The Danger of Elon Musk

Ed Zitron, tech journalist, sits down to talk about how Elon Musk scammed his way into being a nation-state level actor.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
A zone media, this could be a giant disaster. Those
were the words that Elon Musk texted biographer Walter Isaacson
on a Friday evening in September twenty twenty two, claiming
that the Ukrainian military was attempting a sneak attack on
the Russian naval fleet in Sebastopol. In the annexed region

(00:24):
of Crimea must have been providing starlink Internet to the
Ukrainian military for months as part of their ongoing conflict
against Russia's invasion, and the resourceful Ukrainians began using stalink
as a way to remotely control the Kamikazi drones. Musk,
having spoken to a Russian ambassador, saw Crimea as a
red lion that, when crossed, would escalate the conflict, potentially

(00:45):
even provoking a nuclear retaliation, and so he acted disabling
or depending on who you ask, refusing to enable starlink
access in the Crimea region. When the Ukrainian drones serbs
approached their targets, they suddenly stopped communicating with the operators
and eventually washed up ashore, harmless and impotent. While the
specific details of this episode are hazy, the core truth

(01:07):
is unambiguously clear. Elon Musk is a supremely powerful individual
and through action or inaction, has the ability to influence
the outcome of combat operations and the bloodiest war inflicted
upon Europe in generations. It's a level of power typically
only reserved for nation state actors, not tech company CEOs.

(01:27):
Throughout history, we've seen plenty of examples of individuals and
companies with outsized country like power and influence. Musk isn't
unique in that regard, nor is he the sole cautionary
tale about why this shouldn't be allowed to happen. As
a private individual operating within his capacities as CEO, he's
unconstrained by democratic accountability, and as a private businessman he

(01:48):
has his own conflicts of interest, from Tesla's long history
of sourcing aluminum from Russian companies to his contacts with
the highest echelons of Russian leadership, including Vladimir Putin himself. Historically,
the only real accountability mechanism for people like Muscus to
be in the media, and yet in this case, the
media is chosen instead to fate the Elon Musk creation

(02:09):
myth that he's a trailblazing real life Tony Stark that
will take humanity to the stars, rather than asking him
many hard questions of any kind. This situation is the
product of a media industry dominated by journalists seeking access
to popular public figures, pulling their punches in the process.
The most notable access journalist is Kara Swisher, who spent
decades covering the tech industry with a pantomime like aggression,

(02:32):
asking the quote unquote hard questions without ever really pushing
the level of discover that might make a source un
willing to participate. Swisher famously, in an interview during the
All Things Digital conference in twenty ten, convinced Meta CEO
then called Facebook Mark Zuckerberg to take off his hoodie
after asking him a challenging question about Facebook's invasion of privacy,

(02:54):
only to be distracted by the design of the inside
of what he was wearing, effectively objecting to her own
line of questioning for endstainment purposes. Eight years later, Swisher
would interview Zuckerberg about Cambridge Analytica and Russian interference in
the twenty sixteen elections, lobbing softball questions like make a
case for keeping info wars on Facebook and responding to
Zuckerberg outright saying he wouldn't ban Holocaust and Sandy Hook

(03:16):
deniers by asking how it made Zuckerberg feel when people
said Facebook killed people Myanmar. The Swisher house style is simple,
ask a big meeting question, and then failed to interrogate
a single answer in any way, shape or form. Around
a month later, Swisher would interview Elon Musk, who at
that point indid harassment campaigns against reporters, called a man

(03:37):
saving children a pedophile, and had his companies face multiple
allegations of sexual harassment and racism. When asked about his
fights with the press over Twitter must claim that the
Wall Street Journal, whose Swisher used to work for, outright
lied about investigation into Tesla's production figures, to which Swisher
asked him if he realized the dangers of him saying

(03:57):
such things about the press and need to help Musk
paper over his claims, saying that he quote just doesn't
like falsehoods. One of the richest and most powerful men
in the world sat before Swisher, and her interrogation involved
asking him simple questions about why he was doing things,
lightly teasing him and saying that he looks and I
quote rested in calm to be clear, this is an

(04:21):
ultra powerful billionaire, and this is a was at the
time enterprising journalist who everyone looked to. In April twenty
twenty two, the week that Musk announced the Twitter acquisition,
Swisher gave a strange interview to James D. Walsh of
The New Yorker, defending Musk, who had of course waived
du diligence on the acquisition, did not seem to have
a single clear plan about how he might run the same.

(04:44):
She claimed that you couldn't pin Musk down, that he
was quite complex, and that we would be surprised about
what he likes and doesn't like. Musk, who has invented
none of the core products that make him rich, is
a quote visionary that gave Swisher genuine answers and arguably
the most damning things she could have said, would call

(05:04):
her back. That was her litmus test that he would
return her calls. Her ultimate defensive Musk was that and
I quote inventors were very difficult, problematic people, and the
moderation on Twitter was not working at the time of acquisition.
These are all, of course demonstrably force based on the
events that followed the growth of hate speech the lack

(05:25):
of accountability, that biggest face on the platform, and the
fact that every third post seems to be some kind
of spambot, either selling t shirts or pornography or cryptocurrency scams.
Swisher only turned on Musk when he emailed her calling
her an asshole in November twenty twenty two, including a
screenshot were according to Swisher, she was actually defending him,

(05:45):
saying that the US government should pay Elon Musk for starling.
Since then, Musk has gone from a difficult to pin
down visionary to carver Swisher calling his social network a
and this is agonizingly horribly written a thunderdome of toxic asininity. Swisher,
it appears, only worried about what she'd called Musk's price

(06:06):
of cocktail of ignorance and big ego until he was
rude to her. One of the most famous tech journalists
in the world, who has failed to take any real
shot at any of the people she's questioned across decades
of doing this, has now been reduced to making epic
dunks that sound like a twenty one year old Harry

(06:28):
Potter fan trying to cast a spell. It's embarrassing. Swisher
isn't the sole media figure guilty of having treated Elon
Musk with kid gloves or treating his bloviating with otherwise
on due credulity. This is a problem that affects almost
every news outlet and reporter that covers billionaires. The assumption
is always that billionaires will act with empathy, patience, and grace,

(06:50):
three things that Musk, Bezo, Zuckerberg, and the Ilk totally lack.
Failing that, one would suppose they'd act like a normal person,
a losing proposition. If you've ever read Jeff best as
his texts, these people are not like us. They do
not experience human struggle. They don't have bills or bosses
or fear of anything, let alone authority. Each and every

(07:12):
billionaire is effectively above the law, and that is the
place that you must start to understand them. It's deeply frustrating,
especially when you consider the myriad of opportunities where the
media could have taken must task and held him accountable.
Take High Poloop, for example, Musk's concept for a high
speed mass transit system where pressurized capsules would hurtle between

(07:32):
cities through vacuum tubes at speeds as fast as seven
hundred and sixty miles an hour. Hyperloop Musk promise would
allow commuters to travel between San Francisco and Los Angeles
in as little as thirty minutes, and with the network
powered primarily by solar power, with no real environmental impact.
If anything, this could have been a much bigger deal
than Tesla. High speed transit that doesn't burn fossil fuels.

(07:56):
Could truly have changed the world. So what do you
think happened? Do you think that must delivered on this
on this product that helped play a vital role in
cementing his image as a real life Tony Stark. Not
only would it be faster and cheaper than anything currently
in existence, but it'd be greener too. What followed was
a gushing or at least gredulous flow of media coverage,

(08:20):
including from The Washington Post and The New York Times,
both papers of record. It wasn't until the hype gradually
died down that people began asking serious questions about Hypepoloop's viability.
An exhaustive report published by the Transportation Research Laboratory earlier
this year raises serious questions about the feasibility of hyperloop,
particularly when it comes to passenger transportation writers, it noted,

(08:43):
would be exposed to extreme physical and mental stress, with
the noise, vibrations and rapid acceleration and deceleration inflicting an
unknowable toll on the human body. Questions about safety still linger.
And then there's the thorny issue of cost, with high
bloop requiring an all new infrastructure. Even the shortest routes
would involve a multi billion dollar upfront investment. These points

(09:05):
were for the most part, absent entirely from the earliest
coverage of highperloop. The media also missed the fact that
hypeloop wasn't even a new idea. In the nineteenth century,

(09:27):
countless inventors toyed with the notion of an atmospheric railway
where vehicles traveled through a near vacuum environment on the
momentum of pressurized air. A small demonstrator route was even
built by Ismbard Kingdom Brunel, the legendary British engineer who
designed the first transatlantic steamship. While Highpoloop differdence and meaningful ways,

(09:47):
it was still, nonetheless, much like many Musk products, a
derivative of an earlier idea. The boring company Musk's hilariously
named tunnel. Boring startup earned similar credulous C coverage upon
its inception, driven in no small part due to Musk's
decision to raise working capital by selling branded flame throwers

(10:07):
dubbed the not a flame Thrower to anyone that paid
five hundred dollars. This stunt, aside, the Boring Company one
praise due to its state admission to reduce the cost
of digging tunnels, which are often an inevitable and expensive
part of road and mass transportation development like hyperloop. The
Boring Company fed into the Tony Stark image of a

(10:28):
billionaire that could, through sheer force of will, change the
world and fix once intractable problems. I quote Mashable when
they said, must build machines to travel more efficiently on
the Earth and above it. So traveling through Earth seems
within the realm of his capabilities. If anyone can transform
the seemingly absent minded half joke into world changing technology,

(10:48):
it's Elon Musk, said The Guardian, and then reality here.
The Boring Company's first commercial project, a one point seven
mile tunnel in Las Vegas, where I in fact live,
wasn't a traditional road tunnel or part of an underground
metro system. It was in fact far less impressive, a
single lane loop where human driven tests. There's varied passengers

(11:10):
between points of interest in the Las Vegas Convention Center
and where traffic jams are a routine frustration for passengers.
Other projects in other cities, most notably Chicago and Los Angeles,
have either been canceled or are on indefinite hiatus. There
is nothing that the boring company has done. The tunnel
in Vegas is useless. It's claustrophobic, it's ugly, feels like

(11:34):
being in an airport lounge, except there's no food. It's strange.
It doesn't feel like it solves a problem other than
how can Elon must get more attention, and that really
is what he craves. Musk's wafer thin skin, his volatility,
and his propensity to overpromise an under the liver has
never been a secret. While he's been able with some

(11:57):
success to obfiscate a misdirect through a well crafted media persona,
the clues have always been there. Musk's reality distortion field
goes some way to explaining how he has managed to
amass the extent of the power he has and how
he cemented himself into our nation's most vital industries like transportation, communications, infrastructure,
and social media. He has a fairly consistent battle plan.

(12:20):
He makes a big promise, he delivers enough to make
the media believe he's for real, and then he relies
upon the fact that very few parts of the media
will ever follow up with him. There is no challenging
Elon Musk in the media. The thinnest amounts of criticism
are usually met by a horde of crazed tesla fans,

(12:41):
or at times Elon Musk himself. He's created the paper
thin media image built on the smallest, thinnest structures of reality.
He has found a way to manipulate the media using
his large amounts of power, money, and his few friends.
Elon mush Usk is a danger to society. He's a

(13:02):
capricious demagogue, desperate for more power and attention, and he
will do whatever he wants, whereever he wants, wherever he wants,
because we are societally unprepared for billionaires. It's no longer healthy,
or safe or honest to see Elon Musk as a
dorky charlatan carrying sinks into offices or destroying social networks
to settle insular beefs Elon Musk is a nation state

(13:25):
level actor with a net worth larger than the GDP
of Ukraine. He associates only with equally spurious reactionaries like
Bill Maher, Ronda Santis, and David Sachs, and he's easily
influenced by anyone who agrees with his thinly backed beliefs.
Musk isn't polarizing. He's polarization given life, an empty man
made of contrarianism and grievances, and he'll happily change the

(13:48):
world based on his own personal beliefs. As a result
of our market driven government and compliant media, Musk has
caused and will continue to cause human suffering an actual
death in his pursuit of fame, power, and capital. It's
time to stop treating him as just an entrepreneur, an investor,
an executive, or an industry blow hard. As a result

(14:11):
of our market driven government and compliant media, Musk has
caused and will continue to cause human suffering an actual
death in his pursuit of fame, power and capital. It's
time to stop treating him as just an entrepreneur, an investor,
an executive, or an industry blow hard and see him

(14:31):
as a man who has used his incredible wealth and
status to twist the world to his petty, ignorant, and
selfish desires. It's important to realize with complete clarity that
Musk makes electric cars that are sold around the world
and sells rockets to NASA. He runs Twitter X or
whatever it's called these days, one of the largest communication

(14:52):
networks in the world, and of course Starlink, the satellite
isp used aroount the world that is specifically marketed to
places that are otherwise inaccessi to traditional broadband. This is
not just the goofy redditor posting epic means and saying
exactly anymore. Elon Musk has chosen to and will continue
to choose to use his influence over these networks to

(15:13):
interfere with global events. And because the media and the
government has been so utterly tepid in their approach to him,
he's accumulated such power and influence that he is on
some level unstoppable. Since his acquisition of Twitter in twenty
twenty two and the subsequent layoffs of six thousand people,
Musk has revealed to the world his deep seated reactionary

(15:33):
beliefs and his noxious pathetic victim complex. He has become
obsessed with the woke mind virus, a term that he
uses to vaguely refer to everything from progressive education on
college campuses to San Francisco's growing homeless problem. He's made
Twitter's bot problem, one that he tried to use to
cancel the original acquisition, significantly worse, littering replies with bots

(15:55):
trying to sell you T shirts or make you join
the latest script ocurrency scam, some of which even include
Elon Musk's face. He took Twitter's verification system, a flawed
yet workable solution to verifying whether a tweak came from
the person who actually sent it, and turned it into
an eight dollars a month's premium account that verifies nothing
other than whether someone is capable of completing a credit
card transaction, and by destroying Twitter's trust and safety team,

(16:19):
Musk has allowed the world's real time communications channel to
become one rife with racism and other hate speech, leading
to Fortune five hundred advertisers worrying that the network and
I quote perpetuates racism, which was raised in a Semaphore
story from earlier in this year, Musk has shown he
is more than willing to do things based on not
what's good for the world, his businesses, or his users,

(16:41):
but on what will confirm his biases and protect his
financial interests. As a result of these moronic and malicious choices,
Twitter's valuation is tanked less than a third of the
forty four billion dollars he paid for it, losing half
of their advertising revenue, and changing their name to X,
which some have argued killed further billions of the original
company's brand value. Being a selfish, ignorant, and gormous charlatan,

(17:06):
Musk has now blamed Jewish non profit the Anti Defamation
League for ruining his company, claiming that the ADL had
pressured advertisers into killing x slash Twitter. Musk had previously
sued the Center for Countering Digital Hate, another nonprofit that
published research showing the growth and hate speech on the platform.
Musk is now fine with the ADL because they resumed advertising,

(17:28):
a deeply confused and utterly pointless exercise that only sought
to further increase bigotry on his website. For all his
statements around freedom of speech, Musk is the ultimate capitalist dictator,
willing to use his money to intimidate and censor those
who dared to criticize him. He's already done so on Twitter,
banning an account that tracked publicly available records of private

(17:49):
jet flights centering over four hundred tweets critical of Turkish
President Urdigan in the week's running up to an election,
suppressed accounts critical of Indian Prime Minister Nearendra Modi, and
cut access to links to newsletter platform Substack when they
launched a network competitive to Twitter. Musk is a propagandis
willing to work with any fellow reactionaries who feel scorned

(18:09):
by progressivism, personally helping Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis launch
his campaign on Twitter and funneling money to alleged sex
trafficker Andrew Tait through Twitter's Creator program. On on Nations roads,

(18:32):
Muscus created another problem in March twenty twenty three. According
to The Washington Post, a seventeen year old stepped off
of a school bus on North Carolina Highway five point
sixty one. As he stepped off, a Tesla Model Y,
allegedly with Tesla's autonomous autopilot engaged hit him at forty
five miles an hour, throwing him into the windshield and
leaving him lying face down on the pavement. He thankfully survived,

(18:56):
but broke and fractured his leg in the process. The incident,
which the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is still investigating,
is part of a growing list of victims of Tesla's
open beta test of quote full self driving, a buggy
dangerous software available on hundreds of thousands of Tesla vehicles
allowing users to let the car drive, which has resulted

(19:18):
in the deaths of seventeen people and led to seven
one hundred and thirty six other injuries and crashes. In theory,
activating Tesla's full self driving lets your Tesla take the wheel,
making turns, avoiding other vehicles, maintaining speed, avoiding objects, and
theoretically helping you arrive safely at your destination. The problem
is that this has only ever been a beta, meaning

(19:39):
that every new release involves some sort of new bug,
such as the one that Electric Car Blog editor Fred
Lambert claimed tried to kill him in September twenty twenty
three by trying to veer at highway speed into the
median strip on the road. One might imagine that such
a thing is illegal. Effectively unleashing beta software onto the
world's roads without s efficiently testing it would for any

(20:02):
normal person lead to imprisonment and a lifetime of fines. Musk,
thanks to his incredible wealth and power equivalent to that
of a small nation, has managed to avoid much scrutiny.
With the occasional government investigations that never seem to go anywhere,
and despite a well documented culture of racism and sexism,
very little seems to happen to test the at all.

(20:24):
This is because our society, in its government, its media,
and its citizen try, is woefully unprepared to deal with billionaires.
Musk is able to operate as a noxious, abusive, and
reckless monster in public, using his companies as vehicles to
lend himself money and political weapons, with little scrutiny or
punishment on their own. One might fob off these concerns

(20:45):
as one time things, but the reality is there's a
pattern of malicious and capricious acts or one after another,
again and again, done in broad daylight for all to see.
Musk has shown he will push whatever on envelope he
sees fit, and as Ronan Pharaoh's New York magazine piece shows,
there are very few people in the government, former and

(21:07):
otherwise anywhere really, not investors, not other members of the
Silicon Valley elite who are willing or able to get
in the way. Musk is so unbelievably rich, well connected,
and powerful that he can push around just about anybody,
even if they work for the Pentagon. Yet, Musk's desperation

(21:27):
for attention and adulation mean that he can be pulled
in any direction that feels like it scorns his critics,
And when his critics are pretty much anyone who isn't
a right wing lunatic, it almost guarantees he will continue
to power around with authoritarian regimes that will influence his
remarkably malleable brain. The actual solution will be to treat

(21:48):
Musk as what he is, a dangerous entity with a
higher GDP than Ukraine and an ego that rivals their
invaders president regardless of what happened in crimea Musk is
the ability to know when attacks are happening and influence
their outcome as a result of his for profit, privately
held satellite internet communications firm that the US government is

(22:10):
paying for. Elon Musk is a nation state global threat
and must be treated as such, he must be treated
as if he will make decisions based only on what
he believes will benefit or amuse him. He's the wish
dot Com version of Bond's earned stavro Blofeld, an offensive, charmless,

(22:31):
and boorish monster that has successfully bought his way into
the elite and found that no matter what he does,
their patience is unlimited and their scruples are few. Musk,
like another high profile narcissist, the former President Donald Trump,
routinely finds himself ensnared in litigation, both from regulators and
private individuals, even though the government never really seems to

(22:52):
actually do anything to him. The SEC is currently investigating
Musk for securities violations concerning his acquisition of Twitter. This
would be his third tryst with the Commission, the first
in twenty eighteen, the second in twenty nineteen. In both cases,
very little happen. However, at the same time, he faces
actions from former employees stiffed on severance pay and from

(23:14):
those who allege age and gender discrimination with factors in
their dismissal from Twitter. For Musk, these lawsuits are unlikely
to be anything other than the minor annoyance rather than
any kind of existential threat or something that otherwise curbs
is most egregious of behaviors. There are people who could help.
There are people that could sway you on Musk. You know,

(23:35):
people as rich as him, Tim Cook, Mark Benioff, Jeff Bezos,
Mark Zuckerberg and the rest of the world's billionaires feel
no need to correct Musk's behavior. They don't need to
interfere or even chide him through his disgraceful acts, because
doing so would potentially make their actions and wealth more conspicuous,
which is far more important to protect than free speech
or human lives. Really, anything that normal people face. They

(24:00):
they act as if they have civic responsibility. But the
few people we have that could actually change things, the
ones with the war chest to box out Musk, blocking
X from app stores and excluding him from their circles,
are sitting on their hands. One approach proposed by Stephen
Feldstein in The Atlantic is to treat Musks businesses as
they are vital to national security, and as a result,

(24:21):
take them into public control when necessary. This wouldn't be
without precedent. The legislation that allows this, the Defense Production Act,
has been invoked fifty times since its inception, both in
times of war and civil necessity like the twenty twenty
two infant formula shortage. While Stalink would remain a privately
held company, it would be obliged to prioritize the national need.

(24:43):
Full nationalization, Falsteine noted would also be a possibility if
Must failed to cooperate. Full nationalization would be a drastic measure.
But at this point, what other options exist for Elon Musk?
What other options exist for someone that is so reckless, dangerous,
so selfish, and so capricious. What options exist to deal

(25:05):
with someone who has inserted himself into the most vital
aspects of the American economy, making himself billions of dollars
off of governments, subsidies, and contracts. How the hell do
you handle someone who has insulated himself from media scrutiny
despite holding immense nation state power. Musk is not a

(25:26):
goofy Weirdow or the real life Tony Stark. He's a fragile,
mean hearted ogre one hell bent on seeing his whims
brought to life at any cost. The only way to
write about this man, the only fair coverage of Elon Musk,
the only clear perception of this man is to frame
him as a villain, a bigot, a bully, and a crook.

(25:48):
But what do you do about the man who has everything?
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(26:10):
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