 And he's already talked about a lot of the new features he's going to bring.

00:28:35.000 So it's not only about speech that's going to make Twitter, I think, a more interesting, dynamic platform.

00:28:41.000 But back to the point about speech, this really is just about core American values.

00:28:46.000 I mean, the First Amendment is first for a reason.

00:28:49.000 Our freedom of speech is enshrined in that.

00:28:52.000 But the power structure found a loophole to the First Amendment.

00:28:55.000 That loophole is that private actors are, they're free to limit people's speech.

00:29:00.000 And unfortunately, the town square got privatized.

00:29:03.000 It's really the town square is now in the hands of a handful of big tech companies.

00:29:08.000 That is where speech occurs, is on these giant social networks that, and they're run by, you know, a small number of sort of executives.

00:29:19.000 And so if those executives get together and decide to cancel people or deplatforming, deplatform them, they can really take away their free speech rights.

00:29:27.000 So this is really about whether we in the United States are going to have an effective First Amendment anymore.

00:29:35.000 And I think that Elon is really pushing back on this idea that Twitter executives, or really, I think he's setting an example for executives of all these big tech companies, whether they are simply going to indulge in their own political and partisan biases and suppress the side of the debate that they personally don't agree with, or whether they're going to set the example of being neutral and staying out of these debates themselves and simply providing the forum for them to take place.

00:30:02.000 And I think that, you know, this is ultimately the battle that Elon's taken on.

00:30:08.000 David is an amazingly smart and successful tech entrepreneur and venture capitalist, understands this intimately, as you could tell.

00:30:15.000 All right, David, I am by no means a crypto expert, but am I really supposed to believe that Sam Bankman-Fried didn't commit any crimes here?

00:30:25.000 What's your take?

00:30:26.000 No, I mean, something like $8 billion of customer deposits have just mysteriously disappeared and no one knows where they've gone.

00:30:33.000 So anytime you have that much money disappearing overnight, I think it's safe to assume there's some sort of criminal activity going on.

00:30:41.000 But in this case, the way we actually know quite a bit about the fraud already.

00:30:46.000 So Sam Bankman-Fried or SBF, as he's known, was the founder of a crypto exchange called FTX.

00:30:54.000 At the same time, he ran a hedge fund called Alameda, which was his money and he controlled it.

00:31:01.000 And essentially, he was siphoning off customer deposits from FTX to his hedge fund, Alameda, for his personal use, whether it was for making investments or whether it was making donations to political candidates or dark money or philanthropies that he believed in.

00:31:21.000 There was this massive siphoning off of customer funds to his own entity, again, for his personal use.

00:31:29.000 And I think it's a pretty huge financial fraud that we're still in the early stages of unraveling.

00:31:36.000 So, some of the kind of billionaire finance intelligentsia have come out, if I'm not mistaken, Ackman, I think Paul Tudor-Jones, I could be wrong.

00:31:46.000 I was reading some of this.

00:31:47.000 We'll get some of the names here in the chat.

00:31:48.000 Have come out and they say they believe him and that he really hasn't done anything wrong.

00:31:53.000 And it seems like the PR tour to win over those kinds of people that are the thought leaders that are managing tens of billions or hundreds of billions of dollars is working.

00:32:03.000 How would you compare this to Madoff?

00:32:07.000 Well, it's interesting.

00:32:08.000 I think it's Madoff-like in this sense that apparently FTX or Alameda lost $3 billion last year, and the crypto crash didn't even start until this year.

00:32:20.000 So they were already in the hole by a significant amount of money during the bull market.

00:32:26.000 And that tells me that something was really wrong there.

00:32:28.000 And yeah.

00:32:30.000 And so the Madoff aspect here was that if customers ever withdrew more money from the site, then they had new deposits coming in, they would not be able to pay off those customer deposits.

00:32:42.000 So, and so, in a sense, this was all just a matter of time in terms of it unraveling.

00:32:48.000 Because, again, as soon as they would get some sort of event happening, let's say a crypto crash, which is what happened, and you had more customer withdrawals than new net new deposits, the whole thing was going to unravel.

00:33:00.000 So, it was a, it was Ponzi-like in that respect.

00:33:04.000 But, but, you know, the difference between this and Madoff, the differences are really curious as well, which is that Madoff was a pretty low-key guy.

00:33:14.000 Like, nobody knew who he was until he was exposed as running this giant Ponzi scheme.

00:33:21.000 I mean, to be certain, he seemed to live a pretty good life, but he wasn't putting himself on the cover of magazines.

00:33:27.000 Whereas SBF really put himself forward as the sort of the white knight of the crypto industry, the sort of benevolent crypto king.

00:33:37.000 He cultivated media relationships, he courted a lot of press, and he courted a lot of regulators.

00:33:45.000 You know, he was taking photographs with people like Maxine Waters, who runs the House Finance Committee.

00:33:52.000 He was supposedly, he was reportedly in the back rooms of the SEC helping to write their crypto regulations.

00:33:59.000 So, you know, the regulators not only missed this and failed to exercise oversight over this growing fraud that he was perpetrating, but they actually let the fox in the hen house and they were crafting legislation with him and rules with him.

00:34:16.000 So it's quite extraordinary.

00:34:17.000 And that's what I think has really caught not just the crypto world, but sort of the larger finance world and the larger venture community really off guard about this.

00:34:28.000 Is that, again, SBF really created this image of being this extremely benevolent person.

00:34:35.000 You know, he was always touting this effective altruism that he supposedly believed in.

00:34:40.000 You know, this idea that he was going to make many billions of dollars, but he was also going to give it all away.

00:34:45.000 And so therefore, we should trust him.

00:34:47.000 And so there were many participants, unwitting participants, I think, in the scam.

00:34:53.000 It was the media.

00:34:54.000 It was these effective altruism philanthropies.

00:34:58.000 It was regulators and politicians.

00:35:02.000 And they all helped create this aura around SBF.

00:35:06.000 And that aura helped him perpetuate this fraud.

00:35:09.000 Yes.

00:35:10.000 And so I think that's the aspect of it that's a little different than Madoff's.

00:35:14.000 Thing is so synthetic of a caricature, like the messy hair never wearing a suit, kind of just the aloof thing, it's just the whole thing is just the Kermit, the Kermit, the Frog voice.

00:35:25.000 You know yeah no, just to add another layer to this, the. 0.91

00:35:28.000 I think one of the things that's really interesting about it is the way that Sblf self-diagnosed this and he said, you know in one of these interviews that he did, he said this is the, the woke game that we, we dumb Westerners, play. 0.80

00:35:42.000 Well, said.

00:35:43.000 Thanks so much for listening.

00:35:44.000 Everybody email me directly, freedom at Charliekirk.com.

00:35:47.000 Thanks so much for listening and god bless For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk.

00:35:56.000 Com.

The Charlie Kirk Show - December 08, 2022

Why is Elon Doing This? with David Sacks and Mike Davis

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