Speaker 1: A zone media, this could be a giant disaster. Those
Speaker 1: were the words that Elon Musk texted biographer Walter Isaacson
Speaker 1: on a Friday evening in September twenty twenty two, claiming
Speaker 1: that the Ukrainian military was attempting a sneak attack on
Speaker 1: the Russian naval fleet in Sebastopol. In the annexed region
Speaker 1: of Crimea must have been providing starlink Internet to the
Speaker 1: Ukrainian military for months as part of their ongoing conflict
Speaker 1: against Russia's invasion, and the resourceful Ukrainians began using stalink
Speaker 1: as a way to remotely control the Kamikazi drones. Musk,
Speaker 1: having spoken to a Russian ambassador, saw Crimea as a
Speaker 1: red lion that, when crossed, would escalate the conflict, potentially
Speaker 1: even provoking a nuclear retaliation, and so he acted disabling
Speaker 1: or depending on who you ask, refusing to enable starlink
Speaker 1: access in the Crimea region. When the Ukrainian drones serbs
Speaker 1: approached their targets, they suddenly stopped communicating with the operators
Speaker 1: and eventually washed up ashore, harmless and impotent. While the
Speaker 1: specific details of this episode are hazy, the core truth
Speaker 1: is unambiguously clear. Elon Musk is a supremely powerful individual
Speaker 1: and through action or inaction, has the ability to influence
Speaker 1: the outcome of combat operations and the bloodiest war inflicted
Speaker 1: upon Europe in generations. It's a level of power typically
Speaker 1: only reserved for nation state actors, not tech company CEOs.
Speaker 1: Throughout history, we've seen plenty of examples of individuals and
Speaker 1: companies with outsized country like power and influence. Musk isn't
Speaker 1: unique in that regard, nor is he the sole cautionary
Speaker 1: tale about why this shouldn't be allowed to happen. As
Speaker 1: a private individual operating within his capacities as CEO, he's
Speaker 1: unconstrained by democratic accountability, and as a private businessman he
Speaker 1: has his own conflicts of interest, from Tesla's long history
Speaker 1: of sourcing aluminum from Russian companies to his contacts with
Speaker 1: the highest echelons of Russian leadership, including Vladimir Putin himself. Historically,
Speaker 1: the only real accountability mechanism for people like Muscus to
Speaker 1: be in the media, and yet in this case, the
Speaker 1: media is chosen instead to fate the Elon Musk creation
Speaker 1: myth that he's a trailblazing real life Tony Stark that
Speaker 1: will take humanity to the stars, rather than asking him
Speaker 1: many hard questions of any kind. This situation is the
Speaker 1: product of a media industry dominated by journalists seeking access
Speaker 1: to popular public figures, pulling their punches in the process.
Speaker 1: The most notable access journalist is Kara Swisher, who spent
Speaker 1: decades covering the tech industry with a pantomime like aggression,
Speaker 1: asking the quote unquote hard questions without ever really pushing
Speaker 1: the level of discover that might make a source un
Speaker 1: willing to participate. Swisher famously, in an interview during the
Speaker 1: All Things Digital conference in twenty ten, convinced Meta CEO
Speaker 1: then called Facebook Mark Zuckerberg to take off his hoodie
Speaker 1: after asking him a challenging question about Facebook's invasion of privacy,
Speaker 1: only to be distracted by the design of the inside
Speaker 1: of what he was wearing, effectively objecting to her own
Speaker 1: line of questioning for endstainment purposes. Eight years later, Swisher
Speaker 1: would interview Zuckerberg about Cambridge Analytica and Russian interference in
Speaker 1: the twenty sixteen elections, lobbing softball questions like make a
Speaker 1: case for keeping info wars on Facebook and responding to
Speaker 1: Zuckerberg outright saying he wouldn't ban Holocaust and Sandy Hook
Speaker 1: deniers by asking how it made Zuckerberg feel when people
Speaker 1: said Facebook killed people Myanmar. The Swisher house style is simple,
Speaker 1: ask a big meeting question, and then failed to interrogate
Speaker 1: a single answer in any way, shape or form. Around
Speaker 1: a month later, Swisher would interview Elon Musk, who at
Speaker 1: that point indid harassment campaigns against reporters, called a man
Speaker 1: saving children a pedophile, and had his companies face multiple
Speaker 1: allegations of sexual harassment and racism. When asked about his
Speaker 1: fights with the press over Twitter must claim that the
Speaker 1: Wall Street Journal, whose Swisher used to work for, outright
Speaker 1: lied about investigation into Tesla's production figures, to which Swisher
Speaker 1: asked him if he realized the dangers of him saying
Speaker 1: such things about the press and need to help Musk
Speaker 1: paper over his claims, saying that he quote just doesn't
Speaker 1: like falsehoods. One of the richest and most powerful men
Speaker 1: in the world sat before Swisher, and her interrogation involved
Speaker 1: asking him simple questions about why he was doing things,
Speaker 1: lightly teasing him and saying that he looks and I
Speaker 1: quote rested in calm to be clear, this is an
Speaker 1: ultra powerful billionaire, and this is a was at the
Speaker 1: time enterprising journalist who everyone looked to. In April twenty
Speaker 1: twenty two, the week that Musk announced the Twitter acquisition,
Speaker 1: Swisher gave a strange interview to James D. Walsh of
Speaker 1: The New Yorker, defending Musk, who had of course waived
Speaker 1: du diligence on the acquisition, did not seem to have
Speaker 1: a single clear plan about how he might run the same.
Speaker 1: She claimed that you couldn't pin Musk down, that he
Speaker 1: was quite complex, and that we would be surprised about
Speaker 1: what he likes and doesn't like. Musk, who has invented
Speaker 1: none of the core products that make him rich, is
Speaker 1: a quote visionary that gave Swisher genuine answers and arguably
Speaker 1: the most damning things she could have said, would call
Speaker 1: her back. That was her litmus test that he would
Speaker 1: return her calls. Her ultimate defensive Musk was that and
Speaker 1: I quote inventors were very difficult, problematic people, and the
Speaker 1: moderation on Twitter was not working at the time of acquisition.
Speaker 1: These are all, of course demonstrably force based on the
Speaker 1: events that followed the growth of hate speech the lack
Speaker 1: of accountability, that biggest face on the platform, and the
Speaker 1: fact that every third post seems to be some kind
Speaker 1: of spambot, either selling t shirts or pornography or cryptocurrency scams.
Speaker 1: Swisher only turned on Musk when he emailed her calling
Speaker 1: her an asshole in November twenty twenty two, including a
Speaker 1: screenshot were according to Swisher, she was actually defending him,
Speaker 1: saying that the US government should pay Elon Musk for starling.
Speaker 1: Since then, Musk has gone from a difficult to pin
Speaker 1: down visionary to carver Swisher calling his social network a
Speaker 1: and this is agonizingly horribly written a thunderdome of toxic asininity. Swisher,
Speaker 1: it appears, only worried about what she'd called Musk's price
Speaker 1: of cocktail of ignorance and big ego until he was
Speaker 1: rude to her. One of the most famous tech journalists
Speaker 1: in the world, who has failed to take any real
Speaker 1: shot at any of the people she's questioned across decades
Speaker 1: of doing this, has now been reduced to making epic
Speaker 1: dunks that sound like a twenty one year old Harry
Speaker 1: Potter fan trying to cast a spell. It's embarrassing. Swisher
Speaker 1: isn't the sole media figure guilty of having treated Elon
Speaker 1: Musk with kid gloves or treating his bloviating with otherwise
Speaker 1: on due credulity. This is a problem that affects almost
Speaker 1: every news outlet and reporter that covers billionaires. The assumption
Speaker 1: is always that billionaires will act with empathy, patience, and grace,
Speaker 1: three things that Musk, Bezo, Zuckerberg, and the Ilk totally lack.
Speaker 1: Failing that, one would suppose they'd act like a normal person,
Speaker 1: a losing proposition. If you've ever read Jeff best as
Speaker 1: his texts, these people are not like us. They do
Speaker 1: not experience human struggle. They don't have bills or bosses
Speaker 1: or fear of anything, let alone authority. Each and every
Speaker 1: billionaire is effectively above the law, and that is the
Speaker 1: place that you must start to understand them. It's deeply frustrating,
Speaker 1: especially when you consider the myriad of opportunities where the
Speaker 1: media could have taken must task and held him accountable.
Speaker 1: Take High Poloop, for example, Musk's concept for a high
Speaker 1: speed mass transit system where pressurized capsules would hurtle between
Speaker 1: cities through vacuum tubes at speeds as fast as seven
Speaker 1: hundred and sixty miles an hour. Hyperloop Musk promise would
Speaker 1: allow commuters to travel between San Francisco and Los Angeles
Speaker 1: in as little as thirty minutes, and with the network
Speaker 1: powered primarily by solar power, with no real environmental impact.
Speaker 1: If anything, this could have been a much bigger deal
Speaker 1: than Tesla. High speed transit that doesn't burn fossil fuels.
Speaker 1: Could truly have changed the world. So what do you
Speaker 1: think happened? Do you think that must delivered on this
Speaker 1: on this product that helped play a vital role in
Speaker 1: cementing his image as a real life Tony Stark. Not
Speaker 1: only would it be faster and cheaper than anything currently
Speaker 1: in existence, but it'd be greener too. What followed was
Speaker 1: a gushing or at least gredulous flow of media coverage,
Speaker 1: including from The Washington Post and The New York Times,
Speaker 1: both papers of record. It wasn't until the hype gradually
Speaker 1: died down that people began asking serious questions about Hypepoloop's viability.
Speaker 1: An exhaustive report published by the Transportation Research Laboratory earlier
Speaker 1: this year raises serious questions about the feasibility of hyperloop,
Speaker 1: particularly when it comes to passenger transportation writers, it noted,
Speaker 1: would be exposed to extreme physical and mental stress, with
Speaker 1: the noise, vibrations and rapid acceleration and deceleration inflicting an
Speaker 1: unknowable toll on the human body. Questions about safety still linger.
Speaker 1: And then there's the thorny issue of cost, with high
Speaker 1: bloop requiring an all new infrastructure. Even the shortest routes
Speaker 1: would involve a multi billion dollar upfront investment. These points
Speaker 1: were for the most part, absent entirely from the earliest
Speaker 1: coverage of highperloop. The media also missed the fact that
Speaker 1: hypeloop wasn't even a new idea. In the nineteenth century,
Speaker 1: countless inventors toyed with the notion of an atmospheric railway
Speaker 1: where vehicles traveled through a near vacuum environment on the
Speaker 1: momentum of pressurized air. A small demonstrator route was even
Speaker 1: built by Ismbard Kingdom Brunel, the legendary British engineer who
Speaker 1: designed the first transatlantic steamship. While Highpoloop differdence and meaningful ways,
Speaker 1: it was still, nonetheless, much like many Musk products, a
Speaker 1: derivative of an earlier idea. The boring company Musk's hilariously
Speaker 1: named tunnel. Boring startup earned similar credulous C coverage upon
Speaker 1: its inception, driven in no small part due to Musk's
Speaker 1: decision to raise working capital by selling branded flame throwers
Speaker 1: dubbed the not a flame Thrower to anyone that paid
Speaker 1: five hundred dollars. This stunt, aside, the Boring Company one
Speaker 1: praise due to its state admission to reduce the cost
Speaker 1: of digging tunnels, which are often an inevitable and expensive
Speaker 1: part of road and mass transportation development like hyperloop. The
Speaker 1: Boring Company fed into the Tony Stark image of a
Speaker 1: billionaire that could, through sheer force of will, change the
Speaker 1: world and fix once intractable problems. I quote Mashable when
Speaker 1: they said, must build machines to travel more efficiently on
Speaker 1: the Earth and above it. So traveling through Earth seems
Speaker 1: within the realm of his capabilities. If anyone can transform
Speaker 1: the seemingly absent minded half joke into world changing technology,
Speaker 1: it's Elon Musk, said The Guardian, and then reality here.
Speaker 1: The Boring Company's first commercial project, a one point seven
Speaker 1: mile tunnel in Las Vegas, where I in fact live,
Speaker 1: wasn't a traditional road tunnel or part of an underground
Speaker 1: metro system. It was in fact far less impressive, a
Speaker 1: single lane loop where human driven tests. There's varied passengers
Speaker 1: between points of interest in the Las Vegas Convention Center
Speaker 1: and where traffic jams are a routine frustration for passengers.
Speaker 1: Other projects in other cities, most notably Chicago and Los Angeles,
Speaker 1: have either been canceled or are on indefinite hiatus. There
Speaker 1: is nothing that the boring company has done. The tunnel
Speaker 1: in Vegas is useless. It's claustrophobic, it's ugly, feels like
Speaker 1: being in an airport lounge, except there's no food. It's strange.
Speaker 1: It doesn't feel like it solves a problem other than
Speaker 1: how can Elon must get more attention, and that really
Speaker 1: is what he craves. Musk's wafer thin skin, his volatility,
Speaker 1: and his propensity to overpromise an under the liver has
Speaker 1: never been a secret. While he's been able with some
Speaker 1: success to obfiscate a misdirect through a well crafted media persona,
Speaker 1: the clues have always been there. Musk's reality distortion field
Speaker 1: goes some way to explaining how he has managed to
Speaker 1: amass the extent of the power he has and how
Speaker 1: he cemented himself into our nation's most vital industries like transportation, communications, infrastructure,
Speaker 1: and social media. He has a fairly consistent battle plan.
Speaker 1: He makes a big promise, he delivers enough to make
Speaker 1: the media believe he's for real, and then he relies
Speaker 1: upon the fact that very few parts of the media
Speaker 1: will ever follow up with him. There is no challenging
Speaker 1: Elon Musk in the media. The thinnest amounts of criticism
Speaker 1: are usually met by a horde of crazed tesla fans,
Speaker 1: or at times Elon Musk himself. He's created the paper
Speaker 1: thin media image built on the smallest, thinnest structures of reality.
Speaker 1: He has found a way to manipulate the media using
Speaker 1: his large amounts of power, money, and his few friends.
Speaker 1: Elon mush Usk is a danger to society. He's a
Speaker 1: capricious demagogue, desperate for more power and attention, and he
Speaker 1: will do whatever he wants, whereever he wants, wherever he wants,
Speaker 1: because we are societally unprepared for billionaires. It's no longer healthy,
Speaker 1: or safe or honest to see Elon Musk as a
Speaker 1: dorky charlatan carrying sinks into offices or destroying social networks
Speaker 1: to settle insular beefs Elon Musk is a nation state
Speaker 1: level actor with a net worth larger than the GDP
Speaker 1: of Ukraine. He associates only with equally spurious reactionaries like
Speaker 1: Bill Maher, Ronda Santis, and David Sachs, and he's easily
Speaker 1: influenced by anyone who agrees with his thinly backed beliefs.
Speaker 1: Musk isn't polarizing. He's polarization given life, an empty man
Speaker 1: made of contrarianism and grievances, and he'll happily change the
Speaker 1: world based on his own personal beliefs. As a result
Speaker 1: of our market driven government and compliant media, Musk has
Speaker 1: caused and will continue to cause human suffering an actual
Speaker 1: death in his pursuit of fame, power, and capital. It's
Speaker 1: time to stop treating him as just an entrepreneur, an investor,
Speaker 1: an executive, or an industry blow hard. As a result
Speaker 1: of our market driven government and compliant media, Musk has
Speaker 1: caused and will continue to cause human suffering an actual
Speaker 1: death in his pursuit of fame, power and capital. It's
Speaker 1: time to stop treating him as just an entrepreneur, an investor,
Speaker 1: an executive, or an industry blow hard and see him
Speaker 1: as a man who has used his incredible wealth and
Speaker 1: status to twist the world to his petty, ignorant, and
Speaker 1: selfish desires. It's important to realize with complete clarity that
Speaker 1: Musk makes electric cars that are sold around the world
Speaker 1: and sells rockets to NASA. He runs Twitter X or
Speaker 1: whatever it's called these days, one of the largest communication
Speaker 1: networks in the world, and of course Starlink, the satellite
Speaker 1: isp used aroount the world that is specifically marketed to
Speaker 1: places that are otherwise inaccessi to traditional broadband. This is
Speaker 1: not just the goofy redditor posting epic means and saying
Speaker 1: exactly anymore. Elon Musk has chosen to and will continue
Speaker 1: to choose to use his influence over these networks to
Speaker 1: interfere with global events. And because the media and the
Speaker 1: government has been so utterly tepid in their approach to him,
Speaker 1: he's accumulated such power and influence that he is on
Speaker 1: some level unstoppable. Since his acquisition of Twitter in twenty
Speaker 1: twenty two and the subsequent layoffs of six thousand people,
Speaker 1: Musk has revealed to the world his deep seated reactionary
Speaker 1: beliefs and his noxious pathetic victim complex. He has become
Speaker 1: obsessed with the woke mind virus, a term that he
Speaker 1: uses to vaguely refer to everything from progressive education on
Speaker 1: college campuses to San Francisco's growing homeless problem. He's made
Speaker 1: Twitter's bot problem, one that he tried to use to
Speaker 1: cancel the original acquisition, significantly worse, littering replies with bots
Speaker 1: trying to sell you T shirts or make you join
Speaker 1: the latest script ocurrency scam, some of which even include
Speaker 1: Elon Musk's face. He took Twitter's verification system, a flawed
Speaker 1: yet workable solution to verifying whether a tweak came from
Speaker 1: the person who actually sent it, and turned it into
Speaker 1: an eight dollars a month's premium account that verifies nothing
Speaker 1: other than whether someone is capable of completing a credit
Speaker 1: card transaction, and by destroying Twitter's trust and safety team,
Speaker 1: Musk has allowed the world's real time communications channel to
Speaker 1: become one rife with racism and other hate speech, leading
Speaker 1: to Fortune five hundred advertisers worrying that the network and
Speaker 1: I quote perpetuates racism, which was raised in a Semaphore
Speaker 1: story from earlier in this year, Musk has shown he
Speaker 1: is more than willing to do things based on not
Speaker 1: what's good for the world, his businesses, or his users,
Speaker 1: but on what will confirm his biases and protect his
Speaker 1: financial interests. As a result of these moronic and malicious choices,
Speaker 1: Twitter's valuation is tanked less than a third of the
Speaker 1: forty four billion dollars he paid for it, losing half
Speaker 1: of their advertising revenue, and changing their name to X,
Speaker 1: which some have argued killed further billions of the original
Speaker 1: company's brand value. Being a selfish, ignorant, and gormous charlatan,
Speaker 1: Musk has now blamed Jewish non profit the Anti Defamation
Speaker 1: League for ruining his company, claiming that the ADL had
Speaker 1: pressured advertisers into killing x slash Twitter. Musk had previously
Speaker 1: sued the Center for Countering Digital Hate, another nonprofit that
Speaker 1: published research showing the growth and hate speech on the platform.
Speaker 1: Musk is now fine with the ADL because they resumed advertising,
Speaker 1: a deeply confused and utterly pointless exercise that only sought
Speaker 1: to further increase bigotry on his website. For all his
Speaker 1: statements around freedom of speech, Musk is the ultimate capitalist dictator,
Speaker 1: willing to use his money to intimidate and censor those
Speaker 1: who dared to criticize him. He's already done so on Twitter,
Speaker 1: banning an account that tracked publicly available records of private
Speaker 1: jet flights centering over four hundred tweets critical of Turkish
Speaker 1: President Urdigan in the week's running up to an election,
Speaker 1: suppressed accounts critical of Indian Prime Minister Nearendra Modi, and
Speaker 1: cut access to links to newsletter platform Substack when they
Speaker 1: launched a network competitive to Twitter. Musk is a propagandis
Speaker 1: willing to work with any fellow reactionaries who feel scorned
Speaker 1: by progressivism, personally helping Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis launch
Speaker 1: his campaign on Twitter and funneling money to alleged sex
Speaker 1: trafficker Andrew Tait through Twitter's Creator program. On on Nations roads,
Speaker 1: Muscus created another problem in March twenty twenty three. According
Speaker 1: to The Washington Post, a seventeen year old stepped off
Speaker 1: of a school bus on North Carolina Highway five point
Speaker 1: sixty one. As he stepped off, a Tesla Model Y,
Speaker 1: allegedly with Tesla's autonomous autopilot engaged hit him at forty
Speaker 1: five miles an hour, throwing him into the windshield and
Speaker 1: leaving him lying face down on the pavement. He thankfully survived,
Speaker 1: but broke and fractured his leg in the process. The incident,
Speaker 1: which the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is still investigating,
Speaker 1: is part of a growing list of victims of Tesla's
Speaker 1: open beta test of quote full self driving, a buggy
Speaker 1: dangerous software available on hundreds of thousands of Tesla vehicles
Speaker 1: allowing users to let the car drive, which has resulted
Speaker 1: in the deaths of seventeen people and led to seven
Speaker 1: one hundred and thirty six other injuries and crashes. In theory,
Speaker 1: activating Tesla's full self driving lets your Tesla take the wheel,
Speaker 1: making turns, avoiding other vehicles, maintaining speed, avoiding objects, and
Speaker 1: theoretically helping you arrive safely at your destination. The problem
Speaker 1: is that this has only ever been a beta, meaning
Speaker 1: that every new release involves some sort of new bug,
Speaker 1: such as the one that Electric Car Blog editor Fred
Speaker 1: Lambert claimed tried to kill him in September twenty twenty
Speaker 1: three by trying to veer at highway speed into the
Speaker 1: median strip on the road. One might imagine that such
Speaker 1: a thing is illegal. Effectively unleashing beta software onto the
Speaker 1: world's roads without s efficiently testing it would for any
Speaker 1: normal person lead to imprisonment and a lifetime of fines. Musk,
Speaker 1: thanks to his incredible wealth and power equivalent to that
Speaker 1: of a small nation, has managed to avoid much scrutiny.
Speaker 1: With the occasional government investigations that never seem to go anywhere,
Speaker 1: and despite a well documented culture of racism and sexism,
Speaker 1: very little seems to happen to test the at all.
Speaker 1: This is because our society, in its government, its media,
Speaker 1: and its citizen try, is woefully unprepared to deal with billionaires.
Speaker 1: Musk is able to operate as a noxious, abusive, and
Speaker 1: reckless monster in public, using his companies as vehicles to
Speaker 1: lend himself money and political weapons, with little scrutiny or
Speaker 1: punishment on their own. One might fob off these concerns
Speaker 1: as one time things, but the reality is there's a
Speaker 1: pattern of malicious and capricious acts or one after another,
Speaker 1: again and again, done in broad daylight for all to see.
Speaker 1: Musk has shown he will push whatever on envelope he
Speaker 1: sees fit, and as Ronan Pharaoh's New York magazine piece shows,
Speaker 1: there are very few people in the government, former and
Speaker 1: otherwise anywhere really, not investors, not other members of the
Speaker 1: Silicon Valley elite who are willing or able to get
Speaker 1: in the way. Musk is so unbelievably rich, well connected,
Speaker 1: and powerful that he can push around just about anybody,
Speaker 1: even if they work for the Pentagon. Yet, Musk's desperation
Speaker 1: for attention and adulation mean that he can be pulled
Speaker 1: in any direction that feels like it scorns his critics,
Speaker 1: And when his critics are pretty much anyone who isn't
Speaker 1: a right wing lunatic, it almost guarantees he will continue
Speaker 1: to power around with authoritarian regimes that will influence his
Speaker 1: remarkably malleable brain. The actual solution will be to treat
Speaker 1: Musk as what he is, a dangerous entity with a
Speaker 1: higher GDP than Ukraine and an ego that rivals their
Speaker 1: invaders president regardless of what happened in crimea Musk is
Speaker 1: the ability to know when attacks are happening and influence
Speaker 1: their outcome as a result of his for profit, privately
Speaker 1: held satellite internet communications firm that the US government is
Speaker 1: paying for. Elon Musk is a nation state global threat
Speaker 1: and must be treated as such, he must be treated
Speaker 1: as if he will make decisions based only on what
Speaker 1: he believes will benefit or amuse him. He's the wish
Speaker 1: dot Com version of Bond's earned stavro Blofeld, an offensive, charmless,
Speaker 1: and boorish monster that has successfully bought his way into
Speaker 1: the elite and found that no matter what he does,
Speaker 1: their patience is unlimited and their scruples are few. Musk,
Speaker 1: like another high profile narcissist, the former President Donald Trump,
Speaker 1: routinely finds himself ensnared in litigation, both from regulators and
Speaker 1: private individuals, even though the government never really seems to
Speaker 1: actually do anything to him. The SEC is currently investigating
Speaker 1: Musk for securities violations concerning his acquisition of Twitter. This
Speaker 1: would be his third tryst with the Commission, the first
Speaker 1: in twenty eighteen, the second in twenty nineteen. In both cases,
Speaker 1: very little happen. However, at the same time, he faces
Speaker 1: actions from former employees stiffed on severance pay and from
Speaker 1: those who allege age and gender discrimination with factors in
Speaker 1: their dismissal from Twitter. For Musk, these lawsuits are unlikely
Speaker 1: to be anything other than the minor annoyance rather than
Speaker 1: any kind of existential threat or something that otherwise curbs
Speaker 1: is most egregious of behaviors. There are people who could help.
Speaker 1: There are people that could sway you on Musk. You know,
Speaker 1: people as rich as him, Tim Cook, Mark Benioff, Jeff Bezos,
Speaker 1: Mark Zuckerberg and the rest of the world's billionaires feel
Speaker 1: no need to correct Musk's behavior. They don't need to
Speaker 1: interfere or even chide him through his disgraceful acts, because
Speaker 1: doing so would potentially make their actions and wealth more conspicuous,
Speaker 1: which is far more important to protect than free speech
Speaker 1: or human lives. Really, anything that normal people face. They
Speaker 1: they act as if they have civic responsibility. But the
Speaker 1: few people we have that could actually change things, the
Speaker 1: ones with the war chest to box out Musk, blocking
Speaker 1: X from app stores and excluding him from their circles,
Speaker 1: are sitting on their hands. One approach proposed by Stephen
Speaker 1: Feldstein in The Atlantic is to treat Musks businesses as
Speaker 1: they are vital to national security, and as a result,
Speaker 1: take them into public control when necessary. This wouldn't be
Speaker 1: without precedent. The legislation that allows this, the Defense Production Act,
Speaker 1: has been invoked fifty times since its inception, both in
Speaker 1: times of war and civil necessity like the twenty twenty
Speaker 1: two infant formula shortage. While Stalink would remain a privately
Speaker 1: held company, it would be obliged to prioritize the national need.
Speaker 1: Full nationalization, Falsteine noted would also be a possibility if
Speaker 1: Must failed to cooperate. Full nationalization would be a drastic measure.
Speaker 1: But at this point, what other options exist for Elon Musk?
Speaker 1: What other options exist for someone that is so reckless, dangerous,
Speaker 1: so selfish, and so capricious. What options exist to deal
Speaker 1: with someone who has inserted himself into the most vital
Speaker 1: aspects of the American economy, making himself billions of dollars
Speaker 1: off of governments, subsidies, and contracts. How the hell do
Speaker 1: you handle someone who has insulated himself from media scrutiny
Speaker 1: despite holding immense nation state power. Musk is not a
Speaker 1: goofy Weirdow or the real life Tony Stark. He's a fragile,
Speaker 1: mean hearted ogre one hell bent on seeing his whims
Speaker 1: brought to life at any cost. The only way to
Speaker 1: write about this man, the only fair coverage of Elon Musk,
Speaker 1: the only clear perception of this man is to frame
Speaker 1: him as a villain, a bigot, a bully, and a crook.
Speaker 1: But what do you do about the man who has everything?
Speaker 1: It Could Happen Here as a production of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 1: For more podcasts from Coulz zoned Media, visit our website
Speaker 1: coolzonemedia dot com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Speaker 1: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can
Speaker 1: find sources for It could Happen Here, updated monthly at
Speaker 1: coolzonmedia dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening,