Speaker 1: Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio news.
Speaker 2: Well, Elon Musk is now the richest person on the planet.
Speaker 1: More than half the satellites in space are owned and
Speaker 1: controlled by one man.
Speaker 3: Well, he's a legitimate super genius.
Speaker 4: I mean legitimate. He says.
Speaker 1: He's always voted for Democrats, but this year it will
Speaker 1: be different.
Speaker 5: He'll vote Republican.
Speaker 2: There is a reason the US government is so reliant
Speaker 2: on him. Elon Musk is a scam artist and he's
Speaker 2: done nothing. Anything he does, he's fascinating people.
Speaker 4: Welcome to Elon, Inc. Bloomberg's weekly podcast about Elon Musk.
Speaker 4: It's Tuesday, September twenty fourth. I'm your host, David Papadopolis.
Speaker 4: Now regular list ers might know that this show, like
Speaker 4: Elon Musk himself, loves a feud, and this week has
Speaker 4: been all about the feuds. Elon lost one battly in Brazil,
Speaker 4: he seems to have started another one with the warlord
Speaker 4: of Chechnya, and he even made a couple of enemies
Speaker 4: in a battle over land rights. Yes, says Elon has
Speaker 4: been rubbing elbows and yucking it up with his new pals,
Speaker 4: Javier Milay and Georgia Maloney. In New York for the
Speaker 4: UN General Assembly. The conflicts have been coming in fast
Speaker 4: from all directions. Dana Hall will join us to talk
Speaker 4: about that Chechenan warlord Ramsen Kataroff and his beloved cyber truck,
Speaker 4: and we'll get into those land rights bats. But before that,
Speaker 4: we're going to start in Brazil, where Elon just caved
Speaker 4: to Judge Aleishandri jumurais bringing an end to a high
Speaker 4: profile battle that led to X being banned. There to
Speaker 4: discuss this, Max Chapkin has joined me here in the studio. Hey, Max, Hey,
Speaker 4: David and from salpowl Will were beaming. And Julia Leche,
Speaker 4: who run are Emerging Markets coverage in Latin America.
Speaker 1: Julia, welcome, Hey David, thanks for having me.
Speaker 4: Okay, Julia. So, when we last visited the topic of
Speaker 4: Musk versus the Sovereign Republic of Brazil, Musk was still
Speaker 4: refusing to do the things at the Supreme Court wanted
Speaker 4: there remove accounts spreading disinformation on X, a point a
Speaker 4: representative in the country, and X was still banned. All
Speaker 4: that change late last week. Walk us through what exactly happened.
Speaker 1: So a little less than a month after Twitter went down,
Speaker 1: Musk decided to back down. Indeed, so he named a
Speaker 1: legal representative. He blocked the accounts that the judge had
Speaker 1: ordered them too, and paid fines that had been incurring
Speaker 1: for a while and that he had been refusing to pay.
Speaker 1: Now at the beginning you said it was over right,
Speaker 1: it's not quite yet. You cannot access Twitter here yet.
Speaker 1: We tried a bit earlier.
Speaker 4: So when you try to call up the app, it'll
Speaker 4: get what do you get? What does it show?
Speaker 2: It just keeps loading, keeps a.
Speaker 1: Load and just looks, you know, no tweets, no nothing,
Speaker 1: just you know, the little what is it called it the.
Speaker 2: Beach Ball of doom.
Speaker 4: It's the beach Ball of Doom. Okay, Max. So you
Speaker 4: still can't access it as we speak. And that's been
Speaker 4: the case, as you said, what for going over a
Speaker 4: month now, right.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think it was August thirty or thirty first
Speaker 1: that it first went down.
Speaker 4: Okay, So the better part essentially all of September, Musk
Speaker 4: has said he's done these things, he's shut down these
Speaker 4: accounts that the Supreme Court wanted to shut down, and
Speaker 4: he's now got a legal representative in the country. But
Speaker 4: for Gimo and ies I guess that's just not quite
Speaker 4: enough yet, is that right?
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's right. So he gave the company until Friday
Speaker 1: to file additional paperwork, which is essentially proof that he
Speaker 1: hired legal representation, wants things to be notarized and you know,
Speaker 1: just full proof that yes, this is the legal representative.
Speaker 1: They can be held accountable. And he also asked the
Speaker 1: regulatory bodies on NATHEL to ensure that they've paid all
Speaker 1: the fines that they owe from previous rulings before he
Speaker 1: allows it to before he'll decide.
Speaker 4: It's like a million bucks, right, it's like three and
Speaker 4: a half million dollars, okay, But basically this guy's not
Speaker 4: messing around. I mean he's like, you may say these things,
Speaker 4: all right, show me the money and show me bring
Speaker 4: me your counsel. I want to speak with this person.
Speaker 1: All the paperwork, all the bureaucracy, I want it, and
Speaker 1: then all decide.
Speaker 4: And X is a pretty big deal there in Brazil. Right,
Speaker 4: as far as social media giants go, it's.
Speaker 1: Pretty widely used. It's not like when it went down.
Speaker 1: It was not the chaos of when what'sapp went down
Speaker 1: in twenty sixteen, also because of a court order that
Speaker 1: was chaos, but this was weird. I think the latest
Speaker 1: numbers that we have are about twenty million active users,
Speaker 1: which is pretty hefty. It's not it doesn't compare to
Speaker 1: What's app or YouTube, but it's still pretty widely used.
Speaker 1: I think the survey one survey that we had was
Speaker 1: about a third of smartphone users had it installed.
Speaker 4: That is indeed a pretty big number. Nine Max. I mean,
Speaker 4: here's the thing. We had the sense on this show
Speaker 4: a few weeks ago, you and Kurt Wagner as well,
Speaker 4: that as big a market as Brazil is for X
Speaker 4: in some ways twenty million users and so on and
Speaker 4: so forth, that ultimately, in terms of the nickels and
Speaker 4: dimes that generated for the company, it wasn't enough for
Speaker 4: Musk really to worry about it. And because the whole
Speaker 4: thing had been come in in this pitched battle over
Speaker 4: free speech with the Brazilian Supreme Court judge it and
Speaker 4: he had kind of become a cause celeb, and so
Speaker 4: it was a good fight to fight. But the way
Speaker 4: he suddenly just absolutely caved, bang bang bang and acquiesced
Speaker 4: everything Jim what Ies was asking for. I guess he
Speaker 4: didn't need the money in the end, you know, there are.
Speaker 2: Some memes are not worth the cost.
Speaker 3: And you know, when you Elon Musk walked into the
Speaker 3: Twitter headquarters with the sink, like I assume he had
Speaker 3: to send an intern to home depot.
Speaker 2: That costs the interns.
Speaker 3: Labor and the you know, one hundred and fifty bucks
Speaker 3: for that sink, And maybe that was worth it.
Speaker 2: But here we're talking.
Speaker 3: About a bunch of costs and I think what probably
Speaker 3: happened over the course of this month is that they
Speaker 3: started to add up in his mind. So so yes,
Speaker 3: it's true that revenue in terms of advertising revenue from
Speaker 3: Brazil is not significant, but as Kurt pointed out when
Speaker 3: we talked about this, as far as a number of users,
Speaker 3: it's actually one of the bigger markets. And you know,
Speaker 3: if we've learned anything over the last couple of years
Speaker 3: of Elon Musk's ownership of Twitter, now x he doesn't
Speaker 3: care that much about advertising revenue, but he really cares
Speaker 3: about engagement. And if you just like pull out a
Speaker 3: bunch of users like that is going to show up,
Speaker 3: and then.
Speaker 4: Why do you care about engagement without the revenue? I mean, ultimately,
Speaker 4: at the end of the day.
Speaker 2: He's building a new model.
Speaker 3: David he is. He is charging people a subscription fee.
Speaker 3: He's also interested in influence. So like advertising revenue, right,
Speaker 3: it's it's been devalued in his mind. So but what
Speaker 3: hasn't been devalued, I don't think is number of users.
Speaker 3: He constantly is bragging about how many users are in
Speaker 3: X and also.
Speaker 4: From the style right, Well, I don't think it's just
Speaker 4: about look at the size of my crowd.
Speaker 3: It's not just about his ego though, I mean, part
Speaker 3: of what makes this thing worth it in his mind,
Speaker 3: I think is number one, like influence, which is about
Speaker 3: number of users. And number two he is trying to
Speaker 3: build a subscription model and having a lot of users,
Speaker 3: you know, is the way to do that.
Speaker 2: So those are things that I think hurt him. The
Speaker 2: other thing is like.
Speaker 3: There are a lot of like very active accounts in Brazil,
Speaker 3: some of which Elon Musk you know follows and others
Speaker 3: that are just like they're you know. One of the
Speaker 3: funny things about this band was that you had like
Speaker 3: random fan accounts, random meme accounts, just just these big
Speaker 3: X accounts that happen to be run by Brazilians that
Speaker 3: were went offline.
Speaker 2: So I think that's one.
Speaker 3: Thing and the last thing is like Brazil has ways
Speaker 3: to hurt at Elon Musk outside of x You know,
Speaker 3: we talked about the potential for freezing assets, you know,
Speaker 3: for attacking his other businesses, Like you don't really want
Speaker 3: to pick a fight with a large country if you
Speaker 3: can help it.
Speaker 2: And I think in that sense this was inevitable.
Speaker 4: Yeah. And I also believe it was inevitable because on
Speaker 4: Brazil being a large country. This is a very important
Speaker 4: point here. I mean, it seems to me that when
Speaker 4: he got initially locked in this battle with them, he
Speaker 4: some way, somehow convinced himself that Jimurai's in the Supreme
Speaker 4: Court of Brazil were going to capitulate. That was never
Speaker 4: going to happen. I mean, you should just call up
Speaker 4: Brazil in a map. Okay is geographically a very very
Speaker 4: large place, larger than the continental United States, and like
Speaker 4: the US, it's it suffers a bit from big country itis.
Speaker 4: It carries itself that way in international forms. And there
Speaker 4: was no way in hell alischandri Jimurais was going to say,
Speaker 4: you know what, Elon Musk, You're right, let me rever
Speaker 4: all these orders I made, and I'm gonna let you
Speaker 4: operate here in the country without striking down those accounts
Speaker 4: and without having a legal representative here, that was a
Speaker 4: losing hand, and perhaps he came to realize that.
Speaker 3: It is also the problem of the precedent right. So
Speaker 3: part of the part of the problem here with making
Speaker 3: taking a stand in Brazil is that there are other countries,
Speaker 3: countries with politics that Elon Musk might find even more objectionable,
Speaker 3: that have also asked X to throw out accounts and
Speaker 3: or have bandexed altogether. And Elon Musk had attempted to
Speaker 3: kind of walk this line, saying that he believed, as
Speaker 3: you're saying, David, that the actions of the Supreme Court,
Speaker 3: that the application of the law was somehow unlawful, like
Speaker 3: basically attempting to say, like, well, this is just a
Speaker 3: dispute over the reading of the law. As if, as
Speaker 3: you say that that that the Justice would bret back down,
Speaker 3: which of course didn't happen. If he had, if he
Speaker 3: had sort of tried to play this out, it would
Speaker 3: create all sorts of problems in other countries, In Turkey,
Speaker 3: in China, you know, anywhere where you have countries attempting
Speaker 3: to restrict speech, which is a lot of countries.
Speaker 4: Julia leto let me ask you this on the topic
Speaker 4: of losing engagement and losing numbers there there has been
Speaker 4: some migration from X users to other platforms there in Brazil.
Speaker 4: Has there not been?
Speaker 1: Yeah, there has been. They were losing active users even
Speaker 1: before this, as I think globally is the case as well.
Speaker 1: Correct me if I'm wrong, But we did see. I
Speaker 1: think the main ones were Threads, which is owned by Meta,
Speaker 1: and Blue Sky, which was founded by Jack Dorsey. Both
Speaker 1: look very similar to Twitter and both saw a big
Speaker 1: inflow in the lead up and right before Twitter went down,
Speaker 1: politicians and celebrities and influencers started tweeting their handles in
Speaker 1: these platforms so they wouldn't lose the following.
Speaker 4: Now, did you yourself go over to believe hire threats?
Speaker 1: I did not go into Blue Sky? I did.
Speaker 5: I did.
Speaker 1: I did go into Threads.
Speaker 2: I did.
Speaker 4: And now okay, now, but now that X is coming back, Julia,
Speaker 4: are you going to shut Threads down? You're right back
Speaker 4: on X or no, you're sold on Threads. I will.
Speaker 1: I will keep it open, I see, but I will if, if, if,
Speaker 1: and when it's restored, I will go back.
Speaker 4: To people sending you like you were trying to watch
Speaker 4: the debate, the US debate, the Kamala Harris Donald Trump debate.
Speaker 4: You know, that was the kind of thing you to
Speaker 4: typically would have followed on X. Unable to use simply
Speaker 4: what we're like send screenshots by people outside of the
Speaker 4: country pretty much.
Speaker 1: Yeah, both, And it was we are having local elections
Speaker 1: here as well, which is also playing into this dynamic
Speaker 1: of Musk and the Supreme Court. But watching a political
Speaker 1: debate without Twitter or without.
Speaker 2: X is very different.
Speaker 3: I'm curious, like it's an interesting, sort of like natural
Speaker 3: experiment to have a country, just a large country with
Speaker 3: a big Twitter following, where you know there's a lot
Speaker 3: of very healthy political discourse, suddenly have no Twitter, Julia
Speaker 3: did has Does Brazil seem just like a less vibrant
Speaker 3: place over the last month without this town Square, this
Speaker 3: amazing app that we're all addicted to a little bit.
Speaker 1: I think it's harder to find stuff right, and it's
Speaker 1: harder to find common ground through these conversations because they're
Speaker 1: all Some are on Blue Sky and some are on threads,
Speaker 1: and some are on WhatsApp group. So you just have
Speaker 1: to get screenshots sent to you.
Speaker 4: The whole time. Okay, well, Julia, you know you're gonna
Speaker 4: have to let us know as soon as your account
Speaker 4: is working again, to great fanfare, we shall announce it
Speaker 4: here on this show. Thank you for joining us, and
Speaker 4: we'll have you on again too.
Speaker 1: Thank you.
Speaker 4: Now we say hello to Dana Hall. Hello, Dana, hey, hey,
Speaker 4: and we're going to talk all about the Chechen world
Speaker 4: ROMs and Cadaroff and his cybertrock and how Elon Kadaroff
Speaker 4: alleges has disabled it. What exactly is going on here
Speaker 4: and how did Kadaroff get his hands on one of
Speaker 4: these things again in the first place. Remind us.
Speaker 5: So this story is a little bit problematic for me
Speaker 5: because we have no way to actually verify if anything
Speaker 5: that this Chechnian warlord is saying is true. Right now,
Speaker 5: the cyber truck is only sold in North America. That said,
Speaker 5: some people in Europe and elsewhere have gotten their hands
Speaker 5: on them. They're importing them via third parties. So apparently
Speaker 5: he got his hands on a cyber truck, outfitted it
Speaker 5: with a machine gun, drove it to the front lines
Speaker 5: or used it, you know, in the war in Ukraine,
Speaker 5: and then alleged that Elon Musk had disabled it remotely.
Speaker 5: I mean, I can't verify if that that's true. Tesla
Speaker 5: does not have a comms team, so it's like we're
Speaker 5: sort of taking his you know, the whole news cycle
Speaker 5: around this was basically taking this Chechnian warlord at face value.
Speaker 5: And the people are like, you know, and I get it, like, oh,
Speaker 5: Tesla cybertruck warlord. That's like easy clicks for the news media.
Speaker 5: But I just have a problem with it because I
Speaker 5: really have no idea what is true and what is
Speaker 5: just sort of like a fake thing.
Speaker 3: We also Musk denied that he gave the original claim
Speaker 3: is that Musk gave him this truck. Musk denied it,
Speaker 3: you know, right immediately, and like I, like Dan, I
Speaker 3: think we should wait.
Speaker 4: But are we doubting that this guy actually has his
Speaker 4: hands on a truck and has fitted it with a
Speaker 4: machine gun, or were we saying we think that those
Speaker 4: are deep fakes.
Speaker 3: Or were I think it's very possible, as Dana says,
Speaker 3: that he managed to.
Speaker 2: Acquire one through a third party.
Speaker 3: That happens all the time in countries that are subject
Speaker 3: to sanctions, so totally possible that it happened here. I
Speaker 3: don't know what the You know, I'm not an expert
Speaker 3: on cyber truck authenticity or whatever, but I do think,
Speaker 3: like Dana is saying, we should regard these posts as
Speaker 3: having motivations that might not be might not be as
Speaker 3: explicit as just saying as just complaining elon Musk or
Speaker 3: thanking him or whatever. This very much, to me has
Speaker 3: felt like efforts by somebody who's very close to Vladimir
Speaker 3: Putin to get messaging out into the Western media, which
Speaker 3: has effectively here we are, we're talking about it, and.
Speaker 4: We are indeed talking about it. Now, let me at
Speaker 4: least ask you this part of it, though Dana he
Speaker 4: cut her off, alleges that indeed that Musk disabled it,
Speaker 4: and I need to ask you this is this a
Speaker 4: thing so you can all of a sudden, like I
Speaker 4: could be driving a cyber truck down the highway at
Speaker 4: seventy two miles an hour or abiding the law, so
Speaker 4: at fifty five and all of a sudden, you know,
Speaker 4: big brother turns it off on me and I lose momentum,
Speaker 4: Like is that is that possible?
Speaker 5: That's the other thing, like it could have just broken
Speaker 5: down right, Like I mean, the cyber truck is still
Speaker 5: in fairly early production, so it could have just been
Speaker 5: broken down and he's claiming that Musk himself disabled it. Yeah,
Speaker 5: that said, like Tesla is very much a software based company.
Speaker 5: You know a lot of people always talk about how
Speaker 5: the vehicles are iPhones on wheels. I'm sure that like
Speaker 5: if Elon and his like it and security team really
Speaker 5: wanted to, they could like go deep into the bowels
Speaker 5: of their security infrastructure and like low hate the vehicle
Speaker 5: via the vinn and somehow like send some software to
Speaker 5: you know to stop it. But I'm not under the
Speaker 5: impression that this is something that like Tesla actively does.
Speaker 5: I think a more plausible explanation is that it just
Speaker 5: broke down.
Speaker 2: Well, especially was on the bet so third party actor.
Speaker 3: Like you know, first of all, there have been accounts
Speaker 3: of other vehicles, non Tesla vehicles that have been remotely
Speaker 3: accessed by hackers. Like Tesla isn't alone in having a
Speaker 3: car that is connected to the internet that like they're
Speaker 3: like this stuff has come up with other vehicle makes
Speaker 3: where hackers have have reported exploits that they say have
Speaker 3: been able to disable vehicles. There are also third parties
Speaker 3: probably involved. There's like a chain of software providers and
Speaker 3: so on, and if he really did acquire this cyber truck,
Speaker 3: he acquired it through a broker, so so some other
Speaker 3: third party who could have put something in the in
Speaker 3: the like, It's just it just seems like there are
Speaker 3: so many unknowns here that it's almost impossible to say
Speaker 3: anything definitive or useful about this, except that, like the
Speaker 3: cyber truck is a meme, and that meme has reached Russia.
Speaker 5: And the cyber truck is a vehicle that I think
Speaker 5: Musk would clearly love for the military to think of
Speaker 5: as a procurement option. It's this apocalyptic car designed for
Speaker 5: you know, zombies and life on Mars and apparently war,
Speaker 5: and so I think that there's like some upside to
Speaker 5: this being out there. But I'm just sort of frustrated that,
Speaker 5: like we went through a whole news cycle of like
Speaker 5: credulidity based on like what a Russian warlord wrote on telegram,
Speaker 5: and I just think that, you know, in this era
Speaker 5: of disinformation and deep fakes, like I would prefer that
Speaker 5: people just exercise a little bit more caution before believing
Speaker 5: that there's any validity to this whatsoever.
Speaker 4: So, you know, by the way he does counter off
Speaker 4: again forever much we want to believe him. Here he
Speaker 4: said that the cyber truck Max was performed its combat
Speaker 4: tasks beautifully. Now I'm just trying to guess what we
Speaker 4: think these tasks were. You know, was it actually in
Speaker 4: the front line or was it like making dunkin donut
Speaker 4: runs for the generals or something.
Speaker 3: I have a hard like Dan, I have a hard
Speaker 3: time believing any part of the story, including that part
Speaker 3: of the story. The cyber truck has gotten kind of
Speaker 3: middling reviews from car reviewers. I don't expect that military
Speaker 3: reviewers are going to offer anything other than that. Although again,
Speaker 3: it does have the look, and if you care about
Speaker 3: the look, maybe, but I just don't. There's there's just like,
Speaker 3: very little evidence that this is even a good way
Speaker 3: to like haul wood, let alone move around your move
Speaker 3: along a battlefield.
Speaker 5: Yeah, what's the charging infrastructure there? That's my other question.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I don't know. That's you know, that's it. That
Speaker 4: is a very good question. But Max, to someone who's
Speaker 4: hold a lot of wood in my life, yes, no,
Speaker 4: I don't think that that's a wood hauling vehicle.
Speaker 1: Dan.
Speaker 4: I'm sorry to obsess on this point though, but on
Speaker 4: the disabling of this thing. I'm just worried if all
Speaker 4: of a sudden, my you know, my truck, you know,
Speaker 4: as I'm driving down the road, is going to turn
Speaker 4: off on me. What you're telling me is it's not
Speaker 4: necessarily if this technology exists, in this ability to exist,
Speaker 4: that big brother can do this to you. It's not
Speaker 4: about whether your vehicle is an EV or a combustion
Speaker 4: engine vehicle. It's about just how connected you ultimately are
Speaker 4: to the Internet and how much you know, how much
Speaker 4: of a smart vehicle it is. That's what would make
Speaker 4: it to separate.
Speaker 5: I mean, Chessa just has a lot of data about
Speaker 5: its vehicles. Like there was a there was an incident
Speaker 5: like years ago where certain vehicle owners, instead of charging
Speaker 5: their Teslas at home, would go to like the local
Speaker 5: supercharger and charge and they were kind of like using
Speaker 5: the superchargers more than they were supposed to, and they
Speaker 5: were like supercharger scoff laws, and like Tesla knew who
Speaker 5: they were because they have the data analytics about like
Speaker 5: charging use and they sent letters to some owners that
Speaker 5: was like, hey, you should really charge at home, and
Speaker 5: so they just know a lot about your vehicle there's
Speaker 5: you know, so this is just the way that vehicles
Speaker 5: are going to be going forward, Like especially if you
Speaker 5: have a vehicle, this very software to find and Tesla
Speaker 5: doesn't use third parties they do, you know, they buy
Speaker 5: and large do all their software in house, so they
Speaker 5: have a lot of information about you. Whether they're actively
Speaker 5: disabling vehicles, I have no.
Speaker 3: Idea, yeah, and I just think, like clearly, both of
Speaker 3: these messages have seemed to feel like deliberate attempts. Both
Speaker 3: of what mess both the original claim that he had
Speaker 3: that here look at me driving around me a Chechen
Speaker 3: warlord in a sanctioned country. That el must gifted me
Speaker 3: this thing, which would be a sanctions violation, and the
Speaker 3: claim that Tesla remotely disabled it, which would be damaging
Speaker 3: if everyone believed that if that were if that were
Speaker 3: true thing, if Tesla just goes around, you know, bricking.
Speaker 2: These is what I'm trying to figure that out, that'd
Speaker 2: be very damaging.
Speaker 3: So to me, these feel like both in their own way,
Speaker 3: attempts to somehow destabilize effect put out some information about
Speaker 3: Musk that is damaged.
Speaker 4: So you think this guy is short Tesla stock.
Speaker 2: If I had to guess which direction he would is in.
Speaker 4: I would guess short Okay, you know what that I'm sure.
Speaker 3: That Chechen warloads have very you know, robust ethics codes
Speaker 3: around short selling, so I wouldn't I wouldn't want to
Speaker 3: accuse him of doing anything.
Speaker 4: But okay, So given how both Max and Dana feel
Speaker 4: like the entire thing, the entire episode and incident are preposterous,
Speaker 4: We're moving on. Okay. You know, Max, it's been a
Speaker 4: while since we've had a real feud watch here at
Speaker 4: the end. So it's been weeks and weeks so long
Speaker 4: that I've heard from some of our listeners they're wondering
Speaker 4: if you're taking your job seriously enough here.
Speaker 2: Oh my god, there have been so many good feuds
Speaker 2: as you so where.
Speaker 4: You've been, all right, So if you're back to you,
Speaker 4: You've got not one but two for us this way.
Speaker 3: And they are both related to land use disputes. So
Speaker 3: the first is a lawsuit brought by the card company
Speaker 3: Cards Against is a game company, I should say, Cards
Speaker 3: against Humanity. They make sort of tabletop games.
Speaker 5: Like Apples to Apples X rated version or something.
Speaker 2: I always find it like to not be the most fun.
Speaker 3: I'm more of a catan guy or whatever, but like,
Speaker 3: you know, whatever to each his own, and they as
Speaker 3: part of a cards against humanity, has a sort of
Speaker 3: anti establishment.
Speaker 2: There's a puckishness to everything they do.
Speaker 3: During Donald Trump's presidency, they did some like a crowdfunding
Speaker 3: effort to buy a swath of land on the Texas
Speaker 3: border to stop form President Trump from building a border wall.
Speaker 3: And they have like taken this swath of land and
Speaker 3: used it as ammunition in a new dispute with Elon Musk,
Speaker 3: claiming that it's close to this launch site where SpaceX
Speaker 3: shoots rockets off, claiming that SpaceX has essentially trashed their
Speaker 3: land and asking for damages. And it's a very I
Speaker 3: was trying to pull up the page that lays out
Speaker 3: these allegations, but it's like a very entertaining complaint, essentially
Speaker 3: saying we bought this land to mess with the efforts
Speaker 3: of a racist billionaire. But now there's an even more
Speaker 3: racist billionaire who is who you know who We've turned
Speaker 3: our attention to, that being Elon Musk.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean, I gotta say I love this feud, right,
Speaker 4: I mean, this is a fantastic feud. And I feel
Speaker 4: like a little bit like we were saying earlier about
Speaker 4: you shouldn't mess with Brazil. Don't take on Cards against Humanity.
Speaker 4: They're they're they're ferocious, Max, And so I also believe right,
Speaker 4: correct me if I'm wrong that, according to the lawsuit,
Speaker 4: Musk and SpaceX tried to pony up the money and
Speaker 4: hand hand Cards against Humanity some money and buy the land.
Speaker 4: Cards against Humanity said, hey, this is like a tiny
Speaker 4: little amount. This is a joe. Come on, we're not
Speaker 4: taking this seriously. But you know, if you think about it, Max,
Speaker 4: who better to own Cards against Humanity than Elon Musk?
Speaker 4: Just but I would actually thought that maybe he found
Speaker 4: it and created the game. It's a perfect game.
Speaker 2: It does it. You're so right, David.
Speaker 3: I mean, I will say they so they've included some
Speaker 3: pictures of this land, and it really shows you that these,
Speaker 3: I mean, the pictures look bad. Like it looks like
Speaker 3: there's a before and after, and like one of them
Speaker 3: looks like a nice like looking marsh and the other
Speaker 3: looks like an industrial site. And I do think like
Speaker 3: Elon Musk has made a lot of efforts to kind
Speaker 3: of dismiss the concerns of environmentalists as just kind of
Speaker 3: like red tape or seeing this kind of extended dispute
Speaker 3: with the the FAA, the aviation authorities over these sort
Speaker 3: of reauthorizing SpaceX disputes with the EPA.
Speaker 2: Like this stuff, it like doesn't look good.
Speaker 3: And I think, obviously he's gonna this is gonna roll
Speaker 3: right off his back. But it isn't necessarily helpful for
Speaker 3: a guy who has a lot of fans or used
Speaker 3: to anyway have a lot of fans in the environmental movement.
Speaker 4: But Dana, this is in line with somebody who likes
Speaker 4: to push the envelope and whould much much more prefer
Speaker 4: to ask for forgiveness than permission, right, Yeah, And I.
Speaker 5: Think that this Cards against Humanity tidbit was like deep
Speaker 5: in a really well reported Reuter story that was just
Speaker 5: all about how vastly SpaceX has kind of changed Bokachika,
Speaker 5: you know, which is where Starbase is and buying up
Speaker 5: all the land around it. And yeah, I mean, Musk
Speaker 5: does not have a lot of tolerance for the slow
Speaker 5: wheels of government bureaucracy.
Speaker 3: The other thing I'll say is, and we're probably gonna
Speaker 3: have to talk about this more in a subsequent episode
Speaker 3: or episodes, But like Donald Trump is talking a lot
Speaker 3: about Elon Musk these days, and has made comments about
Speaker 3: Mars and the need, you know, suggesting that he's just
Speaker 3: going to like hire Elon Musk to fly some rockets there.
Speaker 3: This story and that together, it strikes me that that
Speaker 3: if SpaceX were to become Trump coded, where like, if
Speaker 3: you just start to think of this as like a
Speaker 3: Trump thing, that it's not. This isn't about humanity getting
Speaker 3: to Mars or expanding, you know, its ambitions or sort
Speaker 3: of all of those like really you know values that
Speaker 3: I think many people share about how how wonderful the
Speaker 3: space exploration is. Like if it just turns into this
Speaker 3: partisan thing, that would be very bad for you, Musk.
Speaker 3: So like, I don't think this is not going to
Speaker 3: damage him, but I do think there is this kind
Speaker 3: of drumbeat of ways in which his sort of political
Speaker 3: support for Donald Trump and his shift to the right
Speaker 3: is creating exposure and like legal exposure, but also cultural exposure.
Speaker 4: Okay, very good. Now listen to a certain extent, I
Speaker 4: feel our rustiness here in the feud Watch segment, because
Speaker 4: I think one of the rules of feud Watch is
Speaker 4: you can't take any of it that seriously Okay, we're trying.
Speaker 4: You're trying to break down a fight between Elon Musk
Speaker 4: and the men and women of Cards Against Humanity. Come on, now,
Speaker 4: you have a second feuture.
Speaker 3: Okay, now this is This one is between Venodekosla, who
Speaker 3: is a very famous, very accomplished venture capitalist also a
Speaker 3: donor to democratic candidates. Like, it's so much back and forth.
Speaker 3: They're just they've been mean tweeting each other for like
Speaker 3: two days. He started by attempting to sort of criticize
Speaker 3: some of Elon Musk's migration posts about migrants and essentially
Speaker 3: calling Elon out for repeating the lie that that Haitians
Speaker 3: are eating cats and dogs, and that devolved into a
Speaker 3: lengthy back and forth in which Elon brought up an
Speaker 3: earlier dispute, an earlier land dispute where Venode Cosla had
Speaker 3: been trying to stop the public from accessing a beach.
Speaker 3: Elon used a fake sign that said no pleabs allowed.
Speaker 2: They posted that. Venode responded that that that's a notion.
Speaker 3: You need to do a pull it, and lots of
Speaker 3: back and forth and I really it really just shows
Speaker 3: like Twitter is not the best place to resolve your
Speaker 3: differences and as a result, we have these two very
Speaker 3: wealthy guys, very powerful guys, kind of doing a back
Speaker 3: and forth like crazy, like like schoolyard style.
Speaker 4: Schoolyard style. I don't know. I still of the two
Speaker 4: feuds you brought here this week, I still feel like
Speaker 4: the Cards against Humanity is the better feud at the
Speaker 4: two first of because I just like saying cards against humanity.
Speaker 4: I mean that that's part of it.
Speaker 3: But I also like, can we talk about the the
Speaker 3: opposite of a feud. I just want to say that
Speaker 3: I had predicted that there that there might be a
Speaker 3: closing together.
Speaker 4: Predicted like what you told your kids or something.
Speaker 1: No.
Speaker 3: On this podcast, on this pot between Georgia Maloney, the
Speaker 3: head of State of Italy, and Elon Maloney is here
Speaker 3: in New York.
Speaker 2: Elon gave her an award.
Speaker 3: He said she was beautiful on the inside and the outside.
Speaker 1: She's also someone who is authentic, honest, truthful, and that
Speaker 1: kind of always be said about politicians.
Speaker 3: It really feels like they had a connection already, but
Speaker 3: it feels like that connection, that alliance, whatever you want
Speaker 3: to call it, it has deepened, and like she's got
Speaker 3: to be one of his favorite heads of state.
Speaker 4: If not his favorite, right, then are we gonna grant
Speaker 4: Max this point? Are we gonna Are we gonna reward
Speaker 4: him and say, indeed he nailed this prediction.
Speaker 2: He did.
Speaker 5: I don't remember it was several months ago.
Speaker 2: But yes, he did.
Speaker 3: I predict that Elon Musk and Georgia Maloney, the leader
Speaker 3: of Italy, will intensify their alliance.
Speaker 5: However that means, and I mean they are united around
Speaker 5: immigration about concerns about the falling birth rate. I think
Speaker 5: it's interesting that like she My understanding is that she
Speaker 5: chose him to get the award.
Speaker 3: They both really do seem to be whatever to appreciate
Speaker 3: the other, and you kind of get it. I mean,
Speaker 3: Maloney is conservative but has has been effective as a
Speaker 3: prime minister. She kind of maybe the embodiment of the
Speaker 3: kind of world leader that Elon Musk admires that maybe
Speaker 3: even in a way that Donald Trump is not.
Speaker 4: Okay, very good Max. So that was a little bonus.
Speaker 4: I thought we only had few well done, We're going
Speaker 4: to leave it there, Max. Dana, as always, thank you
Speaker 4: great to be here, Thanks for having us. This episode
Speaker 4: was produced by Stacy Wong, Naomi Shaven, and Rayhan Harmantier
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Speaker 4: fact checks. Our supervising producer is Magnus Henrikson. The Elonin
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Speaker 4: Brendan Francis Newnham is our executive producer, and Sage Bauman
Speaker 4: is the head of Bloomberg Podcasts. A big thanks as
Speaker 4: always to our supporter Joel Weber. I'm David Papadopoulos. If
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