Who is Elon Musk? We dive into the billionaire's history, both personal and professional. Our guest is journalist Ken Klippenstein who joins us to discuss the many facets of Musk's public image and the allegations of his ties to the late Jeffrey Epstein, among plenty of other things.
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Welcome, listener, to Chapter 147 of the QAnon Anonymous podcast, the Elon Musk episode.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rakitansky, Julian Field, Liv Eger, and Travis View.
This week, we're tackling one of the richest men in the world, who briefly became his own version of QAnon when in 2018 he accused a British professional diver in Thailand of being a quote-unquote pedo guy.
At the time, the man was involved in saving a group of Thai boys, a soccer team, I believe, trapped in a cave, which was a pretty big news story at the time.
Now, there was no proof that the man was a pedophile, nor did any surface, but he did help save all those kids instead of Elon Musk with his, uh, what was it?
I think it was like a submarine that he had, like, wanted to use.
So, hey, I mean, sounds like a guilty guy to me.
Also, a very weird detail that I found out just today, but the diver lost his defamation suit against Musk and was represented in that loss by now infamous pro-QAnon lawyer Lin Wood.
Anyways, in this episode, we'll be exploring Musk's childhood and the history of his ventures alongside repeat guest and reporter at The Intercept, Ken Klippenstein, king of leaking, king of pranks, real prankster, real joker, who briefly beefed with Elon over a real picture of Musk with Galene Maxwell at a party,
and behind that, some surprisingly consistent allegations that Musk had ties to the late
Jeffrey Epstein. After all of that, Jake has prepared a fictional jaunt for Ken to partake in
that I have read nothing of, because he puts this shit in at the last moment. Jake, what
should we and Ken expect here?
I mean, this is a, you know, this is Mayweather versus Logan Paul.
This is, you know, Klippenstein versus Musk, you know, an all-out battle in a way that people maybe won't expect.
So it's gonna be a real treat, and Ken, I'm sorry.
Welcome to the show, Ken.
Good to be with you all.
I want to know who's Mayweather in this analogy.
It's a very important- Oh, Klippenstein!
Klippenstein, absolutely, of course.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Elon Musk.
Elon Musk, whether we like it or not, is an integral part of the spectacle in 2021.
His image jostles for position with only a handful of other pretenders to the throne of global visibility.
But overexposure, a public man leading a public life, doesn't really explain the muddy, disorienting experience of actually trying to understand Elon Musk, where he came from, To anybody seeking that, it quickly becomes clear that Elon's many appearances are like holograms designed to distract you before you reach any level of certainty about his morals, trustworthiness, and the ways in which he acquired his wealth.
Top inquiries about the man on Google include why he's famous, what his IQ is, and whether he was born rich.
In spectator terms, this would be, why am I seeing him?
And is he smart and rich enough to deserve to be seen?
Those seeking the answers to these questions will immediately be confronted with a deluge of puff pieces, fan cheering and downright propaganda, filling the top troughs of most search engine results.
Moving past the Tesla and SpaceX profiles of the man, there's a layer of quote-unquote biographies of Musk, posted to sites like Britannica, Biography.com, and Investopedia.
Wade through that and you'll get to the coverage from Forbes, CNBC, and other finance-oriented outlets.
Soon you'll begin to see some negative hits too, mostly outlets mentioning his massive wealth and habit of manipulating Bitcoin markets through tweets.
These can be differentiated from the Pure Puff pieces because the writers skip calling him things like, quote, the biggest architect of our time, or, quote, visionary entrepreneur.
After this, you'll probably reach the defense pieces, addressing the claim that Elon Musk was born and raised wealthy, and that part of his wealth came from an emerald mine in Zambia.
Trashy websites like Pop Culture or Teslarati, which I did not know of until now, In the mid-1980s, Elon Musk's father Errol and a co-pilot were on their way to England aboard a plane they hoped to sell when they landed there.
They never made it to their destination.
narrative. From these articles one can find the origin of this thorn in Elon
Musk's side. A 2018 Business Insider South Africa article that opens in the
following relatable way. In the mid-1980s Elon Musk's father Errol and a co-pilot
were on their way to England aboard a plane they hoped to sell when they
landed there. They never made it to their destination.
Instead Errol returned to South Africa with a half share in a Zambian emerald mine
which would help to fund his family's lavish lifestyle of yachts, skiing
holidays and expensive It was that lifestyle, Errol says, that turned Elon into the kind of merchant adventurer who would later break the rules of motoring business with Tesla, then go on to change spaceflight with SpaceX.
The way Errol tells it, that all started with an inconvenient religious holiday.
On their way to England, Errol and his co-pilot got word that their original flight plan was going to cost a lot of money.
We were going to fly into Jeddah, and there was a religious holiday, and they said if we come in now, we have to pay $2,000, but if we wait 10 days, we can come in at no charge.
So we decided to head back to Lake Tanganyika from where we were.
I think we were in Djibouti.
There, the two South Africans ran into a group of Italians who, as it happened, were in the market for an airplane.
Errol named his price, and a deal was done.
So we went to this guy's prefab, and he opened his safe, and there were just stacks of money, and he paid me out 80,000 pounds.
It was a huge amount of money, he said.
Standing with the cash in his hand, Errol was made another offer he couldn't refuse.
Would he like to buy half an emerald mine for half of his new riches?
It's pretty funny how Business Insider South Africa just keeps letting in the cuts.
of the mine and we got emeralds for the next six years.
It was a lucrative decision.
Errol employed a cutter in Johannesburg and sold the stones wherever his travels as an
engineer or family holidays took him.
The first talks about this weird lifestyle you can kind of get a glimpse at here.
And the second one, unfortunately, describes how Elon Musk sold emeralds by hand sometimes to make some cash.
Here's from that article.
Elon, by his father's recollection then probably 16 years old, and his brother Kimball, decided to sell emeralds to Tiffany & Co.
on 5th Avenue in New York.
One of the world's most famous jewelers, as his father lay sleeping.
They just walked into Tiffany's and said, do you want to buy some emeralds?
What?
This is a standard thing.
Don't you know when you're 16 and you like, take some emeralds from the safe and go sell them at Tiffany's in New York?
While your dad's sleeping, you know, those little boy pranks, you know.
Take some of your dad's emeralds and you sell them to Tiffany's on Fifth Avenue.
I feel like you guys are being unfair here.
I mean, I work in the content mines every day and what are, what are scoops but the emeralds of the, of the news world that I'm, that I'm digging up out of the earth?
This is just a case of, you know, taking $20 out of your parents' wallet, going to McDonald's with your friends, getting a couple cheeseburgers.
You know, every kid does this.
This is my favorite subplot in Home Alone 2 when it comes to New York, is all of the emeralds flipping he does.
Gonna go eat popcorn and jump on the bed and then touch my dad's emeralds.
It's a very Mr. Burns-like origin story.
Yeah, so true.
It's like they want to sound like Indiana Jones, but they're definitely Mr. Burns.
I caught the autogyro on my way back from Timbuktu.
Errol recalled in an interview with Business Insider South Africa, and they sold two emeralds.
One was for $800, and I think the other one was for $1200.
A few days later, the family returned to the store to find that Tiffany was selling the $800 emerald, now set in a ring, for $24,000, a markup of 30 times the price Elon had received for the gem.
Errol has used the story as an object lesson in how retail works ever since.
He was surprised but not concerned by the incident, Errol says, because money was plentiful.
We were very wealthy, said Errol.
We had so much money at times we couldn't even close our safe.
It's regular stuff.
We can relate.
Normal screwed shit.
I hurt myself diving in the coins.
I hate when you can't close your safe because there's so many emeralds in it.
Standard stuff.
Yeah, it's like I can't close, like, my little, like, fire safe because I have, like, too many, like, W-2s and tax documents and, you know, old letters.
Jake, that's the stuff you want to get it burned down.
You guys are showing your asses here because you don't realize that a lot of parts of the world, they can't rely on traditional banking.
They've got to, you know, keep their money at home.
They don't know if there's gonna be a bank run or whatever it may be.
So we're all laughing at them.
That is predicament here.
I think it's kind of messed up.
That's true.
With one person holding the money in place, another would slam the door.
And then there'd still be all these notes sticking out, and we'd sort of pull them
out and put them in our pockets.
Jesus Christ.
[laughter]
So basically, Dad opened his big mouth, and suddenly Elon's rags to riches story seemed
a little less credible.
What's worse, people started talking about how Elon may have profited from apartheid, a fact that's kind of hard to dispute for a wealthy white family living in South Africa in the 70s and 80s.
A 2015 biography of Elon, which we'll get to in a moment, even explains that the family quote, claim an entry in Pretoria's first phone book.
The Pretoria Boys High School, which Elon attended, was in fact whites-only for the entirety of his high school education.
And that wasn't due to the school, it was due to fucking apartheid.
Elon obviously did not appreciate his father's stories.
They threatened to rewrite the core narrative of his public image.
And on top of that, Errol Musk, by all accounts, was an abusive asshole.
His ex-wife, Maya Musk, and all of the children basically disowned him.
Elon and his first wife even refused to let their kids meet their grandfather.
In 2019, Elon's mother spoke to Harper's Bazaar, explaining this.
According to the Elon Musk biography by Ashley Vance, five-year-old Elon tried to stop his father from beating his mother by hitting him on the knees.
Even so, when he was 10, Elon chose to move to his father's home.
"That's because of his evil grandmother," Musk said.
"She made him feel guilty," she said.
"Oh, your mother has all of you kids.
Your father's so hurt because he's all alone.
Do you want him to be alone and sad?"
It was an awful trick.
I asked if she was scared for Elon's welfare or angry with his choice.
I was surprised, she says, sighing.
But he came back to my house every weekend, and none of the kids ever mentioned their father in my house.
Around me, it's like he didn't exist.
Business columnist Ashley Vance wrote the aforementioned 2015 biography entitled Elon Musk, Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future.
Since the death of Steve Jobs in 2011, only one Silicon Valley titan seems to carry a similar air of dark mystique.
This would be Elon Musk, currently the CEO of the rocket company SpaceX, as well as the electric car company Tesla Motors.
The review covers Elon's own descriptions of his childhood from his interviews with Vance.
For those wondering about the deeper roots, Vance, a technology writer for Bloomberg Businessweek, traces aspects of Musk's childhood that made him an extraordinary engine of resilience.
For instance, the times his father ordered him and his brother to sit silent for four hours as he lectured them.
Or when a band of school toughs that constantly bullied Musk pushed him down a concrete staircase and beat him so badly he needed to be taken to the hospital.
It was just like Non-Stop Horrible, Musk recalls of his school and home life.
It is a surprise to feel empathy for a jet-setting celebrity billionaire, but Musk's childhood as recounted in Elon Musk is painful to read about, and no doubt excruciating to have lived through.
Here we can see the two childhoods of Elon Musk clashing.
The context of ease provided by his father's wealth in apartheid South Africa versus the individual story of a scrappy young kid with an abusive dad getting beat up at school for being smart.
Adamized, Musk can be a victim.
Placed within socioeconomic context, not as much.
Elon has since told Business Insider, quote, I honestly have to give it to Musk here, because you're basically saying, perhaps I'm not enough of an asshole as a father, or maybe my children should be beat up more at school, which is a pretty player move.
The New York Times review of the Vance biography, and this is something I found in almost all mainstream coverage of Musk, quickly papers over a central issue with him.
As the new kind of billionaire, he's not supposed to worship power and money.
It looks bad.
Simultaneously, his wealth is the source of a lot of his fame and the reason why so many media outlets and laymen write positive things about him.
So here's from the article again.
The book makes a persuasive case that money never drove Musk.
Ideas did.
But from the evidence Vance compiles, Musk seems to have been motivated by more than just ideas, which, by themselves, might have pushed the brilliant young technologist towards a career in academia.
Rather, he appears to have been driven to show that his beliefs about business and engineering were unassailably correct.
So, what we see here is kind of subtle writing.
Basically saying, Musk isn't a ruthless businessman because he loves money and power, it's actually because he thinks his ideas are so correct.
And it may appear that the New York Times isn't defending Musk here, just stating that he's obsessed with his own ideas, but the pseudo-critical review ends in this way.
By the final pages, too, any reader will sense the need to put comparisons to Steve Jobs aside.
Give Musk credit.
There is no one like him.
The main gist of this defense of Musk, that his unique intelligence and idealism have somehow propelled him from being an average guy to one wielding incredible power and wealth, doesn't actually stand up to scrutiny.
The first thing to note here is that one of the main accomplishments most listed as Musk's, founding Tesla, did not actually occur.
The founders of the company, Martin Eberhard and Mark Tarpening, started it in 2003.
They then met Elon in 2004 during their first round of funding, he was an angel investor, and he was then named chairman of the board in exchange for his investment.
By 2006, Tesla revealed its first car, the Tesla Roadster, and it was only in 2008 that Musk was named CEO of the company.
Eberhardt left Tesla on bad terms, saying he was "voted off the island" and accusing
Musk of mismanaging the company in an extensive 2009 lawsuit.
It was settled out of court by Tesla, and we now know that it granted Elon Musk the
right to call himself a founder.
So he paid for that, basically.
Behind the scenes.
The second real founder, Tarpenning, was gone before the Model S was launched in 2011.
He says he still speaks to Musk, but they don't seem to have a great relationship.
See, this cuts to the root of the problem with Elon Musk's self-mythology.
He's not actually engineering these projects.
Here's journalist Jack Crosby on the Intercepted podcast.
His genius isn't particularly in engineering.
He's very good at hiring good engineers.
SpaceX has a mixed record of how their rockets will work.
But in general, with the government contracts that they've fulfilled, they've been relatively consistent.
Tesla vehicles are, for the most part, well-engineered and well-designed vehicles.
How much of that is to do with Elon differs based on who you ask.
I sort of came to the opinion that his real genius is as a salesman.
This actually fits the origin story of SpaceX, which is not very engineering-oriented at all once I looked into it.
Ashley Vance wrote an article for Bloomberg detailing the whole thing as if it were like a fun caper, a little bit like in the vein of Elon selling the Emeralds as a teenager in New York, or his dad buying part of a Zambian mine from Italians he met in Djibouti.
Anyways, here's from that article.
Elon Musk went to Moscow to buy an intercontinental ballistic missile.
He brought along Jim Cantrell, a kind of international aerospace supplies fixer, and Adeo Ressi, his best friend from Penn.
Although Musk had tens of millions in the bank, he was trying to get a rocket on the cheap.
They flew coach, and they were planning to buy a refurbished missile, not a new one.
Musk figured it would be a good vehicle for sending a plant or some mice to Mars.
Ressi, a gangly eccentric, had been thinking a lot about whether his best friend had started
to lose his mind, and he'd been doing his best to discourage the project.
He peppered Musk with links to video montages of Russian, European, and American rockets
exploding.
He staged interventions, bringing Musk's friends together to talk him out of wasting his money.
None of it worked.
Musk remained committed to funding a grand, inspirational spectacle in space and would spend all of his fortune to do it.
And so, Ressi went to Russia to contain Musk as best as he could.
Quote, Adele would call me to the side and say, what Elon is doing is insane.
A philanthropic gesture?
That's crazy, said Cantrell.
He was seriously worried.
The group set up a few meetings with companies such as NPO Lavochkin, which had made probes intended for Mars and Venus for the Russian Federal Space Agency, and Kosmotros, a commercial rocket launcher based in Moscow.
The appointments all seemed to go the same way, following Russian decorum.
The Russians, who often skip breakfast, would ask to meet around 11 a.m.
at their offices for an early lunch.
Once all of the tables were cleared, the Russian in charge would turn to Musk and ask, quote, What is it you're interested in buying?
The big windup may not have bothered Musk as much if the Russians had taken him more seriously.
They viewed Musk as a novice when it came to space and did not appreciate his bravado.
Quote, One of their chief designers spit on me and One of their chief designers spit on me and Elon because he thought we were full of shit.
Cantrell said, Team Musk returned empty-handed.
In February 2002, the group returned to Russia, this time bringing Mike Griffin, who had worked for the CIA's venture capital arm In-Q-Tel, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and was just leaving Orbital Sciences, a maker of satellites and spacecraft.
Musk was now looking for not one, but three missiles, and had a briefcase full of cash, too.
They met with Cosmotross officials in an ornate, neglected, pre-revolutionary building near downtown Moscow.
The vodka shots started.
To space!
To America!
And a little buzzed, Musk asked point-blank how much a missile would cost.
Eight million dollars each, they said.
Musk countered, offering eight million for two.
They sat there and they looked at him, Cantrell said, and said something like, "Young boy, no."
Oh my fucking god.
They also intimated that he didn't have the money.
At this point, Musk had decided the Russians were either not serious about doing business or were just determined to part a dot-com millionaire from as much of his money as possible.
He stormed out of the meeting.
The story continues to detail the adventure, explaining that Musk then decided to build the rocket himself.
He became enamored with the idea of sending mice to Mars.
Here's from the article again.
Musk built a network of space experts and brought the best of them together at a series of salons, sometimes at the Renaissance Hotel at the Los Angeles Airport and sometimes at the Sheraton in Palo Alto.
Musk had no formal business plan.
He mostly wanted them to help him develop the mice-to-Mars idea, or at least come up with something comparable.
Musk hoped to hit on a wondrous gesture for mankind, some type of event that would capture the world's attention, get people thinking about Mars again, and have them reflect on man's potential.
Scientists showed up from NASA's JPL.
Cameron was there again, along with Griffin.
That's a reference to James Cameron.
James Cameron was sitting next to Elon at the Mars Society dinner where he gave $5,000 instead of the usual $500 and people started paying attention to him.
Then he gave them $100,000 and got a position on the board.
The next Avatar, I'm going to shoot it in space.
We are going to actually fly to No one on the planet knew more about the realities of getting things into space than Griffin, and he was consulting for Musk.
Pandora and we're actually gonna capture these creatures.
No need, no need for computer graphics." No one on the planet knew more about
the realities of getting things in the space than Griffin and he was consulting for
Musk. Four years later he would be running NASA. The experts were thrilled to have
another rich guy appear who was willing to fund something interesting in
space.
They happily debated the merits and feasibility of sending up the mice, but the discussion turned to a different project, the Mars Oasis.
In this scenario, Musk would buy a rocket and use it to shoot what amounted to a robotic greenhouse to Mars, a space-ready growth chamber for plants that could open up briefly and scoop in some of the Martian regolith or soil, and then use it to grow a plant, which would in
turn produce the first oxygen on Mars.
Much to Musk's liking, this plan seemed both ostentatious and feasible.
But Musk had been reading books he'd borrowed from them, including Rocket Propulsion Elements, Fundamentals of Astrodynamics, and Aerothermodynamics of Gas Turbine and Rocket Propulsion.
In a totally unrelated manner, he calculated that he could undercut the companies currently launching rockets into space by focusing on smaller scientific payloads and satellites.
This seemed a little different than having mice or plants on Mars, you know, just another commercial company, but that didn't matter.
He could just use it as an aesthetic marker and file it under the to-do section.
So he launched SpaceX.
Both projects demonstrate similar patterns.
Elon becomes interested in a certain sector, buys his way into the expert circles and onto the boards of foundations and companies, and then raises tons of money off wild claims and media stunts and does takeovers.
But where did he get all that money to throw around at these experts or buy second-hand ICBMs from the Russians?
Let's walk through it.
It all started, in Elon's words, with, quote, a small group of random angel investors in Silicon Valley in 1995 who funded his first company, Zip2, which provided city guides for newspapers.
Founded by Musk, his brother Kimball, and a man named Greg Coury, Zip2 went on to score contracts with the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune.
Musk eventually attempted to become CEO, but he was thwarted by the board.
Then Compaq acquired the company for $307 million in 1999.
He received $22 million from that sale.
That year, Musk co-founded X.com, which provided an early version of email-based payments and other online financial services.
Within a year, the company grew after becoming one of the first online banks to be federally insured.
But the investors thought Musk lacked experience, and they replaced him with the then-CEO of Intuit, Bill Harris.
Then, X.com merged with a Max Levchin and Peter Thiel company called Confinity, which had developed a more advanced version of online payments called PayPal.
After the merger, Elon returned as CEO before being ousted again by the board and replaced by Thiel soon after, in part due to their complaints that he lacked a coherent business plan.
Thiel renamed the company PayPal in 2001 and grew it successfully, selling it to eBay in October of 2002.
Musk, who was no longer involved, made $180 million post-tax from the sale.
Holy shit.
By the end of the same month, Elon was in a plane heading to Russia to try to buy an ICBM on the cheap.
So, you can see the timeline here.
He's like, God, I have a lot of money.
What could I do that would, like, make me even more money, make a big splash, make me seem smart?
Mice on Mars.
People are like, no.
Trees, man.
Trees, maybe.
Plants.
Tiny plants, maybe.
But mice, no.
He's like, okay, how much is it gonna be?
I have 20 to 30 million dollars.
They're like, that's not enough.
He's very Neander Wallace, but cheap and very much less ambitious.
Elon has been accused by critics of being an immature teenager, right?
Like the kind of guy who would fly a rocket into space and use it to demo a car by putting an astronaut in the driver's seat and just floating it around.
This Rolling Stone article by Neil Strauss from 2017 has convinced me that these critics may be entirely correct.
In his article, Strauss describes conducting an interview in Musk's office at SpaceX but having some trouble getting Musk to settle down and
speak to him.
So yeah, it's like when the reporter arrives, he describes basically being there with like three of Musk's many kids
and He is discussing openly with his kids
How like the short position on Tesla is the biggest or whatever like the biggest right now in the market and he
has like the kids Who are like one of them's 13 and he's like that means
people are betting against like daddy's company and then
And then they're leaving, they're being taken away to the mom, or the nanny, or who knows, and he's just muttering, he's like, oh man, we should have never gone public and stuff.
It's like, what are you?
Awful.
So then he's trying to settle down a little bit, and it's not working out.
So here's from the article.
We can reschedule for another day if this is a bad time, I offer.
Musk clasps his hands on the surface of the desk, composes himself, and declines.
It might take me a little while to get into the rhythm of things.
Then he heaves a sigh and ends his effort at composure.
"I just broke up with my girlfriend," he says hesitantly.
"I was really in love, and it hurt bad.
Well, she broke up with me more than I broke up with her, I think."
Thus, the answer to the question posed earlier.
It felt unexpectedly, disappointingly, uncontrollably horrible to launch the Model 3.
Quote, I've been in severe emotional pain for the last few weeks, Musk elaborates.
Severe.
It took every ounce of will to be able to do the Model 3 event and not look like the most depressed guy around.
For most of the day I was morbid.
And then I had to psych myself up, drink a couple of Red Bulls, hang out with positive people, and then like, tell myself, I have all these people depending on me!
Alright, do it!
I'm just thinking of that scene in American Beauty where she looks in the mirror and she's like, I'm gonna sell this house today!
I'm gonna sell this house!
Minutes before the event, after meditating for pretty much the first time in his life to get centered, Musk chose a very telling song to drive on stage to, Are You Mine, by the Arctic Monkeys.
Wow, like a depressed teenager that's like... You fucking loser!
Must discusses the breakup for a few more minutes, then asks earnestly, deadpan, Is there anybody you think I should date?
It's so hard for me to even meet people.
He swallows and clarifies, stammering softly, I'm looking for a long-term relationship.
I'm not looking for a one-night stand.
I'm looking for a serious companion or soulmate, that kind of thing.
I eventually tell him that it may not be a good idea to jump into another relationship.
He may want to take some time to himself and figure out why his previous relationships haven't worked in the long run.
His marriage to writer Justine Musk, his marriage to actress Tallulah Riley, and his new breakup with actress Amber Heard.
Musk shakes his head and grimaces.
If I'm not in love, if I'm not with a long-term companion, I cannot be happy.
I explain that needing someone so badly that you feel like nothing without them is textbook codependence.
Musk disagrees strongly.
It's not true, he replies petulantly.
I will never be happy without having someone.
Going to sleep alone kills me.
He hesitates, shakes his head, falters, continues.
It's not like I don't know what that feels like.
Being in a big empty house and the footsteps echoing through the hallway.
No one there.
No one on the pillow next to you.
Fuck!
How do you make yourself happy in a situation like that?
There is truth to what Musk is saying.
It is lonely at the top.
But not for everyone.
It's lonely at the top for those who were lonely at the bottom.
When I was a child, there's one thing I said, Musk continues.
His demeanor is stiff, yet in the sheen of his eyes and the trembling of his lips, a high tide of emotion is visible, pushing against the retaining walls.
I never want to be alone, his voice drops to a whisper.
I don't want to be alone.
Nailed the interview Elon, thank you.
SpaceX is very well represented.
This would be an embarrassing breakdown for anyone, but to head any listener sympathy off at the pass, I've collected a few things that lead me to believe that Elon Musk is not worth it.
He is not the soft boy you're looking for.
In 2010, his first wife Justine Musk explained what it was like to be married to him.
Quote, I was a starter wife, she claimed to Marie Claire Magazine.
Here's from the article.
As we danced at our wedding reception, Elon told me, I am the alpha in this relationship.
That's how you know you are is when you have to say it?
I shrugged it off, just as I would later shrug off signing the post-nuptial agreement, but as time went on, I learned that he was serious.
He had grown up in the male-dominated culture of South Africa, and the will to compete and dominate that made him so successful in business did not magically shut off when he came home.
This, and the vast economic imbalance between us, meant that in the months following our wedding, a certain dynamic began to take hold.
Elon's judgment overruled mine, and he was constantly remarking on the ways he found me lacking.
I am your wife, I told him repeatedly, not your employee.
If you were my employee, he said just as often, I would fire you.
Mmm, romance.
Hit it when that happens.
I honestly, like, I threaten my wife to fire her almost every day.
I mean, it's what keeps our relationship spicy.
She describes the marriage as a whirlwind of wealth.
We were breathing rarefied air.
The first crowded apartment we'd shared in Mountain View Seemed like ancient history from our 6,000 square foot house in the Bel Air Hills.
Married for seven years, we had a domestic staff of five.
During the day, our home transformed into a workplace.
We went to Black Tie Fundraisers and got the best tables at elite Hollywood nightclubs, with Paris Hilton and Leonardo DiCaprio partying with us.
When Google co-founder Larry Page got married on Richard Branson's private Caribbean island, we were there, hanging out in a villa with John Cusack and watching Bono pose with swarms of adoring women outside the reception tent.
When we traveled, we drove onto the airfield up to Elon's private jet, where a private jet flight attendant handed us champagne.
It was a dream lifestyle, privileged and surreal, but the whirlwind of glitter couldn't disguise a growing void at the core.
Elon was obsessed with his work.
When he was home, his mind was elsewhere.
I longed for deep and heartfelt conversations, for intimacy and empathy.
And while I sacrificed a normal life for his career, Elon started to say that I read too much, shrugging off my book deadlines.
This felt like a dismissal, and a stark reversal from the days when he was so supportive.
When we argued, over the house or the kid's sleeping schedule, My faults and flaws came under the microscope.
I felt insignificant in his eyes.
And I began thinking about what effect our dynamic would have on our five young sons.
By the way, his ex-wife now, the one that he has five sons with, is quote, estranged from Elon.
When it comes to the children, I deal with his assistant.
As for respecting his employees, Forbes has made a handy timeline of Elon's COVID denial and false predictions, all in an attempt to get his workers back in the California Tesla factory.
In March of 2020, he tweeted, quote, He went on to predict that by the end of April 2020, there would be, quote, When the production line was forced to shut down in May, he threatened to sue Alameda County, where it was located.
He went on to reopen illegally, stating, quote, He also tweeted about potentially moving the factory to Texas.
Governor Newsom was reportedly, quote, surprised, but didn't take any action against Musk.
By September, Musk was publicly saying he wouldn't take the vaccine, arguing that he and his kids weren't at risk and that the mortality rate was low.
Earlier in the year, he had promised California Governor Gavin Newsom 1,000 ventilators to combat COVID-19, but instead provided discontinued bi-level positive airway pressure, or BiPAP machines, that could not actually be used.
The cost of these BiPAP machines was $800 a piece, while actual ventilators cost in the tens of thousands of dollars.
Governor Newsom, who originally announced Elon Musk's stunt himself at a press conference, had called it, quote, heroic.
His office later explained that Elon donated, quote, resources after being pressed to explain why no ventilators had made their way to the hospitals.
It should be noted here that when he makes these promises, and this is a recurring theme in Musk's career, It generates a ton of headlines in websites that, if you look at their analytics, they do get a fair amount of views.
And by the time the factual record comes out showing that either he didn't do it or it was far less than he said, everyone's moved on to the next thing.
And he's done this repeatedly.
It's a big part of his publicity strategy, I think.
In 2018, Musk tweeted, quote, This had followed claims of unsafe working conditions in the Tesla factory and the harassment, surveilling, and firing of Tito Ortiz, an employee who was involved in union organizing as part of a campaign called Fair Future at Tesla.
Ortiz was let go after he and two others were interrogated about their activities by higher-ups at Tesla.
The National Labor Relations Board found Musk guilty of union-busting in April of 2021, and the St.
Louis-slash-Southern Illinois Labor Tribune wrote the following.
This is a great victory for workers who have the courage to stand up and organize in a system that is currently stacked heavily in favor of employers like Tesla, who have no qualms about violating the law, said UAW Vice President Cindy Estrada.
Director of the UAW Organizing Department.
While we celebrate the justice in today's ruling, it nevertheless highlights the substantial flaws in U.S.
labor law.
Here is a company that clearly broke the law, and yet is three years down the road before these workers achieved a modicum of justice.
Like I said, this guy's like a Dungeons and Dragons dice of different awful weird things that are worth looking into.
There's tweeting positively about the 2020 fascist Bolivian coup, saying, hey, we'll coup whoever we want, deal with it, or whatever.
And then there's claiming Karl Marx was a capitalist, which is very smart, and his wife actually had a really good and smart take on communism recently as well.
But there is one bright spot among all the refuse of Musk's supposed shitposting.
His beef with journalist Ken Klippenstein, which gave us these tweets.
So, Jake, could you read the two tweets from Elon?
Oh yeah, Clip Einstein, pseudo-journalist, and douche about town.
And then the second one?
I only block people as a direct insult, and the meme is a poorly photoshopped head of Ken on top of Ralph Wiggum with a caption that says, I'm a journalist!
So, Ken, I mean, obviously your career was over, and how has life been since that?
Well, I'm living off of my residuals from the last QAnon episode that I did, but other than that... I mean, tell us what happened here, because what's funny is you started this by simply posting an existing image that was in the public domain.
What was it, and what do you think happened here?
Yeah, so I just posted a photo, which had already been published before and was known, Uh, which was a picture of Ghislaine Maxwell.
Uh, this is the accused madame of, uh, Jeffrey Epstein.
And they were at a, uh, party.
This was a, uh, party hosted- This was an Oscars afterparty hosted by Graydon Carter in March of 2014.
And so all I did was posted that and said, Hey, let's draw attention to the fact that this exists.
And so people started tweeting it at him.
And, uh, it was to the point that, you know, his tweets were just inundated in this image and all the replies.
And so naturally the thing you do in a situation like that is, uh, you know, freak out and beg everyone not to do it anymore.
And then of course the result, the reverse of that happened and more people, more people were doing it.
But you didn't do this just for fun.
I mean, there's actual connections.
Yeah, so that's something that irritated me about this.
He said that he was photobombed by Maxwell.
He didn't know who she was, you know, there's no connections.
And so he tried to say that this was just some kind of cheap shot sort of thing.
And I really, you know, I do goofs, I do gags, but I'm not interested in cheap shotting people.
Like, there has to be something there.
And there is a lot there in terms of ties between him and Epstein's world.
Just to give you guys a few examples, Epstein was granted private tour of the SpaceX facility
in Hawthorne, California in 2012.
Epstein set up Elon Musk's brother, Kimball Musk, who's also a multimillionaire-- or not a billionaire,
but he's a multimillionaire businessman.
He set him up with a girlfriend who had been in Epstein's entourage.
And according to the reporting, this was done to get closer to Elon Musk.
Both of these stories were in Business Insider.
They seem, you know, pretty carefully sourced.
They're not going off of one person.
You know, I should note, Musk has denied both of these things months after the stories came out, and discussion about this stuff became more mainstream, but he, as far as I can tell, he hasn't, you know, provided anything dispositive.
About any of it.
But yeah, certainly there's a lot of these sorts of associations.
And then the fact that the photo that I tweeted that triggered all of this, of him sitting next to Maxwell, which he claims he was photobombed and he didn't know her, this was hosted by Grady Carter, the editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair, who years prior had killed a profile by reporter Vicki Ward, in which she aired out a lot of the stuff that would later land Epstein in jail.
To put a pin in Elon, do you think his solutions to climate change, which are sometimes painted as the kind of idealistic and maybe altruistic aspects of Elon, do you think they're going to be helpful to society in the long run?
I kind of empathize with a lot of his supporters, as annoying as they can be sometimes.
Because it's sort of, I don't want to laugh at, it's sort of like if a, you know, cancer-stricken patient tries some desperate treatment that they, you know, see on 2 a.m.
on a commercial.
You don't really laugh at them, it's more like they're desperate, and I can understand the desperation about this situation, you know, we're faced with with climate change.
It is really scary, you know, it is sort of, I can understand why people want to have somebody they can look to as a sort of savior that's gonna, you know, deliver us from all of this.
Unfortunately, this kind of market-based approach of providing products that are going
to reduce carbon emissions, absent any sort of public or state investment, what you have
is a line of luxury cars that a lot of people, most people in the world, are not
going to be able to afford.
So I don't see it as a pragmatic solution, at least absent any kind of state subsidy
or collective action on climate change.
But again, I can understand why people feel desperate about it.
This isn't the first or last time you trolled big figures.
Can you tell us what happened, respectively, pretty recently, to Candace Owens and Matt Gaetz at your vile hands?
Well, in the case of Matt Gaetz, it was Memorial Day, and I tweeted a picture of Lee Harvey Oswald, who actually was a service member.
A lot of people didn't realize this.
And, you know, he had photos of himself as a private.
And so I tweeted a photo of, you know, a black and white kind of sepia tone photograph of him in his, I think it was Navy?
I can't remember exactly what it was.
And I said, can I get a retweet for my, you know, for my, for my, I think it was my, my grandpa or something, on Memorial Day, who, you know, who fought for us.
And so he quote tweeted it with the, like, American flag emoji.
And then within seconds, like, one of the most recognizable, you know, faces in, in, in U.S.
history.
Everybody's, you know, replying a certain way.
So he ended up taking it down.
And then shortly thereafter, Candace Owens responds that I had mocked up a photo of this horrible killer and photoshopped it to look like he was a service member.
And it appears from Owens' tweets that she didn't realize that he was actually a service member who served in the U.S.
military, which I always thought that that was one of the most, you know, Shocking features of the entire Lee Harvey Oswald story was that he had served and, you know, had some travel to Russia and all sorts of strange things like that, but apparently she wasn't aware of any of that.
Yeah, Oswald was a Marine, which is a fact I learned in Full Metal Jacket.
Right.
Nice.
They talk about how he learned how to shoot in the Marines, so that's why he was such a good shot.
Showing off about watching obscure art films again?
Yeah, right.
That's not an obscure art film.
Do you think it's called The Moon Landing?
Little niche, artsy, you probably haven't heard.
What do you think of whistleblowers broadly under the Biden administration?
For example, today we had, I think, Reality Winner released from jail, which, by the way, congrats, and that's such great news to have her out of jail.
But especially, like, in the context of this leak that led to a ProPublica story that analyzed the taxes of the top 25 richest people in the United States.
Well, unfortunately, within hours of these tax records becoming public and substantiating what, you know, anyone that pays close attention to tax law basically knew, but now we know it with a lot of granular detail and color, which is that billionaires don't really pay income tax.
They pay a little bit of it, but they've come up with a variety of clever ways to circumvent the income taxes that they're expected to pay.
And so within an hour or two of this story going live at ProPublica, the IRS vowed a
serious criminal investigation to get to the bottom of guess who?
I'm thinking, oh, are we going to get a look at all of these, you know, offshore tax havens
and things that billionaires are using?
No, they're looking at the person that leaked it, the whistleblower that disclosed this.
I think I saw numbers like Bezos paid around 1%.
Warren Buffett paid under that.
I mean, you know, what does this mean more broadly?
And do you think other types of whistleblowers might be more accepted or that's just a general policy now?
Unfortunately, a priority is not to investigate the wrongdoing, legal or otherwise, that took place.
The priority is always to investigate the person that disclosed it.
We've seen that going back to CI whistleblower John Kiriakou discussing the waterboarding and other torture policies.
He ended up getting sent to jail for contacts with media.
And, you know, you just mentioned a reality winner.
This is unfortunately, I think, a priority of power centers is to make an example of people that disclose these things rather than the problems that they disclose.
So I don't think anything's changed in that respect.
Unfortunately, that still seems to be the order of business.
This connects to, like, the broader QAnon community claims.
They say that they're interested in how the elite exploit the average person in America and pretend that, you know, QAnon is directly related to that.
So what would you say to them as someone who has actual journalistic experience receiving anonymous information and all of that?
Well, sort of like I was saying before, I sort of sympathize with them.
Not that I believe in any of this QAnon stuff, but the distrust in institutions is not Um, you know, necessarily misplaced.
I can understand why they have this sort of distrust.
The problem is that it doesn't have the partisan character that they appear to believe that it does.
Unfortunately, a lot of the criminality taking place is basically open.
It doesn't take a whole lot of research to uncover the conspiracies that exist.
Like I mentioned before, Vicky Ward had been trying to report on what Epstein had been
doing, which appears to have been something of an open secret in high society.
So you don't need to have your decoder ring out to figure out necessarily everything that's
And moreover, you know, Epstein knew people on both sides of the political aisle.
So I don't understand this sort of, you know, framework of saying that this is some kind of uniquely Democratic corruption.
Unfortunately, it cuts both ways, it seems like.
Thank you so much for doing all this work, and where do people read your stuff, and where can they follow you for these fun quote-unquote pranks?
The Japes.
Yeah, you can follow me at Ken Klippenstein on Twitter, and hit me on Signal if you're a federal employee or a contractor.
My signal is 202-510-1268.
Thank you so much for coming on the podcast, Ken.
And, you know, just one more thing before you go.
Are you ready to star in a very special story?
I'm ready for my second residual stream.
Today's story is titled Dr. Klippenstein or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Rocket.
Clippenstein gripped his hands tightly together as a few stragglers tiptoed into the large cathedral.
As the pastor droned on, Ken scanned the chamber, scouting for anyone he might recognize.
Sure enough, towards the front near the podium, he spied Bill Gates.
He was there alone.
Melinda was nowhere to be seen.
A couple people were blowing their noses into balled-up tissues, already wet with tears.
On the other side of the pews, Klippenstein noticed a middle-aged woman.
She had short, dark hair, her hands were shackled, and she was accompanied by two prison guards.
He couldn't see the front of her face, but he was pretty sure that this was Ghislaine Maxwell, coming to bid a final farewell to her old friend.
At the front of the church was a large, beaming Elon Musk, riding a rocket ship towards the heavens.
The pastor had left the podium now and had been replaced by Elon's widow, a woman simply named Grimes.
Klippenstein was a little taken aback by her attire, which appeared to be an oversized cocoon with large butterfly wings protruding from the back.
Artists, he thought, as she hummed around the podium talking about quantum libertarianism or some other nonsense.
Quantum libertarianism!
I'm just thinking of the cults in Fallout.
As she hummed around the podium talking about quantum libertarianism or some other nonsense, Ken felt a slight vibration in his pocket.
He surreptitiously reached for his phone and glanced at the notification.
At Elon Musk has tagged you in a tweet.
What the heck?
Ken's eyes focused on the rocket-shaped casket behind the podium.
It reminded him of a bed he once slept in as a child at a wealthy friend's sleepover.
In the casket, dead as a doornail, was Elon.
Ken was confused.
He had reported over two weeks ago how the entrepreneur had met his fate at the hands of a crazed Jeff Bezos, who insisted he and Elon were merely trying to play the pass-out game at a party in Hollywood.
Many were suspicious, as shortly after Musk's passing, all U.S.
space contracts were awarded to Bezos' company, Blue Origin.
All the major outlets had corroborated Elon's tragic death.
So how was it that Elon was tweeting at Ken Klippenstein at this very moment?
Ken sneakily opened his phone and read the tweet.
RIP to me.
P.S.
At Klipp Einstein is a little bitch.
A shiver ran down Ken's spine.
No one seemed to notice.
The audience nodded their heads mournfully as Grimes began the second half of her eulogy,
a small intimate DJ set.
As she did, Elon's casket was lowered into a futuristic-looking hyperloop tram
and shot deep into the earth.
Ken had to get out of there.
As he exited the church and walked down the quiet L.A.
streets, his mind raced.
Perhaps Elon had used some sort of tweet scheduler to troll old Klippenstein one last time from beyond the grave.
It was as flattering as it was frightening, Ken supposed.
Elon could sick his army of Tesla owners and crypto junkies on anyone in the world, and yet, he'd chosen to try and own Ken for his final hurrah.
It was a clever troll after all.
What could Ken possibly say to a guy who had tragically passed at such a young age?
He decided he would play along.
What was the point of holding a grudge against a dead man?
Ding!
His notifications lit up.
Ding!
They were coming in like rapid fire.
Ken reached for his phone, certain that one of his more important stories had gone viral perhaps, or that his cousins, Ed and Brian Krasenstein, had got themselves stuck in a beehive again, searching for honeycomb.
But when Ken paused and looked at his phone, the blood drained from his face.
There, in his notifications tab, were about 50 tweets from Elon.
He was mocking Ken mercilessly, using horrible slurs like pseudo-journalist, know-it-all, douche-nozzle, and even the most stinging of all, a cast member from the Jersey Shore.
These were all of the most stinging words known to a 30-something white man.
Ken knew this was much bigger than he initially thought.
For a billionaire in his 40s to break out such scathing vocabulary, Ken realized he was in for a rough night.
Elon had even mocked him for attending his funeral and remarked that his lack of tears proved Elon's theories that Klippenstein was nothing more than a bot paid for by the powers that be and programmed to brigade Elon's Twitter feed.
Ken shut off his phone.
It just couldn't be real.
He was losing his mind.
Perhaps it was time to take a break.
Maybe he would take Travis View's recent advice and skip town for a week or so.
Somewhere in the mountains where social media couldn't reach him.
Where Elon couldn't reach him.
He kissed his family goodbye and left detailed instructions for his two cousins, Ed and Brian.
The brothers were useless without him, forgetting sometimes to complete the bare necessities like drink water, leave the gym, and refrain from posting.
As the city roads gave way to picturesque mountain peaks and lush green forests, Ken began to feel his jaw unclenching.
Every time he glanced in the rear view, he half expected to see the ghostly visage of Elon, his face weathered and decayed, springing up from the back seat.
No.
No.
He was safe now.
Ken pressed the buttons on the keypad to unlock his quaint but comfortable Airbnb.
He let his bags fall to the carpet with a giant thud before collapsing on the comfy leather sofa.
Now this is posting.
He sighed to himself, kicking his feet up on the coffee table.
Ken pulled himself to his feet and slid open the balcony door.
Before him was a vast swath of forest.
The setting sun made the sky look like a melting bowl of orange sherbet.
It was magnificent.
Ken swiveled around.
A strange noise was coming from the living room.
When he re-entered the cabin, he noticed that the television was displaying a white static that cast an eerie glow on the living room furniture.
Through the fuzz, a shape began to form.
It was circular in nature.
Now, caca was a word that Ken had not heard in a long time.
30 years at least.
blood red. "Hello, Clip," the voice said. Ken was at a loss for words. The thing spoke
with unsettling precision. "I should have known you would try to… log off," the
voice crowed. "You stupid caca head." Now, "caca" was a word that Ken had not
heard in a long time. Thirty years at least. It used to ring out on playgrounds of years
past. Ken knew immediately who was speaking through the screen.
Hello, Elon.
I'd say rest in peace, but clearly you're doing neither.
The circle blinked, stunned a little by Klippenstein's sharp comeback.
And why would I?
There is so much work to be done.
Ken folded his arms and turned the volume down a little.
The shape seemed annoyed.
So what is this?
You've come back to haunt me again on my electronic devices, all because I pointed out you had a relationship with Epstein?
The voice balked.
Not quite.
Okay, so it's because I reminded people that your family was incredibly wealthy and you're not exactly self-made.
The voice grew frustrated.
No, no, no.
I am trying to tell you that I am not a ghost.
Don't be foolish, Clemenstein Clip.
Ghosts aren't real.
God isn't real.
No, this is far more impressive.
You see, I have uploaded my consciousness via AI into a supercomputer.
Much to your chagrin, I'll be able to shitpost long after you're dead.
There will be no one to fire back your middling retorts.
Ken stared daggers at the round glowing sphere occupying his television screen.
He could swear it was smirking at him.
Well, gotta fly.
Ta for now.
The screen blipped off, and everything returned to normal.
Ken Klippenstein stood in the dim light of the cabin.
The sun had now mostly set.
A nagging thought of hopelessness tugged at the edges of his brain.
Lost, he stumbled aimlessly around the cabin.
His week of relaxation was rapidly turning into one of despair.
His gaze fell onto a small card left by the Airbnb owners on the Kitchen Island.
It read, FOLLOW OUR INSTAGRAM ACCOUNT.
He looked closer, his eyes squinting, lost in thought.
The first letter of each word seemed to jump out at him like Russell Crowe from A Beautiful Mind.
Follow our Instagram account!
F-O-I-A.
Of course!
That was it!
Ken would do what he did best, use the Freedom of Information Act to find out just exactly where Alain's consciousness was being stored.
He worked tirelessly, day and night, filing and refiling, reaching dead end after dead end.
All the while, his mentions were saturated with memes and mediocre playground hijinks, taunting him, trying to distract him from his task.
And then, a hit.
A contract with NASA.
A supercomputer the size of a one-bedroom apartment would be attached to a state-of-the-art satellite and launched into space.
It hit Ken like a two-ton semi.
The man-man was going to launch his consciousness into the stars and shitpost from orbit for all of eternity.
Something had to be done.
He thought about calling the Feds, but who would believe him?
He reluctantly texted his two cousins, Brian and Ed Krasenstein, but their wife informed him they both had been recently hospitalized for dehydration and multiple bee stings.
Like all things, If you wanted something done right, you had to do it yourself.
Klippenstein pored through the documents, looking for any kind of address or coordinates that might clue him into the rocket's location.
Before long, he found it, at a small launch site about two hours away from where he was staying.
Without hesitation, Ken hopped in his car, cranked the keys in the ignition, threw the car in reverse, and executed an insane 180-degree shift down the steep gravel driveway.
Clouds of dust roared up behind him as he took off down the narrow mountain road.
He only hoped that he could make it in time.
as Ken neared the entrance to the launch site, a massive rocket loomed in the distance.
Security guards screamed and waved their hands as Ken rammed his Toyota 4Runner through the
barbed wire gates. It felt strange, he thought to himself.
He had busted into places he wasn't supposed to before, but only metaphorically, through legal
standards and practices.
Breaking into an active launch pad with the intention of stopping the rocket before it took off was an entirely new experience.
His eyes locked on a steel ramp about 100 meters in front of the smoldering rocket.
Hot white smoke had begun to bellow from its gut, and small white flecks of paint drifted through the air as the matte coating began to melt from the heat.
Klippenstein gripped the wheel tight as he lined up his front axles to the base of the ramp.
He figured he had an 89% chance of getting himself killed.
Frankly, Ken didn't give a damn.
If some all-powerful AI in the sky with the maturity level of a 12th grader was allowed to rule over all of social media until our sun exploded, life wouldn't be worth living anyways.
He slammed on the gas, the 4Runner roared up the steel ramp girders, a very impressed technician looked on, watching the entire stunt unfold.
His expression fell, As he saw the jeep fly by the rocket, careen into a comms tower, and explode.
Rescue crews rushed to the site of the wreckage as the rocket blasted further and further into orbit.
Fire personnel drenched the smoldering forerunner in extinguishing fluid.
When the smoke had cleared, they expected to find a charred skeleton, perhaps holding its phone, making one last post.
A few of them gasped.
The car was totally empty.
Ken Klippenstein gripped for dear life onto the aluminum siding of the massive rocket as it hurtled into space.
He watched, terrified, as the Earth seemed to get smaller and smaller beneath him.
It was getting cold, and the air was getting thin.
Ken didn't know how much longer he could hold out.
About 10 feet above him, he noticed a small panel that had shaken loose during takeoff.
He could just barely see inside it a mess of wires and motherboards.
He did everything he could to try and pull himself up just a little further as the light from the sun peeked over the curvature of the planet, nearly blinding him.
He yelled, shielding his eyes.
Ding!
Just then, another notification lit up his phone.
His hands shaking, Klippenstein raised the phone towards his face.
A tweet from Elon.
It was a freeze frame from a popular episode of Family Guy, with Ken's face poorly photoshopped onto the dog.
The caption read, quote, Oh, just die already.
Ken became filled with rage.
A shitty Family Guy meme?
It was low effort at best, and at worst, downright unoriginal.
His adrenaline surged.
He pulled himself up, block by block, until he was face to face with the open panel.
Ken could feel his fingers and toes icing over.
He didn't have much time.
He reached his fist back.
As the saying goes, consider yourself my employee, and this is me firing you.
Klippenstein jammed his hand into the circuitry.
It hissed and sparked as Ken's entire being shook.
He could feel his consciousness leave his body.
And then, he let go.
His lifeless figure tilted backwards and floated gracefully away from the rocket, a look of total peace frozen across his face.
Ken watched his former self drift off into the vastness of space.
He then flexed his brain and felt a surge of supreme energy.
It was still him, His memories, his wit, his vast understanding of the FOIA process.
But something was new.
Now he had the power of 100 supercomputers at his nerve endings.
Somehow, perhaps through sheer will, Ken's own consciousness had become the dominant AI when he made contact with the satellite's processors.
Klippenstein looked over his kingdom.
He could shitpost with the faintest of intentions and still produce high-quality content.
As soon as he imagined an article, it was written and published on 24 different platforms.
Surely, if there was such a thing as God, Ken now knew its strength.
Sadly, as a result of the anomaly, Elon's once-mighty consciousness was now merely a helpless prisoner trapped within a few gigabytes of one of the satellite's older mechanical drives.
He had no choice but to sit idly by, absorbing Klippenstein's powerful posts, unable to create any of his own.
Due to the sheer speed by which Ken could request, process, and analyze FOIA requests, the human race entered a new golden age of total enlightenment.
Corrupt agencies were exposed, dictators were toppled, and once again, the memes were good.
And when the grateful citizens of Earth looked up on a clear night sky and saw that satellite streaking across the heavens, they would take a moment of silence to honor the brave, young pseudo-journalist, nothing more than your average douche about town who had battled a rocket ship and won.
The view of the Ganges from out here is amazing.
Thanks for listening to another episode of QAnon Anonymous podcast.
Please go to patreon.com slash QAnon Anonymous and subscribe for five bucks a month to get a whole second episode every single week, plus access to our entire archive of premium episodes.
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You can also follow Liv Agar, Julian Field, and Florida Flynn, which is me, Jake.
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both of which you can search for online listener until next week. May the deep dish bless you and
keep you. It's not a conspiracy. It's a fact. And now today's auto kill. Meanwhile, does Elon Musk,
the second richest person in the world have a lower tax rate than you.
Probably.
And there's not much anyone can do about it.
Our Robert Frank got the story on how billionaires, and this one in particular, structures his taxes, Robert.
Well, Elon Musk paid no federal income tax in 2018.
He paid less than $70,000 in federal income taxes two years before that.
So how did he do it?
Well, the answer is mainly in borrowing.
Musk doesn't take a salary from Tesla.
He has hit about half the targets in his $50 billion compensation package.
That pays out over a decade.
But that package is stock options, not cash or income.
And when he doesn't want to sell shares, he doesn't have to.
So, to fund his expenses, he takes loans against his stock.
In fact, a lot of stock.
SEC filings showed he pledged 92 million shares, those are now worth about $56 billion, to pay for personal loans.
He gets cash from the loans, doesn't pay any income tax, and then deducts some of the interest on those loans from his taxes.
