Elon's Spies - episode 4, 'A Star is Born'

From Tortoise Media, episode 4 of Elon's Spies, I've annotated parts that I think are especially important in green colour:

Alexi Mostrous: It's the evening of Tuesday, the 5th of November. Millions of Americans have voted in the US presidential election and Donald Trump is awaiting the result. He's assembled a select group of supporters at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. It's the inner circle, family members, senior campaign staff, a handful of donors, vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance is there, along with his wife, Usha. It's the cast list of people likely to dominate the next four years of American government. But one very influential person is missing.

Elon Musk: Everyone here, me. It's my voice coming through.

Alexi Mostrous: Elon Musk.

SPEAKER_06: It's like thumbs up.

Alexi Mostrous: Like me, Ryan Mac, a tech reporter of The New York Times, is wondering what he's up to. Musk is a central figure in Trump's MAGA movement. But for the moment, he's nowhere to be seen.

SPEAKER_07: But then we also got a tip that he would be going to Mar-a-Lago for the election night party. And, you know, we're still watching his plan and eventually we realize it's taken off from Texas.

Alexi Mostrous: Musk's Gulf Streamjet is on the way to West Palm Beach. Earlier in the day, the billionaire cast his vote in Texas. And now he has some time to kill. So he settles back into the cream leather chairs of his $78 million jet and starts a live stream on X.

SPEAKER_07: And he does that while hardly playing a video game and answering questions from essentially very close fans and friends of Donald Trump on why he viewed this election to be so important.

Alexi Mostrous: In this moment, it feels like momentum is building. A jet hurtling towards its destination, the finish line of the election in sight. Much of the live stream is rambling, but there are parts which stand out.

Elon Musk: So America PAC is going to keep going after the election and improve preparing for the midterms and any intermediate collections as well as looking at elections at the district attorney level.

Alexi Mostrous: 40,000 feet up in the air, this is a glimpse into Musk's thinking. That he's not just another wealthy donor, that his involvement in politics isn't concluding with the election. It's just beginning. This is his manifesto for the future.

Elon Musk: So it's like we'll make kind of way more efficient. We'll give us tax money will be spent almost sensibly. And, you know, they're not saying they might be a few bumps in the road, but the best in things I think we'll do out of for a golden age of prosperity.

Alexi Mostrous: At 6.11 p.m. on Tuesday evening, Musk touches down in West Florida. After all the talk of a knife edge election, it's not even close. The next time I hear Musk's name, it's 2.30am in America. Trump is on stage giving his victory speech. He's jubilant. Enough votes have come in now that he knows he will be the next president of the United States. Trump name checks his campaign manager, his family, his vice president. They get a few seconds of praise each, but Elon Musk, he gets a whole four minutes.

Donald Trump: Let me tell you, a star is born: Elon.

Alexi Mostrous: For much of the speech, Trump is reading from a teleprompter. But this, it's off the cuff.

Donald Trump: I love you Elon, that's great.

Alexi Mostrous: Looked at one way, this is simply inaccurate. Musk is the world's richest man, a tech billionaire, a builder of rockets and robots and electric cars. And famed for his takeover of Twitter, he's already a star.

But in this particular moment, I think Trump is on to something. Musk was impressive before the election, but we've seen billionaires before. What's unprecedented is this new combination of political power and immense wealth. Like disparate forces of energy colliding to form a new star, Musk has combined control of a major social media platform, a 300 billion-dollar net worth, and insider access to the next president of the United States.

The election has transformed this mere business mogul into a political giant: Elon 2.0.

Over the last few months, I've been looking at how Elon Musk has exercised his power before the election: how he operates, how he thinks, what drives him every day. And now I'm wondering, will that change now he's got the ear of the next president? What form will this new supercharged Musk take? What does he really want to happen in the next four years? And what does it mean for all of us?

SPEAKER_00: That's what people just voted for. They want unconventional. We have to be very careful.

SPEAKER_05: Extraordinarily alarming. It's powerful. He's megalomaniacal. Now he's going to be something approaching a kind of co-president.

Alexi Mostrous: I'm Alexi Mostrous, and from Tortoise, this is Elon Spies, episode four: A Star is Borh.

It's the morning after the night before. Trump's granddaughter, Kai, posts a family photo on X. There's Trump, and next to him, Don Jr. Eric Barron, the whole squad. All of them beaming in triumph. The vice president elect J.D. Vance and his wife Usha aren't there, but Musk and his four-year-old son are the only non-family members in attendance. His transition to Trump insider complete. But it hasn't always been that way.

Musk was raised in South Africa, but he's been a US citizen since 2002. For the first two decades after that, he voted Democrat. Musk has described as pro-environment and pro-climate. He said that humanitarian causes are super important to him. He once queued in line for six hours to shake the hand of President Obama. Even after he switched support to the Republican Party two years ago, Musk had little good to say about Trump himself. In July 2022, he urged the former president to retire, tweeting that it was time for him to hang up his hat and sail into the sunset. And if Musk wasn't sold on Donald Trump, well, the feeling was mutual.

Donald Trump: Elon! No, he's got himself a mess. You know, he said the other day, oh, I've never voted for a Republican. I said, I didn't know that. He told me voted for me. So he's another bullshit artist, but he's not going to be buying it.

Alexi Mostrous: Eighteen months later, everything's changed. These two stars are no longer at loggerheads, but working together, feeding off each other's energy.

Elon Musk: This was the last chance, man.

Alexi Mostrous: The day before the election, Musk appeared on Joe Rogan's podcast. As I listened to this two-hour, 38-minute show, I thought: can this really be the same guy that donated thousands of dollars to fund Hillary Clinton's campaign for president? And who told CNBC in 2016 that Donald Trump didn't have the sort of character that reflects well on the United States?

Elon Musk: If the big government, the commonwealth puppet machine wins, they will legalize the legal and swing states. There will be no swing states. Every election going forward will be guaranteed Democrat win. This is the final. This is it. This is the last chance.

Alexi Mostrous: The language feels radicalized. Puppets, illegals, last chances. Musk isn't speaking like a traditional business leader or a politician. He sounds like someone ranting on his own social media platform. This is this is no ordinary election.

Elon Musk: The other side wants to take away your freedom of speech. They want to take away your right to bear arms. They want to take away your right to vote, effectively.

Alexi Mostrous: The billionaire also gave almost $120 million to the Trump campaign. In the days leading up to the election, that included giving away $1 million a day to a registered voter in a key swing state.

Of course, other billionaires have spent big on Trump, including some of Musk's fellow tech heads in Silicon Valley. But none have got as down and dirty as Musk. At some points, he was even on Zoom calls with Trump's organizers to help get out the vote. Just like the periods where he slept under his desk at Tesla or at Twitter, when he worked 100 hour weeks to keep his factories running, Musk was in the trenches of the Trump campaign. He was running the campaign like he'd run a business. Except this time, the mission wasn't to put rockets in space or to make electric cars. It was to elect a president who could dismantle the very institutions that Musk had railed against for years. And his contribution, it was critical.

SPEAKER_11: By the way, I don't think this race would even be close if it wasn't for what Elon's doing with X and just showing people what's going on.

Alexi Mostrous: To thousands of male millennials and Gen Z is Musk is a hero, an entrepreneur not afraid to make a risky joke. For Trump, this connection to the manosphere was invaluable. According to the Wall Street Journal, Trump, won men aged 18 to 25 by 56 points to 40. In 2020, Biden won the same demographic by 56 points to 41.

Musk and X was the cannula through which Trump's message flowed into the political veins of this critical demographic. Not just through his own posts, but through connections to influential podcasters like Joe Rogan who endorsed Trump only after interviewing Musk himself.

This is the fourth episode of Elon's Spies. In the first three, my producer, Gary and I looked at how Musk used surveillance and private investigators to control the world around him. It's pretty obvious that we're not talking about private investigators here, but I'd argue that it does touch on some of the same themes.

One of the things that shocked me about reporting on Musk was just how vindictive he seemed to be, how much he was affected by personal slights. Like when he hired a private investigator to dig up dirt on Vernon Unsworth, the British cave expert, just because Vernon had told Musk to stick his submarine where it hurts. And that aspect of Musk's character, his thin skin, carries across because it might at least partly explain why he's shifted so violently towards the Republican Party.

SPEAKER_12: If we try to sort of trace back Musk's kind of transformation into this Trumpian cheerleader, when do you think the first time was that Musk started to fall out with the Biden administration?

Linette Lopez: When Biden didn't invite him to the White House to talk about electric vehicles.

Alexi Mostrous: There are moments in history which don't seem very important at the time, but looking back, they're turning points. Linette Lopez is a columnist at Business Insider. She's covered Musk and Tesla for years. In her view, one such turning point took place on a hot Thursday in August 2021. It's about a year and a half into Biden's presidency, and the president has summoned executives from global carmakers to talk about electric cars. Except, one person isn't invited.

SPEAKER: Tesla's CEO Elon Musk accused President Biden of ignoring his electric vehicle company and paying more attention to legacy automakers.

Alexi Mostrous: Biden's decision was all to do with Tesla's anti-union stance. But given that Tesla was the world's leading electric car manufacturer, and given that Musk has done more than anyone to promote the idea of electrification, it feels like a very personal snub.

Ryan Mac: He is very upset about it. He doesn't understand why Biden is talking about GM, which produces far fewer cars than Tesla, and it hurts him to his very core. That's why he reacts in the way he does. After that, you start to see his messaging around Joe Biden. He starts to call him sleepy. He starts to call him incompetent. And you get this kind of increasing of rhetoric that you see on Twitter and you're like, whoa, that's got to be coming from somewhere. But I view it as one incident in a few that kind of angered him about the direction of the Democratic Party.

Alexi Mostrous: The EV summit is important, but it's not the only factor. By 2021, Musk was already angry about COVID and the pandemic restrictions on workers. And he felt like Tesla and SpaceX were being signaled out unfairly by regulators.

Ryan Mac: Bear in mind, he had already had a lot of problems at Tesla with Democratic administration. I think of something like what was happening in California, with investigations into racism and treatment of workers at his factories. He also viewed the COVID lockdowns in California and the shutting down of his factories in 2020 as a direct result of government overreach. So this 2021 EV summit is the culmination of all that.

Alexi Mostrous: Around the same time, Musk's transgender daughter Vivian applied to legally change her name and her gender, saying that she no longer wanted to be related to my biological father in any way, shape or form. Musk later said that he was tricked into approving gender affirming care for Vivian and told the controversial philosopher Jordan Peterson that she is dead.

Elon Musk: Killed by the woke-mind virus.

Alexi Mostrous: By the end of 2021, all the billionaire could see in front of him was an overly progressive Democratic Party led by a president who seemed to disrespect him. A wave of political correctness which had, according to him, helped him lose his own child. And a series of computer-says-no regulators determined in his view to shackle innovations at Tesla and SpaceX. To Musk, America was going in the wrong direction.

Ryan Mac: So in earlier this year, he was already talking to other Republican donors about how not to elect Biden. And he was warming to the idea of Trump.

Alexi Mostrous: So perhaps then it's not a surprise that Musk and Trump have found a kinship. Donald Trump has also been described as a thin-skinned man, one motivated by vengeance. But it's not fair to say that both men are simply driven by grievance. It's clear that Trump has successfully remade the Republican Party in his own image. Like Musk, he creates his own reality simply through the force of his own will. I think when it comes to his own political experiment, Musk sees things in a similar way. Both Trump and Musk see themselves as builders, as businessmen bringing efficiency to America.

Linette Lopez: I think he's finding the returns are good and he didn't realize how easy it was. He's made an investment to him that probably doesn't seem like that much of his wealth. And the return is the White House. American politics are cheap for billionaires.

Alexi Mostrous: Within hours of Trump declaring victory, Tesla's share price rocketed. By the end of the day, the shares were up nearly 15%, adding about $21 billion to Musk's wealth on paper at least. The scary thing is though, that might just be the start.

And when you say the return is the White House, what do you mean?

Linette Lopez: There's a lot of power in the executive branch in the United States. As you mentioned, there are federal level investigations into Musk's companies. There are certainly government contracts on the federal level for SpaceX. Having a friend in the White House could make things appear and disappear.

Alexi Mostrous: This is what Lynette is talking about. Unchecked power. Musk's companies, which include Tesla, SpaceX and Neuralink, are intertwined with the federal government.

Last year, they benefited from $3 billion worth of contracts according to analysis by the New York Times.

US taxpayers pay Musk to launch rockets, to build satellites, and to provide space-based internet services. In total, 17 separate agencies oversee Musk's businesses. In recent years, these agencies have launched no fewer than 20 investigations into the billionaire's business operations. Tesla, for example, is facing half a dozen wrongful death claims relating to its self-driving cars. What happens to these investigations now?

Ryan Mac: He can maybe wipe some of those away, or he can make it very difficult for those agencies to continue with those investigations, as he makes cuts, for example, or decides who to appoint at these agencies. He can maybe send contracts his company's way. If there's a big contract that NASA is discussing, maybe he can put his thumb on the scale and be like, hey, we have SpaceX right here. Why would you go with Blue Origin, or why would you go with these other companies? Who needs them? I think it remains to be seen how those played out, but there's a tremendous potential for conflict of interest across all his companies and interests.

Alexi Mostrous: It's not just about Musk now being able to influence regulatory decisions.

Donald Trump: I will create a government efficiency commission task with conducting a complete financial and performance audit of the entire federal government and making recommendations for drastic reforms. Need to do it. And Elon, because he's not very busy, has agreed to head that task force. Be interesting, if he has the time.

Alexi Mostrous: Trump has promised him a government role that would allow him to cut government spending on regulation itself.

Joe Rogan: Are you going to have the time to oversee all this shit?

Elon Musk: Well, I'm pretty good at improving efficiency.

Joe Rogan: I mean, I would say so.

Elon Musk: Yeah.

Alexi Mostrous: If this role materializes, it would mean that a man who has numerous government contracts could end up effectively marking his own homework.

Ryan Mac: I think the top line thing that he's talked about is cutting $2 trillion from the government, which is an astronomical figure. In fact, at one point, he made a comment where if he cut something that was important, he would just simply put it back. He just said it as so. And that's how he's operated at places like Twitter, for example, where he came in and started cutting things. And realized some things were important or some employees were important and tried to bring them back or rehire them. He's going to take that same approach to this so-called government efficiency commission. Something like the FAA, for example, where he's claimed that it takes longer to do paperwork and to approve a launch than to build a rocket. That's one of his favorite talking points.

He wants to get rid of that so that the builders can build so people can put their rockets into the sky and not have to be afraid of doing environmental reports or reviews of air pollution, for example, or whatever, and just get out of the way so that entrepreneurs can do their jobs, I guess.

Alexi Mostrous: This melding of the business and the political, it's already happening. Musk has already asked Trump to hire some of his employees into the defense department and Trump is now in favor of electric cars in a way that he was never before. But there's one big question hanging over all of this. How long can this bromance last?

Elon Musk is used to being in control. That's a big theme of Ryan Mac's new book, Character Limit. Ryan's reporting reveals how Musk didn't like being just another Twitter board member. He wanted to run the company not to be one voice amongst many. And everything I've learned in my own reporting about Musk suggests he offers people close to him two choices, his way or exile.

Linette Lopez: Just like people before him, he will attempt to push Trump in a certain direction. But people who have tried to do that too much in the past have gotten burned.

Alexi Mostrous: And so what do you think will happen tomorrow next month next year?

Linette Lopez: Honey, I don't know. Both of these men have very thin skin.

Alexi Mostrous: Last Friday something extraordinary happened. Reports emerged that Musk had joined President Elect Trump's phone call with Vladimir Zelensky, the Ukrainian president. Less than 48 hours after the election, an unelected billionaire is on the phone with two world leaders discussing the most fractious and explosive foreign policy issue of our day.

A political nightmare that Musk already has a stake in thanks to his control of satellite internet systems above Ukraine. And one complicated further by recent reports in the Wall Street Journal that Musk has been in regular contact with Vladimir Putin, the Russian president since late 2022. So it means something that Musk, rather than say, J.D. Vance, was by Trump's side as he seeks to pressure Ukraine into making peace with its enemy.

Ryan Mac: But now he has the direct ear of a president. But he is in kind of unprecedented territory, uncharted waters in some ways.

Alexi Mostrous: This weekend lots of people were talking about Musk and Trump's relationship and how it might develop or collapse. But framing the next year or so as a battle between two super or anti-heroes is potentially missing the point. This isn't a Marvel movie, however much the two main protagonists wanted to be. The big shift has already happened.

Musk's elevation is already arguably anti-democratic.

The billionaire is already on phone calls with world leaders. The balance of world power has already shifted. There's one more thing to say, something that several people who worked with Musk told me in my earlier reporting. The ultimately all Musk really cares about, more than political power or business success is Mars. And that in fact Musk was supporting Trump because the Republican was his best hope of getting humans to the Red Planet.

Under Biden, the Federal Aviation Administration kept shackling Musk's rocket launches, delaying them for failing to follow the right permits. When Linette Lopez talks about Musk enriching himself in a Trump presidency, perhaps that's what she means. Not financial enrichment, but a release from regulation and investigation to pursue his ultimate multi-planetary ambition.

Elon Musk: Hopefully I live long enough to see my kids grow up and people on Mars. That's all I'm asking for here.

Alexi Mostrous: To get to Mars, any spacecraft would have to fly through uncharted territory, 140 million miles of space. To make that happen, Musk may have put himself in uncharted territory too, transforming himself from a quirky billionaire with a Twitter habit into the most powerful, unelected person on the planet. It's already clear that Musk is going to keep on helping Trump. He's going to keep on funding his political action committee all the way through to the midterms in 2026. He's going to keep on posting on X, and he's going to keep on involving himself in government efforts to cut spending.

As one former Trump staffer told us:

they see themselves as mavericks riding in to save the world. Musk likes to break things and rebuild. It's a fetish. See Twitter? He was very open about it. If Musk's advice backfires, Trump will blame him and it'll get nasty. They'll fall out and I'll be ready with the popcorn.

Alexi Mostrous: Musk has calculated that helping Trump and the Republican Party is indivisible from helping his own interests. Nobody knows how long these two stars can travel side by side without one getting sucked into the other's orbit, or what the effects of such a fallout would be on all the rest of us.