Inside 'Musk': Power, Family and the Making of a Tech Demagogue

In his new documentary, "Musk," filmmaker Alex Gibney set out to answer two big questions about the world’s first trillionaire: How has Elon Musk assumed so much power, and why have we given it to him so willingly? Over nearly four hours, the film connects the dots between Musk’s various ventures — SpaceX, Tesla, Starlink, X, xAI, and Neurolink — to tell a bigger story of the unique threat he poses to democracy. The film also includes revealing interviews from people who know Musk personally, including his first wife, the writer Justine Musk, who hasn’t spoken publicly in years. Kara sits down with Alex and Justine to talk about making the film, Musk’s obsession with being seen as an “engineer,” and Alex’s use of a computer-generated Elon as a stand-in for an interview with him (Musk declined to participate in Gibney’s film and declined to comment on this interview). They also talk about Musk’s hard shift toward right-wing politics and what it means for the midterms and future U. S. elections. Questions? Comments? Email us at [email protected] or find us on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Threads, and Bluesky @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.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  I kept thinking, well, this is America. You're supposed to be able to.

• 0:05Kara Swisher?

  Say your piece.

• 0:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, say your piece, you know, free speech. And this is my experience and this is my viewpoint. And I didn't want to be intimidated into silence.

• 0:32Kara Swisher?

  Hi, everyone. From New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is On with Kara Swisher, and I'm Kara Swisher. The story of how Elon Musk went from an average tech entrepreneur to the richest man in the world has been told many times over the years, including by yours truly. But even I sometimes struggle to really comprehend it all. How did this man with a reputation for failing to deliver on so many big promises become the world's first trillionaire? How did he become such a dominant force in so many vital industries? Tech, yes, but also automobile, space, and communications? And now, politics, too? And why do we let him amass so much power and influence? And what does it all add up to? And also, why does he want so many kids?

• 1:14Kara Swisher?

  Filmmaker Alex Gibney wanted to answer some of those questions. His new documentary, Musk, tries to connect the dots between Musk's many companies to tell a bigger story about the unique threat he poses to democracy. Of course, I'm in the film, and so is Musk's first wife, Justine. She's speaking out for the first time in years. Both are here with me to talk today about the film, which clocks in at four hours. There's an intermission. Gibney is also no stranger to difficult subjects. His past films have uncovered Scientology, Enron, Elizabeth Holmes, WikiLeaks, and the US policy on torture during the war in Afghanistan. He's won Emmys and an Oscar, but the media environment is a lot different today because of how much power people like Musk have over the way information gets shared.

• 1:57Kara Swisher?

  And Gibney is facing a lot of headwinds to get this film out. I think this is a really terrific film. It is very long, but he manages to knit it together. And it is worth the time you spend on it, because this is the singular most important figure in politics, in business, and in our society today. It's really revealing to put it all together, and especially for those who don't know the story. And then I think Gibney's been very fair to him. Musk says it's a hit piece. It is not. It's really important. All right, let's get into this conversation with Alex Gibney and Justine Musk. Our expert question comes from Kirsten Grine from The New York Times, who's covered Musk an awful lot and done some astonishing stories. This is one, I promise, you're not going to want to miss, so stick around.

• 2:53Kara Swisher?

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• 3:36Speaker 02

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• 4:07Speaker 03

  I'm Anna Garten, and each week on Happy Hour, I invite new and old friends for a drink and a fun conversation at my kitchen table in New York City. On this week's episode, I'm joined by Julia Louis-Dreyfus. We talk all about attending a fashion show in Paris together, throwing dinner parties, and making her Broadway debut in other desert cities. New episodes of Happy Hour are available every Wednesday. You can watch on YouTube or listen wherever you get your podcasts. Cheers.

• 4:47Kara Swisher?

  Alex and Justine, thank you for coming on On. I really appreciate it.

• 4:51Speaker 04

  Great to be here.

• 4:52Speaker 00

  Thank you for having me.

• 4:53Kara Swisher?

  First of all, amazing movie, an astonishing documentary, very long, obviously. And I will say, Justine, I find you to be at the center of it. I thought what you were saying was really important for people to understand, especially in the context of this very long story.

• 5:09Speaker 00

  Thank you. I appreciate that.

• 5:11Kara Swisher?

  So let's begin. Alex, you started work on this film in 2022, a little after Elon Musk first became the richest man in the world, before he got involved with Trump.

• 5:24Kara Swisher?

  I'll also say, when I was speaking to him. Why did you want to make a film at the outset? And talk about the changing nature of it when you were making it. Obviously, the big question for a lot of people that ask me is, why does it need to be four hours?

• 5:38Speaker 04

  Well, it became a much, much bigger story. I mean, to be honest, we were ready in early 2024 to finish the film as a less-than-two-hour film. And, you know, that film was about 21st century power, but it's mostly economic power, not necessarily political power. And then, when Trump was nearly assassinated and Elon Musk hitched his wagon to Trump, the story changed. And HBO, actually, were the ones who came to me and said, don't finish it. Expand it, because the story has gotten a lot bigger. So we expanded it. And obviously, the political dimension was huge, even though I didn't really appreciate

• 6:22Speaker 04

  or understand that his political shift had really taken place in 2022. I just hadn't seen it or didn't know about it yet.

• 6:31Kara Swisher?

  Right, a lot of people hadn't. So, Justine, you've largely stepped back from the public eye in the years since your divorce in 2008, with a handful of notable exceptions. You're a well-regarded writer. Interestingly enough, so is Mackenzie Scott. There's a lot of really amazing writers. I'm assuming you're still doing that, correct?

• 6:49Speaker 00

  I am.

• 6:50Kara Swisher?

  Yeah. And talk a little bit about that and why you decided to participate, because you have been not in the public eye, and I know it's not a place you feel is comfortable in.

• 7:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, I sold three novels to traditional publishing companies in my early 30s. And the last one came out, I think, just when Elon and I were divorcing, separating, and then the publishing world was changing. And I became really interested in blogging. And so that took me away from novel writing. And I think I became aware that I just wasn't quite sure of the kind of writer I wanted to be after what I went through with Elon. He really did change my perspective in a lot of ways, and he's still doing that. You can't really get away from him.

• 7:46Kara Swisher?

  Right. Right. How do you mean change your perspective?

• 7:52Speaker 00

  I don't think that I would have been exposed nearly as much to some of the same things if I had not married him, because he really took me in deep into a world where my own interests and talents would have taken me elsewhere. And so I often felt like a stranger in that world, definitely an outsider and an observer. And like, when you're living in a foreign country, it takes you a while to find your feet. And I don't think I really started becoming fascinated by it until after the divorce, actually.

• 8:34Speaker 00

  And I started to get more of a framework for what was happening and the kind of moment that I was in. And then I feel very lucky for that. And I like the way that Alex talks about 21st century power.

• 8:53Speaker 00

  Watching the arc of some of these guys, because I knew Elon in college, I knew his brother in college, and his friends I met, we were all in our 20s, you know, mid to late 20s, early 30s. So just the rise of them. And I...

• 9:19Speaker 00

  I didn't know that they were going to take that turn to the right. That was a surprise.

• 9:24Kara Swisher?

  Me too.

• 9:25Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 9:26Kara Swisher?

  Yeah. Why did you decide to participate, though? Because you've been relatively quiet.

• 9:31Speaker 00

  I was hesitant about it for a while. And I had several long conversations with Alex. And I felt comfortable with his worldview. And I had, I knew at some point that I wanted to come out in support of Jenna, my daughter. And there were things that I wanted to express to make sure that they were on the public record, so to speak.

• 10:00Speaker 00

  I know I'm not so sure I can control the narrative or that I would try to narrative, that I would try to control the narrative. But I wanted the narrative to be something that I at least recognized.

• 10:13Kara Swisher?

  Yeah. Elon's a little loud.

• 10:16Speaker 00

  A little loud.

• 10:16Kara Swisher?

  Yeah.

• 10:17Speaker 00

  Yeah. And he tends to reshape things as he goes.

• 10:21Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, he tells the story to his own.

• 10:23Speaker 00

  He tells the story.

• 10:24Kara Swisher?

  To the way he wants it done.

• 10:25Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 10:26Kara Swisher?

  Alex, talk a little bit about bringing in the personal part. Because Justine's really at the fulcrum of that, like discussing that. So people understand Elon as a person. He's sort of formulated this character that he plays on television, essentially. And now he's become that person, I think, in many ways. And that happens a lot. Trump is that way, too. There's obviously a similarity. Talk a little bit about how you were thinking about that, Alex, from a personal point of view. Because this is a living person.

• 10:53Speaker 04

  Well, I mean, the first film before it expanded was really about his professional and business life. And it dealt with certain issues. But there was this idea of storytelling that was terribly important, even in that iteration of the film. And how he was telling stories that weren't necessarily true and grew further and further away from the truth. But when Justine and I started talking, because it's always interesting. I mean, character matters. And you're trying to understand who this person is and how he does what he does. You know, she said a couple of things to me that were very powerful that I felt that I needed to dig in.

• 11:35Speaker 04

  One is she said, you know, the personal is political. And that, in the sense that you have to understand the person in order to stand their political journey. And then she also talked a lot about the challenges that she had. She says something, which she says in the film very articulately, which is that I first learned about gaslighting from Elon.

• 11:57Kara Swisher?

  That was a very powerful line.

• 11:59Speaker 04

  Which is to say, even in her personal life, she was dealing with somebody who was trying to redefine the reality around him. And I felt that that was a very powerful and potent notion in terms of how you understand what ultimately he did, both in the economic and the political sphere. This kind of fiction making or even science fiction making. And then the other thing that was interesting to me was trying to understand whether or not he changed over the course of time as he accreted more power to himself. And that's something that Justine really had a lot of perspective on.

• 12:41Kara Swisher?

  Talk about that line of gaslighting. I thought that was a really important line because it does extend everywhere. It's a little like a P T Barnum. Edison did this, too, by the way, in his time as an inventor. And so did Franklin. And weird, you know, they all sort of tell their own stories in that regard and disregard reality. Why did you think of that, both the personal and as it moved into the public space?

• 13:09Speaker 00

  You know, my mind immediately goes back to something I said to Elon when we had separated, officially separated, and there were lawyers involved. But we were still in the same house. And we were arguing a lot. And at one point, I said something to him along the lines of, you know, this thing that you do with the truth, like, I'm not, I'm not having it. And I didn't really have a word for it because it's not necessarily a lie, but it's not the truth. And it's a way of, you know, pushing and pulling the truth. And pushing and pulling or, you know, reframing things so that what you're trying to say

• 13:53Speaker 00

  has been, you know, twisted into something that you didn't mean. And that suddenly becomes the conversation. And so it's like having the rug jerked out from under you over and over and over again. And it's very difficult to live with. And it's very difficult to have a conversation with somebody when you're talking at cross purposes. And I became aware that he communicates in order to control. And it's all about control. And it's all about having power, you know, over you. It's all about dominating the room. In fact, I think that whole, I don't know what to call it, philosophy or worldview is about, you know, freedom through the domination part.

• 14:36Speaker 00

  And they don't really see any other way to be, especially when he's talking to a woman or a wife or a girlfriend or something along those lines.

• 14:46Speaker 00

  So that was crazy making.

• 14:53Kara Swisher?

  When you think about that, because it does set up, it's a bigger picture of what Silicon Valley does, create great things and at the same time lie, feel the need to lie about their efficacy or their damage. Zuckerberg does it around Facebook. There's some good things, but he doesn't tell you the part that's damaging or wants to pretend they're victims of something that you misunderstand them in a lot of ways.

• 15:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'm sorry, I'm just, that victim thing. You know, they're so quick to accuse other people of having a victim mentality, but they love to be the victims.

• 15:25Kara Swisher?

  I always say every accusation is a confession for these people, which is interesting. So this is the most powerful man on the planet, as far as I can tell, in terms of money, access, power, astride a number of key industries, right? A lot, important industries. It's not like he's running the taco stands of America or something that's not going to really affect people. But it's space, it's communications, it's all manner of media.

• 15:50Kara Swisher?

  How scared were each of you to do this? Why don't you start, Alex, and then Justine?

• 15:58Speaker 04

  I was foolishly not scared at the beginning because it felt like a continuation of a lot of the stuff that I had done. I mean, I had done an investigation in the Church of Scientology, the Roman Catholic Church, you know, the guys at Enron, the US government. So foolishly, I just thought, well, I'll just do my thing. It didn't occur to me, you know, once Elon Musk essentially became the shadow president or had this weird symbiotic relationship with Donald Trump, suddenly it was, that was a different kind of power. And you realize that even the rule of law was not going to save you.

• 16:41Speaker 04

  And so then I began to be concerned. But it didn't, it didn't stop me.

• 16:47Kara Swisher?

  How did it manifest the concern? It's something I'm asked all the time. How can you say such things about Elon? I'm like, what? Like, I don't even think about it. But I should, probably. But how did it manifest for you?

• 16:58Speaker 04

  Well, you know, once you realize that, in a way, because he has the ear of the president, and this president is uniquely kind of transactional and has turned the Department of Justice into his own kind of revenge mechanism, suddenly you begin to wonder, like, is that mechanism going to turn toward me? And, you know, and I mean, there's history to this, right? But never so bald or blatant. I mean, obviously, there was COINTELPRO with the FBI back in the day. But now you have somebody who's literally, you know, turning his sort of searchlight, looking for enemies or enemies of friends.

• 17:42Kara Swisher?

  It's called the Eye of Sauron, just in case you're interested.

• 17:45Speaker 04

  Yeah. And this group loves Tolkien, as I do. Though typically, they all completely misunderstand Tolkien. They think they're the hobbits and they're really Sauron and Saruman. But that's, that's another story. But so, anyway, it just occurred to me that, wow, not only might I be sued, because that's the other fatal problem we have in this country, which is that the legal system is, in many ways, rigged for the rich, particularly in the civil context. And then you have suddenly a man who has the ear of the president of the United States and is willing to be vengeful.

• 18:30Speaker 04

  So it was, I think, rational to be somewhat concerned.

• 18:34Kara Swisher?

  Are you still concerned?

• 18:37Kara Swisher?

  We'll get into more specifics in a minute.

• 18:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, of course. I mean, look, he threatened to sue. It's still possible to sue. Other stuff could happen. And yes, and to be honest, I've taken certain precautions. But I think the best precaution is, as I think you've discovered, Kara, is sometimes you can hide in plain sight by simply speaking your mind. Speaking your mind turns out to be terribly important because other people tend to agree. And these people care deeply, in a way that I find interesting, about what others think of them. And so speaking out is the best defense, I think.

• 19:13Kara Swisher?

  It often, it often is. One thing someone told me, because I've been pretty hostile to a lot of tech people, is like, how can you do it? I said, well, they're going to have to shoot me in front of everybody. That's what's going to have to happen here. So people can see. And that's one thing or another, it's not going to be quiet. Talk about this with you, Justine, because you have a, you know, personal issue, children, and you're going to have a lifelong, I am blessed with the fact that my ex-wife is lovely. And we've gotten along really well. But this is like the ex from hell in this regard. You have five, five kids, correct?

• 19:49Kara Swisher?

  Talk a little bit, were you nervous about saying something? Because you have been quiet, and I don't begrudge anybody. Like, I know others in his universe that have been quiet. And they often call me and say, I'm really sorry, I can't say, I'm nervous. I'm, that kind of stuff. I hear from all manner of people that have been close to him and then are not.

• 20:08Speaker 00

  Yeah. Well, he's a scary dude. And yeah, I was nervous. I'm nervous now.

• 20:16Speaker 00

  But I, that also really annoyed me because I, you know, kept thinking, well, this is America. You're supposed to be able to.

• 20:25Kara Swisher?

  Say your piece.

• 20:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, say your piece, you know, free speech. And this is my experience and this is my viewpoint. And.

• 20:37Speaker 00

  I didn't want to be intimidated into silence. And, um, you know, I haven't been feeling well over the last six years. I mean, you know, long COVID or whatever it was. So that was a big part of it. And then, uh, everything that that happened with my daughter, I mean, I was watching that. And of course I have opinions about it. And it was more like, um, you know, at some point, uh, I'll speak when I'm, I'm ready to speak. But watching her, you know, get out there and, uh, you know, take the blows and the isolation. I mean, it's hard. It's a little bit like, um, yeah, I, I,

• 21:18Speaker 00

  I'm sorry, I have to. It's okay. I have to reset a little bit. Um, I did, you know, remind myself, I'm not here to trash him or, you know, be bitter or anything like that. It was just, um, uh, I don't like what's happening with language. Um, as a writer, you know, uh, watching everything get, you know, abstracted into algorithms and then the, the, the personal details, the things that make you, you, the way that they can kind of get, uh, you know, stamped out or contaminated with other things. I just, it just seemed to me like there's something here about truth and there's something here about storytelling that, uh, is, is really important and shouldn't be left to

• 22:00Speaker 00

  the hands of people who are trying to control the narrative instead of trying to explore it or, you know, surfacing the missing pieces.

• 22:11Kara Swisher?

  We'll be back in a minute.

• 22:24Kara Swisher?

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• 23:39Kara Swisher?

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• 24:43Kara Swisher?

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• 25:59Kara Swisher?

  Alex, right off the bat, Musk refused to sit for an interview with you, obviously. But in place of him, you, you and your team created a database of everything he'd ever said, uh, using technology to do so. Um, and then used his words to create a computer generated simulation of Elon, which is kind of fun, given how he's obsessed with simulation. The words are all his, it's not a bot. Tell us how you landed on that decision and the ethical considerations you took into account as a documentary filmmaker. And obviously it's all his words. It's not anticipating what he might say, it's what he did say.

• 26:32Speaker 04

  Yeah. And, and it's not a manufactured replica of his voice. It's all his voice. It's audio recordings of, of what he said. I mean, you know, to some extent I've had an experience in, in terms of trying to put people who didn't want to speak for one reason or another, or couldn't speak or couldn't show themselves, you know, in, in other films. In Client Nine, there was an escort who I, uh, who, who agreed to talk to me, but didn't want her identity revealed.

• 27:03Kara Swisher?

  Right. So in shadows.

• 27:04Speaker 04

  I, I got, I know, I, I got an actress because I felt that that would be more compelling. I didn't want to do her in shadow because that would have made her look like a, a kind of, um, I, I transcribed our interview and then had an actress perform it. I revealed it in the film, but I felt it was more human and more compelling. In another case, in Zero Days, a film about, uh, the, the Stuxnet, uh, computer worm, I got a number of people from the NSA to talk. And then I created a composite character with their, um, transcripts and, and had it voiced by an actress who was kind of weirdly digitized in, in ways that seemed appropriate for that film. In this one, I thought, well, okay, he's not going to talk, but I really want to present his point of view.

• 27:49Speaker 04

  And in some case I want to have an argument with him. Um, so I'll create this character, but I was fascinated how much he went back to this idea of the simulation. He's obsessed with that idea for all sorts of reasons, I think. And so I thought, well, okay, how about a simulated interview? That would be interesting. And we, we went and designed, you know, two camera angles with our, our, my partners on visual effects called Make Make and, uh, decided what he would be dressed like. And, you know, he would be in a gamer chair because he's obsessed with the video game thing. And that that would become the interview. And interestingly, that also feathers into, to issues of AI and how we feel about AI

• 28:31Speaker 04

  and this weird personal transference that takes place with AI, um, bots or L L Ms. Because people have told me as they watch the film, they know that the, the interview of Elon, which I, I should say it makes them look pretty good, I think. But, um, that after a while.

• 28:50Kara Swisher?

  It's very flattering. It's very flattering.

• 28:53Speaker 04

  I forget that it's not real. And, and they start to identify and engage with it as if, oh my God, I'm, because we purposefully had the avatar look directly into the camera. So for all those reasons, it seemed to make sense to me cinematically. And yet I could have defended it journalistically because those are Elon's words.

• 29:12Kara Swisher?

  You also dressed him in his typical way, which is I think a late 1980s lesbian kind of look he has to. That's his kind of clothing these days.

• 29:21Speaker 00

  I just realized it was the eye contact, I think, in the movie because he, he often is like, his, his simulation is often looking at the camera and he's looking directly at you. And in real life, he's like, usually often like, he's distracted, he's on his phone. So I think.

• 29:33Kara Swisher?

  Yeah.

• 29:34Speaker 00

  It's, it's, I mean, the word uncanny keeps coming to mind and it was strange. It was, uh, him and not him. Something about his eyes and, uh, his, uh, manner. I was often reminded of Errol, his father. And so there was, there was that element in terms of, I definitely recognized the words, I recognized the attitude. And it just made me realize about the thing about AI and the thing about like large language models and all of that is that you don't really get to say anything new. You know, there's, there's a, a point where the evolution of, of the thinking, you know, stops and it, it like freezes in place. And so it's, um,

• 30:14Speaker 00

  Seems like an interesting possibility that you can kind of like tell when that

• 30:18Kara Swisher?

  Yeah.

• 30:18Speaker 00

  When that conversation froze, we'll be able to to track that person's.

• 30:22Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, no, I thought it was really interesting. At first, it's uncomfortable. You're right. It's because they he is looking at the camera and he doesn't. That's another thing. But at the same time, it feels simulated. It has a simulated feel to it.

• 30:35Speaker 00

  The empathy.

• 30:36Kara Swisher?

  Yeah.

• 30:37Speaker 00

  Part, you know, that was kind of a little bit of a revelation for me. I wasn't.

• 30:42Kara Swisher?

  Explain.

• 30:43Speaker 00

  Um, this idea that empathy is is the suicide of Western civilization.

• 30:48Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, that's their new thing.

• 30:50Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 30:50Kara Swisher?

  Yeah.

• 30:51Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 30:52Kara Swisher?

  The Pope is doing his level best to push back, but but they all have that version.

• 30:57Speaker 00

  I think it's I think it's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard, you know.

• 31:01Kara Swisher?

  Thank you.

• 31:01Speaker 00

  I think it's really, really intellectually vapid, but that's, you know, another conversation.

• 31:08Kara Swisher?

  Well, they say a lot of things that are like, what? It's just nonsense is what what I feel like. That said, the film is still making Hollywood and tech nervous. Universal has denied reports it's getting cold feet about releasing the film outside of North America. They have international rights. Alex, you've expressed fears about the Paramount Warner Brothers merger. It is being bought by a man who is close friends with Elon, Larry Ellison. As much as you want to talk about David Ellison, Larry Ellison is the is the wizard behind and the money behind it all. The film is supposed to hit HBO early next year. HBO is owned by Warner Brothers. Of course, there was the recent incident about ads on platforms where some of them have reversed themselves.

• 31:47Kara Swisher?

  I can believe they made a mistake on in some cases, but the other times you do start to get in a conspiracy theory, like that they wanted to see how far they could push it. Semaphore reported the Ellison's may ask Musk for money to help finance the merger. Alex, you start, what does it say about the state of the documentary business that a filmmaker with your reputation is facing these kind of headwinds? And then I'd love to know what you think about the use of power here in media.

• 32:13Speaker 04

  Well, I mean, it really shows you the level of consolidation. Whether it's a soft consolidation, which, you know, uses a series of rules to enforce, you know, a certain permitted kind of discourse. Or hard consolidation, which is basically we're putting our foot down and we're either going to censor stuff we don't like, or we're not going to allow it to be seen. So it really it brought home in a very personal way just how pernicious this consolidation is. And and also, to some extent, and I can't, I mean, Universal's on side now and they and they're and

• 32:56Speaker 04

  we're going to have a discussion with them later this week about their release pattern. Great. But, you know, for a long time, they they were kind of missing in action. And I think in part because they were sort of, I don't want to speak for them, but it may be that they were concerned. Like, do we do we want to go up against this oligarch and?

• 33:16Kara Swisher?

  And at this point, they're kind of the good guys in a weird way.

• 33:19Speaker 04

  Right, sure, they are, because they're not in sort of the transactional camp. In other words, we'll make our peace with Trump and and we'll do what he wants. And then he'll look the other way when we want to do what we want, like, like have this ridiculous merger, which clearly violates all sorts of antitrust and free speech principles. But it's going to go through anyway, because you have a Justice Department that just doesn't care, so long as Trump says it's what he wants. So you really see the face of power and how it's defining discourse and how the rest of us have to find sort of offbeat ways of speaking.

• 33:59Kara Swisher?

  Getting through. So are you worried about HBO, which has a stellar reputation among documentaries and everything else, not not releasing this?

• 34:09Speaker 04

  Well, I am. I mean, first of all, I should say that HBO has been great. I mean, the the people who are there now are just magnificent. They're they're they're so supportive. They're the ones who encouraged me to make it longer, which is rare for a director. Make it longer, please. And they've been great on the lawyering side. You know, I went through the trial of fire with them with Scientology. So they've been awesome. But, you know, I'd have to be a fool not to think that something bad might happen if Elon Musk were to help the Ellison's.

• 34:47Speaker 04

  And then suddenly, the guy who's an owner in the platform is now the subject of a critical documentary about him. So I'm concerned. But the benefit that we have is it's about to open in theaters. So you'd be trying to put a something that's already been seen back into the box. And so that's the the benefit of the Bleecker Street release, which I should say, they've been great too. But, you know, now we're back in this era where suddenly theatrical distribution becomes a mechanism for saying stuff that you can't say on these services, which are conflict diverse or actually or literally propagandistic.

• 35:30Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, you're not getting ads on X or Twitter, correct? Anyway, that's okay. He can do it. It's his. He bought it and he can do whatever he wants on it.

• 35:40Kara Swisher?

  How do you look at this? This because you just were talking about you wanted to say the truth and you thought we live in America. When you think about the consolidation of power here, it does feel disturbing, the the nonability to tell the truth or being censored in a lot, which is, of course, what they complain about themselves again.

• 36:01Speaker 00

  Well, it goes back to what you were saying about they don't want to let anybody else talk. And I just remember dinners when I was married and Elon's family had this, they would talk about his father, Errol, and how Errol or there was this, Tosca was joking about it at Kimball's wedding that.

• 36:20Kara Swisher?

  His sister.

• 36:22Speaker 00

  Elon's sister, yeah, that in the Musk family, women are in the same category as as dogs and children, you know, to be seen and not heard, basically. And so it's, it's, again, it's that overlap of the personal and the political where you see this this idea that there's only one group of people who get to express their narrative because it's my way or the highway. It's it's my story. And it's not just, you know, my story, but it's it's my.

• 36:51Kara Swisher?

  It is the story.

• 36:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, it is. It is the story. And then as you, you know, and then there are like more and more and more layers put in between that and and the actual, you know, assemblage of facts that you experience. I mean, it's it's it's not just the the map being confused for the territory, but it's like the the map becomes becomes the territory and then the map is getting redrawn beneath your feet. And they can only do that if if they lock other people out of the conversation. So just, I mean, that's that's not democracy. I mean, democracy is a conversation. And if anything, it's it's it's the responsibility to protect the parts of the conversation that are not, you know,

• 37:37Speaker 00

  the dominant forces in the culture.

• 37:40Kara Swisher?

  When you talked about that dinner table, you're not like this. Was this something that was surprising to you or did it get worse over time?

• 37:48Speaker 00

  Oh.

• 37:52Kara Swisher?

  You don't seem to be a shrinking violet, is what I would say.

• 37:54Speaker 00

  That comes and goes. There were, there were times when I would, I would, oh, God. Yeah, I would get so bored and I and I I wouldn't be able to hide it. And Elon would get angry with me afterwards and I'm, you know, and then I I want to apologize for that. I want to apologize a lot. But it's, but it was always men talking and men monologuing. And I don't mean to say that as like a feminist rant because I've been accused of doing that.

• 38:31Kara Swisher?

  No, I've been there.

• 38:32Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 38:32Kara Swisher?

  Yeah.

• 38:33Speaker 00

  But it's it's like, it

• 38:38Speaker 00

  you could really see where the power is at those tables. And it's always the same people saying the same things.

• 38:48Kara Swisher?

  Yeah.

• 38:48Speaker 00

  And then the inability to listen to other viewpoints becomes those other viewpoints don't exist.

• 38:58Kara Swisher?

  Yeah.

• 38:59Speaker 00

  I mean, you're either like, a friend of mine recently said something along the lines of, oh, he's he's a non Republican. And that didn't mean Democrat is just, well, and then she said, well, nobody's really a Democrat anymore. And I was thinking, well, you know, you're saying this in California, but it's like if you're a Republican or a non Republican, then like Democrat, like as a word or as a concept like that no longer exists. It's just a way of shaping.

• 39:25Kara Swisher?

  Right.

• 39:26Speaker 00

  Shaping the.

• 39:27Kara Swisher?

  Right.

• 39:28Speaker 00

  The conversation.

• 39:29Kara Swisher?

  Let me move on to something else. Elon's also obsessed with the idea of presenting himself as an engineer. He fetishizes it. I have noticed this for many years. Why do you think that's so important to him? I mean, obviously, it's an imposter syndrome thing happening there because he's not the greatest technologist in most of the rooms he's in. But he presents himself as thus. And there are some very significant engineers around, by the way. Certainly, he's technical, but how much of that image he projected was real? Because it reminds me of him trying to sort of play Steve Jobs, and Steve Jobs never did that. He was very clearly not the technologist. Wozniak was. He never presented himself that way. He certainly was tech savvy, but he never needed to say, I'm the I made this. I'm the engineer.

• 40:13Speaker 00

  I think I'm not an engineer. So that was completely outside of my my can always. It is the way he likes to see himself. At least that was always my my view on that. But I always saw his his genius in how he puts things together. You know, he pulls ideas from different domains and he pulls people from different domains. And then he he really drives it towards a very, very particular result.

• 40:43Kara Swisher?

  It's very Henry Ford like, actually.

• 40:44Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 40:45Kara Swisher?

  That's who he is in a lot of ways. It's not Edison, it's Ford.

• 40:48Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 40:49Kara Swisher?

  Which is a very different talent, right? And I agree with you. I think that is it's an astonishing talent to find things, put them together and shove them through. It's a real it's a real talent. But he really does need to be seen as a techy in a lot of ways, when in fact, that's not his greatest asset.

• 41:07Speaker 00

  But I think, you know, tech rules, like especially in that world. I mean, if you're a non tech, you're a lesser being and. He considers himself hardcore. And I think, you know, the hardest of the hardcore is tech. And so I think that's just the essence of how he sees himself, especially when he has to justify his lack of empathy by saying, well, you know, empathy is, you know, the ruin of civilization itself. And this is what he does. He kind of like engineers reality or the reality around him to fit him and to fit the version that he's selling to you.

• 41:44Kara Swisher?

  Right, exactly. So Alex, let's talk about that. One of the main takeaways from your film, and I think you got this correct, is Musk's great invention is really himself. And he used his cult of personality to reward hack the market. It's an idea that he can defy economic fundamentals because people want to invest in him, even if things he's promising are based in reality, like going to Mars, fully autonomous cars. So talk about that, the constant lie. And lie is probably a harsh word, but I think that's the correct word here.

• 42:14Speaker 04

  Well, it starts out with fibs and then it becomes big, big, big lies. And that was one of the interesting things I discovered. Early on, you know, I made contact with a guy named Ed Niedermeyer, who's in the film briefly, who had written a book called Ludicrous, which really looked at the vast disparity between what Elon Musk said Tesla was and what Tesla really was. And it's not like there aren't great cars. I mean, I still talk to people who rhapsodize about their Tesla S, you know, and great, you know, but it doesn't nearly justify the stock price. But he learned early on to do certain things in order to be able to find the money to be able to float Tesla.

• 42:58Speaker 04

  Because I think in a way, his genius is his talent for risk and also his ability to sculpt this story, which allows him access to the equity markets that otherwise he wouldn't be able to get. Or to reward hack, because that's the other important part of this.

• 43:14Kara Swisher?

  Explain that. Explain reward.

• 43:16Speaker 04

  Reward hacking is this idea that you fulfill the conditions of a government award, like, you know, doing battery swaps, which is the idea that you could pull into a gas station and have somebody swap out a thousand pound Tesla battery in a matter of minutes. It was just ludicrous, but he convinced people that it was possible. And that would have solved the biggest problem that everybody has with an electric car, which is range. But then he said, oh, no, once, but it was tethered to this inducement from the government

• 43:57Speaker 04

  of California, that if you could prove that you could do it once, you'd be the recipient of hundreds of millions of dollars of tax benefits.

• 44:05Kara Swisher?

  Essentially, you're saying, tell them what they want to hear.

• 44:07Speaker 04

  Tell them what they want to hear and come up with a fib or a wink and a nod, you know, fake it till you make it. That's it, you know? So I think that it was the creation of these larger and larger fictions, which was, and one of the biggest fictions was this idea that he was an engineer. Like, because when I talked to people at Tesla, I said, is he a great engineer? They would like laugh, but they wouldn't ever say it on camera because they were afraid of Elon.

• 44:36Kara Swisher?

  I've heard that over and over again.

• 44:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, but that idea, then, if you don't see the reason to, you know, buy in to Tesla's stock through the economic fundamentals, there's always Elon. And Elon is Leonardo da Vinci.

• 44:52Kara Swisher?

  And then it's a stock play. And then it's a stock play that why not get in on it and then make it go up? Justine, talk about that idea of like performative versus real, because there are real things here. Like, as you said, he does put it together. Nobody was doing the car before him. And one of the things that I found really interesting is, these were big ideas, space, cars, solar, climate, big ideas. And everyone else was doing like a digital dry cleaner. It was exhausting. And he wasn't. And some of these things did result in real products that were terrific. Why was that not enough, that the slow moving acceleration? It had to be, we're going to live on Mars. And then you say, well, you know, you have to be underground in Mars, and it's this

• 45:34Kara Swisher?

  way to get there, and we will lose our bone structure, we'll probably become dumb. No, no, we will be living there. Like, why the need to take it to the, you know, put the volume up to 12 when seven was fantastic?

• 45:47Speaker 00

  Um, he's impatient. I, I just, you know, it's just, I think he has a different sense of time. I really, you know, Elon time, it's.

• 46:02Kara Swisher?

  Elon time.

• 46:04Speaker 00

  Like, I can't explain it. It's one of those things that sometimes you can feel when you're with him or around him. But there is this, other humans seem to fit very awkwardly into the reality that, you know, he is sculpting. And, you know, like, there's that joke that he used to make, like, safety third. And, you know, when we're going into the era of AI, you have to wonder about that because of his sense that, you know, it has to be now, now, now, no matter the cost. And the pain and the trauma that, that, that other people go through because of, you know,

• 46:49Speaker 00

  the way reality gets wrenched around or the way that value gets determined, who has it and who doesn't, like, that doesn't matter. That's just, you know, feelings. So we'll just, you know, brush that aside.

• 47:01Kara Swisher?

  Collateral damage.

• 47:03Speaker 00

  Western civilization, yeah. I think this is who he is, and this is what he's comfortable with. And so if he's comfortable with it, then full speed ahead. And he doesn't want to spend any time in those areas where, you know, his strengths aren't necessarily on full display. So those are the unnecessary areas.

• 47:29Kara Swisher?

  That has to move on.

• 47:30Speaker 00

  Avoid them, yeah. We'll be back in a minute.

• 47:35Speaker 02

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• 48:14Kara Swisher?

  Hi, everyone. I'm Kara Swisher.

• 48:18Speaker 06

  And I'm Scott Galloway.

• 48:19Kara Swisher?

  Twice a week, we get together on Pivot to sort through the biggest stories in tech business and politics. And we're taking the show back on the road for a live tour in November.

• 48:27Speaker 06

  So we'll bring hot takes, I'll bring the insight, and the dick jokes, and Kara will try, keyword is try, to keep me in check. You'll get to see her hit me in person, live.

• 48:39Kara Swisher?

  I'll do it. If someone has to do it.

• 48:42Speaker 06

  We'll cover AI, whatever chaos Washington has cooked up that week, and every billionaire misbehaving.

• 48:47Kara Swisher?

  That's all of them. And you'll also get to participate in an audience Q and A, so bring your best questions. Scott will probably answer ones you didn't ask. We also have secret special guests, which you'll enjoy for every city. Get tickets at pivottour.com. That's pivottour.com.

• 49:02Speaker 06

  We are selling out, so don't wait. And we look forward to seeing you.

• 49:05Kara Swisher?

  I'm Kara Swisher, and I like people who say the quiet part out loud. In fact, I love it. That's Tiger Sisters, a new podcast that recently joined the Vox Media Podcast Network. Cherie Brooke-Lu and Jean Lu are real sisters who built their careers at LinkedIn and Goldman Sachs. On their weekly podcast, they're giving the next generation practical tips on how to get ahead, how to write emails people actually answer, how to make your LinkedIn profile stand out, and how to keep learning as an adult. It's straight talk about money, career, and relationships every Monday. Follow Tiger Sisters wherever you get your podcasts.

• 49:42Kara Swisher?

  Now, you mentioned Errol Musk, his father. He sat for the interviews. Every time I see him, I just, my skin crawls, I have to say. The two of a deeply strained relationship, I remember him talking about how much he didn't like his father. He called him a terrible human being. And the New York Times investigation found that Errol had been accused of sexually abusing five of his children. He doesn't talk a lot about his father, but he's around. In the film, Justine, you said you understood him so much better after you met Errol.

• 50:13Speaker 00

  Oh, gosh. A little bit of a sensitive topic. Errol is a.

• 50:22Speaker 00

  There's a lot of silence around him in the family. Nobody wants to talk about him, and I think journalists have commented on that. The stories around Errol, when I first entered, you know, that world.

• 50:37Kara Swisher?

  The Musk universe.

• 50:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, they were hard to believe. And they were just, you know, my tendency was to assume that, oh, because May was the one who was telling them, well, she's exaggerating or she's distorting. And then-

• 50:51Kara Swisher?

  This is Musk's mother, May Musk.

• 50:53Speaker 00

  His mother, yeah. And then he visited us in Palo Alto, and I spent a couple of days, like, you know, walking around and talking to him. And first impression, he's, you know, like, a nice guy. He's charming, he compliments you. He seems to be willing to get along. But then, you know, over time, things start to slip a little bit. And Elon would say that, you know, Errol can behave himself for three days, you know, at the most, and then he turns mean. And what I noticed was that when Errol would get insulting, he would use the same language that Elon would use to insult me.

• 51:33Speaker 00

  And so that was a direct and powerful lesson in how patterns, you know-

• 51:39Kara Swisher?

  Create.

• 51:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, they just pour through other relationships.

• 51:43Kara Swisher?

  Or you become what you hate sometimes.

• 51:46Speaker 00

  Yeah. And I was thinking about that, actually, because one of the, there's a moment in the movie when I think Errol is saying, yeah, Elon, he's just like me. He's just like me. And when I was married, there would be certain relatives of the family who would try to rein Elon in a bit when he was being difficult, or, you know, when somebody was having an Elon problem, as Kimball once described it. They would, they would tell him that he was being like Errol, or he was turning into Errol, or, you know, there was, there was something there that Elon did not want to be.

• 52:22Kara Swisher?

  Which he didn't want at the time.

• 52:23Speaker 00

  Which he did not want to be.

• 52:24Kara Swisher?

  Alex, talk a little bit about this. You know, he has become his father in a way that I think he tried to avoid. I do believe he, he had disdain for him. I thought that was genuine, when he said it, to me at least.

• 52:39Speaker 04

  Well-

• 52:41Kara Swisher?

  And I don't want to blame his father. He's an adult fucking man. Like, he can, he can get some mental help if he really wants to not be that way.

• 52:47Speaker 04

  Sure. And, and it could be an explanation. It's turned into an excuse, perhaps. And I do think, I mean, one of the reasons I included a section on Errol in the film was because, you know, I felt there was an element of the apple doesn't fall far from the tree. He has become his father to some extent. Yet, at the same time, I think it's fair to say that, as Elon did say, that he suffered greatly at the hands of his father in terms of this kind of psychological abuse that, that Kimball also talks about. And that Kimball also talks about in the film, is an audio recording that we found, about how you could never believe anything that Elon's dad said, which I felt I had

• 53:29Speaker 04

  to put in there, as if to say, like, don't believe everything that Errol says because he's a gaslighter. Well, that was interesting, because what happened to Elon? He became a gaslighter. There was also this very uncomfortable moment where I asked Errol Musk about this incident where intruders came into his house, and he claimed that he killed three of them, or three intruders with two bullets from a .357 Magnum. But then went on and on and on, which is, some of which is included in the film, about the different colors of the blood that spilled out onto the floor, as if he was still, all these years later, reveling in the violence.

• 54:11Speaker 04

  So, so he's a complicated character, but I included him because he clearly feels very strongly about the fact that he and Elon are the same. And I think in many ways, they bear an uneasy resemblance to each other.

• 54:27Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, I would agree. Now, one of the ways, which I think, Justine, and I'd love you to comment, one of the things that really got me, soured me, lots of things, but it was, two, was the obsession with insulting gay people and trans people. And then it extended to Jenna, in a way that was shocking, violent, heinous. I don't know what I would do as a parent. I, I mean, I know, I would do what you have done. Can you talk about it a little bit? Because I think part of your speaking out has to do with your children, presumably.

• 55:08Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, I, I recognize that at one point that Jenna and Elon were on a collision course. And I would send Elon Long texts about it, you know, kind of like warning him, or, you know, saying, like, you have to recognize who she is, you have to-

• 55:25Kara Swisher?

  Accept her for who she is.

• 55:27Speaker 00

  You know, yeah. Respond to her differently. But he, you know, wasn't really interested in my parenting opinions. I mean, at one point, he kind of like dismissed it all as maternal spam and-

• 55:38Kara Swisher?

  Maternal spam.

• 55:39Speaker 00

  Maternal spam, yeah. But, you know, I wanted the kids to have the best relationship possible with their father for, for as long as possible. And I wanted to protect any ability that they had to do that. I think fatherhood is, you know, crucial.

• 55:58Kara Swisher?

  Absolutely.

• 56:00Speaker 00

  And I certainly don't take it lightly. But she was in Japan when he gave that interview with Jordan Peterson, and that was really a game changer. And when he came right out and said, you know, I was tricked into signing this, this release, I mean, I mean, I felt like that, while that was, you know, directed at me, I was supposed to react to that, and I felt like I might be being baited a bit. But his decision to sign that form was actually an act that made me respect him more. You know, it gave me some hope.

• 56:42Kara Swisher?

  Hope.

• 56:43Speaker 00

  Yeah. And then I, I think he had to fix the narrative, like, going into this increasingly Republican direction. And he says in the film that he's socially progressive, which was another thing that confused me, because there were times when I was like, like, he doesn't really care. You know what I mean? Like, this is the kind of thing where-

• 57:06Kara Swisher?

  No, I don't think progressive is, he doesn't care. You're right. One of the things that was interesting was, I, what struck me is that someone who liked having children, or bearing children, or creating children, but didn't really like the children part.

• 57:20Speaker 00

  Or the mothers.

• 57:21Kara Swisher?

  Or the mothers.

• 57:22Speaker 00

  Yeah. He doesn't really seem to have much use for motherhood. You know, he wants the mother influence, kind of like sidelined and neutralized.

• 57:30Kara Swisher?

  So when that happened with Jenna, who is not in the film, I mean, obviously, it would anger you. But, and it certainly, when I started to see it, it was really astonishing, largely because I recall a conversation we had, he called me in the middle of the night, when Trump was going to put an executive order against gay and trans people, and he said, I'm going to do everything to battle this. Now, I'm not sure why he needed to perform for me on that at all. But did it shift, or was just that not true either? Any of it true?

• 58:02Speaker 00

  I don't know. Maybe he was trying to find a way to explain it to himself, to kind of like heal some, whatever kind of cognitive dissonance he might be experiencing. He feels he has to, you know, believe and promote a very particular perspective that really has caused him, you know, his daughter, and created like a lot of division and pain in the family and the extended family. I mean, so I, I don't know. But the, I mean, the whole woke mind virus thing, too, I-

• 58:39Kara Swisher?

  It's part of it.

• 58:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, I was like, oh, this is the origin story of my, you know, rise as a Republican. I'm getting revenge for, like, the evil that has done me. And it was a WTOF moment for me.

• 58:52Kara Swisher?

  Yeah.

• 58:52Speaker 00

  You know, like-

• 58:54Kara Swisher?

  And you weren't expecting it.

• 58:56Speaker 00

  No. No.

• 59:03Speaker 00

  You know, and he was reacting more to Jenna's rejection of him, but Jenna's rejection on him was was based on her rejection. I mean, sorry.

• 59:10Kara Swisher?

  Of his rejection of who she was.

• 59:13Speaker 00

  At a young age, you know, like, like she, she has to say what she feels and she has to be who she is. She's one of the most authentic people you'll ever encounter. And so.

• 59:24Kara Swisher?

  That must terrify him.

• 59:26Speaker 00

  The price that being in his presence was demanding of her was too high. And

• 59:33Speaker 00

  there are people, and I am one of them, that when you spend time in his presence, you come away feeling really terrible about yourself and you're not sure how that happens. But he communicates his disdain.

• 59:43Kara Swisher?

  Alex, talk a little bit about this because it does manifest itself politically, too. It's this, you may not be the way you are. There's a woke mind virus. You're being controlled when, in fact, they're trying to control you.

• 59:56Speaker 04

  Well, yeah, and he's always been somebody who doesn't want any constraints. And he wants to be able to exert his power and to control people. And if you have a child who's learning to be herself, that's very natural. It's what every kid does. Ultimately, it's to break free of their parents' control. It's part of growing up. But he couldn't accept that. Because it can't be personal with him. It's got to be bigger than that. So it becomes this rationalization for why he's going.

• 1:00:28Kara Swisher?

  Using Jenna as a vehicle.

• 1:00:30Speaker 04

  Yeah, using Jenna as a foil to explain why he's going MAGA. But, you know, we now know why he went so hard MAGA, and it had nothing to do with that. It was much more transactional.

• 1:00:44Kara Swisher?

  Absolutely. It was an existential crisis if Kamala Harris had won, you know, in that regard. He needed the protection.

• 1:00:48Speaker 04

  He could have gone to prison. Not to mention all the civil investigations into his companies, which have now been utterly swept aside, you know, so.

• 1:00:57Kara Swisher?

  I actually said that at the time, and all his minions went after me. They're like, no, no, it's about a bigger. I was like, no, it's about money. Like, it's about investigations.

• 1:01:07Speaker 04

  Well, that's what they're all in it for. I mean, he's not unique in that way. It's just he came up with a different rationalization for it.

• 1:01:12Kara Swisher?

  Right. So in that, the shift towards conservative politics, and again, it happened, COVID was when it sort of seemed to happen. But I think he knew the jig was up on many things, like, or it was moving that direction. He obviously got angry at Biden over, over the car stuff. I remember him calling me over and over again that he wasn't invited to some dumb get together, which you chronicle in the, in the film. But, but he buys Twitter in 2022. He becomes extremely online, which is an expression I use, like, in a way that I think he went down that rabbit hole of online conspiracy theories, combined with a number of other things, well-reported in the, in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal about drug use. But it's more, it's all of them together, it seems like.

• 1:01:54Kara Swisher?

  But Twitter seemed to be the, the sort of fulcrum of that kind of stuff. Eventually, he teams up with Trump. He spends nearly $300 million to help get him elected. As reward is the creation of Doge. Alex, on its face, Doge was a failure. It cost the government more money than it saved. And Musk went on to say the government is, quote, "basically unfixable." But you argue he did fix the government. He fixed it to work for him and other tech leaders. Talk a little bit about this.

• 1:02:19Speaker 04

  Well, I mean, we now know, you know, in 2022, he was putting his money all in for the Republican Party, you know, way before, and which is, of course, bears out the theory about COVID. But to take your point about Doge, I mean, it was never about waste, fraud, and abuse. I think it was about destroying the government. And if you destroy the government, you destroy any constraints on you, meaning you, the businessman, you, the, the person who needs and wants power. The other interesting thing that we discovered was that these Doge boys who went into agency after agency and had zero understanding of how those agencies worked and didn't seem to care.

• 1:03:03Speaker 04

  But they were very sophisticated about one thing. And that was how they accessed the data. And they were granted something called super admin status,

• 1:03:13Speaker 04

  which meant that they could, they had total access to the data of those agencies, which meant, in many cases, our data. Now.

• 1:03:21Kara Swisher?

  Which had never been collected together. People, this is something I talked about at the time. I was like, this has never been, it's been in all kinds of places.

• 1:03:29Speaker 04

  And we, we can, we don't know that it was taken to SpaceX, but we do know that if you have that kind of super admin status, taking that data to SpaceX would be as easy as taking a computer file and putting it in a folder. You don't need to, to hack in. You, you have complete and total access to all the data of the government, which is our data, which is purposefully siloed in order to protect us. And so it raises the question, as is raised by Geoffrey Hinton, you know, the godfather of AI, and also Katie Drummond from Wired, of whether, if he has that data, and I suspect he does, but I can't say for sure, then what happens if he's training an AI on that data?

• 1:04:14Speaker 04

  And, and what is that going to do for our midterms coming up? So there's always bank shots with Elon. In other words, there's always the stated idea, and then there's something else that he discovers, just like in Twitter. You know, I think he brought Twitter on a dare. It was sort of fun and wacky. But then he turns it into a propaganda machine for himself.

• 1:04:37Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, I think so. One of the things I was told by Mark Cuban at the time, when everyone was talking about, he just likes being online. He likes tweeting. Mark Cuban actually called me and said, no, he's buying it for influence. That's what he's doing. Kara, just understand that when he goes into a meeting in India as the head of Tesla, it's one thing. It's just like going in as the head of Ford or whatever. When he goes in and has Twitter and Tesla, it creates a whole new thing. Justine, when this started happening, obviously, the first indication was Jenna, right? Was the beginning of it. When you saw that rightward shift, did you think it was transactional? When he realized that Trump was a coin-operated president?

• 1:05:11Speaker 00

  I think he saw somebody that he knew he could work with. You know, I think there was, there are a lot of affinities there. You know, Jeffrey Epstein is kind of like

• 1:05:24Speaker 00

  a ghost in the background. But they, you know, Jeffrey says some things about women that, you know,

• 1:05:35Speaker 00

  mesh really well with, with things that Errol has said about women. And when you kind of like extend that outwards, I think you have

• 1:05:45Speaker 00

  a philosophy on how to live and how to, you know, create order that not only makes a lot of sense, but, you know, starts to seem like the only sensible way.

• 1:05:58Kara Swisher?

  To live.

• 1:05:59Speaker 00

  To live, yeah. And, and the only future to bring into being. So it's, you know, the future, the only future. It's, it's the dangerous future that's going to destroy us all unless they are put in charge of it and they, you know, save us.

• 1:06:15Kara Swisher?

  It's monarchical, and you are an NPC, right? Which is one of Elon's favorite things. These people are NPC. These, so many times.

• 1:06:23Speaker 00

  They're not religious, but they're, they're the messias. Yeah.

• 1:06:26Kara Swisher?

  So one of the things, he was one of the earliest people to voice skepticism about AI. First person I heard say anything negative. Most tech people are up and to the right. He was not. He was very smart about this, as I recall. At the same time, of course, he sees to get, while the getting's good, in developing his own AI through XAI and his chatbot Grok. It's not keeping up as much as the others, but he's going for it. He's going for it. One of the things you do well in the film, Alex, is you connect all these dots. AI with space, with cars, with government power, government ties and Starlink. Another, I remember when he discussed that idea for the first time, great idea, great big idea kind of thing. That data, of course, is routed through SpaceX. Tesla's cameras and microphones can be used to collect data.

• 1:07:11Kara Swisher?

  What do you think it's all adding up to each of you at this point, where we are in the game? Alex, first.

• 1:07:20Speaker 04

  Well, one of the scariest things is that he seems to be a person who's psychologically unhinged, and I think he grew into that with an enormous power, enormous power. But power that he doesn't really know what to do with. There's a kind of chilling moment toward the end of the film where one person says, well, why is it so important, Elon, for you to accrete all this power with the satellites, the space, and everything else into one sort of global business?

• 1:07:57Speaker 04

  And there's like a two-minute silence. He can't answer that. It's like Ted Kennedy being asked, why are you running for president? He, he has enormous power, but no idea what to do with it, which is maybe the most chilling thing of all, because the hardest thing to do in this film was to at once communicate the deadly seriousness of this massive accretion of power. And at the same time, understand that there is fundamentally something so unserious about him, you know, in, in terms of his perspective or his ability to see the world in some kind of holistic fashion.

• 1:08:36Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, one of the things, you wrestle with these two contradictory ideas, the public has of him. One is that he's a genius set out for world domination. The other, that he's kind of a hapless chaos agent. He cannot pay attention to details and succeeds in spite of himself. How do you reconcile them, Justine?

• 1:08:55Speaker 00

  I once described him, this was many, many years ago, but this is what comes to mind. I once described him as somebody who can like, jump off the edge of a cliff and, you know, invent a parachute on the way down. Like, he, I think he thrives on chaos. I think when you read about PTSD, when you get to know, you know, more about how that reshapes the brain, I mean, that makes a lot of sense to me. Because if you, you know, listen to the language that he uses, and like even taking into account that a lot of it is, is a pitch, it's performative. But, you know, everything is, it's very, very urgent. You know, we're going to die. The world is going to, you know, be destroyed.

• 1:09:33Kara Swisher?

  It's a suicidal, almost a suicidal apocalyptic.

• 1:09:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, everything is, is life and death. And I think, you know, he, he really lives like that. He really lives with that pitch of intensity, and that's the place where he feels comfortable. And so if he's too comfortable, he looks for that chaos. And he brings it with him, and he has a way of sucking you into it. And at first, it can look a lot like excitement. It's, it's that intensity.

• 1:10:02Speaker 00

  I think he really needs that. And so I think.

• 1:10:07Speaker 00

  I always assume that there's a method to his madness. A lot of sleight of hand sometimes, you know, oh, look over here and then he's doing something.

• 1:10:14Kara Swisher?

  Right, a trickster, yeah.

• 1:10:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, and, you know, I think there's a lot of engineering of language, you know, engineering of belief systems, you know, like to take that from that kind of of systems thinking is like working with something physical and tangible, then, you know, if you've put rockets into space, then let's go after human minds. I mean, that's such a key idea in science fiction.

• 1:10:40Kara Swisher?

  So every episode, we get a question from an outside expert. Here is yours.

• 1:10:45Speaker 07

  Hi, it's Kirsten Grind. I'm an investigations reporter at The New York Times, and I've covered Elon Musk for a lot of years now. My question for you is about his legacy, actually. I'm wondering if at this point, with everything that's happened with him at the helm of X, with everything that's happened in Washington, with his problematic reputation, does that at this point outweigh whatever contributions he's made to society and technology along the way? Thanks.

• 1:11:21Kara Swisher?

  This is a point made to me by a lot of people. Well, he makes rockets. Well, the good outweighs the bad. Alex, why don't you go first, then Justine?

• 1:11:29Speaker 04

  So I would say two things about that. I mean, I would say in general, the damage he's done does outweigh the good that he did, particularly when you look at Doge and the catastrophic, and also what he has effectively done by finding a way to surround himself with this much power through reward hacking, which started with the Obama administration and ends with a transactional president like Trump. But I would say one other thing, too, because I get this to some extent from, you know, in Q and As from the fanboys. So like, can you imagine a world, you know, without Elon? And here's what I would say to that.

• 1:12:09Speaker 04

  I mean, I give him tremendous credit for creating a sense of mission at Tesla and SpaceX. And that sense of mission attracted a lot of very talented engineers and executives who've done a pretty good job of running those companies. Elon didn't, you know, he didn't screw in every screw. He's not the inventor, he's the investor.

• 1:12:32Kara Swisher?

  Sort of the Willy Wonka idea.

• 1:12:34Speaker 04

  This idea that he is the only person in those companies, and everybody else is, as you say, an NPC, I just think is a wrong-headed way to think about it. He was an important catalyst for getting these companies off the ground. And I guess that would include, you know, the satellite business.

• 1:12:50Kara Swisher?

  Starlink.

• 1:12:51Speaker 04

  Starlink. But it's not the only person. There are a lot of talented people that made these companies, and yet we've lived in a world where the only person that's important is Elon, and you've got to accept the bad with the good, which is sort of the theory behind Walter Isaacson's book. You know, it's like he did so much good, so you have to accept the fact that he's cruel. No, I don't accept it. And the cruelty took us to a terrible place in terms of where we are in this country, the damage that is going to have to be undone at some point in terms of what was done during Doge is really cataclysmic.

• 1:13:30Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, the conflation of Trump and Elon is really a one-two punch for our country in a lot of ways. What do you think?

• 1:13:36Speaker 00

  Two of the favorite, you know, quotes that always come across in Silicon Valley. The future is here already, it's just unevenly distributed. And then the best way to predict the future is to create it, to invent it. So what is the future that he is deliberately trying to create? And one of the things I noticed about Elon is that he is often guilty of the things that he's accusing you of.

• 1:14:00Kara Swisher?

  All the time.

• 1:14:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's the best defense is a good offense, or something along those lines. And when he announced on, it was Twitter at the time, when he announced on Twitter that he was a Republican now, he accused the Democrats of being like incredibly polarizing and divisive and the party of, you know, hate and anger. So then, like going along that theory, you know, is he playing to his strengths as a warrior, you know, as a storm god come down from the mountains? If there's no war, you don't need a war god.

• 1:14:36Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, yeah, that's true. You're absolutely right. Yeah, that war stuff is strange. This is sort of my last question. It's two parts. At one point in the film, you ask Alex a series of questions. What are Elon's goals? What are his actual motivation? And do we actually know the man at all? Are either of you closer to answering those questions? Alex?

• 1:15:01Speaker 04

  We're closer to knowing them in some ways, and yet maddeningly unable to answer them at a fundamental level. You know, what does he really believe? If he's the trickster, what do you really believe? And at some moment, you know, is he honest enough with himself to...

• 1:15:21Kara Swisher?

  Or can he be, given he has enablers around 24/7?

• 1:15:26Speaker 04

  To go there. And I'm not sure that he is. Yet, at the same time, I think we have a much better understanding of the levers that he pulls in order to create the Oz-like image of himself. And so in that sense, I think we do know him better.

• 1:15:44Kara Swisher?

  Justine?

• 1:15:45Speaker 00

  I used to think I knew him really well. You know, he has a way of commanding focus. Like even now, we're sitting here and we're talking about, you know, Elon, Elon, Elon. But, you know, Elon comes with...

• 1:15:56Kara Swisher?

  Well, the film is called Musk.

• 1:15:57Speaker 00

  Oh, of course, that's true. Yeah, but even like Musk, it's, you know, Musk could be many people, but it's, there's only one Musk, and it's Elon.

• 1:16:04Kara Swisher?

  Thank God.

• 1:16:05Speaker 00

  But he, you know, he's surrounded by, you know, a cast of characters, and they are remarkably consistent. And, you know, they bring in their set of influences, and there's a very definite worldview that's emerging. But I think, you know, you can go back now, and when you know what you're looking for, you know, you see the tracks and the traces early on.

• 1:16:28Kara Swisher?

  How you got there.

• 1:16:29Speaker 00

  Yeah. And I do wonder about that. I wonder about, you know, those leverage points, when it could have gone in a different direction.

• 1:16:37Kara Swisher?

  Absolutely. That's what I think about all the time.

• 1:16:39Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:16:40Kara Swisher?

  It could have.

• 1:16:41Speaker 00

  It could have.

• 1:16:42Kara Swisher?

  It could have. That's what a lot of people give me a hard time for liking him back then. I'm like, you don't understand where it could have gone, right? There's unique individuals that can change things for the better. And then they become villains. And you're like, it didn't have to be that way, which is what I think about a lot.

• 1:16:58Speaker 00

  I think ultimately, I mean, he has this incredible energy that needs something to work on, otherwise he'll, like, you know, knock his own ankle off. Like, he just, he needs to be working on a giant, massive problem. But it removes him from people. And when you think about, you know, those accumulating layers of tech space, the world gets smaller and smaller, and the people get smaller and smaller, and then you get to a point where everything looks like your toy chest, and people are your toys. And the one thing about Elon is that he absolutely cannot stand being bored, you know, and part of him really

• 1:17:39Speaker 00

  does want to play. So, you know, I think trickster might be a good...

• 1:17:45Kara Swisher?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:46Speaker 00

  A good word.

• 1:17:47Kara Swisher?

  So my last question, how does the story end? All stories end, or maybe they don't.

• 1:17:55Speaker 04

  I don't know. I don't know how it ends. You know, Elon has hitched his wagon to somebody who benefits his short-term goals. What happens when that person is no longer in power? He's created a lot of damage and created a lot of enemies for himself. Does the pendulum swing back, or is it too late? That's sort of Katie Drummond's point in the film. He's created so much power, it may be too late. I hope it's not.

• 1:18:22Kara Swisher?

  Justine, you get the last word.

• 1:18:24Speaker 00

  How does it end? I don't know. I think we're heading into a new type of 1984. You know, eyes everywhere. And, you know, Einstein has that quote about how imagination is more important than knowledge. What separates us from animals, our ability to imagine a future that's different from the past. And so I guess now the challenge to men like Elon is what can you imagine for us that is different from the past? You know, all these empires that have crumbled and they've died, you know, all these wars that have destroyed...

• 1:19:01Kara Swisher?

  Ozzy Mandus.

• 1:19:02Speaker 00

  Worlds. Yeah, Babylon was.

• 1:19:04Kara Swisher?

  Babylon was.

• 1:19:06Speaker 00

  Yeah. How can you create Babylon is?

• 1:19:10Kara Swisher?

  That's a great way to end. Thank you so much, both of you. It's a wonderful film, and you are particularly a standout, I have to say, in a film of standouts. Thank you so much.

• 1:19:22Speaker 04

  Thank you, Kara.

• 1:19:23Speaker 00

  Thank you. Thank you for the conversation.

• 1:19:24Kara Swisher?

  We reached out to Elon Musk for comment. He did not respond. Today's show was produced by Vicky Vergalina, Michelle Aloy, Catherine Millsop, Madeline LaPlante-Duby, and Megan Burney. Nishat Kurwa is Vox Media's executive producer of podcasts. Special thanks to Annika Robbins, Jim Mackel, and Manolo Moreno. Our engineers are Fernando Aruda and Riqwan, and our theme music is by Trackademics. If you're already following the show, you're living in reality, not a simulation. If not, we're sending you to Mars. Go wherever you listen to podcasts. Serve for On with Kara Swisher and hit follow. Thanks for listening to On with Kara Swisher from Podium Media, New York Magazine, the

• 1:20:06Kara Swisher?

  Vox Media Podcast Network, and us. We'll be back on Monday with more.

• 1:20:10Kara Swisher?

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