Is Elon Musk the Ultimate Scam Artist? with Max Chafkin

Author and journalist Max Chafkin, co-host of the podcast Elon, Inc., joins Trevor and Christiana to discuss one of today’s most fascinating and controversial figures: Elon Musk. The three talk about how Elon came to be the world’s richest person, whether he’s a brilliant entrepreneur, scam artist, or both, and whether he and the rest of the “Paypal Mafia” have helped the world or helped ruin it.

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

• 0:00Trevor Noah?

  This segment is brought to you by Google Pixel. You know what's really frustrating? Knowing the exact information you need is somewhere on your phone, but still ending up wasting your time digging through five different apps just to actually find it. Thankfully, Google Pixel 11 is designed with Gemini intelligence, so it can proactively find the information I need right when I need it. Like my flight info on travel days or my calendar when Eugene texts me to hang out. Oh, sorry Eugene, I'm booked. Learn more about what Google Pixel 11 can do at googlestore.com. These AI features are available in select countries and languages for users 18 and over, and make sure to check responses.

• 0:45Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, booked forever, forever.

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• 1:18Trevor Noah?

  I think people sometimes take for granted that a scam artist doesn't necessarily fail. Right? You know, we were talking to one of my producers earlier and we're like, 10 years ago today, Elon Musk said, he was like, "In 10 years, we will be on Mars." He's like, "I'll do it. We're gonna be on Mars."

• 1:36Trevor Noah?

  We're still here, baby. You know what I mean? Okay, Trump's a simple one. What did Trump say? Never forget, he said, "Day one, we're gonna bring down the price of eggs. They're coming down, folks. We're gonna bring it down." They've done nothing. They've done nothing. Eggs have only gone up since he came into power. And now what's his story? Biden left me with bad egg prices. You said day one. You said day one. And you said you're gonna do this thing. Not only have you not done it, it's gotten worse. The stock market is taking tanks like you've never seen.

• 2:10Trevor Noah?

  This is What Now? With Trevor Noah.

• 2:22Trevor Noah?

  Max Chafkin, welcome to the podcast.

• 2:23Speaker 03

  Thank you for having me.

• 2:24Trevor Noah?

  You know what I love about what you do is, I mean, you're deeply ingrained in the world of reporting around, you know, finance and business and tech and everything. But I'm oftentimes amused and enthralled by people who seem to be in a place where they were well ahead of something before other people saw it. And I wonder sometimes if it's luck or if it's them having like a premonition. You host a podcast called Elon Inc., right? And I remember the first time I saw the podcast, I was like, huh, like, wow, is there gonna be enough?

• 3:01Speaker 03

  Material? We had the same concern.

• 3:04Trevor Noah?

  No, you did.

• 3:04Speaker 03

  I mean, to some extent, yeah. Or there were definitely people around it who wondered. But of course, you know, it's turned out, it's worked out, like you said, like Elon Musk is everywhere right now, even before he was, you know, involved with Donald Trump. We were making this argument like, no, you don't understand. He's this, he's this big cultural figure.

• 3:24Trevor Noah?

  Yes.

• 3:24Speaker 03

  He's a mega billionaire. He has more influence than maybe anyone on the planet. And then, of course, he became, you know, obviously very closely linked to Donald Trump, became his number one campaign donor and de facto, you know, senior advisor, or however you want to think of it. It does feel, yeah, like we're ahead of something. On the other hand, I think even people who have been following this man for a really long time, and I met him, I think, for the first time in like 2007. So I've been covering him for many, many years. Even so, it's been very surprising to watch the kind of transformation over the last couple of years and then what's happened over the last, you know, four or five months.

• 4:05Trevor Noah?

  Right. The reason I really wanted to have you on so that we could chat with you today is because I think it's easy to make the conversation about Elon Musk and for us to like hyper-focus on it because it's happening right now. But what I think, where I think you're uniquely positioned is because of your expertise, I think you can help us paint a picture.

• 4:27Trevor Noah?

  That that gives us a larger idea of what we're experiencing because you also wrote many people argue like the definitive biography on Peter Thiel, right? And now I've learned a lot of people, you say Peter Thiel, they're like, what's that? Like a lot of people, you say Peter Thiel and they go, what is that? And then some people really know the name and some people don't. And the people who know it sometimes will say, oh, forget Elon Musk. Peter Thiel is the puppet master who's running all of this. So I guess to set the scene for this conversation, when we talk about the technocrats or the tech elites or the tech like, who are we actually speaking about? So it's like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, who would you count in that echelon?

• 5:12Speaker 03

  I would add Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos. And then I would throw in some other investors, Marc Andreessen, probably a name that is less familiar to people, but the founder of Netscape, who's now a major venture capitalist, also advising Trump right now. And then there's this kind of like larger universe of guys who are connected to Thiel, who are involved in politics at the moment. David Sacks, who's like running Trump's AI and crypto initiatives. And it's sort of a list of venture capitalists and so on. What what actually made this kind of helpful in investigating it is that Thiel and his cohort, you know, call themselves the PayPal mafia. They actually like

• 5:56Trevor Noah?

  They gave us a name.

• 5:57Speaker 03

  They still identify, yeah, as an influence network. And Elon Musk, he started a company in the dot com during the dot com bubble and then started a company that merged with PayPal effectively, became like a co-founder of PayPal. So he was in that PayPal mafia, although he and Thiel were kind of like rivals, sort of friends, frenemies over a number of years. Thiel invested in his companies, Musk invested in Thiel's hedge fund. There's a lot of sort of, you know, back scratching or whatever going on in this world. And the way I see it, you know, Thiel was a prominent backer of Donald Trump in 2016. He was kind of the first tech guy to back Trump, to say like, uh, yeah, this, this is

• 6:41Speaker 03

  the guy. Uh, he, he spoke at the RNC, the Republican National Convention. He donated a little more than a million dollars in October of 2016. That was after the Access Hollywood thing.

• 6:52Trevor Noah?

  Wow.

• 6:53Speaker 03

  And then joined the Trump administration, uh, or joined the transition anyway, with this idea of attacking the quote unquote administrative state, but which is really similar to what Elon Musk is trying to do right now.

• 7:07Trevor Noah?

  With Doge.

• 7:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. When I wrote that book on Thiel, he had kind of all these secret connections with various like right wingers and, and Thiel was operating kind of behind the scenes and you're, you're looking at like, oh, did he, did he consort with this extremist or that extremist? And, and he was sort of playing footsie with the far right.

• 7:26Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 7:26Speaker 03

  Musk is just supercharging it, right? So it's just this kind of like dramatic acceleration of what these tech guys have been up to for a very long time.

• 7:36Speaker 04

  I'd, I'd like to go back before you started the podcast. Why Elon? Why did you, what, what made, what made you feel that this is the guy to dig into?

• 7:44Speaker 03

  I mean, so just at the most basic level, he is, I mean, he's either the world, depending on the day, right? He's now far and away the world's richest person, but at various times he's been like top two, top three. He's one of the wealthiest people on the planet. He owns two very important companies, Tesla Motors. So he's, he's the, he's a significant shareholder and Tesla Motors CEO effectively controls company. Tesla is the most valuable car company. It is, um, you know, the leading player in electric cars. So in certain ways, you know, the leading player for the future of, of cars. He also owns this gigantic defense contractor SpaceX, which is the leading provider of rocket launch services, uh, to,

• 8:28Speaker 03

  to satellite players and to the US government. And he's got a bunch of other little companies. And then he has this, as I said earlier, like this, this cultural impact. It's not just that Musk is rich and, you know, controls a lot of people's livelihoods. People are really into him. I mean, he has a story that has captivated to some extent the world, right? There's like a lot of young people who look up to him and want to be him. And then you layer on top of that, of course, his. Pension for being weird, he's, he's, he's, he has, he has crazy beliefs, he has this complicated, very, very complicated and involved, uh, personal and romantic life or whatever, as a, as a father of, you know, 14 children that we know of, maybe, you know, who knows, perhaps more.

• 9:12Speaker 03

  And he's always been, you know, right at the edge of doing what is reasonable. People who are coming to it fresh are like, well, what happened to Elon Musk? And people have been covering Elon Musk for a long time are like, well, like, let me tell you, like, when he, like, fake acqui- like, did a fake private offer and had a huge fight with the SEC and then, you know, uh, sort of, kinda told the SEC to suck Elon's cock and like, you can kind of go back, like, he's always been this incredibly, I don't know, for like a better word, like, edgy figure.

• 9:42Speaker 04

  Even as far back as 2007, when you first met him?

• 9:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, and I think that's part of why, I mean, there are all sorts of reasons, like, why he became successful, but I think like Donald Trump, he has a knack for, um, like authenticity and for, and for being willing to sort of say things that seem transgressive and then using that to his advantage. Just like Trump, I mean, he rails against the media all the time, but he got incredible media coverage because during those years, like, if you were a reporter, he would, you know, he talked to everybody and he would say crazy stuff. He would attack his enemies, he would, now, now, back then, his enemies weren't like George Soros, they were just like,

• 10:26Trevor Noah?

  It was like BYD.

• 10:27Speaker 03

  Or, no, it was like the Cars columnist for the Wall Street Journal.

• 10:31Speaker 03

  But, so it'd just be like somebody, you know, some random blogger or whatever, he'd be mad at, and, and so he was always, you know, he's always saying provocative stuff and, and I think that, you know, contributed to his rise.

• 10:44Trevor Noah?

  Okay, help me understand this, though.

• 10:47Trevor Noah?

  Have we missed something in Silicon Valley shift? Because it seems like there was a time when Silicon Valley was the bastion of progressivism and liberalism, you know, it was Elon Musk himself. He's got like tweets where he's out there proudly being like, and that's why we have LGBTQ protections of our workers and we believe in this and we... Silicon Valley seemed like that place. It was the place where people came together and said, "We want the world to be a better place." I remember when Uber was launching and they were like, "Hey." And it was correct, it was saying like, "Yeah, now if you're a black person or a person with disabilities, this car will pick you up. You're not gonna now get driven past." It felt like this utopia crew that was trying to make the world a better place.

• 11:31Trevor Noah?

  And so because of that, they were often at odds with the people they're in bed with now. You know what I mean?

• 11:38Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 11:38Trevor Noah?

  They were the ones who were like, "We don't like Nazis. We don't wanna see swastikas on our websites. We're gonna ban you and we don't want racism and we don't want people separated." Like, did we miss something? Did Silicon Valley shift or was this something that was always there that is now rearing its head? I don't know which way to look at it.

• 11:56Speaker 03

  Um, it's both. So, going back to the beginning of the industry, Silicon Valley, people talk about the military-industrial complex. That phrase, like, that is Silicon Valley. That's what Silicon Valley was. It was a bunch of companies that were making technology to help the United States win the Cold War. And like, so you know, you rewind the clock like way back and this was like a conservative place. This was not a place, um, full of progressives. It was a place that, you know, a lot of ways was kinda like, you know, pro-military and so on.

• 12:29Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 12:29Speaker 03

  And I think that strain has always been there. The like kind of conservative or even kind of borderline reactionary strain, um, has always been in this part of California. But of course, there's also the counterculture and those two things sort of swirl together. There was a moment during the like 2000s when like you're saying, like Silicon Valley seemed very closely allied with the Democratic Party and in particular Barack Obama. Um, you know, I listened to your podcast about Elon from September.

• 12:59Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 12:59Speaker 03

  And Trevor, you said, and I think you were kidding, like, "Obama did this to us."

• 13:03Trevor Noah?

  Mm-hmm.

• 13:05Speaker 03

  I think you're, I think you're right, although not exactly, I wouldn't, I would tell a different story, which is that Obama, I'd say more than any politician, maybe more than any cultural figure, is the one who gave us that story about Elon Musk in particular.

• 13:22Trevor Noah?

  Oh.

• 13:23Speaker 03

  So, so like, you, Obama, you know, this vision of kind of a centrist, forward-looking progressivism that embraces tech and the future.

• 13:36Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 13:37Speaker 03

  He really embraced Elon Musk, he embraced clean technology.

• 13:39Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 13:40Speaker 03

  Tesla nearly went bankrupt during the financial crisis, Elon Musk got a big loan from the Department of Energy, effectively was saved from bankruptcy, by Elon Musk's own admission, by Barack Obama, by the, by the Obama administration.

• 13:52Trevor Noah?

  Can we just pause there for a second and, and say, this is, this is probably one of the things that I find I'm most amused and frustrated by.

• 13:59Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 14:00Trevor Noah?

  Is how many times these guys' stories are littered with them being helped by the government, that they are telling people they need to dismantle because it helps people.

• 14:11Speaker 04

  Fancy welfare.

• 14:12Trevor Noah?

  It's, it's the craziest thing ever, like, li- listen, literally listen to what you said.

• 14:16Speaker 03

  There's more, I mean, SpaceX, his rocket company, I mean, basically all of its money early on came from the government, and SpaceX, like, their big breakthrough was signing this contract with NASA to provide, uh, launch services to the International Space Station, also an Obama-era thing, um, you know, when you add up, the, the amount of money that they've taken from the government over the years is, it's enormous, but it wasn't just that, I mean, Obama put Musk kinda at the center of, of like, what, of like, his idea for what the future should look like, and I also think Silicon Valley, these, these venture capitalists, these guys who are thinking about the future, they're really good at

• 14:57Speaker 03

  picking up the vibes, and so like, they saw that a lot of people were excited about Barack Obama, that he was filling up stadiums, that young people were excited, like, that's their game, and they, and they said, oh, you know, let's, let's move there, and I, I think something kinda similar happened this summer with Donald Trump, where, where they sort of sensed that this is where the vibe was headed.

• 15:18Trevor Noah?

  They also have data that we can't dream of, right?

• 15:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's true, although I'm always skeptical like how good the data actually is.

• 15:24Trevor Noah?

  Really?

• 15:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, they definitely, they're definitely people who are driven by data, but I think these guys make decisions pretty much the same way the rest of us do. Although when they like turn back and tell the story, they maybe use a little more data.

• 15:37Trevor Noah?

  Oh, they'll try and rip. Okay, okay, okay.

• 15:39Speaker 03

  So, so, yeah, and, and, and, you know, after the election, after this last election, you know, and we had the inauguration and like, all these tech guys had better seats than like the governor of Florida.

• 15:49Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 15:50Speaker 03

  A lot of the guys who are associated with Trump now were associated with Obama. Some of the, some of the same people were at the inauguration in, you know, 2024, where the 2008 inauguration.

• 15:58Trevor Noah?

  See, this is so funny because look at some of the conversations we've had on the podcast. Like where Josh says as a joke, but he says it as a real thing goes like, Trump is white Obama. And he goes like, not as.

• 16:09Speaker 03

  Very controversial comment.

• 16:10Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, a very controversial comment, but it's like, yeah, but you, you see, like, we, we talk about the overlapping voters. Now you've just thrown another piece of the puzzle where it's like, oh, the fact that these are the same guys sitting in both, these administrations could not be further apart from each other. You tell me any world you know better than anyone, like, think about in African countries. When they switch a regime, you will definitely not see the same people sitting behind the new leader. Because that's a signal that like, no, no, no, these are my people and these people. But like, the fact that they've done that either tells us that there's an overlap in the Trump and Obama-ness

• 16:49Trevor Noah?

  that they can resonate with, or it tells us that, that their masterminds are getting into somebody, but they weren't sitting with Joe Biden.

• 16:57Speaker 03

  They hated Biden, and I think.

• 17:00Trevor Noah?

  Why?

• 17:00Speaker 03

  And I think to some extent, the feeling maybe was mutual. I mean, Biden, unlike George W. Bush, Obama, and even Donald Trump, did not embrace Silicon Valley and didn't, I mean, he did. Because he's a politician and they have like the most money in the world like, but you know, his, his politics was the politics of organized labor and, you know, American manufacturing.

• 17:25Trevor Noah?

  He's an Amtrak man.

• 17:26Speaker 03

  He's an Amtrak man, exactly. And he actually, he sensed like correctly to some extent that there was a backlash against these tech guys. And Trump too, right? Like Trump was threatening to throw Mark Zuckerberg in prison.

• 17:40Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 17:41Speaker 03

  Uh, like just a few months ago.

• 17:42Trevor Noah?

  And shut down Google.

• 17:43Speaker 03

  Yeah. Um, Biden was, you know, was, was more skeptical of the tech people, including Elon Musk. And, you know, when Biden was promoting EVs, he made this very concerted effort to promote, you know, GM and Ford, the, the two big American companies. They have union labor. Um, and that like really offended Elon Musk.

• 18:07Trevor Noah?

  So I've always wondered, are you familiar with the story?

• 18:10Speaker 04

  The parts of it? Tell it again.

• 18:12Trevor Noah?

  I've often wondered if this is part of the reason we have the Elon Musk we have today. Because Biden holds a summit at the White House, an EV summit, and he invites all the big car manufacturers to the White House, but he doesn't invite Elon Musk. And I don't care what you say about.

• 18:34Speaker 03

  Was it a deliberate slight?

• 18:35Trevor Noah?

  I mean, come on, how can it not be? And if you look at, I don't care what you say about politics, all right? Let's even, let's go back to that time. I think that is a terrible move because, say what you want, Elon Musk has done more to push EVs than any other human being, right? In terms of like that, that position that he's in.

• 18:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. But certainly more than like the CEOs of Ford and GM.

• 19:00Trevor Noah?

  That's what I mean, than the CEO of Ford and GM. And so it was strange to me that he did that. But I, I often wonder if that was the moment. Cause I remember seeing a shift after that where Elon went from being the guy who's like, I don't, I don't get involved in politics. And I, I just think that it's good for us to look at both sides. And Trent, Trent and I are still in a space where we, we're, we're not exactly looking at like, what does happen? And he was that guy.

• 19:21Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 19:22Trevor Noah?

  Biden doesn't invite him to the White House? This man went full Trump. I mean, he went, and I, you watch it intensely. So as a casual observer, do you think that that was a seminal moment in the Musk that we get today?

• 19:36Speaker 03

  I think that is, that was kind of the beginning of this version of Musk. And of course, there are other stories, like, again, the story that you all talked about, about Musk's, you know, trans daughter and Musk's own, like, sort of his person. I think all that also applies. But in terms of, if you're looking for, like, a political act, that was it. I mean, that was the moment. And I, I do think all of those other personal things, also COVID restrictions, you know, Musk got really mad about the closure orders. It was affecting his bottom line, played into it. Um, you know, I do understand why Biden did not invite him. But the thing Biden was trying to do was bring the rest of the auto industry into EVs.

• 20:19Speaker 03

  And in certain ways, that was what Musk was trying to do, you know, way back in the day. There was a version of Elon Musk, you know, 10 or 15 years ago, who would have looked at that and said, oh, my God, that's great. Like, I have achieved my goal. It's, it's not just Tesla, it's everybody.

• 20:34Speaker 04

  Oh, so you felt that was like an ideological impulse that was maybe environmental? He really believed electric cars are better for the planet?

• 20:43Speaker 03

  That's, if you had asked me, yeah, like 10 years ago. I mean, that was, that was his ideology, to the extent that he had an ideology. It was, it was bringing electric cars and, and bringing the, the industry along with him. And, you know, at times, he had actually been kind of friendly with people at GM. Because GM, of course, had also done some electric cars. They actually released an electric car in the 90s and then killed it. I think Biden was trying to, I mean, and this is the account that the Biden people have given in explanation to, to sort of defend themselves from the argument that you're making, which is, you know, there are definitely a lot of people who, who agree with you, which is like, listen, this was about, this was about Detroit and everything.

• 21:20Trevor Noah?

  I don't believe that. I'll be honest with you, I don't believe it. I think, I think Biden's people were going, we're going to put you in your place, and we're going to show you that this industry is going to move on without you. And so we're going to bring all these people in to go like, we got this. And then Elon Musk, if there's one thing I've seen from Elon Musk and what I've heard about, yo, let me tell you something, that man does not take slight well.

• 21:40Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 21:42Trevor Noah?

  We're going to continue this conversation right after this short break.

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• 23:38Trevor Noah?

  Maybe we should talk about that a little bit more, to like, take a step out of the Elon of it all. I know the world has often been populated by, you know, you always call them the thin-skinned powerful men.

• 23:48Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 23:49Trevor Noah?

  I don't know that we've ever been in a time when the men have had this much power and their skins have been.

• 23:55Speaker 04

  And this much wealth, like this is an unprecedented amount of wealth to accumulate. It just wasn't this much money to be hoarded by one person, right?

• 24:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, there's an.

• 24:06Trevor Noah?

  One sensitive person.

• 24:07Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah, unprecedented wealth and kind of an unprecedented cultural impact and control. I mean, Musk, I used to talk about this with Mark Zuckerberg, you know, Facebook, you know, it's the, it's the biggest media company in history. Um, you know, but, but that always felt a little bit hard because clearly Mark Zuckerberg wasn't like going through his mentions, like trying to suspend people who were mean to him.

• 24:31Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 24:31Speaker 03

  At least not as far as I could tell, whereas Musk definitely seems to be.

• 24:35Trevor Noah?

  Oh, he does.

• 24:35Speaker 03

  Doing that, yeah. And so like that feels like the combination of, of like power and control over our cultural lives and money. Like, yeah, that feels new.

• 24:47Speaker 04

  Yeah. And how much do you think this is fueled by his ketamine use?

• 24:55Speaker 04

  He's kind of known that is, don't come for me, Musk, I'm not rich enough to fight that.

• 25:01Trevor Noah?

  You're gonna ask that.

• 25:02Speaker 04

  But like, because people are kind of, you read all these articles and it's always an anonymous source. He's like, I've never seen him like this before. This is the most angry or erratic or, you know, the parade when he went to the White House and he brings his kid, you know, like, he's doing things that even don't seem typical for somebody who has been known for being pretty eccentric and out there. How much do you think his rumored ketamine use is kind of fueling this behavior?

• 25:28Speaker 03

  I mean, he's acknowledged his, his ketamine use as a treatment for, I believe, depression. I think he said he had a, has a prescription. I don't have any special knowledge about his substance use. I've actually never taken ketamine, so it's sort of hard for me to know exactly like, is that, you know? But I do think that he is behaving erratically and I.

• 25:52Trevor Noah?

  For him.

• 25:55Trevor Noah?

  No, but you get what I'm saying.

• 25:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, I get what you're saying.

• 25:57Trevor Noah?

  Do you think he's behaving radically for him?

• 25:59Speaker 03

  That's a question, that's a question, because he is, he's different. And so it's, it is a little bit hard to, to, to like parse, like, well, how much of this is Elon in a dark place? And how much is this Elon, um, you know, how much of this is whatever substance Elon's taking? And how much of it is just like, he's a, he's a unusual guy? And I'm not sure that anybody knows the exact answer to that question. Even, even Elon Musk. Um, I, I have to say though, um, you know, the Walter Isaacson book that came out.

• 26:28Trevor Noah?

  Right.

• 26:29Speaker 03

  What was that, like two years ago? There's a lot in there about his mental well-being. And, and admissions from his, you know, himself and from his own, from people who are very close to him, who have been concerned at various points. So like, I don't think it's totally wrong to like, to, to, to ask, because Musk talks about it himself all the time. I mean, he's somebody who, who is constantly talking about struggles with demons and darkness.

• 26:55Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, he is.

• 26:55Speaker 03

  To me, that makes him actually kind of relatable. I mean, that's like, a lot of us, you know, everybody struggles and to some extent with demons and darkness or whatever, it's just unusual that he wears it so on his sleeve. Even more so for me than like the, the rumored drug use or whatever, or the actual drug use, like he did once smoke pot on a Joe Rogan podcast or whatever, um, is just the, the hours he's keeping, right? Like, he seems to be tweeting 24/7, like.

• 27:25Speaker 04

  By the way, this man has 14 kids.

• 27:27Trevor Noah?

  Yes.

• 27:27Speaker 04

  So who's looking after the kids?

• 27:28Trevor Noah?

  Not him, no, not him. Um, you, you, you know what it does bring up for me though? You, you, we talk about unprecedented wealth.

• 27:37Trevor Noah?

  There's this idea that I, I've been playing around with in my head and I, because I'm not a clinical psychologist, I'll never say what a person is or isn't. But I find it particularly interesting that Trump.

• 27:53Trevor Noah?

  Kanye and Elon all have very similar trends if you watch like how they are. So they have moments where people go, oh, no, they're lovely and they're in person, they're charming and they're this and then that. And then they'll have like these like sort of outbursts and all of them have 3am tweet rants, all of them.

• 28:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 28:13Trevor Noah?

  All of them. And people are like, what is happening right now?

• 28:15Speaker 03

  Almost manic.

• 28:16Trevor Noah?

  Yeah. Have you seen what Kanye is saying? Have you seen? And then Kanye will come and be like, I'm sorry and I'm da, da, da, da. We also have very seldom been in a society where that goes like unchecked. Do you get what I'm saying? So let's talk about manic, right? I can talk about like my grandfather. My grandfather was bipolar. Everything like that Kanye does, my grandfather did. But my grandfather didn't have billions of dollars. And I don't know what he would have done had he had billions of dollars because broke was the barrier that caught him every time. And then the family would be like, all right, come fetch your grandfather. He's at the supermarket lecturing people about blah, blah, blah. All right, gotta go to the supermarket, pick up granddad. And then tomorrow, he's a sweet little peaceful man.

• 28:58Trevor Noah?

  But he didn't, you know what I mean? There's a barrier that most people in society will experience when they have whatever it is. These men don't have that. So to your point, like when Elon's like going, being erratic, when Kanye is being erratic, we don't know what erratic plus billion equals. And I think we might be experiencing it. Do you get, do you know what I mean?

• 29:16Speaker 03

  Also, I mean, there is this like ideological thing that we haven't talked about, which is that these guys, and you brought it up with Uber, but like they, they have been in various ways and Teal played a big part of this, but Elon has too, have made this argument that sort of breaking the rules, transgressing, it's not just, it's not just acceptable. It's like a good thing. It's like, it's like a thing we need more of. That's their, that to some extent is their ideology. And like, and so Uber was like breaking the taxi industry.

• 29:48Trevor Noah?

  They broke every rule.

• 29:49Speaker 03

  Or breaking the rules. And it wasn't just, it wasn't just okay. I think a lot of people prior to this would agree that like it's okay if a small business doesn't like fill out every single form or whatever, because they're a small business. But, but these guys took it further to say, no, like disruption, breaking things, sticking it in the eye of, of the establishment. Like that's how progress happens. Like that is, to the extent that any of these guys have really strongly held beliefs, that is the belief that kind of ties them like all together.

• 30:20Trevor Noah?

  Let's, let's talk more about Peter Thiel. Who who is this shadowy figure?

• 30:24Speaker 04

  I find him very scary. When I saw, when I was like prepping for today, I was like, this guy shut down Gawker.

• 30:31Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 30:31Speaker 04

  He's a scary kind of person.

• 30:33Trevor Noah?

  But that's like, who who is Peter Thiel? And why do some people consider him the ultimate puppet master for everything that's happening? And not not, by the way, I'm not saying like conspiracy land. I'm not saying like, who is this mystery? No, I mean more more in the way of like someone going, oh, yeah, this is how he helped Trump and this is what he's meant to Elon, etc.

• 30:53Speaker 03

  Well, so he is just to start, he is a famous investor. He is, he was the, um, he started, co-founded PayPal, became kind of like the big tech investor in the 2000s and 2010s. Many of these, many of his friends and colleagues like Elon Musk, but also Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn, the guys who started YouTube, they all worked together at PayPal. They all kind of went out in the world and and did business together. And Thiel, in addition to all of this, was a very conservative person, somebody who had been essentially one of these like college conservatives, really like before it became so cool.

• 31:37Trevor Noah?

  Okay.

• 31:37Speaker 03

  So he, that, and that was really like his first, his first like entrepreneurial venture was this kind of right wing newspaper at Stanford called the Stanford Review. And, you know, they would like rail against, uh, it's basically wokeness, but they, you know,

• 31:51Trevor Noah?

  Yes.

• 31:51Speaker 03

  back then they called it like political correctness.

• 31:53Trevor Noah?

  PC culture.

• 31:55Speaker 03

  And, you know, they would sort of like do something that is like right on the line of of being racist or sexist or homophobic or or maybe all three all at once, and then use that to, yeah, to their advantage. And, um, and Thiel kind of combined those two things, combined the, combined his, you know, conservative worldview with his, his business thing. And he's, he's sort of bounced between the two and tried to use his political influence to to benefit his companies, um, beginning with Palantir. And this is where some of these like puppet master theories start because Palantir, which is a It's like a database company that does data mining for for intelligence agencies and corporations.

• 32:38Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 32:38Speaker 03

  And Teal started the company in two thousand four and and it sort of grew in tandem with his his political influence, where they were able to, you know, get government contracts and so on as as he grew. And of course, Palantir scares people because because databases and data mining, you know, it it there are ways in which you can kind of like surveil somebody without actually surveilling them.

• 33:02Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 33:03Speaker 03

  And like I said, he became really the first tech guy to to go, you know, all in on Trump. And as you.

• 33:11Trevor Noah?

  What did he like about Trump? I'd love to know like what he connected to that, you know, because Trump seemed, people forget this now. But I I remember when Donald Trump was running for president, he had no ally, right? So.

• 33:27Speaker 03

  It was Steve Bannon.

• 33:28Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 33:28Speaker 03

  That was it, right?

• 33:29Trevor Noah?

  But Trump was the antithesis of the Republican Party as they saw themselves.

• 33:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 33:33Trevor Noah?

  You know, I remember, you know, whether it was the people running the RNC or whether it was people who were running against him, they were like, oh, no, no. This guy is a pariah. He's a joke. He does not represent our values. So the establishment Republican Party was not for Donald Trump. The media was not for Donald Trump, right? Fox News was also like, meh, who's this guy in that way? The Democrats were not for Donald Trump. Silicon Valley wasn't. So I'd love to know, like, what did Peter Thiel see in Donald Trump where he's like, no, no, no, this is my guy?

• 34:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, that was the mystery that I started with, like, when I got started writing about him seriously and and wrote the book was just like, how does this, you know, he he's like a gay immigrant tech guy.

• 34:19Trevor Noah?

  Yes.

• 34:19Speaker 03

  Get behind, you know, he's born in Germany. I spent some of his childhood in in modern day Namibia. I think a short time in South Africa as well. How does this guy, you know, embrace this like avowed Luddite? Remember Donald Trump, like proudly didn't use email.

• 34:36Trevor Noah?

  Yes.

• 34:37Speaker 03

  You know, and and is talking about this vision of the country that has nothing to do with Silicon Valley.

• 34:41Trevor Noah?

  Yes.

• 34:41Speaker 03

  And I think.

• 34:42Speaker 04

  Miners.

• 34:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 34:43Speaker 04

  Bring back miners.

• 34:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, we're bringing back coal, baby. Yeah. And I think the answer was, well, there's like two things, one of which is this political correctness point, like, Thiel really does believe left wing ideas and tolerance and diversity were like holding back America, that that was like a significant problem with our country and that all we needed to do was be able to say, you know, stuff, the stuff that's like maybe borderline racist and get away with it. And like, that would make things better because then we wouldn't have to hold back or something. And, and I think the fact that Trump was doing that and getting up there and saying stuff that was edgy was a big, like, that was a big part of the appeal. And the other thing is, these guys want to destroy the old order and, and,

• 35:29Speaker 03

  and build their new order and build a technological, you know, techno future. And Trump, maybe he wasn't super focused on the future, but he was saying, we need to break a bunch of stuff. Yeah.

• 35:41Speaker 04

  And I think, and so I think- Which is very tech, move fast and break things, right? Isn't that like, kind of the ethos-

• 35:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, that is, that-

• 35:46Speaker 04

  Silicon Valley.

• 35:47Speaker 03

  That slogan is, you know, super associated with Facebook, Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg has used it. And, and of course, Mark Zuckerberg was basically a mentee of Peter Thiel. Thiel's first big investment was an early bet on Facebook, like, one of the best venture capital investments, like, of all time. And so, and then I think the last thing is just, these guys are opportunists. And Thiel saw, it's not that Thiel thought, oh, for sure, Trump is gonna win. He thought he might win. And if he does win, and I, I do kind of like him- It's an investment. Yeah, exactly. It's an investment. He made an early investment. It's a high risk, high reward investment, which is exactly the kind of thing that these tech guys specialize in. But with Musk, I think it was the same thing. I don't think

• 36:30Speaker 03

  Musk knew for sure that, that, that Trump was gonna win. But I think he thought, look, I've already, I've already gone sort of, I've already been red pilled or whatever. I'm already tweeting right wing stuff every day. What am I really gonna harm my brand by, by putting a couple hundred million dollars behind Trump? Probably not. If he loses, what have I lost? And if he wins, then I become the, you know, the right hand man of, of the most powerful person in the world.

• 37:00Trevor Noah?

  And now it's time for today's self-care toolkit segment brought to you by Amazon. Whether it's delivering medication to your door with Amazon Pharmacy, or 24/7 virtual care with Amazon One Medical. Thanks to Amazon, healthcare just got less painful.

• 37:22Trevor Noah?

  You know, one thing I always think about when we talk about self-care? Home remedies. I don't know what it was like in your house, but in mine, if you had a sore throat, you weren't getting medicine right away, never. You were getting a concoction and a prayer. Most of the time, it was warm water, maybe with some salt, lemon, honey, ginger, and if you were brave, garlic. Yes, there was always the garlic. How sick are you? Bring out the garlic. Because apparently, I guess sicknesses and vampires have the same weaknesses. At that time, I hated it. I was like, please, just give me something from the pharmacy, please. But now, I don't know, I don't know what changed. Now, I swear by it.

• 38:04Trevor Noah?

  First sign of a cold, and I'm suddenly becoming like a backyard herbalist. You know, it's funny how these things stick with you. And what's wild is how different they are. Like depending on where you grew up, they completely change. My friend from India told me that he used turmeric in warm milk as a remedy when he was growing up, which honestly, sounds like a latte now, but back then, it was medicine. I've heard of people using onions in socks or steam tents with eucalyptus. People really do get creative. And the thing is, it's not an either or. You can absolutely believe in modern medicine and still make your mom's mystery tea. It's all part of taking care of yourself, knowing what makes you feel better,

• 38:47Trevor Noah?

  even if it's just because it reminds you of home. Well, we hope you gave you some ideas for your self-care routine.

• 38:56Trevor Noah?

  Today's self-care toolkit segment was brought to you by Amazon. Thanks to Amazon, healthcare just got less painful.

• 39:08Trevor Noah?

  You know, we see this played out in a different way in developing nations, I find. So because it's a lot more blatant and there, there isn't like, like a finesse around it. I mean, now it's become blatant in America, if I would say. But like, for instance, I grew up in a world where, you know, and you know what I'm talking about. They'd be like, there would be this businessman who's about to go to jail or their business is about to, there'd always be something that's happening. They're losing the mining license or something's happening. And they go, okay, I need to go all in on this candidate. Otherwise, my whole world is going to come crumbling down. And then they would back them completely. And if the candidate won, they got more mining deals, they got more oil deals, they got more everything. But if they lost, that was it for you. You read about it in like old Cold War Russia as well.

• 39:53Trevor Noah?

  It was like, okay, who's supporting Yeltsin or who's going after Gorbachev? It feels like that wasn't America's story. It feels like America was the place where people like, yes, there's, you know, there's shaking hands between companies and businesses and government. But that's not what this country does. And now it seems like.

• 40:14Speaker 04

  Very naked, right?

• 40:15Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, now it seems very direct. But this is, okay, this is what confuses me on, on, you know, we talk about Peter Thiel and one aspect.

• 40:24Trevor Noah?

  Elon Musk makes electric cars. Donald Trump keeps on smashing electric cars and going like, people don't want these things. They're terrible. Bring oil back, baby. Okay, what am I missing there?

• 40:37Speaker 04

  Strange bedfellows.

• 40:38Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, but I, but I want, like, am I missing some, does, does Elon Musk think? The only thing I've thought of is Elon Musk goes,

• 40:46Trevor Noah?

  if the car, electric car industry is destroyed,

• 40:51Trevor Noah?

  the legacy brands will die first in it. And they'll be the first to bail out because they're, they'll panic. So Ford and all them will be like, okay, we're not making electric cars. And then Tesla will once again be like the only player. And so I think he's betting that he can weather the storm more than they can. And then he will have a monopoly in the space. And so I think for now, he supports Donald Trump trying to like crush the industry. But I don't know what you think because you're in it so deeply.

• 41:15Speaker 03

  I think that the story you just told is is more or less the right story. Like Tesla has the market lead. So if Tesla has the best margins, if Donald Trump nixed every subsidy for electric vehicles, it'd be very bad for Tesla, but it'd be worse for Tesla's competitors. It's kind of like what you're saying. I do think like what you were just describing is like an oligarchy, right? Like the the these business people who are using, who are very powerful, using their business connections to to to to influence politics and using that to influence their bottom line. I feel like that is what Elon Musk right now is trying to do. And people have described Musk and Thiel and Bezos as as oligarchs.

• 41:57Speaker 03

  And I think there's there's something to that because the playbooks do feel very similar. I don't think we yet know, like, we don't know how this story ends. And America, like, we may have some oligarchs or some would be oligarchs, but we still live in a democracy. And there is, there's still the possibility, or even the probability, that this won't work, that that Musk will not be able to, that that that, yes, he he is buying influence when he when he donates $300 million to Donald Trump. But like, how much influence is he actually buying? Can Donald Trump really just write him a check for like $10 billion? And I think the answer, I I think we're gonna learn, and maybe we already are starting

• 42:42Speaker 03

  to learn, that like, the answer may be no, that Trump is not able because of Congress and because of all of these, you know, because of the countervailing forces, because of the fact that many people in the United States, including, you know, Donald Trump voters, do not want to live in that world. And so so I think, so I just don't think we know yet what the payoff is.

• 43:02Trevor Noah?

  So then maybe, I guess, for someone like Thiel, it works out because he seems like he's more on the ideological side of it. But Musk seems to be more blow with the wind, but really, it's all about the money. Just bottom line, bottom line, bottom line.

• 43:15Speaker 03

  I think they're both, they're both about the money. But but Thiel is more ideological and has more of an ideology.

• 43:23Speaker 04

  So and maybe you can explain the psychology of these guys. How much more money do they want? They have so much like, because that doesn't feel like a satisfying explanation when we're talking about

• 43:35Speaker 03

  Totally.

• 43:36Speaker 04

  the richest man in the world and we're talking about somebody that made a venture capital investment that is unprecedented, will never happen again, what after the Facebook IPO.

• 43:45Speaker 03

  It's a great point and it's actually what some of them have said in sort of saying like, how could this be corrupt? I don't need more money. Why would I as a, we've seen David Sacks, who's a, you know, close friend of Thiel and Musk, say this, like, why would a rich person be corrupt? They don't need to be corrupt.

• 43:59Trevor Noah?

  Oh, brilliant.

• 44:00Speaker 03

  And, um.

• 44:01Speaker 04

  I love that.

• 44:01Trevor Noah?

  That's brilliant.

• 44:03Speaker 04

  It's despicable, but it's like brilliant thinking.

• 44:06Speaker 03

  Wow. Um, so yeah, maybe point taken.

• 44:09Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 44:09Speaker 03

  On the other hand, like Elon Musk is worth, I didn't, I didn't check before I walked in. I'm guessing it's around 300 million, 300 billion dollars. That's not like 300 billion. That's not a giant stack of dollar bills. That's 300 billion dollars largely in illiquid assets, Tesla stock, stock in these private companies, primarily SpaceX. These companies all do business with one another. So if one were to fall very quickly, then all, then all the others might, might fall. So it's not like, like he is very rich, but it's not like his wealth is, is, is totally stable.

• 44:45Speaker 04

  Are you saying he's low key broke? Is that what you're trying to say?

• 44:49Speaker 03

  He's definitely not, he's definitely not sitting on a ton of cash.

• 44:53Trevor Noah?

  He's not Pablo Escobar rich.

• 44:54Speaker 03

  But I mean, he, he, this is, this is not to say he's broke. He can borrow money and this is like what he did when he bought Twitter. He, he basically can take some of this, some of these stock certificates, give them to a bank.

• 45:06Trevor Noah?

  It's the biggest scam in the world.

• 45:07Speaker 03

  And get money out of it.

• 45:07Speaker 04

  So he's kind of over leveraged now because Twitter was not a good investment. We know that.

• 45:11Speaker 03

  He is, he just is not sitting on a pile of cash. And so if these, if some of these stocks were to fall dramatically, he'd still have enough money to, to have a plane and probably, and, and go after his enemies or whatever, but he just, he would not be mega rich the way he is now. And, and so I do think like, they don't feel as secure as, as we might think we would feel if we were in their, their shoes.

• 45:37Trevor Noah?

  I'll say one thing to that. I've met a bunch of these men. I haven't met Elon Musk or Donald Trump, but I've met a bunch of like mega billionaire people. And I think we should never take for granted how much their drive is governed by just being invited back to the club. You know, i- i- it's whoever has the biggest yacht gets the biggest parking spot. Well, you know, you get to dock your boat. It's it's there's a there's something that comes with it that goes beyond like the money. And sometimes we think of the money because for most people, money is the thing that's governing your life. But once it gets beyond that, the money is just a number that determines where you are positioned now in life.

• 46:22Trevor Noah?

  So when you have half a billion dollars, okay, I'm sure there's like a lot of presidents who will take your call. When you have three hundred billion dollars, they're praying that you take their call.

• 46:37Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 46:38Trevor Noah?

  Money is now power. It's now having the ability to what Max was saying to shape the world now. Think about how many times we as people go, man, I wish they would. No, no, no, these people don't wish they would.

• 46:50Speaker 04

  They just do it.

• 46:51Trevor Noah?

  They do they would. So they phone the Department of Education, you know what I mean? The Secretary of Education go, hey, this needs to change in schools. And that person goes, I'll look into it. They go, I don't like that the roads are like this. They go, I'll look into it.

• 47:05Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 47:05Trevor Noah?

  You know, and I think I think that's what we take for granted. But I would I would love to know this about Elon in particular. And I know it's like a loaded sentence, but I I keep feeling it like my spidey sense. Maybe I spent too much time in Africa. I don't know.

• 47:19Trevor Noah?

  It feels like a lot of Elon Musk is a scam.

• 47:23Trevor Noah?

  And I know that that is a counterintuitive statement because people will go, what are you talking about, Trevor? Man, man, the richest man in the world, the company. He's every single time he's had a new event, he said full self-driving is not it's not it's imminent. It's imminent, it's imminent, it's imminent. There is still no full self-driving. They they and now people like, but have you seen how they drive? That's not what I'm saying. A lot of the stock price is tied to what he says will be done or is achievable. A lot of the valuation is tied to that, but it doesn't get done. And that's why I noticed an overlap between like him and Donald Trump. Donald Trump, I think it was Jeff Zucker who said this about him, who used to run NBC. Jeff Zucker, someone asked him once, they said, yo, why do you keep giving Donald Trump The Apprentice?

• 48:04Trevor Noah?

  And they're like, this hack failed businessman who's like this goofy dude who's not even a billionaire, who acts like a billionaire, why do you keep? And Jeff Zucker said, can I tell you something? He said, this man is a one man, one man ratings wrecking ball machine. And he said, because he will go to press events. And the press will say, how do you feel about the ratings being down for this season on The Apprentice? And Trump will turn and say, this is the biggest rated show of all time. And the journalists would go, no, it isn't. It's lost ratings. And he's like, no, you're wrong. This is the biggest show. It is watched by more people than ever before. The Apprentice is the biggest show.

• 48:44Trevor Noah?

  And Jeff Zucker says he'd never seen a human being who could take reality and just butt up against it and force. And then he would, he would create the reality that he now said existed. And I, I feel like Musk and Trump do a similar thing. So Musk goes, it will work, it will work, it will work. It doesn't work, doesn't work, doesn't work. And then a version of it does work. And the people are like, aha, and then thank you, 50 billion. You know, and I know it's like a loaded question. I'm obviously asking it in a blunt way.

• 49:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean.

• 49:11Trevor Noah?

  Is he legit?

• 49:12Speaker 04

  You're saying, Trevor, you're saying the tech emperor has no clothes.

• 49:15Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, I'm saying, is he legit, genuinely?

• 49:17Speaker 03

  You use the word like scam. And then the, what you described was, I think, what like a tech Silicon Valley people would describe as like a reality distortion field. And they.

• 49:28Trevor Noah?

  Oh, I love that.

• 49:28Speaker 03

  That's the phrase, right? And it was used memorably around Steve Jobs. People use it to describe Elon Musk, the, the tendency for these tech guys to, you know, kind of like bend reality to their will or to say something. And like then the fact of saying it somehow makes it real. Now, I'm not saying that the, the self-driving cars obviously are not real. And he's been promising that, as you said, for a very long time. And he's.

• 49:52Trevor Noah?

  And I'm not saying they'll never be real, by the way.

• 49:54Speaker 04

  But they're not real now.

• 49:54Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, I'm just saying a lot of like the success is based on what people think is going to happen when it is going to happen, but it's not happening. But now the very thing that they got into the position for, they're failing at, but then somehow.

• 50:10Trevor Noah?

  They spin it to not be failure. Do you know what I mean?

• 50:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I, I, I think that maybe that's something that's an insight that like Trump and Elon have about the world. That it works now or something. And the way I've thought about it is more like as a, like a bullshit artist. A bullshit artist isn't necessarily scamming. They're just, they're just, you know, they're just spinning a story or whatever.

• 50:33Trevor Noah?

  I love that.

• 50:33Speaker 03

  Elon Musk is, I mean, he is an amazing marketer. He's taken a, it was a very difficult story, electric vehicles. Um, there were no electric cars really at the time he started doing it. There, he didn't own any car, he didn't have any cars to sell people. He managed to convince people to give him money.

• 50:50Trevor Noah?

  This is what I mean though. You see what I mean?

• 50:51Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 50:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, like, the business model for Tesla was, okay, we're gonna make this very expensive car. You're gonna give us the money for it, then we will go make it. And we will use the extra money left over to make another car. We sell that ahead of time. He sells all his cars ahead of time when there isn't one.

• 51:07Trevor Noah?

  Right.

• 51:07Speaker 03

  He's been, he's been basically selling products that don't exist for his, in, you know, his entire career. And then hopefully, most of the time, eventually delivering them. And as long as people, you know, believe that something is, that it's coming, that there is gonna be this next thing. It, it, it kinda works. And, and I do feel like we're in this moment where we're gonna learn, basically. Like, how, how, how far that goes.

• 51:33Trevor Noah?

  I think in another life.

• 51:36Trevor Noah?

  Elon Musk has the ending that Elizabeth Holmes had with the Rannos.

• 51:40Speaker 04

  Get out my head. I was thinking, this is what, what they threw Elizabeth Holmes in jail for.

• 51:44Trevor Noah?

  It's the same thing. Elon gets money to make a car that hasn't been made and basically says the thing is what it isn't and what, cool. Elon is the same guy who then like convinces one car manufacturer. That he has gotten funding that he doesn't have and then convinces the bank that the car manufacturer is in when they're not in. And then gets the deal done, but both sides came to the deal because they both had information that wasn't in fact true.

• 52:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 52:10Trevor Noah?

  And Elizabeth Holmes is in jail. And I'm not saying she shouldn't be in jail, but I'm just like, oh damn. With a bullshit artist, you just need one person to go to Bernie Madoff, you to go, I need my money Bernie. And then all of a sudden, the whole thing falls apart. But if no one asks you for the money, Bernie Madoff could still be around as one of the most successful

• 52:28Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 52:29Trevor Noah?

  money guys, because no one would ask him to for the actual money.

• 52:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, there's a fine line between like fake it till you make it and faking it, you know? And uh, when you look at him and you look at all the ways he's failed to like live up to these promises. There are ways that he has succeeded.

• 52:45Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, that's true.

• 52:46Speaker 03

  And like, and like those car like, and again, if it's what's so weird and kind of maddening. If you've followed him for a very long time is he has succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. Like he, he wanted to have a mainstream electric car. He wanted to make electric cars, have them everywhere and now, and he has it. And like, like if you get an Uber now, like it's probably going to be a Tesla.

• 53:07Trevor Noah?

  It's amazing, it's amazing how many of them are Tesla's.

• 53:09Speaker 03

  Model threes, right? It's like, it's like a Corolla or something, but it's not enough, right? Maybe the thing that, that allowed him to get to where he is now, it's like he can't stop it or something. And he just has to keep, you know, now we're, you know, now we're doing the cyber cab or something. And at some point, you, you have to think he's going to, you know, write a check with his mouth that he can't cash. Um, and, and that is sort of like what every Elon person who's skeptical of him, every critic has been waiting for.

• 53:36Trevor Noah?

  I mean, that's where people have lost a lot of money bidding against him, right? A lot of people, that's what, that's what makes him a paradox. You know me, I love electric cars, love, love, love, love, love electric cars. So for me, I've always been the guy who's gone, yes, go Elon, do the thing. Because I, I love that, I love that concept. I love the idea of Starlink. I think too many parts of the world don't have internet. And this archaic idea of like a cable coming to your house and now you don't have it. And then infrastructure last mile, it's too, it's too intensive. It's a fantastic idea. Yeah, it has downsides with satellites. I get that, but there's, you know what I mean? It's a fantastic idea. There's so many elements of Elon where I go, great. But I think what, what, you know, rubs me the wrong way is like the con man-y side of it. I'll tell you like the biggest one that got me with Elon.

• 54:20Trevor Noah?

  Was him lying about the video games. Guys, I no, no, let me tell you something. I've been offended by few things in my life. More than I have been. Yo, let me tell you why. I'll tell you why. I play a shit ton of video games, right? And video games have always been, for me at least, the bastion of like where you are because nothing else like worked for you. We weren't good at video games because we were good at catching a ball. We weren't good at video games because we were the fastest. We weren't good at video games because we were the best looking. We weren't good. No, but that was the place. It's like my mage was at this level because I wasn't at that level in real life. And I don't know how to explain, but that thing for me.

• 55:03Trevor Noah?

  It was so insignificant that I was like, why does he need to steal that thing as well? I get it when you're doing stock market things. Alright, yeah, I may not like it, but you know what? I'm sure a lot of other people do it in different ways. But when this man came in and stole the valor of video gaming. And proclaimed himself one of the top ten players in the world and talked about how he does it. Yo, I remember watch, and then I felt like a hater because I watched it and I said to my friend, I was like, that's impossible. I've always said, like my whole life, there should only be two modes in a video game, not easy and hard. It should be unemployed and employed. That should be the mode you play the game in because if you are unemployed, you play the game at a different level. When you're employed, you can't get the levels that some of these people get, right?

• 55:48Trevor Noah?

  For me, that was the biggest red flag and I don't know how to explain it.

• 55:50Speaker 04

  Not all the kids.

• 55:51Trevor Noah?

  Let me tell you something. I hear that stuff and I understand why. But Nick Cannon has a lot of kids.

• 55:56Speaker 04

  And he's a red flag.

• 55:57Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, but I'm saying he's not a red flag for the world, for me. For me, Elon Musk lying about the video games. And then acting like he didn't lie about the video games when he finally got busted now being like, because when he sat with Joe Rogan, he proudly professed how. And he used it to prop up his aptitude, by the way. I think this is what part of the problem I have. He sat across from Joe Rogan, and Joe Rogan was like, "You play a lot of video games. You're one of the top in the world." And he's like, "You know, they've actually shown, the studies have shown that doctors who use, like, who play video games, they're actually better. They've got more dexterity and they're better at using." And so, yeah, I find it helps me like solve problems. And I can see someone going like, "Wow, he's also one of the best video gamers, which means his brain, which means his brain."

• 56:39Trevor Noah?

  He gets busted. One of the top gamer streamers or whatever talks to him. He goes like, "Yeah, yeah, of course I get someone in China or wherever to play for me. That's what everyone does."

• 56:47Speaker 04

  But it shows that it's never enough for him.

• 56:49Trevor Noah?

  But that's what I, but that's what I mean. But I'm saying,

• 56:53Trevor Noah?

  I can understand somebody who steals my car. I can understand somebody who steals my phone. But then there's like somebody who's gonna steal the box that my phone came in, even though the two were separate. And I'm like,

• 57:10Trevor Noah?

  there's a thief and then there's a kleptomaniac. Do you get what I'm saying?

• 57:13Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 57:13Trevor Noah?

  For me, that's, that's the red flag with Elon Musk. If you can lie about that, and you've lied about the big things as well, what are the other things that we don't know?

• 57:24Speaker 03

  I think you might be on to something, honestly. We're seeing this, and I feel like this is something that the media was like a little bit slow to pick up on. You know, Musk has been saying all the, it's, there are these, there are these protests going on in front of Tesla dealerships and so on. And Musk is saying, "Oh, it's ActBlue. It's George Soros." We don't totally know what's driving it. And I do think that the video game thing, both like you're saying, is this kind of like naked deception.

• 57:52Trevor Noah?

  Yes.

• 57:53Speaker 03

  And one that was maybe particularly offensive to his, you know, universe of fans.

• 57:59Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, no, completely. No, I'm with you. I'm with you.

• 58:02Speaker 03

  And I think like Musk is becoming this symbol, partly because of Trump and maybe partly for other reasons, having to do with his extreme wealth and so on. And, and the fact that he did this, you know, thing that looked like a Nazi salute to, to many people, like, he's, he's become a symbol of something very bad for a lot of people. And I, I do kind of wonder, maybe like, maybe the video game thing was the, was the turning point of it. You're not the first person who said like, "Well, that's gonna be the thing." That cooks him.

• 58:34Trevor Noah?

  Don't go anywhere, because we got more What Now? after this.

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• 1:00:30Speaker 04

  I'm really curious, because we have a South African here. We haven't spoken much about his South African...

• 1:00:37Trevor Noah?

  Even there, by the way, because Peter Thiel, I'm...

• 1:00:41Speaker 04

  Yeah, all of them have a South African connection. Namibia, like, all these guys have some Southern African connection. And it's particularly apartheid South Africa and white South Africans. And Trump's mission to help the very desolate, struggling white South Africans who need to be taken to America because of all the prejudice they're facing in South Africa right now. What do you think about... Spending his formative years.

• 1:01:06Trevor Noah?

  That was a joke, by the way, for anyone. Some people would be like, Cristiano believes it.

• 1:01:10Speaker 04

  Yeah, they're having a bad time. I've heard it's really bad for them.

• 1:01:13Trevor Noah?

  It's actually funny. I was, yeah, I was at a golf club talking to them about it. And I was like, how are things? And they're like, it's really tough. Really, really tough. I felt for them. All of those.

• 1:01:22Speaker 04

  I only have three cars and five houses.

• 1:01:24Trevor Noah?

  All of those guys.

• 1:01:25Speaker 04

  But what do you make of, because his father has kind of become like, there's all of these characters. You've got Grimes, you've got his eccentric mother, you've got like the woman that worked with him that has three children for him now. Like, it's not just Musk for me, because maybe I'm into celebrity gossip. It's all the like, the parade of characters that come with him. And I think South Africa is the backdrop to a lot of that. What do you make of like, spending his time there? How it informs his ideology? How it informs how he's engaging with Trump and some of the policies that he wants?

• 1:01:54Speaker 03

  I don't feel like an expert in the politics of like, the modern day Afrikaner movement like, and I, and I don't, I'm not sure that Elon even is. Like, I, I kind of think some of what's going on is he's just like drinking in the far right, you know, social media stream. And like, there's some far right people talking about, you know, white racism in South Africa. But what you're saying, though, I mean, there has to be some part of the South African-ness that is informing this. And I thought about this a lot with Thiel. He was born in Germany, family moved to the United States. And then he spent a couple of years, as I said, first in South Africa and then in modern day Namibia.

• 1:02:34Speaker 03

  His father worked at a uranium mine. If you're working at a uranium mine in Namibia, which at the time was like basically a colony, a client state of South Africa, an apartheid state, you are like as complicit in the apartheid system as you could possibly be. You are making, you are producing, you're not only like dealing with a labor structure that is benefiting from apartheid, but you're trying to produce nuclear weapons so that you can defend that system from the world that is trying to shut you down. And like, all these guys who had family connections in South Africa.

• 1:03:08Speaker 04

  And they're all white, by the way.

• 1:03:09Speaker 03

  White guys, yeah. And they went to American college campuses and, and in Teal's case, it's the 1980s. Apartheid was like the cause on the left.

• 1:03:21Trevor Noah?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:03:21Speaker 03

  And I think what I think was a political statement by the anti-apartheid activists, you know, at Stanford in the 80s, but you process it as a personal attack.

• 1:03:30Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:31Speaker 04

  Attack me and my family.

• 1:03:32Speaker 03

  My family and like I did some reporting, talking to people who went to college with him and where he would get into these arguments, he, he's, he's denied, I should say, supporting apartheid or, or, or expressing pro-apartheid views, but there are certainly classmates of his who, who remember him doing so.

• 1:03:46Trevor Noah?

  Can I just interject and tell you something? And this is something that really plagues me. I, I have yet to meet someone who supported apartheid. It's really weird, guys.

• 1:03:58Speaker 04

  Are you being, is this, are you being serious?

• 1:04:00Trevor Noah?

  I've, I have, I am yet to meet a person. It really worries me because it's almost like apartheid just happened by itself. I mean, no, everything you're saying here, let me tell you something now. I have yet to meet a person anywhere in the world who was in apartheid, for instance, and who goes like, yeah, no, Trevor, I didn't want those blacks and whites. No, I have yet, every person I'll talk to will go like.

• 1:04:22Speaker 04

  Free Mandela.

• 1:04:23Trevor Noah?

  They go like, I was totally against it. Then I'm like, huh, everyone was against it. Huh, so who was for it? Because it seems like there were a lot of people for it. Seems like a lot of people didn't want the thing to stop.

• 1:04:33Speaker 04

  A lot of people benefited from it.

• 1:04:35Trevor Noah?

  It seems like a lot of, huh, for a thing that nobody wanted to end. But anyway, forgive me, I just.

• 1:04:40Speaker 03

  Anyway, yeah, what's weird though is when I first started talking to Elon, he made apartheid part of the reason he wanted to come to North America. He said, I, I left South Africa because I was so against apartheid. And, and like he, and he's always very careful.

• 1:04:57Trevor Noah?

  Wait, how old was he when he left?

• 1:04:59Speaker 03

  He was like 17 or something.

• 1:05:01Trevor Noah?

  Okay.

• 1:05:01Speaker 03

  That's the story he told. And of course, you know, the, he's, the story has, has shifted a little bit. I mean, his, you know, now he's very concerned as, you know, as you're saying about the, you know, the property rights of the white farmers or whatever.

• 1:05:14Trevor Noah?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 1:05:15Speaker 03

  And, and so, so I don't know like what, what the truth of, what the truth of it is there, but I do think there might've been a sense of like feeling attacked and then reacting, you know, in a, in a sort of extreme way.

• 1:05:26Trevor Noah?

  So I don't know that this is correct at all, but I've been trying to sit and figure out what it could be. And I think some of it is this. I think a lot of these people, a lot of these tech leaders who came through like South Africa and like were, you know, in and around apartheid at the time. They witnessed something that is very unique to countries like South Africa. And that is the proximity between business and government and how the two work hand in hand to further each other's goals, right? So apartheid is not a free system. Apartheid is not a world where the best company wins. Apartheid is not a world where the the best speech is accelerated, no. Apartheid is a system where the government says, will you help us to turn coal into oil?

• 1:06:10Trevor Noah?

  Because we've been oil embargoed, yes, you have the business. We will give you all the resources you need to give us all the oil we need. And then all the anti apartheid companies, they left South Africa, right? But the system is set up in such a way where there's like a direct, it's very, very similar to like Cold War Russia. You know, it's like you help the government, the government helps you. You help the government, the government helps you. And then these people come to America where that's like frowned upon. It's almost like, oh, no, no, no, no, no. Church and state, things are separate here, you don't, you don't do that. But I think they still have this idea where they go like, no, no, no, hey, government, we help you and you help us.

• 1:06:47Speaker 04

  And they have the racism too.

• 1:06:48Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, and I think, for for instance, when you talk about ideologies. If you look at Elon's like plight against South Africa, again, I'm not sure this is perfect. But I saw it start when he wasn't able to launch Starlink in South Africa. Because in South Africa, the government says they want to make sure that you have minority ownership when you launch a company. And the reason the government did this, and they haven't done it perfectly, by the way, I'm never gonna say it's the poster child. But what they were trying to do is they were going, guys, we've learned that money gets closed off. So if we don't make sure that companies have representation in terms of who owns the companies, the money's never gonna go anywhere.

• 1:07:25Speaker 04

  And when you say minority ownership, South Africa's a black majority.

• 1:07:29Trevor Noah?

  Yes. No, no, what I, what I mean is like, sorry, now what we say minority here, so yeah, so I'm saying like, black, people of color, yeah, yeah, people of color.

• 1:07:36Speaker 04

  So that explains the anti DEI thing he has.

• 1:07:38Trevor Noah?

  Exactly.

• 1:07:38Speaker 04

  He's just like, oh, the plane crash, it's DEI reasons.

• 1:07:40Trevor Noah?

  So Elon, so Elon, I think there went, you're not gonna let me open this. And not only did they not let him, they then banned Starlink. And then now Starlink, you can't use it in South, even though it's a satellite thing, they don't enable it in South Africa. And I think Elon now again was personally, he was like, oh, I'm gonna find a way to break this system. And one thing I've heard about Elon from everyone who's worked in and around his orbit is, he is supremely talented at finding the right lever to pull and he will pull it. It doesn't matter what he's trying to do, but Elon will go, oh, this is, that's the lever. I need to get people working harder, that's the lever. I need to get these people doing this, that's the lever.

• 1:08:23Trevor Noah?

  To start businesses that break things and don't follow the rules. What do you need? You need the people who make the rules to lose some of their power. What's the best way to get those people to lose some of their power? You find the people who are the least happy, you find the people who have the most hate formenting. And you encourage that and you grow it and you nestle. And so what you, if, if, essentially, I love that you said it in the beginning with Peter Thiel. These guys are essentially investing in disruptors all around the world.

• 1:08:50Speaker 04

  They're just, so they're very opportunistic.

• 1:08:51Trevor Noah?

  They're seed funding everywhere. That's, they're using the same principles of like money. They go, Christiana, tell me about your movement. Huh, you believe that governments shouldn't exist.

• 1:09:00Speaker 04

  It gives me an idea now.

• 1:09:01Trevor Noah?

  You know what, this sounds like a good company. Yeah, they go, this is a great company. You know what? It might be a risky bet, but it's nothing in the greater scheme of things. I'm just gonna throw you a bone and I'm gonna throw you a bone and I'm gonna throw you a bone. And as we see it growing around the world, you just need a few unicorns for all your bets to pay off. You need a few billion dollar companies to make up for every like hundred thousand dollars you've invested. And I think that's what he's doing there. I think that's what he's doing in Germany. Cause again, Germany, people forget this, people like, why is Elon involved?

• 1:09:31Trevor Noah?

  Which place makes some of the like most expensive and most important cars in the world? Germany. If Germany collapses and if the German car economy collapses, seems like there's a big winner somewhere.

• 1:09:42Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:09:43Trevor Noah?

  His name is Elon Musk. Places that he doesn't care about, it's because they don't in some way, shape or form benefit him. Do you know what I mean?

• 1:09:49Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:09:50Speaker 03

  I think you're right. I think there's always an angle with him and like often a business angle. Like, I don't think he's ever, I mean, he is, he does obviously have some ideology, but, but like you said about the apartheid system and this, this idea of like, of becoming sort of a client of the government or something like that. Like, he has been so freaking good at getting the government to give him money.

• 1:10:15Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, brilliant.

• 1:10:15Speaker 03

  And finding, like you said, finding these levers. And those levers can be, they can be like reaching regular people and saying like, here is this awesome product, but they also are often and have often been like political levers. And like, I, I agree, I don't fully understand the, the dynamics of German politics and what exactly he's doing with the AFD, uh, which is the far right party in Germany. But it definitely, everything I know about Elon tells me there's an angle there. And whether it's uh, something having to do with the auto industry, you know, he has union issues in Germany. Or perhaps, you know, Europeans have a space, uh, agency, they compete with SpaceX, maybe looking for more contracts there or whatever.

• 1:10:59Speaker 03

  But he's, he's trying to find an in and, and it just, there, you know, there's, obviously there's collateral damage sometimes when, when you're, when that's your, um, when that's your modus operandi.

• 1:11:12Trevor Noah?

  I know we're gonna have to let you go, so it's a, it's a, it's a terrible question to ask you because we are finding you in the middle of a story. This is a book that hasn't concluded, but if you were to try and not necessarily predict what you think will happen. But maybe a more interesting one for me would be, what do you predict their end goal and their aim is? Cause you know, sort of what Cristiano was saying, they have the money or they have the, the, the access to the money. They have the valuation, they have, you know, the power, et cetera. But what is, is there an end goal? Like, does Peter Thiel rest when something is achieved? Does Elon Musk rest when something is achieved? Or are there, as you said, like a fusion reaction that is now powering itself infinitely?

• 1:11:57Speaker 03

  I think with Thiel, there is a more calculating approach. He has not gone all in with Trump. And there were a lot of people around him and in the kind of right wing Silicon Valley world saying, like, oh, what a huge mistake. I mean, he was, he was the earliest Trump supporter. Like, why is he not supporting Trump? But I think, like, we are living, as you said, in that moment. And where, and there has been, you know, as we're talking, like, this kind of high of Trump support and Trump's power. And that won't last. And, and I think Thiel has set himself well, set himself up well, in case it doesn't last. Because he has a, he has a very close relationship with J.D.

• 1:12:38Speaker 03

  Vance, who's Trump's, you know, Trump's vice president, and who Thiel basically helped him start his political career, was his, his main donor to Vance's Senate campaign. So if Vance, you know, becomes the Republican candidate in 2028, as I think he's probably the favorite to do, Thiel has an end. Musk, I think, is somebody who needs this kind of endless crisis, a sort of endless series of, of, I don't know, like, games or something. What he wants, his end game, is he sells all the cars, he sells all the rocket launches, he's worth way more money. He's even said this, you know, he thinks Tesla, his car company, should be worth, you know, $30 trillion or something.

• 1:13:21Speaker 03

  If that's worth $30 trillion, Elon is gonna be worth, you know, like, I don't know, like, $6 trillion, $7 trillion more, probably. So for him, it's, it's just like, way more dominance, being able to sort of

• 1:13:35Trevor Noah?

  A god king.

• 1:13:36Speaker 03

  Essentially run the world.

• 1:13:37Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, god king, that's what it sounds like to me.

• 1:13:39Speaker 03

  I don't think that is the most likely scenario. But, but I do think that is the, that's like what he is pushing for. And, and I think to some extent, you know, it's up to voters and democracy to, to try to restrain him.

• 1:13:55Trevor Noah?

  Damn. Well, here's hoping, Max. Here's hoping. And I say this, I hope you take this in the best way possible. I hope that your podcast becomes less relevant as time goes.

• 1:14:09Speaker 03

  Fair enough.

• 1:14:09Trevor Noah?

  And I hope the people who listen now are now just like interested in business and like, you know, and I hope it has like not as much of a broad appeal because right now, I think Elon Inc., it is like the hub of everything. And so, um, yeah, man, thank you for taking the time and coming and sharing a bit of the universe with us. Appreciate it. Thank you both for having me.

• 1:14:33Trevor Noah?

  What Now with Trevor Noah is produced by Spotify Studios in partnership with Day Zero Productions. The show is executive produced by Trevor Noah, Sanaz Yamin, and Jodi Avigan. Our senior producer is Jess Hackle. Claire Slaughter is our producer. Music, mixing, and mastering by Hannes Brown. Thank you so much for listening. Join me next Thursday for another episode of What Now.

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