The Week: Elon’s $366 Million of Influence, Washington’s Corruption Problem, and the Skill AI Can’t Replace

George Hahn connects the dots across the week's biggest stories: what Elon’s political spending actually buys, why Kimberly Guilfoyle shouldn’t be the only one resigning, and what we lose when we outsource reading and writing to AI. We’d love your feedback as we build this show! Let us know what you think: [email protected]. 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

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• 1:29George Hahn?

  Welcome to the week from Prof G Media, where we break down what mattered and what it all means. I'm George Hahn, and it's Friday, October 16th. Today, Elon Musk and how much power one man can buy. Then, Washington's corruption problem and who actually gets held accountable. And finally, the storytelling skill we shouldn't let AI take from us.

• 2:00George Hahn?

  Let's get into it. Elon Musk is everywhere this week. There's a nearly four-hour documentary from director Alex Gibney, an Atlantic cover story about his space race with Jeff Bezos, and another round of political spending. On Thursday's Conversations, Atlantic staff writer Josh Tiringell explained how Musk's chaotic public life coexists with a company like SpaceX.

• 2:27Speaker 04

  The way I describe Musk in the piece is that he, his life is a browser with too many tabs, right? He is constantly moving between things that distract him, that interest him, personal crises, professional crises, random statements that compromise his time. And obviously, X is the tab that's always open, right? I mean, he is always sounding off about one thing or another. What I would say is that people are many things, as you know. He's incredibly weird and complicated. And one of the reasons that SpaceX is so successful is not only delegation, but the groundwork he put in between, really, 2003 and 2012 to get a very skilled team.

• 3:10Speaker 04

  That's not a huge team, but very skilled. They know exactly what they do every day. They have really clear business goals and business leadership. You can't give him all the credit for their accomplishments, but you can give him credit for delegation, right? And the way in which he's delegated has made SpaceX very, very successful. I'll talk in a minute about the ways in which that coheres into a future business plan. But I do think both things can be true. Is that personally, he's, he's a mess. And professionally, particularly when it comes to SpaceX, that team is really, really good.

• 3:45George Hahn?

  And that success has given Musk considerable leverage over the US government. Scott asked whether a future Democratic administration could reset the relationship.

• 3:57Speaker 04

  Right now, the United States has outsourced launch capability to such a degree that we better be really careful about how we negotiate with Elon Musk. Because, you know, Musk, remember, Musk and Trump have gone back and forth on this too. And Musk threatened to turn off the rocket, the one rocket that takes Americans to the International Space Station. And the Soviets, I mean, the Russians, were only too happy to charge America $80 million a seat to get them there. So right now, the only way Americans can get to space is by SpaceX. So Musk has lots of reasons to depend on the United States government for funding, for licensing. It's not like we have nothing. But we do actually need to be careful

• 4:42Speaker 04

  because right now, we've allowed ourselves to get into a position where we would not be negotiating from a position of ultimate strength. So will there be a reset in that relationship? Should there be a Democratic administration? Absolutely. Will it be overnight? And will it be the kind of strong arm of government going in and taking exactly what it wants and reposition? No chance. Musk has too much leverage.

• 5:06George Hahn?

  That's the leverage his businesses give him. Then there's the influence his money can buy. Musk has put roughly $366 million into this election cycle, which is more than the $290 million he put into 2024. Last May, he said he'd be doing a lot less. On Wednesday's Prof G Markets, Ed Elon asked political strategist Bradley Tusk what that money buys.

• 5:36Speaker 05

  I think it largely will be for waste. But I think the ROI for him comes in two things. One is the reality, which is that for the people that he helps elect, they owe him. And whether his needs are for SpaceX or for Tesla or the boring company or something else, he can call upon them for help. He is probably also trying to stop the House from flipping because when the House Oversight Committee starts grilling people left and right, private citizens especially don't have the same ability to fight subpoenas that government officials do. And so Musk, Jared Kushner, they're going to be very frequent attendees in Congress in the coming year or two. However, with that said, his money's not going to change the fact that the House is going to flip. The other thing is that for him, there's value in the perception, right? So for as long as politicians think

• 6:21Speaker 05

  that fundraising is really, really important, if he is seen as the biggest spender, that creates a certain amount of fear and deterrence that's useful for him anyway. And for normal people, that kind of money obviously is unimaginable. But if you're literally worth a trillion dollars and it's a rounding error of a rounding error, it might be worth it purely for perception stakes.

• 6:42George Hahn?

  Sarah Longwell, publisher of The Bulwark, has a theory about why Musk came back to politics after swearing it off. She laid it out for Jessica Tarlov on Monday's Raging Moderates.

• 6:53Speaker 06

  The party that claims that it's deeply concerned about voter integrity has allowing Elon Musk to do all kinds of deceptive advertising and is obviously promoting a lot of voter deception right now. He is spending more money in these midterms than he spent in the general election of 2024. He's spending more money in these midterms, much of it deceptive. And so people, and part of why that is, it's obviously interesting from the perspective of how much Republicans are freaking out and they're trying to flood the zone with a lot of crazy stuff. But remember when Elon said he was taking his ball and going home?

• 7:36Speaker 06

  It was right when he also said Donald Trump is in the Epstein files. And he said he was going to make it his life's purpose. And I think it was after the big, beautiful bill. Because he said, this is going to raise inflation. This is like politically illiterate. I think it had some things in there that he didn't like, like cuts to EVs. And so he was like, I will make it my life's mission to make sure all of these people are defeated. Donald Trump did something to him to threaten whatever contracts and everything else because Elon Musk is showing up like a very good boy to help Republicans in every way they can. The thing that keeps me up at night is how many Trump allies now own our means of communication, either the platforms on which news is disseminated or the actual news stations themselves.

• 8:21Speaker 06

  CBS, they obviously just got CNN. Washington Post, whatever. Anyway, Elon, and this is, Elon is turning me into a communist, where I want to tax his wealth because he has too much, I mean, tax all of his, like, so much of it. JVL has this theory, like, we should definitely nationalize SpaceX. We should nationalize Starlink. And I am, you know, I don't like nationalizing private companies. That's not for me. But then there's the other part of me that's like, I don't know, man. I don't know. I don't know that we can live like this with Elon Musk having this much power and also with the taxpayer subsidizing so much of what he does.

• 9:04George Hahn?

  Speaking of who pays whom in Washington, this week, the White House asked Kimberly Guilfoyle to pack her bags. Guilfoyle, the now former US Ambassador to Greece, was asked to resign after The Wall Street Journal reported she had solicited $100,000 from a Trump donor in exchange for access to the president. On Tuesday's Raging Moderates, Jess walked through the allegations.

• 9:30Speaker 06

  It is a big deal that she said that they've asked Kimberly Guilfoyle to resign. She was facing a whole host of allegations, you know, accepting lavish gifts, political connections for private business interests, which is just regular fare for the administration. She apparently asked this Trump donor to pay off her Amex bill in exchange for access. And there are, Daily Mail's been publishing text messages of hers about Don Jr.'s now wife. This was when she was just her girlfriend because Kimberly obviously got. Dumped for this other woman, and I think they thought the safest thing to do would be to plant her in Greece, but I guess she's gone too far.

• 10:10George Hahn?

  Then on Prof G Markets, Ed Elon gave the White House some credit for responding, but he asked why the same standard hasn't been applied elsewhere.

• 10:20Ed Elson?

  I wouldn't have been that surprised if they had just denied the report, called it fake news, or simply ignored it. Instead, they did acknowledge it, and they politely asked her to leave. It's a low bar, I know, but it is a bar nonetheless. The question now, though, is if they will do anything about all of the other corruption scandals that have gone unaccounted for. Will they do anything, for example, about Tom Homan, who accepted $50,000 in exchange for his promise to help win government contracts? Meanwhile, he is still running the government's deportation program. Will they do anything about Howard Lutnick, who negotiated a $1.6 billion federal financing deal for a Kazakhstani mining

• 11:03Ed Elson?

  project, which his sons ended up collecting fees on through his investment firm, Cantor Fitzgerald? Will they do anything about Jared Kushner, who actively steered America's Middle East foreign policy, including the decision to go to war with Iran, while also soliciting money for his private fund from Middle Eastern governments and sovereign wealth funds? Or Eric and Don Jr., who invested in 15 private companies right before they inked more than $3 billion worth of federal contracts? Or of course, Trump himself, who traded $220 million in stocks in the first three months of the year while also selling Wall Street early access to his social media posts? Will any of these people be held accountable at

• 11:44Ed Elson?

  all? Or will it just be Kimberly Guilfoyle? Because the truth is that the corruption that Guilfoyle engaged in as ambassador actually pales in comparison to the corruption that we're seeing across the rest of the government. And perhaps that is why they asked her to resign. Perhaps this is their way of saying, see, we dealt with it. We don't like the corruption either. Meanwhile, nothing has been done about all of the other corruption we've seen. And even though Ms. Guilfoyle should probably go to jail, you can also bet that she will be just fine. The White House expects us to just nod along and ignore the corruption that we keep on witnessing every day, every week. But we

• 12:25Ed Elson?

  are keeping the receipts. And until someone ends up accountable, until someone ends up behind bars, I'm sorry, but we will not move on.

• 12:35George Hahn?

  If Democrats take the House next month, they'll have the power to investigate. Sarah Longwell had some advice about where to start.

• 12:44Speaker 06

  In some ways, where I want Democrats to be more ruthless, you know, and this is ruthless without cruelty, like ruthless is on things like this, where they have got to get it in their heads, that they need to prosecute and hold accountable these people to create disincentives for having them. My old style conservative is we love incentives and disincentives. You have to disincentivize criminal behavior. Kimberly Guilfoyle, Corey Lewandowski, Kristi Noem, these people are all corrupt right now. They're all doing an enormous amount of corruption every day. Democrats, I hope they've got their oversight

• 13:26Speaker 06

  hats on, because those are the people. Don't impeach Trump. Go after those people as soon as you get the gavel.

• 13:33George Hahn?

  We'll be right back.

• 13:40Speaker 06

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• 14:17George Hahn?

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• 14:50Speaker 02

  I make naan grilled cheese when my daughter has friends over. I use Stonefire naan to reward the humans who do my bidding.

• 14:57George Hahn?

  Right. It's perfect for camping trips.

• 15:00Speaker 01

  Dance for it, feeble mortal. Sorry, is he talking to me or? Dance. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.

• 15:07George Hahn?

  From our tradition to yours, Stonefire. Together we naan.

• 15:16George Hahn?

  Welcome back. What happens when we outsource the work of thinking? Reading, math, and science scores across developed countries have been falling for a decade. On last Friday's Prof G Markets, Georgetown computer science professor Cal Newport described the situation. Social media changing how we consume information and AI changing how we produce it.

• 15:43Ed Elson?

  I think social media delivered through smartphones and AI is a one-two punch to the cognitive abilities of the world, essentially, right? Because when you have the hyper addictive social media developed through smartphones, as we've seen over the last decade or so, what it does is reduce your comfort with consuming complicated information, right? So we're reading less, we're understanding less what we read, because our brains are getting retrained to getting immediate rewards from incredibly optimized and digestible content. AI then comes along, and it hits the other part of cognitive fitness, which is writing. This idea of taking what's in my brain, trying to organize it and produce it in a coherent way, is actually one of the most demanding cognitive activities we

• 16:25Ed Elson?

  do. It's why writing is at the core of most educational curricula. It's what we take the information we take in through reading, and we really work it out in our minds. Well, AI can take over writing for us so that we don't have to do that friction either. That's a one-two punch that's going to lead to extremely diminished cognitive fitness, and you would predict it to lead to just the general cognitive abilities of the population going down. And that's exactly what we're seeing, right? 2012 to 2015, right when social media delivered on smartphones become ubiquitous, scores start to go down, AI comes along, becomes ubiquitous in the last four years, and we see those scores going down at an even faster rate. So yeah, we're not taking cognitive fitness seriously, and these companies are taking advantage of that oversight.

• 17:10George Hahn?

  Writing forces us to organize our thoughts. And in a world flooded with AI-generated content, the most valuable skill in the economy is one of the oldest: storytelling. LinkedIn job postings mentioning storyteller doubled between 2024 and 2025, and AI companies are paying as much as $400,000 for communications roles. That was the argument on this week's deep dive. Do you want to be a great storyteller? I would start with writing. I think it's very difficult to be a great storyteller without mastering the ability to write. There's the famous Bezos dictum that he likes to get all ideas in a written memo. And from there, pick a medium. There's all sorts of mediums, whether it's threads, whether it's

• 17:54George Hahn?

  texting, whether it's speaking, whether it's the written word, long form, short form, posts on LinkedIn, and find out what is your medium, what is your craft, what is your weapon for storytelling? And then give yourself an objective. And I do this with my class. I ask them to pick a platform or a medium, and then to identify a metric that will let us evaluate if and when they get into the top 10% in that medium. And I challenge them to get into the top 10% in that medium by the end of the class, whether it's number of followers on threads, the number of likes they get on Instagram, or the number of reads they get on Substack with a written article. But that's the key here. What is your medium?

• 18:35George Hahn?

  How do you craft a voice? Start with writing. Pick your poison or your weapon, and hold yourself accountable to becoming a top 10% storyteller. Pick a medium, find your voice, put in the work. That's the week. I'm George Hahn. We'll see you next Friday.

• 19:03Ed Elson?

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• 19:29Speaker 02

  Stonefire naan is made with real buttermilk and ghee. It's the perfect flatbread for any occasion. I put out Stonefire naan with dips at every dinner party. I make naan grilled cheese when my daughter has friends over. I use Stonefire naan to reward the humans who do my bidding.

• 19:44Speaker 01

  Right. It's perfect for camping trips. Dance for it, feeble mortal. Sorry, is he talking to me or? Dance. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. From our tradition to yours, Stonefire.

• 19:57Ed Elson?

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