Speaker 1: Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news.
Speaker 2: Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome President elect Donald J. Trump,
Speaker 2: First Lady Melaia Trump, and the Trump family.
Speaker 3: It's around two thirty am, the night of the election,
Speaker 3: West Palm Beach, Florida.
Speaker 4: Well, I want to.
Speaker 5: Thank you all very much.
Speaker 4: This is great.
Speaker 5: These are our friends.
Speaker 4: We have thousands of friends in this.
Speaker 5: Incredible movement.
Speaker 3: Pretty much everyone was expecting a close race, the polls,
Speaker 3: the pundits, even the candidates. But by midnight on the
Speaker 3: East Coast, we more or less new Trump had done it,
Speaker 3: and not just Trump.
Speaker 4: Let me tell you, we have a new star. The
Speaker 4: star is born Nylan noh he is now He's an
Speaker 4: amazing guy.
Speaker 3: By the next morning, it was official. Trump won Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan,
Speaker 3: North Carolina, Georgia, every swing state but Nevada and Arizona.
Speaker 3: Later that week he'd win those two. Kamala Harris called
Speaker 3: Trump the next morning to congratulate him. Biden called two
Speaker 3: at four pm. Harris gave her concession speech.
Speaker 6: I was relieved and grateful that we had a decision
Speaker 6: so fast.
Speaker 3: Joan Donovan, again journalism professor, disinformation expert, spent a lot
Speaker 3: of time thinking and writing about January sixth of twenty twenty.
Speaker 3: She's been watching Elon Musk plus his army of followers
Speaker 3: and fanboys. In the months before the election, they posted
Speaker 3: so many conspiracy theories Democrats were going to steal the
Speaker 3: vote again. You can't trust the media and trust the polls.
Speaker 3: That anything other than a landslide victory for Trump is fraud.
Speaker 3: And so she figured if Harris wins, or even if
Speaker 3: it's close, Elon could call it fraud. That means violence
Speaker 3: against a poll worker or a poll site or something worse.
Speaker 6: And so it's very difficult to know what they're going
Speaker 6: to do. People are planning different kinds of violence and
Speaker 6: destruction if Trump hadn't won again.
Speaker 3: This wasn't theoretical fear. Post election things are mostly calm.
Speaker 3: Three weeks ago, not so much. Ballot boxes set on
Speaker 3: fire in Washington and Oregon and Arizona, bomb threats called
Speaker 3: into polling places in Georgia and Pennsylvania. Elon tweeting like
Speaker 3: a maniac. Felt like we were in a tinderbox and
Speaker 3: he was holding the match.
Speaker 6: And so at least we know what the outcome is,
Speaker 6: we can accept that outcome and can move forward with
Speaker 6: some social assurances that the election had not been rigged.
Speaker 3: There were so many warnings from both sides, from experts
Speaker 3: like Joan about the future of democracy. But then it worked.
Speaker 3: The person with the most votes won. Like Elon said
Speaker 3: when he brought Trump back on Twitter, the voice of
Speaker 3: the people is the voice of the gods.
Speaker 5: I'm Max Chafkin. This is citizen Elon.
Speaker 3: So we made it post election. Trump definitely won. Something
Speaker 3: else that's indisputable.
Speaker 5: Elon won. How did he get there? How did he
Speaker 5: do it? James?
Speaker 3: Are you there not hearing James from Flat Rocket? On
Speaker 3: November fourth, the night before the election, Elon scheduled one
Speaker 3: of his town halls. It was supposed to be virtual
Speaker 3: and it be live streamed on Twitter as usual. The
Speaker 3: event started late, a few things went wrong. Elon got frustrated.
Speaker 7: You know, I think, let's uh, let's cancel this. Give
Speaker 7: him this in some technical challenges, and.
Speaker 3: He announced instead of this town hall Q and A,
Speaker 3: folks should listen to the interview he'd done that day
Speaker 3: on Joe Rogan's show at two and a half hour podcast.
Speaker 5: Good Joe Wrogan Experience.
Speaker 8: First of all, thank you so much for buying Twitter.
Speaker 8: You're looking so much. I think you changed the course
Speaker 8: of history. I really do.
Speaker 3: If you've ever listened to Rogan, you know the conversations wander.
Speaker 3: They started with video games.
Speaker 8: Surgeons who regularly play video games make less errors.
Speaker 3: How awesome eating meat is, how creatine is good for you.
Speaker 8: Yeah, creatine is actually a neotropic, believe it or not, but.
Speaker 3: Factory farming isn't. And about the exact right dosage of
Speaker 3: amphetamines in higher doses.
Speaker 7: Man, I've seen people turn into just raging monsters. They're
Speaker 7: just angry, like extremely angry all the time.
Speaker 5: Yeah, they're messed up.
Speaker 3: They went through a long list of Elon's grievances, which
Speaker 3: basically boiled down to anything stopping him from making money
Speaker 3: is bad, if not evil.
Speaker 7: They decided SpaceX was a target like Stalin's, like chief Torturer.
Speaker 7: One of his famous quotes was show me the man,
Speaker 7: and I'll show you the crime.
Speaker 3: Right, And eventually they got to the White House Correspondent's
Speaker 3: Dinner twenty eleven. Rogan remembers Obama basically saying Donald Trump,
Speaker 3: you know what, You'll never.
Speaker 5: Be president of the United States.
Speaker 8: You see Trump and the ions going okay, I'm on
Speaker 8: the floor.
Speaker 7: The degree to which they attacked Trump at that whitest
Speaker 7: Correspon Center was really so over the top. It was
Speaker 7: like making everyone uncomfortable. They twisted the knife big on Trump,
Speaker 7: and I was like, man, this is not good karma,
Speaker 7: you know.
Speaker 3: And there it is a shared sense of grievance, humiliation,
Speaker 3: a revenge story.
Speaker 5: Elon and Trump.
Speaker 3: They really are the same person, and Elon seems to
Speaker 3: know it. But then Rogan brought up the impetus Obama
Speaker 3: wasn't roasting Trump for the hell of it. He was
Speaker 3: responding to the literal conspiracy theory Trump successfully spread about
Speaker 3: the president not being born in America. And what's funny
Speaker 3: is Elon went ahead and rewrote history.
Speaker 5: He asked Rogan, was Trump actually saying that.
Speaker 9: No, he definitely was.
Speaker 5: He was definitely saying he's from Kenya.
Speaker 3: Trump, Rogan said, he was actually a victim of a
Speaker 3: busted up information ecosystem, people wanting to manipulate him. Elon,
Speaker 3: though he stayed on message, he turned somberly, looked straight
Speaker 3: into the camera and said, men.
Speaker 7: Need to vote. That is the biggest issue. So I'm
Speaker 7: just like saying, there's a message to the men out there.
Speaker 7: Vote like your life depends on it, because I think
Speaker 7: it does. Vote quote tomorrow like your life depends on it.
Speaker 5: Nothing is more important. Oh.
Speaker 3: For a few hours on election day, it seemed Elon
Speaker 3: worried he'd backed the wrong horse. He was quiet he'd
Speaker 3: gambled so much on Trump. The money, yes, but also
Speaker 3: his reputation. Tesla's customers they're fans of the old Elon Musk,
Speaker 3: not the guy who tweets about immigrants replacing white people.
Speaker 3: Mostly they're Kamala voters. In the late afternoon, Musk voted
Speaker 3: in Brownsville, right on the Mexico border. He posed for
Speaker 3: a photo op, then he got on his plane headed
Speaker 3: to mar A Lago, where Trump was. By eight thirty
Speaker 3: that night, things started leaning in Trump's favor. Elon started
Speaker 3: cracking jokes again on Twitter. Later, a picture began circulating
Speaker 3: from Trump's private watch party in mar A Lago. Three
Speaker 3: men huddled in conversation, Donald Trump, his transition co chair,
Speaker 3: and of course Elon Musk. In the background was a
Speaker 3: CNN screen with the electoral count Trump was winning.
Speaker 10: It's kind of rare for people to change their strikes.
Speaker 3: That's Josh Green again. He works with me at BusinessWeek.
Speaker 3: Josh was skeptical of Elon's commitment to politics, that is,
Speaker 3: before Elon started putting his money where his mouth.
Speaker 10: Was, and the fact that he's kind of rocketed onto
Speaker 10: the scene no pun intended. What's exciting about Trump, at
Speaker 10: least from a journalistic standpoint, is there are always these
Speaker 10: new characters and storylines, and like, you know, Elon is
Speaker 10: like the star of Season two, Episode one of the
Speaker 10: Trump White House.
Speaker 3: Elon's everywhere in mar al Lago on election night, Uncle
Speaker 3: Elon on Instagram and Trump's family photos, at meetings with
Speaker 3: lawmakers and DC on the phone with Vladimir Zelenski. Trump
Speaker 3: turns it into a running joke. Wherever he goes, Elon
Speaker 3: goes too.
Speaker 4: You know, he likes his place.
Speaker 5: I can't get him out of here.
Speaker 6: He just likes this place.
Speaker 4: He's done a fantastic job. Really an incredible miss.
Speaker 3: Insult wrapped in compliments. We've seen it before. Trump has
Speaker 3: a long history of firing people. It was true on
Speaker 3: The Apprentice, it was true in the White House almost always.
Speaker 5: You can see it coming, you know, when Trump starts
Speaker 5: to get annoyed with people.
Speaker 10: You can kind of feel it in the Richter's scale
Speaker 10: in Washington, like, there will be little asides in Politico
Speaker 10: or Washington Post stories, and you know they'll be leaked
Speaker 10: anonymously by Trump aids, and then Trump himself will say
Speaker 10: something or tweet something belittling, like publicly humiliating him to
Speaker 10: sort of, you know, assert his dominance and express his annoyance,
Speaker 10: you know, and then all of a sudden, one day
Speaker 10: it will just be announced that, like, you know, he's
Speaker 10: no longer in the end circle.
Speaker 5: Or that's one possibility. There's others too.
Speaker 3: A week after the election, Trump officially named Elon the
Speaker 3: co head of the still unrealized Department of Government Efficiency.
Speaker 3: By the way, the Department of Government Efficiency doge. Elon
Speaker 3: named it for a cryptocurrency he likes. Trump says it
Speaker 3: will become quote potentially the Manhattan Project of our time.
Speaker 10: So really, at the end of the day, it's what
Speaker 10: used to be in Washington, a blue ribbon commission. It's
Speaker 10: basically this kind of phony concoction that you whip into
Speaker 10: being to give important people something to do and something
Speaker 10: to talk about, hopefully draw some media attention. But that
Speaker 10: doesn't have any real power. And as far as I
Speaker 10: can see, Elon's DOGE office doesn't have any real power.
Speaker 3: The thing is, and maybe it's because I've spent nearly
Speaker 3: two decades watching Elon star grow. Part of me thinks
Speaker 3: that Josh could be wrong, that Doge could have power.
Speaker 3: Either way, Elon's already won. In the days following the election,
Speaker 3: He's gotten richer, a lot richer.
Speaker 5: By Friday of that week, his.
Speaker 3: Net worth had gone up by fifty billion dollars. And
Speaker 3: that doesn't even account for money that could be coming
Speaker 3: in in the form of defense contracts or killed investigations
Speaker 3: into his business dealings, or new subsidies or regulations that
Speaker 3: could be tweaked to turn his money into more money. Already,
Speaker 3: Trump's picked Brendan Carr, a massive fan of Elon's, to
Speaker 3: run the fc SEE, which means Elon's satellite internet company, Starlink,
Speaker 3: is much more likely to get money from the government.
Speaker 3: And that's just one example. Normally this is where accountability
Speaker 3: measures come in. But who or what could hold somebody
Speaker 3: like Elon Musk to account. He's got a major media platform,
Speaker 3: he's richer than anyone in all of history, and he's
Speaker 3: got Trump in his pocket.
Speaker 5: I asked Josh about this.
Speaker 10: I don't know what the bright line is between just
Speaker 10: being like a kind of a human hurricane in Washington
Speaker 10: and like destroying these ethical and political norms and being
Speaker 10: an out and out authoritarian. But but it looks, you know,
Speaker 10: it looks more and more like we're gonna we're gonna
Speaker 10: test those bounds every day.
Speaker 3: I don't know where we go from here. There's a
Speaker 3: case to be made that right now, Elon is the
Speaker 3: most powerful person on this planet, maybe in history too.
Speaker 9: Elon Musk, he's a unicorn. He's suey generous.
Speaker 3: David NASA professor meritith of history at CuNi and biographer,
Speaker 3: and I've.
Speaker 9: Written a bunch of books, including biographies of Andrew Carnegy,
Speaker 9: William Randolph Hurst, Joseph Kennedy.
Speaker 3: David's beat is really powerful men, and here he sees
Speaker 3: a lot of parallels with Elon.
Speaker 9: Let me take but one example. He is not the
Speaker 9: first rich man to fund a candidate in the hopes
Speaker 9: of getting a quid or a quo for his quids,
Speaker 9: or however you say it, getting some sort of payback.
Speaker 9: What's different is that this is not dark money. His
Speaker 9: is anything but dark. I mean, it glows, it sparkles.
Speaker 9: He is out front saying this is what I'm doing,
Speaker 9: you know, and this is why I'm doing it, and
Speaker 9: that is unprecedented. In the past, huge donors to campaigns
Speaker 9: who saw it influenced thereafter kept it quiet.
Speaker 3: Like Carnegie, the guy who built America steel industry. He
Speaker 3: was rich, like Elon or Hurst, who the movie Citizen
Speaker 3: Kane is literally based on, had mega cultural influence like
Speaker 3: Elon or Kennedy the original Kennedy had immense political influence
Speaker 3: like Elon, But David says those guys were mostly behind
Speaker 3: the scenes. They didn't act the way that Elon does.
Speaker 9: The other thing that's new is that this guy has
Speaker 9: more He's more presumptuous than any business leader I've seen.
Speaker 3: For instance, Elon's live Twitter interview with Trump back in August,
Speaker 3: when the idea of a government efficiency commission was first floated.
Speaker 3: David points out that was Elon's idea.
Speaker 9: Nobody talked about him entering the government until he did.
Speaker 9: You know, if you look at if you listen to
Speaker 9: that interview, about fifty minutes in, Trump mentioned something about inflation,
Speaker 9: and Musk says, yeah, you're right, and I think we
Speaker 9: need a Department of government efficiency.
Speaker 7: I think we need like a government efficiency commission to say, like, hey,
Speaker 7: where are we spending money that's sensible?
Speaker 9: Where is it not sensible?
Speaker 7: And would you agree that we need to take a
Speaker 7: look at governspending and have perhaps a government efficiency commission
Speaker 7: that just I mean, I think it'd be great to
Speaker 7: just have a government efficiency commission that takes a look
Speaker 7: at these things. And I'd be happy to help out
Speaker 7: on such a commission.
Speaker 9: And Trump doesn't know what to do about it, and
Speaker 9: then he.
Speaker 5: Says, yeah, you know, it's funny.
Speaker 3: The thing that was surprising to me in that interview
Speaker 3: was how subservient he allowed himself to beat a Trump.
Speaker 9: He was subservient, He rolled over on any number of questions.
Speaker 9: But then he saw his opportunity when inflation was mentioned,
Speaker 9: and he must have known this was what he was
Speaker 9: going to do, but he waited almost an hour to
Speaker 9: put in in his plug.
Speaker 3: David says he wants not the first guy to try
Speaker 3: buying himself political influence. All three of his moguls, he
Speaker 3: calls it my moguls. By the way, that's what they
Speaker 3: tried to do too. But the presidents they helped put
Speaker 3: in office mostly ignored them focused on making their voters happy,
Speaker 3: which you know, that's democracy working this time. We don't
Speaker 3: know those moguls of the past. They didn't have Elon
Speaker 3: social media, following a newspaper, even a chain of newspapers.
Speaker 3: It's not the same as owning a social network.
Speaker 1: I just see a lot of triumphalism.
Speaker 3: Ellie Reeve again an expert on right wing extremism. We
Speaker 3: spoke with her in episode one. She says that Twitter
Speaker 3: has been different since Elon bought it, and especially since
Speaker 3: he came out in favor of Trump. It's not just
Speaker 3: that there's a lot of hate, it's that the people
Speaker 3: promoting hate have gotten less restrained.
Speaker 1: Like I was just watching this video hosted by Benny Johnson,
Speaker 1: who used to work for BuzzFeed in other places, talking
Speaker 1: to him Trump official, who was saying joking but not joking,
Speaker 1: We're going to rain down hell fire when we take office.
Speaker 1: We're going to deport all these people and their kids
Speaker 1: and their grandparents, and it's going to be awesome.
Speaker 11: Ten million people in growing anchor babies, their parents, their grandparents.
Speaker 11: We're gonna put kids in cages. It's gonna be glorious.
Speaker 11: We're gonna deport a lot of people. I will reign
Speaker 11: hell on Washington, DC. We've talked about this.
Speaker 5: Like that's the kind of stuff.
Speaker 1: I see real names, real faces saying the stuff you
Speaker 1: could only say anonymously ten years ago.
Speaker 3: Elon says he bought Twitter to save free speech, to
Speaker 3: bring back the town Square. But I don't know. I'm
Speaker 3: not convinced what he's built. It feels less like a
Speaker 3: public forum and more like a soapbox for him and
Speaker 3: his side to stand on.
Speaker 5: I have affection for my.
Speaker 9: Three guys, my three moguls, Carnegie, Hurst and Joe Kennedy.
Speaker 9: I don't have the same affection for Elon Musk. I
Speaker 9: think in the long term, Elon Musk is more dangerous,
Speaker 9: is smarter, and has amassed a kind of political and
Speaker 9: cultural power that no one should have that kind of power.
Speaker 3: Maybe it's that you have been able to figure out,
Speaker 3: like what matters to him beyond himself.
Speaker 5: That's absolutely right.
Speaker 9: What I can't figure out about Musk is what drives him.
Speaker 9: He says what drives him is he wants to go
Speaker 9: to Mars. At various times, he says what drives him
Speaker 9: is that he wants more smart children to be born.
Speaker 9: You know where the country is going to fall apart.
Speaker 9: At various times he wants to save the planet, and
Speaker 9: I don't know what's most important in the end. Somehow
Speaker 9: I think that he he has succeeded in so many
Speaker 9: different areas that he thinks he's godlike.
Speaker 3: Something occurred to me Musk's favorite saying, the voice of
Speaker 3: the people is the voice of the gods. Maybe what
Speaker 3: he actually means is the voice of the people is
Speaker 3: whatever I say it is.
Speaker 9: He can't be president, he can't be king, but he
Speaker 9: can be God. And I think the more he achieves,
Speaker 9: the more power he amasses, the more he thinks he
Speaker 9: is Zeus, you know, And it's you know, it's up
Speaker 9: to us to say, no, we don't want a Zeus.
Speaker 9: We want to live in a democracy.
Speaker 5: What David's saying, I've been thinking about it.
Speaker 3: Of course, it's dramatic, but it also captures the dramatic
Speaker 3: scale of Elon's ambitions and what we've made of them
Speaker 3: looking back. Something I got wrong about Elon from the start,
Speaker 3: when his whole thing was just rockets.
Speaker 5: And climate change. He seemed like some.
Speaker 3: Sort of superhero, like larger than life, more than just
Speaker 3: some guy Elon.
Speaker 5: Musk is not zeus.
Speaker 3: What he is, though, is a celebrity, and we've got
Speaker 3: a lot of say in that. After all, Fox popular
Speaker 3: the people we do make up hathy EQ.
Speaker 5: Citizen.
Speaker 3: Elon is produced by Lena Mesitzis, Rayon Harmonci is our
Speaker 3: senior editor, Blake Maples handles engineering and Emma.
Speaker 5: Sanchez fact checking.
Speaker 3: Brendan Francis Newham is our executive producer, and Sage Bauman
Speaker 3: is the head of Bloomberg Podcasts. Big thanks to the
Speaker 3: Elon Ink crew, David Popadopoulos, Naomi Shaven, Magnus Hendrickson, Stacy
Speaker 3: Wong listen every Tuesday for breaking Elon news. Thanks as
Speaker 3: well to our Bloomberg colleagues David Fox, Julia Press, Dana Hall,
Speaker 3: Sarah Fryar, Kurt Wagner, Josh Green, Mark Million, Margaret Sutherland,
Speaker 3: Alison Mobley, Jackie Kessler, Ariel Brown, Chris Nocenzo, and Albert Hicks.
Speaker 3: An extra big thanks to Brad Stone, editor of BusinessWeek,
Speaker 3: and Katie Boyce, executive editor of Bloomberg Digital, for their
Speaker 3: unflagging support.
Speaker 5: I'm Max Schaft.
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