UNLOCKED! Bonus Ep22 Elon Musk and Twitter, with Eric from ESG Hound
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I'm Jack Graham, he/him, and in this podcast I talk to my friend Daniel Harper, also he/him, who spent years tracking the far right in their safe spaces.
In this show we talk about them, and about the wider reactionary forces feeding them and feeding off them.
Be warned, this is difficult subject matter.
Content warnings always apply.
Hello and welcome to Anastasia German bonus episode 22.
I can never remember the exact number, but I looked up the last one was 21, so this one should be 22.
We did miss October.
Jack is still having some issues with his health, and hopefully that's going to be solved pretty soon.
Yeah, so he's not going to be joining us today, although this may be, you may be listening to it on his feed because I'm going to give him the file.
Instead, I am joined by a new voice of the pod, someone that I've been kind of chatting with behind the scenes for a little while now.
And this is Eric, and he runs a sub stack built on sort of skepticism towards ESG efforts in the corporate world and is something of a self-taught expert on Elon Mux.
So since Elon just bought Twitter, finally, And just running that to the ground, we thought we would kind of discuss Elon Musk a little bit.
So Eric, please say hello.
Hi, yeah, so thanks for having me on.
I am sadly a kind of longtime Elon Musk expert, for better or for worse.
And so I run a publication called ESG Hound, where I look at finance and corporate governance and greenwashing topics.
From a mostly left liberal standpoint, but I try to be realistic about, you know, kind of this hot topic that everyone's talking about.
In particular, I got decent traction last year.
Elon Musk's rocket company, SpaceX, was expanding their operations in South Texas, which the operation down there is situated in, basically surrounded by wildlife preserve and they were expanding to basically do a lot more explosions and launches and they were actually going to put in a natural gas plant a power plant and like lng facilities in there
they kind of tried to sneak it past government regulators and i wrote a bunch about it and they ended up canceling some of the natural gas stuff they ultimately got approval probably not not in compliance with the law um and so so basically i've i've um kind of had this - Yes.
Elon Musk, critical voice on Twitter that's kind of specific to SpaceX.
And there's been a long time kind of Twitter skepticism community, but it's mostly centered around kind of his Tesla, his car company.
But yeah, I mean, Elon's in the news again about Twitter.
And I figured, you know, Daniel and I could talk about kind of all those intersecting different topics and some of them that really do like involve like this really kind of scary right wing, you know, ethno nationalism that's that's been Yeah, no, absolutely.
I mean, the first time I really paid much attention at all to Elon Musk as a cultural figure in terms of his In terms of his ability to actually do the things he says he's going to do was the Do Not Eat video on The Loop.
I don't know if you've seen that, but he has gone on to, he's part of the Well, There's Your Problem podcast.
He's kind of the lead guy there.
And I mean, it's just, once you start looking at the math behind this stuff, it's like, not even, because his point is always like, it's not just, it's not like the engineering is like inherently flawed necessarily, although in some cases it is.
As much as there are downstream social effects.
It's not that you can't drive a car in a tunnel, it's that you still need just as much of an interchange as you would if you were building on surface roads and the other technical challenges.
And that's the sort of thing that the Musk fanboys just never seem to be able to get through their heads, is that there's more than just This sort of like techno magic stuff and that you can't just innovate your way out of some of these problems.
And I find that this, like as someone who has a background in STEM and it was like spent a lot of time with like engineers and, you know, researchers of various kinds, you know what I mean?
I do find this sort of, you know, this kind of tech genius, like inability to see kind of social reality is something that Elon Musk is just that times a billion, basically.
What if one of those guys just got to play with $244 billion and make fun racing cars, you know?
So, and obviously that intersects with a lot of like far-right personalities, both in sort of the Silicon Valley, like, you know, the kind of live, work, work, die, you know, kind of idea of, you know, there's just this kind of right-wing ideology that just goes along with this, but also like very explicitly in some cases.
And so I'm wondering if you have any examples of something that's Kind of pretty explicit Elon Musk, you know, connections, other than that, you know, they both worked at PayPal.
Well, he worked at PayPal with Peter Thiel back in the day.
Right.
So that's a connection.
But I'm wondering, you know, what else what else kind of comes to your mind immediately in terms of Musks?
There's a bunch of it.
And I think if you look back at this techno-fetishism, there's this idea that's been going around for a while.
And you see it now, especially cropping up with Twitter, that Twitter's being run by commies because the employees there are well-educated, young white guys who tend to be more socially liberal.
And so there's this idea that the communists are running it.
And I think that's been The brilliance of Teal, like the kind of that Teal ideology that's been behind the scenes.
And it's, if you go back and you look at kind of the dialogue back in like 2015, like these kind of like libertarian types were, you know, all about like, you know, kind of just like being accepting of homosexuality, but like, you know, free markets.
And then there was a lot of talk about stuff like I don't know if you remember this, there was a bunch of talk about universal basic income.
And so Musk was one of those guys that was universal basic income.
And behind the scenes, Teal was saying stuff like this.
And it's really, in the last couple of years, it's moved to this almost neo-feudalism.
It's like Peter Thiel's a royalist, and you've seen Musk, and I don't want to say so-and-so's manipulating, but you've seen basically this whole VC set, like the PayPal mafia and all the other people associated with this crowd have kind of made this Weird move to an explicitly authoritarian standpoint.
And I will point out, there was a great article on David Sachs, another member of that crew who's injected himself into the middle of this Twitter deal.
Jacob Silverman wrote a really great article on this just a couple weeks ago, so I highly recommend You read that and then I'll get that.
I'll get that link to you.
And you can just, I may have already read it, but yeah, just give me that.
Give it to me.
I'll put it in the show notes for sure.
So, yeah, no, I mean the, what you were saying about like UBI being this, you know, kind of pushed by these libertarian types.
I mean, that goes back several years.
I mean, I remember seeing that even In the mid 2000s, Megan McArdle was kind of like making noises about that kind of UBI.
And it was explicitly intended to be like the cheap version of the welfare state.
Essentially, we're just going to gut the entire.
So it's not like, you know, we're going to provide services and then also provide, you know, some money for everyone so that they can, you know, be free of work.
It was, you know, we're just going to gut the welfare state and we're going to replace it with, you know, the $300 check every month.
And then that's going to be enough for people, which, you know, is not.
Not the case.
It was always this, like, subterfuge, ultimately, as this sort of almost a way to kind of get the left liberals kind of on board by making the kind of UBI noises that, you know, that people like.
And I think that, interestingly, I think you're absolutely right.
I mean, that's something that we've been kind of talking about in this podcast, obviously, is, you know, there is this switch around the Right around mole bug and Curtis Yarvin, who essentially, I mean, he doesn't invent, but certainly popularizes this, you know, essentially libertarian monarchism in which they lose all respect for democracy.
Democracy is kind of fundamentally flawed because You know, we're the bright people, we're the elites, we're the smart ones who can come in and actually save all this.
And I think that's very like Silicon Valley as well.
It's very tech bro.
It's like Elon Musk doesn't see himself as, you know, as the CEO of a great company.
He sees himself as the visionary who's going to transform society around him in ways and that no one gets to tell him no, no one gets to ask questions about him.
And I think that's this, this feeds into that kind of VC, You know, Mythos, the CEO of the great Silicon Valley company, the great startup.
It feeds into that constantly.
Those ideas just kind of go hand in hand.
And I think that what Moldbug does is provide this sort of intellectual justification for it through the neo-reaction movement, which then leads, you know, it kind of feeds into what became the alt-right and what is now what we're seeing in the streets today.
I mean, it's all the same.
It's the same general idea.
It's just became a little more explicitly anti-Semitic over time.
Well, I think the genius part, and it's interesting that you brought up the Hyperloop at first, is that Musk's kind of genius has been to launder himself as an engineer instead of just like a visionary.
And I think that's interesting because engineering at its fundamental level is not inventing.
Usually the application of like standards, right?
So it's this, it's basically, it's a function of like the bureaucratic state, which is what they want to dismantle.
And so Musk really laundered himself as this engineering.
And I think that the Hyperloop examples, I think was when I just like, that's what broke my brain on him years ago.
Because if you're looking at it like, and so I have a background in oil and gas and I work for a pipeline company.
And if you look at his assumptions, he's like, He's like, OK, we're going to make we're going to make a, you know, 500 mile long tube that goes across the ground and it's going to be, you know, so many meters in diameter.
And he's doing these like cost analyses and he doesn't ever reference like the pipeline industry.
So pipeline industry has like scores of engineering volumes about like, you know, how much like how many welds you have to do per meter, like all these different Functions and instead he's like, well, this is the price of, you know, uh, uh, milled steel.
And I, he's like, I'm just going to assume it's going to be, you know, however many million kilograms.
And he's like, I'm just going to add like some bullshit number for like how much it's going to cost to weld it.
Whereas like the, the pipeline industry has this, like these like standards in place and then kind of cutting over to that where it's where, where that's like, He's laundering his credibility through engineering.
That's not how engineers do things.
They'll look at codes and standards.
They basically step.
It's all iterative on top of what other people have done.
But if you look at the The way it's applied, right?
And so this is kind of the other examples.
If you're going to have this vacuum tube super speed train, the curvature of the tube has to be basically minimal.
And so you're talking about through California, you have to basically, you're talking about like right-of-ways and land rights.
In order to make that happen, you have to gut the entire regulatory state that revolves around right-of-ways and land use.
You have to say, nope, my project is going to get this Exact path and it doesn't matter whose land it cuts through because this is what I want to do and so that that for me like really cuts into like his What's interesting to me the most, besides this ideological stuff, is his disdain for regulations is just profound.
It's like the Koch brothers times a million, and I don't think a lot of people have really paid attention to that.
It's stunning to me, really.
You don't have to hand it to the Koch brothers, but the Koch brothers have an ideological goal.
They're trying to make money.
They're trying to kill the regulatory state so that they can make money through their investments, or when the CEO of Chevron wants to deny climate change and wants to get rid of all the environmental regulations.
That's pure greed capitalist impulse, right?
With Elon, it really does strike me as just this overgrown child who just wants to do it.
I'm a train guy.
I don't know if that comes across how much, but I'm a casual train guy.
I really want California high-speed rail.
Elon just personally killed high-speed rail in California by promising all these legislators, oh no, we're just going to build the Hyperloop, and that's going to be the future.
That's going to be better.
And that's going to be, and it's like, it's just doesn't, it's just, it's just, you're just wrecking the world for your own, just your own id and your own ego.
You're just, you're just wrecking things that would actually make a material difference in people's lives.
And you're just taking resources for yourself and not even out of any, like, not even like avarice, you know?
Like, it's like, he's, he's, he's just this pure, you know, I don't know, just like, hey, college.
Chaos goblin.
Yeah.
Chaos goblin.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
I mean, Yeah.
Sorry, I'm not expressing myself all that clearly here.
I agree.
And I think to the Koch brothers is a really good point.
And like you said, not to give credit to them.
I think if you actually follow the history of the company is that in the 1980s, the Koch brothers, their company had an explicit, they would do a cost benefit analysis.
So they would say, they would take a refinery and they actually had one of their refineries in Minnesota had a bunch of I don't remember what it was.
I think it was ammonia or something, or maybe it was benzene.
They basically had this giant plume that they kept basically just poisoning.
I don't remember exactly what it was.
I think it was groundwater poisoning.
I don't remember what the exact pollutant was.
And the regulators kept basically hitting them every year with like a, you know, Two or $3 million fine.
And they're like, this is going to cost us $200 million to fix.
And if I look at my capital table, my depreciation, it's just cheaper to pay the fine.
And so they would do that across the board until the media got wise to it, until they started getting sued.
And the regulators were not just saying, we're going to fine you.
We're going to shut you down.
And so the Koch brothers then, they basically, they came up with this new mantra, which was like 110% compliance.
It was like, or 1,000% compliance.
I don't remember what it was.
It was like 100% compliance, 100% of the time.
And like, I mean, like, let's be honest, like that's impossible to do even for a company that wants to do the right thing.
But they, I mean, they put a lot of efforts into like applying with the rule of the law and they took that money And instead of fighting the individual consent decree to not stop polluting the river with benzene, they try to dismantle the state behind the scenes to try to loosen the regulations.
But when it comes to the day-to-day operations, they're like, I mean, I've worked in highly regulated industries.
I mean, I worked in the pharmaceutical industry for a while, you know, and you know, it's, it is like, you know, you've got your set of rules that you have to abide by, you know, at the bottom level, you know, and you, you know, it can be a firing offense to, you know, violate some of these things very quickly.
And yet those same industries are then working at the higher level to ease those regulations.
And so that's kind of the two-step that they play in these games.
Whereas, you know, Elon is just kind of openly, you know, like during, I'm sure you have tons of examples of this, but during the beginning of lockdowns, when he's just like, well, no, we're just going to, that Dallas facility, we're just going to be open and I hope they come and arrest me.
That's a very different mode, right?
that's a very different mode right yeah sorry right no no i think that's that that cuts to the core of like the way musk is different and the way i've kind of compared it is like you see some similar you know parallels to like how amazon and facebook does it but they still they still like i've what i've said is like they're playing in in like the ballpark and they're like you know they're using corked bats right to use a baseball analogy they're They're stealing signals.
They're breaking the rules, whereas Musk is playing Calvin Ball in the parking lot.
It's a totally different game.
There's so many examples.
I think the most horrifying issue that I think a lot of people have read, the stuff that's going on in SpaceX that I've written, But I think the one example that I have that just still blows my mind is when they were starting up the mass production, this is in California in their factory, which is really just like pretty close to like a residential area, kind of a poor residential area.
They were ramping up production at their paint shop for the Model 3 build-up, and this is when the company was in pretty serious financial straits, and they were kind of at the risk of going bankrupt.
And they had this production push that they had to like meet to investors to be like, and they, what happened was is they, their paint shop was like so poorly designed and they were running it beyond capacity that their scrubber system.
And so the scrubber is going to be something that basically pulls out like toxic particles and actually uses like a charge magnetic plate to basically remove what we call like hazardous air pollutants, these carcinogens out of the air.
And it was so backed up that it was causing fires.
This has been reported multiple times.
Ed Niedermeyer has written a bunch about it.
There's been some other articles.
And they're having all these safety issues.
And at some point, someone at the factory made a deliberate decision to turn off the air pollution control equipment and basically circumvent it and shoot hazardous air pollutants that were not permitted directly out into the atmosphere.
In the environmental world, 99% of problems are these civil violations where you messed up, it may have been neglect or poor repair or whatever, but when you do that, that is the time when the EPA actually has a criminal enforcement division and they throw people in jail for that.
And so there's documented evidence of them circumventing a control device to meet a production goal, which is hugely illegal, and the EPA Was notified of it.
They did investigations and they ended up just doing like a minor civil penalty over it.
And for me, that's like the most egregious example because when you talk about like this, the failures of regulatory state is like Musk has been a genius and not getting for some reason not getting hit for that.
Because other companies I've worked for have gotten basically debarment or threats from the federal government, like, if you don't get your shit in line, you're going to go to jail, including companies that have circumvented control devices, where it's happening with him.
And it's just like, no one cares.
And California regulators, despite the reputation about them, they're asleep at the wheel.
And so, for me, that's always the most telling story when it comes to his view on compliance.
Yeah, I mean, you've got to think that that's a, you know, partly ideological, you know, thing in terms of, you know, that Musk has, you know, this kind of aura around him because he kind of sells himself in this very particular way to regulators and to legislators at that matter, you know, like he, you know, that a lot of that comes from that kind of golden boy kind of phenomenon that other CEOs and other companies can't match.
But I mean, you also got to wonder, like, you know, where's that There's got to be some money changing hands, right?
At some point, you know?
And it is one of those things whenever these right-wing chads are like, you know, Commie-fornia, just over-regulating everything.
And it's like, yeah, no, these are very center-right neoliberal shills at a certain point, you know?
When Gavin Newsom is the standard bearer of the California state government, yeah, no, these are not exactly raging.
Lennon and Mao are not hiding in the bushes anywhere in California.
Yeah, well, I mean, that's that's that's that's a broader problem than than just California.
I mean, every every left of center, even center candidates like, well, no, this is communism again.
Oh, one thing I forgot, I did I did take a note before this that I my favorite my favorite anecdote about about Musk when it comes to regulatory, besides the the emission one, this one is a labor issue.
I don't know if you know, the Trump administration did a NLRB investigation under Musk.
Or under Trump.
Sure.
And actually, they actually did a hearing under Trump against Tesla.
That's how bad it was.
And so there was this whole back and forth in like, I want to say like 2018, where basically union busting like Musk was doing on Twitter and Grimes, his partner at the time was like helping to do union busting online.
And she was like offering to mediate like union discussions, which is all very weird.
Anyway, the settlement that the company came to was finalized at the beginning of 2021.
And again, most of this happened under the Trump administration.
And essentially, this was in March of 2019.
The NLRB said, hey, you messed up.
You have to like apologize.
You have to pay ten million dollars.
And also you have to delete tweets.
Right.
So that was the that was.
And the most insane thing is this.
This order was put in that that Tesla signed up.
They signed the letter saying we're going to do this in 2021.
The tweet that was supposed to be deleted is still up there on Twitter.
He still has not deleted that tweet.
You can see it today.
You talk about the Koch comparisons.
The Koch brothers are going to be like, fine, we'll delete a tweet.
We got off easy, but Musk is like, it's so much more than just the money.
It's this whole ego thing where it's like, he's not deleting a tweet, which is bananas to me.
I don't get it.
Yeah, no, that's I mean, it's again, it does feel like ego and, you know, it and ego together just, you know, just climbing this ziggurat of, you know, complete nonsense.
I mean, I just it's it's amazing to me, like how much he just loves his sycophants as well and how much he loves being in the spotlight and going on Joe Rogan and then going to these things.
And I I just like I'm fascinated.
I guess I think I don't I haven't spent a lot of time thinking about Musk until I think the Twitter stuff.
Because, you know, I've just I've kind of followed along.
I kind of know the kind of the big picture, but I haven't like I don't follow like SpaceX day by day, which is why I was really excited to get you on here so we can kind of talk about some of this stuff.
But I think one thing that people don't realize is that like he didn't he didn't found Tesla, for instance.
You know, he bought Tesla.
And then, you know, and there's a whole, I know there's a story behind that.
I don't know if you've got it on hand where you can kind of talk about it.
I do.
And for your show notes, I'm going to recommend Edward Niedermeyer's book.
He's a friend of mine called Ludacris.
It's an excellent read for people who want to know kind of the, you know, the origin story of Tesla.
And so there's, so basically he was a very early financier of the company.
He bought his way on with his PayPal wealth.
And he was listed in news articles as like a financier and it really got under his cross.
So he ended up forcing the two founders out.
There was some lawsuit about him getting officially named as a founder, and that's like kind of an ego thing.
In fairness to him, a lot of people have used that to discredit what he's done at Tesla, but at that point, it was the original Roadster and then the very early stages of what would become the Model S. To be clear, officially he's not a founder, but Tesla as it exists today, it would be foolish to say that that isn't
90% as a result of his ability to raise funds and to hire engineers and just beat them to death and underpay them until whatever.
So, on the one hand, technically, he's not a founder, and he's sued for it, and it's fun to make fun of him for it, but for all intents and purposes, he's so much more important than the people that founded the company that, for me, it doesn't... Sure.
Yeah, no, no.
I wasn't trying to make that value judgment at all.
But I do think that it is important that, again, the golden glow off of him seems to come from this... I don't know if you've read a lot of Robert Heinlein.
I have, yes.
You ever read The Man Who Sold the Moon?
I have not.
Okay.
Well, I believe Elon Musk sees himself as the lead character of The Man Who Sold the Moon, who is this kind of brilliant industrialist who's building rockets and who uses his political wiles in order to eventually send up the first rocket that lands on the moon.
That's the story of that novel.
Or that, it's a novella, but anyway, so not important, but you know, you'd be like Heinleinian, you know, sort of sort of archetype of the brilliant whiz kid, who's also the industrialist who kind of goes off and does the, and I think, you know, Musk sees himself very much in that light.
And I think that he sells himself that way, even to people who haven't like read those archetypes.
And I guess where I'm going with that is that like, he sort of gets along with Like he has to frame himself as an engineer or else people will see him as just the ruthless businessman, right?
Right.
Which is what he is.
And like you point out, like, yeah, he absolutely tortures his employees who, some of whom, you know, say, oh yeah, it was the greatest working experience of my life.
I got so much accomplished.
Well, yeah, you also worked 90 hour weeks and, you know, to meet impossible specifications so that like the Tesla door handles will work the way that Elon thinks they should because he saw it in a sci-fi movie once, you know?
It turns out most of the time the door handles don't actually work like they're supposed to, but that's another story.
Yeah, I love the Tesla engineering problems.
Like, oh, if the door's locked, then you just have to open up the glove compartment.
If the power's down, there's a special key that you have to get to, and it's like, I can't just open a latch.
These things are death traps.
I would never open them.
Right.
It's just right.
I mean, they're poorly assembled cars.
I think like, yeah, I mean, like, and like, I think and that's why I like, I mean, I do think the founder story is like very funny because it tells a lot about his personality.
But I think sometimes like a lot of like the people on the left, like you see credit critiques of them.
People are always like, oh, he's like apartheid, which I think doesn't play a lot into his personality.
But but they're like, oh, the emerald mine thing.
And like, there's some truth to that.
But it's like probably like like Like his dad was like a millionaire, but not like, you know, not, not like running the country type rich like he currently is.
And so I think a lot of that, like, I think a lot of that actually works to Musk's benefit because it kind of undermines like the way that he's actually gotten successful.
I think a lot of the way he approaches things is definitely foundationally from like kind of a like his apartheid, like you have a two tier system.
I think that's how he approaches everyone he interacts with.
So I think that's instructive.
But I do find a lot of times like the people on the left who criticize him for the Emerald Mine thing.
It's like that's like an aside.
Maybe you make a little joke about it, but that's It's at the core of the critique, you know?
And I think that is sort of like the Twitterification problem of the way that we talk about these things, is everything has got to be in 280 character bytes, as opposed to something that's a little more long form and a little bit more, kind of gets at the subtleties a little bit more.
Although, I mean, ultimately what Elon Musk really is, he's just a flashy robber baron, effectively.
I mean, he's just the exploitation of the system Taken to the nth degree.
I mean, you know, who, who gets along, who gets along, who gets to do it partly because of the myth he's made around himself about it, you know?
Well, no, it's just funny because the people, even the people that critique him, like, I mean, like, like listening to you and like, this is not like a knock on you, you know, your, your idea of him is like, as a, this, as this businessman, but He's kind of shitty at running businesses.
If you actually look at him as being like, I think a lot of critics of Musk almost give him too much credit where they're like, Oh, well he's like this singular evil instead of him being him being a consequence of like, you know, the regulatory state failing.
And then also this like insane concentration of wealth.
So this kind of like venture capital, you know, mode of financing that he's just he's been able to just sell things.
He's basically like, you know, like how Elizabeth Holmes was able to just raise this insane amount of money that his real genius is being able to continue to fundraise in spite of business fundamentals being either horribly bad, as is the case with his Twitter deal and with SpaceX, even though those numbers as is the case with his Twitter deal and with SpaceX, even though those numbers are a little bit more obscure to like things that have kind of worked out, which is like Tesla
But the Chinese, basically in allowing him to build there with the kind of a special arrangement, have become a somewhat decently profitable enterprise.
So it's just really interesting to me because I think The businessman thing, we tend to think about people who min-max production and do a really good job of managing commodities and workflows and all these synergies with supply chains and customers.
But I think really his big genius is just this force of will of getting people to work extra hard for him and for people to just continue to give him money that he will light on fire with hope that it'll be worth more in the future.
So I think that's kind of his genius.
Which is a type of businessman, don't get me wrong, but I think a lot of times it's framed as he's like this, um, you know, like, like this just like amazing, like, kind of like a, um, uh, like a, like a, uh, Tim Cook, right?
You know, you're, you're, you're Tim Apples.
He's that, that guy's, that guy's amazing at running, you know, logistics.
Oh yeah.
No, no.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, I was never a, you know, when I, when I say like this brilliant businessman, I kind of mean in the, in the exploitation of workers kind of way.
To be fair, that is in our current system.
That's part of being hugely successful exploiting that.
Yeah, you just exploit your workers and you just, you know, you give them a, again, you give them the feeling that they're changing the world through, you know, through this corporate vision.
You know, I mean, I've never worked somewhere where the corporate vision meant anything at all to my day to day, you know, work life, but people do it.
So, you know, that's how it goes.
You know, I, God, there's so many places we could go here.
I just, I remember like so many stories of the door handle thing struck me because it was like, Musk had this idea that he wanted it to work this way.
And then the engineers all had to work overtime to get it to work for a product demo.
And then it doesn't even work.
And you're right.
One of the things that again, you know, as someone who hasn't been following him obsessively, but I remember reading like a Twitter thread a few years ago when it was just like, you know, Tesla's cars just aren't put together.
Well, this is something you mentioned, but And I don't know cars, but they'll say, look, the trim doesn't work here.
These two pieces don't fit together the way they're supposed to.
And so these are supposed to be the cars of the future, the techno car that has this aura of being this luxury product.
And then the people who actually know cars look at them and go, this is just garbage.
It's fundamentally, it's got this...
It strikes me that the two enterprises that are arguably successful, the SolarCity concept, the battery concept, and then the Tesla concept, are both ideas of incremental change.
The actual way that you make a battery is you make one 1% more efficient this year than you made one last year.
So I think there's a lot more actual engineering at Tesla.
have like, you've made up massive efficiency gains, but this is just, again, iterative engineering.
This is, this is very, all they really did was just throw a bunch of money behind this project.
Right.
I mean, as I understand this kind of how the.
So, so, so I think there's a lot more like actual engineering at Tesla.
I think their actual assembly procedures are really bad.
I think they've done some interesting stuff with how they conceptualized the battery pack, if you want to give them credit for it.
They certainly made, like on a marketing standpoint, they made them cool.
And I think the reason they got away with kind of this high price but kind of lower build quality is kind of that halo effect that you saw with this huge weld.
in these kind of tech circles, these people that were working for Facebook and all these other startups, like he's basically just kids who are computer science degrees and like they're millionaires.
And so this is like baby's first like expensive car.
And so a lot of times they don't know better.
Right.
And I mean, to be fair, like the acceleration is insanely fast and like there are some cool things about Tesla The vehicles themselves, I don't want to just rag on them.
But yes, when compared to how well put together a BMW is, it's not even close.
But he's certainly exploited, he's kind of created that new market, or the company has, and so you've got to give him credit for that.
Give him credit for that for sure.
And I think that like moving, I mean, electric cars are not the future of, you know, build a train, build a train.
I think for commuting purposes, like especially like your commuter cars, where there is going to be this long transition.
I certainly think that there's a place for them, but, but certainly as like replacing everyone's like one for one mode of transportation.
I mean, it's like on a carbon basis, like electric cars are about.
50%.
Even this is including all your battery construction.
They're about, you know, 50% as impactful on a kind of carbon footprint basis, which isn't terrible, but like, you know, the big problem, and this is kind of, you know, stepping back is like in America, we have these suburbs and most of our carbon footprint, believe it or not, does not come from our commuting.
It comes from, you know, all the infrastructure, like, you know, your groceries, like how far apart everything is, how much land we all own, how much we heat our houses.
And so like, if you're just enabling that system, just continue as is, you're not going to do anything to save the planet.
You're basically just prolonging it.
So I think that's, that's kind of the, the nuance critique of electric vehicles.
I certainly think on the margins, they're very, very helpful.
They're very helpful in dense cities at, you know, reducing, you know, cancer, cancer and asthma causing, you know, a ground level ozone pollution.
I mean, there's there's certainly a very good argument for them to exist.
But in terms of a replacement, like just replacing every car with a Tesla is not it's it's it's not really a leap forward.
It's just kind of a, you know, a step sideways, I guess.
Yeah, for me, it's mass transit and density.
That's what's really going to change the nature of how we actually pollute as a society.
If you really wanted to be serious about it, you would put a streetcar on every town of more than 50,000 people.
And you would encourage densification through land use policies.
But again, that's not an engineering problem.
All those problems have been solved in terms of the technology.
And it's not sexy, right?
The way that Tesla wants to be sexy.
The way that, oh, this is the future.
We have electric cars now.
It's like the Jetsons.
But no, really what we need is mass transit.
Anyway, sorry, this is my No, I agree with you.
And I think it's actually a really interesting segue into the actual, like, Twitter purchase, right?
So, if you want to talk about, like, and this is, like, where he always talks about, like, it's so funny because if you watched, like, his rhetoric, like, that he was just, like, he's, like, thinking out loud while this whole deal was going on, right?
He was forced to buy something that he realized after he made the offer was a mistake and he wasn't going to get out of it legally.
So, he ended up having to really convert a lot of his wealth into cash and then turn that cash into a non-liquid private company, which is not great.
But the way he's approaching it, he tweeted something along the lines of like, well, I checked and there's 10 managers for every one coder.
And it's like, bro, okay, so when you're building rockets, yeah, 90% of it is engineering and production, but But when you're running a social network, how many coders do you need?
You're going to have them, but running the social network is complying with every regulation you have to deal with, not pissing off your advertisers, managing all these different social conflicts.
You know, you see him all the time, like who's getting banned, who's getting suspended, who's getting promoted.
Like it's a political problem.
And he's, he approaches, he's like, well, we have, we have too many managers and not enough coders.
It's like, you're not going to, how are you going to code people to like, you know, stop doing like, you know, stop organizing, um, you know, ethnic genocides on the other end of the world.
Like you can't like, you can't engineer your way out of that.
That's a political problem.
They're all, all these companies are trying to do that.
Of course, you know, you get the little content warning.
Are you sure you want to post this?
This seems, you may not want to post this.
This seems to be inciting hatred.
Right.
But that's, that's the tip of the spear.
And it's, it's like a, it's a first catch and like, and like Facebook figured it out.
Like they, they, uh, I think I saw their, Back in like 2017, and this is while Facebook was pretty big, this was like post-Trump, but it wasn't like, you know, their throughput was like in terms of content was nothing like it is today, like they alone, right?
And so this puts it into concept, like into context, like they had like, Human moderators and like on their trust and safety team, they have like five or 6,000 people that were like just dedicated to that task, right?
And so Twitter right now, like Musk bought it and has like, had like 7,000 employees.
He's already cut the workforce in half, including entire global like, like, like, like branches elsewhere, like the entire like Australian and like all these other countries are these like,
Issues that are very specific to that region like they've been gutted and so it's like Facebook who like obviously is like ruthless and like wanted to like AI and machine learn their way around these problems realize they'd have a ton of Content moderation and Musk is like nope I'm gonna I'm gonna do it differently anyway, and it's like that laissez-faire shit is like not gonna work and you know I think what I mean like I think like the biggest fear like you have from like
Um, like, like a standpoint is like he's moving towards like talking about like basically gatekeeping videos, like almost like a, like a, like an only fans thing.
And then it's like, well, you cut your content moderation.
It's like, how is that not going to be like ground zero for like, you know, uh, uh, Nazi recruiting and like, you know, uh, child sexual assault abuse material.
Right.
I mean, like that's like, yeah.
I mean, it's like, I don't know.
It's, it's insane to me.
Yeah.
No, I mean, I think that's where the, because these, it seems like every day I've been, I've been like checking, like my Twitter feed is all just people talking about all the weird shit happening in Twitter right now.
And I've been following it a bit, but like the thing that came out like a couple of days ago and like every day there's a new, new story and everything is changing again.
So who knows what, what's going on, but he's floated the idea of just taking the whole platform private.
of just like there just won't be a public facing twitter anymore it's all like you just pay to get on there and that's supposed to solve the problem by just like and no who's gonna spend eight dollars a month for like an army of bots and i can tell you you know it's gonna be every bad actor in the fucking world is going to spend you know eight dollars is eight dollars is nothing for daniel i don't have a ton of faith a lot of times in the free market but i feel like if you gatekeep access to the site for eight dollars
like i think the free market will figure out how to make that not happen let me just say i'm not paying eight dollars a month for you know for the for the uh curated version of twitter uh I mean, and again, what you were saying about there being multiple tiers, I can kind of see like in this, like Elon might just kind of have this idea of like, even leaving like the Twitter blue concept.
Which has been around prior to Elon, but he seems to be really kind of putting his notions into this of like, there's going to be like a better experience for people who pay.
Like you have a better algorithm.
Like we can't just have the good algorithm like for free.
Like, you know, you've got a good algorithm and a bad algorithm.
Okay.
If I pay $8 a month, I get the better and half as many ads.
Well, somebody did the math on that and is like, well, yeah, if you're paying $8 a month, but then you're losing $6 a month per user in ad revenue, which seems to be how the numbers work out, you're not really making a dent in your problem.
You're not solving anything ultimately.
I mean, it's just, but it does seem to be like this, again, this like two tiered system is like, there's going to be the elite who pay for the special Elon Twitter.
It's just so funny because it's like you're watching him in real time rediscover.
of us who get the crappy version.
Again, that's that apartheid kind of thinking.
Right, right.
But it's just so funny because it's like you're watching him in real time rediscover.
That kind of goes back to the whole thing where it's like, Twitter's so funny because I think it's a great platform.
I use it for news.
I find it much easier to communicate.
I like it.
But at the end of the day, no one uses Twitter except for... It's really popular among journalists and politicians.
Politicians are like... You'll see Trump at rallies.
Even most Trump followers, they see tweets because they're screenshotted and put on Facebook or texted from their friends.
He'll be riffing about his...
about his gripes about getting banned or shadow banned on Twitter.
You see all these politicians doing this.
Like, no one cares about this, but it's like, the reason you're seeing so much journalistic coverage on is because it's Elon Musk, but also because every journalist uses Twitter, right?
So they're all like- - Journalists rely on it for their jobs.
I certainly use it.
The growth of our podcast grows along with our Twitter presence, for sure.
It's one of those big signs when my account skyrocketed after I was threatened by neo-Nazis.
I don't think I know anyone personally right now.
I don't, I mean, I don't, maybe you're different.
You know, I don't think I know anyone like personally right now.
Like I don't have a person that I see on like a more than weekly basis who uses Twitter.
Except for me.
Like it's, it's, it's.
It's a tiny platform in terms of its actual user base, you know, much smaller than Facebook or even, I mean, TikTok is gigantic these days.
YouTube is gigantic these days.
And, you know, I pay for YouTube premium because that's a platform, that's an experience that is worth it to me to have the ad-free experience because I'm using it almost all the time for podcasts, et cetera, you know?
Giving yourself brain worms.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's my job is give myself brain worms.
Yes.
Um, but no, I wouldn't pay for that at same experience on Twitter.
I mean, you know, I'm going to find another place to get my news effectively and wherever the journalists go is going to be, you know, kind of that thing.
I mean, you know, that's, that's really what, that's really what, what you're going to see is that wherever the journalists are going to kind of talk to each other, that's going to be the new Twitter.
And I don't think that it even exists yet.
So I don't know.
Right.
And I think like the whole thing is like, just, I think the thing that amazes me too, about him is like,
For how much of like a Twitter super user he is and maybe this is like the whole thing is that he has you know 100 million followers and so his experience is a lot different than everyone's but it's just like amazing that he like thinks that like like he's it's like he's he's like he's red um and actually remind me later because I do have a really good 4chan anecdote that you'll probably like that's Elon Musk related um but but um there's like it's like he's it's like he's been reading all these like right-wing forums and like they all like rage about like blue checks
And so he's like the problem is like like the blue checks and it's like he's like he's like it's like he's like mainlining like this like crazy like Steve Bannon Charlie Kirk like talk about like how like Twitter is like You know, blue check elites.
And so he's like, well, people will want to have the, I guess the whole thing is like, he doesn't understand the reason that like your celebrities, right?
So like the people that with millions of followers, the reason they're on Twitter is because there's this, that verification system is good for people that are doing journalism for people knowing that they can trust a source, but also like their source of revenue.
And like, this is Twitter's big breakthrough is like one of the first celebrities that came on like years and years ago was like Shaq, right?
So Shaq was on there, and this was a huge thing.
And there was the whole Charlie Sheen thing.
And so the verification allowed these people that brought eyeballs to Twitter to want to come on.
And now Musk is like, well, we're going to charge them, and we're also going to make it really easy for people to impersonate you.
And it seems like there's no good business sense for it, which is really funny because people are laughing at him, I think, correctly.
But it's almost like that whole I can kind of tell you the big picture on that, at least in terms of the right-wing space.
spiritual, like right wing.
Yeah.
And I can, I can kind of tell you the big picture on that, at least in, in terms of like the right wing space.
It's like, first of all, I have a, I have several, I have like a Twitter account that where it's just, I just follow Nazis.
Like I just follow like everyone, all the worst people I find.
I just switch over to that account and then follow those accounts.
And you would not believe how toxic that feed is.
Like, it is, you know, the idea that there are no Nazis on Twitter or that there's no right-wing thought on Twitter.
Believe me, I can show you that feed.
The thing that really kind of happened with the blue check thing, I think comes back to, uh, Milo Yiannopoulos was kind of like one of the, one of the kind of like bellwethers of that is when, you know, because as you know, and just for the audience, you know, like the blue check was always meant to be like a verification badge.
You have verified that you are someone that you have like some level of, There were rules for it back in the day.
You had to have at least two independent references to some kind of media.
You had to be mentioned in the New York Times at least twice.
Those sorts of criteria so that not just anybody could get it.
But the idea was that you were someone of some kind of notability who might be impersonated.
That was the whole point of Twitter verification.
It was, you know, it was, you know, just anybody, you know, I know people who were just, you know, they were journalists for a couple of years in between 2012 and 2014.
And they just got the blue check and this now just always had it.
Milo Yiannopoulos started being like really super toxic on Twitter, too.
I think it was her name, Leslie.
She was in that.
She was in the Girl Ghostbusters movie, the Paul Feig Ghostbusters.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, my God.
Yes.
Yes.
I know who you're talking about.
Yeah, anyway, he was absolutely atrocious towards her.
In particular, I think, was the moment at which, like, he just lost his blue check.
Like, they kept, like, he kept kind of getting suspended and then unsuspended and then suspended, and then they just took his blue check away.
And that, That really rubbed people raw, just on the, you know, like, this is supposed to be just a personal verification badge, but now you're using it as, like, a mark of good behavior or something?
And then that sort of, like, carries down the list of, like, it all just became a meme that suddenly, like, a blue check verification is like, oh, well, you're, like, the good little children who don't say all the nasty things, you know?
And now it's just a mark of like your neoliberal beliefs or whatever.
It's a mark of that you're on the left, that you're on the right side.
And, and, um, yeah, but like Tim Poole still has his verification.
And Richard Cernovich, right?
Cernovich, like your original, yeah, Richard, I know Richard Spencer.
Yeah.
I'm like your original like Pizzagate guy.
Well, it's so funny.
So like now you talk about like the, the, the geopolitical implications of, of Musk owning Twitter, right?
Saudi dissidents have been outed via Twitter.
Right.
So Musk has an intimate relationship with like China.
And like, it's just so funny because because, you know, that, you know, the escalating domino meme, like, you know, it's like it's like Milo Yiannopoulos is mean to someone on Twitter.
No, it's it's it's they make they make a all all women Ghostbusters movie.
And the big domino is that like, I don't know, World War Three with China.
Yes.
No, exactly.
Exactly.
Yeah, no, you're absolutely right.
And I think it's just, you're right.
It is like, it is just this meme on the, like in that fever swamp and that right wing fever swamp that, you know, that the blue check means system approved essentially.
And we don't want to be system approved.
And you know, the, the 2016 election, obviously the basket of deplorables thing and the sort of, you know, like just, It's not like one, any one thing that created it.
It's just this kind of like these right-wing ecosystems just have this like amplifying effect on these kinds of ideas.
And it just kind of becomes like accepted wisdom among these people that the blue check that, that, you know, it means your system approved.
It means you're one of the good ones.
It means you're not one of us, you know?
And that's, and Elon has just responded to that.
And like, we're going to keep official verification now.
This is today's thing is they started seeing accounts like that have official, like an official account that it says the word official on there somewhere.
And it has a blue check, but apparently the blue checks are going to go away and they're just going to mean people who've paid.
So you're going to have two.
So what does the blue check then except like, I think right before we started recording this Musk tweeted that he was getting rid of it.
So it's like, he told all these engineers, like you have to like work overtime or And then like two hours later, people are like, told him exactly what would happen.
That would be a problem.
Then he got rid of it.
So that's like, that's like Musk in a, in a, in a, you know, a nutshell.
Well, he fires half the workforce.
And then like two days later, like started getting like phone calls of like, Hey, do you want to come back?
Right.
Right.
And so I think the funniest thing is like all this stuff, like where we talk about like the things like I have known, like, especially like following like the SpaceX is just a complete like financial disaster and always has been.
And I think this Twitter thing makes it a lot more difficult for them to raise money, which has all sorts of implications.
We should talk about that maybe in a later episode.
If you're interested, it's really, I think fascinating.
I think it's probably too long for this.
Um, but it's just, it's just like that, that It's really funny to see a lot of people realize, like, hey, maybe this guy is actually not the genius he says he is, and so I'm enjoying that.
Oh yeah, definitely.
It's just sort of like the whole process, again, of bringing everything.
It seems like every story of a Musk company sort of has the same sort of backstory on some kind of big level.
And Twitter is just like, everybody's paying attention now because all the journalists are on Twitter and seeing it personally.
And when you see how the sausage is made, it's like, no, he's always been like this.
This isn't new.
Sorry, go ahead.
No, I was just going to say like, I mean, yeah, like that's, that's like, I mean, that's it.
And I think, I guess, I guess I'm actually really curious about your take.
And I don't want to forget to do this because I think, you know, because of the, the spaces, like, and I'm, like, like I told you, I'm an avid, I'm an avid listener to, to, to the pod here.
I find, I find it really fascinating to see like how these, Right spaces online have morphed and, you know, just like, I really find it just just super fascinating to listen to.
And, you know, one thing I wanted to bring up to you, and I think I sent this to you actually months and months ago, back in May, you know, I think he was kind of flirting with kind of right wing ideas, especially, you know, some issues around personally having dealt with transgender people in his family and different relationships.
And I don't I don't want to I I don't want to get too much into that because I think there's some privacy issues.
But but but I think what's really fascinating to me is is is people who, you know, he had these kind of he was kind of flirting with these kind of like outwardly right wing ideas are pointing out.
But I tweeted about this back in May.
Right.
So Musk was posting about fertility rates.
Right.
So he's like he's like posting charts about fertility rates.
And he doesn't like explicitly say like white replacement, but it's like literally white replacement shit.
And it's like people were like, oh, you're right.
He's talking about population collapse.
And if you look at on a macro standpoint, population collapse is not on anyone's radar.
What will decrease is in Europe and the United States, either absolute or by proportion, percentage of white populations, which is the big concern, which is why Tucker Carlson's talking about it.
So Musk is talking about it and I was tweeting about like, Hey, look, this is like straight up like white replacement theory stuff.
And like the, the Musk fans who, some of them have really, uh, uh, because I, um, kind of caused a little bit of trouble with like SpaceX, like some of their messaging, like some of them have kind of glommed on to me and, and, you know, they're, they're tweeting at me like, that's not it.
He's just talking about, you know, Having enough humans to populate Mars or whatever.
And I found, like, immediately, like, on 4chan, like, immediately after this went up, someone posted, and I'll send you the screenshot, like, immediately afterwards, someone's like, does this guy browse poll now or something?
And then there, you know, someone responds, careful, he could be using that talking point to brainwash people into accepting mass illegal immigrations of aliens and n-words.
Um, and then they're talking about like and there's people like having this argument be like he's based and then other people are like he's part like it's and so it's just like people people in these right spaces picked up on it immediately and we're like this guy's base now or like this is like a psyop and like they're doing that whole thing they do and like normies or whatever on twitter who i'm like hey this is like this is like This is like barely, this is like, I don't even want to say dog whistle.
I mean, this is like, this is like obvious.
It's pretty explicit.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Explicit.
And like, people were like, oh no, it's just, it's just him being him.
And it's like, for me, that part was just so bizarre.
And like, it's gotten, you've seen more and more of that stuff.
Like he's, it's like, how many times can the guy like accidentally or like, you know, use Hitler in a meme, even if it's like kind of a joke.
And it's like, how many times are you going to post that exact same stuff that is like, If not identical to, like, stuff you see on, like, explicitly racist forums is, like, just close enough to it or runs in parallel to it, where it's like, this guy's problematic.
Like, I don't know how much he's doing it, like, like, explicitly versus how much he just has, like, boomer brain and is just, like, you know, totally Facebook Q-pilled like, like every other, like, you know, white 50-something, you know?
I don't know.
It's just part of the discourse on that, on those sides now.
I mean, you see, and this is something that I've talked about a lot on this podcast and, you know, like, You know, it's, it's a recurring theme, but you know, stuff that like Richard Spencer was saying that was, you know, overt Nazi stuff in 2016 is now just in 2022, you have, you know, mainstream political candidates talking, you know, when just that many words, it's just like, you just kind of shave off.
You know, the overt anti-Semitism, you know, but, but I mean, this whole like great replacement stuff, the whole, you know, anti-democracy ideas, these, these kind of look, this is very normalized on like even the center, right?
These days, you know, it is, it is, it is not like, and it's not even like, I think Republican politicians, like they kind of the old school Republican politicians, they want, you know, their tax cuts and they want their money and they want the industry and they want the oil industry to, you know, do whatever the fuck it wants to do.
They're not paying attention to this stuff, but like the new people, like all the new blood, all the young blood, every young Republicans club is just absolutely filled with this stuff.
And I mean, look, YouTube is better than it used to be.
But you can still find this stuff on YouTube.
It is not difficult.
I can go and I can find you.
You know, live streams where, you know, I mean, Lauren Southern is sitting in like palling around with Destiny, you know, and that matters for, you know, for, for youth culture.
And it's been going on long enough that if you're 20 years old today, you've been listening to this since you were like 12, you know, it's just part of the conversation now.
And I think it bubbles up through people like Musk.
And so when Musk tweets it out like that, it's like, It doesn't matter if he's based or if he's just a boomer thinking about this.
What matters is that it's coming forward through him into more and more people's eyes.
It's a sign of how popular this stuff is just within that ecosystem.
And when the people beneath him are saying the quiet part, the slightly quiet part, the one that's like two decibels lower quiet part, They're bringing that back up to volume and actually saying like, no, this is about, you know, the Jewish people and the black people, you know, not to use their words, but it's just right there.
It's just right there along with it.
And it, and they get thousands of upvotes sometimes it's just, and the, the issue there is not even the, you know, the individual size of the accounts.
Cause a lot of these accounts only have, you know, a couple of hundred, you know, followers or whatever, but there are so many of them and that they are, there is a bot like behavior, but these are also just like, 18 year olds, 16 year olds hanging out on Twitter and like all retweeting each other.
They're hanging out in some other forum and then they see this and then you hang out on Telegram and they see, Oh, Elon Musk posted this.
And then they all go swarm onto it and make it seem like it's bigger than it is.
But it is like a large number of people like, you know?
Right.
Right.
And if you look at, if you look at like, I haven't spent a bunch of time doing it because it's just, I mean, if you look at how many accounts have been like registered in the last like month or two, they're just like, First person they follow is like Elon Musk.
Elon Musk and Kanye West.
You see the video the other day?
That incel stalker guy?
Did you see that video that went viral?
I don't think I saw that one.
Jacob something.
There was a kid who basically did like a Like a rape and stalking fantasy and he was like interviewed by police and like filmed himself and then put online you should definitely follow but he's like he started an account like like earlier this year after Musk bought the site and it's like first follows like Musk yeah so it all it all like I don't know it's just like that that's the part that concerns me and and I think there's some really
I think the good news is that among the Musk followers, a lot of people that followed him from early on were, um, I don't want to say like a lot of people will call them leftists.
I don't think they were.
They were just kind of like your generic, I kind of like millennial Gen X or like kind of like socially liberal people.
And some of them have really gone along for the ride and are just repeating everything he says, but a lot of them are pushing back.
What is concerning, though, and I think this is a thing that I've seen, is I've pointed this out and people are like, oh, isn't he allowed to cut loose?
Isn't he allowed to talk shit and post shit?
And I was like, I posted shit when I was a teenager.
First of all, I'm not a 50-year-old man, but also, I'm sorry, but one of the downsides of running a public company is you can't do that stuff.
That's bad governance.
Your board should be stopping you from doing that.
I'm sorry if that's the downside of being the richest man in the world.
Sorry, you don't get the same grace for shitposting.
People are going to put a higher standard on it.
It's such a bizarre dynamic.
I don't get it.
I think about the things that I don't post on Twitter, you know, like that I'm uncomfortable kind of being around.
Even, I have like 10,000, actually I lost like 300 followers in the last month, so I've been right under 10,000 for a really long time and now I'm at like 9,700.
It's fine.
I'm not, I'm not bitter about it at all.
It's fine.
Um, but yeah, I have, I have nearly 10,000 followers and I'm like, I know that that comes with a certain degree of like scrutiny and a certain degree of responsibility, you know, for this podcast and for just, you know, and I'm like nobody, you know what I mean?
And you know, for Elon Musk to just go out there and like openly try to manipulate the markets and like deuce his stock price on Twitter, like, yeah, no, that he should be punished for that.
Absolutely.
And the stuff that goes out there, I mean, I just think the larger your platform is, the more responsibility you have to use that platform responsibly.
And Elon Musk is just the absolute, you know, opposite of that.
He just, and his defenders on that sense are just like, what, he can't just be a person?
If he wants to be a person that goes out there, then create a dummy account and, you know, like, yeah, create an alt, create a private alt or do whatever and post to your buddies all your kind of fun jokes.
But like, that's not what he wants to do.
He wants to be I don't think he can.
I don't think he can step down from anything.
We now have him.
It's Elon Musk.
Elon Musk will be the main character for the rest of time, I guess.
But, you know, or until he, until he steps down, I'm, I kind of think he's going to step down.
I don't know.
Do you have any predictions about that?
I don't think he can.
I don't think he can step down from anything.
I think, I think the financial situation kind of all of his companies are highly interlinked.
He has a lot of personal loans and leverage.
I don't think he can step away from anything.
I think like every other great corporate blow up we've seen, like I don't want to call it like an explicitly a Ponzi scheme or anything like that.
There's a lot of circular funding.
There's a lot of lying that's required to keep it up.
My expectation is that like every other person before him, he has to go bigger and more extreme, more distractions, more risks until it eventually falls apart.
I don't think he's mentally capable of stepping down because that's admitting failure, but I think more fundamentally, I think all of his businesses and all his personal interests and all of his finances are all tied up into just this big incestuous mess and he can't step down.
I don't think he's capable of it.
I was kind of thinking more he would be, you know, more in the background, like less the, you know, like he can't financially walk away from it, but essentially he just like goes, look, I put a team of people in charge.
These are the, and I'm not going to Twitter specifically.
Oh yeah.
I think he possibly could do that, but then it's just like, but he, I mean like the problem is, and like, this is kind of like, this is kind of more of a, like kind of business wonky, like, like business management stuff, forever faith you put in it.
If you're, if you're, if you're like the, the, you know, the, the funder or whatever, the owner, and you put a CEO in charge, like you have to give them, like, you have to give them, um, you know, like, like, like, for example, like with Jeff Bezos, say whatever you will about him, I'll say plenty of things, bad things about him.
Right.
But when he's running, right.
So when he's running, even like, even like his, his, his rocket company or the Washington post, he has a CEO.
Like, I'm sure he, he, he checks up with them on some basis, but he's not like, He's not going in and like undermining them at every regular interval and like you didn't you just know with Twitter is like when something goes viral like hey this like you know right wing shithead who like did did some bigotry got banned like enough people are going to go to it then he's going to chime in and I just I don't think that that's I don't think that's conducive for a business environment to thrive.
I think the other thing to keep in mind is that he bought a mature business that had been around forever, had its own insular culture.
And every other company that he's been involved with has been either very small or been a startup.
And he's been able to keep sycophants and keep these people that are loyal to him.
Whereas now he's buying a company with people who have Largely are fairly wealthy or like you're pretty upwardly mobile.
And he's going in and saying, like, for example, the first thing he did is like, and this is like very, like, laugh at me if you want, but like, you know, every company has their own culture.
And like, there, there's still like, you know, there's still some sense of camaraderie, even if it's all like kind of intertwined with capitalism.
Like, Twitter employees called themselves Tweeps, which was a Twitter peep, right, put together.
Like literally the first day on the job, he's out there tweeting, we're not Tweeps anymore, we're Twits.
And it's like, for me, that's like, it's like, it seems so silly, but it's like, you don't understand the culture.
You haven't, you haven't bothered to learn it.
And all these things are going to alienate people.
And it's going to, and so like, there's so many like little like, kind of like NBA, like business failure stuff that you'd see, like, What not to do in Harvard Business Review that he's doing.
And that's beyond just his like, it seems like kind of everything he just doesn't, he's, he's just making up as he goes along.
It's, and for how much public visibility Twitter has, it just doesn't seem tenable.
And basically I'm just saying he's fucked and I don't know if he can walk down.
I have no idea what he should do, but I don't think he can.
I don't think he's capable of it.
Yeah.
Well, I guess on the upside, all the engineers at Tesla and SpaceX are actually giving some work done.
So, you know, at least there's that.
You know, look on the bright side.
Yeah, until the layoffs come.
Yeah, until the layoffs come, you know.
He has to downsize all those businesses in order to fund his, you know, debt obligations to Twitter.
Like, it will be so hilarious to me if this literally just pulls his entire empire down.
Like, if it just goes out in a fire sale because he just has to fund, because otherwise the Bonesaw guys in Saudi Arabia are going to come for him.
Well, I mean, it's just, it's, for me, the most stunning part is, is like, I don't, Like Tesla is able nominally to generate cash flow to pay for expenses and they book a profit.
There's some weird stuff with their accounting, but I don't think it's anything super insane.
But SpaceX is doing these huge R&D expansion projects, their satellite internet project, their super rocket they have to do for kind of these NASA moon projects.
And they burn billions in cash every year.
And this company does not make money at all.
And so they have to go to the VC market at a higher valuation every single year and extract billions and billions of dollars.
And all these co-investors, these co-equity investors that signed on with him on Twitter, they've already taken like a 50 percent haircut on their valuation.
These bonds that the banks promised in order to back the deal, you know, the top line value or the nominal value was like $13 billion.
Like if those banks try to place those bonds today, especially in the current interest rate environment and what Musk has done already, like you're talking about like a A $6 billion loss.
And so really, I think, I think, I think the one to pay attention to is when SpaceX needs more money, um, are, is he going to be able, right?
Cause he can't go to the Saudis for that money.
You can't, you can't, you can't, uh, uh, fund your, your, uh, uh, you know, national security intensive, like us rocket company with Saudi and Chinese funds.
So when he has to raise that money, is he going to be able to, cause he's burned a lot of people.
Um, History has said he's able to always pull a rabbit out of the hat, but kind of the macro environment for those funds doesn't look so hot.
So it'll be really interesting.
I think SpaceX is the one that's kind of been ignored, but that people will have to pay attention to.
No, no, definitely.
And we will.
I think this has been fun.
I definitely want to bring you back and we can get into some of these more granular issues.
So hopefully people enjoyed this.
You have anything else to add before we wrap up here?
No, thanks for having me on.
You can follow me on Twitter at ESGHound and I've got a sub stack, whatever.
I don't publish that much, but yeah, always happy to talk about a topic I know way more than I should about.
So thank you for having me on.
Oh, no, it's been great.
And I will definitely put a link to that sub stack and any other links you want to give me down below for sure.
All right.
Thanks a lot.
That was I Don't Speak German.
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