Dissecting Elon Musk’s Hostile Takeover with Anne Applebaum, Eoin Higgins & Ryan Mac

Elon Musk and a band of young DOGE engineers are taking control of key government infrastructure. The scale and speed with which they’re hijacking control of the federal government is shocking, and even President Donald Trump appears not to know all that Musk is doing. In order to analyze what’s actually happening and understand how and why other tech billionaires are also cozying up to Trump, we’re joined by Anne Applebaum, Eoin Higgins & Ryan Mac. Applebaum is a staff writer for The Atlantic, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, and author of the recently released Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run The World. Higgins is a reporter for the IT Brew and author of Owned: How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left. And Mac covers corporate accountability across the global technology industry for the New York Times, and he is the co-author of Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter. This episode was recorded on Monday February 3rd. Questions? Comments? Email us at [email protected] or find us on Instagram and TikTok @onwithkaraswisher Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:12Kara Swisher?

  Hi, everyone. From New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is On with Kara Swisher, and I'm Kara Swisher. We're currently in the middle of a hostile takeover of the federal government orchestrated by Elon Musk. He's bringing his Twitter destruction playbook to the US government, and unfortunately, much of the mainstream media is covering it with a big shrug, as if it's just another Tuesday. It is not, and it's really important that the media step up and really understand what's happening in each of these federal agencies, which are being run roughshod over by Elon Musk and his team at Doge. So I've gathered three of the sharpest journalists I know to begin unpacking this unprecedented government takeover, which is still unfolding, as I said.

• 0:55Kara Swisher?

  Anne Applebaum is a staff writer at The Atlantic and a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian. Her latest book is Autocracy, Inc: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World. Owen Higgins is a reporter with IT Brew who covers cybersecurity, IT jobs, and government tech. He's just published a book called Owned: How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left. And Ryan Mack is a New York Times reporter who covers corporate accountability across the global technology industry. His book is Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter. And it's required reading if you want to understand what Musk is doing to the federal government right now, so stick around.

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• 3:48Kara Swisher?

  Anne, Owen, Ryan, thanks for coming on ON.

• 3:50Speaker 04

  Thanks for having us. Thank you. Thanks, Kara.

• 3:53Kara Swisher?

  Okay, so it's obviously a lot of news happening. This weekend was kind of crazy, so let's get to it. On Friday, after Elon Musk began to lock career staff out of the Office of Personal Management out of the system, I posted, "This is a hostile takeover of the federal government by a private citizen of unlimited means with no restrictions and no transparency. Welcome to the deep state." I think I was underselling it. Since then, his band of young engineers and acolytes have done the same to the General Services Administration, GSA, taking control of payment systems at the Treasury Department or threatening death to the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID. Just the beginning, I assume. I'd love your top line assessment so far and what's next. Ryan, then Anne, then Owen.

• 4:38Speaker 04

  I'm going to talk my my book up a little bit here.

• 4:41Kara Swisher?

  Okay.

• 4:41Speaker 04

  Literally figuratively, but yeah, I mean, we've seen this playbook before. This is what he did with the Twitter takeover. And he is implementing that playbook now with the federal government. He's coming in with kind of a

• 4:57Speaker 04

  low knowledge background of how these things work, but a high confidence in that he can be the expert or is the expert in a lot of these things. He's the expert cutter. He's someone who prioritizes engineering about everything. And he's deploying those tactics now across, you know, OPM or GSA or any three letter agency. So, um, yeah, that's kind of my top one.

• 5:20Kara Swisher?

  All right, Anne.

• 5:21Speaker 05

  I would describe it as a hostile ideological takeover of the US government. He has a different view of the world. He's not an American patriot. He doesn't believe in the rule of law. He doesn't believe in the Constitution. He's attempting to impose another very different ideology on how the government works. I hate to say it with my, I won't tout my books, but my background in Soviet history, the first thing I thought of was the way that Stalin took over the Soviet Communist Party was by controlling personnel famously. Personnel management, um, management of the of the cadres. This is a famous way by which you take over and transform a political institution or party

• 6:04Speaker 05

  to make it do what you want and to change what it was doing before. And that's what this looks like to me.

• 6:09Kara Swisher?

  Owen?

• 6:10Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, I think that the lack of accountability here is also a large part of the problem. That's probably my main takeaway. I've spoken with a couple of people in different departments of the federal government, and they're all kind of describing a situation where there's been so many people cut or people or either their job's been cut or they're cut out of the decision making process that now we're in a situation where nobody really knows like what's going on and how that is all going to play out. I think my my two biggest fears here are one that they're going to be, I've heard from a couple of people in different agencies that there are AI recording.

• 6:57Speaker 06

  Software that's being used for just every meeting that they're having. Uh, that's one. And then two, I mean, I'm afraid not only with that, but just in general, with a lot of this private, personal information, whether it's, you know, individuals or, uh, sensitive information within any of these agencies that Musk is going to do something maybe like the Twitter files and hand it over to a friendly journalist or hand over some kind of curated amount of this information and, uh, push out public, some public information that should be public, sure, but then I'm, I'm more afraid that there'll be information that he will kind of curate and put out there to attack his political enemies.

• 7:34Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, that works so well with the Twitter files.

• 7:36Speaker 06

  Right, right.

• 7:37Kara Swisher?

  Wasn't that was a little bit of an egg on his face. So let's start with the OPM. And Ryan, why don't you address this, which sent an email to all federal employees, offering them the generous, possibly illegal exit package if they resign. And all the hallmarks of Elon's, as you said, Twitter tactics, right down to the subject line, which read fork in the road. I think he purposely did that to say it was me. Um, on top of that, government tech workers have been called in the meetings and forced to explain their coding to very young Doge people, uh, with Gmail addresses who won't even identify themselves. They've done the same with GSA, staffing it with Musk loyalists like Steve Davis and his wife, Nicole Hollander, um, who's, who don't seem to have any expertise in this, as you said. Ryan, you wrote the book about Elon's Twitter takeover. Um, explain the

• 8:22Kara Swisher?

  parallels.

• 8:23Speaker 04

  Yeah. So we'll start with that email. Um, fork in the road was an email he sent during the Twitter takeover. He offered these sort of buyout packages to employees. Basically, you take this, uh, you can leave with a couple of months' pay, no questions asked. But if you don't take this package, you are opting in to become a quote unquote extremely hardcore employee. You are, you know, working for me around the clock. We're going to build some great things and we're going to transform this company. And it was kind of a very pivotal moment in the Twitter takeover. You know, a couple of weeks after he had finalized his deal to buy the company, where he was kind of, you know, drawing a line in the sand and saying, you know,

• 9:05Speaker 04

  we're going to separate the people that want to be here from the people that are just hanging on. And so, you know, he's he's sent that same email to federal employees last week. The subject line is is the same, although there was one key characteristic in that. With Twitter, he made people opt in to staying, which caused a lot of problems. You know, you have to directly say, you know, you want to stay here and work with me. In this case, with federal employees, you have to opt in to resigning essentially. And there's a lot of questions over whether that's legal, whether he has the authority to do that, whether there is even funding to to to provide people with these kinds of, I guess they're

• 9:45Speaker 04

  delayed resignations. But, you know, the hallmarks are all there and we can see the the the parallels.

• 9:51Kara Swisher?

  So obviously, the government's a different creature and their argument is that they're trying to make the government more like the private sector, essentially. That's their biggest argument, or that brings Silicon Valley management style to it. But what it feels a little bit like, Anne, is Eastern European feel to it. Doge is getting access to incredibly sensitive information, including the Treasury Department's payment system. That includes information on government contractors that are competing with Elon's companies, as well as sensitive data about people's finances. It caused the department's top career official to resign. Talk about the obvious conflicts of interest here, Anne. Does it compare to some of the kleptocracies and governments you saw in Eastern Europe after the fall of the Iron Curtain? What does this portend in that regard?

• 10:35Speaker 05

  Yeah, so to be clear, there is no precedent in American history for a private businessman having this kind of influence over the very intimate elements of of of the US government. Of course, rich people have always been influential before, sometimes very influential. They've they've shaped legislation, they've influenced presidents and so on. But to have a private businessman who has no government position, who has not been confirmed by Congress, who the people who are working for him are not government employees, or it's unclear what their statuses, they don't Have any right to these this information. They don't have security clearances. This breaks so many lines of illegality that, as I said, it looks much more like a hostile takeover by an outside power.

• 11:20Speaker 05

  I mean, so this is, these are people trying to substitute their version of reality or their version of how the world should work on top of government officials whose jobs, whose salaries, whose programs, who, you know, have all been approved by elected US government officials.

• 11:39Kara Swisher?

  Right, right. In this, in this case, he's saying that they have permission from the president. He noted that several times.

• 11:45Speaker 05

  Permission from the president is completely meaningless.

• 11:47Kara Swisher?

  Meaningless, exactly. But I'm noting that he's saying that.

• 11:49Speaker 05

  Congress has control over spending. Congress allocated the money for these programs. This is, you know, this is, this is illegal at a new level. And you're right, in that sense, it looks much more like, as I said, you know, the Communist Party taking over the Polish state in 1944, 1945. It's a, it's imposing a different set of rules, a different, literally a different ideology, you know, a belief that one person gets to decide everything, that this isn't a, you know, that, that voting doesn't matter, Congress doesn't matter, the constitution doesn't matter, and the legal system doesn't matter.

• 12:23Kara Swisher?

  Right. So Doge is already getting dogged by reports that it was set up to skirt around government transparency laws. For example, they're apparently using Signal to communicate. Owen, in your book Owned, you wrote about the Twitter files, which was sold as an exercise in free speech and transparency. In reality, Elon controlled access to all the data, as you noticed, and doled out what might have been cherry picked files to writers he chose. He obviously did. Talk about that process and what it says about Elon's supposed commitment to transparency, because he kind of just, he gave it to friendlies, who then wrote what he wanted and twisted a lot of what was in there. Several times, there were meetings where management was dealing with something and they said, can you believe management dealt with this, which is what the job of management was, in my opinion.

• 13:08Kara Swisher?

  But not that I particularly trust anybody in Silicon Valley, but it seemed a little cooked.

• 13:13Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, I think that with the Twitter files, I mean, here you had Musk coming in, um, he took a company that was relatively successful and he instituted all of these changes. Um, as, as Ryan was saying, you know, cutting staff, uh, slashing the workforce. There was some bad press around that, but he also wanted to kind of get back ideologically at the, this kind of idea of the liberal, uh, both the deep, deep censorship state that he thought existed in the, in the federal government and the elements of Twitter that he believed were kind of going along with this and making things too quote unquote woke. So he found, uh, Matt Taibbi, he was recommended, uh, Matt Taibbi by, uh, David Sacks, a fellow billionaire,

• 13:56Speaker 06

  reached out to him, said, hey, you know, you can have access to some of these files. Uh, Taibbi went in, uh, the, from, from what we understand, this was, I mean, heavily curated. He didn't have access to everything. It only went up until, you know, until, uh, Musk took over. Um, and what, what, what I think the problem is, and I think that this is what Bodes kind of ill here for how he's going to manage the so-called Department of Governmental Efficiency and whatever he does with the federal government is that he, he makes a lot of noise about being committed to free speech and being committed to all of these, you know, lofty ideologies. But in reality, Musk really only cares about one thing, which is himself and his material profit. And so when it comes to something like the Twitter files, he's putting out this, um, all

• 14:40Speaker 06

  this information because it pushes forward.

• 14:42Kara Swisher?

  To benefit himself.

• 14:43Speaker 06

  To benefit himself and to push forward an ideological vision that he believes is going to then wrap around and benefit himself again. So with, with, with him having access to all this information and all of this, uh, data, all of this.

• 14:56Kara Swisher?

  Who knows, who knows?

• 14:57Speaker 06

  Who knows what he'll pick.

• 14:58Kara Swisher?

  Yeah. I always say every accusation these people make is a confession most of the time. But so Ryan, senior officials from the U S Agency for National Development were placed on leave after they tried to block members of Doge from accessing USAID's security system and personnel files. Earlier this weekend, according to the Washington Post, a group of about eight Doge officials entered the USAID building Saturday and demanded access to every door and floor, despite only a few of them having security clearance, according to Senate Democratic staffer who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the incident when USAID. USAID personnel attempted to block access to some areas Doge officials threatened to call federal marshals, the aide said. The Doge officials are eventually given access to, quote, "secure spaces," including the security office. Elon responded to the showdown

• 15:40Kara Swisher?

  between Doge and USAID officials in a tweet storm against USAID, included the post on exit, said, "USAID is a criminal organization, time for it to die." Another one accused it of funding bioweapon research, including COVID-19, that killed millions of people. Recording this on Monday, and Trump Musk now say they're in the process of shutting down the agency. There's zero proof for anything he's tweeting, which is sort of just another Tuesday for Elon Musk. But explain what he does here and what's the tactic.

• 16:06Speaker 04

  The tactic here is, you know, he needs to create enemies. And he is someone who views himself as a hero, you know, a hero of his own making, and a hero with millions of followers around the world. And he needs to constantly create opposition to that. And so when you see him tweet things like such and such is evil, or such and such is a criminal organization, which he's done-

• 16:31Kara Swisher?

  Or say someone's heart is seething with hate. That's me. But go ahead, keep going.

• 16:35Speaker 04

  Kara Swisher is evil, yeah.

• 16:36Kara Swisher?

  No, I'm not evil. Yoel Roth is evil. So is USAID. My heart is seething with hate.

• 16:41Speaker 04

  You know, it's hard to keep track. But, you know, he's done this with former Twitter executives when he denied their golden parachutes, when, you know, he fired them from the company for cause. You know, this, this language repeats itself over and over again. It's a, you know, us versus them kind of tactic. He needs to be able to justify what he's doing and why he's doing it. And the simple, you know, kind of baseline answer to that all is, you know, everyone against Elon is evil.

• 17:08Kara Swisher?

  Is it a tactic, or does he actually believe it, from your perspective, having interviewed a lot of people?

• 17:13Speaker 04

  You know, I think-

• 17:14Kara Swisher?

  I think he believes it.

• 17:15Speaker 04

  I think he believes it as well. And he kind of gets lost in his own sauce. You know, he, he tweets it into existence, in a way. You know, we talk about these reality distortion fields with these, you know, supposed great men that run these tech companies, people like, you know, Steve Jobs, for example, was talked about having a reality distortion field. In some ways, you know, this is Elon's reality distortion field. He tweets something into existence, and he believes it. And he gets millions of people around the world to believe it as well.

• 17:48Kara Swisher?

  We'll be back in a minute.

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• 20:54Kara Swisher?

  So, Anne, you've spent your career reporting on Eastern Europe and the fall of communism. Talk about the significance of USAID in that region, where it's seen as a lifeline for many formerly Soviet states. Because we did our own thing going in there and helping. And what's the interest of malevolent foreign players like Russia and China in this situation? Because we've spent enough time trying to burnish our reputation through USAID, which was started by John Kennedy, for people who don't know.

• 21:19Speaker 05

  Yeah, let me actually take a step back and say that it looks to me like what he's doing isn't just about himself and his power, although, of course, it is in addition about that. But there is a pattern to what he attacks, and particularly what he's doing in the last few days. He's attacked USAID. He's attacked the National Department for Democracy. You know, this goes along with his support for the German far-right, for the British far-right. He's attacking organizations and institutions that talk about and promote democracy. And talk about, and maybe democracy is even the wrong word here. They promote the rule of law. They promote checks and balances. They promote rights, the idea of rights. They promote the idea of justice.

• 22:01Speaker 05

  These are really fundamental elements of, you know, of what the United States has been, you know, at least since 1945, probably, you could, you could, you could make the argument for the last 100 years. These are the elements of our foreign policy, of our national definition. This is who we are. You know, if you go to Moldova, you know, if you go to Indonesia, I mean, if you go anywhere in the world, you'll find people who've been trained by the USAID or trained by other US programs. They've been taught what is an independent judiciary, you know, how is the legal system supposed to work? This has been a package of ideas we've been promoting for many decades. And Musk's attack on these institutions and these organizations, I would

• 22:44Speaker 05

  say, again, this has an ideological edge. You know, these are, these are the institutions that, that Musk and the tech billionaires and others around him need to eliminate and get rid of if they are to enjoy absolute power and if they're to, and if they're to help create a different kind of political system. I don't know that they're going to succeed in creating a different kind of political system, but if that's what they were trying to do, this is what they would do. They would attack those institutions.

• 23:11Kara Swisher?

  Owen, you've written that tech leaders often try to deceive the public by presenting their beliefs as general libertarianism. But in fact, their political project is best described, I think, as techno authoritarianism. Talk about what you mean by techno authoritarianism and how that plays out, following what Anne was saying.

• 23:27Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, I think that the libertarianism comes from this desire, I think, on their part, to see themselves as the result of a meritocracy and to see their, the development of their businesses and the, and the increase in their wealth as the result of their work and how well they've done in Silicon Valley and how, you know, they're like, they are driving the world economy. But that leaves out an important aspect to this, which is that their fame and, or their fortunes and their businesses have really been propelled by government spending, government investment and government subsidization. And at some

• 24:07Speaker 06

  point down the line, they decided that that was good for them, but not good for anyone else. They didn't want their money going to, to other people, you know, whether it's, you know, foreign or domestic. And the, but the net result of this has been, you know, a feeling, I think, on the part of these tech leaders that

• 24:30Speaker 06

  That there's somewhat of like an unfairness

• 24:33Kara Swisher?

  Mm hmm.

• 24:33Speaker 06

  And how they're being treated,

• 24:34Kara Swisher?

  Yes.

• 24:34Speaker 06

  Particularly by elements of the government, particularly by Democrats.

• 24:39Kara Swisher?

  Sure, sure. They are the world's greatest victims. That's for sure.

• 24:43Speaker 06

  Right, yeah. But they see themselves as that. And I think that then, you know, you see them kind of taking this, throwing the spaghetti against the wall approach to further grievances for how they feel like, you know, this is the fault of government investment in woke or this is the fault of government investment in USAID, as Amos said, or any number of government spending programs that don't directly benefit. The tech companies then become evil and bad and, you know, something to attack.

• 25:12Kara Swisher?

  Yeah.

• 25:13Speaker 06

  And they become the victims of this, as you're saying.

• 25:16Speaker 06

  And that's, again, like, still somewhat par for the course for any industry. The problem is that once you start to control the discourse through social media and through their work on kind of subverting media, as I write about in the book, then it starts to become a problem for more of us than just, you know,

• 25:38Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 25:38Speaker 06

  the industry and the regulators. And then you get to the point, I think, where you have this kind of techno authoritarianism ideology that kind of builds out of that and then starts to, like, it's like a perpetual motion machine. It just adds to itself and radicalizes.

• 25:53Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So as I'm going to branch out from Elon, because he's not alone among tech types. He's just the most irritating and embracing Trump. Larry Ellison, Mark Andreessen, the OG Peter Thiel are in that group. There's also a group of techsios that didn't necessarily endorse Trump nor like him, but has made a show of bending the knee to Trump after he won. That includes people like Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg, who apparently now do like him when they didn't before. Bill Gates, though, donated $50 million to former Vice President Harris's campaigns. And he recently said of Silicon Valley, "The fact that now there is a significant right of center group is a surprise to me." It's not a surprise to me because since I never thought they had any opinions on anything except themselves, which sort of dovetails into the current Republican Party.

• 26:37Kara Swisher?

  But is Tex's embrace of Trump surprising? Ryan, then Anne, then Owen.

• 26:42Speaker 04

  I don't think so. I mean, these guys, their, their best interests are their business. It, it, you know, it doesn't matter what political party is in power. It's, they're going to do what's best for their business. That's always been the guiding light for Elon. You know, if you look back at his relationship with Barack Obama, for example, there were very favorable policies to SpaceX and Tesla under Obama. So he had this great relationship with the Obama White House. And you see that start to shift with Biden, you know, when he doesn't get invited to the EV summit. You know, that was obviously bad for his business and he turns. These guys are all similar, you know, it's, it's, I don't think it's a surprise to me.

• 27:22Speaker 04

  And I was actually surprised by that Bill Gates quote, you know, it's, these guys aren't exactly hiding it by any means.

• 27:28Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, he asked me that and I'm like, what are you talking about? Like, they're like this all that there's such a bunch of fucking babies. Anne?

• 27:34Speaker 05

  I, I think I am surprised and given that all of these people, one way or the other, have been the beneficiaries, as you've just said, of US government subsidies.

• 27:44Kara Swisher?

  Yes.

• 27:45Speaker 05

  In some cases of excellent American education. They're workers, the people have money, the people who work for them are, are educated in the United States. They're beneficiaries of the, of the political culture and the, and the economic freedom that we have in the United States. Loans, money, you know, capital markets, you know, investment. I mean, all those things, you know, it's not an accident that those companies were created in the US in, you know, at, at a particular moment in a, in a time and place. And what surprises me is the revelation of their lack of patriotism. You know, that they don't value the, the systems that created them, that they are turning on their own political system, that they've become entranced by, I mean, I'm not sure what we're calling it yet.

• 28:29Speaker 05

  Techno authoritarianism is, is good enough, you know, neo monarchy, you know, not, maybe that, maybe that's a, that's a good system too. I mean, I, I feel like we're just at the beginning of understanding this. Maybe we don't have the right words yet, but they are turning away from the political system that created them, that nurtured them, that helped them and that, that, that, that gave them the possibilities in order to create something else. I, I, I really can't stress enough, I see this as, you know, I'm not saying they will succeed, but it's pretty clear to me that they're trying to break and change the political system that we have and, and lead us to something else. And yes, I'm surprised by it.

• 29:07Kara Swisher?

  Okay, Owen?

• 29:09Speaker 06

  I mean, I think it depends on who you're talking about. I probably tend more toward Ryan's interpretation here that these guys are mostly just interested in their bottom line, and that's the thing that kind of motivates them. But I do think that it's worth noting that while people in business may tilt right or left for whichever reason, and that may be somewhat fluid when it comes to someone like Zuckerberg, certainly Elon was very happy to flip back and forth politically from the right to the left. Someone like Peter Thiel has had a far-right

• 29:47Kara Swisher?

  Yes.

• 29:48Speaker 06

  political project for decades. He has not made a secret of it, and Trump, in many ways, may be a more vulgar expression of what Thiel believes in. But the far-right ideology that is behind Trump is not something that is, I think, alien to Thiel.

• 30:11Kara Swisher?

  Right.

• 30:12Speaker 06

  And Mark Andreessen, for over 10 years, has been headed in this direction absolutely. pretty consistently. So I do think that

• 30:20Kara Swisher?

  Twenty, I'll tell you, 20 years, if you ever have breakfast with him.

• 30:23Speaker 06

  Yeah, I guess what I'm saying is that if you're looking at tech people, especially like Musk and Zuckerberg, you're going to see people who have the kind of flexible and fluid ideology, depending on who's in power, because that's who can help them immediately. That's who can keep funneling the government dollars toward them. While someone like Thiel or Andreessen is more

• 30:49Kara Swisher?

  Hardcore.

• 30:51Speaker 06

  Hardcore. And I would also say that Bezos making the decision to not have The Washington Post indoors in the presidential election, a week or two before voting, I think that's an interesting point, because I think Bezos is also ideologically flexible in the same way that these guys are. But he made a very clear calculation that If he did this, he wasn't going to face any consequences

• 31:19Kara Swisher?

  Mm hmm.

• 31:19Speaker 06

  Right from the Democrats.

• 31:21Kara Swisher?

  Right.

• 31:22Speaker 06

  But that if he didn't do this and Trump did win, he might face consequences.

• 31:26Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 31:27Speaker 06

  And when you have, when there are billions and billions of dollars in uh, public contracts for Amazon Web Services, that's the kind of thing that you want to make sure that, that, that all.

• 31:37Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, he didn't mind going against them before, though. I think it was, it's a life change he's going through. And honestly, he was one of the more conservative ones. He's from Wall Street. And people forget that Jeff was an adult from Wall Street when he started. So he had much more conservative personality. So one of the, the first, uh, first group that you're talking to Andreessen and also Elon and Peter Thiel, to an extent have complained about D E I wokeness, what they see as censorship. They also, as you said, financial reasons for backing a candidate who promises tax cuts and thinks they can get a more hands off approach to regulation on everything from A I uh, and crypto to antitrust. Um, I, I just briefly, I'd like you to talk about the culture war issues versus deregulation and the different roles that play to motivating them to get behind MAGA.

• 32:21Kara Swisher?

  And why don't you start? What do you think their, their biggest issue is? Personally, I think it's self-interest always to the, to their core. And, and typically a very problematic childhood. I don't know what else to say, or just a, a personality development that is, that is, um, broken in some fashion.

• 32:41Speaker 05

  Yeah. I mean, you know, you know, these guys better than me, so I'll, I'll, I'll go with what you think.

• 32:46Kara Swisher?

  Well, I do call Mark Andreessen baby Huey, but, and I've thought that for 20 years, but go ahead.

• 32:51Speaker 05

  It's always seemed to me that, you know, there is a real issue around, um, what we're calling woke and some of the arguments inside the Democratic Party that weren't useful, or the some forms of identity politics that weren't useful. But it seemed to me that these guys were willing to use, uh, propaganda to create and, and blow up and enlarge that culture war for their own purposes. Um, you know, they, they looked for issues that bothered Americans or that they could exaggerate or play up um, in order to divide Americans in a way that was advantageous. For Trump and for them, and they used it in that sense. And what they actually believe, I really have no idea.

• 33:30Kara Swisher?

  Yeah. Oh, and you write about this in the book, this attention to the media. They've been very interested in the media forever, like very, and manipulating it. Mark was one of the most egregious manipulators of media over the years. Such enormous gossip for people who don't know and drops dimes on everybody, right and left, for his own business interests. But they do understand the power of that. So let's get to the group of tech, second tech leaders. They didn't donate to the campaign. They've been openly trying to curry favor with him ever since. Tim Cook is probably the only CEO in the bunch who already had a relationship with Trump. Ryan, many of these titans of industry personally donated to his inauguration, appeared on the dais as props, I think, visited him at Mar-a-Lago, fawned over him on social media.

• 34:14Kara Swisher?

  Mark Zuckerberg just settled a spurious lawsuit, 25 million to get inside the tent. What is the role here of these larger billionaires? What do you sense has shifted here?

• 34:27Speaker 04

  I think we, you know, I've been comparing it a lot to what happened in 2016, 2017. You know, we get that famous Trump Tower meeting where you have all those leaders making, you know, making those faces in those photos, sitting around the table with Trump and Peter Thiel and just looking miserable. And, you know, I don't think they got anything out of that. You know, they were the face of the resistance for a couple of months and then they kind of faded and, you know, they went back to business as usual. And I think that tactic didn't work well for them in the past.

• 35:02Kara Swisher?

  Well, they weren't that resistant. They were there and they got their tax breaks and they got their repatriated money. And I happen to break that story. So they were embarrassed to say they were there to me.

• 35:13Speaker 04

  You also had Sergey Brin at SFO protesting the Muslim ban. And you had Sundar holding a very kind of energetic, all hands at Google, you know, saying, we're not going to support these immigration policies. We stand with you, our fellow employees. And you fast forward eight years later and Sundar is standing right behind Trump, you know, next to Bezos and Elon Musk.

• 35:39Kara Swisher?

  Yeah.

• 35:39Speaker 04

  You have Sergey a little bit further in the back.

• 35:42Kara Swisher?

  Yeah.

• 35:42Speaker 04

  In one of the back rows next to Vivek Ramaswamy.

• 35:44Kara Swisher?

  Yes.

• 35:45Speaker 04

  This is a guy who said, you know.

• 35:46Kara Swisher?

  You notice who was in the back rows, though. They were trying to be in the back rows.

• 35:49Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 35:50Kara Swisher?

  One of them called me the single greatest engineering feat of all time to be in the back row. Anyway, I was like, courage, you're so courageous. Anyway, so.

• 35:58Speaker 04

  And so, I don't know, it's as simple as currying a favor. It's as simple as, you know, if you, if I show up here at this inauguration, maybe the Trump administration won't pursue me and my companies. And I don't think it's any more complicated than that.

• 36:11Kara Swisher?

  All right. And as you said, the CEOs are doing their job, look after shareholders. Even if being obsequious to Trump is good for business in the short term, in the long run, it's not going to be good for businesses because these are, this is a kleptocracy that is being built. And, you know, people are throwing around the word oligarch quite a lot. What happens here in these instances when people are sort of doing, closing lawsuits that they never would have done, vying for proximity, which was one thing, looking like props like they did at the inauguration?

• 36:46Speaker 05

  So you are absolutely right. This, historically and in other countries that you can look at around the world, this doesn't end well. When you no longer have a political system where there's separation between business and politics, at least, you know, at least formally, where you create the idea that people who are close to the leader prosper and people who are not close to the leader do not, then sooner or later, you will also get a system where the leader begins to pick winners. So, you know, what happened when Putin took over in Russia? He got rid of the first group of oligarchs who were there at the time, and he replaced them with his own oligarchs. What happened in Viktor Orban's Hungary?

• 37:29Speaker 05

  He's gotten rid of almost every independent businessman at a high level that exists, and he's replaced them with, I mean, in some cases, literally, you know, his, his, his family and people who are close to him. So the temptation for. An autocratic leader to use that power to decide who prospers and who doesn't is going to be very, very strong. And so it is a pretty profound mistake that they are making by demonstrating this kind of strange fealty. You know, it's not, it's not going to be advantageous to them in the long term and not going to be advantageous to the American economy. I mean, the Hungarian economy is now, depending on how you count, is the second or third poorest in Europe.

• 38:10Speaker 05

  Russia is now, you know, has been led down this path to destruction and disaster and more. You know, these are, these are not political systems that end well for, for business.

• 38:21Kara Swisher?

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• 40:47Kara Swisher?

  So, oh, and after January 6th, all the major platforms kicked Trump off. Apple, Google, Amazon basically killed Parler after its CEO said on my New York Times podcast, "Sway, I don't feel responsible for any of this and neither should the platform." That was not a good interview for him. But Parler is back under new ownership and Trump is obviously back on all the platforms. What happens if it seems like Trump incites violence again? Can you imagine any of these CEOs doing anything about it?

• 41:13Speaker 06

  No. I think we're so far beyond any kind of normal consequences at this point for Trump, especially from the private sector, that it is hard for me to see like what it would take for them to take action. I mean, I do think that if it became politically unpalatable and impossible and they were seeing, you know, major, a major threat to their bottom line, they might do something to take him off the platforms for inciting violence or any kind of, I mean, basically my mind

• 41:55Speaker 06

  just went to a bunch of even worse things that I, you know, won't, won't put out there. But, you know, anything that he could possibly do is very hard to see. Them taking that action. Also, I think it's important to remember that when they took that action, it was after the election was certified that was going to mean that he wasn't going to be the president in two weeks.

• 42:16Kara Swisher?

  Right, right, correct.

• 42:17Speaker 06

  He was a two-week lame duck. I mean, this wasn't some act of great courage against someone in a lot of power. You know, them to do something like this now, why would they do that? The consequences could be, could be quite effective. And I, I just want to go back to something that, that Anne was just saying about like how these, you know, picking winners and losers, you know, every, every administration is going to, you know, be, be favorable to, to the people that supported them and like a little disfavorable to the people that don't. That's, that's kind of the ebb and flow of politics. But what we're, what we're talking about here is something much more intense. So I think that it's, it's important to, to contextualize whether or not they would take some sort of action against Trump with, within, within that context.

• 43:02Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, I think the answer is they would not. And they weren't that brave before.

• 43:05Speaker 06

  Right.

• 43:05Kara Swisher?

  You're absolutely right. So Trump, speaking of which, Ryan, obviously there's lots of gimmies and things like that for all these people. One is, is ignoring a bipartisan, Trump is ignoring the bipartisan bill banning TikTok. He's working on a potentially illegal deal that could be creation of a joint venture between ByteDance and American investors like Oracle and Microsoft. To be clear, both of those were involved. And the last time Trump wanted to ban, before he didn't want to ban it, and now, whatever. Anyway, he was for, until he was against it. What are the, what are the downstream consequences to companies in Silicon Valley, Microsoft, Oracle, Elon Musk owning TikTok? It's like sort of a grab bag of oligarchs here. And what happens if there's no deal and everybody

• 43:48Kara Swisher?

  goes to red note? Give me an example here. Use this TikTok thing as an example.

• 43:53Speaker 04

  It's kind of a Mad Libs scenario, you know, anything could happen. And I think that is, that is just kind of what we're going to see in these next couple of years where, you know, could Elon Musk buy it? Sure. Like, who, like, who am I to say, you know? And, and that's just the reality of it. And that, you know, I'm sure Mark Zuckerberg doesn't love it, you know, that TikTok is still in the picture. But how is he going to speak up? You know, he's already kind of made his bed. He's, he's donated to the inauguration. He is becoming buddy buddy with the Trump administration. So like, he's just going to take it. And I think that Is what we're going to see over the next four years where you could get, you know, a lot of benefiting of Trump's allies and, you know, Zuckerberg is going to want

• 44:38Speaker 04

  to be there for when something else comes into play, you know, maybe it's not TikTok. I think they've just learned that there's, there's no benefit in becoming the resistance or a kind of a barrier to Trump. And so they're just going to wait in line and see.

• 44:52Kara Swisher?

  So, Anne, what are the calculations or foreign leaders making right now with regard to what's happening? Your latest piece in The Atlantic makes the point that social media exists outside the legal system. That's true in the US because the immunity granted by Section 230 in any country that doesn't have its own laws specifically regulating social media until recently, most didn't. Talk about what they do elsewhere because there are other places, the EU, which are capable of reining in platform excesses and the excesses of these tech oligarchs or billionaires. I'm not sure if I should call them oligarchs yet also. I'd love to know what you think. So what are the calculations that other countries are making? The non-autocrats, I guess. The autocrats are thrilled, but go ahead.

• 45:33Speaker 05

  Yes. No, no. First of all, I'm fine with the word oligarch. I think it applies really well. And oligarch is somebody who has both political and economic power. And that's clearly what certainly Musk now has. So this is a really interesting question. You know, there are a lot of other democracies on the planet and they have their own rules about elections, about funding, about, you know, they have rules about limits on funding, limits on advertising, political advertising. All of those rules can now be got around on the tech platforms. And a great example of this was a recent election in Romania where a kind of wacky conspiracy theorist candidate won the first round of the election after someone spent more than a million dollars advertising him on TikTok, even though he

• 46:18Speaker 05

  had declared that he had spent no money on the campaign. He broke the system election laws that the court wound up nullifying the election. But of course, that's a catastrophe for Romanian democracy as well. So it's suddenly brought to light the threat to, you know, European, but also any other democracy that wants to set its own rules about elections, about conversations and so on. And this has created, that plus Musk's advocacy for the German far-right party, the AFD, which has created a kind of crisis in Germany because he has so much greater reach on X than any normal German media. It's created this moment where the European Union is now looking seriously at what it can do to regulate. I mean, they're particularly interested, not in tech broadly, but in the social media platforms, obviously.

• 47:02Kara Swisher?

  Right, right. They have a make, he has Make Europe Great Again mega, which they have turned into Make Elon Go Away, which is funny. They did protest. They did, the Germans did have 100,000 people, right? Correct? Huge amounts of people showing up to protest his support, his support particularly.

• 47:21Speaker 05

  Yes, it's a huge issue, especially in Germany, but not only in Germany. I think pretty every, every, every country in Europe and other democracies as well are also looking at this. And let me just say briefly, I mean, Europe can do this. They have something called the Digital Services Act. And the primary thing that it could do would be to force social media platforms to create greater transparency. So this is not about restricting speech or censorship or anything like any of the language, the fake language that Musk and others use. This is about giving people who use the platform greater access to information, making more obvious how the algorithms work, giving people, giving outside researchers and others access to the algorithms. Obviously, the companies are resisting this really, really hard. And it may even be a part of the reason

• 48:06Speaker 05

  why they have supported Trump. I mean, for example, why Zuckerberg supported Trump, because he wants Trump

• 48:12Kara Swisher?

  Needs help in the EU.

• 48:13Speaker 05

  In fighting, in fighting the EU. And again, it's not an accident that the groups and people, a lot of them that Musk is supporting are people who are explicitly anti-EU and anti-European. So this may also be part of their propaganda campaign to break up Europe or weaken Europe so that it, so that it's unable to regulate these companies. I think this is a really important moment. It's a kind of make or break moment, you know? Is it possible for other democracies to have their own rules, to have sovereign elections and to regulate media that is essentially coming from the United States?

• 48:44Kara Swisher?

  Or getting infected. It sounds like Canada's all united against Elon Musk. It sounds like and the rest of them, it's interesting. People that didn't agree in Canada, we'll see if it has an effect to strengthen things like those parties in Germany, the right wing parties, or to hurt them, which will be interesting. Owen, in your book Owned, it is an attempt to show how two of the most popular journalists on the left basically are corrupted by platforms run by tech billionaires. And you know how they shifted Glenn Greenwald and Matt and the others was really something to see. Do you worry that this playbook is going to work for other journalists, say on the left? It might be ultimately corrupted by the platform? And can a journalist on the left reach an audience of this scale today using a tech platform?

• 49:26Kara Swisher?

  What is the, what are the outlook if you, since they own these platforms now and run them? They have enormous power over them.

• 49:35Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, I think that journalism is in a pretty precarious position right now in general. And I think for, I mean, in the book, I detail like my journey through this, right? Like I took money from Colin, from David Sacks. I was approached by Rockfin, which is like another, like, you know, kind of like a right wing alternative to Twitch, kind of that offered me, you know, money, but it was in cryptocurrency. So, no, but, and, you know, I think that the temptation is there. Feeling like you can do your work independently with financial backing that doesn't really ask you for much is a really appealing thing.

• 50:20Speaker 06

  And so I think that that's okay. And I think that that's good. And I think that alternative media, independent media are good. And I think, you know, that's how I came up. And I think that that's, you know, like, those are positives. Where it starts to make me feel a little uncomfortable is once you kind of get into these right wing networks that have a lot of financial backing and are willing to give you money. And the way that that can, you know, kind of manifest itself is, you know, I talk about Glenn in the book.

• 50:51Speaker 06

  He leaves the Intercept, he goes to Substack, he doesn't get paid to go to Substack, but he makes, he starts making a lot of money there. Then, you know, Teal, Peter Teal and J D Vance invest in Rumble, and then a couple of months later, Rumble gives a paid deal to Glenn, where he kind of moves everything over, consolidates it over there, they, they, they pay him a lot of money, and he's now, you know, working for, for Rumble, which again is invested in by, by Teal. But it's not only that, right? It's also, you know, he's speaking at, at conferences, like the Network State Conference, you know, this is, these are allies of, of Teal and entries and, and all of these right wing guys. So, once you're kind of in, in this world, then you have the opportunity

• 51:33Speaker 06

  to continue to make money. And the kind of, the, the implicit trade off, certainly from the outside, appears to be that then you kind of, you know, talk about the things that they want to talk about, or maybe more importantly, you don't talk about the things that they don't want you to talk about. And I think that that is a very appealing thing to independent journalists, certainly. And while at any publication, there are going to be interests that determine, you know, what you cover and what you don't. And that's not, you know, I'm not being conspiratorial here, like, that's just like, you know, like, like you have to make coverage decisions. Having

• 52:15Speaker 06

  those decisions be unduly influenced by a small cohort of extremely wealthy men who have, you know, an ideological project, an economic project, I think that is the kind of thing, that's, that's the part of it that unsettles me. And I think that often, maybe people don't really even see what's happening as it's happening.

• 52:37Kara Swisher?

  Oh, we see it. Ryan, you wrote a piece about how Elon and X, used X to woo right, these right wing leaders around the world and in this country, and then push them to embrace policies that benefit him and his companies. Do you think he'll be able to maintain the relationship over the next four years with Trump? And if he can't, what are the consequences for Tesla, SpaceX, X, the rest of his companies?

• 52:59Speaker 04

  I think that's the million dollar question, right? I think a lot of

• 53:02Kara Swisher?

  Billion.

• 53:03Speaker 04

  Billion dollar, trillion dollar question, you know? A lot of folks were wondering, you know, these are two big egos. When are they going to fall out? It's a question I ask pretty regularly and, you know, I get the sense that they actually get along pretty well right now. You know, whether that'll last for four years is, again, the question, but for now, they have a mutual kind of dependence on one another. You know, Trump gets a lot of value out of having Elon around.

• 53:30Kara Swisher?

  He's his junkyard dog.

• 53:31Speaker 04

  He takes a lot of heat off of him, for example. You know, we're, you know, we're writing about how Musk is taking over government entities right now, justifiably, but it's not, we're not talking about Trump. You know, it's, we're talking about Elon. And, you know, I think the only thing standing in the way of that are their egos. You know, if one of them gets annoyed that, that the other is getting too much credit or vice versa, you know, it's, that, that seems to be the only impediment here, but for now, they seem to be enjoying each other's companies, you know, what they, and they benefit each other.

• 54:06Kara Swisher?

  Who is the stronger character here?

• 54:08Speaker 04

  Oh, man. Uh, I don't know if I could answer that.

• 54:14Kara Swisher?

  Musk.

• 54:15Speaker 04

  Why is, why is that? What?

• 54:17Kara Swisher?

  Because I think they're using Trump as a vehicle. And I think ultimately Elon has the power because he has the money, he has the influence, the relationships. And Trump is older and at the end of it, you know, they need him for so long, I think. And so in that way, I think Elon's much more powerful. But I don't know, he is the president, but I don't know if that's as good a job as it used to be.

• 54:41Speaker 04

  I thought, I watched, I watched a clip last week that was very interesting. And it was, it was Trump being interviewed in the White House. And it was during these reports that there were being changes being made to government websites. And if they weren't being made-

• 54:55Kara Swisher?

  They didn't know.

• 54:56Speaker 04

  They would get taken down. And he's being asked about it and he, like you said, doesn't know. He has, he says-

• 55:01Kara Swisher?

  Doesn't know.

• 55:02Speaker 04

  Hey, that sounds like a good idea. I'm, you know, I'm, I support that happening. But that clearly wasn't his call, or at least he wasn't read in on it. And I thought that was- Mind blowing, you know, and maybe it's a tactic. I don't know, maybe, maybe there's some 3D chess I don't know about going on here.

• 55:17Kara Swisher?

  Yes, that's what, that's what's happening there. All right, so on a scale of one to 10, each of you, how scared are you of these billionaires? And I don't mean fearful or maybe fearful of the impact they're having right now. Anne, you go first.

• 55:35Speaker 05

  So I'm not personally fearful, but my, my, my autocracy detection radar is very, very high, and I would say I'm up to nine or 10.

• 55:45Kara Swisher?

  Nine or 10, and the possibility of pushing them back? Where is that?

• 55:50Speaker 05

  You know, we'll see what happens in the next few days and weeks. I mean, we do still have a legitimate political opposition in the United States. We have courts, you know, there, there, there are tools available, and I think there will be a pushback, but whether it can succeed, given, given the nature of the current administration, I just don't know yet.

• 56:10Kara Swisher?

  Ryan?

• 56:12Speaker 04

  4.20.

• 56:14Kara Swisher?

  Why?

• 56:14Speaker 04

  No, I'm kidding, 420 joke.

• 56:17Kara Swisher?

  Oh, ha, ha.

• 56:19Speaker 04

  You know, 420, 69.

• 56:21Kara Swisher?

  Got it, okay.

• 56:22Speaker 04

  I don't like thinking about things and being in terms of like fearful. I just think of things in terms of accountability, and there's no accountability. You know, there, he is completely unfettered. He has no opposition.

• 56:37Kara Swisher?

  All of them, Elon in particular.

• 56:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, and, you know, I'll keep writing about it and we'll keep reporting on it at the New York Times, but I don't know, it, there's, there's just no accountability here. And, and that's, I think, what the biggest takeaway is for me, you know, that there's just nothing in the way.

• 56:57Kara Swisher?

  Owen?

• 56:58Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, I fluctuate. The tactic that they're using right now of just going full speed ahead, and this is, you know, Trump is doing this as well, so it's kind of hard to like, see how it can be stopped, but it does fluctuate because I'm pretty, at my core, I'm pretty optimistic, and I just don't think that this can continue like this in this country specifically with the national character of this country.

• 57:29Speaker 06

  Like, it can take people a long time to motivate and to take action and to like, push back, but it does happen eventually, and.

• 57:40Speaker 06

  I guess, I guess that my hope is that it happens, you know, sooner, sooner than later. Because again, you know, you can eat the, how, how fast is the train going to go before it goes off the rails? And how many things is it going to destroy on, on, on the way? So that's kind of a mixed metaphor, but I think you guys know what I'm saying there. Like it's, it's disturbing. And I think, I think probably what I'm most scared of is like, what's going to happen?

• 58:06Speaker 06

  Before it stops.

• 58:12Kara Swisher?

  On with Kara Swisher is produced by Christian Castro-Russell, Kateri Yokum, Jolie Myers, Megan Burney, and Kalen Lynch. Nishat Kurwa is Vox Media's executive producer of audio. Our engineers are Rick Kwan and Fernando Aruda, and our theme music is by Trackademics. If you're already following the show, you get to be the team of white hat hackers that will undo all the mess that Elon's minions are making. If not, you get to join his team and have a really silly nickname like Big Balls. Go wherever you listen to podcasts, search for On with Kara Swisher and hit follow. Thanks for listening to On with Kara Swisher from New York Magazine, the Vox Media Podcast Network, and us. We'll be back on Monday with more.

• 58:59Speaker 01

  Progressive's Accident Response can contact emergency services if you're in a major accident. The only thing worse than someone you love being in an accident is not being able to help them. So Progressive is here to help when you can't. So get peace of mind knowing your loved ones are protected with Progressive's Accident Response. Learn more at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. Limited availability in California. Driver is responsible for emergency and towing charges not covered by the policy. Coverage subject to policy, terms, and conditions.

• 59:29Speaker 02

  As wish lists grow, you know where to go. Head to Ulta Beauty. We have gifts they'll love from brands like Tato One and Rare Beauty by Selena Gomez. Shop beauty faves to give or keep from Shark Beauty, Sol de Janeiro, and more. Not sure what they want? You can't go wrong with Baumann, Clinique, or Redken. And don't forget to put yourself on the list. Book a salon moment or add a little more sparkle to your season. Shop holiday in store or at ulta.com. Ulta Beauty.

• 59:57Speaker 01

  When everyone's finally together, what makes mornings even brighter? Keeping things deliciously simple. Whether you're pouring up a glass of morning refreshment or topping off festive drinks for a family brunch, Simply Orange brings that 100% fresh squeezed taste to every moment. Deliciously bright and delightfully easy, Simply Orange is made for all your seasonal gatherings. Simply Orange: Say yes to simple.