Elon, Inc.

In the fourth (top secret) episode of Bloomberg Businessweek’s new podcast Everybody’s Business, hosts Max Chafkin and Stacey Vanek Smith grapple with the rise of the Man-o-sphere. Elon Musk is backing away from Doge, but his legacy will linger, and Max reveals the man behind Doge (hint: it’s not Elon)

Then Sarah Frier joins the show to talk about the former talent agent who introduced President Trump to the Manos...

Last year was a big year for Neuralink, Elon Musk’s brain implant company, seeing as it made headlines by successfully inserting a chip into a human’s brain. Soon the world may marvel at a quadriplegic man playing chess using nothing but his mind. And while there are other companies in the field of neurotechnology, Neuralink has received outsized attention thanks to its deeply controversial founder. His ultima...

In the third (semi-secret) episode of Bloomberg Businessweek's new podcast Everybody’s Business, Businessweek Editor Brad Stone fills in for Max Chafkin and joins Stacey Vanek Smith to talk trade war winners an losers. Though uncertainty still surrounds many of the Trump Administration's tariff policies, some trends are starting to emerge. Brad and Stacey select their winners and losers based on what we know so far.

And Harva...

It’s tax day in the US, and the Internal Revenue Service is reeling from more potential firings courtesy of Donald Trump, Elon Musk and their “Department of Government Efficiency” or “DOGE.” But DOGE headlines seem to have abated of late. What does it mean? Has Musk turned his gaze back to his actual businesses? Has the media’s attention span run out? Are the South Africa native’s effo...

In the second episode of Bloomberg BusinessWeek’s new podcast Everybody’s Business, Max Chafkin and Stacey Vanek Smith talk market turmoil. The stock market has been on a wild ride ever since the Trump Administration put sweeping tariffs in place, but it was trouble in the bond market that seemed to get the President’s attention and inspire the White House to hit pause on the tariffs. Tracy Alloway of th...

When Donald Trump unveiled that big list of countries and their respective tariffs, the markets reacted immediately by nosediving. In the days since, business leaders, tech founders and global CEOs have been making noise about how their companies will be negatively impacted. And even though Elon Musk is now part of the Trump administration, he’s also jumped into the fray, feuding with Trump adjutant Peter Navarro on (where el...

In the first episode of Bloomberg Businessweek’s new podcast Everybody’s Business, Max Chafkin and Stacey Vanek Smith try to make sense of “Liberation Day”—Donald Trump’s recent introduction of steep tariffs on imports from seemingly every corner of the globe. Will these taxes "fix" the economy like a hammer helps a ...

On Friday night, news broke that Elon Musk was merging his company X with his company xAI—a move that this very podcast, Elon, Inc., had predicted last year. This week, a campaign for the Wisconsin Supreme Court looms very large, as Musk is again spending millions of dollars to (Democrats contend) try and tilt an election in the Republican Party’s favor. Today, we talk about what the Friday night news means for Mus...

Elon Musk’s leverage over the Republican Party, made plain by his threats to finance primary challenges against anyone who fails to fully support Donald Trump, comes from his multibillion-dollar bank account. Recently, he’s decided to spend some of that money on behalf of the party. In Wisconsin, Musk has spent upwards of $13 million to sway a state supreme court race that has ramifications for Republican control o...

Elon Musk has been making news at a furious pace as he seeks to dismantle wide swaths of the federal government at Donald Trump’s behest. His behavior has certainly been enough to fill the pages of Judd Legum’s new publication, Musk Watch. The newsletter, an offshoot of Legum’s Popular Information Substack, launched on Inauguration Day. Since then, he’s used his background in law, journalism and digging...

In some ways, Elon Musk had a quiet week—if making news on a daily instead of hourly basis counts as quiet. This week on Elon, Inc., the panel— Max Chafkin, Dana Hull and Bloomberg Businessweek columnist Amanda Mull—discusses Mull’s latest story about the wrong turns Musk has taken with the Tesla brand.

And while Tesla dealerships and Supercharger stations are increasingly the focus ...

He may be the world’s richest person and a personal pal of Donald Trump, but even Elon Musk can have a bad week. Not only has Tesla stock continued to crater as consumers worldwide turn their back on the South Africa-born multibillionaire (some violently) but his right-wing social network X was hit by sporadic outages he blamed on hackers. Even one of his SpaceX rockets blew up, raining debris down on the Earth...

While Elon Musk is busy in Washington, his publicly traded company has been suffering. Having skyrocketed in the immediate aftermath of Donald Trump’s election, Tesla is now in free fall and increasingly a target of protesters. Every weekend, more people have shown up at Tesla dealerships across the US with signs and chants, demonstrating against Musk’s effort to gut federal regulators and agencies while firin...

Personnel Management (OPM) sent out an email seemingly to all federal employees instructing them to send back a list of five things they accomplished the previous week. Over on X, Musk posted that failure to do so would be tantamount to resigning.

Confusion reigned as departments scrambled to advise employees on whether to follow the order from Donald Trump’s wealthiest assistant. This week, Bloomberg Businessweek’s Max...

Elon Musk and his assistants have reportedly spent the past week dropping in on federal agencies ranging from the US Department of Education to the Department of Energy, the Social Security Administration and the Internal Revenue Service. The result has been the potentially illegal disclosure of personal financial and health data belonging  to tens of millions of Americans. Accompanying these visits has been the summary (and a...

Federal judges continue to declare most of Elon Musk’s activities in Washington to be probably illegal as the question of whether his 78-year-old boss will trigger a constitutional crisis becomes more pressing. At the same time, Musk has been making news in Silicon Valley, with a report Monday that he and others want to buy OpenAI. The proposal may have been a feint, but Sam Altman did take the opportunit...

Elon Musk has been in Washington a few weeks now, and he and his team of Silicon Valley adjutants show no signs of stopping their efforts to (illegally, many legal experts say) dismantle portions of the federal government in the name of Donald Trump. This weekend, we discussed how the Tesla co-founder and far-right billionaire was given access to a central component of government—the mechanism by which the Treasury distr...

In a week of unprecedented action (and chaos) from both Elon Musk and the Trump administration, breaking news this weekend brought the Elon, Inc. team together for an emergency episode. The New York Times broke the news, and the Washington Post followed, that Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency was given access to the Treasury Department’s payment system. This system, which handles a big ...

It’s that time of year: quarterly earnings for Tesla are tomorrow. Regular Elon, Inc. listeners will know that means a new bingo card is here (and you can play on the Bloomberg Terminal at BNGO). But that’s only one of the many breaking news items about Elon Musk—another is today’s announcement that Visa is partnering with X to deliver banking services to the social media platform. To discuss all o...