Pod Insights The Vergecast How Tesla became the Elon Musk Co. from Land of the Giants About this episode Today we're sharing an episode of Land of the Giants: The Tesla Shock Wave
Not many people can name the original founders of Tesla. So how did two guys who wanted to build an electric car create a company synonymous with Elon Musk?
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Transcript 7,145 words · 27 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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1:03 David Pierce? Welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of corporate infighting. I'm your friend David Pierce, and in lieu of our normal Wednesday episode this week, I want to play you an episode of Land of the Giants. It's another podcast on the Vox Media Podcast Network. It's one of our favorite shows, and if you like The Vergecast, I'm pretty confident you will love Land of the Giants. We've done series on Facebook. We've done series on dating apps. We've done series on Netflix. And the current one is all about Tesla. And this episode, the one I want to play you, is the second episode in the new season. You can go subscribe to Land of the Giants and listen to the first episode, but you actually don't need to have heard it for this episode to work. This episode is really all about Elon Musk as a leader, what he learned from being booted out of PayPal,
1:46 David Pierce? how he took over Tesla from its founders, and how he turned Tesla, the company, and Elon Musk, the CEO, into very much the same thing. The big open question in this episode is so fascinating to me. Basically, is Elon Musk a megalomaniac above all else who would do anything to be more famous and more powerful? Or did he believe in the mission? Of Tesla and want to save the planet above all else and do what was required to get there. It's hard to know for sure. I'm not sure we'll ever know for sure, but I really think it matters, given how much this guy is at the center of business and culture right now. There's also this underlying story here about what you might call the Elon Musk cinematic
2:29 David Pierce? universe and how the stories of PayPal and SpaceX and Tesla and Twitter all actually inform one another. You could make a really compelling case that Tesla wouldn't have become Tesla if Twitter didn't exist, for instance, and that if Musk had never run Tesla, he might never have bought Twitter. It's fascinating. Anyway, this episode is great. The series has been great. There are a bunch of Verge voices here. You're going to hear Liz Lapato and Andy Hawkins. Even my co-host Neelai Patel has been in the series. It's great. I can't recommend it highly enough. I really think you'll love this episode and this whole series of Land of the Giants. You can subscribe to Land of the Giants anywhere you get podcasts, wherever you're listening to this. I suspect you will also be able to find Land of the Giants. Anyway, thank you as always for listening to the Vergecast.
3:14 David Pierce? We'll be back on Friday with our regular news show and back next week with some fun new stuff. In the meantime, here's Land of the Giants.
3:22 Speaker 03 The year 2000 was a crazy good year for Elon Musk. He was the CEO of an exciting new startup, a company that promised to disrupt a fundamental part of daily life: how you pay for things. With PayPal, you can pay for anything, anytime, anywhere. A brand-new company that was the result of a merger between Musk's online bank and a payments company co-founded by a guy named Peter Thiel. Musk and Thiel looked like a dream team on paper: two Silicon Valley rising stars with one vision: blow up the banking world. Musk even felt confident enough as CEO to take a quick break.
3:57 Speaker 04 I'd gotten married earlier that year and not had any vacation or honeymoon or anything.
4:03 Speaker 03 Turns out, he was a little too confident. Because Musk's honeymoon period at PayPal was already over.
4:10 Speaker 04 I think it's not a good idea to leave the office when there are like a lot of major things underway, which are causing people a great deal of stress.
4:20 Speaker 05 Elon went on his honeymoon, and they did a coup and forced him out.
4:25 Speaker 03 Liz Lopato has covered Musk for years at The Verge. Musk may have been the CEO of PayPal, but Thiel had installed guys from his former company in most of the other C-suite slots. The moment Musk was out of sight, they persuaded PayPal's board to oust him and replace him with none other than Peter Thiel.
4:44 Speaker 04 There was just a lot of worry, and that caused the management team to decide that I wasn't the right guy to run the company.
4:51 Speaker 03 Another way to look at this coup is that Musk was never really in control of PayPal, even with that CEO title. Thiel was the one who held all the cards. Lesson learned.
5:02 Speaker 05 Elon Musk is very much about Elon Musk. And there's like a real need for control that shows up in his companies, where he needs to be in charge all of the time. Having learned from PayPal that if he didn't create that situation, he could potentially be fired.
5:19 Speaker 03 But after PayPal, Musk had no company to control. Licking his wounds, he started looking around for something different.
5:26 Speaker 04 On a personal level at this point, I would say I'm a little tired of the internet. The next company that I do, one of the things that I think would be important is that it has some long-term beneficial effect.
5:40 Speaker 03 A few years later, a couple of guys who were also excited about changing the world came to him with an idea. And it was just what he was looking for.
5:51 Speaker 03 A fast, sporty, electric car. Musk went all in.
6:01 Speaker 03 This is Land of the Giants. I'm Patrick George, your co-host this season. I'm an automotive journalist. I've covered the industry for about a decade, including as the editor-in-chief of Jalopnik and editorial director of The Drive. In the whole time I've been covering cars, I can tell you that nothing has quite defined the modern car industry like the rise of Tesla. But not many people remember, it wasn't Musk's idea to start with. Today, the story of how Elon Musk made Tesla his own, and the perils of shaping a company in one's own image. Before Musk even arrived, there were two guys with a dream. In 2000, Martin Eberhard had just sold his first startup, developing an early e-reader technology.
6:45 Speaker 03 He needed a new ride, and he wanted to treat himself a bit.
6:47 Speaker 06 I was considering getting myself a new car, and something fun and sporty.
6:51 Speaker 03 He loved to drive fast cars, but a Porsche 911, a Ferrari? Problem was, those cars were terrible on gas.
6:58 Speaker 06 To me, by 2001, climate change looked real. It looked like it was the real deal.
7:03 Speaker 03 So he looked around for something a little less like a carbon bomb, but the options at the time were kinda sad.
7:08 Speaker 07 Martin called these cars punishment cars, designed by people who really didn't believe you should be driving.
7:16 Speaker 03 This is Mark Tarpening, Eberhard's friend and business partner since the 80s.
7:20 Speaker 07 You know, you should be riding your bike, or taking public transit, or walking, but if you had to drive, you needed to be put into one of these things to be punished.
7:28 Speaker 06 That got Mark's and my heads thinking about that this was a real opportunity.
7:35 Speaker 03 What if there was an electric car that was fast, sleek, and sexy? For people like Eberhard, rich dudes who like flashy toys.
7:42 Speaker 07 When you look at the market, there turns out there's a segment that is super into that, and that's the sports car segment. And the faster you can get to, you know, 0 to 60 miles per hour, the more people are willing to pay. And if you can really get it close, people are willing to pay almost an insane amount of money for it.
8:00 Speaker 03 The guys wanted that kind of car, and the money didn't sound bad either. So they decided to do something audacious: start their own car company. The first thing they needed to do was figure out how to power the car. At the time, lithium ion batteries were mostly used for small things like e-readers and laptops. But the guys knew these batteries could do a lot more, like power a car for a much greater distance on a single charge than anyone had ever seen before. But just to make sure, they mocked up a sample battery and tested it out in a car. And it worked. But these were tech guys. They didn't know where to begin with building the rest of the car. So they partnered with a small British automaker named Lotus. A Lotus body would house all the cool EV tech these guys could come up with.
8:45 Speaker 03 The last thing they needed was a name.
8:47 Speaker 06 I had been out on a date with a woman who became my wife. And I'd been in the back of my head thinking about this company and thinking about names. And the idea of Tesla came to me and I proposed that to her and she loved it.
8:59 Speaker 03 OK, so they actually needed one more thing: money.
9:02 Speaker 06 There were so many reasons not to invest in Tesla that we didn't exactly have investors coming out of the woodwork wanting to invest to us.
9:10 Speaker 03 For months, the pair were in and out of dozens of venture capital firms.
9:13 Speaker 07 It was a pretty radical idea, you know, a new car company.
9:18 Speaker 03 Wall Street and VCs loathed the car industry. Cars were expensive, capital-intensive products that required complicated supply chains and enormous amounts of manual labor. Newcomers never succeeded. And remember, nobody was taking EVs seriously back then. But there was one person with a lot of extra cash who was not easily daunted.
9:37 Speaker 07 We got an intro to Elon.
9:39 Speaker 03 Musk was into risk. I mean, his other company was trying to colonize Mars.
9:44 Speaker 06 My initial impression of him was he was quite smart and quite enthusiastic.
9:49 Speaker 07 He immediately got it. He was like, oh, I see you did all the math. I love that. You know, I'm in.
9:55 Speaker 06 And I mean, you wouldn't guess it by the things he said today, but at the time, it seemed really clear that he understood that climate change was a real problem.
10:04 Speaker 03 When Musk made his first investment in Everhart and Tarpeting's company, he was almost four years out from the sting of being ousted from PayPal and on his way to establishing a reputation as a kind of tech maverick.
10:14 Speaker 08 He had a very restless mind, and I think he found he had a very big interest with the world dying.
10:22 Speaker 03 This is tech journalist Kara Swisher, who's been following Elon Musk since the 90s.
10:27 Speaker 08 That's why he was interested in space travel, to get off this planet. He always thought there should be a multi-planetary species. He was worried about the end times. So that's why he focused on things like Tesla, which he thought was existential to the human race.
10:40 Speaker 03 To Swisher, Musk was nothing like his peers. Everyone around him was building online stores or primitive social networks, and Musk was trying to save the world.
10:48 Speaker 08 He could have made a lot more money, a lot easier doing other things, and he didn't. I think he was always motivated by making it the impossible happen. I think he was still motivated by his feeling that the Earth was going to be destroyed, and he was critical to stopping that in some way.
11:06 Speaker 03 Sounds great, but maybe a bit of a red flag, too.
11:09 Speaker 08 I think he had sort of a god complex. Only I can do it. Sounds like Trump, right?
11:15 Speaker 03 But as far as Everhart and Tarpeting were concerned, they had just gotten their first check: $6.5 million. As the lead investor, Musk became the chairman of the board and appointed his brother and an old friend as directors. The founders took on executive positions. Everhart is CEO and Tarpeting is CFO and VP of Engineering. With the new money coming in, they could finally hire people to build their very first car, the Tesla Roadster. Dave Lyons is one of those early hires. He was an elite engineer, and Tesla wanted him to lead development.
11:45 Speaker 09 I got brought into a back room, and they said, hey, look, we're starting this car company. It's going to be huge. You're either with us or against us. Martin Everhart is a very fast-talking guy, and he was pretty charismatic, I have to say. And then there was this other quiet guy, Elon, in the corner, who really didn't say anything.
12:03 Speaker 03 Lyons didn't know if electric cars had much of a future, but the room was full of energy and potential. And he knew a little bit about that quiet guy and his ambitions. So he was intrigued.
12:12 Speaker 09 Well, this guy's got a rocket company, and he's saying this is going to take off. So, I mean, that pitch sold pretty well to me.
12:21 Speaker 03 Lyons became employee number 12, but Tesla would need a whole lot more people like him before it could make anything, let alone a brand-new kind of electric car. Musk had faced this challenge before at SpaceX, and he had developed a sort of recruitment philosophy that seemed to work.
12:36 Speaker 09 I remember one day he told us about his kind of, you know, his view of the world where like, all these companies are all bound up by all this regulatory mess, and they don't get to do the good ideas. And the young engineers that are working at these aerospace companies, they're, you know, kind of low men on the totem pole with all these older moon-launch-era managers who kind of tell them what they can't do all the time. And he was saying, like, what I want to do is I'm going to hire all those energetic, smart guys and give them freedom to soar.
13:07 Speaker 03 There were lessons here for Tesla. SpaceX plucked young, bright engineers out of government jobs and gave them the freedom to innovate. Tesla could do something similar: attract the most dynamic talent from the old rigid auto companies with promises of creative empowerment and equity. For the next few years, the whole company was focused on one goal: launching the Roadster, the car that would announce Tesla to the world. That day finally came in July 2006.
13:33 Speaker 10 This is one of the great cars, Tesla Roadster, an electric car that gets 250 miles per charge.
13:40 Speaker 03 And of course, the birthday party for a flashy sports car had a celebrity guest list, including California's governor at the time, Arnold Schwarzenegger.
13:47 Speaker 10 The test of this one, it's hot.
13:50 Speaker 03 White-hot. The Roadster was tear-your-face-off-quick. Eberhard, as CEO, took the lead on planning the Roadster's public debut. He hired a publicist to help out.
14:02 Speaker 06 She's the one who put together the basic idea of what that launch event would look like. From the idea of having it at an airport and having a track outside where people could drive, to having the event held in a giant tent where the track actually came in and people could see these cars coming and going and line up and go for a ride. All of this, this was basically her idea.
14:20 Speaker 03 This wasn't just the debut of the Roadster prototype. It was also the debut of Tesla.
14:25 Speaker 06 I went to show this idea to Elon down in L.A., and he basically had me fire her on the spot.
14:32 Speaker 03 Eberhard was taken aback. It was the first time Musk had ever done something like this. Reach into Eberhard's company and demand someone be fired. But Musk was adamant. Eberhard realized if he wanted to, Musk could take it to the board, and that was a fight he would have lost. Over the previous two years, Musk had remained the lead funder, allowing him to stack the board with guys loyal to himself. Not everyone was a Musk guy, but the math didn't look good. So Eberhard did what he was told.
14:58 Speaker 06 Which was heartbreaking for me. And then he hired his own team of people to produce exactly the party that you had laid out. Exactly. So I didn't understand what that was about. It was very strange.
15:11 Speaker 03 Now, Eberhard did no as fold on key decisions, especially when it came to building the cars. But he could see that this moment, Tesla's debut, was very important to Musk. It was Tesla's first big splash, the reveal of its first car. And Musk seemed like he had to be out in front, there to take credit and absorb the limelight as the face of the company.
15:30 Speaker 04 The opportunity is now, and the need is now, to have a car company of this nature.
15:38 Speaker 03 Eberhard says Musk became sort of obsessed with this idea. He remembers when The New York Times first wrote about Tesla. It left out any reference to Musk, and he was furious. By the way, we've reached out to Elon Musk and Tesla about this and other stuff. We never heard back. It's worth noting that Tesla doesn't even have someone who handles media requests anymore. Anyways, Musk had inserted himself into the process of making the car as well. Small stuff, mostly.
16:03 Speaker 06 There were a lot of little, sort of, random interventions that he would come in and say, "I want this changed," or whatever.
16:08 Speaker 03 Like door handles. He was determined that the doors on the Roadster should not open with a handle, but with a button.
16:15 Speaker 06 The motorized door handles on the Roadster, you know, they're cool, but they were also quite tricky to get right, because the door latches on a car have to work correctly even after it's crashed. And if the power goes out, then how does the electric thing work? And we wound up spending some number of millions of dollars to get that to work right and to get it to pass the side impact crash test.
16:37 Speaker 03 And it wasn't just door handles. Musk decreed the seats weren't comfortable, and the door frame needed adjustments, and the headlights didn't look cool enough.
16:46 Speaker 03 Meanwhile, the company had much bigger problems than door handles, and it wasn't due to Musk's meddling.
16:51 Speaker 06 I was over budget and behind schedule on the project.
16:55 Speaker 03 Sourcing parts for a tiny car startup, and an electric one no less, was extremely difficult. Suppliers were reluctant to sell just a few parts to a small company that might not even exist within a year. But also, things like heating or air conditioning that played nice with EV tech, there was almost no demand for these parts, so they weren't widely available. You couldn't just put in an order and expect a shipment.
17:16 Speaker 06 If you could ask me, what was the thing that was the most surprising to me, the thing I was not expecting? That was, how hard was the supply chain problem? I just didn't expect it to be that difficult.
17:27 Speaker 03 They were a whole year behind schedule, and the car was shaping up to cost way more to produce than they had ever planned to sell it for.
17:33 Speaker 06 It was getting to be clear that I was maybe not the right guy to be the CEO of the company for a long time, to myself.
17:41 Speaker 03 So Eberhard began the search for his replacement, which was fine. He looked forward to working on something else at Tesla.
17:46 Speaker 06 I would have taken a role as CTO or Vice President of whatever. Anyways, but someplace where I'm spending most of my time working on the technology or on evangelizing the company. That was what I imagined. That's what we had discussed with the Board of Directors.
18:01 Speaker 03 But Musk had something else in mind. A few months into the search for a new CEO, Eberhard got a call from Musk. He'd found someone who might work as Eberhard's replacement.
18:11 Speaker 06 He came across as though this is a friendly suggestion.
18:13 Speaker 03 After all, it was Eberhard who was leading his own replacement effort. This was just a suggestion, right?
18:18 Speaker 06 And then I learned, basically the next day through email, that the board had basically voted me off the island.
18:25 Speaker 03 Eberhard was out as CEO. Musk's pick was in. Eberhard's own search for a new CEO looked like kind of a sham. And the assurance that he'd always have a role at Tesla was now totally in question.
18:37 Speaker 06 I felt like a brick on the side of my head.
18:41 Speaker 06 It felt like I got hit on the side of my head with a brick. It was totally unexpected.
18:45 Speaker 03 And there was nothing he could do about it. The company that had sprung from Eberhard's desire to drive a better sports car was now completely out of his control.
18:52 Speaker 06 Keep in mind, who was on the board of directors? It was Elon, right? It was his brother. Okay, he's kind of aligned. It was Antonio Gracias, who was an old buddy of his and had made a lot of money off of previous investments with Elon.
19:03 Speaker 03 Musk controlled half the board. Eberhard says he asked for the board to vote again, this time with him present. The result? A demotion to the made up role of president of technology. No one reporting to him, no responsibilities. But even that wouldn't last very long.
19:18 Speaker 06 I was asked to resign. Well, for me, it was really sad. Yeah.
19:25 Speaker 03 His co-founder, Mark Tarpenning, left shortly after that. If Eberhard sounds a little muted, it's because he has to be. He sued Musk and Tesla, claiming libel, defamation, breach of contract, infliction of emotional distress, and failure to pay his wages, among other things. The lawsuit was settled out of court.
19:43 Speaker 06 I have a mutual nondisparagement agreement signed with Musk. And although he's been frequently violating that agreement over and over and over again, he's also the richest man in the world. And if he decides to crush me with lawsuits, I can't survive it.
19:58 Speaker 03 Tesla's founders were out. Musk had personally picked a new CEO. But really, by then, he was running the show.
20:05 Speaker 09 There was a new sheriff in town, no doubt about that. And he was quite drastic.
20:12 Speaker 03 But even that wasn't quite enough.
20:18 Speaker 03 Coming up, how Elon Musk made Tesla synonymous with Elon Musk.
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22:31 Speaker 03 Watch me take off!
22:35 Speaker 03 Tesla started delivering the Roadster in 2008. Late-night legend and famous car guy Jay Leno got to test drive one and he was an instant fan.
22:42 Speaker 13 You know, the thing that's fascinated me about this car is you've eliminated all the negatives of an electric car. A lot of times-
22:48 Speaker 03 Tesla proved it can make an EV that didn't feel like a punishment car. The Roadster cost as much as a Porsche 911, but it could keep up with one, too. And it didn't use gasoline.
22:59 Speaker 03 The founders were gone, but their dream had become a reality. And Tesla's engineering team was primed to work on the next challenge.
23:05 Speaker 09 And all the engineers, not just some of the engineers, all the engineers wanted to work on the cool new high-volume project.
23:14 Speaker 03 They knew exactly what it would be: a luxury sedan, the Model S. This was the plan going back to Eberhard and Tarponing's original business proposal. The team was ready to go, but their timing could not have been worse.
23:26 Speaker 14 The economy went into absolute freefall.
23:30 Speaker 03 That's Rachel Conrad, who was the only person on Tesla's PR team as the company faced the Great Recession.
23:36 Speaker 14 This was the peak Lehman Brothers liquidity freeze. Both General Motors and Chrysler declared bankruptcy. This was called Carmageddon, right? It was literally the worst downfall in the auto industry for a couple of generations.
23:54 Speaker 03 This is no exaggeration. Analysts at the time fully expected at least one of the big three American automakers to go out of business. At this point, Musk's handpicked replacement for Eberhard had already bounced. Another followed, but didn't last long either. Ultimately, Musk looked around and decided the crown belonged on his own head. He named himself CEO.
24:14 Speaker 14 In December of 2008, Tesla literally had one day of cash runway before they would have to enter the zone of insolvency and they would just flame out.
24:25 Speaker 03 It was a kingdom in trouble. Still, Tesla closed out the year with a holiday party.
24:30 Speaker 14 We could not rent a place. We didn't even have a caterer. We literally set up tables in the Tesla garage in Menlo Park.
24:40 Speaker 03 So there they were, sitting in some folding chairs in front of a hydraulic lift, drinking cheap wine and wondering if the company would last another day.
24:47 Speaker 14 And Elon stands at a table, literally, and says, guys...
24:55 Speaker 14 We just shifted in America from having a Texas oil man who was president to an environmentalist named Barack Obama, who has vowed not to just help the auto industry at large, but to specifically accelerate the shift to electrification. If you can't see the opportunity in that, you are not looking.
25:23 Speaker 03 This story about Musk feels like a freeze frame in a movie. The moment before the man is made. Well, before Musk becomes the richest person on the planet, before he even becomes famous, before he gets a Twitter account with tweets that move markets. In this moment, he's just trying to move people enough to stay in their jobs. For Conrad, who'd been on the job just a few months, it was a moment of clarity. Musk made it seem like anything was possible. He seemed brilliant. He had a vision. He was in control.
25:54 Speaker 14 And the way he said it was so fucking powerful that everyone in there, he had us all. Like, none of us were about to abandon ship at that moment.
26:07 Speaker 03 Musk kept Tesla afloat by injecting his own money in the company.
26:11 Speaker 04 My salary's minimum wage. So I'm a volunteer. Basically.
26:18 Speaker 03 He was even writing personal checks to cover payroll and charging work expenses to his credit card.
26:22 Speaker 14 The doors of Sand Hill Road, the epicenter of the global venture capital industry, were bolted shut. Okay? Nobody would give Elon a penny. Elon Musk, the most brilliant technologist who ever lived, right? The one who all VCs kiss his ass now. None of them would give him a penny.
26:44 Speaker 03 Around that same time, he found another audience, one that was willing to listen. He got a Twitter account.
26:52 Speaker 14 Almost immediately, because of his history with PayPal, et cetera, he had a bit of a following.
27:01 Speaker 03 He didn't tweet much at first. Updates about his companies, recommending books he liked.
27:06 Speaker 14 To be able to harness very, very low-cost channels to talk directly to consumers, policymakers, regulators, thought leaders, media, et cetera, is very high leverage.
27:19 Speaker 03 Twitter offered Musk something that couldn't be bought.
27:23 Speaker 05 I think Musk's insight was that he didn't just need to speak to media. He could also speak directly to his audience through social media.
27:32 Speaker 03 Here's Liz Lopato from The Verge again.
27:34 Speaker 05 And that creates a kind of direct relationship that all of the news interviews in the world can't create because Elon Musk reads his replies.
27:49 Speaker 03 Musk used Twitter like no other CEO at the time. He didn't consult his publicists to craft each tweet or hold focus groups on how to engage with his followers. He shot from the hip and said what was on his mind.
27:59 Speaker 05 There was a kind of unguardedness there that I think people are really related to. And it creates a kind of closeness. Musk very much became a star of the social media age by being available.
28:10 Speaker 03 So in public, Musk was cultivating a fan base for himself, lapping up all the credit for this ambitious new car company.
28:16 Speaker 13 The man behind the whole project is here, Elon Musk. Elon, come on in here. How you doing?
28:20 Speaker 15 So clearly you have many aspirations and an overwhelming drive to innovate.
28:25 Speaker 16 You are establishing a presence, certainly with Tesla Motors. This is an electric car company.
28:31 Speaker 03 He had proven to be just as persuasive in private. Musk got some of those reluctant investors to loosen up, and he got enough cash to prevent bankruptcy. The government also came through with a $500 billion loan to float Tesla through the collapse. And then the company raised even more money by going public in 2010. Musk had managed to save the company. And in 2012, Tesla released a new model.
28:52 Speaker 17 This is a historic automobile at a historic time.
28:56 Speaker 03 There was nothing else like the Model S on the market.
28:59 Speaker 18 Tesla definitely was making waves.
29:02 Speaker 03 Christina Ra joined Tesla's PR team to help launch the Model S.
29:05 Speaker 18 And so more and more coverage on Tesla, more and more curiosity. Much desire to get a peek under the hood. And in parallel, Elon was starting to use Twitter more and more.
29:17 Speaker 03 Musk's tweets became the thing to watch for all things Tesla. He'd make surprise announcements about new features or updates to the cars, sometimes in a reply to another user. It was chaotic, unpredictable, and captivating.
29:29 Speaker 18 There was definitely something that happened in those early years that has continued, I think, on to today, where his accessibility created more interest in the product.
29:42 Speaker 03 Plenty of cars have avid fanbases. Ford Mustangs, Jeep Wranglers, even the humble Volkswagen Beetle. But the people in the C-suite rarely get the same love their products get. Musk was different. He made Tesla feel like a movement, and he was the leader of that movement.
29:57 Speaker 18 I think there was a phenomenon happening where people learned more about Tesla and SpaceX, but really, this person behind them, whom they found fascinating and really attributed the products and the company's successes to. And they became sort of Elon believers.
30:15 Speaker 03 If Musk was the high priest prophesizing the future, then Twitter was where he took people to church.
30:21 Speaker 19 This guy's a real treat. And it took me a while to get him to come here. But he's a really interesting entrepreneur, very much a visionary, many people think, in space and in cars and in all kinds of things.
30:36 Speaker 17 Elon Musk.
30:39 Speaker 03 But everything worked towards cultivating a faith in him, Elon Musk. That same faith we heard about from Rachel Conrad. And his believers were everywhere. They were kids online forming Elon Musk fan groups. They were also deep-pocketed investors. Tesla had never made a profit as a company. But as Musk's believer count took off, so did Tesla's stock price.
31:01 Speaker 20 If you look at Q1, Tesla grew about 1,700 and something percent. And there's a lot of potential for this company to continue to grow and for the company itself to double and double and double again.
31:13 Speaker 21 Elon has been a big part in the investment in Tesla in the past, current, and future.
31:18 Speaker 03 This is Tesla investor Ross Gerber. And what he's saying is that his decision to invest in Tesla in 2014 was also a decision to invest in Musk.
31:26 Speaker 21 It paid off pretty quickly for us. And we were able to take profits off our original investment pretty rapidly.
31:34 Speaker 03 Over the years, Musk's followers were used to seeing a particular mix of his personality.
31:39 Speaker 08 90% of him was really inspirational and aspirational, and 10% was kind of a jerk.
31:45 Speaker 03 And when he went into jerk mode, you never knew what you were gonna get.
31:48 Speaker 08 His humor was a little juvenile for my taste, but I would say that about three dozen people I cover. And he, more than others, liked memes. He thought things were hysterical that I didn't think were hysterical.
32:00 Speaker 03 One time, a group of boys and their soccer coach had gotten trapped in a cave in Thailand. A rescue diver was leading efforts to save them, and Musk offered to build a submarine to help. The diver called it a PR stunt. He told Musk to, quote, "stick his submarine where it hurts." So Musk hopped on Twitter to clap back.
32:18 Speaker 22 You know what? Don't bother showing the video. We will make one of the mini-sub pod going all the way to cave 5. No problemo. Sorry, pedo guy. You really did ask for it. By the way, I'm not actually Elon Musk. I'm an AI reading his tweets.
32:32 Speaker 03 Did the CEO of a company just flippantly call a man a pedophile? When another user pointed this out to him, Musk doubled down.
32:40 Speaker 22 Bet your signed dollar it's true.
32:42 Speaker 03 The diver sued him for defamation, but Musk won the lawsuit. Musk also got in trouble for his tweets about Tesla. He once sent a series of coy but confident-sounding tweets about taking the company private. The SEC was not having it. It charged him with securities fraud for essentially lying and misleading his shareholders. So his Twitter feed was a mix, his special recipe of the provocative and unfiltered.
33:05 Speaker 08 What was problematic for me is that he started to become sort of high on his own supply.
33:10 Speaker 03 For Swisher and many others, his tweets drifted more and more into topics wholly unrelated to cars or space or tech. The meanness started to take over. He started sharing conspiracy theories, promoting anti-trans tropes and cozying up to far-right-wing personalities. If any other CEO did this stuff, they'd be strapped to a rocket and fired into the sun. But a lot of his fans have been willing to overlook this stuff because even if he was an asshole, he was still an aspirational asshole. His companies were changing the world. He was literally the richest person in the world. His brand, and by extension Tesla's brand, was still pretty solid.
33:47 Speaker 05 I think the Twitter acquisition was actually a really big turning point in how people viewed Elon Musk.
33:52 Speaker 03 Here's Liz Lopato again.
33:54 Speaker 05 Sure, he was attention-seeking, and sure, he occasionally said weird stuff in public. But to discover his flaws as a businessman, you actually needed to be paying pretty close attention to what was going on at Tesla.
34:05 Speaker 03 But buying Twitter read to just about everyone as a pretty massive mistake. The purchase itself was a spectacular business blunder. Musk offered to buy the company for way more than it was worth, tried to back out, and then was basically forced by a court to finish the deal.
34:20 Speaker 05 And then immediately like alienated a large percentage of the advertisers and drove a bunch of users away and like sort of drove the thing into the ground.
34:30 Speaker 03 Twitter was bleeding value. This humiliation was being broadcast everywhere, including on the platform that helped build his fandom, the one he now owned.
34:39 Speaker 05 Those were not good business decisions, that these things were being made impulsively. These ideas were not necessarily good, but there was no one around him to say no to him.
34:51 Speaker 03 It was complete chaos, and it was Musk's fault. This was almost a funhouse mirror image of what happened after the Tesla founder Red Wedding went down. Musk led a coup that essentially offed the founders, and then he ably steered the company through the financial collapse. He took a tiny startup and made it into a real car brand. He built his own brand on doing this kind of thing. Now everyone was taking a hard look at the legend of Elon Musk.
35:17 Speaker 08 The rich liberals are like, what the fuck am I giving this guy money for? I have dozens of my friends are like, I want to get rid of my Tesla.
35:23 Speaker 21 Ever since he bought Twitter, he's been obsessed with it. And it hasn't been good for him.
35:30 Speaker 03 Tesla investor Ross Gerber again.
35:33 Speaker 21 And so what's happened over the last six months to a year, which has been really distressing to me, is that the public opinion, at least in my area of the world, has changed to decidedly negative about Elon.
35:46 Speaker 03 And that hasn't been good for Tesla. There's this closely watched poll that Axios puts out every year. It ranks the reputations of 100 different companies. Tesla fell 50 spots from last year, an enormous drop. Why? People side-eye the company's character, culture, and ethics. Now, this poll doesn't tell us why people are suddenly questioning Tesla, but not much has changed with the cars. Musk had worked hard to make Tesla nearly synonymous with himself. He created structures that helped him seize power and keep it. He built the company's brand by harnessing his own on social media. And all that, it worked for Tesla, until it didn't. The brand has taken a hit. Musk has become a polarizing figure in a way he never was before.
36:31 Speaker 03 The shareholders have gotten restless. This might have been a potential turning point. A moment where he reassessed how his public persona played into the future of Tesla.
36:40 Speaker 23 You know, do your tweets hurt the company?
36:44 Speaker 04 There's a scene in The Princess Bride. Great movie.
36:48 Speaker 23 Great movie.
36:50 Speaker 04 Where he confronts the person who killed his father. And he says, "Offer me money. Offer me power. I don't care."
37:02 Speaker 03 But the reality is, he might have to care. At least a little bit. Musk did hire someone else to serve as the CEO of Twitter. Perhaps a nod to his Tesla shareholders who have begged for a little more of his attention. But will he curb his toxic brand of tweeting?
37:17 Speaker 04 So I've got 127 million followers. It continues to grow very rapidly. That suggests that I'm, you know, reasonably popular. I might not be popular by some people, but for the vast majority of people, my follower count speaks for itself. I think Twitter is actually incredibly powerful tool for driving demand for Tesla.
37:44 Speaker 03 Maybe, maybe not. But Musk knows about control. He's learned how to hold on to a company. So even if his personal brand is now hurting Tesla's, it's not clear who could stop him.
38:00 Speaker 03 Next week, we're going to take a look at Tesla's competition. Finally, other automakers are starting to realize Tesla's here. We need to get here also, and they are. And we're going to find out who's making the best electric vehicles right now.
38:12 Speaker 24 You are now competing with luxury brands like Volvo, Mercedes, BMW.
38:18 Speaker 25 Teslas used to look cool, and now they don't. And they've become the Uber car of the city.
38:25 Speaker 03 Land of the Giants: The Tesla Shock Wave is produced by the Vox Media Podcast Network in partnership with our colleagues at The Verge. This episode included clips from CNBC, CNN, Jay Leno's Garage, Vator TV, Wired Science, The Wall Street Journal, and Bloomberg. This episode was produced by Charlotte Silver. Zach Mack is our showrunner and senior producer. Jolie Myers is our editor. Sarah Craig is our fact checker. Brandon McFarlane mixed and scored this episode. Andy Hawkins is transportation editor at The Verge. Nishat Kurwa is our executive producer. Tamara Warren is our co-host. And I'm Patrick George. If you liked this episode, give us a follow and tell a friend. And follow us to hear our next episode when it drops.
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