Speaker 1: Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news.
Speaker 2: Well, Elon Musk gives 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 1: I mean legitimate.
Speaker 3: He says he's always voted for Democrats, but this year
Speaker 3: it will be different.
Speaker 1: He'll vote Republican.
Speaker 3: There is a reason the US government is so reliant
Speaker 3: on him. Alon Musk is a scam artist and he's
Speaker 3: done nothing. Anything he does is fascinating.
Speaker 4: People. Welcome the elan Ink, Bloomberg's weekly podcast about Elon Musk.
Speaker 4: It's Tuesday, May seven. I'm your host, David Popadopolis. Today,
Speaker 4: well into a mystery what happened to Tesla's one so
Speaker 4: lofty supercharging plans and what does it mean for the
Speaker 4: rest of America's auto industry. And then we're going to
Speaker 4: get into the next stage of Elon's free speech plan
Speaker 4: for x reinstating Nick Fuentes, a white supremacist who's been
Speaker 4: banned from basically every social media platform. To go over
Speaker 4: all of this and then some we're joined by our
Speaker 4: usual superstar panel, Elon reporter Danahull. Hello, Dana Good, Afternoon
Speaker 4: and BusinessWeek Senior writer and editor Max Chafkin. Hey, David, Okay,
Speaker 4: So to be clear here, I know I said it's Tuesday,
Speaker 4: May seventh, but we're actually recording this a day earlier
Speaker 4: than normal on Monday. Because this is a special week
Speaker 4: for us. Elon Inc. Is hitting the road. We'll be
Speaker 4: hosting a live taping on Thursday at the Bloomberg Tech
Speaker 4: Summit in San Francisco. Join us there. Links will be
Speaker 4: in the show, notesh. Well, let's get this started and
Speaker 4: talk about how Elon has done away with most or
Speaker 4: all of the Supercharger team. We touched briefly on this
Speaker 4: last week, but the details keep coming out.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So Elon Musk is reorganizing Tesla and kind of
Speaker 1: really reshaping the company to focus more on AI and autonomy,
Speaker 1: and as part of the layoffs that he has been
Speaker 1: doing for several weeks now, he completely disbanded the Supercharging
Speaker 1: team that reported up to Rebecca Tanucci, who is one
Speaker 1: of the top female executives at the company. Tesla watchers
Speaker 1: will remember that she was one of the speakers at
Speaker 1: the investor day last year, and it was really surprising
Speaker 1: because Supercharging it's like this awesome product. I mean, I
Speaker 1: think I've even called it Tesla's shrewdest product. And it
Speaker 1: kind of comes at a time when all these other
Speaker 1: automakers like Ford and Rivian and GM had like signed
Speaker 1: on to adopt the Tesla charging network as their own,
Speaker 1: and all of this injured raation work was underway before
Speaker 1: the summer driving season, so a lot of it is
Speaker 1: very puzzling. If you believe in the idea that EV
Speaker 1: adoption is slowing and that sales are slowing, it makes
Speaker 1: sense to kind of throttle back your expansion plans. But
Speaker 1: it does not make sense to fire all five hundred
Speaker 1: people who worked on that team, because now who does
Speaker 1: GM call who? Like, all the people that were facilitating
Speaker 1: these partnerships with other automakers are now gone.
Speaker 4: So then you know, the Tesla charging network is indeed
Speaker 4: very different than the charging networks that these other EV
Speaker 4: makers have they refer to as super charging stations. What
Speaker 4: makes exactly their stations different and better than those controlled
Speaker 4: by their rivals?
Speaker 1: So I think the thing to really think about is
Speaker 1: Tesla doesn't just make cars. They really own the fueling
Speaker 1: infrastructure that is important for electric vehicle adoption, and they
Speaker 1: very early On knew that the key to getting people
Speaker 1: to drive electric vehicles was to make charging easy and seamless,
Speaker 1: and over a decade ago they started building their own stations,
Speaker 1: and Elon Musk called them superchargers. And at first there
Speaker 1: were like six of them in California, and so you
Speaker 1: could drive from San Francisco to La or San Francisco
Speaker 1: to like Tahoe. Now they are all over the world.
Speaker 1: They are in China, they are all over the United States,
Speaker 1: they are all over Europe, and they are really easy
Speaker 1: to use, and they are often located off of highways
Speaker 1: near a place where you can stop and go get
Speaker 1: a cup of coffee. I mean, the one in Kettleman City,
Speaker 1: which is on the way to La is like this
Speaker 1: amazing spot. It's open twenty four hours. There's coffee there,
Speaker 1: you can get a latte, you can buy Tesla merchandise.
Speaker 1: And the supercharging network has always been seen as Tesla's
Speaker 1: value add because Tesla is not just selling you a car,
Speaker 1: they also are basically owning and creating this fueling infrastructure.
Speaker 1: But now what's happened is that Musk is trying to
Speaker 1: cut twenty percent of his staff, and he cut this
Speaker 1: entire team, and you know, the superchargers still exists, but
Speaker 1: there are just a lot of questions as to who's
Speaker 1: going to maintain them, and like what his whole strategy
Speaker 1: here is. My understanding is that the business unit was
Speaker 1: close to being profitable. But maybe if you're reconfiguring your
Speaker 1: whole company to be about autonomy and the RBOTAXI, maybe
Speaker 1: you don't need to build as many as you had
Speaker 1: originally planned.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so if the business was close to being profitable,
Speaker 4: max I would have to have imagined that this is
Speaker 4: the kind of thing you have a dominant position in
Speaker 4: that space, in the charging space, and for years, as
Speaker 4: more and more automakers go into evs, like this could
Speaker 4: have been a thing that just threw off cash for
Speaker 4: decades to come.
Speaker 2: Now you would think, I mean building these superchargers and
Speaker 2: on a big scale and expanding the number that they
Speaker 2: have currently. That's also capitally intensive, and clearly like Elon
Speaker 2: Musk has as other areas where he wants to spend
Speaker 2: that money. He wants to spend that money buying you
Speaker 2: know Nvidia, you know H one hundred's these like GPU
Speaker 2: chips to train these AI models, AI models For what
Speaker 2: I mean assumably for the Robotaxi, right, I should say
Speaker 2: the aspirational Robotaxi, because there is no Robotaxi yet, you know,
Speaker 2: is going to use enormous resources. And Elon Musk, as
Speaker 2: Dana saying, has been trying to reorient the company towards
Speaker 2: that Tesla before when they were trying to come up
Speaker 2: with this twenty five thousand dollars car or moving more
Speaker 2: aggressively to other models, Elon must really seemed to be
Speaker 2: betting on a lot more scale, right, like more superchargers,
Speaker 2: lots of cars, And it really does seem like over
Speaker 2: the last few months he's changed his thinking there right
Speaker 2: where the company is not trying to drastically increase the
Speaker 2: number of evs out there in the short term, it's
Speaker 2: it wants to essentially, you know, get rid of the
Speaker 2: conventional car altogether. It's extremely you know, it's a bold bet,
Speaker 2: and it also seems like, like you said, like maybe
Speaker 2: it's a foolhardy decision to throw away or or put
Speaker 2: the brakes on what has been a really good part
Speaker 2: of the company.
Speaker 4: But to get rid of the conventional car altogether. Do
Speaker 4: you still not need more charging stations or is the idea,
Speaker 4: Dana that I guess, if just a handful of robo
Speaker 4: taxis are driving us all around, we need a limited
Speaker 4: number of cars.
Speaker 1: So I think you have to really look at sales
Speaker 1: and ed adoption. And you know, Tesla had a terrible
Speaker 1: first quarter. They had like forty six thousand more cars
Speaker 1: in inventory than they could sell, and so you don't
Speaker 1: need to keep building new superchargers if your sales are slowing.
Speaker 1: And Tesla has a lot of superchargers. As of the
Speaker 1: end of the first quarter, they had over six thousand
Speaker 1: supercharging stations and more than fifty seven thousand connectors worldwide,
Speaker 1: so you don't really need to build more. And what
Speaker 1: Musk said was, you know, we're going to We're going
Speaker 1: to focus instead on optimizing our existing stations. That's all fine,
Speaker 1: that makes sense to me. What does it makes sense
Speaker 1: is firing all the people who were overseeing relationships with
Speaker 1: other automotive partners, like for GM and Rivian, Because the
Speaker 1: whole idea was that, you know, Tesla's network is the
Speaker 1: dominant network in the United States, and like Tesla got
Speaker 1: all of this money from the Biden administration through this
Speaker 1: program called the Nevy program, where under the Inflation Reduction Act.
Speaker 1: If you opened up the network to other automakers, you
Speaker 1: got federal funding. And so you know, Musk has never
Speaker 1: been one to kind of turn down the spigot of funding.
Speaker 1: So all of these nevy projects that were supposed to
Speaker 1: be built using federal funds, I don't know where that stands,
Speaker 1: And frankly, I don't think anyone else does either, because
Speaker 1: all the people that oversaw the contracts are now gone.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and Max, That's one of the things that jumps
Speaker 4: out at me a little bit here is when you're
Speaker 4: a small startup or a startup of any sort, like
Speaker 4: Kessel was for a while, you know, you can blow
Speaker 4: stuff up all the time and shut down departments and
Speaker 4: start other things, and you know that the broader ripples
Speaker 4: across the account of me and across the broader industry
Speaker 4: are small. I wonder if right now it's almost a
Speaker 4: little bit like Tesla and Elon aren't realizing their own
Speaker 4: strength and might and power in this space. Is that
Speaker 4: they don't realize their strength or might or power. Are
Speaker 4: they just simply don't care?
Speaker 2: I mean, it's very hard to disentangle like Elon Musk's
Speaker 2: strategy in terms of like the business strategy of the
Speaker 2: business case for slowing down superchargers or firing the team,
Speaker 2: and then the management style, which is to these like
Speaker 2: grand gestures in which you know, you fire entire teams
Speaker 2: to prove a point. And my guess is it's it's
Speaker 2: probably a little bit of both, right, Like, there's been
Speaker 2: some reporting suggesting that the person who's running that team
Speaker 2: was hesitant to like cuts as deeply as Elon Musk wants.
Speaker 2: Elon Musk is trying to make this point that the
Speaker 2: company has to be extremely hardcore. I suppose what.
Speaker 4: Better way to show that then to just set that
Speaker 4: person in the entire team.
Speaker 2: Seems it seems crazy from the outside, and I'm sure
Speaker 2: if you're sitting, you know, in Detroit and you've been
Speaker 2: counting on these superchargers, it seems crazy as well. It
Speaker 2: does conceivably, I think, hurt other EV makers to have
Speaker 2: Tesla slow this down, because of course, this Tesla supercharger
Speaker 2: network was going to be an asset to the entire industry,
Speaker 2: and people who are buying a Hondai or a Kia
Speaker 2: or a Ford or whatever, we're also going to benefit
Speaker 2: from these networks. You could see a situation where Elon
Speaker 2: Musk feels like, do I really want to be paying
Speaker 2: to build this massive infrastructure that is going to also
Speaker 2: be used by my competitors. Maybe I have this sort
Speaker 2: of modestly profitable thing, but like it doesn't serve the
Speaker 2: big goal, which is to be worth you know, to
Speaker 2: trillions of dollars and do all the crazy ambitious stuff
Speaker 2: that he wants to do.
Speaker 4: Did they not hire anyone back? I thought they were
Speaker 4: hiring people back or no.
Speaker 1: There's rumors that they could hire people back. I mean,
Speaker 1: Elon Musk has changed his mind before. I'm reminded of
Speaker 1: like in twenty nineteen, he like announced that they were
Speaker 1: closed all the stores, and then once he realized like, oh,
Speaker 1: actually we have like long term leases with all of
Speaker 1: these shopping malls, he like kind of did in about face,
Speaker 1: and they like they like recance it. So I mean,
Speaker 1: I wouldn't be surprised if they tried to hire some
Speaker 1: people back. And I mean, to be clear, you know,
Speaker 1: there are still people that are going to like service
Speaker 1: the existing superchargers.
Speaker 5: You know.
Speaker 4: I recently Max was trying to drive from Miami South
Speaker 4: to Key West. My wife and I we were trying
Speaker 4: to rent to Tesla Avis had no Teslas for us.
Speaker 4: They gave us another EV, some fancy pants Mercedes EV.
Speaker 4: We said, okay, fine, it was not fully charged. When
Speaker 4: they gave it to us, Dan, we said, fine, I
Speaker 4: had forty seven miles. Like whatever, we'll find a charging station.
Speaker 4: We went by a zillion Tesla charging stations we had
Speaker 4: no access to, and then very quickly found ourselves down
Speaker 4: to just a handful of miles left. And at that
Speaker 4: point we got to this charging station, there was nowhere
Speaker 4: else to go. We wound up waiting in a Walmart
Speaker 4: parking lot across by the way the road from a
Speaker 4: Murphy USA gas station where cars were just zipping in,
Speaker 4: filling up, zipping out. It took us four hours to charge. Wow,
Speaker 4: that sounds like a great It was awesome. It was awesome.
Speaker 4: And the thing that jumped out at me, though Dana,
Speaker 4: was it wasn't just idiot tourists like us stuck in
Speaker 4: this position. And I do emphasize idiot tourists. They were
Speaker 4: also queuing up in the line behind us, waiting a
Speaker 4: half an hour, an hour, getting frustrated and driving off.
Speaker 4: There were also actual EV owners of Hyundai's and volkswagons.
Speaker 1: Well, right, And that's why Tesla has had such an
Speaker 1: incredible advantage because the superchargers work, and like, if you
Speaker 1: have the Tesla app on your phone, you can see
Speaker 1: where the nearest supercharger is and how many stalls are open,
Speaker 1: and like you get like very real data on like
Speaker 1: what your charging time is, and like whenever I've rented
Speaker 1: a Tesla, I've used the superchargers, I've never had like
Speaker 1: one problem with them. So that's why, like Tesla had
Speaker 1: such an advantage, and they really built like the best
Speaker 1: team in the industry, Like all of these people are
Speaker 1: like top flight talent. So now the market is flooded
Speaker 1: with like five hundred people and every other charging network
Speaker 1: is going to try to stap them up and learn
Speaker 1: from their expertise. But that's what's so amazing. No one
Speaker 1: was able to replicate what Tesla did. And Tesla also
Speaker 1: has all this data about like where you charge, which
Speaker 1: ones are the most used, Like they have just a
Speaker 1: ton of information about electricity pricing and real time pricing
Speaker 1: and how much the average person charges. So I think
Speaker 1: the fact that Tesla is really throttling back what was
Speaker 1: this clear advantage at this pivotal time when EV adoption
Speaker 1: has very much slowed. It's like cause ripple effects throughout
Speaker 1: the entire industry. And if you go on LinkedIn, oh
Speaker 1: my god, there's like this uproar. Like everyone in the
Speaker 1: charging business is like trying to figure out what's.
Speaker 4: Going on, right, and they don't exactly know. But as
Speaker 4: far as we understand the deal that willow them and
Speaker 4: their cars to charge at these Tesla supercharging stations, it
Speaker 4: is not dead, correct, It is not dead.
Speaker 1: I mean I have not heard of any automakers backing
Speaker 1: out of the deal. I just think that how the
Speaker 1: onboarding and the integration and the billing all works is
Speaker 1: just up in the air because all of the people
Speaker 1: who oversaw those details are now gone.
Speaker 2: And it just feels like one of the ways in
Speaker 2: which these companies have not quite figured out how people
Speaker 2: are going to use evs and and how they're going
Speaker 2: to convince the kind of person who's watching, like you said,
Speaker 2: watching this giant line at a charging station on one
Speaker 2: side of the street and a gas station where dozens
Speaker 2: of cars amazing, it was amazing. It seems like it's
Speaker 2: just not totally figured out yet. And that and that's
Speaker 2: a good reason if you're Elon Musk and you're you're
Speaker 2: worried about your spending, and you think that there's this
Speaker 2: amazing target called you know, AI that you should be
Speaker 2: aiming for. You could sort of understand why you would
Speaker 2: want to try to cut back.
Speaker 4: The other person I want to quote here, while I
Speaker 4: waited in line forever at the charging station, was somebody,
Speaker 4: after they had finally finished charging and was clearly exhausted
Speaker 4: by the experience, has turned to me and said, is
Speaker 4: America ready for this? I think the answer, at least
Speaker 4: right now is looking like no. Okay, We're now going
Speaker 4: to talk about X and Elon's reinstatement of Nick Fuentes.
Speaker 4: And to help us do that, we've got Kurt Wagner,
Speaker 4: who covers X for us here at Bloomberg and is
Speaker 4: the author of the book The Battle for the Bird
Speaker 4: about Elon's takeover of Twitter.
Speaker 3: Welcome, Kurt, thank you for having me.
Speaker 4: Okay, So, Kurt, I think it was on Friday Elon
Speaker 4: has reinstated. He made the decision to reinstate Nick Fuentes.
Speaker 4: Tell us to get this started, who exactly is Nickquente's.
Speaker 5: Yeah, Nick Fuentes is I believe about twenty five years old.
Speaker 5: He's labeled a white supremacist, anti Semite. He's basically a
Speaker 5: far right sort of media personality. He's got his own
Speaker 5: talk show and he has a conference, and he shows
Speaker 5: up sort of in the far right circles of you know,
Speaker 5: folks who support basically Donald Trump, and then sort of
Speaker 5: came to light during Donald Trump's presidency, and so a
Speaker 5: few years ago he was banned from what was then
Speaker 5: Twitter permanently.
Speaker 4: This is by the previous the pre Musk team.
Speaker 5: That's right, this is you know, Twitter one point zero,
Speaker 5: if you want to call that, and had still been
Speaker 5: banned on what is now x up until obviously just
Speaker 5: a couple of days ago, even though Elon has brought
Speaker 5: back several other people, but he is now back. He
Speaker 5: went on a Twitter spaces over the weekend with it
Speaker 5: was quite the crew. I believe Alex Jones was there,
Speaker 5: Andrew Tait was there, Mario knopfol who's sort of like
Speaker 5: a you know, Elon I don't know fan, I guess, and.
Speaker 4: He's like the Larry King of this word.
Speaker 3: Yeahs of journalist.
Speaker 5: I just check him before he hopped on. I believe
Speaker 5: that it's up to one point eight million viewers. Or
Speaker 5: listens for that spaces. So this crew, many of whom
Speaker 5: were suspended or banned on X until you know, Elon
Speaker 5: took over, now has quite the quite the audience.
Speaker 4: That's one of the things I was going to ask you, Kurt, So,
Speaker 4: how many exactly controversial people has Elon reinstated since taking
Speaker 4: the company over a couple of years ago.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I don't have the full number, but I did
Speaker 5: jot down a few examples because it's an interesting list.
Speaker 5: There's the obvious, you know, President Trump, right is the
Speaker 5: most high profile.
Speaker 4: Well, President Trump, ex President Trump. He has been reinstated,
Speaker 4: but he has turned X down right, he has not
Speaker 4: come back.
Speaker 5: Actually, yeah, I believe he's only posted one time. He
Speaker 5: posted his mug shot you may remember, and used it
Speaker 5: to try and thunderraise. So president, you know, ex President
Speaker 5: Trump is the most high profile. But Nick Fuentes is
Speaker 5: one we were talking about. Alex Jones is obviously a
Speaker 5: very you know, notorious far right personality that's been brought back.
Speaker 5: Andrew Tait is another. There was a guy Ali Alexander
Speaker 5: who you know, helped organize the Stop the Steal campaign.
Speaker 5: He was brought back and I think he was actually
Speaker 5: re suspended. I think Fuentes might have been as well.
Speaker 5: I think he and Ali Alexander were brought back in
Speaker 5: the very early days of Elon's takeover and then almost
Speaker 5: immediately suspended again, and now Fuentes is now getting to
Speaker 5: come back again for a second time under Elon.
Speaker 4: So Max, what were you said, Where does FA's rank
Speaker 4: in terms of extreme on the extremists scale among those rehabilitated,
Speaker 4: He's pretty far.
Speaker 2: On the far end of the extreme scale. You know,
Speaker 2: after the election of President Trump, you had a lot
Speaker 2: of the kind of quote unquote remember that the term
Speaker 2: alt right. Those were the kind of online supporters of
Speaker 2: Trump and Trump is a lot of them kind of
Speaker 2: backed away from the movement or were banned or faded away,
Speaker 2: or sort of embraced the fact that they were in power,
Speaker 2: and you had this kind of new wave of even
Speaker 2: further right personalities, of which Pointe is probably like the
Speaker 2: most prominent example. The main target of his ire, besides
Speaker 2: you know, blacks and Jews and minorities of any kind
Speaker 2: and gay people, is the Republican Party and the right right.
Speaker 2: It's like going after the mainstream for not being you know,
Speaker 2: pro American, pro white whatever. Enough and you know, we
Speaker 2: talked about this, and others have talked about this. One
Speaker 2: of the difficulties of operating social network is like where
Speaker 2: do you draw the line? And even if you're a
Speaker 2: free speech absolutist, there are going to be part kinds
Speaker 2: of speech that are going to kind of mess up
Speaker 2: your network. And Musk two has kind of struggled with this.
Speaker 4: He banned them, he unbanned him, and I guess Kurt
Speaker 4: to a certain extent in his post rehabilitating him again,
Speaker 4: you know, he kind of tries to sort of caveat
Speaker 4: it a bit. The post said very well, he nick flant,
Speaker 4: this will be reinstated provided he does not violate the
Speaker 4: law and let him be crushed by the comments and
Speaker 4: community notes.
Speaker 5: Yeah, this sort of aligns with what Elon has said
Speaker 5: in a few different situations. You know, sunlight is the
Speaker 5: best disinfectant kind of thing, right, And his point here
Speaker 5: is like, instead of letting these terrible viewpoints kind of
Speaker 5: fester away hidden, let's let them out in the open
Speaker 5: and everyone can see how terrible they are.
Speaker 4: And is that working?
Speaker 5: Kurt Wagner, I don't think that's sort of ever worked, right,
Speaker 5: especially the way social media works. The people who have
Speaker 5: the most extreme viewpoints often find their communities, and people
Speaker 5: get empowered by that, they get radicalized by that, they
Speaker 5: get excited about it. And the fact that this space
Speaker 5: yesterday with that crew I mentioned, got one point eight
Speaker 5: million viewers sort of tells the story, right.
Speaker 2: It's a big group of people in terms of numbers,
Speaker 2: but as a percentage of the population and so on,
Speaker 2: it's small. And like that's kind of the problem, is
Speaker 2: that like this this belief system, the will you know,
Speaker 2: white supremacy, or in the case of Alex Jones, it's
Speaker 2: you know, conspiracy theorizing like it is not and never
Speaker 2: is going to be a mainstream anything. And so so
Speaker 2: the more time Elon Musk spends it clearly seems like
Speaker 2: this is taking up a huge part of his you know,
Speaker 2: mind space. It almost looked looking at his X page,
Speaker 2: it almost seemed like he was sort of badgered into
Speaker 2: doing this, or you know, there were a lot of
Speaker 2: replies from from Fuentes's you know, allies and so on,
Speaker 2: suggesting that he do this.
Speaker 3: It just it's like it's like he's he's off in a.
Speaker 2: Corner that is he's going to making me, you know,
Speaker 2: far right very happy, and meanwhile, like X itself continues
Speaker 2: to sort of go sideways. Right, this is not going
Speaker 2: to address any of the big problems that that X has.
Speaker 4: Yeah, Dan, to that point, there is a sort of
Speaker 4: or seems to be something of a spur of the moment,
Speaker 4: not necessarily super well thought out element to this decision,
Speaker 4: a little bit of like, I guess this is the
Speaker 4: way Elon always rolled at Tesla when he was tweeting there, Right,
Speaker 4: it's not necessarily all been properly vetted and such.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, I think Elon makes impulsive decisions, and
Speaker 1: you know, the fanboys are like, oh, he's playing four
Speaker 1: D chess or five D chess, and it's like, no,
Speaker 1: he's just like, you know, he's just like whatever, He's
Speaker 1: just impulsive. He's tweeting, he's on his plane, like he's
Speaker 1: just following his gut. And I don't think that we
Speaker 1: should read too much into it. I mean, I think
Speaker 1: that fundamentally he wants X to be, you know, like
Speaker 1: the water cooler, and and he wants engagement, and like,
Speaker 1: you know, everyone who covers social media knows that like,
Speaker 1: anger drives a lot of engagement. So even if you
Speaker 1: think that Nick Fuentes is like a horrible person. You
Speaker 1: still click on the tweets or read the tweets or
Speaker 1: quote tweet the tweets to show how awful they are,
Speaker 1: and that's still driving engagement. So I think that that's
Speaker 1: a big that's a big part of it. I mean,
Speaker 1: he is courting the right but also just really trying
Speaker 1: to drive up his numbers. And Kurt, I don't even
Speaker 1: know what metric he's using now. Is it like unregrettable
Speaker 1: user minutes? Is it He's like making up all these
Speaker 1: new metrics.
Speaker 4: Whoah, well, what is that unregretted user minute? Oh and
Speaker 4: so and vise a v regretted? Like what is that?
Speaker 4: How does that work?
Speaker 5: That's sort of the thing one no one really knows,
Speaker 5: like what is an unregrettable user minute? It's not a
Speaker 5: metric that I've ever heard, you know, I've covered social
Speaker 5: networks for ten years, many that have failed along the way.
Speaker 5: I've never heard that statistic before. But that's sort of
Speaker 5: the idea, right, And I guess I would echo just
Speaker 5: really quickly what Dana said about the impulsiveness. You know,
Speaker 5: when when Elon first took over Twitter and book plug
Speaker 5: here I cover this in the book, but like he
Speaker 5: shows up and the battle for the Bird about the
Speaker 5: Twitter takeover, and when he shows up, there were employees
Speaker 5: who were really excited to work with like this visionary, right,
Speaker 5: this guy that they thought was going to, you know,
Speaker 5: fix everything, and were shocked to find out how frequently
Speaker 5: it seemed like he was just flying by the seat
Speaker 5: of his pants and sort of making these decisions on
Speaker 5: a whim. And so I think it's very possible that
Speaker 5: the Fuentes reinstatement falls into that same bucket.
Speaker 3: Not good for the business.
Speaker 4: So obviously, if you're trying to lure back mainstream advertisers,
Speaker 4: probably not so good. And CEO Linda Yakarino is probably
Speaker 4: not loving that. But Kurt as Dana was just saying
Speaker 4: he has the rehabilitation of Nick quent This has given
Speaker 4: the thing, you know, a jolt of I think customer engagement.
Speaker 4: I guess that Twitter spaces that x space has had.
Speaker 4: You were saying like one point seven million people tuned in.
Speaker 4: Is that not monetizable some way somehow, well.
Speaker 5: Just monetizable, but not all traffic is created equal, right,
Speaker 5: Like it's number one, who who are you reaching? And
Speaker 5: number two? What is the I think Twitter's case, what
Speaker 5: is the risk of reaching those people?
Speaker 3: Right?
Speaker 5: And so if you're an advertiser going to X, you
Speaker 5: have to say, Okay, maybe there is an audience here.
Speaker 3: That would be great to reach, but at what cost? Right?
Speaker 3: The cost is that.
Speaker 5: You're doing business with Elon who is openly, you know,
Speaker 5: supporting in platforming a white supremacist or several white supremacists, right,
Speaker 5: And so the trade off for a lot of brands,
Speaker 5: I think is that, well, yeah, sure there are people
Speaker 5: there we'd like to reach, but they're not worth reaching
Speaker 5: if it means, you know, we have to associate with
Speaker 5: what X has sort of become. And I think that
Speaker 5: is the bigger issue, is that there's a lot of
Speaker 5: discomfort around what Elon has become, what Elon is starting
Speaker 5: to represent, and what they would sort of be labeling
Speaker 5: themselves as as advertisers on that platform.
Speaker 2: And this is not like news to anyone who follows
Speaker 2: media industry, but you know, it's dangerous for advertisers in
Speaker 2: two ways. One is that you know, someone sees a
Speaker 2: ad for like Campbell soup next to a Nick Fuents,
Speaker 2: you know, racist meme or something, and that's embarrassing to
Speaker 2: the advertiser. The other is that advertisers, you know, care
Speaker 2: a lot about who they're reaching, right, and they want
Speaker 2: they want like C suite executives. They want people with influence,
Speaker 2: with huge amounts of disposable income, with with long term
Speaker 2: plans to spend that money. Nick Fuentas is a self
Speaker 2: described in cell he is you know, I mean like
Speaker 2: he is he so sorry, that's an involuntary celibate. That's
Speaker 2: that's somebody. It's it's a sort of subset of the
Speaker 2: men's rights movement.
Speaker 4: When you look at like.
Speaker 2: Who his audience is, it is like the opposite of
Speaker 2: what a normal corporate advertiser wants. Like it's it's just completely,
Speaker 2: if not counterproductive, it's very close to it. And and
Speaker 2: to the extent that Elon Musk is talking is using
Speaker 2: the name Nick Fuents responding to people talking about Nick Foents.
Speaker 4: It's bad, right. It may be engagement, but it's not
Speaker 4: the kind of engagement they want. It's the opposite of
Speaker 4: the convenation that they want.
Speaker 5: I found it interesting to these sort of like, hey,
Speaker 5: we may lose advertisers over this isn't isn't going to
Speaker 5: be good for business? To me, it's almost cover at
Speaker 5: this point, right, Like they're already losing advertisers.
Speaker 3: It's already a.
Speaker 4: You can't once you get this zero, I guess it's
Speaker 4: hard to go like you know.
Speaker 5: Yeah, now he has something to point to, right, he
Speaker 5: can say, well, business is bad because I'm supporting free
Speaker 5: speech over here, and it's like, well, business was kind
Speaker 5: of already bad, but this might just be you know,
Speaker 5: an added example.
Speaker 4: Okay, So Kurt, there was other news over the weekend,
Speaker 4: which is that Jack Dorsey, formerly the head of X
Speaker 4: Twitter at the time, has he's left the Blue Sky
Speaker 4: board and he's now praising X again. Remind us again
Speaker 4: what exactly Blue Sky was, and how do we interpret
Speaker 4: all of this?
Speaker 5: Sure, yeah, Blue Sky it's a little bit tough to understand.
Speaker 5: But the simplest explanation is it's a social network that
Speaker 5: looks and feels very much like Twitter, but it is
Speaker 5: you know, decentralized. So this idea that it is not
Speaker 5: owned by any single company or any single investor in
Speaker 5: theory would never like go out of business so long
Speaker 5: as you know, someone's pain to keep the servers running.
Speaker 5: And the idea started while Jack Dorsey was still at
Speaker 5: Twitter as a way to sort of create a you know,
Speaker 5: solution to the fact that these companies are beholden to
Speaker 5: you know, investors, or they're beholden to advertisers or all
Speaker 5: these things where they have to make a business decision
Speaker 5: that you know, means they might have to kick someone
Speaker 5: like Nick Foyintes off the platform.
Speaker 3: That kind of stuff bothered Jack Dorsey.
Speaker 5: So he said, hey, let's create a different network that
Speaker 5: doesn't have any owner, that has none of these pressures
Speaker 5: around Wall Street. It's not publicly traded, and you know,
Speaker 5: that can be sort of the solution to all this stuff.
Speaker 5: And he funded it while he was at Twitter. He
Speaker 5: joined the board after he left Twitter, and now he
Speaker 5: is sort of, as far as I can tell, like
Speaker 5: abandoning this this idea, at least this version of this idea,
Speaker 5: and has started to I saw him post it on
Speaker 5: X quite a bit over the weekend.
Speaker 4: Matt Max, you seem to have a theory.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, I mean it just it's like there were
Speaker 2: all these ideas about sort of what who's going to
Speaker 2: take the mantle after you know, Elon Musk, when Elon
Speaker 2: Musk was firing you know, eighty percent of his.
Speaker 4: Staff at Twitter.
Speaker 2: At Twitter now X and doing all these things that
Speaker 2: seemed somewhat destructive to the brand, like letting, letting the
Speaker 2: likes of Nick foante Son, and you know, it just
Speaker 2: seems like Twitter, even even a reduced Twitter, even a
Speaker 2: Twitter that is somewhat has been somewhat taken over by
Speaker 2: crypto schillers or you know, weird you know, alt right
Speaker 2: types or whatever, it's still Twitter. And maybe Jack Doorsey,
Speaker 2: just like the rest of us, he just can't. He
Speaker 2: just can't get off of it, even if he knows,
Speaker 2: he knows in his heart that there was there's a
Speaker 2: better thing out there, It's just it has a pull
Speaker 2: on him.
Speaker 4: We're going to go into our final segment, Max, We're
Speaker 4: going to have you break down and analyze critically some
Speaker 4: advice that Elon had for jk Rowling, the author of
Speaker 4: Harry Potter Max Well.
Speaker 2: Jk Rowling, as many people know, in addition to being
Speaker 2: the best selling author of Harry Potter and a bunch
Speaker 2: of Harry Potter spin offs, has for some time now
Speaker 2: been on something of a kind of anti woke kick
Speaker 2: has posted many, many posts about what she sees as
Speaker 2: sort of overreached by in terms of trans rights, and
Speaker 2: many people feel like she's expressed, you know, bigoted, anti
Speaker 2: trans statements. She's been sort of fighting this battle on
Speaker 2: social media for some time, and more or less out
Speaker 2: of nowhere.
Speaker 4: Elon Musk replied to.
Speaker 2: One of her tweets it was like a month old tweet,
Speaker 2: suggesting that she might want to try posting sort of
Speaker 2: more positive content.
Speaker 4: The ekes was from Elon was, while I heartily agree
Speaker 4: with your points regarding sex and gender, may I suggest
Speaker 4: also posting interesting and positive content on other matters.
Speaker 2: It's weird how a guy who like just types mostly
Speaker 2: memes and like one word things will then suddenly string
Speaker 2: a sentence that almost seems like it was written by
Speaker 2: you know, chat GPT or something. But anyway, as you
Speaker 2: can imagine David, when I saw this, I had one thought,
Speaker 2: which was feud.
Speaker 4: God, Danna. He can't he can't help himself. He sees
Speaker 4: this guy sees feuds everywhere. Dana is this if he's
Speaker 4: going to take this into feud territory? Are you okay
Speaker 4: with that?
Speaker 1: I'm okay with it. I just think it's so funny
Speaker 1: that like Musk is now the tone plus, like mister
Speaker 1: free speech is tone policing. JK Rowlings. This was Grock
Speaker 1: doing his why why why? And is he trying to
Speaker 1: steal thunder from the bigger beef of the weekend, which,
Speaker 1: let's face it is really Drake and Hendrick and Molamar.
Speaker 1: That was the beef that everyone on the internet was
Speaker 1: paying attention to.
Speaker 4: But Max, we stole the mic from you, so we're
Speaker 4: gonna give it back.
Speaker 2: You were saying, as I said, this is you know,
Speaker 2: I'd say it's a very delicate form of criticism, but
Speaker 2: as Danna says, coming from Elon Musket, you know, kind
Speaker 2: of crazy for a guy who ekes is you know,
Speaker 2: seven thousand times, a guy who had mostly about culture
Speaker 2: war stuff, for a guy who the SEC had signed
Speaker 2: a Twitter sitter two to that supposedly every single eks
Speaker 2: he made. So yeah, also okay, So so JK. Rowling
Speaker 2: did sort of respond. The following day, she did another
Speaker 2: post with a profile of hers and it said something like,
Speaker 2: some people have suggested I need to post more positive
Speaker 2: material through you. This is not a response to that,
Speaker 2: but everyone who's watching knows. Of course, shots fired, basically
Speaker 2: going straight to a Drake Kendrick situation, and then Elon
Speaker 2: quickly de escalated. He actually then posted later something to
Speaker 2: the effect of JK Rowling is awesome. It seems like
Speaker 2: he realized all of a sudden he was not ready
Speaker 2: to you know, beef with the world famous best selling
Speaker 2: author Harry Potter.
Speaker 4: No, I see, so it's not a feud.
Speaker 3: It was a feud.
Speaker 2: Well on my power ranking, which I maintain it is.
Speaker 2: It is at number ten, so it's at the very
Speaker 2: bottom of the power ranking.
Speaker 1: Climbing up the leaderboard.
Speaker 3: But I'm keeping it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm keeping it on there because you just never
Speaker 2: know where these things are going to go.
Speaker 4: Kirk to wrap up here is this, Do we think
Speaker 4: this is a bit of a window into the new
Speaker 4: elon on X that periodically he's going to want to
Speaker 4: try to play the hey, let's moderate tone guy, or no,
Speaker 4: this is just some random one off.
Speaker 3: I think it's a random one off.
Speaker 5: I mean this is all coming within what twenty four
Speaker 5: hours of him, you know, bringing back a pretty well
Speaker 5: known white supremacist, right, So it's like he can't really
Speaker 5: be the guy who's setting the tone on Twitter and
Speaker 5: telling people to clean up their act and you know, hey,
Speaker 5: let's be a little more positive and then at the
Speaker 5: same time like bring back the guy who you know
Speaker 5: is all about white Christianity and think that those things
Speaker 5: are going to be fine.
Speaker 3: So I just I don't know.
Speaker 5: I don't really see this as anymore than just maybe
Speaker 5: someone sent it, someone maybe tagged him. He came across
Speaker 5: it randomly and chimed in and moved on with his day,
Speaker 5: and he.
Speaker 4: Was in a particularly mellow.
Speaker 3: Mood at the time.
Speaker 2: Jeez, there's a lot of controversial content on this platform.
Speaker 2: It does feel like he it's a attempt to correct, right,
Speaker 2: It's like, my guess is like he spent a lot
Speaker 2: of time, you know, letting this white supremacist on the platform,
Speaker 2: and maybe is trying to do something to not at
Speaker 2: the fact that, you know, there are other kinds of
Speaker 2: content beyond controversial content and when especially, it would.
Speaker 4: Be much better if JK.
Speaker 2: Rowling was talking about wizards all day on Twitter rather
Speaker 2: than you know, beefing with the left.
Speaker 4: Very good. So, listeners, you heard that Max mentioned a
Speaker 4: power ranking. Yes, it's true. He is now compiling. He
Speaker 4: spends hours and hours and hours a week compiling, pouring
Speaker 4: over his feud power rankings. We are not ready to
Speaker 4: release them to America yet, but they are coming soon.
Speaker 4: So you will have to stay tuned for that, Max, Dana, Kurt,
Speaker 4: thanks for joining.
Speaker 3: Me, Thank you, thank you, thanks for having me.
Speaker 1: Always a pleasure, great to be here.
Speaker 4: This episode was produced by Stacey Wong. Naomi Shaven and
Speaker 4: Rayhan Harmanci are senior editors. The idea for this very
Speaker 4: show also came from Rayhan. Blake Maples handles engineering, and
Speaker 4: we get special editing assistants from Jeff Grocott our supervising
Speaker 4: producers Magnus Hendrickson. The Elon theme is written and performed
Speaker 4: by Taka Yasuzawa and Alex Sugiura. Brendan Francis Newnham is
Speaker 4: our executive producer, and Sage Bauman is the head of
Speaker 4: Bloomberg Podcasts. I'm David Papadopolis. If you have a minute,
Speaker 4: rate and review our sh show, it'll help other listeners
Speaker 4: find us. See in San Francisco.