Speaker 1: Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio news.
Speaker 2: Well, Elon Musk is now the richest person on the planet.
Speaker 3: More than half the satellites in space are owned and
Speaker 3: controlled by one man. Well, he's a legitimate super genius.
Speaker 3: I mean legitimate.
Speaker 4: He says he's always voted for Democrats, but this year
Speaker 4: it will be different.
Speaker 1: He'll vote Republican.
Speaker 5: There is a reason the US government is so reliant
Speaker 5: on him.
Speaker 2: Alon Musk is a scam artist and he's done nothing.
Speaker 1: Anything he does, he's fascinating people.
Speaker 5: Welcome to Elon, Inc. Bloomberg's weekly podcast about Elon Musk.
Speaker 5: It's April second, twenty twenty four. I'm your host, David
Speaker 5: Papadopolis Bright and early this morning, Tesla released their first
Speaker 5: quarter delivery and production report and it was disappointing, so
Speaker 5: disappointing that Tesla scher sank seven percent in a matter
Speaker 5: of minutes. But if you're an X user and you
Speaker 5: opened X to follow that news this morning, odds are
Speaker 5: that you saw a little bit of Tesla news and
Speaker 5: a whole lot of something else. The site is a
Speaker 5: wash in spamy ads for adult content and actual pornography.
Speaker 5: What's going on here is this part of Musk's vision
Speaker 5: for free speech. We'll get into all of this X
Speaker 5: rated stuff on X what's happening and what it means
Speaker 5: for the one time global public square. We'll turn to
Speaker 5: our editor extraordinary Raihan Harmansi and a special guest, John Herman,
Speaker 5: who covers technology for New York Magazine, to dig into
Speaker 5: the Tesla numbers. First that we have Dana Hall, who
Speaker 5: covers all things Elon Musk for US. Hello, Dana Hey.
Speaker 5: And we have Max Chapkin here in the studio, Max
Speaker 5: senior reporter at Business Week. Maxilo Happy Tesla Deliveries Day,
Speaker 5: David Happy Tesla Deliveries Day to you. Although it was
Speaker 5: not Dana Hall very happy for Tesla shareholders, the numbers
Speaker 5: were grimy. The company missed Wall Street estimates by a
Speaker 5: fair amount, delivering something like three hundred and eighty thousand,
Speaker 5: I believe, which was about sixty thousand blow estimates, and
Speaker 5: it also represented a decline from deliveries of Tesla's a
Speaker 5: year ago. What happened here?
Speaker 6: Yeah, this was very ugly. I mean there's no there's
Speaker 6: no two ways about it. This was like a horrible, terrible,
Speaker 6: no good, very bad start to the year. And yeah,
Speaker 6: they delivered three hundred and eighty seven thousand vehicles, which
Speaker 6: is like an eight point five percent drop from the
Speaker 6: number of cars that they delivered in the first quarter
Speaker 6: a year ago. And so basically Tesla has a demand problem.
Speaker 6: Like you can blame interest rates or you know, the
Speaker 6: company talked about diversions caused by the Red Sea conflict
Speaker 6: and the arson attacked at the gigafactory in Berlin, but fundamentally,
Speaker 6: like it's it's about demand, like Tesla has an aging lineup,
Speaker 6: and yes, like the macro environment for buying a big
Speaker 6: purchase like a car is lousy, but like Tesla is
Speaker 6: running out of excuses. They have an aging lineup and
Speaker 6: people are sitting on the sidelines. And as Max and
Speaker 6: I have talked a lot together, Elon Musk's behavior is polarizing.
Speaker 6: Most people don't like that, and like I'm not you know,
Speaker 6: we don't have like quantifiable data to show how many
Speaker 6: consumers are not buying Tesla's because they don't like the
Speaker 6: fact that Elon is very political on the platform that
Speaker 6: he owns. But it's it's like it's not something that
Speaker 6: you can brush aside.
Speaker 5: And to that point, Max, I mean it is indeed,
Speaker 5: as Dana said, something we've been over before. But I
Speaker 5: think with the result like this, it's, you know, it's
Speaker 5: becoming more and more acute and louder and louder that
Speaker 5: it is just an enormous problem having a CEO for
Speaker 5: as brilliant as he may be, and all the things
Speaker 5: he may have done for Tesla, whose worldview is so
Speaker 5: misaligned with that of his customer base.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean it's almost like if you spend eighteen
Speaker 2: months embracing like a extremely niche, extremely polarizing, borderline racist ideology,
Speaker 2: you're gonna turn some people off. I mean, like there's
Speaker 2: a reason like car companies, like when they advertise cars
Speaker 2: tend to embrace pretty like classic tropes, apple pies, American flags.
Speaker 2: They don't necessarily lead with cat turd and like freaky
Speaker 2: videos from the border. And that's of course what Elon
Speaker 2: Musk has done. And again, as Dana says, like, we
Speaker 2: don't know for sure how much of this is Elon's behavior,
Speaker 2: how much of this is sort of macro environment stuff.
Speaker 2: And then there's this third factor, which is that evs
Speaker 2: are just not setting the world on fire quite like
Speaker 2: they once did in terms of growth right, Like, they've
Speaker 2: a lot of people have adopted electric vehicles, and we
Speaker 2: should say, like selling three hundred something electric cars in
Speaker 2: a quarter, that is achievement in some sense, but it's
Speaker 2: just not moving in the direction that Elon Musk needs
Speaker 2: it to be for this company to grow.
Speaker 7: It's shrinking.
Speaker 5: In fact, Hey, Dan, you had actually seen early this
Speaker 5: morning a tweet that you thought was spot on on
Speaker 5: this topic.
Speaker 6: So Ross Gerber, who's like a long time former teslable,
Speaker 6: lives in Santa Monica, California, guy tweeted this morning basically,
Speaker 6: Tesla can't sell its cars due to Elon's behavior. Let's
Speaker 6: stop blaming the Houthi rebels or German environmental terrorists or
Speaker 6: a recession that never came or interest rates. Only one
Speaker 6: person responsible for this.
Speaker 7: You know, and this guy, Ross Gerber, I mean, for
Speaker 7: years was like the most reliable testlable. He basically would
Speaker 7: cheer on anything they did with extreme enthusiasm. And I
Speaker 7: guess it's a credit to his intellectual honesty that he's come,
Speaker 7: you know, he's basically gone one to eighty on this.
Speaker 7: But I think it's also sort of Gerber like many
Speaker 7: people really bought into the ev story the environmentalist story. Uh,
Speaker 7: he is not on board for the crazy right wing signaling.
Speaker 7: And I think there are a lot of Tesla investors
Speaker 7: like that, and frankly, like a lot of car buyers
Speaker 7: like that. It's probably the majority of car buyers are
Speaker 7: just even if they're conservative, even if they vote Republican,
Speaker 7: are not super into like Elon's tweeting.
Speaker 5: Dennat to that point. Is this merely a window into
Speaker 5: the broader EV market woes or is a fair amount
Speaker 5: of this problem in addition to those broader woes a
Speaker 5: Tesla and Elon problem right now?
Speaker 6: Well, you know, the long arc is that like the
Speaker 6: world is still moving towards electrification, so like that trend
Speaker 6: is not going away, but the like rapid double digit
Speaker 6: year over year growth that like investors had become expected
Speaker 6: to is no longer happening. And Tesla as the market
Speaker 6: leader here in the US, is going to be like
Speaker 6: the Canary and the Cold Mine in terms of that.
Speaker 6: So you've already seen like a lot of other automakers
Speaker 6: like pull back on their plans, Like people are now
Speaker 6: talking a lot about hybrids. Tesla only makes evs and
Speaker 6: like to have this kind of slump in sales after
Speaker 6: a quarter where they did all this stuff like free supercharging,
Speaker 6: thousand dollars discounts, like you know, like advertising, like all
Speaker 6: these executives besides Elon like talking up the car and
Speaker 6: doing all this consumer education. I think they really have
Speaker 6: to kind of look at their strategy. You know, for
Speaker 6: so many years Elon was like, we don't have a
Speaker 6: demand problem, we have a production problem. Now they actually
Speaker 6: kind of have to reckon with the fact that they
Speaker 6: have a demand problem. And they've said very clearly to
Speaker 6: investors that they're in between two growth waves. So until
Speaker 6: they get that next wave of growth ready, which is
Speaker 6: the next car, Like, what are they.
Speaker 7: Going to do?
Speaker 6: And I mean, the other thing that I really noticed
Speaker 6: about this this press release was they don't break out
Speaker 6: sales of the cyber truck. And I know, David that
Speaker 6: you were very excited about the cyber truck, but they're
Speaker 6: not even telling us how many cyber trucks they made,
Speaker 6: much less delivered.
Speaker 5: Which probably means that the number is somewhere between like
Speaker 5: twenty and fifty I suppose.
Speaker 6: Well, the other thing that's super interesting about Tesla's release
Speaker 6: today is for the first time they talked about energy
Speaker 6: storage which is you know, Tesla sells these big batteries
Speaker 6: to utility companies like PG and E, and they deployed
Speaker 6: you know, over four thousand megawat hours of energy storage
Speaker 6: products in Q one, the highest quarterly deployment yet. So
Speaker 6: what I predict is that as the car business kind
Speaker 6: of stuck in this trough, you're going to see Tesla
Speaker 6: really start talking about the energy side of their business,
Speaker 6: and that is where the growth is going to come
Speaker 6: for the next year or two, because they're not going
Speaker 6: to really have much growth on the car side.
Speaker 2: I will say, you know this on this question of
Speaker 2: is it a growth stock without growth, The way it
Speaker 2: becomes a growth stock is the full self driving thing.
Speaker 7: And I think you know so much of that.
Speaker 2: The valuation the sort of like it's worth ten times
Speaker 2: what other car companies are worth based on the number
Speaker 2: of cars they've sold. The reason for that is because
Speaker 2: investors and even a lot of analysts have bought the
Speaker 2: story that Elon Musk has been selling about Tesla as
Speaker 2: not a car company as much as an AI company,
Speaker 2: as a as a basically essentially a Silicon Valley company
Speaker 2: that only looks like a car company. And I think
Speaker 2: that's why we saw. You know, Dana made a very
Speaker 2: prescient comment last week. We were talking about this for
Speaker 2: you felt full self driving thing, and and Dana said,
Speaker 2: this is a good thing to say if you're about
Speaker 2: to have a terrible quarter, because right, in some sense,
Speaker 2: if you believe the full self driving story, which I think,
Speaker 2: as we've talked about in this podcast, lots of reasons
Speaker 2: to be skeptical of that story. You know, they've been
Speaker 2: talking about it for a bit basically a decade and
Speaker 2: haven't made a ton of like you know, verifiable progress.
Speaker 2: If you believe the story, nonetheless, then these results don't
Speaker 2: matter that much because in the future, the robotaxties are
Speaker 2: gonna come and it's going to change everything. And I
Speaker 2: think that's why we see if you look at Elon
Speaker 2: Musk's Twitter page right now, the pin tweet, which is
Speaker 2: like the thing that you first see is saying that
Speaker 2: you know, full self driving is better than anybody realizes.
Speaker 2: It's so freaking good. And so I think we're going
Speaker 2: to see over the next few months that's going to
Speaker 2: be the story they go with, selling what's the calm,
Speaker 2: what's the In certain ways, it's the only story they
Speaker 2: have to go with.
Speaker 5: I will just say this, Dana, though, there's one group
Speaker 5: out there in the in the Tesla investing universe that
Speaker 5: is thrilled, which is the short sellers, the group that
Speaker 5: Elon Musk hates, the people who have bet against Tesla stock.
Speaker 5: I saw a report the other day that said they
Speaker 5: are up billions and billions of dollars this year. So
Speaker 5: at least someone out there apparently is raking it in. Okay,
Speaker 5: So Max and I are now joined in the studio
Speaker 5: by our very own Rayhan HARMANCI, senior editor of the
Speaker 5: podcast He Love. They're Rayhan. Hello, and we brought in
Speaker 5: John Herman, who just wrote a piece on X's X
Speaker 5: Rated problem for New York Magazine.
Speaker 3: Hey John, thanks for having me on.
Speaker 5: Thank you for being here. Okay, So, Rayhan, we're gonna
Speaker 5: start with you. Give us a little bit of the
Speaker 5: long arc of Twitter and X and pornography.
Speaker 1: Oh Man.
Speaker 8: Well, in a previous life, I was a tech culture
Speaker 8: reporter at BuzzFeed, actually with John, and this is like
Speaker 8: twenty twelve. Twitter was only a few years old, and
Speaker 8: even then porn was a huge issue. Porn is always
Speaker 8: an issue, and every time there's an opportunity for users
Speaker 8: to upload things.
Speaker 1: People are going to upload sexual content.
Speaker 8: Twitter has had long had a reputation as being maybe
Speaker 8: let's say, more open to porn than other social networks.
Speaker 8: Albeit they employed content moderation teams and you know, did
Speaker 8: their best to eradicate offensive material. But over time there's
Speaker 8: been a lot of funny, little mini scandals, like people
Speaker 8: might remember that in twenty seventeen, the Senator Ted Cruz
Speaker 8: liked a bit of sexual content that spawned a lot
Speaker 8: of jokes. And then in twenty eighteen, the actor de Norris,
Speaker 8: known for breaking bad, he actually.
Speaker 1: Just tweeted the words sex gift.
Speaker 8: So this has been happening, but it's worth noting that
Speaker 8: this issue has not been helped by elon cutting content
Speaker 8: moderation teams in general at Twitter. And you know, there's
Speaker 8: like a lot of really awful and criminal types of
Speaker 8: pornography that are also on the platform and that make
Speaker 8: content moderation you know, illegal necessity.
Speaker 5: So the other day, I believe you told me that
Speaker 5: you have a friend of yours who said, you know, Rayhon,
Speaker 5: actually I go to X specifically for poor.
Speaker 8: Yeah, I was really fascinated by this. I have a
Speaker 8: friend who only uses X for porn. He made an
Speaker 8: account simply to look at porn. And when I was
Speaker 8: like looking up older stories about Twitter and porn, I
Speaker 8: found some stories from like I don't want to say's
Speaker 8: like twenty seventeen where like hopping to posts interviewed sex
Speaker 8: therapists about why people.
Speaker 1: Are going on Twitter for porn.
Speaker 8: So clearly this is a long standing practice for some people,
Speaker 8: and I think that at least the stories I read
Speaker 8: were suggesting that you can search for porn on X
Speaker 8: in a way that makes it less obvious you're looking
Speaker 8: for porn as opposed to going straight to pornhub or
Speaker 8: porn website.
Speaker 1: So maybe for some people that has appeal. There was a.
Speaker 8: Recent number that came out showing that X had experienced
Speaker 8: a growth in users who are like younger men in
Speaker 8: their like late teens, early twenties, So maybe there I
Speaker 8: don't know, there's there's fewer content moderation. Speech is getting
Speaker 8: freer and freer every day on X. You know, maybe
Speaker 8: people are noticing and looking at you more.
Speaker 5: This friend is not Ted Cruz. So John, what in
Speaker 5: general are you saying in your reporting on the proliferation
Speaker 5: of pornography on X?
Speaker 3: Well, the existence of porn that people are like looking
Speaker 3: for on purpose is kind of the crucial context here,
Speaker 3: Like Rayham was saying, Twitter has been a kind of
Speaker 3: a porn friendly site for a long time. It's a
Speaker 3: good place, you know, it's a great place. It's a
Speaker 3: good place to find adult content, like mixed in with
Speaker 3: regular stuff in a way that almost no other social
Speaker 3: networks Aren'tumblr used to be like this, and it was
Speaker 3: presented a whole range of problems for them that they
Speaker 3: ultimately decided we're not really tolerable, and so Twitter has
Speaker 3: remained so sort of open to adult content.
Speaker 5: Truly, more so than other social media.
Speaker 3: Much more than for example, metas products, Facebook and Instagram
Speaker 3: have very strict rules about nudity, Whereas on Twitter before
Speaker 3: Elon Musk bought it, After Elon Musk bought it, you
Speaker 3: could enter a variety of terms, some of them pretty benign,
Speaker 3: into the search bar and find like hardcore pornography, people
Speaker 3: having sex on video, just right there in the feed.
Speaker 3: So it's like, oh, that's always been a pretty remarkable
Speaker 3: difference between between Twitter and NX and most of the
Speaker 3: other mainstream social platforms. Not something you'll see on TikTok
Speaker 3: for example, right, And this also brings with it a
Speaker 3: whole range of spam challenges because like the adult you know,
Speaker 3: online adult entertainment industry, porn, and then the ways that
Speaker 3: overlaps with sex work. All of that brings with it
Speaker 3: businesses that are you know, trying to exploit people from
Speaker 3: the sort of you know, periphery of the web where
Speaker 3: they've been relegated for most of this time. So you
Speaker 3: get a lot of spammers, you get a lot of scammers,
Speaker 3: and you get a lot of people who see this
Speaker 3: open vector, this forum for like posting adult content, promoting
Speaker 3: adult content, trying to like do what they can to
Speaker 3: you know, scrape together some business.
Speaker 5: Yeah, your piece really dug into those spammers and some
Speaker 5: of the spam tactics they used at to be that
Speaker 5: have gone viral frankly for that matter on X, What
Speaker 5: more or less is the model and how does it work?
Speaker 5: This model that seeks to hap into the fact that
Speaker 5: just generally speaking, there's a lot of nudity and porn
Speaker 5: on X.
Speaker 3: So the thing that went viral on X is this
Speaker 3: sort of like funny construction that was showing up in
Speaker 3: the replies to all kinds of posts. It would be
Speaker 3: a piece of history trivia, a piece of breaking news.
Speaker 3: It would be an argument between two people that had
Speaker 3: gotten really intense, and then here comes a spammer in
Speaker 3: big block texts spaced out with weird symbols saying pussy
Speaker 3: in bio or some variations.
Speaker 5: And that's not and it was not germane to the conversation,
Speaker 5: not at all.
Speaker 3: I mean, you know, sometimes incidentally it is that goes
Speaker 3: viral on its own, but this was it was so
Speaker 3: visible that it really became a meme. And this is
Speaker 3: a meme that is sort of like getting extra traction
Speaker 3: because of the platform stance on spam, and in particular
Speaker 3: because of Elon Musk's like complete fixation on bots and spam.
Speaker 3: It's like, you know, in the lead up to the purchase,
Speaker 3: through the purchase, after the purchase, it's just this constant
Speaker 3: drum beat of like, we must stop the spammers. The
Speaker 3: bots are you know, ruining the site.
Speaker 5: You actually opened your piece with those words. If our
Speaker 5: Twitter bid succeeds, he wrote back in May of twenty
Speaker 5: twenty two, we will defeat the spam bots or die trying.
Speaker 3: That doesn't include the third option, which is just like
Speaker 3: everyone gets kind of riled up and is like confused.
Speaker 5: About what you know.
Speaker 3: It's just like this, it's such a funny thing. It's
Speaker 3: such an undeniably funny like turn in this saga of
Speaker 3: the you know, Elon Musk Twitter acquisition and that it
Speaker 3: just it sort of had to go viral, and it
Speaker 3: sort of stayed viral, helped by the fact that these
Speaker 3: bots are still around. This started happening early this year
Speaker 3: and it has sort of remained pretty visible.
Speaker 5: So the pib bots, as we will refer to them
Speaker 5: henceforth in this family friendly show, are still as prevalent
Speaker 5: as ever.
Speaker 3: It sort of varies day to day, like they're clearly
Speaker 3: working really hard to stop them. Some days I won't
Speaker 3: really see anything, other days I'll see them constantly. They are,
Speaker 3: i should say, evolving a little bit. You've got a
Speaker 3: whole bunch of different funny constructions that they're using. The
Speaker 3: one that I've seen a lot lately is my crazy
Speaker 3: boobs in Bio, which is like a you know, completely
Speaker 3: normal thing that people say.
Speaker 5: It's this human evolutions as right in front of our eye.
Speaker 3: You get fasaurus versions of that too that are absolutely delightful.
Speaker 3: But anyway, it's yeah, it's it's very very visible, and
Speaker 3: what it is is a pretty basic, like scale based
Speaker 3: spam tactic. What was remarkable about this is that it
Speaker 3: exists to promote very old fashioned, extremely unsavory flirt sites,
Speaker 3: dating sites where users are funneled through a whole bunch
Speaker 3: of pages. They sort of become like disoriented and lost,
Speaker 3: and then they get somewhere that says they're you know, hot, local, hot, single,
Speaker 3: local people who want to chat with you and maybe
Speaker 3: meet up. You enter your credit card, you end up
Speaker 3: chatting with an operator who lives in a different country.
Speaker 3: That operator maybe getting a cut of what you're paying
Speaker 3: this company. They might not be getting a cut, and
Speaker 3: they might be under some terrible labor arrangement, or they
Speaker 3: might be you know, scraping your personal information for things
Speaker 3: that they can use to then scam you via text
Speaker 3: message or a telegram. They might be asking for nudes
Speaker 3: from you. So it's a pretty dark path that you
Speaker 3: can follow. You if you actually click through these languages.
Speaker 5: You did, God bless you. You did it for all
Speaker 5: of us.
Speaker 3: So we don't have to Yeah, and you know, I'm
Speaker 3: getting married in two months.
Speaker 5: So max is this just a case of Elon Musk
Speaker 5: the true libertarian, just saying, heck, let's just give the
Speaker 5: people what they want. They want sex and nudity. Knock
Speaker 5: they can knock themselves.
Speaker 2: Well. I mean, I think it's fair to say, based
Speaker 2: on like Elon's tweets and like his fondness for risque memes,
Speaker 2: that this is a man who's not totally averse to
Speaker 2: you know, online pornography and so I and also he's
Speaker 2: of course a libertarian and somebody who I think genuinely
Speaker 2: like thinks.
Speaker 5: This stuff should probably be okay.
Speaker 2: But that, of course is at odds with the fact
Speaker 2: that trying to run a large media company with major advertisers,
Speaker 2: which is what ostensibly he's trying to do, you cannot
Speaker 2: have a lot of porn. And there's a reason why,
Speaker 2: you know, pharmaceutical companies don't really want to sell their
Speaker 2: you know, heart disease medications against porn. Even Viagra does
Speaker 2: not want that. Nobody wants it if you're like a
Speaker 2: big advertiser. Disney does not want to sell Disney Plus
Speaker 2: subscriptions against hardcore pornography, against pib or whatever. And lots
Speaker 2: of companies wrestle with this there's a reason only fans,
Speaker 2: which you know hosts is basically an adult content business.
Speaker 7: There's a reason why.
Speaker 2: When they talk about what they do, they don't say, yeah,
Speaker 2: we're a great place to find adult content. They talk
Speaker 2: about the cooking shows and the you know, and other
Speaker 2: stuff like advertisers don't like this, and you know, this
Speaker 2: is just like a way in which Elon Musk's worldview
Speaker 2: is at odds with the realities of the media business.
Speaker 2: I think there's all so an extent to which, as
Speaker 2: John's saying, you know, he talked about getting rid of
Speaker 2: these spambots, but clearly it's gone the other way. And
Speaker 2: it's not just it's not just the porn stuff, right
Speaker 2: this The dynamics around these PIB accounts are very very
Speaker 2: similar to cryptosam scammers. Like you'll often see somebody post
Speaker 2: something about their you know, their late you know, uncle
Speaker 2: dying or something, and you have a PIB and then
Speaker 2: you have someone being like, check out pepe coin. It's
Speaker 2: it's pumping right now, you know.
Speaker 3: And if you get the AI you know, the AI
Speaker 3: scam spam, then you've got the trifecta. It's something.
Speaker 8: But also you guys, like I think part of this
Speaker 8: is that like x is completely unable to moderate itself,
Speaker 8: Like who could forget when there was deep fake porn
Speaker 8: of Taylor Swift? Like yeah, you know, the God of America.
Speaker 8: Like Twitter just simply deleted the ability to search for
Speaker 8: the words Taylor Swift, Like they couldn't moderate.
Speaker 5: They sort of panicked and they didn't know what they
Speaker 5: hit the new keys.
Speaker 8: For days, you couldn't search for one of the most
Speaker 8: popular search terms on a platform.
Speaker 3: Well, that's that's that's worth it sizing like this isn't
Speaker 3: just a funny, you know, meme spam thing that's showing
Speaker 3: up in a bunch of replies. You can't really search
Speaker 3: for very much these days without seeing something that you
Speaker 3: don't want to see.
Speaker 5: Well, this is what Rayhon keeps alleging.
Speaker 1: I mean meetings I have.
Speaker 8: I have made it clear that while I don't follow
Speaker 8: proactively any sex workers, I see a lot of porn
Speaker 8: in my feet and I was looking into it this morning,
Speaker 8: and a lot There are a lot of people commenting
Speaker 8: on Reddit and other places who are like suggested tweets
Speaker 8: now include spot like before you follow tab is filled
Speaker 8: with pornography.
Speaker 5: So John post the gutting of X's content moderation team.
Speaker 5: How reportable is this stuff and how easy or difficult
Speaker 5: is it to get it filtered out?
Speaker 3: A lot of the same basic mechanisms are in place.
Speaker 3: You flag content, it gets reviewed. Mostly that's not how
Speaker 3: the spam is getting dealt with. This is getting dealt
Speaker 3: with sort of invisibly, with a lot of like behind
Speaker 3: the scenes algorithmic identification and then a bunch of contractors
Speaker 3: feel are now, who are you know, basically looking at
Speaker 3: the outputs from these you know, algorithms and saying, okay,
Speaker 3: this is actually spam. We should identify this and get
Speaker 3: rid of this. So they're doing, you know, they're doing
Speaker 3: the same stuff that every other platform is doing. It
Speaker 3: just seems that they're doing it not as effectively, and
Speaker 3: arguably they're facing a challenge that is a little bit
Speaker 3: more complicated than some of the other platforms just because
Speaker 3: of what Twitter is. It's it has a really like
Speaker 3: thorough connection to the outside web that a lot of
Speaker 3: other platforms don't. Instagram isn't all about links, and so
Speaker 3: you don't have this constant interface with like a world
Speaker 3: where anything could be happening. Just on the issue of
Speaker 3: only fans alone, that creates a huge problem because you know,
Speaker 3: you have a lot of onlyfan scammers, who are you know,
Speaker 3: running these agencies with with operators and chatbots and all
Speaker 3: this stuff. But as far as Twitter can tell, the
Speaker 3: link to the only Fans profile is legitimate. You know,
Speaker 3: the user then follows it and then they're sort of
Speaker 3: in a world of scans. And so I do think
Speaker 3: that x deserves a little bit of recognition for the
Speaker 3: scale of the challenge.
Speaker 2: One thing that's kind of funny and almost redeeming about
Speaker 2: this story is that the PIB thing has now become
Speaker 2: a meme. I think your story had this tweet It
Speaker 2: was like Merrion Webster's Dictionary did a tweet that it
Speaker 2: was like words in bio. You know, it's become like
Speaker 2: it just like a Twitter are just swallowed, like is
Speaker 2: a culture unto itself and in some ways has been
Speaker 2: able to absorb this kind of scammy, sad phenomenon and
Speaker 2: turn it into its own thing, And in a way
Speaker 2: that's redeeming almost.
Speaker 3: When Xai announced that they were, you know, revealing a
Speaker 3: lot of details about how groc works and how the
Speaker 3: underlying model works, they posted a PIB meme. They said
Speaker 3: weights in bio from the official Grock account, Like this
Speaker 3: is they're not even They're like.
Speaker 5: They're leaning into it.
Speaker 3: It's like they have no choice.
Speaker 2: I do think part of the issue here is that,
Speaker 2: like fewer people are using Twitter right now, notwithstanding you
Speaker 2: know those who are going there for porn, and then
Speaker 2: you have the porn scammers who are riding on top
Speaker 2: of that. But all of this is kind of a
Speaker 2: problem when your numbers are going down generally, because then
Speaker 2: it gets hard to like you don't really want to
Speaker 2: delete those those accounts. You could want to keep the
Speaker 2: numbers moving the right time.
Speaker 5: Correct. So is there a school thought inside of X
Speaker 5: that says, hey, when given lemons, let's make lemonade, let's
Speaker 5: lean into as part of our new business model pushing
Speaker 5: adult content on X.
Speaker 1: Well, there were stories.
Speaker 8: Last week though that X was going to be testing
Speaker 8: some kind of adult content feature. I mean, it has
Speaker 8: rolled out for the past year or so, various like
Speaker 8: paid mechanisms, including like I think something about like paid video.
Speaker 8: Although if X really wanted to make money off of
Speaker 8: all the porn on its site, there's like a lot
Speaker 8: of reasons why that would.
Speaker 3: Be difficult, right, They tried before the acquisition to develop
Speaker 3: basically a competitive set of features for OnlyFans. They were
Speaker 3: talking about kind of like a Patreon's but clearly influenced
Speaker 3: by OnlyFans fan follower model that fell apart. I remember
Speaker 3: it was I believe the Verge that reported on this,
Speaker 3: in part because of concerns about c SAM and you know,
Speaker 3: illegal pornography and non contentional content, and this was something
Speaker 3: that they figured out pretty quickly with a like quick
Speaker 3: red teaming of the feature. They were like, oh, this
Speaker 3: is going to be really really hard. They probably were
Speaker 3: also aware that OnlyFans has a lot of trouble with this.
Speaker 3: But yeah, now fast forward a little bit. Those features
Speaker 3: were mostly built OnlyFans. Spam along with the PIV spam
Speaker 3: is absolutely overwhelming the platform. So they've got this big opportunity.
Speaker 3: They see that it feels a little bit out of reach.
Speaker 3: They've got that competitor and only fans that is kind
Speaker 3: of abusing their platform, albeit indirectly through third parties, and
Speaker 3: you know, probably getting a lot of benefit out of
Speaker 3: what X is doing. It's got to be kind of frustrating.
Speaker 5: Right because, as you said, it's simultaneously overwhelming the site
Speaker 5: and driving away a tizers who would otherwise be there,
Speaker 5: but at the same time they can't monetize it in
Speaker 5: a way.
Speaker 4: I mean, the winners really are my friends, right, my
Speaker 4: good friends who are now able to see more free
Speaker 4: porn that X cannot control at all.
Speaker 5: And like, I think it was a big tal in
Speaker 5: hindsight when he changed the name of the company to
Speaker 5: X and had quite properly appreciated it. So John, Indeed,
Speaker 5: when you drilled all the way down and you click through,
Speaker 5: and you click through, and you know you got the
Speaker 5: pib spam and you followed it all the way to
Speaker 5: its logical conclusion, you found that I think it took
Speaker 5: you to a link called Provocative Neighbors, which in turn
Speaker 5: is run by a Dutch company.
Speaker 3: Yeah, this is like normally you can't figure out who's
Speaker 3: running these kinds of sites. You know, it's pretty well
Speaker 3: concealed through anonymous domain registrars and all this stuff. One
Speaker 3: of the sites that you end up at was you know,
Speaker 3: pretty candidate about what they do and who runs them.
Speaker 3: And it was a small operation called Meteor Interactive run
Speaker 3: out of the Netherlands that on their website claims to
Speaker 3: offer payment solutions for a variety of things, but mostly
Speaker 3: adult sites, and it appears as though they're running a
Speaker 3: network of these flirt sites or dating sites that wrote
Speaker 3: people into these arrangements where you're chatting with fake personas.
Speaker 3: This is all explained in the terms of service on
Speaker 3: their website. I tried to pull some records on them
Speaker 3: there as of a few years ago, relatively small, a
Speaker 3: few hundred thousand euros in revenue per year. They are
Speaker 3: obviously one of many, but they are emblematic of the
Speaker 3: type of operation that the PIB spam exists to support.
Speaker 3: And so the fact that that is popping up on
Speaker 3: x like that one of the world's most powerful and
Speaker 3: one of the wealthiest people has declared war on spam
Speaker 3: on his platform and is now being thwarted by like
Speaker 3: totally third rate porn.
Speaker 8: I mean, do we think that is he almost giving
Speaker 8: up his war on spam? You know now that like
Speaker 8: Grock is tweeting out these memes and like, you.
Speaker 2: Know, it was really clear how committed he was to
Speaker 2: the war on spam. He did as as Kurt Wagner
Speaker 2: brought up several weeks ago, he was frustrated, I guess
Speaker 2: from the spam replies he was personally getting. But you know,
Speaker 2: a lot of that war on spam, you know, if
Speaker 2: you if you remember Back was about trying to wiggle
Speaker 2: his way out of the Twitter deal, right like, he
Speaker 2: sort of cooked up the war on spam in part
Speaker 2: at least because he realized that Twitter was was not
Speaker 2: worth as much as as he.
Speaker 5: Not worth forty four billion dollars.
Speaker 2: Man, It's definitely not worth forty four billion dollars. If
Speaker 2: a big part of the business is the business that
Speaker 2: John's talking about, if you're in like the porn business,
Speaker 2: you're basically cut.
Speaker 7: Off from a big part of the normal, Like.
Speaker 5: Financially, you become like a pariah state of sam.
Speaker 2: And again, totally, you know, it is not compatible with
Speaker 2: running a mass media company. It is not compatible with
Speaker 2: running like a public company on a major exchange.
Speaker 7: I mean, with that very small handful of exceptions.
Speaker 5: So John, will we have you back in a year's
Speaker 5: time to report about whatever the new PIB is at time?
Speaker 5: Is X going to be more a wash and porn
Speaker 5: or will they have figured finally the bots problem out?
Speaker 3: I think one one way to make a guess about
Speaker 3: that is to look at what's going on with like
Speaker 3: the Blue checks and verification because to some extent, I
Speaker 3: do think that current Twitter, current x leadership has kind
Speaker 3: of given up on conventional like spam countermeasures. They're still
Speaker 3: doing a lot of it. They have to, otherwise the
Speaker 3: platform just wouldn't work. But all of Elon Musk's big
Speaker 3: ideas about this are like, what if we charged people,
Speaker 3: Like what if we emphasized our verified users that pay
Speaker 3: over everyone else, And then what if beyond that we
Speaker 3: experimented with charging people a dollar just to post anything
Speaker 3: at all. It's it's a really like sort of pay
Speaker 3: to speak model that does have like, you know, real
Speaker 3: promise for ending spam in a narrow sense if it
Speaker 3: just makes speech more expensive, but also blue check replies.
Speaker 3: The things that Elon is seeing now every day as
Speaker 3: he posts are kind of full of spam. It's just
Speaker 3: like it's a spam on a different part of the spectrum.
Speaker 3: It's a little more expensive to produce. A lot of
Speaker 3: the bots that you see there are clearly using like
Speaker 3: new large language models to produce convincing replies to posts.
Speaker 3: The scams are a little more opaque. Some of them
Speaker 3: are you know, are in startup mode, not totally monetized yet.
Speaker 3: Some of them are just monetizing through the revenue share
Speaker 3: platform on X, Like spam is this impossible problem that
Speaker 3: plagues every public venue and a lot of private venues
Speaker 3: on the web. And I think I think Elon is
Speaker 3: still in this in this phase of thinking like there
Speaker 3: might be a sort of magic bullet, there might be
Speaker 3: this big innovative idea that no one else has tried.
Speaker 3: And I think in a year, you know, he will
Speaker 3: be whatever X looks like, he will remain quiet vexed
Speaker 3: by this.
Speaker 8: I mean, there's like this old chestnut that pornography is
Speaker 8: always at the edge of innovation, Like that was true
Speaker 8: in like times where like you know, filmmaking and video
Speaker 8: recording became popular. That was true in the early Internet days.
Speaker 8: Like I think that spam always finds a way, but
Speaker 8: also like sex always finds a way, you know, And
Speaker 8: so like brute.
Speaker 1: Forcing these memes.
Speaker 8: Is one way I think AI obviously is going to
Speaker 8: present more and more opportunities.
Speaker 2: Wait, are you saying, Rahan, that this is the leading
Speaker 2: edge that we're going to follows. We're no, no, that,
Speaker 2: like you know this, these this you know, huge amount
Speaker 2: of porn on X is only the beginning for a
Speaker 2: new wave of general content on X Maybe is the
Speaker 2: rest of I mean, catch up with the I'm saying.
Speaker 1: That the ex user base is you know, they're.
Speaker 8: Growing demographic as young men. I'm saying that AI is
Speaker 8: flooding the market, and whatever tools exist to defeat it,
Speaker 8: I think are only matched by tools that will circumvent for.
Speaker 5: Our PIB for what it's worth, will be pod in bio. Right,
Speaker 5: all right, John, thank you very much for joining us.
Speaker 5: This was great anytime, Mac great to be here.
Speaker 1: Ray Hunt thanks.
Speaker 5: This episode was produced by Stacy Wang, Naomi Shaven and
Speaker 5: Rayhan Harmanci are senior editors. The idea for this show
Speaker 5: also came from Rayhan Blake Maples handles engineering, and we
Speaker 5: get special editing assistants from Jeff Grocott. Our supervising producer
Speaker 5: is Magnus Hendrickson. The Elon Inc. Theme is written and
Speaker 5: performed by Taka Yasuzawa and Alex Sugiura. Brendan Francis Newnham
Speaker 5: is our executive producer, and Sage Bowman is ahead of
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Speaker 2: M