Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Elon Musk. I'm just gonna go into the news. Elon,
he's set aside. He's officially done, no longer in charge
of Doze steps Aside, leaving Doge to the guys he
worked with then hired. His role in government lasted four
months and eight days or so, and he's officially left
(00:23):
the administration. I don't know. It's been rumored for weeks
that he's looking to get back into kind of the
more private sector and work with the you know, work
with Donald Trump. Maybe from a business perspective, He's got SpaceX. Obviously,
of course Trump coming back to X had a lot
(00:44):
to do with I think the building of their relationship.
Elon's got Tesla to worry about, and stock has been
improving a little bit here in the last few weeks
for for Tesla. But he's gonna be focusing more on
his businesses after kind of dipping his toe in the
last twelve months into his into government. So as the
(01:05):
campaign was going on and Elon jumped fully on the
Donald Trump train, and I think we like, there were
people out there that were just like, well, Elon wants
to be the President of the United States. Well, I
hate to inform you, But the Constitution itself prevents anybody
who was not born as a citizen of the United
States of America, and he wasn't. He is a citizen now,
but he was not born here. That's a disqualifier for
(01:27):
anyone who's trying to be the president of the United States.
So I mean, I don't know. I take the Constitution
fairly literally. I don't think it should be that easy
to change, especially just for one singular person. I feel
the same way about Donald Trump in a third presidential term.
He says he's not looking to do that, but there
are people out there, the Steve Bannons of the world,
that are suggesting that he should do that. And I'm
(01:49):
here to tell you that anybody who cares about the
Constitution of the United States would say they care about
the Constitution of the United States. It should not be
that easy to usurp the Constitution and just change it
because of one person. Doesn't make sense. Now. With that
being said, Elon Musk I think had an incredibly important
role to play in American government. Whenever he decided he
wanted to do that. He made the determination last summer
(02:12):
that this was the time it started with that Space's
interview on Twitter or X where he sat down and
had an interview with Donald Trump. It was Trump's triumphant
return to the platform, a platform which, really you could
make the argument kind of made him and kind of
broke him a little bit as his presidency wore on,
and then eventually the executives of the time of Twitter
(02:34):
essentially told him, you can't be on here anymore. We
don't like the speech, that you have too much influence,
and we're not going to be a conduit to the
hate speech that you're using or whatever. And that became
an entire different conversation about censorship social media and what
it's there for. It led to Elon Musk. I think
that direct example, among other accounts that had been frozen
(02:55):
or suspended by the powers that be at X, that
was what got Elon Musk into the social media game.
That changed everything. You see Facebook now going to a
more community notes format and not trying to censor or
mute or delete things or block things from people's periphery
because they don't like what they're saying. Politically, it's something
that you had to worry about a few years ago.
(03:16):
That's something you don't have to worry about.
Speaker 2 (03:17):
Now.
Speaker 1 (03:18):
We can think Elon Musk for that. We can think
Elon Musk for when he got into the race. I
think there was a big swing in I think intellectualism
a lot of people who are out there. And this
isn't to say that every single voter needs to feel
like they're an intellectual to participate in their civic duty
to vote, but I think I felt like, in a
pretty big, you know scenario, from the Elon Musk perspective
(03:43):
of things, that when you have someone who many consider
to be like the Edison of his time, maybe maybe
even more, you know, accurately, he's kind of a mixture
of the different types of scientists, you know. Not not
that he's going to go down in history like say
Robert Oppenheimer, who developed the atomic bomb. Maybe he won't
(04:04):
go down as as you know, a guy who really
was an engineer of the most forward thinking, like an
Edison of his time. But for our lifetime, there's not
been anybody who has really dabbled in as many types
of industries and been as successful as Elon Musk. There's
just no doubt about that. Elon, however, getting into government,
(04:25):
unfortunately for him, made people very split on him as
a person. That's America. That is just the unfortunate way
of American politics. This guy, I think, universally was praised
for his ability to be progressive in his inventions, in
his industrialization, in the way that he wanted to build
(04:47):
these companies. He was one of the early guys who
really pushed the electric vehicle, you know, kind of movement
in this country. Which makes it so ironic that so
many hardcore lefty liberals are trying to destroy or set
out to destroy his vehicles in temper tantrums because they
disagreed with him politically. It's just it's absolutely asinine to
(05:10):
me that people felt that way. But it's just ironic that, oh,
they don't care about electric vehicles anymore because the guy
that makes them doesn't think about the same things politically
as they do. Of course, SpaceX is breaking new ground
all the time. I think it is incredibly important for
SpaceX to have a great relationship with the American government
for what that could look like in the future. Of course,
(05:31):
we have to give plenty of praise to Elon for
his attempt at trying to save the American tax payers dollars,
But I don't think he anticipated it being this negatively received.
There are a lot of people in Republican districts, representing
people in their state or in the country in Washington,
d C. And they've had an answer for DOGE. They
(05:51):
haven't liked how DOGE is operated. They haven't liked how
quickly all this stuff was happening. They haven't liked it.
They haven't gotten a lot of transparent answers about why
certain things were cut and how certain things were cut.
Judges have stepped in, and you can say that it's
politically motivated for them too. I can't prove you wrong,
but judges have had to step in and say this
is being done too hastily. There has been no due
process as to proving that this is something that should
(06:13):
be done. And then there was some embarrassment in some
of these phases of letting people go or telling people
they needed to go through DOGE that some of these
people need to get hired back because they realized that
their job was important. This all happened over the time
span of four months. Now you can talk about how
much money has been saved so far. The estimation from
(06:33):
some people that it's not verifiable at this point but
taxpayers are saving roughly one hundred and seventy five billion
dollars so far from the efforts of Doge, and that's
a pretty pinion. That's a lot of money. But Musk
said on the campaign trail that he felt like, based
on looking at the records that the government was keeping,
he could save at least two trillion dollars in federal spending.
(06:54):
This is coming at about the same time that the
big beautiful spending bill that Donald Trump has been touting
and trying to get past, which has a lot of
stuff in there that is a pretty hefty spend. Yeah,
you know, kind of kind of undercut some of the
work that Doge was doing, according to Elon Musk. And
maybe that was when he said, you know what, we're
just we're maybe not in the same philosophical space, and
(07:14):
I really need to work on these companies. Maybe it's
time I stepped aside. I'm not sure, but maybe this
is a good time for us now that he has
stepped aside, that we can discuss the short but I
think important legacy politically of Elon Musk. If you'd like
to call us, I'd love to hear from you. Four
oh two five five eight eleven ten. Four h two
five five eight eleven ten. If you have opinions about
(07:34):
Elon Musk and his political legacy, would love to hear
from you here on news radio eleven ten kfab and
where you saw her kind of knocked heads a little
bit with some of the top advisors. I think the
way he operated is is Elon's way, and there just
wasn't a whole lot of space for anybody else to
kind of get the reins on him there. So what's
the legacy? Is it complicated or do you feel pretty
(07:56):
good about it? Let's get to Tom real quick on
our phone line of four h two five five eight
eleven ten. What do you think?
Speaker 2 (08:00):
Hello? Are you there? Yes, sir, okay, thank you for
taking my call. A lot of the news reports going
out about Elon leaving out shading it that he's frustrated
and is leaving in a hub. That's not the way
the facts are. Before he accepted the position back in January,
he said it only deep for a couple of months,
(08:21):
and of the federal law for the way his position
is designated, he has to leave at this time. So
he's just leaving just because his uh time limit has expired,
but he also knew it was going to be short
because he has his other companies to run.
Speaker 1 (08:36):
Yeah, and for full context, even five weeks ago, he
was in a conference call and he said in to
the Tesla shareholders that he was going to be scaling
back his government work over the next few weeks altogether.
And this was back in mid April, and said that
he was going to be scaling Look at.
Speaker 2 (08:52):
The news in the past couple of days. He was
present for a launch, the last launch of his SpaceX missile.
Speaker 1 (08:59):
Right, and I would imagine and that that that relationship
is still going to be very strong between SpaceX. Uh.
Speaker 2 (09:04):
Yeah, and the G under federal law, he can't work
in that position anymore.
Speaker 1 (09:09):
Yeah, it's it's a good point. And I appreciate the call. Tom,
Thanks for listening to us today.
Speaker 2 (09:13):
Thank you.
Speaker 1 (09:14):
Yeah, I'm not I I don't want to challenge that
because I don't think that Tom's off base there. I
don't think he's wrong about that. I do think though,
that there was an ability for him, based with his
relationship with Donald Trump in this administration, that if everything
was going all peachy and his businesses were running fine,
if he wanted to stick around there would they would
(09:35):
have made a way for him to stick around. But
it is kind of interesting how with only four months
Elon is now exiting and leaving behind kind of the
foundation of what he wanted Doze to be. And I
guess we'll see what the people that are left, what
(09:56):
they're going to be able to go and do and
uh if Elon's businesses are able to pick back up
to where people felt like they were a year plus ago,