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00:00:53.680There are thousands of podcasts that can tell you how to better yourself.
00:00:58.640Get Worse with Kyle Pru is not one of those podcasts.
00:01:02.020So if you're interested in getting thinner, going to therapy, starting peptides, setting boundaries, taking supplements, making your better, getting closure, then I would humbly recommend other podcasts.
00:01:11.060If you're interested in blackmail, love bombing, cloning yourself, or getting revenge, then we've got a little something something for a dastardly individual like you.
00:01:19.340Listen to Get Worse with Kyle Pruitt on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:03:06.800I mean, you know, to some extent, if when you do sort of investigative stuff that I do, sometimes the investigations don't go as quickly or as smoothly as they might, as you might like.
00:06:35.300I think it got maybe 20 miles to a full charge.
00:06:39.700but I'm being generous to the 20. Right. Right. About, you know, I think you lost about 10 going
00:06:44.820up a hill in San Francisco. You gained three or four on the way down. That's right. Were those
00:06:51.080the ones I mean, the ones I remember were the EV ones that were literally destroyed by General
00:06:55.880Motors. Yeah, they took all of them. And apparently they're just a couple that exist. And I had
00:07:00.500firsthand evidence. I was I was out there trying to make the case for electric vehicles at the
00:07:05.940michigan ford factory and in the michigan uh at their at their beautiful remarkable uh ford museum
00:07:12.460uh there was there it was uh an old saturn ev1 so apparently it's one of two uh that they claim
00:07:19.900still exists that we're not all completely destroyed wow so interesting you know you
00:07:25.500so i appreciate that context because it gives me context and sort of your origin story of
00:07:30.560consciousness, not just the man, the technology, but also the connection at the time, which was so
00:07:36.920intense, you know, back in those days around sort of a growing consciousness around climate change
00:07:42.660and a growing consciousness about the need to do more and to do better. But you opened this movie
00:07:49.540up, which by the way, I watched all three plus almost four hours. And I think I've watched it
00:07:56.320two or three times. And I mean this sincerely. It's anyone that's watching, anyone's listening,
00:08:04.140just, in fact, push pause on this, go watch it, and then come back and listen to this conversation.
00:08:10.620It is profoundly important. It's deeply anxiety-inducing, to be candid with you.
00:08:19.020I was not left feeling lighter about the world I'm living in.
00:08:25.160And I felt heavier and also felt deeply connected to the subject matter.
00:08:28.600There are 9 out of 10 people in there I know well.
00:08:31.320And I know the origin story well because I was there in the front of the line getting one of the first 50 Tesla Roadsters, one of the first 50 S's and X.
00:08:41.760I drove into my studio at Current TV with Al Gore, driving one of the S's in with Elon,
00:08:49.420and I was out there, one of his biggest promoters, and thought I was a friend of his.
00:08:53.360So in so many ways, you took me back on that journey and ended in the place I think so
00:09:00.200many of us are in, which is a much darker place.
00:09:03.080But forgive that long-winded preamble, but I wanted just to open up on why you opened
00:09:08.220up with this ancestral assimilation framework.
00:09:11.760which was an interesting way to begin your documentary,
00:09:17.280this notion of being in a simulation to sort of contextualize all things Musk.
00:09:22.980Yeah, well, I mean, one of the reasons we went there was because he went there.
00:09:28.220I mean, as we started, you know, famously,
00:09:30.960he did not agree to sit down for an interview with me.
00:09:34.560But once we started listening to everything that he had said,
00:09:38.280he kept returning to this idea of a near certainty that we're living in a simulation.
00:09:44.380I found that intriguing. I sort of went into the origins of that philosophy. It takes you down the
00:09:50.160path of effective altruism and something called long-termism. But this notion that either an AI
00:09:56.640or aliens have exfiltrated all data from planet Earth and are now playing us as a video game,
00:10:03.780Or perhaps that Elon Musk is Ready Player One and he's playing us as a video game.
00:10:08.780In any event, it seemed worth leaning into in part because I think it helps to give a framework not only for his sort of musings about the universe and our place in it, but also became a kind of framework for a rationalization for what would become performative cruelty for him.
00:10:34.220And in that sense, it gives, you know, context. We're making a film after all. So it gives some context to this exploration that we were doing and also gave a sense of context to how I then created where one wouldn't exist a kind of simulated interview by using his real words, but creating a kind of avatar, which also leaned into this increasing tension between what is real and what is unreal.
00:11:03.640which grew increasingly large with elon musk so and just holistically to put that in perspective
00:11:09.740so you couldn't he he refused to sit down for an interview you you you share some of those text
00:11:14.640exchanges uh which are interesting he hadn't even seen it didn't even know uh what your intent was
00:11:19.760but dismissed it but you decided to basically download every single damn thing the guy's ever
00:11:25.420said and put him into a rather attractive version of elon dare i say i agree i'm a director and i
00:11:31.080want my star to look good yeah he i think he i think he'll appreciate it when he and he'll see
00:11:36.380this he can't help himself i'm not sure he ever will see it i think he's more comfortable having
00:11:40.520other people see it for him but but yes he looks buff and you know a little much thinner than he
00:11:46.600is now um you know i i wanted to him to look at his best um though i mean and we did really
00:11:53.580confect it you know he designed it in a way that was you know he's sitting in a gamer chair he's
00:11:58.300wearing a leather jacket. Not unlike the leather jacket he wore when he did that wild interview
00:12:04.740in The Economist with Zannie Bellows. But yeah, I wanted him to look directly at the camera,0.97
00:12:12.260because there's something interesting. You'll notice in a lot of Elon's interviews, he doesn't
00:12:16.840really look at people when he's talking to them. And so this was an opportunity to kind of do
00:12:22.360something a little bit different. And how do you think about his words when he's looking right at
00:12:26.400you um so it seemed like an interesting cinematic way to kind of um do something that was uncanny
00:12:34.780valley in a way that would call attention to um again this this this tension that's always exists
00:12:43.880in musk between what is real and what is not and you begin at the origin story at least in
00:12:49.400contemporary speaking of valley valley terms was zip two uh and his first sort of you know where
00:12:55.200he cashed in. I think it was $22 million. It was his first big success, which, as Kara Swisher,
00:13:01.060as one of your interviewees, described as nothing more than internet for the yellow pages.
00:13:07.120And that was his first big hit. And that's what sort of got him on the radar of a number of people,
00:13:13.560including the radar, what eventually became X.com and PayPal, which he merged. And that
00:13:21.700is a story I think most of us are familiar with here in Silicon Valley. Tell me a little bit about
00:13:27.300what you were trying to communicate about those first two businesses and his relationship
00:13:32.920to those startups. Well, it's kind of interesting, because in a way, it was sort of the common man's
00:13:40.820critique of Silicon Valley economics. In both cases, he got fired. Zip2 never made a dime.
00:13:47.880um now paypal made a lot of money but elon was fired very quickly as ceo by peter teal
00:13:55.600and still he ended up with hundreds of millions of dollars so it's hard for nurses uh you know
00:14:04.740first responders plumbers to kind of understand how that works like how you fail and and you get
00:14:11.840massively rewarded and so in a way it was kind of setting a context for some of what was to come
00:14:17.620which was how Elon then kept playing with that economic model
00:14:27.520in ways that made him the richest person on the planet.
00:14:30.520It's not because his companies ever made a,
00:14:43.460and it made him the richest man in the world.
00:14:45.340So it seemed an interesting place to start. Now, at the same time, you know, he was clever. He was clearly very bright. And he was pursuing a dream. But at that moment, you know, the interest in investors, you know, sort of playing long, it's like playing long shots at the track. You know, oh, I like this name, but it's a 50 to one shot. Sure, let's try it. If it comes in, we're going to be rich.
00:15:37.780Tell us a little bit about those early days at Tesla, because I bet nine out of 10 people think,
00:15:42.480well, he founded Tesla. He came up with the idea. Yeah. And later on in the film,
00:15:48.500he's called out by the shareholders who vote him some staggering compensation package for like
00:15:54.200$800 million. They introduce him as the founder. He wasn't the founder. The fact was, in the early
00:16:02.840days of Tesla, Elon Musk, as he says in the film, spent most of his time at SpaceX. That's really
00:16:08.720his day job. And he was approached by two guys, Martin Eberhardt and Mark Tarpening, who literally
00:16:15.000founded Tesla. Eberhardt had come up with this idea for a lithium ion battery pack that would
00:16:22.560really make cars go fast. And also had an idea about how you start at the top of the market,
00:16:28.740the Roadster. And then as people adopt, you drive the price down until you have a car that
00:16:35.620every man could afford. So that was Martin's idea. Musk came in with the money and was the
00:16:41.680chairman of the board, but then had a falling out with Eberhard. This often happens. But what was
00:16:49.180unique about this was when Eberhard sued to try to get what he felt he was owed, Musk refused to
00:16:57.080settle until Everhart agreed to say that Musk was what he wasn't, which was the founder of Tesla.
00:17:04.040So that's going way further than than than just firing somebody. It's like now we're going to
00:17:10.700rewrite history to tell a very different story in the services, as you just mentioned, of kind of
00:17:16.700creating an image of who you are, which had a certain mythic utility, but also had a kind of
00:17:24.660financial utility, particularly in the political economy of Silicon Valley, where to the founder
00:17:30.120goes the spoils. And it's interesting, you're setting up that dynamic between his time at Tesla,
00:17:37.560it didn't happen sequentially, it was happening in parallel, his investment chair of the board
00:17:41.820at Tesla, a big investor, obviously, at the time of Tesla, but shifting his days, depending on
00:17:49.520the interview. I'm spending 20% on Tesla. I'm spending 40% on Tesla, up to 80% on this rocket
00:17:57.600company. And I love the way you introduce the SpaceX story. And it begins with a need and desire
00:18:06.400to find cheaper rockets. And it starts with a trip that they all took to Russia
00:18:12.000to get an ICBM missile. Very ironic now. Correct. That's why I bring it up.
00:18:19.520Yeah, they tried to get a rocket. They tried to buy rockets in Russia and then soon figured that it was too expensive. Also, one of the engineers in Russia was so disgusted by this, when he saw this callow kid that he spat on his shoes, right?
00:18:39.440Jim Cantrell, who was there with him at the time, said, Elon, yes, I think that's a sign of disrespect.
00:18:44.580So they came back. That trip didn't work out necessarily, but they ultimately landed not on a technology that was new or distinctive per se, which is another part of the mythology that somehow you invented some new technology.
00:19:00.280But he certainly maintained a persistence and you have some wonderful, I mean, I think some of the most glowing and complimentary aspects of the documentary are quite literally the videos of this, you know, rather extraordinary company.
00:19:17.420The Falcon 1 launches. I mean, this is where they were trying to get that rocket up and they kept failing and Elon kept going. And you see a very different Elon, you know, somebody who's really rallying the troops. He seems to be sharing the glory with others, you know, and when they finally launched the Falcon 1, and that footage, of course, has never been seen before.
00:19:40.000That was something that came from a revenge of the electric car.
00:19:45.000You know, it's really a magnificent moment.
00:19:47.620You're really rooting for Elon because he's he's not only so proud and ebullient, but he's giving so much credit to so many other people.
00:19:54.980And it was clearly a group effort. Right.
00:19:56.940um the it's funny though that even at that moment there's a twist there which is that you know he
00:20:05.300he's he's kind of rewriting history in a way that i i don't really begrudge him but he's sort of
00:20:11.540saying if we had failed on that fourth launch that would have been it for us and laurie garver who
00:20:16.500was deputy administrator of nasa says well actually not like we had invested in them we were going to
00:20:22.180keep supporting them until they got it right because we were we were pretty sure they were
00:20:26.120so it it um it lends an aura of drama to elon's story and as a dramatist i i get it um but but
00:20:35.940it wasn't exactly true and then later of course he would downplay the role that the government
00:20:40.400played it was all you know um because the elon's enterprises at tesla and at spacex
00:20:48.180are unimaginable without the massive help of both state, particularly California, and federal
00:20:55.380government assistance, whether it be through, you know, credits or contracts or, you know, loans.
00:21:05.680And it's such an important part, because that's where you introduce that framework, that, as you
00:21:12.300You say after that third failure and he's waxing on, you know, and looking more like
00:21:17.860the hero, and this would have bankrupted me.
00:21:39.980Because he needed. Yeah, he needed to create the impression of the rugged entrepreneur who doesn't need government help. But but actually, Elon has always been a very clever reward hacker when it came to the when it came to government. You know, he's he's he's always needed it. And he's he's always used it as there's two ways that Elon found. And I'll give him enormous credit for this. I mean, you're starting two companies and you've got to keep them alive. And in order to keep them alive, you need capital.
00:22:07.480well he had run out of debt you know he couldn't and the vcs weren't going to give him any more
00:22:13.600money so there's only two places to get it the government and the stock market and he played
00:22:18.760those games you know brilliantly in order to be able to keep those companies alive but in the
00:22:24.720process he began to tell fictions that um that then i think over time um morphed into a kind of
00:22:35.940tendency toward fraud, where there were some real mortal consequences.
00:22:45.260Yeah. And I want to talk about those. And that was also quite sober part of the film is
00:22:53.640walking through some of the video footage of some of these horrific accidents that occurred because
00:23:00.660he was promoting a lie around the autopilot. He was promoting the lie that somehow these things
00:23:05.800were safe and driverless when, in fact, they were not. And that tendency grows throughout this sort
00:23:12.120of, you know, this fudging, this constantly saying, well, this next year, I think, 14 next
00:23:17.760year, 15 next year, 16 next year, 18 next year, even today. At some point, he said it was a solved
00:23:22.960problem, you know, and even today, I mean, you know, people need to understand that while Waymo
00:23:28.100has done a really good job of developing their self-driving cars safely and also within certain
00:23:36.940constraints, like they map out an urban environment rather than trying to figure out
00:23:43.100something that would drive from coast to coast. Elon's cars, the Teslas, are still rated as level
00:23:51.140two, which is to say a kind of sophisticated cruise control. They're driver assist programs.
00:23:56.620They're not self-driving programs. But for the stock market, he needs you to believe that they are, in fact, autonomous vehicles. And that's how he sold them. And that was always the problem. In other words, that was the problem at Enron. That was the problem with Elizabeth Holmes.
00:24:13.860I mean, it's selling a dream, to quote David Byrne's song at the end of the film, that was not real and that had real mortal consequences because at least 67 people have died as a result of failure of autopilot.
00:24:29.480You start to talk about, you know, and we'll get to this in the modern sense, including as we take today, what, you know, all the hype around now Tesla merging in with SpaceX and so much of his origin story and now so much of present day.
00:24:46.920One of the things that you referenced was your, you know, you talked about your charging or at least your home batteries that were Tesla related.
00:24:56.200The origin story there, I imagine, was SolarCity, which he was associated with.
00:25:15.200But there's a pattern of when things are struggling, all of a sudden, now we start to roll them up.
00:25:21.120And that's why I want to sort of roll into so many of the other companies that are deeply part of this extraordinary film.
00:25:28.720And so he's having some early success at Tesla.
00:25:32.040He's having success, as you note, with contracts from the federal government, not just a loan, but also credits.
00:25:40.920And I am, as governor of California, intimately familiar with the game of selling credits, not selling cars.
00:25:47.800And one of the biggest profit centers for Tesla for the last decade plus has not been selling cars, but selling credits.
00:25:56.820And you talk about one such credit in 2013 that he was very explicitly targeting, and that was a battery swapping opportunity that would give him eligibility under the California Air Resources Board.
00:26:12.600It was really kind of a foundational moment.
00:26:15.480It's something that was pointed out to me by a guy named Ed Niedermeyer, who wrote a book called Ludacris and also an interesting kind of financial blogger named Lawrence Fossey.
00:26:26.400And when I went and saw the footage, I was kind of gobsmacked because it's it's almost like something you would see at Magic Castle.
00:26:33.200I mean, it's not it's just I mean, there's a Jobsian quality to it.
00:26:37.840You know, he's coming on stage, this technology, you know, and the whole idea was that you would see a BMW pull up to a pump.
00:26:44.720And in the time that the BMW took to gas up, to fuel up, he would be able to swap out a battery.
00:26:52.760And this Tesla pulls up and something happens underneath the car.
00:27:03.120And if you think about it, a battery swap, if that technology were able to work, that solves the one problem that everybody's obsessed with, with electric cars, which is range.
00:27:13.720You just want to be able to pull over to a gas station, swap out your battery and go.
00:27:21.180But you will understand this much better than I.
00:27:24.680But according, as I understand it, to the terms of the deal with California at the time, you just had to prove that you could do it.
00:27:31.480You didn't really have to demonstrate how many times you did it.
00:27:36.720And then they then they went and and and put a swap station out in the middle of nowhere, which an enterprising journalist went and and observed and nobody ever swapped out a battery.
00:27:49.500Now, it's not surprising. A Tesla battery is a thousand pounds. And when it comes out of the factory, it's covered with sealant.
00:27:57.920You know, these are not like double A batteries. Right. And so it was a complete con.
00:28:03.700And but it sort of but he did it with such grandiosity, like the great magician.
00:28:09.800And also he fulfilled the terms of the bargain.
00:28:13.120That's what Cory Doctorow calls it, reward hacking.
00:28:16.060You know, he he hacked the reward without actually delivering the benefit to the public.
00:28:23.160And he got roughly one hundred million dollars just from that credit until the Air Resources
00:28:27.400Board caught on to the fact that you actually have to do it.
00:28:31.820Yeah. And then he abandoned the program saying people just don't want it.
00:28:35.740Yeah. By the way, it was a program in a single garage at Harris Ranch near Bakersfield, California.
00:28:41.440So hardly a program. By the way, it's interesting. And you may or may not be familiar with him,
00:28:46.700but there was a company called Better Place at the time that was also promoting. So it wasn't
00:28:51.620even an original idea, which is part of a pattern with Musk taking credit as if it's an original
00:28:58.240idea, when in fact it was already out there, former CEO or at least executive at SAP, I
00:29:04.920think his name was Shia Gassi or something, started a company called Better Place with
00:29:09.120the Israeli government and the Denmark government, and they were going to roll out these battery
00:29:13.120swapping electric vehicles at the time.
00:29:16.120It was another company that went bankrupt, that didn't deliver on its promise, but it
00:29:20.420was actually technology that was being promoted years prior to even Elon Musk coming up with
00:29:27.740the framework. But Elon did one better. He was able to get the tax credit. That's right. That's
00:29:33.300right. Which which was enormously helpful to him at the time, because as I recall, it allowed him
00:29:38.500to turn a profit in a quarter where he otherwise would not have been able to. And so he was showing
00:29:43.140financial progress in a way that he wouldn't have been able to do, which is one of the things that
00:29:47.840helped, you know, goose the ultimate fundraising mechanism, which was the stock market for him.
00:29:53.960And you talk about, you know, you show a tweet here or a tweet there, another one of those press conferences promoting and promising something in a year or two, and how he was able to consistently, when things look tight or tough, to juice up the stock market and to get a frothiness there.
00:30:12.180Well, and you just saw it the other day.
00:30:14.120I mean, just as, you know, this news is breaking about Starlink and Starshield, what happens?
00:30:19.380There's this flying car that suddenly materializes.
00:30:21.980Now, I don't think that's a real car. I think it probably weighed about 10 pounds. But it was another magnificent demonstration. It went viral online. It's like, whoa, look what Elon's done. And he was really fond of doing those demos. And they're almost always impressive. They're just not real.
00:30:43.860They're not real. And we'll get to that demonstration and the curious timing of that demonstration as your film's coming out. But maybe that's just me connecting an obvious damn dot.
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00:35:09.160The jump off for me was Hamilton and it was the most popular thing in a very long time.0.97
00:35:15.220But it was still, for me, it was me and my friends making something dumb.0.63
00:35:19.320Bruce Lee's daughter and Brandon Lee's sister, Shannon Lee.
00:35:22.880Back to your initial point of stewarding my father's legacy and giving my energy to that.
00:35:29.220You're lending your life to stewarding somebody else's life.
00:35:34.700Listen to Who's With Me with Debbie Kwan Bell on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:35:40.740and so speaking of connected where he also you start to introduce some interesting and novel
00:35:47.620uh companies that that elon's interested in one of them's connecting sort of the brain
00:35:52.140uh to the machine uh and neural link uh and it also connects with part of the story that you
00:35:58.680introduced earlier in the film but is woven in even further and that's uh his relationships
00:36:03.720with uh spouses uh his first spouse had six children with the tragic death of their first
00:36:10.160child. And she's magnificent. I, by the way, full disclosure, had a chance to spend time with both
00:36:17.420of them back in the day. And she was very courageous, I thought, to be in this film for
00:36:24.340you. But you introduced one of his, another relationship he had with Neuralink, this notion
00:36:32.680of homo techno. If I got that right, tell us a little bit about that company. You cannot really
00:36:39.320be alive until you are backed up on a drive, I think is one of the lines from a Grimes song,
00:36:45.080which, you know, her music, I think is great. But yeah, they were very interested in this idea that
00:36:51.200human beings are sort of the bootloader for artificial intelligence. There's a theme running
00:36:57.020through the whole Elon Musk story related to AI, which is, it's, it's, it's fraught. It's interesting
00:37:04.840because he's one of the first people who sort of warns us about summoning the demon of AI and warns
00:37:11.800us of the dangers of AI. And he starts OpenAI as a foundation, allegedly, you know, to do AI in an
00:37:20.260ethical way. But even as he's doing that, he's kind of recklessly pursuing AI, particularly at Tesla,
00:37:26.700in ways which, you know, would have tragic consequences. So that relationship with Grimes,
00:37:32.880his uh they never married but they had three kids um you know is is really interesting because
00:37:39.680that's at the moment he's sort of embracing this idea of neural link and others um and and by the
00:37:46.180way a key executive at neural link is somebody who also had many of his children a woman named
00:37:50.160siobhan zilis uh who had been in tesla so the the merging of human beings and machines is is another
00:37:57.700element here now neural link again is another technology that other people were way out ahead
00:38:03.680of and musk got in some trouble of doing some animal testing he shouldn't have been doing and
00:38:08.560so forth and so on but the um he's not the first to go there he is just something that's really
00:38:15.460interesting to him but this sort of human machine thing is an interesting dimension in his story
00:38:23.080because he will get to a place where he treats people
00:38:28.020more like machines, more like NPCs in a way,
00:38:33.380and seems to have issues with empathy,
00:38:37.360as many of his either wives or lovers testify to.
00:38:43.400You know, he's initially extremely attentive and loving,
00:38:47.420and then often when they have kids, there's a switch that turns.
00:38:50.860Yeah, as we saw in the interviews that you have with Ashley St. Clair, you introduced his first foray into AI, and many people are familiar with this, a lot of people are not familiar, with the origin story of his direct engagement with DeepMind, his engagement at the time with not only the founder of DeepMind, but the founding story, or at least when they rolled in to Google.
00:39:16.160And you start to introduce a number of interesting people that were associated with that.
00:39:21.460Tell us a little bit about his first at-bats in terms of AI.
00:39:27.300Well, he was interested in a company called DeepMind, which is run by a guy named Demis
00:39:42.280And one of the interesting things about Breakout was they initially were sort of sampling human players to see if they could sufficiently sample them and use AI to really improve the playing so that you could really win.
00:42:13.660But we also know that at the same time he was doing that,
00:42:17.340he was also pursuing AI in a way, particularly at Tesla,
00:42:20.260Because that's kind of the foundational mistake that was made at Tesla.
00:42:27.500The whole idea was that they would use cameras to feed data into AI, and the AI would ultimately teach the car to drive itself, but without surrounding it with all of these other default systems like radar and LIDAR and so forth to keep people safe.
00:42:45.780And that's how some of the tragic accidents occurred.
00:42:49.480So it's an interesting moment for Elon that he's reckoning with the possibilities, but
00:42:54.640ultimately taking a path that doesn't lead him in a moral direction, even though he's
00:43:02.720And speaking of that moral direction and a path, and you have Sam, who was wonderful
00:43:07.900as well in this film that you interviewed, and he shared what appeared to be actual text
00:43:14.200messages back and forth with Elon in the middle of COVID.
00:43:17.120And we all had, I had a similar experience in the beginning, the middle of COVID, intimately dealing with the factory in Fremont and whether or not to keep it open and how he was responding, not responding to what was going on in real time.
00:43:33.020But your suggestion and Sam's suggestion, and I think my own observation is COVID was the time when Elon really started to change a little bit.
00:43:42.040mm-hmm and he's he's gaining a tremendous amount of power he's still obsessed with making
00:43:48.520tesla successful and then covet hits and now we're talking about march april 2020 this is
00:43:56.860when covet is really terrifying everybody i mean this is when you know new york didn't have enough
00:44:02.000places to put the bodies they were having to rent freezer trucks people forgot and and um and it was
00:44:08.340really a scary time and elon pooh-poohs it you know and and i think he pooh-poohs it because he
00:44:14.580didn't want to encounter any kind of a constraint on his ability to continue to produce cars he
00:44:22.160didn't want to really bother with developing a safety plan that would protect his workers
00:44:27.300um and and and and indeed some workers who refuse to come you know i i can't remember the number
00:44:34.680But a lot of workers at the Fremont plant got COVID, and people who refused to come to work, some of them were fired. It was really an ugly time, but it was also clearly the time. And he claims that the state of California had become fascist because they were trying to, you know, implement safety protocols for human beings.
00:45:00.820so um so yes he he he flips his lid and ultimately you know packs up his bags uh and unlike the
00:45:09.040beverly hillbillies he moves not to beverly hills but to austin texas where um government
00:45:15.660the the ability to pay to play is a little bit more pronounced yeah if there was a if there was
00:45:22.140a chapter or sort of to me it was sort of the hinge moment uh as he turned the page this would
00:45:26.300be my intermission i know you do a deeper intermission in the middle of film but this
00:45:30.460would be sort of chapter one, the California days, and now to all things, this sort of new city that
00:45:37.820he's built in and giga this, giga that. And we'll get to chainsaws in a minute. But you do open up
00:45:45.560now sort of the thematic of Elon feeling sort of this liberation, this freedom, and now truly
00:45:53.660living life out loud in even a more pronounced and outsized way as he moves, quote unquote,
00:46:01.240the company, though he didn't move many jobs, but moved the corpus of the company, took all
00:46:10.380And he starts to move to the right politically.
00:46:13.500At the time, it wasn't so evident, but we now know that even in 2022, he donated something
00:46:22.400like $50 million to the GOP, which is a big chunk of change. But he was trying to keep it quiet
00:46:28.740because, I mean, he had a lot of Tesla owners who would not have seen, who would have been very much
00:46:36.780on the left. And it's not until 2024 when he goes all in for the GOP, particularly for Donald Trump.
00:46:48.080And meanwhile, he's still receiving billions and billions of dollars of tax credits from the
00:46:52.060federal government from the state of California at the same time. And I'll continue to remind
00:46:58.880everybody what you reminded everybody, that many of those quarters where he had no profits,
00:47:03.700or if he did have profits, they were almost exclusively in some cases, because of the
00:47:09.720benefits and the margins of that credit program, not necessarily always the sales of the vehicles.
00:47:17.120what what yeah i agree at the time at the same time now he's he's continuing just this
00:47:25.620entrepreneurial and and again this is this is hardly a takedown or hit piece i mean you
00:47:30.260you you maintain that appreciation for the entrepreneurial spirit and and and you
00:47:35.360demonstrably and some of those cars i mean i you know we the the s was one of the all-time great
00:47:42.200you know electric cars you know give tesla credit uh everybody says give elon credit i mean
00:47:48.500give him some of the credit too but give tesla credit they they make some great cars
00:47:53.360100 and uh you know as as i said i was i took a back seat i was in the front of the line
00:47:59.620for all those models including the s when it came out and uh i'm not sure i'll be alive for
00:48:04.840the new roadster back to your point but we'll get to that in a minute none of us will i don't think
00:48:10.320So here he is. I mean, it is remarkable. I mean, he's got an electric vehicle company. He's got a rocket company. He's dabbling now in artificial intelligence, not just dabbling, making big investments, big bets.
00:48:25.160He's starting to get in the battery business at scale.
00:48:28.180It's diversifying its data, artificial intelligence, technology company, not just, you know, a traditional manufactured automobile company.
00:48:39.900You start to see XAI come into the picture.
00:48:42.640But first, I want to talk about how Twitter came into the picture and what's the origin story on the Twitter deal.
00:48:49.300it was really kind of it was sort of like a joke almost how he bought twitter you know
00:48:57.600Tallulah Riley and I can't remember if they were married at the time or not but Tallulah Riley his
00:49:03.420who he married twice um girlfriend wife anyway she got pissed off at some things that were said
00:49:10.500on twitter and the and the fact that twitter you know banned some accounts and so you've got to
00:49:15.560take it over and so so he says okay i'll take it over um and he he he offers an insanely high price
00:49:23.380and also waives all of his due diligence so when um when the folks at twitter say okay
00:49:32.900you know bid accepted suddenly it's just like he's got to go through with it or else he's going
00:49:39.880to face all these penalties and and and come billions and dollars and penalties and come up
00:49:44.560with nothing so he does he he buys it but he buys it you know again in a classic sort of vc way you
00:49:52.460know borrows money from people like larry ellison but also um you know takes out a whole load of
00:49:59.120debt collateralized by twitter itself and so he comes in saying that it's a company that's really
00:50:05.860underwater he's got to fire people he's really got to fire people because he's loaded the company up
00:50:09.820with debt. Now it's his right to fire people, but I'm not saying it was right to do it. So he goes
00:50:19.120in and fires 80% of the company, sometimes firing all the wrong people and imperiling the platform
00:50:31.300because he's firing the engineers who are running the place without knowing or thinking about it.
00:50:36.860It's kind of crazy. When the smoke clears, he suddenly has this platform. He's fired all this trust and safety people. And now what's he going to do with it? He then realizes, oh, and this is classic Elon. Sometimes there's always it's not exactly a bait and switch, but he realizes there's something else here that's might be valuable and he's able to pivot.
00:51:02.840And what's valuable, of course, is Twitter now, which then becomes X as a propaganda machine for him. And it had always been a kind of booster machine for him. You know, Tesla didn't have much of an advertising budget. They would advertise on Twitter. And he was he was great at that. And he really understood how Twitter worked. But now with trust and safety gone, suddenly it becomes a kind of hellscape, not a free speech absolutist place at all.
00:51:30.640He starts crushing people or deplatforming them if they have views that he doesn't disagree with.
00:51:37.440And maybe the biggest and most evident moment when he turns away from his free speech absolutism has to do with the fact that both he and President Biden were tweeting about the Eagles game.
00:51:53.460And Biden got more, you know, likes than he did, more engagement than he did.
00:51:58.720He went into a rage. And so he flies his jet back to San Francisco and has the engineers work all night to retweak the algorithm. And the next morning, everybody who was on Twitter wakes up and all they see is Elon Musk feeds. That's it. Right.
00:52:15.600And so so, you know, it blows apart also the invisible nature of of Twitter, which is to say you can just tweak it the way you want to tweak it.
00:52:26.360And that's what Elon does. And he ends up not only using it as a propaganda platform for himself, but also loaning it out to various authoritarian regimes all over the world.
00:52:36.760Yeah. And I'm laughing nervously about that because I want to talk to you a little bit more about that. And that goes to my opening comments about how anxiety inducing this film becomes as you start to dive deeper and to start to appreciate more and more the power this person has to decide what we see here, what we read and what we think every single day.
00:53:00.860But before that, I want to talk, you know, and also I thought it interesting too, he replatforms Trump, he replatforms Andrew Tate, yay, he replatforms a lot of folks that for, you know, good people can disagree, but there may have been a reason they were deplatformed.
00:53:19.040But as you suggest, Mr. Anti-Cancel Culture starts canceling the people he doesn't like off the platform at the same time.
00:53:28.880I mean, one of the people he got to sort of head up this project called the Twitter files, which he fed them all sorts of a back and forth from the Biden administration, sort of weighing in on Twitter and urging them to do this, that or the other thing.
00:53:44.640It was to prove how bad and how woke Twitter was.
00:53:48.360But, of course, he didn't provide them the back and forth from the first Trump administration.
00:53:54.600and but interestingly the person who's sort of running the twitter files program is barry weiss
00:54:01.620and she makes a brief cameo in the film and she of course will end up you know ended up
00:54:07.680with a much bigger project at cbs news and also not exactly uh no longer uh i'm not sure it ever
00:54:17.480was but uh not a uh a haven for free speech absolutists at the moment no and you you have
00:54:26.300a great scene there at the deal book uh with with sorkin and uh and it's that infamous you know
00:54:32.120fuck them excuse my language moment i'm paraphrasing yeah uh with elon remind everyone0.74
00:54:38.660of that yeah it was just because when he he fires all of the trust and safety team the trust and1.00
00:54:46.520safety team are the people who are supposed to go in and monitor tweets to see if they're
00:54:52.080offensive, possibly illegal. You don't want any child exploitation material, you know, anything
00:55:00.160that would be either illegal or beyond the bounds of generally recognized morality. He fires them
00:55:08.100all. So suddenly you get some very, very, very ugly stuff on Twitter, all sorts of Nazi shit1.00
00:55:14.620posters and and child sexual content starts to return it's bad and as a result advertisers start0.99
00:55:22.120leaving in droves because they don't want to be next to a hitler post um and uh and he goes on
00:55:29.780this um show with andrew ross sorkin and basically says people are going to bribe me with advertising0.97
00:55:37.440fuck you um which is which is you know he could he could imagine it's a principled stand0.97
00:55:45.820but basically these advertisers are fleeing uh twitter which lost 80 of its value after musk1.00
00:55:54.280took it over um because it's become a hellscape and there are no controls which is what generally
00:56:00.860speaking citizens and people uh and advertisers want they don't they don't they don't want a
00:56:06.860hellscape they don't want a a kind of rage addicting platform which is what it's unfortunately
00:56:13.840become so he was really and i think it was that was if my recollection serves me in relationship
00:56:18.580to i think specifically he got triggered over bob eiger and disney uh pulling back some of their
00:56:25.000advertising on the platform that's right that's right that's exactly right and meanwhile alex
00:56:30.200he's, you know, the same thing, you know, the toxicity that we started to see back on the
00:56:35.420Twitter platform, we started to see on the artificial intelligence with Grok. You talk
00:56:40.080about sexually exploited images. You've got Ashley St. Clair, who briefly dated Elon Musk.
00:56:45.980They have a child together. Talk about that and her own, what happened to her as it relates to
00:56:51.040those sexual images, people being undressed, et cetera. Talk about, I mean, again, back to,0.57
00:56:57.360Again, extending, I imagine, that same culture, that same mindset, regardless of the platform.
00:57:03.280That's right. It was just reckless. And also, I would argue, performatively cruel.
00:57:12.000And when you get to XAI and these programs that are via Grok, which is the sort of the chat bot on XAI, you know, the easy ability to undress people who don't want to be undressed and particularly children.
00:57:32.460I mean, it's utterly reprehensible. And Elon defends it under the rubric of free speech, which is, and in a way, it becomes kind of his, the cruelty that I think he sort of enjoyed when he comes into Twitter, like he has this gang of folks who have a podcast called All In.
00:58:02.460Yeah. And Jason Calacanis, who's one of the key hosts of All In, you know, says to Elon on the verge of going into Twitter, sharpen up your blades, boys. You know, that's the kind of fun, performative. And even they do a little podcast from Twitter, and there's nobody there because most of them have been fired. And they're all laughing.
00:58:24.100laughing. I know that was chilling to watch that David Sachs, those guys laughing, turning the
00:58:28.980computer around as if it is some game. That's right. And these people have lives. You know,
00:58:34.640you can decide as a businessman, you need to cut costs, whatever, even though you've loaded the
00:58:39.820company up with debt. But it's not a game to these people. These people have lives. So, you know,
00:58:47.300I think that it begins to show a side of Elon that almost it starts with this sort of
00:58:57.380cynical, taking on the wokest vibe and ends up in a very, very, very dark place where he's
00:59:06.820able to rationalize a kind of cruelty that most of us really can't imagine. And that's where you,
00:59:13.540And, you know, ultimately you get to USAID and stuff like that.
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01:03:59.240yeah and and a perfect segue into doge and and and that same ready fire aim framework that you
01:04:08.060vividly display with the uh graphics and sort of the video uh game like graphics of just sort of
01:04:15.800firing away and eliminating individuals and staff. He took that same approach, not just to USAID,
01:04:22.560as you highlight, but across the spectrum. Talk a little bit about what that represented in the
01:04:28.600context of what, you know, I think you were about to, and forgive me, let me back up a little bit.
01:04:32.760Your film was, I'm told, was going to actually end before Doge, and you were going to present it.
01:04:39.400Oh, we hadn't even gotten to Doge. I mean, I was ready, you know, it was going to end with Twitter.
01:04:43.380um it was in the spring of 2024 i was getting ready to to wrap it up but that's when trump
01:04:52.160was nearly assassinated and and and musk hitched his wagon to trump um and my friends at hbo said
01:05:00.240you're not done you have to keep following the story and i said okay i do and so i did and and
01:05:08.360And that's where the story took a much bigger and also much darker turn.
01:05:14.100And it's interesting. And you talk about this and showcase it in the film.
01:05:19.660You know, we talk about the 501C4s that he discovered. Sam references a little bit of that.0.80
01:05:24.740The COVID days. He dabbles in the midterms. He's starting to make donations, not just to Democrats as he had in the past and not just associate himself with a lot of Democrats that you've showcased in the film.
01:05:35.980I'm briefly in an appearance. You've got Jerry Brown. You've got Barack Obama, many others.
01:05:42.940You know, we had Governor Schwarzenegger at the time who was part of those early days in the tax credits.
01:05:48.440But so he starts to lean in a little bit on the right. But he wasn't a Trumper at first.0.81
01:05:53.120He was a little bit more inclined to be with Ron DeSantis.
01:05:56.300He tries to platform DeSantis and that infamous campaign kickoff on Twitter that goes completely.
01:06:01.840It's a total disaster with David Sachs, but he ultimately finds alignment with Trump.
01:06:09.100He comes out very publicly after that assassination attempt in a much more aggressive way.
01:06:17.680Yeah, because he had been hiding his donations up until that point.
01:06:20.260Now suddenly he comes out and he's the front man for the Trump campaign.
01:06:24.320I mean, not only does he he give close to three hundred million dollars, but he's out there every day on the hustlings.
01:06:32.680And I think, you know, at that time, he was a very inspirational figure for a lot of young men who are sort of seeing him as this guy, you know, move fast, break things, you know, got to eliminate the stultifying, you know, bureaucracy.
01:06:48.520and not that any of us really like bureaucracy
01:06:52.000or that corporations don't have enormous bureaucracies.
01:06:55.420But, you know, it was like they admired him
01:06:57.900for a guy who was going to break the rules
01:07:14.300And I do believe he would not have won without Elon Musk.
01:07:18.520So now, there are two questions you sort of ask. One was, why did he go so all in for Trump? I mean, this is a guy, if you believe in Musk as the climate savior, he's endorsed the guy whose principal slogan is drill, baby, drill, and who wants to reward the oil and gas companies and literally doesn't care about destroying the planet.
01:07:41.880And Alex, let's underscore just for a moment, he's the guy who said, give me a billion dollars, I'll roll back last half century of regulations, including the tax credit program the Biden administration put in effect that has been one of the principal profit drivers for Tesla.
01:07:57.480Correct. Correct. So what's going on there? Why would you do something that seemingly is against your philosophical interests and your economic interests, at least at your car company, which is, of course, quickly becoming a robot company?
01:08:11.420but um that's why and i think the answer to that is uh he was in some jeopardy there were 11
01:08:19.980different agencies that had 32 different investigations into various aspects of his
01:08:24.600company there were state investigations there were federal investigations and there was one
01:08:29.040criminal investigation at the department of justice that was looking into fraud at full
01:08:34.140self-driving which might have landed uh musk in prison and he jokes about it with tucker carlson
01:08:40.220You know, on the eve of the election. I hope this doesn't go wrong. I wonder how, you know, how long my prison term is going to be.
01:08:48.120With Musk, there's always a joke and it's always for real. It's like the Nazi salute.
01:08:52.780It's like, is that a joke? Is he having us all on or is that really his way of saying fascism is the way to go?
01:09:00.940It's almost always both. It's like the chainsaw. Right.
01:09:04.160um it was a joke it's just a joke but really he's um he's destroying lives um and a chainsaw is not
01:09:13.660the other images he uses during that period is i threw usa id into the wood chipper well um so
01:09:21.780he gets this brief and i think it's motivated and ashley st claire actually confirms it because she
01:09:27.300says elon told her and texted her many times you know that that's why he turned so hard for trump
01:09:32.980because he knows trump is transactional then he's given the keys to the kingdom in doge
01:09:37.440and he allegedly says he's going to um you know root out waste fraud and abuse and look all of us
01:09:47.260can agree by all means eliminate waste fraud and abuse uh but that's really not what this is about
01:09:55.380because he goes into agencies and starts ripping them apart without understanding what they're
01:09:59.620doing. His goal was to destroy the regulatory state. And first and foremost targets were the
01:10:06.560agencies that were regulating him. And then I think also, you know, a more nefarious goal,
01:10:17.740which I think was underappreciated at the time, was that he wanted data. And he wanted data for
01:10:23.740his AI. Now, one of the things that, you know, a head of one of the agencies told me was that the
01:10:31.480Doge kids, you know, these 18, 19, 20 year old kids from Tesla and SpaceX and whatever, didn't
01:10:39.500know anything about the agencies. It was just embarrassing how little they knew about government
01:10:43.760in general. They knew a lot about data and they knew a lot about how to access it. And they were
01:10:51.680given what's called super admin status which meant that there were no information silos for
01:10:56.860them inside these agencies so whether it was classified information or personal information
01:11:01.240they had access to it all now none of us have been us meaning journalists or filmmakers or
01:11:08.540congressional committees have been able to ascertain whether all of that material was
01:11:13.420taken and deposited at spacex but it would have been as easy as drag and drop and that is a
01:11:20.160terrifying idea. And so I think that there was a data project there that may well evidence itself
01:11:28.560in the midterms upcoming. But it was knowing how assiduous all of the Doge boys were, and they were
01:11:35.820all boys, about accessing that data without restriction, it means it was really part of the
01:11:42.300project. And that's the point you highlight, that while we can laugh off Doge as being a
01:11:49.300colossal failure, $2 trillion, trillion dollars, $400, $500 billion. You make the point. It's the
01:11:55.420opposite. It may cost us half a trillion dollars because the IRS cuts that were penny-wise pound
01:12:01.880foolish in terms of the ability to go after waste, fraud, and abuse, and those that are cheating on
01:12:07.400their taxes. But that the success was very much, I mean, from his perspective, this was a master0.98
01:12:15.780class of success by eliminating going after those power ministries that were targeting his interests
01:12:22.240and his friends' interests as well. That's right. And he comes out of it, you know, with kind of a
01:12:28.160rough bargain with Trump that, you know, they're going to eviscerate rules and regulations on the
01:12:33.080stock market and on AI, which becomes the big project, right? That's where the profit center
01:12:38.660is going to be in the future. And also, for this president, if you flatter him or if you give him
01:12:48.600money that advances his political agenda, he'll give you virtually anything you want. And that
01:12:54.440means you can treat the government, as he had done in the past, as a piggy bank. And suddenly
01:13:01.660the contracts start coming you know xai was xai which is the worst of all the frontier ai systems
01:13:10.780was fully integrated into the department of defense by pete hegseth why because elon musk
01:13:17.540is a huge campaign contributor it's it's it's uh crony capitalism at its worst so you know going
01:13:24.840back to that's where you go back to the foundation you realize oh he was always good at getting money
01:13:28.900out of the government. But he used to go in and play these games. Now he just has a conversation
01:13:33.980with Trump. How about a billion here? How about a billion there? What do you say? No problem.
01:13:38.740How much do you feel the scars and the wounds that he felt, which seem real on so many levels?
01:13:46.100You highlighted with a number of interviews, I think Karis Wisher again, even Elon's own words,
01:13:52.100not being invited to the EV summit with Joe Biden?
01:14:20.820And of course, we know that why, because it's all about, you know, the unions. But then say so, you know, rather than pretend that General Motors is leading the charge on electric vehicles, which it clearly is not.
01:14:36.060They're the worst. Mary Barr has sold us out.
01:14:39.280Yes, exactly. So it's kind of a sham, but it's also a slap in the face to Elon, who was famously anti-union.
01:14:46.620Well, he can't be a big boy about it, you know, which is odd because actually he makes bank or Tesla makes bank during the Biden administration.
01:14:55.440They do very well during the Biden administration. But he's been hurt.
01:15:01.860And if they don't, you know, they don't appreciate me, then I'm going to go to other people who do appreciate me.
01:15:08.400It's really like a wounded child. And you see that in Elon a lot.
01:15:12.880And honestly, I've seen it in other very wealthy and powerful people, too, that no matter how wealthy and powerful they get, then at some point they're surprisingly immature when it comes to absorbing criticism or or slights.
01:15:30.160They don't rise above it. They see themselves as victims. And it's hard to understand, but it seems to be part of the package of the corruption of power that you begin to, you're no longer able to seek criticism as possibly constructive.
01:15:53.640And so you surround yourself with flatterers and then cast out anybody who doesn't.
01:15:59.620And in this way, I would say Musk is rather different from, say, Steve Jobs.0.93
01:16:04.860Because Steve Jobs, for example, is a guy who, after Next, which was a great failure for him,
01:16:11.900gets into Apple 2.0, which would birth the iPhone, among many other great things.
01:16:17.420He surrounds himself with a small group of people who really can tell him no,
01:16:21.480who can be critical to his face. And he not only doesn't resist that, he encourages it because he
01:16:28.200knows he needs it. He has the maturity to understand he has to go there. That is not
01:16:33.160what Musk has done. And in that way, he's very much like Donald Trump.
01:16:38.100The much like Donald Trump is something briefly I want to come back to. But interesting,
01:16:42.840you start with Zip2. You don't start with Elon's father, who you interviewed, where so much of this
01:16:48.760may come from right emanates the relationships one father particularly as a young man uh it's a
01:16:54.840hell of an interview and the coldness to which he describes elon's father uh shooting an intruder
01:17:02.180three of them and the blood and he describes the color and the pull of the blood the way he
01:17:09.020described tell me what that interview represented how did you how did how'd you take a well tell me
01:17:16.480a little bit about that. Sure. I mean, that was an interview. It was very hard getting people to
01:17:21.980be interviewed for this film because they were all very scared of Elon Musk. They were scared
01:17:25.940he was going to sue them or worse. But in this case, I had Errol Musk at hello. You know, I had
01:17:36.740his number. I just called him up. And Errol Musk said, sure, I'll do an interview. Because there's
01:17:42.140a both um you know there's a very uneasy relationship between uh elon and errol and
01:17:48.800elon himself and we include remarks by him and kimball his brother you're talking about how
01:17:53.900their father tormented them as children psychologically and that often took the
01:17:59.400side of other kids you know um particularly kids who beat elon up and he describes a childhood as
01:18:06.840as being very violent and disturbing and traumatic for him.
01:18:14.600And by the way, I would say that Justine, for example,
01:18:17.540would corroborate that, at least in terms of what she told him.
01:18:23.280and the kind of uneasy relationship he has with the truth,
01:18:28.580the sort of enthusiastic way he has of describing violence,
01:18:33.500particularly violence that he seems quite proud of,
01:18:36.840Um, that there is a kind of discomforting feeling that the apple doesn't fall far from the tree.
01:18:45.820Including, um, that violence that was expressed in a tragic accident. And Elon was there just
01:18:51.920casually reading the comic book, which as a young child, I don't begrudge any of that, but
01:18:58.280it was just, it was, it had a similar sort of, it was, there was a beat removed as Errol's trying
01:19:05.020to describe this. Yeah, there was just a kind of, let's say, an obsession with yourself rather than
01:19:12.420what's going on around you. Well said. And that, I think, is the concerning part. I mean, Elon has
01:19:19.940leaned at times to this idea that he might be on the spectrum. He's never been formally tested.
01:19:25.380But I would argue that that's a bit of a shape-shifting mirage in the sense that people
01:19:33.520on the spectrum don't ordinarily engage in performative cruelty. That's not part of the
01:19:39.300package. They can be distant and socially uncomfortable. But this kind of performative
01:19:47.480cruelty is not part of that package. And also, if you have wounds from your childhood,
01:19:53.620Elon is not the first person who had a difficult childhood. It can be an explanation, but not an
01:20:00.920excuse not an excuse is you do what it is it to you performative cruelty or is it deeply
01:20:08.300this whole issue about the woke mind virus his son transitioning um you know i've had my own
01:20:16.600direct engagement with elon on this topic so i have my own thoughts what did you how much of
01:20:23.000how important is that as as part of the story that is elon musk well i think it plays a part
01:20:30.240I think to some extent he overdoes it because it's his way of saying, you know, I was determined because he says coming out of that, you know, his daughter transitioning that I made up my mind then and there that I was going to kill the woke mind virus.
01:20:48.620and he does some very hurtful things uh you know in talking about uh vivian jenna wilson which is
01:20:56.400her name now um you know he said my son my son xavier is dead yeah right this is your child
01:21:04.180right and and and so going back to what we talked about about you know do you have the maturity
01:21:11.540as a man to be able to accept that your child grows up into something other than maybe what
01:21:18.520you had planned for them and this is where justine is very moving in her testimony where she talks
01:21:23.700about you know he calls it the death of a child even after we went through the actual death of
01:21:29.480an actual child but also doesn't reckon with the idea that this is a child who's growing up
01:21:35.280into her own self and that is something all of us as parents go through and and you you do it
01:21:42.700hopefully with love and instead he he cancels her health insurance cancels her health insurance
01:21:50.560um you you talk are you you you don't talk you you you highlight it it's so interesting just i
01:21:57.880think about elon and children and of course all those photos iconic videos and you include a lot
01:22:03.980of them in this film with x one of his kids always on his shoulders and i've i've been to events and
01:22:10.160You had a short clip with Elon and myself when he was reopening the R&D headquarters after he left, infamously left California, realized he couldn't get the talent in Texas.
01:22:21.600So he needed to reestablish his relationship to California by opening up the world headquarters for his R&D back at the old HP Enterprise space.
01:22:31.160And so I was there with him on that event.
01:22:33.060And his child was with him the entire time, not dissimilar to the photos we see in the Oval Office with Trump.
01:22:38.900almost as in, you describe it often as a prop or something, but for me almost it was, there's
01:22:44.980anxiety. It was an attachment. What do you make of that? Because you highlight those images
01:22:51.340in relationship to those cuts at USAID and Lancet suggesting up to 14 million human beings,
01:22:58.30014 million could lose their lives because of the cruelty of those cuts.
01:23:03.700Explain a little bit of some of the images, some of the editing on that,
01:23:08.900Well, it's just, I mean, I think you have a guy who's obsessed with spreading his seed and obsessed with an environment, allegedly, you know, we're in a low birth environment and he wants to do everything he can to do that.
01:23:22.720While at the same time, these sudden cuts at these are the kind of, you know, contradictions in Elon Musk that are hard to reckon with. Right. He claims to be about birthing children. Of course, they all if he had his way, they'd all be, you know, with his DNA and the same color, presumably.
01:23:44.220And but also then at the same time, he enables through his policies, which were draconian and could have been easily mollified or redirected in order to allow alternatives to be developed.
01:24:11.020In other words, the problem with the USAID cuts were that they were so sudden.
01:24:16.860You know, you had literally tons of food sitting on pallets, which were burned instead of going to starving children.
01:24:26.160That is a kind of performative cruelty.
01:25:41.860It's interesting the angle you took on that was through vignettes with the AFD in Germany, some of his forays now globally, which is an area I'd love to just mine as well because it's incredibly important, particularly the news as recent as yesterday, this morning.
01:25:59.120the back and forth. Did he or did he not? Was it Trump? Was it Elon that turned down or throttled
01:26:03.880down the military version of Starlink in the Ukraine? So they didn't have the offensive
01:26:09.120capacity. But you start to show those vignettes. You show that chainsaw, not just a metaphor for
01:26:16.200doge cuts, but for his political influence with Mele and Argentina and Sonora and Brazil.0.51
01:26:23.140Javier Mele gives him that chainsaw and he he he's aligned with with Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, you know, with Erdogan Turkey.
01:26:37.140And you can see him performing at rallies by somebody as virulently anti-immigrant and violent as Tommy Robinson in the United Kingdom.
01:26:55.900So he's collecting these people, and I think it's because he feels a kind of kinship to them.
01:27:01.400and also i think around the world there's always a a kind of secondary reason for elan too which
01:27:08.180is authoritarian governments tend to be much more transactional if you can um get on the right side
01:27:15.480of them then then you know democracies are messy um it takes time to enact policies where but if
01:27:23.920you can just go to the capo di tutti copy you know then it's much easier so he really does start
01:27:32.580to embark on a campaign where he's globe girdling um um you know authoritarian states i mean it's
01:27:41.960scary um because now it seems as if there's a political project even if it's shoot from the
01:27:48.780hip as you mentioned sooner of ready uh fire aim um nevertheless there seems to be a sort of he's
01:27:56.320not reaching out to incipient democracies he's reaching out to uh people who want to take
01:28:02.540countries in a very rightward direction including ours where he's invested by at least some estimates
01:28:08.520over 366 million this time not the 300 for trump last time in the midterms and and that obviously
01:28:16.600has its own, you know, there are all kinds of set of questions there in terms of what he's looking
01:28:21.820for in return and the return potentially of a more antagonistic Congress. What do you see
01:28:29.160things going in the next few months? He today was doubling down after the earnings call at Tesla
01:28:35.920and Starlink about merging the two companies as if he's passive observer on that. And he's got
01:28:42.720a committee, but he can't get involved in any conflicts. When we know full well, that's his
01:28:47.040intention to do that. It's coming out, of course, just the same time where what some described as
01:28:52.640the Hot Wheel show with the flying car that's been delayed over a decade. That seems very
01:28:59.440different than the one he just rolled out a few weeks ago and will be different still if it ever
01:29:04.100gets developed, but seemed self-evidently about the bridge to SpaceX merger with Tesla.
01:29:11.020So where do you think we are now in the context of where not only Elon is with his companies, but with the project that is Elon, Inc.?
01:29:22.020Well, I mean, he clearly still has a political project, and I think that that political project is playing itself out now, as you mentioned, with campaign contributions, perhaps also with some kind of cyber element, which may or may not come before the election, may even come after, if there's a contesting of the election.
01:29:45.320if there is a kind of wave that I think I would anticipate, at least at this juncture.
01:29:54.080I think he's afraid. There's part of him that's afraid because he knows that if the Democrats
01:29:58.480take the House and if the Democrats take the Senate, there are going to be hot and cold running
01:30:03.580hearings about and investigations into his businesses, and particularly into some of the
01:30:10.260questions that are unanswered about data and about the kind of antitrust concerns that he has
01:30:15.560and about the kind of fraud he's promulgated on public markets. But there's no doubt at this
01:30:21.760moment that he has achieved extraordinary power between SpaceX, Starlink, which is now mapping
01:30:30.280the world, and Starlink both as a means of communication and also, I would argue,
01:30:35.380surveillance because all that all that stuff goes through spacex all those transmissions go through
01:30:41.240spacex by the way including starlink on the white house which you highlight in the film
01:30:45.580correct and and and that is not something that that that any sane person who's looking out for
01:30:52.360the security of white house communications whatever buys so um and and you have tesla
01:30:58.720of course, even folding in all those failing businesses into SpaceX, it's still trading at
01:31:06.320this fantastic value. So he has enormous wealth and resources to devote to both his economic projects
01:31:14.640and able to exert market power. He's threatening to turn Starlink, for example,
01:31:22.760into a phone system that will maybe undercut everybody, right? And without any antitrust
01:31:29.000regulation, you know, is that a possibility? So he's got globe-girdling power, and he's got the
01:31:35.540ear of the President of the United States. But he is afraid of coming investigations. So I think
01:31:45.180the struggle over these midterms will be powerful. And I think it's really incumbent on all of us
01:31:51.480to look closely at the power this guy has accreted
01:32:23.300He literally can't answer the question.
01:32:25.300So that's not only power without accountability, but it's also power without purpose.
01:32:30.160And in a way, you know, it's Elon, but it's also us.
01:32:35.260Because Elon, to use one of his terms, found the anomaly in the matrix of the political
01:32:40.680economic system that we have in this country, which is money.
01:32:44.620We've allowed the application of money to do so much that it's taken away the ability of us as citizens to have a say over our own future.
01:32:56.900And we're being now ruled by, you know, a handful of oligarchs led by Elon Musk.
01:33:04.620That is maybe the most disquieting thing of all.
01:33:07.460And that's the part that I discovered that really made me the most nervous.
01:33:11.200and did that come to you with in in the second iteration when you know sort of the post doge
01:33:16.840that you started to sort of soberly sort of come to that darker conclusion yes the to see the
01:33:23.200enormous the enormity of the power he had acquired and also that he had now engineered a world where
01:33:31.620he didn't have to observe the constraints that he had before right he's a man now so long as he stays
01:33:38.120on trump's good side and you can do that with money and he's back on it yep yeah then um there
01:33:45.060are no constraints on your power so the i opened with was saying that that it was anxiety inducing
01:33:53.280it's precisely for that reason that it is and and that's how your film ends and you know of course
01:33:58.900we you you reference a little bit about the children etc there's also a sort of uh you know
01:34:05.200He talks in terms of legions of kids and the language, you know, some say breeders, but this notion of legions, this notion that the reason he's got 14 kids that we know about, who the hell knows how many he really has and how he's sending out apparently his seed, forgive my language, on the Internet.