Speaker 1: Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, the only podcast where
Speaker 1: the host just got an email from the A t
Speaker 1: F asking him to sign some documents that I can
Speaker 1: get a suppressor for my A R fifteen. So that's
Speaker 1: exciting news, quite a weird flex. Congratulations dude, thank you,
Speaker 1: thank you. I'm just really excited that I only have
Speaker 1: to wait another twelve months to get it. Um. I'm
Speaker 1: excited to you at some point get to shoot guns
Speaker 1: with you when we can be around pun Sophia. That
Speaker 1: will be a very fun day, especially if my fans
Speaker 1: in the A t F push that paperwork along. I
Speaker 1: have a lot of a lot of A t F
Speaker 1: fans well, because I only talk about wanting the FDA
Speaker 1: to raid me like I don't have any I'm not
Speaker 1: starting to fight with the A t F because I
Speaker 1: know they'll burn down my whole compo. Oh ship. I
Speaker 1: made a Waco. Sorry, this was also that I could
Speaker 1: do a Waco. That was all for a Waco. That
Speaker 1: you built that entire thing up just to bring up
Speaker 1: Waco again. I did, I did, And it's going to
Speaker 1: take two years now for me to get my fucking suppressor.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna get rated by the a t F for
Speaker 1: starting a cult in the woods before I get to
Speaker 1: pick it up, and then they'll burn it down along
Speaker 1: with seventy children keep waking. The A t F would
Speaker 1: think that you wacoing is hilarious, they would. I bet
Speaker 1: they laugh a lot about Waco in the A t F.
Speaker 1: I mean, it could be longer than two years. We
Speaker 1: know that they're terrible at communicating. Yeah, I've spent like
Speaker 1: literal like tens of hours in the last two weeks
Speaker 1: going into like boogaloo Facebook groups and sub creddits and
Speaker 1: like stuff like that, and like there's so many Waco memes.
Speaker 1: They love that fucking Waco uh Netflix show, which was
Speaker 1: like one of the most irresponsible TV shows I've ever seen.
Speaker 1: Electric Boogaloo. What did you say? Yeah, like like the
Speaker 1: civil the second Civil War. That's like the right wing
Speaker 1: meme for like they want to start another civil war.
Speaker 1: It's the boogaloo, that's what they call it. That's how
Speaker 1: ship happens on the internet. Now, Oh gosh, all right,
Speaker 1: so there's like thousands of people on Facebook trying to
Speaker 1: make a civil war happen because they want to get
Speaker 1: to use all of their fancy guns and they also
Speaker 1: really hate the a t F because of Waco, and
Speaker 1: so they have a ton of Waco memes about like
Speaker 1: shooting a t F agents, And it's fine for them,
Speaker 1: but the fucking anti for kids who throw oranges at
Speaker 1: cops get like arrested tear guest for vandalism. It's great
Speaker 1: the mix of how law enforcement responds to these things.
Speaker 1: Were talking selective law enforcement? Were you talking about the
Speaker 1: Waco mini series with McCauley Culkin's brother you're talking about
Speaker 1: I didn't know he was in it, but I think
Speaker 1: that mini series wildly which Caulkin here in Rory's you
Speaker 1: didn't realize there was a coin in there. It's an
Speaker 1: incredibly irresponsible series because while it does accurately I think
Speaker 1: depict how irresponsible the government was, it makes fucking David
Speaker 1: Koresh look like a cool dude when he was lighting.
Speaker 1: No he was not, but I don't know. It's it's fun.
Speaker 1: Fun when you starts where they like show him and
Speaker 1: it makes him look like he can actually sing and
Speaker 1: hiss like a rock star. That that scenes, Yes, yeah,
Speaker 1: like he's a cool rock star. They even try to
Speaker 1: make the fact that he had teenage brides less up.
Speaker 1: It's weird. Netflix really went to bat for David Koresh
Speaker 1: in a way that's kind of baffling. It's like, that's
Speaker 1: a weird. It's an interesting enough story. If he and
Speaker 1: the A T F both suck like and they made
Speaker 1: him hot, he's not that he was picked. No, he
Speaker 1: the guy they picked I think looks exactly like him.
Speaker 1: I will give them that. They cast it like he
Speaker 1: looks and just started his career as a model. I know.
Speaker 1: But if you look at pictures David Koresh like they
Speaker 1: they fucking I think they actually kind of nailed the look.
Speaker 1: They had nothing to contribute to this. I have not
Speaker 1: seen it at all. Yeah, I mean it's not, Oh,
Speaker 1: you're not a Koresh fan. You're not full korushing on korush. No,
Speaker 1: I am not a corrush. You are so fucking wrong. Okay.
Speaker 1: I'm looking at a side by side his face. One
Speaker 1: of them is holy nipples hard, and one of them
Speaker 1: is like, oh send me when I will tell you
Speaker 1: right now, when I start my cult and get taken
Speaker 1: down by I V the F D A or the
Speaker 1: A t F. It's a fucking roll of the dice,
Speaker 1: which one actually burns down our compound and all of
Speaker 1: our children. Um, but when they take me down and
Speaker 1: then make a Netflix movie that whitewashes all of my
Speaker 1: many crimes, make sure Ian McShane plays me. He doesn't
Speaker 1: look like me or sound like me. But that that
Speaker 1: is my wish and it's up to both of you
Speaker 1: to make sure that happens. No, no, no, no, it
Speaker 1: can't be him. Who do you think should play him? Like?
Speaker 1: Maybe give Jared Letto like like some like Oh no,
Speaker 1: no no, but that's nice that you think I'm more
Speaker 1: muscular than Jared Letto. I do appreciate that Sophia does
Speaker 1: any of Jared letto eyes? Oh, now that part it hurts.
Speaker 1: I'm trying to think of. I think that's the only
Speaker 1: nice thing about Jared Letto is his eyes. Are you
Speaker 1: kiding me, Robert? I think we should just got full
Speaker 1: circle and have you played by Jeremy Renner. Okay, alright, Leyeah,
Speaker 1: let's do it, fuck it, Yeah, let's have Renner in there.
Speaker 1: I'm I'm down that, I'm down with that casting. Yeah,
Speaker 1: all right, we've we've figured out when when my Waco
Speaker 1: movie happens. This has been a very Waco start to
Speaker 1: the part two of our Elon Musk podcast. Yeah, let's
Speaker 1: let's get back to talking about Ellen. Hey, thanks for
Speaker 1: having me, by the way, Thanks thanks for coming on,
Speaker 1: Thanks for coming on. I do want to I do
Speaker 1: want to start because like I've been thinking about what
Speaker 1: you said at the end, and I really don't want
Speaker 1: this to be a situation whereby people are like going
Speaker 1: after you because like they think that I was trying
Speaker 1: to be fair to him. I was. I want I
Speaker 1: like there's a lot of ship we're gonna talk about
Speaker 1: today that he did bad. I honestly think the worst
Speaker 1: thing he did is his failure Kitch played Koresh. Sorry
Speaker 1: I sat her aside? Are we still come on so hot?
Speaker 1: That is such badcasting? You Look, it is the official
Speaker 1: position of this podcast that David Koresh that is not true.
Speaker 1: It Look, we have to we have to acknowledge David
Speaker 1: Koresh is sculpted. ABS have to right the side by
Speaker 1: side where it says one of these things is not
Speaker 1: like the other. David Koresh is hot, Elon Musk is bad,
Speaker 1: And I will that that is the stance that I
Speaker 1: want all of the Elon Musk fans hate listening this
Speaker 1: to take out of this is that I officially endorsed
Speaker 1: David koresh is hot. That's important. I officially endorsed you
Speaker 1: to continue this podcast. Hello listeners, this is Sophie. Robert
Speaker 1: is out reporting at the current riots happening in Portland
Speaker 1: right now. But he wanted to make sure that we
Speaker 1: had this correction in part two of this episode. Uh,
Speaker 1: he incorrectly labeled author Ashley Vance as is she and
Speaker 1: he is a he. And Robert also wanted me to
Speaker 1: mention that his book Elon Musk Tesla, SpaceX and the
Speaker 1: Quest for a Fantastic Future is a wonderful book. You
Speaker 1: can find a link to that book under the footnotes
Speaker 1: in part one. Now back to the episode. The thing
Speaker 1: that I condemn Elon most for is and the reason
Speaker 1: I think it's someone important to understand, like how fucked
Speaker 1: up his childhood it was, is that when you have
Speaker 1: an experience like that, a good person should have that
Speaker 1: make them into a better person, a more empathetic person, right, Like,
Speaker 1: that's how what you hope to like. You and I
Speaker 1: both talked Sophia about how like we got bullied a
Speaker 1: bunch and dealt with a bunch of ships like that,
Speaker 1: and I think it made us both into people who
Speaker 1: sympathize a lot with people who are being victimized. Elon
Speaker 1: Musk did not take that out of it. He did
Speaker 1: take the thing where like he clearly hates bullies, but
Speaker 1: he also just basically uses that as an excuse to
Speaker 1: say that everybody who rightfully criticizes him as a bully.
Speaker 1: He clearly didn't learn the most important lesson of his childhood,
Speaker 1: which should have been that a lot of people in
Speaker 1: the world may be forced to serve and horrific militaries
Speaker 1: or stay in countries that they can't stand elite to
Speaker 1: live in, and that it is like an act of
Speaker 1: evil to stop people from trying to find a better life.
Speaker 1: And instead he was willing to like shut his fucking
Speaker 1: mouth and work with an administration that was doing his
Speaker 1: best to cut off other in need kids in a
Speaker 1: similar situation that he was in himself. He did not
Speaker 1: let that turn him into a more empathetic person, and
Speaker 1: that is something that he should be morally condemned for,
Speaker 1: as well as everything else we're about to talk about. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think that's a really good where you could have gone,
Speaker 1: Like they're by the grace of God, go I instead
Speaker 1: of fuck these kids, I made it out funk these kids.
Speaker 1: Fuck them. They weren't lucky. Yeah, you know, it's not
Speaker 1: even I would have a little bit more respect for
Speaker 1: him if he was like a hardline right winger being like, no,
Speaker 1: I think like I have very strong opinions on immigration
Speaker 1: because with racist piece of shit. No, it's all money related, yeah, exactly,
Speaker 1: he wanted to keep his nice government contracts. Exactly. It's
Speaker 1: all money related, yeah, yep. Ashley Vance spends the book
Speaker 1: of her biography of Elon Musk outlining the entrepreneurs history
Speaker 1: of business, setbacks and successes. And you can find that
Speaker 1: story in a lot of places. I'm not going to
Speaker 1: spend a huge amount of time discussing his products the
Speaker 1: technology behind them, are giving play by plays of every
Speaker 1: acquisition in his history. She writes a lot about his
Speaker 1: cool technology, and it is cool. I've driven a Tesla
Speaker 1: a couple of times and their neat Uh he didn't
Speaker 1: make them. Um yeah. Anyway, in Musk and his brother
Speaker 1: headed to the US. They started their time with a
Speaker 1: road trip and the summer before Musk had to get
Speaker 1: started in his degree, he held a couple of internships
Speaker 1: in Silicon Valley. The tech industry was a natural fit
Speaker 1: for Elon. He developed a reputation as an obsessive worker
Speaker 1: who was willing to put in impossible hours, a reputation
Speaker 1: that has followed him his entire career. When he was interning,
Speaker 1: he had the idea for his first business. A salesperson
Speaker 1: for the Yellow Pages walked into one of the offices
Speaker 1: where he worked and tried to sell his startup on
Speaker 1: the idea of an online listing add onto their normal
Speaker 1: Yellow Pages listings. The pitch was poorly delivered, and the
Speaker 1: guy clearly didn't know anything about the Internet, but Ellen
Speaker 1: saw a glimmer of promise in the idea. In he
Speaker 1: and his brother Kimball formed Global Link Information Network, which
Speaker 1: changed its name to ZIP too because Global Link Information
Speaker 1: Network is a ship name. Uh. The idea behind ZIP
Speaker 1: two was to convince businesses to create web press talking
Speaker 1: that a guy named Kibble isn't good at naming stuff.
Speaker 1: I think I think Musk is the bad nam er
Speaker 1: for reasons that will become clear. He actually has kind
Speaker 1: of an early history of sucking at naming companies and now.
Speaker 1: The idea behind ZIP two was to convince businesses to
Speaker 1: create web presences on a searchable business directory that also
Speaker 1: had a maps component. Obviously that's a good idea because
Speaker 1: it's the way everything works now. Uh. In in very
Speaker 1: ahead of the curve. Uh. And if you've read any
Speaker 1: story about a scrappy tech startup in the Bay, you
Speaker 1: know the story of ZIP to Elan and his brother
Speaker 1: started alone own in a dicky office with the toilets
Speaker 1: backed up, yeada, YadA. They had no money. Uh, the
Speaker 1: shoestring budget, all that bullshit. This is not exactly true.
Speaker 1: Like all of these stories, the scrappy underdog entrepreneurs had
Speaker 1: much more funding than they tend to emphasize. In Musk's case,
Speaker 1: Zip two was formed with the help of twenty eight
Speaker 1: thousand dollars of his dad's money. Um. Yeah, he doesn't
Speaker 1: like to talk about that. Uh. Sometimes he openly acknowledges it.
Speaker 1: I think sometimes he lies. I don't know. Yeah, Ashley
Speaker 1: Vance acknowledges this, but in a way that tries to
Speaker 1: make it seem like it wasn't a big deal. She writes,
Speaker 1: quote they were more or less broke after getting the
Speaker 1: office space licensing software and buying some equipment. For the
Speaker 1: first three months, of zip to his life. Musk and
Speaker 1: his brother lived at the office. Uh, they had a
Speaker 1: small closet where they kept their clothes, would shower at
Speaker 1: the y m c A. I'm so sorry. Oh could
Speaker 1: they have sold any of their free floating diamonds? I
Speaker 1: mean sorry? Uh, fucking what was it? Em I'm sorry there,
Speaker 1: Emerald mon they left the emeralds behind with dad and
Speaker 1: just took twenty eight grand of his money. That's it,
Speaker 1: just a small just a small amount, you know, like
Speaker 1: twenty eight you know, it's not like a Trump size loan,
Speaker 1: but it is significant, right, Like, And like I'm sure
Speaker 1: he's like he's not lying when he says, you know,
Speaker 1: we were on a shoestring budget. But the fact that
Speaker 1: you had a budget is because your dad was rich.
Speaker 1: Like that's the point. The point is not that it
Speaker 1: was easy to start a business on twenty eight grand.
Speaker 1: It's that most of us don't get twenty eight grand
Speaker 1: to start a business and do not have an emerald
Speaker 1: mind to fall back on. Yes, yes, don't have dad's
Speaker 1: emerald mind money to fall back on. Yeah. So, like
Speaker 1: most entrepreneurs in a similar position, Ellen doesn't like to
Speaker 1: talk about the privileges that made his success possible. In
Speaker 1: this case, I suspect some of its pride, but I
Speaker 1: think some of it's also the fact that he hates
Speaker 1: his dad um and probably doesn't want to admit that
Speaker 1: his dad helped a lot. I suspect that if you
Speaker 1: were to get him to be honest about this, he
Speaker 1: would blurt out something like, I earned that money by
Speaker 1: putting up with his ship my whole childhood. But that's
Speaker 1: me editorial thing on Elon's mind a little bit. ZIPP
Speaker 1: two grew rapidly, and this is probably due in part
Speaker 1: to the fact that Ellen put in fundamentally lunatic hours
Speaker 1: to build his company. One of his early employees recalled
Speaker 1: to vance quote, almost every day, I'd come in at
Speaker 1: seven thirty or eight am, and he'd be asleep right
Speaker 1: there on that bag. He had a bean bag. Maybe
Speaker 1: he showered on the weekends. I don't know. You get
Speaker 1: the feeling that Must didn't shower a lot. That's why Must.
Speaker 1: That totally makes sense now, the all of these the
Speaker 1: thing that is emphasized. I worked as a tech journalist
Speaker 1: for a while, so I've little read a lot of
Speaker 1: biographies about a lot of tech guys, and they all
Speaker 1: smelled terrible, and so did their little offices. When they started,
Speaker 1: they were all fucking nasty. It's not hard. You get
Speaker 1: your best ideas in the shower, yes, just they get
Speaker 1: their best ideas by forming like a fucking a crown
Speaker 1: of scrutal sweat around their fucking draw string pants. I
Speaker 1: don't know. I used to work at Google. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: some some the engineer areas would sometimes get must Yeah.
Speaker 1: There's a smell that engineers have, engineer stink. Yeah. It
Speaker 1: was Musk's manic level of devotion and obsessive work ethic
Speaker 1: that endeared him to the venture capitalists who investments helped
Speaker 1: ZIP to grow into a viable business. They saw him as,
Speaker 1: in the words of one employee, willing to stake his
Speaker 1: existence on building this business. He told one investor, my
Speaker 1: mentality is that of a samurai. I would rather commit
Speaker 1: seppuku than fail. Um. Yeah, I would die for Global
Speaker 1: Link Incorporated. Yeah, I would die for the Yellow Pages. Yeah.
Speaker 1: But zip to success was also heavily dependent on the
Speaker 1: good will of friends that Musk and his brother made
Speaker 1: during their time at Canada. Their buddy Greg Corey was critical,
Speaker 1: giving them six thousand dollars when they left for California
Speaker 1: to start their company, he became a co founder and
Speaker 1: his past real estate and business experience were crucial. Ashley
Speaker 1: Vance Rights quote the Canadian had a knack for calming
Speaker 1: musk and ended up being something of a mentor. Really
Speaker 1: smart people sometimes don't understand that not everyone can keep
Speaker 1: up with them or go as fast, said Derek PROUDI
Speaker 1: and a venture capitalist who become ZIP to his chief
Speaker 1: executive officer, Greg is one of the few people that
Speaker 1: Ellen would listen to and had a way of putting
Speaker 1: things in context for him. Kourie also used to referee
Speaker 1: fist fights between Elon and Kimball in the middle of
Speaker 1: the office. So and his brother's exactly the kind of
Speaker 1: I expect from peoples and bits totally. Yeah, and it's
Speaker 1: the thing that it's the thing that is true also
Speaker 1: about Facebook, where it's like, yeah, it should be against
Speaker 1: the law for teenagers to start businesses. It's actually it's
Speaker 1: bad for a lot of reasons, in part because they
Speaker 1: never grow out of being teenagers in their heads. Yes,
Speaker 1: he had office fist fights with his brother, and Kimball's
Speaker 1: insistent that he was the only person Ellen ever fought physically.
Speaker 1: At least one uh SpaceX employee has accused Ellen of
Speaker 1: being physically aggressive with him. Um, but that came years later,
Speaker 1: so we'll talk about that maybe a little bit later.
Speaker 1: Kimball claims that neither he nor his brother quote have
Speaker 1: the ability to reconcile a vision other than our own,
Speaker 1: which I think is totally accurate. I don't think Kimball's
Speaker 1: lying at all about that. Um. The fights ended after
Speaker 1: Ellen ripped some of the skin off of his fist.
Speaker 1: I think because he missed a punch and hit something
Speaker 1: else and he had to get a tetnis shot. Uh.
Speaker 1: Corey told them both that they had to stop fighting
Speaker 1: in the office after that, which you shouldn't have to
Speaker 1: tell people. But whatever, boys, boys, keep it down in
Speaker 1: the office of the business. You're trying to start of
Speaker 1: the business, your courting investments for fewer fist fights on
Speaker 1: the floor when the investors are in the room. Yeah.
Speaker 1: By the company was off the ground and running, Elon,
Speaker 1: a self taught coder, was largely replaced by a team
Speaker 1: of new professional coders who rewrote almost every line of
Speaker 1: code that Ellen had put in. There was a good
Speaker 1: reason for this. Elon's code was functional, but tended to
Speaker 1: be idiosyncratic, difficult to update and expand over time, difficult
Speaker 1: for other people to work on. Handing over control for
Speaker 1: this was difficult for him. He had particular trouble with
Speaker 1: the fact that professional coders wanted to work normal human hours.
Speaker 1: He tried to get them to go without sleeping for
Speaker 1: days at a time, but they were unwilling to do
Speaker 1: this for some reason. He tried to get them to
Speaker 1: stop breathing and willing for some crazy reason. Aren't you
Speaker 1: guys willing to die for my vision? No, it's the
Speaker 1: Yellow Pages, but Internet Ellen, like calm, calm, the funk
Speaker 1: down people are not still the business. Yeah, yeah, that
Speaker 1: is an important point you make, Sophia. One of the
Speaker 1: things that I think that I have learned reading all
Speaker 1: this is that like Ellen makes a big point now
Speaker 1: about how all of his business is. His goal is
Speaker 1: like saving the world, Like SpaceX is to save the
Speaker 1: human race by getting us off the planet. Tesla is
Speaker 1: to save the human race by like putting it into
Speaker 1: fossil fuel use. And he talks about that enough, and
Speaker 1: a lot of reviewers act as if he just believes it,
Speaker 1: And I'm sure he has convinced himself that he believes
Speaker 1: that you get the feeling though from his fucking Yellow
Speaker 1: Pages business. He's always needed to be able to claim
Speaker 1: that his businesses are that important so that he can
Speaker 1: justify the fact that he is an unreasonable workaholic that
Speaker 1: fox over people in them, like he had to find
Speaker 1: a business that he could claim was critical to the
Speaker 1: future of the human race so that he could act
Speaker 1: like the asshole he's always acted like in business. That's
Speaker 1: that's I think core to him. Oh, totally, you're right
Speaker 1: on about that. And it also reminds me of like
Speaker 1: a lot of comedians who are like, no, where art
Speaker 1: is I mean, like as a comedian whenever people are like, hey,
Speaker 1: you know what, where art is okay? And like sometimes
Speaker 1: we have to like do stuff to like for our
Speaker 1: art and like it's it's fine if we're dicks, Like
Speaker 1: it's gonna make for great jokes and stories later. It's like,
Speaker 1: you can't do that other people's expense. Man, I have
Speaker 1: I have endangered myself and the people around me for
Speaker 1: my career. I fucked up and been very unreasonable and
Speaker 1: unfair and relationships for the sake of my career. Um,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of men, in particularly men who wind
Speaker 1: up succeeding under capitalism, who have that aspect to their personality.
Speaker 1: And it's not a good thing. It's bad. It's bad
Speaker 1: that I do it. It's bad that Ellen does it.
Speaker 1: It's a bad thing to do. Um. It's not just men.
Speaker 1: A lot of women have it too, But I guess
Speaker 1: men get away with it. I think more because it's expected,
Speaker 1: and I think it's sometimes has admired. They're like, well
Speaker 1: that's what you have to do. If you want to
Speaker 1: become a Steve Jobs, you have to fucking be a dick,
Speaker 1: Like that's what it is. Yeah, Yeah, And you get
Speaker 1: a lot of positive reinforcement as a man for being
Speaker 1: an unreasonable workaholic. Like for years before it started to
Speaker 1: be a problem in like my romantic life and my
Speaker 1: personal life, I got praised a ton for like what
Speaker 1: a hard worker I was, And it was like I
Speaker 1: wasn't actually being praised for working hard. I was being
Speaker 1: praised for working unreasonably. Um, but it's my husband is
Speaker 1: the same way. Yeah, it's rewarded. You can make a
Speaker 1: lot of money doing that. Term the greatest movie ever,
Speaker 1: even though you leave for seven years to fucking figure
Speaker 1: it out, you know, and don't see your fanis you know, Sophia.
Speaker 1: You don't talk about your husband James Cameron often. Um,
Speaker 1: and he's he's right in the background as we talk,
Speaker 1: working on another fucking submarine. Like enough with the submarines, James,
Speaker 1: God damn it. Uh um yeah, thank god. So uh yeah. Um.
Speaker 1: The business did well. ZIP two did really well, and
Speaker 1: success made Ellen into a more confident person, giving him
Speaker 1: a sense of control that he'd lacked in his early life.
Speaker 1: He slowly learned to tone some of the less productive
Speaker 1: aspects of his personality down. His wife Justine later claimed quote,
Speaker 1: Ellen is not someone who would say I feel you,
Speaker 1: I see your point of view, because he doesn't have
Speaker 1: that I feel you dimension where things that sleeemed obvious
Speaker 1: to other people that weren't that obvious to him. He
Speaker 1: had to learn that a twenty something year old really
Speaker 1: shouldn't shoot down the plans of older senior people and
Speaker 1: point out everything wrong with him. He learned to modify
Speaker 1: his pavior in certain ways. And this is true objectively
Speaker 1: because he got good at dealing with money people, but
Speaker 1: he only learned how to communicate more carefully with people
Speaker 1: he needed things from Uh, Doris Downs Zip to his
Speaker 1: former creative director, later recalled I remember being in a
Speaker 1: meeting once brainstorming about a new product, a new car site.
Speaker 1: Someone complained about a technical change that we wanted being impossible.
Speaker 1: Ellen turned and said, I don't really give a damn
Speaker 1: what you think and walked out of the meeting. For Ellen,
Speaker 1: the word no does not exist, and he expects that
Speaker 1: attitude from everyone around him. This is again Advance his
Speaker 1: book to always spun as a positive thing. And the
Speaker 1: thing that Vance will point out is that like and
Speaker 1: and that employees who both like and hate Ellen will
Speaker 1: point out is that his trigger is being told something
Speaker 1: can't be done. You always have to present him with
Speaker 1: an alternate option of what can be done instead. And
Speaker 1: again that's often seen as like no, this is like
Speaker 1: a good management practice, that's part of his success that
Speaker 1: like he makes his people always present him with another option.
Speaker 1: But it really is rooted in the fact that he
Speaker 1: can't hear no. He can't be told no. He's not
Speaker 1: learned that, which is good. Sophia, Yeah, I mean that's
Speaker 1: actually first wife down Yep. Clearly be just a great
Speaker 1: learning of lessons for him. No. Ever, and it's interesting
Speaker 1: that he did learn how to modify kind of the
Speaker 1: noxious aspects of his behavior around people. He needed money
Speaker 1: from UM. That is really telling, and he doesn't want
Speaker 1: to with his employees, so he feels fine taking like
Speaker 1: acting that way around them anyway. That's good behavior. ZIP
Speaker 1: to continue to grow and it it did consistently lose money,
Speaker 1: but obviously in Silicon Valley that doesn't matter. UM and
Speaker 1: the VC money kept trickling in enough to keep it
Speaker 1: alive until the company was purchased purchased by Compact in
Speaker 1: February of nine for three hundred and seven million dollars
Speaker 1: in cash. Ellen walked away with bucks himself. Yeah, he
Speaker 1: got about twenty two million out of that, and he
Speaker 1: left the company immediately because he didn't actually really care
Speaker 1: about this project. He just wanted to get rich off
Speaker 1: of it. UM and Yeah, when he talks about this
Speaker 1: in the present day, his chief lingering frustrations with his
Speaker 1: time seemed to be number one that the coders he
Speaker 1: worked with weren't as good as him. He always talks
Speaker 1: about like how he had to correct their funk ups
Speaker 1: and like everyone else, always talks about the fact that
Speaker 1: his code wouldn't have worked in a real product and
Speaker 1: like needed to be fixed by people who knew how
Speaker 1: to actually code um in a productive way. Uh yeah,
Speaker 1: and he also is really angry that he never got
Speaker 1: to be CEO because everybody agreed that he was bad
Speaker 1: at dealing with people and wouldn't let him be CEO.
Speaker 1: So that's what he was angry with walking out of
Speaker 1: his first business. So uh, he spent a million dollars
Speaker 1: immediately on a on a McLaren, which is some sort
Speaker 1: of fancy rich person car that there's there's not many
Speaker 1: of them, so rich guys love it because there's only
Speaker 1: like sixty Oh I'm just like you. I'm a rare, precious,
Speaker 1: precious you know, muscle that's me. Yeah yeah, by car
Speaker 1: there's just like may really precious and rare and special
Speaker 1: and expensive. And he needed to be unique even more
Speaker 1: because like, not only did he need to get the
Speaker 1: car that's like the fancy car that almost no one
Speaker 1: gets to have, but he also couldn't be like a
Speaker 1: normal rich guy and like have it be like his
Speaker 1: fancy special car that he drives when he wants to
Speaker 1: be fancy. Like he was famous for treating it like
Speaker 1: ship and like letting it get dirty and like fucking
Speaker 1: it up, hitting curbs curbs, and he bragged about it.
Speaker 1: It's important to people that people that he knew that
Speaker 1: he had this unique car and that he treated it
Speaker 1: like ship, like he needed other folks to know that
Speaker 1: about him. I would literally throw this money in a
Speaker 1: garbage disposal, bra I don't care, Okay, I just throw it.
Speaker 1: I don't care disposal. I'm cool. When he had the
Speaker 1: car delivered, he had CNN show up at his house
Speaker 1: to film the delivery. The interview caught Ellen at an
Speaker 1: interesting point in his life, when he was clearly elated
Speaker 1: by his new found wealth, wildly cocky, and far too
Speaker 1: young to know how off putting all of this is.
Speaker 1: Ashley Vance writes, quote the whole time, he looked like
Speaker 1: a caricature of an engineer who had made it. Big
Speaker 1: Musk's hair had started thinning, and he had a closely
Speaker 1: cropped cut that is tuated his boyish face. He wore
Speaker 1: an all two big brown sport coat and checked his
Speaker 1: cell phone from his lavish car, sitting next to his
Speaker 1: gorgeous girlfriend, Justine. Justine moved to California, by the way,
Speaker 1: and he seems spelled by bound by his life. Must
Speaker 1: rolled out one laughable rich guy line after another, talking
Speaker 1: first about the ZIP two deal receiving cash as cash,
Speaker 1: I mean, those are just a large number of Ben
Speaker 1: Franklin's and next about the awesomeness of his life there
Speaker 1: it is, gentleman, the fastest car in the world, And
Speaker 1: then about his prodigious ambition. I could go and buy
Speaker 1: one of the islands in the Bahamas and turn it
Speaker 1: into my personal fiefdom. But I am much more interested
Speaker 1: in trying to build and create a new company. So
Speaker 1: he's just like a real asshole about this and patting
Speaker 1: himself on the back during it. He's like, I could
Speaker 1: have done another rich guy thing, but I'm doing this
Speaker 1: rot guy thing that I think is better. Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: what happens when you give a rich kid in his
Speaker 1: early twenties twenty two million dollars of his own I'm
Speaker 1: not like other rich guys. Yeah, I'm making a space
Speaker 1: company or what I'm gonna make it. Well, not yet. First,
Speaker 1: he wants to make an internet based bank. Uh So
Speaker 1: he rolls most of his money that he got from
Speaker 1: gets from the sale into x dot com, which is
Speaker 1: this his idea for an internet best based bank, and
Speaker 1: what's unusual about this is that most tech millionaires, like
Speaker 1: who started new businesses after their first hit, got other
Speaker 1: people to put in the money. And this is something
Speaker 1: that Musk is rare about. Musk is that he he
Speaker 1: put most of his own fortune into X dot com
Speaker 1: um and this this was really uncommon. And the reason
Speaker 1: why is because he wanted control. He wanted to be
Speaker 1: CEO this time around, and so putting in the majority
Speaker 1: of the funding gave him control and meant other people
Speaker 1: could have less of a say over his vision and
Speaker 1: couldn't say no to him. Now, from the beginning, there
Speaker 1: were conflicts at x dot com based on the alon's behavior.
Speaker 1: One of his co founders was a guy named Fricker,
Speaker 1: who had moved from Canada to help start the business
Speaker 1: and was frustrated by Evon's attitude. Fricker wanted to create
Speaker 1: a straightforward where I'm so sorry, it's really boring here
Speaker 1: during this podcast, just in my life. So Fricker wanted
Speaker 1: to create a straightforward online bank, like he didn't see
Speaker 1: why it needed to be a big deal. It was like, yeah, people,
Speaker 1: the internet is the thing. Now people are gonna need
Speaker 1: a bank. This seems like a thing we should do
Speaker 1: and make money, whereas Elon was like, no, we're going
Speaker 1: to completely change the banking system and the way that
Speaker 1: banking has done will never be the same, And it
Speaker 1: had to be like this big fucking deal for him,
Speaker 1: whereas this guy was like, Yeah, we could just make
Speaker 1: like a bank app thing online and that will be
Speaker 1: a thing people want. Ellen it had to be a
Speaker 1: bigger deal for Elon, and Fricker accused Musk of overhyping
Speaker 1: their product and eventually attempted a coup against Musk. So
Speaker 1: five months after x dot com was founded, Fricker and
Speaker 1: most of the best engineers in the company all left
Speaker 1: to form their own business. It says a lot about
Speaker 1: Musk's personality that very few of the people at the
Speaker 1: company sided with him in this personal dispute. You get
Speaker 1: the feeling they all found him very frustrating. But Musk
Speaker 1: kept going, and he was able to hide x dot
Speaker 1: COM's internal problems from Mike Moritz of Sequoia Capital, who
Speaker 1: put in a major investment that allowed Elon to hire
Speaker 1: are more engineers to continue his vision. One former employee
Speaker 1: later recalled, you look back and it was total insanity.
Speaker 1: We had what amounted to a Hollywood movie set of
Speaker 1: a website. It barely got past the venture capitalists. The
Speaker 1: x dot com office was tiny and cramped and by
Speaker 1: all accounts disgusting. One employee recalled, it was this massive
Speaker 1: adolescent men that worked so hard it stunk so badly
Speaker 1: in there. I can still smell it leftover pizza, body
Speaker 1: odor and sweat. He's so lucky that he isn't Jewish.
Speaker 1: If he had like just come out and been like,
Speaker 1: I'm going to change the banking industry, people would have
Speaker 1: just said all kinds of anti Semitic ship for him
Speaker 1: to him for the rest of his fucking life. It
Speaker 1: would have followed him around. Yes, this was the one
Speaker 1: time anti Semitism might have helped us all out. But
Speaker 1: alas if only oh man yeah uh in a company
Speaker 1: filled with broken souldman who worked way too hard on
Speaker 1: a damn banking app must work the way too hardest,
Speaker 1: putting in twenty three hours a day to everyone else's twenty. Uh.
Speaker 1: That's a bit of an exaggeration, but it's how he
Speaker 1: describes it, and probably not super far off from the truth,
Speaker 1: just based on what we know of him. By Thanksgiving
Speaker 1: of x dot com was live and it worked. It
Speaker 1: was not the only game in online banking town. However,
Speaker 1: Max Levchin and Peter Teal were working on a competing
Speaker 1: product at exactly the same time. They called it Confinity,
Speaker 1: which is a ship name. But Teal and company also
Speaker 1: picked an objectively good name for the service. They called
Speaker 1: it PayPal, which is a way better name than Confinity,
Speaker 1: or than X dot com, which sounds like a porn side. Well,
Speaker 1: it's actually what I heard. What I heard is that
Speaker 1: X dot com got bought out by Exhibit and became
Speaker 1: X to the Z dot com. Oh, I don't get
Speaker 1: the joke. I understand there's a joke. I just don't
Speaker 1: get it. It's fine. You need to know who Exhibit is.
Speaker 1: I know enough for for the both of us that
Speaker 1: so thank you. So yeah. In March, so they competed
Speaker 1: for a while and we're basically like running both companies
Speaker 1: out of business by fighting with money. Uh. And so
Speaker 1: in March of two thousand they decided to merge um
Speaker 1: personality crop conflicts cropped up almost immediately. Uh and it
Speaker 1: I hate Peter Teal is honestly more deserving behind the
Speaker 1: bastards than Elon Musk. He'll get one at some point
Speaker 1: because he is a real monster. Um, but he comes
Speaker 1: off as the more reasonable person in the fight between them. UM.
Speaker 1: So the big issue is that Peter Teal and everyone
Speaker 1: else at the company thought PayPal was a better name
Speaker 1: for their service, and Elon Musk was in love with
Speaker 1: X dot com because he'd come up with it and
Speaker 1: he was not willing to come from bias, and he
Speaker 1: was objectively wrong. But it's also such a little kid
Speaker 1: named to like, he's like X dot com And if
Speaker 1: that's taken, what about dot com? And if that's yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's silly. There's a lot that's been written about
Speaker 1: the Apaul Mafia, which is what all these guys came
Speaker 1: to be known as in this period, and I'm I'm
Speaker 1: just not going to talk much about it because I
Speaker 1: don't find it interesting and fuck it. But yeah, I
Speaker 1: should just let you know that that's a term you
Speaker 1: here a lot, and I don't care about it. I'm
Speaker 1: not gonna go into much detail about PayPal because it's boring. Um.
Speaker 1: What's most important is that there was a split between
Speaker 1: Musk and Teal, and Teel actually resigned from the company
Speaker 1: two months after the merger. Peter Teal is a huge
Speaker 1: piece of ship. But it really seems like Musk was
Speaker 1: more of a problem here, given this was the second
Speaker 1: time in less than a year that a co founder
Speaker 1: of the company that he worked at had quit after
Speaker 1: an argument with Ellen. Uh. Yeah, so that's interesting. UM.
Speaker 1: X dot com had other issues. The company picked up
Speaker 1: new users at a huge rate, but it's infrastructure was
Speaker 1: not able to handle the loads, so the site collapsed regularly. Uh.
Speaker 1: Fraud was rampant, and the business lost tons of money
Speaker 1: as a result of stupid shit. Uh. And I'm gonna
Speaker 1: quote from Ashley Vance's book Now. As x dot com
Speaker 1: became popular and its transaction volume exploded, all of its
Speaker 1: problems worsened. There was more fraud, there were more fees
Speaker 1: from banks and credit card companies. There was more competition
Speaker 1: from star ups. X dot com lacked a cohesive business
Speaker 1: model to offset the losses and turn a profit from
Speaker 1: the money it managed. Ralof BOTHA, the startups chief financial
Speaker 1: officer and now a prominent venture capitalist at Sequoia, did
Speaker 1: not think Musk provided the board with a true picture
Speaker 1: of x dot COM's issues. A growing number of other
Speaker 1: people at the company questioned Musk's decision making in the
Speaker 1: face of all the crises. What followed was one of
Speaker 1: the nastiest coups and Silicon Valley's long illustrious history of
Speaker 1: nasty coup's. A small group of x dot com employees
Speaker 1: gathered one night at Fanny and Alexander, a now defunct
Speaker 1: bar and Paulo Alto and brainstormed about how to push
Speaker 1: out Musk. They decided to sell the board on the
Speaker 1: idea of Teal returning a CEO. Instead of confronting Musk
Speaker 1: directly with the plan, the conspirators decided to take action
Speaker 1: behind Musk's back. So the coup plotters acted right as
Speaker 1: Elon Musk left for his honeymoon with Justine. They actually
Speaker 1: married months earlier, but hadn't been able to celebrate it
Speaker 1: because Elon Musk is a workaholic. Uh. So he finds
Speaker 1: out that they're ousting him as CEO right after they
Speaker 1: land in Sydney, Australia. Um, and he immediately leaves the
Speaker 1: honeymoon to go try to win his company back because
Speaker 1: that is where I what she said when that happened.
Speaker 1: She's so excited. Yeah, he loves me. Yeah. So Ellen
Speaker 1: and Justine land in like Australia. Yeah, and he just
Speaker 1: like books a trip back right away. He didn't get
Speaker 1: his way, though. Teal took over. X dot Com was
Speaker 1: rebranded as PayPal, and according to the folks who worked there,
Speaker 1: Ellen did take this eventually. Well, Um, he didn't blow
Speaker 1: the company up or anything, although we probably could have tried.
Speaker 1: With new, better management and a much better name. PayPal
Speaker 1: took off in July two. eBay offered one point five
Speaker 1: billion dollars for the company. The board accepted the deal,
Speaker 1: and Musk got two hundred and fifty million. This shuck
Speaker 1: out to about a hundred and eighty million dollars after taxes. Question,
Speaker 1: Justine stay and enjoy Australia by herself and have a
Speaker 1: good old time. Was that mentioned? Because that's what I'm Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think, so, I think, Yeah, I hope. So she
Speaker 1: writes fantasy novels, which wasn't initially very supportive of, and
Speaker 1: then made fun of her four around his friends. Um,
Speaker 1: because that's the kind of guy he is. What a
Speaker 1: shitty piece of ship. Yeah, my husband made part of
Speaker 1: my career behind my back. Yeah he would be dead.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, yeah, don't don't ship talk your spouse's career.
Speaker 1: Unless your spouses Elon Musk, then absolutely do ship talk
Speaker 1: your spouse's career grimes. Start a fucking book club just
Speaker 1: so people can come over and rag on your husband
Speaker 1: with Yeah. So like, hey, Ellen, you've seen any space lately?
Speaker 1: I don't know how to I don't have a good
Speaker 1: joke yet. Give me a minute. Yeah, thank you, eat it.
Speaker 1: And while you take that minute, that'll teach you it's
Speaker 1: time for something else, Robert. While you take that man, Hey, hey,
Speaker 1: rocket man, why don't you burn out your fuse alone?
Speaker 1: Because you're incapable of intimacy? There we go, Bam, that
Speaker 1: was weird. Um, But anyway, you know what's not incapable
Speaker 1: of intimacy these products and services. We're back. We're back
Speaker 1: from those incredibly horny products talking about the equally probably
Speaker 1: horny Elon Musk, but horny for business, horny to save
Speaker 1: the world. That's Elon Musk in this period. So uh,
Speaker 1: as everyone I'm sure knows, Ellen takes all his money
Speaker 1: he makes from eBay and he throws it into Tesla
Speaker 1: SpaceX and his brother's business, Solar City. UM. Ashley Vance's
Speaker 1: book gives a good blow by blot blow account of
Speaker 1: how this all went down if you're interested. Solar City
Speaker 1: next door to um Circuit City, Yes, yes, yes, Party City,
Speaker 1: corner from Party City, yes, around the corner from both.
Speaker 1: It's in the city block of Lincoln City. I don't
Speaker 1: know it. Tesla started out as some other dudes electric
Speaker 1: car company, So Elon Musk didn't start Tesla, which is
Speaker 1: should be obvious because it has a good name. And
Speaker 1: as we've learned, Elon Musk cannot name a business well. Um.
Speaker 1: But Musk like the idea behind Tesla, and he pumped
Speaker 1: in a bunch of funding to become part of the business.
Speaker 1: He also introduced the founders to a genius battery building
Speaker 1: engineer whose research must had helped to fund, so he
Speaker 1: does get some credit. Um. And around the same time,
Speaker 1: Musk also started SpaceX, the company grow out of conversations
Speaker 1: and research that Musk had started to fund between a
Speaker 1: bunch of space nerds. In essence, Elon had money and
Speaker 1: he used a bunch of it to gather a group
Speaker 1: of smart astro nerds together and get them talking. The
Speaker 1: rough goal at first was to try and send mice
Speaker 1: to Mars and then send them back to Earth alive,
Speaker 1: which is a cool idea. The scientists he was talking
Speaker 1: to thought that they could do this for like twenty
Speaker 1: million bucks. The plan gradually evolved into the idea of
Speaker 1: building a robot greenhouse and launching it via rocket to Mars.
Speaker 1: The greenhouse would mix Martian soil with Earth soil and
Speaker 1: squared out tiny bits of oxygen, and in the Martian
Speaker 1: atmosphere would send video feedback to Earth, so people could,
Speaker 1: you know, see plants growing on Mars, which is a
Speaker 1: cool idea. That would be a neat thing to see
Speaker 1: plants growing. Love to watch that. That's the most I've
Speaker 1: ever been interested, uh so far in Yes, what he's
Speaker 1: been inventing, I mean, PayPal it's a fine I guess, no,
Speaker 1: fuck it, it's a cool about this fucking space garden.
Speaker 1: That sounds to bring me a space tomato from Mars. Yeah,
Speaker 1: a space tomato from Mars. You could, honestly, yeah, I
Speaker 1: would kick starter that. Yeah. And when you tell stories
Speaker 1: like that, you can see why space nerds fell in
Speaker 1: love with Elon Musk at this period. That's a fucking
Speaker 1: cool thing to want to do. Um And it's a
Speaker 1: cool thing if you have tens of millions of dollars
Speaker 1: to put money into um. Since Elon had a lot
Speaker 1: of money to spare, like obviously he could actually make
Speaker 1: this happen. He flew to Russia with a rocket scientist
Speaker 1: he knew to see if the Russian government would sell
Speaker 1: him a rocket, and they were totally down to sell
Speaker 1: him a rocket, but they wanted way too much money. Um.
Speaker 1: So yeah, he decided to start SpaceX in order to
Speaker 1: make space travel cheaper and get mankind to Mars. And
Speaker 1: gradually the goal switched from space Garden to make it
Speaker 1: cheaper to get satellites into the air and provide shipped
Speaker 1: to the I S. S. Which is like not a
Speaker 1: not cool thing to do, but it's not as cool
Speaker 1: as space Garden. I think we can all agree on that. No,
Speaker 1: and I can't eat that. That's most spaced tomatoes, you can.
Speaker 1: I mean, they do grow things in the I S S.
Speaker 1: So you can say he's contributing to space tomatoes, but
Speaker 1: he's not contributing to Mars tomatoes. Right now? Yeah, for real,
Speaker 1: where the funk is my Mars Basil? That's why I'm
Speaker 1: waiting for. Yeah, funk, where's our Mars Basil? Elan, you
Speaker 1: fucking asshole, Oh my god, do you think they could
Speaker 1: make way bigger vegetables on Mars because of the weight thing.
Speaker 1: If they could make from what I understand that as
Speaker 1: big as my whole body, holy sh it, you can
Speaker 1: make like giant. You could make a watermelon that reaches
Speaker 1: from Mars to the Earth and then we could eat
Speaker 1: our way to Mars inside of a water melon that
Speaker 1: protects us from space. Dude. Finally behind yes, giants space watermelon,
Speaker 1: space giant giant space elevator made out of a watermelon.
Speaker 1: Hell yeah. So um Musk has been pretty adamant from
Speaker 1: the beginning that his goal with SpaceX was to make
Speaker 1: space travel cheaper and get mankind of Mars. That's always
Speaker 1: like the dream, like everything, Like he always emphasizes, like
Speaker 1: the goal is to get human beings to Mars so
Speaker 1: that we can become like an interplanetary society and you know,
Speaker 1: not get wiped out by a fucking rock or whatever. Um,
Speaker 1: And that's like the that's like the pitch that he's
Speaker 1: gotten very good at giving. Um and both of Elon's
Speaker 1: big two companies that he founded with his eBay money
Speaker 1: have dreams like this from the beginning, Even before Elon,
Speaker 1: Tesla's goal was to make sweet luxury electric cars and
Speaker 1: use that money in the lessons from it to drive
Speaker 1: down the cost of building an electric car that could
Speaker 1: dominate the US auto market. Now, there is a big
Speaker 1: debate to be had as to whether or not either
Speaker 1: SpaceX or Tesla have ever had a chance of contr
Speaker 1: beating to the grand goals set for them. They certainly
Speaker 1: have not achieved them um, and we'll discuss that a
Speaker 1: little later. But the fact that both of the companies
Speaker 1: were started with species life and death as the stakes
Speaker 1: um had some benefits for Elon. For one thing, they
Speaker 1: allowed him to inspire and motivate his work place with
Speaker 1: things beyond money. So you can have your workers work
Speaker 1: themselves into an early grave if they think they're saving
Speaker 1: the world, whereas it's hard to do that if they
Speaker 1: think they're making the Yellow Pages. Right. Um, that's one
Speaker 1: benefit to a guy like Ellen. Um. The other benefit
Speaker 1: is that, like he didn't really want to make either
Speaker 1: of these companies public, especially not early, because that means
Speaker 1: you lose control if you have a public company of
Speaker 1: less control than a private company, and Ellen is a
Speaker 1: big control guy. UM. So again, focusing on saving the
Speaker 1: human race is the goal for both companies allowed him
Speaker 1: to justify keeping control, which meant less money for his workers.
Speaker 1: Uh meant they didn't get to cash out their stock options,
Speaker 1: but also meant that he had the control he needed
Speaker 1: to see these dreams through and it makes it easier
Speaker 1: to sell people on that. From the beginning, both companies
Speaker 1: were based entirely off of the work and genius inventions
Speaker 1: of other people. Tesla's founder, a guy named eber Hard,
Speaker 1: was a brilliant and is he's still alive, a brilliant engineer.
Speaker 1: SpaceX relied on a huge crop of genius rocket engineers.
Speaker 1: Musk did make his contributions, and he is a talented engineer,
Speaker 1: and on the engineering side he did some meaningful things,
Speaker 1: but they were also a mixed bag. For example, he
Speaker 1: insisted the Tesla Roadster have a carbon fiber body, which
Speaker 1: necessitated a specific sort of paint. The paint happens to
Speaker 1: be very toxic, which has led to Tesla being fine
Speaker 1: tens of thousands of dollars by the State of California
Speaker 1: for polluting the air with land with toxic waste. So
Speaker 1: that's good. Carbon fiber is cool. Can't make an omelet
Speaker 1: without ruining all of the chickens ability to make eggs.
Speaker 1: That is a very true statement. Sophia Musk is a
Speaker 1: hands on boss, and it's clearly important to him that
Speaker 1: he'd be seen as one of, if not the leading
Speaker 1: minds behind both of his big businesses, signature products and
Speaker 1: to those. In five Tesla got its first New York
Speaker 1: Times coverage. It was very positive about company founder eber
Speaker 1: Hard and the other genius engineers, but it completely ignored
Speaker 1: Ellen when if Tesla's early employees later said, we tried
Speaker 1: to emphasize him and told the reporter about him over
Speaker 1: and over again, but they weren't interested in the board
Speaker 1: of the company. Ellen was furious he was living. But
Speaker 1: nobody puts Ellen in the corner. Okay, no, not ever.
Speaker 1: The early buzz around Tesla was very positive, and they
Speaker 1: were huge problems with the car behind the scenes, though,
Speaker 1: which you'd expect because it's like a hard thing to do.
Speaker 1: The product was laid repeatedly, and it had issues that
Speaker 1: kept cropping up with the transmission and the body, and
Speaker 1: the cost ballooned, YadA, YadA. It became very clear eventually
Speaker 1: that Tesla's early engineers had wildly underestimated what their car
Speaker 1: would cost. To make, and they had sold hundreds of
Speaker 1: pre ordered cars at a price way less than what
Speaker 1: the car would actually cost to make. I think they
Speaker 1: were selling them for like ninety thousand, and they found
Speaker 1: out it was gonna cost a hundred and seventy grand
Speaker 1: per vehicle. Um. And Musk had been the guy largely
Speaker 1: delivering the big speeches that had sold a lot of
Speaker 1: these cars and hyping them up, But he hadn't been
Speaker 1: the guy that was responsible for fucking up the cost calculation. Um.
Speaker 1: That was eber Hard, and he does seem to have
Speaker 1: genuinely really fucked up at estimating what these cars would
Speaker 1: cost to make. And Musk used this funk up as
Speaker 1: an opportunity to push the company founder out as CEO,
Speaker 1: and so Ellen finally got to be CEO. Uh. There's
Speaker 1: certainly a case to be made that he was this
Speaker 1: was the right thing to do. Many early Tesla people
Speaker 1: will say that Eberhard did funk up badly and he
Speaker 1: needed to be ousted at that point. Um. And you
Speaker 1: could say he needed to be ousted as badly as
Speaker 1: Ellen needed to be ousted in ordered for PayPal to
Speaker 1: be a success. But the whole endeavor led a tremendous
Speaker 1: bad blood between Eberhard and Musk, and the two men
Speaker 1: would snipe at each other for many years after that point. Um,
Speaker 1: now this is another thing I've seen folks online come
Speaker 1: after Musk four and I don't I don't like like
Speaker 1: the fact that he stole the company from this guy.
Speaker 1: I don't know. It's debatable as to whether or not
Speaker 1: he did the right thing. He probably did the right
Speaker 1: thing for making Tesla into a profitable company. Uh, what's
Speaker 1: not debate bole is how fucked up it is that
Speaker 1: Elon Musk gets credit for building all of these wonderful
Speaker 1: devices that he did not build. A January article got
Speaker 1: the title how Elon Musk built a Tesla factory in
Speaker 1: China in less than a year. Obviously he didn't. He
Speaker 1: never built a factory his life. In September two tho nineteen,
Speaker 1: Courts published an article titled Elon Musk is designing his
Speaker 1: rocket as fast as he can or undesigning. It was
Speaker 1: making a point about how he thinks, but like it
Speaker 1: still gives the credit to him for like making this rocket. Uh,
Speaker 1: Musk gets a lot of credit in general for the
Speaker 1: wonders that his companies have produced in a two thousand
Speaker 1: seventeen Rolling Stone article, Neil Strauss opened by noting that
Speaker 1: Musk has not yet achieved either of the incredibly lofty
Speaker 1: goals he's set for tests that or SpaceX, but quote,
Speaker 1: what he has done is something that very few living
Speaker 1: people can claim. Painstakingly bulldozed with no experience whatsoever into
Speaker 1: two fields with ridiculously high barriers to entry, car manufacturing
Speaker 1: and rocketry, and created the best products in those industries
Speaker 1: and measured by just about any meaningful metric you can
Speaker 1: think of. In the process, he's managed to sell the
Speaker 1: world on his ability achieve objectives so lofty that from
Speaker 1: the mouth of anyone else they'd be called fantasies. And
Speaker 1: that's frustrating to me, because, uh, he did jump in
Speaker 1: without any experience to do very difficult, interesting industries, but
Speaker 1: he didn't create those fucking products. Um And yeah, it's frustrating.
Speaker 1: It's frustrating that the writers of Star Trek Discovery saw
Speaker 1: fit to give Elon Musk credit as a brilliant inventor.
Speaker 1: They listed him next to the inventor of the warp
Speaker 1: drives that from Cochran as a genius scientific mind, which
Speaker 1: is bullsit Ship se from Cochrane lived through World War
Speaker 1: Three and made a fucking I mean, he's a fake guy,
Speaker 1: but whatever. It's bullshit to put Elon Musk at that
Speaker 1: level because he's not a genius fucking inventor. Um. It
Speaker 1: is fair, I think, based on what I've read to
Speaker 1: say that he's probably contributes more to the development of
Speaker 1: his products than most CEOs do, but he is also
Speaker 1: not just sitting there making them as a general rule.
Speaker 1: Ashley advanced. His book goes into the into tremendous detail
Speaker 1: about the incredible sacrifices that space X Rocket Engineers UH
Speaker 1: made to build the company's first successful rocket. They did
Speaker 1: it in like this this island off of the coast
Speaker 1: of Hawaii, and like lived on this primitive, humid like
Speaker 1: base for years that like didn't have like things that
Speaker 1: people normally need to have to be comfortable. They didn't
Speaker 1: see their family for like months or even years at
Speaker 1: a time. They sacrifice their health and social life because
Speaker 1: these like they believed in the dream of human space flight.
Speaker 1: We're back, uh, listeners will hear this is seamless, but
Speaker 1: we just had an interruption for a mystery, and none
Speaker 1: of you will ever know and it's a it's it's
Speaker 1: a you won't We're not gonna tell. Sorry, suckers, suckers,
Speaker 1: suckers liking my work, said, suckers, But you really went hard.
Speaker 1: I turned it into learned. Yeah. The key to keeping
Speaker 1: an audience is to be like a little bit abusive
Speaker 1: to them, you know, like negging. You need the audience.
Speaker 1: I think when you do that, because they feel like
Speaker 1: he knows we can take it, We're to and then
Speaker 1: they send you more knives. It's weird. You guys have
Speaker 1: a beautiful love it they do. I abuse them and
Speaker 1: they send me knives. And that is the healthiest relationship
Speaker 1: in my life. If anybody wants to send Robert a
Speaker 1: knife for me, I would take it. Just step why
Speaker 1: I Sophia, I was not considered in this factor. But okay, uh, Sophie,
Speaker 1: do you want a knife? No? No, no, that I'm not.
Speaker 1: I've given you so many nice relationships that I wasn't
Speaker 1: part of that, and it's most functional all your podcast. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I know, I know. See that's because I habitually torpedo
Speaker 1: my relationships. But that's how it works. Were great, you
Speaker 1: know the problem. The real problem with this line of
Speaker 1: jokes Sophia is that if you start getting mailed a
Speaker 1: bunch of knives, you're not gonna know if it's because
Speaker 1: Elon Musk fans want you dead or because they really
Speaker 1: enjoyed your performance. Okay, okay, let me amend my request.
Speaker 1: You can send a knife for Robert for me if
Speaker 1: it includes Oh I see, that's badass. I'd love that.
Speaker 1: Just so I know it's not aggressive. You can like
Speaker 1: draw a happy face on it if you want, or
Speaker 1: just include a little with a happy face so I
Speaker 1: know it's like a non threatening gift. Send her knives
Speaker 1: and smiley faces, which is the totally non threatening gift
Speaker 1: is knives in pictures of smiling faces. Everyone, No one's
Speaker 1: creeped out by that at all. Let's move on. Hey,
Speaker 1: I know what I like. Yeah, So the thing I
Speaker 1: want to emphasize is, like, again, muskets all this credit
Speaker 1: for like he made like he's a rocket engineer, he
Speaker 1: like made these incredible space things, and it's like, I think,
Speaker 1: like there's a lot that actually is objectively incredible about
Speaker 1: SpaceX is rockets, including the fact that they like are
Speaker 1: capable of kind of piloting themselves back to the guard.
Speaker 1: A lot of cool stuff has been done by engineers
Speaker 1: at SpaceX who are brilliant rocket designers and who sack
Speaker 1: or fist an enormous amount. Again, these guys had to
Speaker 1: live for years unlike an island base, with like very
Speaker 1: little in the way of comforts, like ignoring their families,
Speaker 1: because there were people who believed in this dream of
Speaker 1: getting to Mars and like sacrificed huge chunks of their
Speaker 1: youth to make these rockets work. It was an incredibly laborious,
Speaker 1: nightmarish process in some ways, and they did it. And
Speaker 1: Musk was sitting in California watching test launches on closed
Speaker 1: circuit video and hyping up the company. Which is not
Speaker 1: to say that like as a CEO, he's not thinking
Speaker 1: probably make the case that he's one of the more
Speaker 1: valuable CEOs out there, which I also think he's still
Speaker 1: very overvalued. But anyway, it's frustrated to me that he
Speaker 1: gets so much credit and all these fucking engineers and
Speaker 1: the guy's actually doing the cool work but whatever, um yeah,
Speaker 1: Must gets. The thing that's frustrating me most is that
Speaker 1: Must gets the credit for the successes of his workers
Speaker 1: while being able to blame them for his or for
Speaker 1: the failures of the company. One example of this came
Speaker 1: in March six. SpaceX had an important launch of its
Speaker 1: Falcon one rocket. The rocket wound up like fucking up
Speaker 1: and blowing up and ship. Uh so it didn't work out,
Speaker 1: and this was made them push like the date because
Speaker 1: they had like contracts and stuff to put stuff into
Speaker 1: space and they couldn't get their rocket to actually work.
Speaker 1: Because Elon Musky used to build that those rockets when
Speaker 1: he was a kid with explosives and was like, I'm
Speaker 1: lucky I kept my fingers. Yeah, you're gonna put that
Speaker 1: guy in charge of your rocket. Yeah. He wasn't really
Speaker 1: like it was engineers and stuff who were like, it's
Speaker 1: it's hard to do. It's hard to do there anyway
Speaker 1: rocket science Robert I am aware. Yeah, yeah, yeah, well,
Speaker 1: and like you would think a good boss would be like, no,
Speaker 1: it's fucking hard, Like it's nobody's fault. This is going
Speaker 1: to take some time to get right and like it
Speaker 1: didn't work this time, but we're going to get it right. Um.
Speaker 1: And that's kind of what Elon Musk like put out
Speaker 1: to the world. But he also needed a scapegoat to
Speaker 1: blame for the investors and so he picked one of
Speaker 1: his hard working engineers who had been sacrificing his youth
Speaker 1: out on an island um in a very unfair way.
Speaker 1: And I'm gonna quote from Ashley vans Now. Musk and
Speaker 1: other SpaceX executives blamed the crash on an onion named technician.
Speaker 1: They said this technician had done some work on the
Speaker 1: rocket one day before the launch and failed to properly
Speaker 1: tighten the fitting on a fuel pipe, which caused the
Speaker 1: fitting to crack. The fitting in question was something basic
Speaker 1: and aluminum b nut that's often used to connect a
Speaker 1: pair of tubes. The technician was Holman, who was like
Speaker 1: one of the guys living out there. In the aftermath
Speaker 1: of the rocket crash, Holman flew to Los Angeles to
Speaker 1: confront Musk directly. He'd spent years working day and night
Speaker 1: on the Falcon one and felt enraged that Musk had
Speaker 1: called out him and his team in public. Holman knew
Speaker 1: that he'd fastened the b nut correctly and that observers
Speaker 1: from NASA had been looking over his shoulder to check
Speaker 1: the work. When Holman charged into SpaceX's headquarters with a
Speaker 1: head full of fury. Mary Beth Brown, Musk secretary tried
Speaker 1: to calm him and stop him from seeing Musk. Holman
Speaker 1: kept going anyway, and the two of them proceeded to
Speaker 1: have a shouting match at Musk's cubicle. Now, later investigation
Speaker 1: proved that Holman had done nothing wrong. The culprit was
Speaker 1: the aluminum body of the rocket. Another board member later
Speaker 1: admitted that Holman quote kind of got blamed so they
Speaker 1: could get out an answer to the investors as to
Speaker 1: why the launch had not worked. And that's fucking shitty.
Speaker 1: And that's one thing that pisces me off about Elon Musk,
Speaker 1: because he gets a lot of credit when the rockets work,
Speaker 1: and he finds a hard working person to blame when
Speaker 1: they don't. That's bullshit. It's like, yeah, literally the opposite
Speaker 1: of good leadership. When you're a leader, you take credit
Speaker 1: for both. You know, it's the it's the responsibility of
Speaker 1: of being the head of something. You take credit for
Speaker 1: the good and the bad, and you shield your people
Speaker 1: who work for you. I would go so far as
Speaker 1: to say that a great leader takes credit for the
Speaker 1: bad and gives credit to his subordinates for the good stuff.
Speaker 1: That's a really good leader that doesn't exist in the
Speaker 1: tech world. So it was not even trying to go
Speaker 1: that yeah Hi, I was like, just be a good
Speaker 1: at decent boss and be like, yeah, the funk up
Speaker 1: is also on me. If you're gonna take credit for
Speaker 1: the good ship and when you are really a great leader,
Speaker 1: your subordinates will make sure that you get a lot
Speaker 1: of credit for the good stuff that happens. You don't
Speaker 1: do that yourself because that's being a dick. But anyway, whatever,
Speaker 1: fuck it. Uh So Mary Beth Brown, let's talk about
Speaker 1: Mary Beth Brown. But he's not gonna stop being a dick,
Speaker 1: right because his social skills are just not very good
Speaker 1: as we've known like the whole time. Speaking of that,
Speaker 1: let's talk about his relationship with Mary Beth Brown. So,
Speaker 1: Mary Beth Brown was Musk's assistant at both SpaceX and
Speaker 1: Tesla from the beginning of both companies, and basically everybody
Speaker 1: who spent any time around either company in this period
Speaker 1: will agree that she was absolutely critical to both success.
Speaker 1: Ashley Evance describes her as Musk's Pepper pots Um because
Speaker 1: there's a lot of fucking iron man uh tony start
Speaker 1: comparisons that made the Musk and for years she was
Speaker 1: the gateway to Elon Musk and his mediator because again,
Speaker 1: like you were just bringing up, he has no social skills.
Speaker 1: So she would keep people away from him when he
Speaker 1: was in a bad mood and unable to productively engage,
Speaker 1: and she would like tell people when it was a
Speaker 1: good line to talk to him because she was under
Speaker 1: She was like the Musk whisper. She brought him his meal,
Speaker 1: she scheduled his time, him with his children, She picked
Speaker 1: out his clothes. She was his fucking mom. That was
Speaker 1: her job, right, That is so sad. I always felt
Speaker 1: so sad for Pepper and those fucking movies. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: a bummer. Uh And it's a bummer. Yeah. I mean,
Speaker 1: at least he didn't have a weird relationship with her,
Speaker 1: I guess, but it was weird anyway, that that's a thing.
Speaker 1: But also he was like a fucking man child, as
Speaker 1: all of these tech guys are. So. Vance credits Mary
Speaker 1: Beth Brown for helping to set up SpaceX's early culture
Speaker 1: and asking as a bomb whenever Musk would ruffle feathers
Speaker 1: and hurt anyone in any like a key a key
Speaker 1: employees feelings. She worked twenty hour days when Elon worked
Speaker 1: twenty hour days. She traveled with him when he would
Speaker 1: because he would he spends like two days a week
Speaker 1: in l A, two days a week in San Francisco,
Speaker 1: had his other company like he traveled around all the time,
Speaker 1: So she this was like a fucking nightmare job. Um
Speaker 1: that she must have been obviously debt. She bought into
Speaker 1: the beliefs of the company, and it seems to be
Speaker 1: widely agreed that she was a very important part of
Speaker 1: both companies, especially as they started off. Um she played
Speaker 1: a huge role in in the that both were a success,
Speaker 1: and Elon Musk fired her in two thousand and fourteen.
Speaker 1: The story goes that she finally worked up the courage
Speaker 1: to ask Musk to be paid a salary in line
Speaker 1: with what the top executives at SpaceX were paid. Shouldn't.
Speaker 1: She was one of the longest serving employees and a
Speaker 1: key part of the operation, and was forced to like
Speaker 1: live Elon's unreasonable schedule. She thought this was fair. Musk
Speaker 1: told her to go take a vacation and he would
Speaker 1: do her job himself and decide if he really needed her.
Speaker 1: When she came back, he told her that she was
Speaker 1: unnecessary and fired her without ceremony. So that's cool. I
Speaker 1: remember reading about that and being like, that is the
Speaker 1: most insulting way to fire someone that's given so much
Speaker 1: of their time and life to you. To just make
Speaker 1: sure that they know that you think they're worthless before
Speaker 1: you let them go. That is so shitty for no reason. Yeah,
Speaker 1: to not just say like, well, I'm not going to
Speaker 1: do this and I don't need you anymore, but like,
Speaker 1: but first I'm going to devalue the decade that you sacrifice.
Speaker 1: That's what I'm saying. That's so wild. That's like just
Speaker 1: the true example of someone being Yeah, of someone being
Speaker 1: so self absorbed that it is truly abusive to other
Speaker 1: people because they do not consider the other person's like
Speaker 1: feelings or their livelihood or anything. Yep. Cool, to be
Speaker 1: a billionaire makes you superhuman, it does very human case
Speaker 1: Alex Luthor more morals. Yeah, I mean, you know what,
Speaker 1: at least Lex Luthor has an understandable life goal. He
Speaker 1: wants to murder Superman, and don't we all, Yeah, you
Speaker 1: have a sex I mean, for me, Superman is the
Speaker 1: f d A. But I get it, like, yeah, well
Speaker 1: you'll have an emesis Robert mm hmm. It's the f
Speaker 1: d A for everyone now, uh yeah, sorry. What he
Speaker 1: did with Marybeth Brown follows a pattern for Elon Musk.
Speaker 1: He hates being told no, um, he's being told anything
Speaker 1: he doesn't want to hear. And every former employee you
Speaker 1: can find is very consistent about the fact that telling
Speaker 1: him you can't do something is the worst career if
Speaker 1: you can make. Musk is famous for reacting to this
Speaker 1: by telling people, Okay, then I'll do your job and
Speaker 1: I'll be the CEO of two companies, and then he
Speaker 1: fires them and does their job. And in the stories
Speaker 1: that get told, he always does the job well, and
Speaker 1: you know, the person goes away. And it is true
Speaker 1: that Musk is very smart. Uh he might even he
Speaker 1: might even say he's brilliant at some things. Uh. It's
Speaker 1: also true that he has contributed to both of his companies.
Speaker 1: He has had a particular impact on the development of
Speaker 1: Tesla's vehicles. From what I can tell, he seems to
Speaker 1: have the same kind of gift that Steve Jobs has
Speaker 1: or had. Uh. And the gift is like the thing
Speaker 1: that Jobs did that made him special and that made
Speaker 1: him actually kind of worth the money he got paid
Speaker 1: as a CEO or more of it than most CEOs are.
Speaker 1: Is that he he was really good at saying no
Speaker 1: to Like he knew to his employees when they would say, like,
Speaker 1: we think we've got this phone right, he knew, like
Speaker 1: he had kind of an instinctive knowledge of what people
Speaker 1: wanted to hold in their hands. And that's why the
Speaker 1: iPhone worked and other phones that were made around the
Speaker 1: same time smartphones early smartphones didn't work. His jobs understood.
Speaker 1: He like refused to let the product out until he
Speaker 1: knew that it was like going to feel good in
Speaker 1: people's hands and to light people. And Musk did kind
Speaker 1: of the same thing with the Tesla, which is why
Speaker 1: people fucking love their Tesla's because it is a well,
Speaker 1: it's a car designed to delight people in certain ways.
Speaker 1: Like one of Musk's big contributions was insisting that the
Speaker 1: door handles do that thing where they like pop out
Speaker 1: and like it's silly and unnecessary, but also having driven one,
Speaker 1: like it's fucking cool as hell, and it makes people
Speaker 1: happy and loyal to the product because it don't like
Speaker 1: has a Tesla and he fucking loves it. The amount
Speaker 1: of joy from driving it. I'm like, this is stupid,
Speaker 1: but it is cool. Yeah, it's cool. It's cool, and
Speaker 1: and must get some credit for a number of the
Speaker 1: really cool things about that car he has he does have.
Speaker 1: I think that the CEO to compare him most too
Speaker 1: is Steve Jobs, who was a monster UM but who
Speaker 1: was also UM had a skill, and Musk has that
Speaker 1: same skill. He's not a rocket engineer. He is someone though,
Speaker 1: who understands. He understood something important that people wanted and
Speaker 1: and he was the first person who understand that thing.
Speaker 1: And as a result, UM he put out a product
Speaker 1: that delights people. And that's that's a that's a town.
Speaker 1: You can say it's not worth nearly as much as
Speaker 1: he's been paid, and I would agree with that, but
Speaker 1: it is a talent UM. So at SpaceX, however, Musk's
Speaker 1: main achievement seems to be pushing a policy whereby the
Speaker 1: company makes the vast majority of their spacecraft components in house.
Speaker 1: This is a really weird thing to do that no
Speaker 1: one else in the rocket industry does UM, and it
Speaker 1: caused them to take years to get off the ground
Speaker 1: because they had to like invent everything from the ground up.
Speaker 1: But it also allowed them to bypass a lot of
Speaker 1: the bloat that the heavily regulated space industry has um
Speaker 1: and has allowed them to do stuff like the radios
Speaker 1: that SpaceX put in rockets cost a fraction of the
Speaker 1: radios that like we're put in rockets before because they
Speaker 1: didn't like get into this Lockheed Martin bullshit where everything's
Speaker 1: like stupidly overbuilt and expensive like, and that it was
Speaker 1: a good idea um to do it this way. It
Speaker 1: seems like a policy that was successful in reducing the
Speaker 1: cost of shooting ship into space. So whether or not
Speaker 1: you think that's good, it worked. My issue with Musk
Speaker 1: isn't that I think he's useless. It's that I think
Speaker 1: he gets way too much fucking credit, and that he
Speaker 1: uses the world saving goals of his company as an
Speaker 1: excuse to treat loyal and critical employees who do more
Speaker 1: of the work in a lot of cases than he does,
Speaker 1: like ship whenever he feels like they're getting in the
Speaker 1: way of what he wants to do at the moment um.
Speaker 1: And I'm gonna quote again from Ashley Vance's biography. This
Speaker 1: is near the end of the biography. The rank and
Speaker 1: file employees tend to describe Musk in more mixed ways.
Speaker 1: They revere his drive in respect how demanding he can be.
Speaker 1: They also think he can be hard to the point
Speaker 1: of mean and come off as capricious. The employees want
Speaker 1: to be close to Musk, but they also feared that
Speaker 1: he'll suddenly change his mind about something, and that every
Speaker 1: interaction with him is an opportunity to be fired. Elon's
Speaker 1: worst trait by far, in my opinion, is a complete
Speaker 1: lack of loyal to your human connection, said one former employee.
Speaker 1: Many of us worked tirelessly for him for years and
Speaker 1: were tossed to the curb like a piece of litter
Speaker 1: without a second thought. Maybe it was calculated to keep
Speaker 1: the rest of the workplace on their toes and scared.
Speaker 1: Maybe he was just able to detach from human connection
Speaker 1: to a remarkable degree. What was clear is that people
Speaker 1: who worked for him were like ammunition, used for a
Speaker 1: specific purpose until exhausted and discarded. What a ghoul. Wow, Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's some baltimort ship right, just fucking sucking the all
Speaker 1: the I don't know, Yeah, I would say it's a
Speaker 1: bad thing to do. Death theater. They'd like, suck out
Speaker 1: all your life force right out of your out of
Speaker 1: your body and then just leave you all your warm
Speaker 1: memories and you just sucking die. That's how I feel
Speaker 1: it is of your talent. Thank you the mentor I
Speaker 1: needed help. Thank you. Um You're the only person I
Speaker 1: would let make a Harry Potter comparison here. Thanks. I've
Speaker 1: earned it with my service, um, with my with my
Speaker 1: dead baby killer service. Um you have. I've graduated to
Speaker 1: not being on those episodes and I've never been less
Speaker 1: disturbed in my life. Speaking of babies alive babies, let's
Speaker 1: talk about thought And I was like, where, what how?
Speaker 1: But Sophie, you know who won't kill babies? Well, Raytheon
Speaker 1: kills a lot of babies. Here's the thing about Raytheon.
Speaker 1: What do we all hate weddings? Nobody likes having to
Speaker 1: go to a wedding, And the dream of Raytheon is
Speaker 1: to make weddings a thing of the past, not just
Speaker 1: for people in Afghanistan, but for everyone all over the world. Yes,
Speaker 1: with Raytheon, we can all live in a world where
Speaker 1: no wedding gets to happen without a drone strike. And
Speaker 1: isn't that the world we all want to live in? No?
Speaker 1: I like weddings. Weddings are dope. There's an open bar
Speaker 1: usually and I get free. What are you talking about, Robert,
Speaker 1: I mean, I don't want to be I don't want
Speaker 1: to be in a wedding. That's a lot of work.
Speaker 1: But like this makes no sense. Well it doesn't have
Speaker 1: to make sense because it's Raytheon, Raytheon wonderful. This is
Speaker 1: the ad break Yeah, adds, we're a and we're talking
Speaker 1: about Elon Musk's first wife, Justine. She famously wrote a
Speaker 1: viral article in two thousand ten after their divorce for
Speaker 1: Mary Claire. Its title is I was a starter wife.
Speaker 1: That is one of the biggest article. That is where
Speaker 1: a lot of my information comes from. It's pretty it's
Speaker 1: a pretty good breakup article information. Uh. It followed on
Speaker 1: the heels of Justine's blog, which she had kept for
Speaker 1: like the entirety of their marriage and had regularly like
Speaker 1: written some unflattering things about Elon about that like then
Speaker 1: made it out like all sorts of like gossip rags
Speaker 1: and stuff would talk about it. Um. He did not.
Speaker 1: He was not happy with that. Um. And also I
Speaker 1: kind of think it was her way of like striking
Speaker 1: back at him for like talking some ship about her
Speaker 1: career as a writer. Um, She's like Okay, then, well,
Speaker 1: I'm going to write about what a dick you are
Speaker 1: in my blog and then, oh, I bet you're gonna
Speaker 1: hate it a lot fucking more when it's about you.
Speaker 1: And what's very funny? It was very funny. Um, the
Speaker 1: article isn't funny, but that's funny. Uh So yeah, um,
Speaker 1: it's full of fun details and I'm gonna read one
Speaker 1: of them now. As we danced at our wedding. At reception,
Speaker 1: Ellen told me I am the alpha in this relationship.
Speaker 1: I shrugged it off. You shouldn't do that, just as
Speaker 1: I was as I would later shrug off signing the
Speaker 1: postnuptual agreement. But as time went on, I learned that
Speaker 1: he was serious. He had grown up in the male
Speaker 1: dominated culture of South Africa, and the will to compete
Speaker 1: and dominate that made him so successful in business did
Speaker 1: not magically shut off when he came home. This, in
Speaker 1: the vast economic and balance between us, meant that in
Speaker 1: the months following our wedding, a certain dynamic began to
Speaker 1: take hold. Ellen's judgment overruled mine, and he was constantly
Speaker 1: mark remarking on the ways he found me lacking. I
Speaker 1: am your wife, I told him, repeatedly not your employee.
Speaker 1: His response to that was, um that, Uh, if you
Speaker 1: were my employee, i'd fire you. Um, he absolutely would. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I'll fuck me. I'll fuck me so good, I'll fuck
Speaker 1: me off. Have my own babies al raised, that'll show
Speaker 1: you nothing. Yeah, it's amazing. So yeah, that's great. Justine
Speaker 1: notes that after the first time she flew to Silicon
Speaker 1: Valley to meet Musk while he was building zip Too,
Speaker 1: he asked her how many kids she wanted. She said,
Speaker 1: one or two unless she could afford nanny's than she
Speaker 1: wanted for. He responded with a laugh and the reply,
Speaker 1: that's the difference between you and me. I just assumed
Speaker 1: that there will be nanny's. A good person says that
Speaker 1: that's the thing about me and you. I I expect servants.
Speaker 1: That's the difference. I know. I'll have servants, slave servants,
Speaker 1: slave servants, servants, definitely servants my dad has. Which was
Speaker 1: it that my dad has? Yeah, not that, yeah, but
Speaker 1: essentially that yes. Justine also claims that Musk had her
Speaker 1: meet with his lawyer two months before the wedding to
Speaker 1: sign a financial agreement that he assured her was not
Speaker 1: a prenup, but essentially was, and it had her sign
Speaker 1: away most of her rights, which does kind of suggest
Speaker 1: that Musk was planning on the marriage not lasting, which
Speaker 1: is kind of the point of the title of her article.
Speaker 1: She also notes that during the marriage quote, no matter
Speaker 1: how many highlights I got, Ellen pushed me to be blonder,
Speaker 1: go platinum, he kept saying, and I kept her using,
Speaker 1: that's cool, but whatever. Yeah, it's hot when someone you
Speaker 1: love just tries to change you all the time. I
Speaker 1: love it. I That's what I've been told. That all
Speaker 1: women love to be changed by men, and just like
Speaker 1: all men like to be improved by women. People that
Speaker 1: want to not be loved for being themselves, yeah, everybody does. Yeah.
Speaker 1: People just want to be told that their garbage and
Speaker 1: that they need to change. That's what people want to
Speaker 1: need is to be told their garbage, which is why
Speaker 1: I tell my audience that their garbage, so that they'll
Speaker 1: be better to try and impress me. Send you a knife,
Speaker 1: because they were like that felt good. Hurt me again, daddy, Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: hurt hurt me again, daddy podcast Daddy. That's exactly what
Speaker 1: it is. That's the slogan of behind the bastards. Hurt
Speaker 1: me again hurt podcast daddy, So yuh. It is worth
Speaker 1: noting that this this postnup didn't really seem to matter.
Speaker 1: Justine what got what seems like a pretty fair settlement
Speaker 1: to me. She's rich as ship. She gets like eighty
Speaker 1: something thousand dollars a month in addition to getting like
Speaker 1: a couple million up front, and how like she's doing
Speaker 1: fine now it's it's it's she. She seems to be okay,
Speaker 1: but must did not treat her well um and was
Speaker 1: a giant dick. And almost as soon as they broke
Speaker 1: things off, he flew to England and met to Lula Rightly,
Speaker 1: an actress who happened to be fourteen years younger than him.
Speaker 1: He hit on her by showing pictures of his rockets,
Speaker 1: and that seems to have worked. The two hung out
Speaker 1: for a night or two in England, and then she
Speaker 1: flew out to visit him. A few weeks later, when
Speaker 1: she'd been out in California for five days, he asked
Speaker 1: her to marry him. She was twenty two, so gross
Speaker 1: and just like cliche. I'm like, dude, come on, come on, dude,
Speaker 1: like five days or I mean it was a little
Speaker 1: more than that, but not much, but you pathetic dude,
Speaker 1: so she said, yes, they got married. They got divorced
Speaker 1: soon after that, and Must tried to be on his
Speaker 1: own for like ten months, and then he got remarried
Speaker 1: to too Lula uh, and then they got divorced again.
Speaker 1: When Ashley Vance published her book in two thousand fifteen,
Speaker 1: Musk was in the process of fixing things before fucking
Speaker 1: them up again with Riley, So her book doesn't really
Speaker 1: get into detail about what happened later. But that two
Speaker 1: seventeen Rolling Stone article certainly does. And it is a
Speaker 1: fucking doozy. I love that article also. Yeah, it opens
Speaker 1: right after he broke up with I wrote some famous lady,
Speaker 1: but it's Amber heard. Um, it's okay to call her
Speaker 1: some famous lady, right What does she do? What's her thing?
Speaker 1: She's an actress and stuff. Yeah, and I'm gonna quote
Speaker 1: from that Rolling Stones article right now. He heaves a
Speaker 1: sigh and ends his effort at composure. I just broke
Speaker 1: up with my girlfriend, he says, hesitantly. I was really
Speaker 1: in love and it hurt bad. He pauses and corrects himself. Well,
Speaker 1: she broke up with me more than I broke up
Speaker 1: with her. I think This happened right before Musk had
Speaker 1: to launch the Model three, and he claims it made
Speaker 1: his job Must harder, much harder. I've been in severe
Speaker 1: emotional pain for the last few weeks. Must collaborates severe.
Speaker 1: It took every ounce of will to be able to
Speaker 1: do the Model three event and not look like the
Speaker 1: most depressed guy around. For most of that day, I
Speaker 1: was morbid, and then I had to psych myself up,
Speaker 1: drink a couple of red bulls, hang out with positive people,
Speaker 1: and then like, tell myself, I have all these people
Speaker 1: depending on me, all right, do it? So he talks
Speaker 1: about how he did it, and then he gets back
Speaker 1: onto the subject of his breakup. In the middle of this,
Speaker 1: he straight up asks Neil Strauss, is there anybody you
Speaker 1: think I should date? It's so hard for me to
Speaker 1: even meet people, which, uh, it's both so entitled and
Speaker 1: so pathetic at the same time. It's just like quite
Speaker 1: a mixture. Yeah, I don't know how to I don't
Speaker 1: know how he would handle that as an interviewer. It's
Speaker 1: actually to Neil Strauss's credit that he managed to like
Speaker 1: not explode in awkwardness at this moment. That's like a nightmare.
Speaker 1: I would think of someone I hate, and then I
Speaker 1: would hook hook them up. Yeah, yeah, I would. I
Speaker 1: would get him to date. I don't know Ivanka Trunk honestly. Um,
Speaker 1: so yeah, it seems like that actually might happen. Okay,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna continue reading from the Rolling Stone article. He
Speaker 1: swallows and clarifies, stammering softly. I'm looking for a long
Speaker 1: term relay hip. I'm not looking for a one night stand.
Speaker 1: I'm looking for a serious companion or soul mate, that
Speaker 1: kind of thing. And yeah, it's just like it's so bad.
Speaker 1: This is like the worst thing I can imagine happening
Speaker 1: as an interviewer. Um, it's just unbelievably awkward. Uh. I'm
Speaker 1: gonna quote from Strauss again. I did eventually tell him.
Speaker 1: I eventually tell him that it may not be a
Speaker 1: good idea to jump right into another relationship. He may
Speaker 1: want to take some time to himself and figure out
Speaker 1: why is previous relationships haven't worked in the long run,
Speaker 1: which is like voice of reason here, that's amazing. Neil
Speaker 1: Strauss is the guy giving him legitimately good advice. Was like,
Speaker 1: maybe figure out what about yourself makes you incapable of
Speaker 1: staying in relationships. He needed Rolling Stone to tell him
Speaker 1: to take it easier and figure out who he is. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's weird that rolling Stone would tell him to take
Speaker 1: it easy. Normally that's the Eagles. Oh god, Wow, you
Speaker 1: are more of a dad than you've ever been. I know.
Speaker 1: That's the dada ist fucking joke I've ever made. You know,
Speaker 1: who's barely a dad? Elon get Yes, he's a terrible
Speaker 1: I feel like Jack O'Brien just took over your body.
Speaker 1: Thank you? Uh so? Yeah, Musk shakes his head and grimaces.
Speaker 1: If I'm not in love, if I'm not with a
Speaker 1: long term companion, I cannot be happy. And this is
Speaker 1: Strauss again. I explained that needing someone so badly that
Speaker 1: you feel like nothing without them, nothing without them is
Speaker 1: textbook codependence, which, again Neo Strauss, author of the game,
Speaker 1: is the guy explaining very reasonably. Yeah, it's incredible. Have
Speaker 1: you looked inside yourself and realized you have a problem
Speaker 1: and maybe that needing people for the way that you
Speaker 1: do isn't psychologically sound? Neil Strauss. Yeah, I wrote the
Speaker 1: book that made negging into a household term. And I
Speaker 1: want to tell you I think you might not be
Speaker 1: healthily approaching your relationships. Dude. That's like Michael Jordan being like,
Speaker 1: you have a problem with gambling. I'm gonna need to
Speaker 1: talk to you about that. You gambled too much. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's like O. J. Simpson telling you you have problems
Speaker 1: with not murdering people. I don't know, probably shouldn't go
Speaker 1: into that. It's like the A. T. F telling you
Speaker 1: you're not treating compounds with seventy some odd children in them,
Speaker 1: well with your tear gas that you think wacing a
Speaker 1: third time is going to be the thing that got
Speaker 1: you out of this. If I have a motto, Sophia,
Speaker 1: it's a b W always be wacoing. That's the That's
Speaker 1: the fucking way I run. It wasn't hot, Robert. You're
Speaker 1: going to have to get over it. I know, I
Speaker 1: know I will. Uh so. Yeah. So Neil Strauss very
Speaker 1: reasonably tells Elon Musk that he's codependent to ship, and
Speaker 1: here's what comes next. Musk disagrees strongly. It's not true,
Speaker 1: he replies petulantly, I will never be happy without having someone.
Speaker 1: Going to sleep alone kills me. He hesitates, shakes his head.
Speaker 1: Falters continues, it's not like I don't know what that
Speaker 1: feels like, being in a big empty house and the
Speaker 1: footsteps echoing through the hallway, no one there and no
Speaker 1: one on the pillow next to you. Fuck. How do
Speaker 1: you make yourself happy in a situation like that? Um?
Speaker 1: You spread the funk out on the bed and you
Speaker 1: sleep eagles style. That's what I do. What the funk
Speaker 1: are you talking about? You enjoy the ship out of
Speaker 1: your fucking single ass self. There you find a sex worker,
Speaker 1: group of sex workers whose personalities you enjoy, and you
Speaker 1: pay them very well because money means nothing to you,
Speaker 1: and this way you're not emotionally damaging somebody. You can
Speaker 1: just pay someone to cuddle with you at night because
Speaker 1: you're a billionaire and you don't have to consistently be
Speaker 1: marrying these people and leading them in these very stressful relationships.
Speaker 1: That's an option for you, Ellen, It would be fine.
Speaker 1: Wait what question? What year was this? Though? Robert? This
Speaker 1: is think about how much needs to be solved in you,
Speaker 1: and like how unhappy you are with yourself that you
Speaker 1: cannot stand to be alone. Do we think theory that
Speaker 1: he just heard the song hate Sleeping Alone by Drake
Speaker 1: one too many times and got it stuck in his
Speaker 1: head and decided that's how you're just going to live
Speaker 1: his life. No, but that's why I was at that.
Speaker 1: His emotions, the most he's probably ever identified with anyone,
Speaker 1: has been like when he just listens to Drake, he's like, ah,
Speaker 1: that's what emotions are like. He's like, hate, sleeping alone,
Speaker 1: got it, got it? Got it? I hate that. That's me,
Speaker 1: Drake says it. So I believe it. So this interview
Speaker 1: keeps going on. Quote when I was a child, there's
Speaker 1: one thing I said, must continues. His demeanor is stiff,
Speaker 1: yet in the sheen of his eyes and the trembling
Speaker 1: of his lips, a high tide of emotion is visible,
Speaker 1: pushing against the retaining walls. I never want to be alone,
Speaker 1: That's what I would say. His voice drops to a whisper.
Speaker 1: I don't want to be alone. So yeah, that says
Speaker 1: a lot. Uh. But you know what says even more, Sophia,
Speaker 1: Is it goods and services? No, it's a line in
Speaker 1: the article where Elon Musk kind of let slip that
Speaker 1: he might believe in race science. Oh I forgot about that.
Speaker 1: How could I have forgotten? Oh? My god? Of course,
Speaker 1: according to Musk's best guess, our personalities might be eight
Speaker 1: percent in nature and nurture. And by the way, there's
Speaker 1: a number of lines where he makes similar kind of
Speaker 1: points in the biography that, like, on their own you
Speaker 1: might not notice, but when you put him together, it's like,
Speaker 1: I think some of that a lot of that apartheid
Speaker 1: ship rubbed off on Elon. Yeah, And again I want
Speaker 1: to be fair in pointing out like he tried to
Speaker 1: get away from it, but like some of that ship
Speaker 1: is plugged deep into his head. And this is part
Speaker 1: of the problem with being a kind of person who
Speaker 1: can't take any criticism, is that you both wind up
Speaker 1: codependent and wind up pushing some weird race science ship
Speaker 1: because you're not able to take criticism about yourself. Anyway,
Speaker 1: that's good that he's nice to his servants, So yeah,
Speaker 1: that's great. That's good stuff. Uh yeah, Now, so much
Speaker 1: has been written about Musk that it's very hard for
Speaker 1: me to draw a line on how much to include,
Speaker 1: or what is reasonable to critique him on, or what
Speaker 1: is even true about the guy, because there's a lot
Speaker 1: of disagreements and stuff. I included some statements by his
Speaker 1: dad and Elon claims his Dad as a liar and untrustworthy,
Speaker 1: and that's definitely true. One thing I'm sure that longtime
Speaker 1: Musk fans will ding me On is not touching enough
Speaker 1: on the subject on the period when Musk nearly lost
Speaker 1: everything betting on Tesla and SpaceX. This is the most
Speaker 1: mythically significant part of Elon's career, and the basic story
Speaker 1: is that at one point, both Tesla and SpaceX had
Speaker 1: yet to prove themselves with their key products. Both companies
Speaker 1: hemorrhaged money. Must had to throw in almost every dollar
Speaker 1: he was worth to keep them afloat, and he executed
Speaker 1: an intricate series of moods that just barely managed to
Speaker 1: bring in enough VC dollars to keep both companies solvent
Speaker 1: until their products proved themselves. It is true that Must
Speaker 1: risk much more of his personal wealth than most tech
Speaker 1: entrepreneurs do. It's also true that he was never in
Speaker 1: danger of being poor, and he always had a few
Speaker 1: million dollars in reserves. And it seems to me that
Speaker 1: most people who write about el Un focused on the
Speaker 1: fact that he gambled of his wealth and ignored the
Speaker 1: fact that the remaining five percent was still enough money
Speaker 1: for him to live uncomfortably for the rest of his
Speaker 1: life without working another day, or as other people who
Speaker 1: are poor call it, not gambling, not really gain. You
Speaker 1: still have enough money for the rest of your life.
Speaker 1: That's not gambling. Yeah. Yeah. I would prefer instead to
Speaker 1: report on the elements of Musk Musk's success that don't
Speaker 1: get covered often. For one example, reporting in two thousand
Speaker 1: fifteen by The l A Times revealed that Musk's three
Speaker 1: big companies had benefited from an estimated four point nine
Speaker 1: billion dollars in government support. This money came in a
Speaker 1: variety of forms, including tax credits and rebates for the
Speaker 1: years of solar panels and electric cars. It is interesting
Speaker 1: to me that Musk's bravery and investing so much of
Speaker 1: his own money is always mentioned in stories about his success,
Speaker 1: but the fortunes and government money that made it possible
Speaker 1: almost never are. A lot of this money came in
Speaker 1: the form of money from states who desperately tried to
Speaker 1: convince Tesla or SpaceX to set up facilities in their backyard.
Speaker 1: Nevada gave Tesla one point three billion dollars in incentives
Speaker 1: to build a battery factory near Reno. SpaceX also got
Speaker 1: twenty million dollars in development subsidies to build a launch
Speaker 1: facility in Texas. And that, Sophia and my dear friends
Speaker 1: on the Internet, brings us to what will be the
Speaker 1: closing anecdote of this episode, how Elon musk destroyed the
Speaker 1: small town of Boca Chica. You heard this story, Sophia.
Speaker 1: I think I was reading a whole threat about it
Speaker 1: actually yesterday for the first time. Yeah, it fucking rules. Um,
Speaker 1: Boca Chica does not matter in the big picture sense
Speaker 1: of the world. It's a tiny, tiny, tiny retirement community
Speaker 1: in the village on the Texas post um and it
Speaker 1: has almost no I think it only had like two
Speaker 1: permanent residents. Like it's what you'd call a snowbird community
Speaker 1: where old people have their retirement homes and come to
Speaker 1: at the end of like during the winter, basically because
Speaker 1: it's it's got a nice beach. Uh. And I read
Speaker 1: a really good Esquire article about the destruction of this
Speaker 1: small town by Elon Musk uh And it opens with
Speaker 1: a Texas Parks and Wildlife magazine quote from nineteen two quote.
Speaker 1: The schemes and dreams of developers to build on this
Speaker 1: beautiful and desolate area die hard, but diet they always have.
Speaker 1: And this is more or less sums up why the
Speaker 1: property values here have stayed low and why old people
Speaker 1: who aren't rich have been able to afford to have
Speaker 1: homes here. Um. It's never been taken over by hipsters
Speaker 1: or developers due to its isolation and its proximity to
Speaker 1: Texas poorest city, uh and difficult geography. Booka Chica is
Speaker 1: a perfect place for old people to spend their golden
Speaker 1: years without having millions of dollars. Um. It's no wonder
Speaker 1: that Elon Musk picked the area for his rocket test range,
Speaker 1: stating in two thousand and eighteen, we've a lot of
Speaker 1: land and nobody around, so if it blows up, it's cool,
Speaker 1: which because the Columbus was like, well, there's no one
Speaker 1: here in America, so we're gonna just take it. When
Speaker 1: they were definitely people here. Musk started working to get
Speaker 1: the land at two that's in thirteen, claiming he was
Speaker 1: going to make the commercial version of Cape Canaveral. He
Speaker 1: pushed for two bills in the Texas State House, one
Speaker 1: to reduce a private company's liability over nuisance complaints and
Speaker 1: run from the city of Brownsville, which is the city
Speaker 1: nearby that would allow city officials to deny public access
Speaker 1: to beaches when space flight activities were on the calendar. Incidentally, Sophia,
Speaker 1: the beach around Boca Chico was known as the poor
Speaker 1: People's Beach for being one of the only chunks of
Speaker 1: nice coastline in Texas that was free to use for
Speaker 1: poor people. I read about that, and also from what
Speaker 1: I understand, it was a key wildlife corridors. It is
Speaker 1: a lot of turtles, a lot of turtles. Musk claimed
Speaker 1: that SpaceX would make twelve launches a year for its
Speaker 1: commercial operations and that one day a man would leave
Speaker 1: Brownsville and go to Mars, which is how he got
Speaker 1: the local government on board. This was a lie. The
Speaker 1: plan quickly changed. Basically, he was like, this is where
Speaker 1: we're gonna like Cindament to Mars from. And then what
Speaker 1: he actually did is like, this is what we're going to.
Speaker 1: This is where we're going to test all of our
Speaker 1: rockets that will funk up and break um. So that's
Speaker 1: what it be. Can blow up in a fucking old
Speaker 1: people's houses. Yep, and SpaceX started running almost daily tests
Speaker 1: when they said they would be doing like once a
Speaker 1: month on experimental rockets that were very loud, often dangerous,
Speaker 1: and lead led to the beach being closed much of
Speaker 1: the time. The roads were increasingly blocked. Life blocked. Life
Speaker 1: was made almost unlivable for many residents due to the
Speaker 1: constant construction and experiments. Musk started buying up Boca Chica
Speaker 1: piece by piece. He offered extant residence three times their
Speaker 1: property value, which stands generous until you realize that property
Speaker 1: values were extremely low, which these old people who work
Speaker 1: their whole lives to be able to live on this beach.
Speaker 1: We're only getting enough money to buy like a tiny,
Speaker 1: like a tiny shitty place in like a city, like
Speaker 1: not a place like they had, which was a nice
Speaker 1: place where they got to be out in the middle
Speaker 1: of nowhere near a beach and live comfortably. Like they
Speaker 1: couldn't buy anything that was like what they were losing.
Speaker 1: Even though he was making this quote unquote generous offer
Speaker 1: because the property of values here were low, which is
Speaker 1: why he was able to anyways, fucking frustrating um and
Speaker 1: it's also always extremely low. When people funk with children
Speaker 1: or old people, it's like yeah, dude, yep, yep. As
Speaker 1: I type this, the community is rapidly dying and being
Speaker 1: turned into an industrial test site for experimental space rockets.
Speaker 1: And I'm sure if you were to have an honest
Speaker 1: conversation with him, Ellen would say that this was a
Speaker 1: necessary sacrifice for humanities future. After all, what a few
Speaker 1: old people's retirement houses really matter when measured against the
Speaker 1: quest to help mankind escape the surly bonds of earth.
Speaker 1: This is the line of logic that kind of follow
Speaker 1: through all of Elon's bad deeds. Yes, it sucks for them,
Speaker 1: but look at what he's trying to do. It's what
Speaker 1: people think when Tesla pays out eighty six thar in
Speaker 1: fines for polluting the environment with their toxic paint. It's
Speaker 1: what people think when they read that he told this
Speaker 1: to a worker who missed a crucial event to witness
Speaker 1: the birth of his child. Quote that is no excuse.
Speaker 1: I'm extremely disappointed. You need to figure out where your
Speaker 1: priorities are. We're changing the world and changing history, and
Speaker 1: you either commit or you don't. Ellen, and I saying this, Um, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's what people think. Would they read articles like this
Speaker 1: September two, nineteen Bloomberg piece about how Tesla repeatedly violated
Speaker 1: the National Labor Relations Act by repeatedly threatening and retaliating
Speaker 1: against employees for attempting to organize a union. Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: the ship that really fucking pissed me off to He's
Speaker 1: so much union busting, tons of union busting. Dude that
Speaker 1: tries to claim he's a socialist to me makes me
Speaker 1: laugh so hard. I'm like, bro, do you know what
Speaker 1: socialism is? It would mean workers own the means of
Speaker 1: production and also have the ability to say no to
Speaker 1: you about some things, which, like Ellen, think about that.
Speaker 1: That is not what you're fucking doing at all, you
Speaker 1: weird dictator. Yep. It's also what people think when they
Speaker 1: read articles like the one published in eight Pril of
Speaker 1: two thousand eighteen in The Intelligencer. This revealed the fact
Speaker 1: that quote company officials labeled toxic exposures, muscle strains, and
Speaker 1: repetitive stress injuries as personal medical issues or minor accidents
Speaker 1: requiring only first aid, lowering the official injury count at
Speaker 1: the factory, which is again one of the most dangerous
Speaker 1: factories in the country. But hey, it's okay because he's
Speaker 1: trying to save the world. What's a few hundred thousand. However,
Speaker 1: many people in pursuit of one man's probably with the
Speaker 1: tiny dicks dreams. If I know one thing that's never
Speaker 1: gone badly in history, Sophia, it's a man having a
Speaker 1: dream about how to save the world that he's willing
Speaker 1: to sacrifice other people for. That always works. Yeah, it
Speaker 1: works great. But you know, I'm gonna retract my statement
Speaker 1: about people with small dicks. You know, doesn't mean they're worse.
Speaker 1: That's in fact, I don't care. Elon Musk has a
Speaker 1: huge dick and he's an asshole. He's definitely as a
Speaker 1: huge dick, and I don't care, and it doesn't matter.
Speaker 1: And I don't know why I brought his dick into it.
Speaker 1: I'm now disgusted just picturing it. I know we've all
Speaker 1: become worse because of our exposure to Ellen. I'm blaming
Speaker 1: him for that. Great I'll join you. Thank you. Yeah uh.
Speaker 1: Some of those injuries and medical issues at the Tesla
Speaker 1: factory were caused by the fact that Elon hates the
Speaker 1: color yellow. The Intelligence who reports on claims made in
Speaker 1: a Reveals News article quote. Among the more baffling the
Speaker 1: tales in the report are several sections about how Elon
Speaker 1: Musk's personal tastes superie to have affected the factory safety
Speaker 1: for the worst. His preferences were well known and led
Speaker 1: to cutting back on those standard safety signals. Musk apparently
Speaker 1: really hates the color yellow, so instead of using the
Speaker 1: aforementioned Hugh Lane, lines in the factory floor are painted
Speaker 1: in shades of gray. Tesla denies this and sent reveal
Speaker 1: photos of rails and posts painted yellow in the factory.
Speaker 1: He also is not into having too many signs or
Speaker 1: the beeping sound forklifts make in reverse, all things that
Speaker 1: would seem important to keeping staff safe. It's just a
Speaker 1: matter of time before someone gets killed. A former safety
Speaker 1: lead set of the conditions in the factory. One employee
Speaker 1: attempted to call attention to these problems before eventually resigning.
Speaker 1: I could, and probably should go on, but this article
Speaker 1: is too long already. We haven't even talked about the
Speaker 1: time Ellen accused that heroic Cave diver of being a pedophile,
Speaker 1: nor have we discussed the fact that, yeah, I know,
Speaker 1: he's so shitty. We haven't also discussed the fact that,
Speaker 1: once he got in trouble for slandering a hero he
Speaker 1: hired a convicted felon to stock that heroic cave diver
Speaker 1: and try to find dirt on him. That's another thing
Speaker 1: that happens. But this article has to end at some
Speaker 1: fucking point, and the real question here, the thing that
Speaker 1: we have to ask, is whether or not anything Musk
Speaker 1: has made himself a part of or started is nearly
Speaker 1: as revolutionary or important as he claims it is. If
Speaker 1: this guy is really saving the old and bringing humanity
Speaker 1: into the future, uh, then you could say, or other
Speaker 1: some people would argue that a lot of his bad
Speaker 1: behavior is justified. At least that's the argument that could
Speaker 1: be made. If he's not, then he's just a rich
Speaker 1: asshole who got richer by pretending to save the world
Speaker 1: so he could get jacked off by worshipful fanboys by
Speaker 1: while participating in the plunder of our planets diminishing resources.
Speaker 1: I cannot answer this question definitively, but derive it a
Speaker 1: fool that I am. I can quote one of the
Speaker 1: more self reflective chunks of Ashley Vance's book about Musk,
Speaker 1: and I'm going to do that now. To close us out,
Speaker 1: the economist Tyler Cohen, who has earned some measure of
Speaker 1: fame in recent years for his insightful writings about the
Speaker 1: state of the technology industry and ideas on where it
Speaker 1: may go falls into that first camp and the great stagnation.
Speaker 1: Cohen bemoaned the lack of big technological advances and argued
Speaker 1: that the American economy has slowed and wages have been
Speaker 1: depressed as a result. In a figurative since the American
Speaker 1: economy has enjoyed lots of low hanging fruits since at
Speaker 1: least the seventeenth century, whether it be free land, lots
Speaker 1: of immigrant labor, or powerful new technologies, he wrote, Yet
Speaker 1: during the last forty years that low hanging fruit started disappearing,
Speaker 1: and we started pretend think it was still there. We
Speaker 1: have failed to recognize that we already technological plateau, and
Speaker 1: the trees are more bare than we would like to think.
Speaker 1: That's it, That's what has gone wrong. And his next book,
Speaker 1: Averages Over, Cohen predicted an unromantic future in which a
Speaker 1: great divide had occurred between the halves and they have
Speaker 1: nots and Cohen's future, huge gains and artificial intelligence will
Speaker 1: lead to the elimination if many of today's high employment
Speaker 1: lines of work. The people who thrive in this environment
Speaker 1: will be very bright and able to complement the machines
Speaker 1: and team effectively with them. As for the unemployed masses, well,
Speaker 1: many of them will find jobs going to work for
Speaker 1: the halves, who will employ teams of nanny's housekeepers and gardeners.
Speaker 1: If anything Musk is doing might alter the course of
Speaker 1: mankind towards a rosier future, Cohen can't find it. Coming
Speaker 1: up with true breakthrough ideas as much harder today than
Speaker 1: in the past, According to Cohen, because we've already mined
Speaker 1: the bulk of the big discoveries. During a luncheon Virginia,
Speaker 1: Cohen described Musk as not a genius inventor, but as
Speaker 1: an attention seeker, and not a terribly good one at that.
Speaker 1: I don't think a lot of people care about getting
Speaker 1: into Mars, he said. And it seems like a very
Speaker 1: expensive way to drive whatever breakthroughs you might get from it.
Speaker 1: And then you hear about the hyperloop. I don't think
Speaker 1: it is any intention of doing it. You have to
Speaker 1: wonder if it's not meant to just be publicity for
Speaker 1: his companies. As for Tesla, it might work, but you're
Speaker 1: still just pushing the problems back somewhere else. You still
Speaker 1: have to generate power. It could be that he is
Speaker 1: challenging convention less than people think. That's where I want
Speaker 1: to end. Wow, Wow, why when? Why you excited for
Speaker 1: all the people who are gonna get piste off at us? Yeah?
Speaker 1: I mean, I can't wait for people to to tell
Speaker 1: me that I should probably die and that I'm a cunt.
Speaker 1: I can't really wait. I'm excited for people to tell
Speaker 1: me that they're so unhappy that I'm confident in that
Speaker 1: I don't just giggle in the background anymore. I am
Speaker 1: excited for people to be briefly angry at me and
Speaker 1: then lose interest in being angry at me, because that's
Speaker 1: what happens when people get angry at ment on the
Speaker 1: Internet and instead focus their rage on Sophia. Because misogyny
Speaker 1: is very deeply boiled into our culture, and that slame
Speaker 1: and funk all of you for that. Sorry Sophia. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm the one who wrote fourteen thousand words about how
Speaker 1: I don't like Elon Musk, so please do come after me.
Speaker 1: I will not respond to you, because I don't care
Speaker 1: what weird Elon Musk nerds say on Twitter. Um, but
Speaker 1: do mail us knives, either as threats or as a gift.
Speaker 1: Either way, we get knives. I want a knife as
Speaker 1: a gift. Again, include a happy face so I know
Speaker 1: it's it's chill. Yeah, I'll take knives as gifts or threats. Uh,
Speaker 1: all kinds of attention are equal to me. All right, Sophia,
Speaker 1: you want to go out with a plug. Sure, I
Speaker 1: am releasing my first stand up album, Father's Day on
Speaker 1: Father's Day. Um, I don't have a father, so it's
Speaker 1: gonna be really fun and you guys should listen. And
Speaker 1: you should also listen to my podcast for Day Fiance
Speaker 1: with Myles Gray and Private Parts on Known with Court
Speaker 1: Kosak shout Out and yeah, follow me Twitter, Instagram, So
Speaker 1: listen to Sophia's album so that you can understand what
Speaker 1: it's like not to have a father and understand what
Speaker 1: it's like to be Elon Musk's kids exactly. If that's
Speaker 1: the last dick we're ending on Beautiful