May 27, 2025 • 29 mins
When Bloomberg’s Mishal Husain interviewed Elon Musk last week, it caused quite a stir. This was especially the case when Musk proclaimed, “in terms of political spending, I’m gonna do a lot less in the future.” (Most news reports missed a sly qualification that made this seem more like an ultimatum. But more on that below). Coverage of the supposed end of Musk’s role as Republican Party’s Sugar Daddy added fuel to the ongoing “what will Elon do now?” frenzy. Over the weekend, a substantial outage at his social media platform X may have added some clarity. In response, the serial entrepreneur announced he was going “back to spending 24/7 at work and sleeping in conference/server/factory rooms.”
Or not. In this episode of Elon, Inc., Max Chafkin brings together Elon Musk reporter Dana Hull and social media reporter Kurt Wagner to discuss whether Musk means what he says about politics, subsidizing the GOP or even going back to work. Is he really leaving politics in the rearview mirror? Or were these statements calculated? Could they be a way for him to intimidate lawmakers who are expecting campaign funds while assuring investors he’s on top of his sometimes struggling companies?
To round things off, they rank Musk’s most immediate plans on a scale of how likely they are to succeed in the foreseeable future. Will it be X Money? A functioning fleet of “robotaxis?” Or maybe shooting Tesla’s humanoid robot Optimus to Mars? There was some disagreement.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio news.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
Let me tell you we have a new star. A
star is born hounded up on Mars Juthan Kennemy.
Speaker 3 (00:14):
He is the Thomas Edison plus plus plus of our age.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
Probably his whole life is from a position of insecurity.
Speaker 3 (00:21):
I feel for the guy.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
I would say ninety eight percent really appreciate what he does.
But those two percent that are nasty, they I'll pay
in four.
Speaker 1 (00:29):
Folks, we are meant for great things in the United
States of America, and Elon reminds.
Speaker 4 (00:34):
Us of that we don't have a fourth branch of
governments called Elon Musk.
Speaker 2 (00:46):
Welcome to Elon, Inc.
Speaker 4 (00:47):
Bloomberg's weekly podcast about Elon Musk. It's Tuesday, May twenty seventh.
I'm Max Chafkin, sitting here with Bloomberg's Elon Musk reporter
Dana Hall. Hey, Dana Hey, Max, and Bloomberg Social media reporter,
our favorite high school quarterback, Kurt Wagner.
Speaker 2 (01:04):
Kurt, how are you? How is your Memorial Day?
Speaker 1 (01:06):
Hi?
Speaker 2 (01:07):
Max?
Speaker 1 (01:07):
It was wonderful.
Speaker 2 (01:07):
How was yours? It was good? It was good. So
we have a lot to talk about.
Speaker 4 (01:12):
Even though I'd say Elon has been maybe a little
bit quieter than usual over the last week. Maybe it
was the Memorial Day holiday. So today I want to
unpack some of the things that we talked about on
our last episode last week. As you'll remember if you
listen to podcast, David Popadoppolis and I reacted kind of
in real time to Elon Musk's comments in Qatar to
(01:33):
Bloomberg's Michal Hussein saying essentially he was going to spend
less money in political contributions.
Speaker 2 (01:39):
We're getting more indications here.
Speaker 4 (01:41):
We're getting a little bit of news, including some news
from Elon about what's happening, what he has planned. And
then the other thing I want to do is I
want to talk about X money, the big.
Speaker 2 (01:51):
New Twitter X credit card.
Speaker 4 (01:54):
This is the everything app. And we'll get into that
next from Kurt. But before we do that, so Elon's
future plans, Dana, I feel like we need a new
term for this. We need to say, what is this
a sleeping arrangement update? Because Elon went on X and
he essentially said that after having spent the last few
(02:14):
months sleeping on the floors of the White House or whatever,
he's got a new location that he plans to take
his rest.
Speaker 3 (02:22):
Well, he said, he's like laser focused on his companies, right,
and he's I mean today he's in Brownsville, Texas where
SpaceX is about to launch Starship yet again. But maybe
I missed this over the long holiday weekend. Did he
give like a bedroom?
Speaker 2 (02:36):
Yeah? May twenty fourth.
Speaker 4 (02:38):
In response to and we'll get to this with Kurt
to some news out of X fire at one of
the data centers, he said, back to spending twenty four
to seven at work sleeping in conference server factory rooms.
So apparently sleeping in the server room since it sounds
kind of loud. But in any case, he said, I
must be super focused on x XAI and Tesla plus
(02:59):
Starship launched next week. As we have critical technologies rolling
out as evidenced by X uptime issues this week, major
operational improvemcy to be made. Kurt, there was a fire, right,
that's what prompted this.
Speaker 1 (03:12):
There was so there was a fire at one of
X's data centers near Portland. There was an outage on
Saturday for a few hours for a lot of users.
I didn't personally experience it, but others did. And it's
not entirely clear if the fire and the outage were linked,
but the timing is certainly interesting. And then you have,
as you pointed out, Max, the comments from Elon basically saying, hey, look,
(03:35):
I need to start spending more time here. There's been
a lot of technical issues that I have to deal with.
You said, there should have been like a failure redundancy
that should have happened. What that means is that when
one of the data centers went down, the other one
should have picked up the slack and consumers should not
have noticed there was an issue. But that didn't work.
And so the fact that he's sitting here saying, hey,
(03:55):
look I need to get back to spending twenty four
to seven on the tech of these companies that I run,
I think is a signal that, you know, the fire
or the data centers, all of this stuff are sort
of intertwined.
Speaker 4 (04:06):
Yeah, was this a particularly bad one, Kurt? I mean
I did on Friday notice people complaining about it. Maybe
my ex usage isn't as sort of fanatical as it
once was, so I actually didn't personally notice this.
Speaker 1 (04:20):
I mean, it was bad enough that people notice for
extended period of time, which is sort of rare. You know,
I cover all these big platforms and max as you know,
and like, it's not uncommon for there to be hey,
thirty minutes people are having trouble on Instagram or TikTok
or x or whatever. What it extends beyond an hour
or two is when you start to scratch your head
(04:41):
and say, Okay, something meaningful happened here. I think Elon's
again his responses acknowledging that you know, that backup plan
that they had in place essentially did not work, I
think to me as a sign that this was you know,
it was it was worse than average. It wasn't like
the X was down for the whole day or something
like that, but it was a just a blip.
Speaker 4 (05:00):
I would say, yeah, and Dana, there's been a few
of these data points. I mean, you brought up the
fact that there's a starship launch. He's going to have
an event a live stream later today, I believe, noon
Texas time talking about Mars. He sort of seems to
be trying to focus publicly on the companies, maybe more
(05:21):
than the past. Also twenty third, just to point you
to a couple of other posts, I have come to
the perhaps obvious conclusion that accelerating GDP growth is essential.
Doge has and will do great work to postpone the
day of bankruptcy in America, but the proflicacy of government
means that only radical improvements in productivity can save the country.
Speaker 2 (05:41):
It almost sounds like he's.
Speaker 4 (05:43):
Declaring what like failure right, Like he's sort of saying,
you know, it turns out, actually, Doge.
Speaker 2 (05:49):
Didn't do that much. I need to focus on my
companies for the good of the country.
Speaker 3 (05:53):
I guess I'm very cynical about this messaging because I
feel like it's a very convenient narrative for a lot
of reporters in Washington to be like Musk is distancing himself.
Speaker 2 (06:02):
You know, Musk is.
Speaker 3 (06:03):
Giving up and going home and taking his ball and
like focusing back in his companies, and like everyone is
parenting the message that Musk himself wants to get out.
And the reason why he is trying to get this
message out is because he really wants Tesla's board to
give him a pay package. And you know, for better
or worse, Like Musk has that kind of messiah complex
of I alone can fix it. So now he's like,
(06:27):
I've got to deal with this data center issue at
X and like we're gonna roll out this ROBOTAXI in
Austin and we're going to go to Mars, And like
he's trying to signal to investors that he is focused,
because the big complaint of investors has been that he
was spending too much time on Washington. So so I
feel like this is a lot for his audience of
investors and board members. I mean, he's always kind of
(06:51):
micro focused and multitasks in a way that is sort
of unique in corporate America. But is he really giving
up like on the DOGE ambitions.
Speaker 2 (07:02):
I don't know.
Speaker 3 (07:02):
He's got all of his people still there. It's like,
is Steve Davis still the COO of Doge? Is Antonio
Grassia still at the Social Security Agency? He's got CIOs
in place, Like it's hard for me to imagine him
really sort of working so hard in Washington and just
like abandoning ship. I feel like this is optics more
(07:23):
than a real change.
Speaker 2 (07:26):
Yeah. I tend to agree with you. I do think.
You know, it's like two things could be true.
Speaker 4 (07:31):
Like one is, he could have less influence in Trump's
White House today than he did I don't know a
month ago. And also he could be more focused on
his companies, like on a day to day basis, and
also hardly moving away from politics. You know, he's still
very much focused on, you know, on his influence in Washington.
(07:53):
The other thing is, and I brought this up last week,
he's going to this Bloomberg event in Qatar or dialing
into the event and saying he's he's sort of spending
less time on less money on politics, but at this
in the same breath saying he's going to the White House.
Like that week we saw him at the White House
with the South African President Kurt. You know, X was
(08:13):
kind of in the favored position before it was Doge.
Speaker 2 (08:18):
Has X suffered like.
Speaker 4 (08:20):
You kind of see it going, you know, one of
two ways, but like, how have things worked at the
company as Elon Musk Musk's attention sort of turned away
from it.
Speaker 1 (08:30):
Yeah, I mean my understanding is that he's been quite absent,
which makes a lot a lot of sense. Right as
we've talked about he's he not only has four other businesses,
but that he's also you know, full time, halftime, part
time whatever in DC. I look at the Doge thing
and Elon and X more as a what does this
(08:52):
mean for the business of the company, not so much
even his time, his personal time, which is that I
think in January and February, when he's tweeting constantly, when
he's hanging out with Trump, when he's literally sort of
dictating US policy via his Twitter account or his ex account,
I think that gave X this continued influence. Right, you
(09:14):
kind of had to pay attention to it still because
it was still driving literal US policy decisions via his
X account. As Elon has the last month or two,
he has stopped tweeting as much about politics. He's obviously
saying he's going to step away from politics. And so
what I wrote last week in our newsletter was sort
of like what happens to X if Elon truly follows
(09:35):
through and steps away from politics, because he spent the
last year turning this thing into a political machine. Like
it the purpose of X for the most part was
to get Donald Trump elected and then to support his
agenda and possibly push his agenda in the ways that
Elon wants it to. And if that's not what he's
going to do anymore, like what is X, right, it's
(09:56):
not really a place for breaking news, It's not really
a place for the global conversation like it has historically
been because Elon pivoted so aggressively into politics a year ago,
and so I don't know, I'm sort of kind of
sitting around wondering, like, what does this platform become if
it's not a Donald Trump Elon Musk politics machine. I
(10:16):
don't know if either what I mean, you two have
both been on it for years as well. I'm curious
if you have thoughts on that, But like, what's the
identity of this thing now? It keeps morphine and I
think the political identity that he's created is sort of
crumbling as we're as we're standing here.
Speaker 2 (10:29):
I don't know.
Speaker 3 (10:30):
I don't really use x anymore. I lurk on it,
but like I locked my account and I don't have
it on my phone and I kind of like check
in like every once in a while, but like, I
don't use it. It is it is not the platform
that I joined over a decade ago.
Speaker 4 (10:49):
Well, I from when I'm still addicted. Although Kurt, to
your point, you know, I do think it loses some
of its vitality. We will in the second segment talk
a little bit about, you know, possible future identity for
x as A as a bank before we get there.
Speaker 2 (11:05):
I mean, there is a swirl of things, right.
Speaker 4 (11:07):
It's not just the fact that Doge hasn't cut as
much maybe as promised. It's not just the fact that
there are fires breaking out in Twitter data centers and
Twitter is going down. It is also, of course, you know,
Tesla and the fact that the sales are are still
despite Elon Musk's comments. You know, Elon Musk said last week,
(11:29):
yet you're bad for us, but it's bad for everyone.
Although as a report today essentially showing that Tesla sales
are way down, down by more than fifty percent, while
overall EV sales in the region are up twenty eight percent. Dana,
one thing I've wondered about. We've talked about the demand thing,
but if you look in that one big beautiful bill
that the Trump budget bill, it is not a great
(11:51):
bill for Tesla. And like the combination of Tesla's sales
and this kind of potential hit to the revenue in
the form of this budget build which takes away or
would take away EV tax credits, do you think that
could be pushing him away?
Speaker 2 (12:05):
I don't know.
Speaker 3 (12:05):
I mean, Elon has always sort of said that he
doesn't think there should be any subsidies whatsoever, whether it's
for evs or oil and gas. So I don't know
if that alone is enough to make him angry or
cause some kind of rift with Trump. I think that
tariffs are not good for Tesla, but like, fundamentally, like
he what he cares the most about is SpaceX and
(12:26):
he wants funding for a Mars mission, So I don't
know if he's willing to jennison one for the other.
But the any thing I pointed out about the European
sales is that like Tesla has a factory in Germany
that makes the model, why if these sales in Europe
continue to crater, there's gonna be real questions about like
do they keep this factory open or like do they
start scaling back production, Like you don't keep making cars
(12:49):
for a market that does not need them. And everyone
always sees the problems in Europe as like, oh, Elon
being so close to Trump, but it's really like it
was really Elon Musk supporting the AfD in Germany that
has caused this huge backlash in Europe. Like European consumers
are very concerned about what Elon is doing with Visa
(13:11):
v European politics.
Speaker 2 (13:12):
Trump aside, last thing, this SpaceX launch, Dana, what are
you going to be looking for here? Like he's saying
that twenty twenty six, right, He's that that's the goal
for like some kind of Mars demonstration mission.
Speaker 4 (13:26):
Do you have any sense of how far away we
are from that in terms of milestones that have to
be hit? To me from the outside, it seems like
a lot.
Speaker 2 (13:36):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (13:36):
I mean, that's a very ambitious, very aggressive timeline, and
Musk's plan is that like, not only will Starship launch
to Mars in twenty twenty six, but Optimist is going
to be on board. So he has a lot of
a lot writing on this and we'll hear from him
later today when he gives this, you know speech about Mars.
I mean, you know, he's always talked about going to Mars,
but now Starship does exist. They've had a couple of
(13:58):
launches that have haven't totally gone well, and so like
there's a lot riding on this one going better. I
think obviously he wants to show to Trump and a
NASA that like this vehicle is ready and that like
it can do all the things that it's supposed to do,
but you know, they're constantly tweaking with the heat shield,
and you know, there's all kinds of issues that they
that they still work out. And I think in the
(14:19):
world of space, you know, everyone will say space is hard,
and you learn by doing and you iterate, and like
what we might see as quote unquote failure is actually
just part of the design, iteration, engineering learning process. So
you know, SpaceX has always been very good at that.
But I mean, you know, the window to go to Mars,
it doesn't come around very often. So that's like a
(14:39):
big reason why he is pushing for this twenty twenty
six Dad.
Speaker 4 (14:48):
So in our first segment, you know, Kurt talked about
kind of like what x becomes, and I think that
is a big question.
Speaker 2 (14:56):
That's an open question. Of course.
Speaker 4 (14:58):
Last week we talked about Xai and this potential deal
that it had with Calshi, which is a predictions company.
You know, hours after we recorded that episode, Calshie actually
did a one eighty pulled the announcement on the Xai deal,
essentially saying that that x had not confirmed the announcement
(15:21):
or something like that. So it sounds like some sort
of either miscommunication or sort of a one eighty that
business is up in the air. But Kurt, the business
that I think feels actually a little bit easier to
get your arms around, if not necessarily, I don't know.
The most promising is money, right, the idea that Elon
Musk has talked about for years that he's going to
turn x Twitter into a bank.
Speaker 1 (15:44):
Yeah, and he has been talking about this. I was
thinking about this just last night as I was preparing
to chat about it. It was October of twenty twenty
two that he first, you know, took over Twitter and
was like, We're going to turn this thing into a bank.
He was telling employees that from the get go, almost
three years max. Where you know, we're summer of twenty
twenty five. Now, I think we can say after a
(16:05):
Memorial Day and we still haven't seen anything other than
sort of a some hints, some teases that something might
be coming. And the idea here, I think, to your point,
is easy enough to wrap your head around. I think
the execution is another thing. And then the adoption is actually,
in my opinion, probably the toughest hurdle for them to
(16:25):
get over. But let's talk just briefly about what this
looks like I mean, imagine opening your X account and
having a balance there right like essentially your your your
debit card, your your account, your debit account right there,
linked to your X account. Now, if I want to
send you money, Max, I could. I could shoot you money,
similar to Venmo. If I'm scrolling through my X feed
(16:46):
and I see an ad for something I want to buy,
I could click and I could buy it right there.
You know, he had talked about having a really high
interest yield on this, on the money that's in these accounts,
so you'd be incentivized to essentially use this as like
a safe account because you'd be making who knows how much,
but we'll say three, four or five percent on that money.
So that is the idea is like your X account
(17:09):
and your financial accounts are linked together, and what would
that do for you? Now, as we're now learning, it's
been almost three years they haven't launched anything. So technologically
this is clearly harder than they anticipated. I think they're
running into some regulatory issues. They're trying to get licensed
for payments in all fifty states. I believe they're in
forty one states. But you don't want to roll out
(17:32):
a product. When you know, if someone in New York,
for example, where they're not licensed, can't send money to
someone in California, like it just it doesn't really work
all that well if you don't have all fifty states.
And then the last thing is just adoption. Is the
average X user going to actually move their money from
a Chase or a Bank of America or something like
(17:52):
that and store it in X And I think that's
just an incredibly, incredibly high bar for a consumer to do.
Speaker 4 (18:00):
Dude, I don't trust X with my jokes, let alone
my you know, let alone my life savings. But that said,
there will be people, and I should just say the
reason we're talking about this, so you know, Elon Musk
as often, is kind of driving this with his with
posting on X. A Tesla owners group tweeted that X
money was launching soon. X Money being this you know,
(18:21):
financial service offered by the company formerly known as Twitter.
Elon wrote on May twenty fifth, so I believe that
was on Sunday. This will be a very limited access
beta at first. When people's savings are involved, extreme care
must be taken.
Speaker 3 (18:36):
I don't want my bank account to be in beta,
like sorry, like I just told like, I just would
never want my personal finances to be in beta mode
at an Elon Musk company like that. I mean, there's
already enough problems as it is with just like security
of data in this new world of you know, hackers
and the Internet and like online banking in general. Like
(18:59):
I don't know, I'm just I'm very I'm very like
old school with my banking and would not willfully share
my banking contacts with the social media platform, particularly one
that's like AI based and trying to use information to
train their algorithms.
Speaker 4 (19:15):
We're joking about this because of course the failwell and Twitter.
As Kurt knows well. He wrote a book about Elon's
takeover of Twitter, Battle for the Bird. This is a
company that has like has sort of for its entire history,
had technical problems even dating back to Elon. It definitely
doesn't convey like trusted secure. It's more like free wheeling.
(19:38):
Anything could happen. It's pretty much all the things you
don't associate with a bank. On the other hand, Kurt,
I mean you talked about the regulatory progress that they've made.
There was also this report that I believe you wrote
about back in January Musk essentially striking a deal with
Visa that would make Visa a payments partner X. I mean,
(20:02):
what is in place right now outside of the sort
of regulatory issue that you talked about.
Speaker 1 (20:07):
Yeah, so I believe they have licenses secured in forty
one states. So again that's just sort of bare bones.
You need that in order to operate in those states
to send money to other people or to businesses. So
they're working their way through that. The Visa thing, My
understanding of that is, you know, you would have some
type of card that is linked to your accounts SOL,
(20:28):
like a debit card for example, that you could literally
go out into the real world and walk into a
store and buy something with this card. And so in
order to do something like that, Max, you need partners
who do debit cards or credit cards, and Visa would
make sense. They're they're gonna need banking partners, right, They're
gonna need We know some of them, which of course
I can't call at the top of my head, but
(20:48):
we know some of them via their payments applications documents
that we've gotten from some of these states. We've done
Foyer requests to try and get those applications to get
a better sense of what it is that they're doing.
This will only if they are partnering with other financial
services providers, Visa being one, and then once you get
all of that stuff in place, you need to convince
(21:09):
actual people to do this, and we've talked about how
that's going to be a problem. But you know, a
Visa that's a well known name, that's a household name.
That's a good sign for them that they have partnered
with someone that people are familiar with and who know.
But I think that's sort of table stakes when it
comes to your money, right, Like You're not gonna sit
there and be like, wow, Visa, this is incredible. You're
(21:30):
gonna be like, yeah, that's what I expect. Like if
I'm going to be giving you my money, I expect
to have household names involved. And so they are, to
their credit kind of getting that. But I think that
that again is sort of the bare minimum at this point.
Speaker 3 (21:41):
What is the model for this? Is this what Weibo does,
Like is there payments on some of the apps in China?
Because I feel like Musk is very aware of what
consumer behavior is in China and there must be like
even though this might be going back to the early
PayPal days. Like this idea of making X the everything
app is that modeled on something that already exists elsewhere
(22:04):
in the world.
Speaker 1 (22:05):
I think everyone always points to we Chat in China,
this idea of you know, having entertainment, banking, social networking,
all shopping all in one location. The issue and why
I'm pretty skeptical that this is going to work, is
that several companies, including Meta and Mark Zuckerberg, have attempted
(22:25):
to do this already in the US without success. And
I think sort of the conclusion that I've come to
from having spoken with people about this over the years
is that the US market is just so fragmented already
that the idea of sort of putting it all back
together feels almost impossible. Right Like you go to Uber
when you want a ride, and you go to your
(22:46):
banking app when you want a bank, and you go
to X or Meta or TikTok or whatever when you
want a social network. And I think the consumer behavior
is just so different in the US than it was
in China, and in China it's controlled more, right, like
the government can basically control which companies, you know, get
get market share, or can sprout up and so it's
(23:07):
just not the case here. And so I'm pretty skeptical
this is gonna happen, in part because this is an
idea I've probably been writing about for like ten years
in the US specifically, and it just hasn't come to fruition.
Speaker 4 (23:19):
Facebook is way way bigger than X like, so, so
you're starting with a much smaller base of users, a
base of users that are not as addicted to it
as as people are of Facebook.
Speaker 2 (23:32):
Like, it's just it's just a much weaker position.
Speaker 4 (23:35):
In addition to like all the market challenges we talked
about as well as the political challenges, there is one
little wrinkle. I've seen a couple of reports suggesting that
when Elon Musk creates this X credit card, you will
be able to print your Twitter user.
Speaker 2 (23:48):
Name on it. Wow. Okay, I think that could change everything, Kurt,
because you know, throw.
Speaker 1 (23:53):
Out everything I've said to this point and let's let's
start from zero. No, I'm just kidding. Yeah, that sounds
like something that would happen, you know. I feel like
that's that's like the ex premium subscriber perk, right that
lures people into their eight dollars a month.
Speaker 2 (24:11):
I'm picturing you taking the team out to.
Speaker 1 (24:13):
The local you know, Buffalo wild Wings after a taping
and throwing down that visa card.
Speaker 4 (24:27):
Okay, so we just got through Memorial Day, you know,
twenty twenty five, or two to a third of the
way through a little more than that.
Speaker 2 (24:33):
But I wanted to look ahead to next year, and.
Speaker 4 (24:36):
We've been talking about all of these things that Elon
Musk is trying to do, the reasons why he wants
to sleep on the floor, sleep in the factory or whatever.
And what I'd like, Kurt and Dana, what I'd like
you both to do is sort of rank these from
most likely to succeed to least likely to succeed by
the end of twenty twenty six. So by the end
of next year, so the list goes a functioning flea
(25:00):
of robotaxis Tesla's trying to do that x money, surpassing
one of the big mobile payment apps in usage by
the end of twenty twenty six. Or third Optimist that's
Tesla's humanoid robot heading on a starship rocket to Mars
by the end of next year. Kurt Wagner, what's the
most likely of those?
Speaker 1 (25:21):
Oh man, I know you're going to pick me.
Speaker 2 (25:22):
First.
Speaker 1 (25:23):
Least likely is probably a full functioning fleet of robotaxis,
just because now I think that's actually the most likely
of those, like long term probably, but twenty twenty six,
I'm just not sold. I'll say the second least likely
(25:45):
is X payments. As we've talked about, I've already shared
why I'm pretty skeptical that that's going to take off.
And then I'm going to say the most likely is
the sending Optimists to Mars. And it's purely because of
the window that Anna mentioned earlier, how there's sort of
like limited windows that you can you can send these
ships on their way to Mars, And so I think,
(26:08):
you know, Elon will Again. I don't think any of
these things are very likely, but I guess of the three,
I would say maybe that one's most likely simply because
it has that time pressure built in of trying to
hit that window. So don't play this tape again at
the end of twenty twenty six. Let's let's burn this
one after this.
Speaker 3 (26:25):
I agree because I think also of all of the
things Elon cares the most about, Mars, like Mars has
been the animating force of his life for over two decades,
and like, you know, for whatever criticism you might have
of Elon, he's like what do they call it, like
a forcing function, Like he will bring the full force
of his personality and his ambition and he will drive
(26:48):
his team to meet that deadline because it is a
window and like Optimus is exists and is like walking
around and you know, like who knows if it's tele
operated or not. But like, I don't think there's anything
stopping them from putting an Optimist a couple of Optimist
robots on a ship and trying to send it to Mars.
Whether they get to Mars remains to be seen, but like,
(27:09):
I think that they will do everything in their power
to meet that deadline. And as we've talked about before,
President Trump mentioned it in his inauguration speech, and I
think that that is really the main thing that Elon
has always cared about.
Speaker 2 (27:22):
Okay, you guys are wrong.
Speaker 4 (27:23):
The most likely is the payment thing, because that's the
only one of the.
Speaker 2 (27:28):
Three that could conceivably happen.
Speaker 4 (27:31):
And like I don't again, like I don't know that
ex money can really take on Venmo or Zell or.
Speaker 2 (27:38):
Apple pay or Square.
Speaker 4 (27:40):
But to me, like you never know it like there
are no like technological barriers to that one. Succeeding that
one is just purely about perceptions about Elon Musk And
maybe I mean, I feel like it's a comment on
how difficult he like his position has gotten politically, that
(28:01):
that we have trouble picturing it, because I do agree
it's hard to imagine. I would say that the second
most likely is the Robotaxi fleet only because I think
like there's a lot of squishiness in that in that term,
and I could see defining it in a way where
Elon would allow himself to declare victory. I don't I
don't buy Optimist getting to Mars by twenty twenty six.
Speaker 2 (28:23):
Guys.
Speaker 4 (28:23):
I feel like it's it's gonna be tough. They got
to refuel the thing. They're like eight zillion steps there.
And like Danna does, does optimists actually work or we've
seen some videos? Like again, like, I don't know, I
don't know if I've seen enough optimists here to trust
him on another planet.
Speaker 3 (28:42):
Oh, come on, Optimist is gonna be babysitting your kid
and doing ballet and playing the piano.
Speaker 2 (28:47):
Come on?
Speaker 1 (28:48):
Well, new nickname for Max the contrarian.
Speaker 2 (28:52):
Name.
Speaker 4 (28:54):
Listen, I'm gonna sign up for X money right now,
get that credit card out, start and start buy you
guys things, and before you know it, ts.
Speaker 1 (29:03):
Up handedly push your prediction over the finish line. I
think that's a good idea.
Speaker 2 (29:08):
Kurt Dana, thanks for being here as always.
Speaker 1 (29:11):
Thank you Max.
Speaker 4 (29:19):
This episode was produced by Stacey Wong. Annam Maserakis is
our editor, Blake Maple's handles engineering, and Dave Purcell factchecks.
Our supervising producer is Magnus Henrickson. The Eloni theme is
written and performed by Taka Yasuzawa and Alex Sagiera. Brendan
Francis Newtam is our executive producer, and Sage Bauman is
ahead of Bloomberg Podcasts. A big thanks to our supporters
(29:41):
Joel Weber and Brad Stone.
Speaker 2 (29:43):
I'm Max Chafkin.
Speaker 4 (29:44):
If you have a minute, rate and review our show,
it'll help other listeners find us and we will see
you next week.
Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio news.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
Let me tell you we have a new star. A
star is born hounded up on Mars Juthan Kennemy.
Speaker 3 (00:14):
He is the Thomas Edison plus plus plus of our age.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
Probably his whole life is from a position of insecurity.
Speaker 3 (00:21):
I feel for the guy.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
I would say ninety eight percent really appreciate what he does.
But those two percent that are nasty, they I'll pay
in four.
Speaker 1 (00:29):
Folks, we are meant for great things in the United
States of America, and Elon reminds.
Speaker 4 (00:34):
Us of that we don't have a fourth branch of
governments called Elon Musk.
Speaker 2 (00:46):
Welcome to Elon, Inc.
Speaker 4 (00:47):
Bloomberg's weekly podcast about Elon Musk. It's Tuesday, May twenty seventh.
I'm Max Chafkin, sitting here with Bloomberg's Elon Musk reporter
Dana Hall. Hey, Dana Hey, Max, and Bloomberg Social media reporter,
our favorite high school quarterback, Kurt Wagner.
Speaker 2 (01:04):
Kurt, how are you? How is your Memorial Day?
Speaker 1 (01:06):
Hi?
Speaker 2 (01:07):
Max?
Speaker 1 (01:07):
It was wonderful.
Speaker 2 (01:07):
How was yours? It was good? It was good. So
we have a lot to talk about.
Speaker 4 (01:12):
Even though I'd say Elon has been maybe a little
bit quieter than usual over the last week. Maybe it
was the Memorial Day holiday. So today I want to
unpack some of the things that we talked about on
our last episode last week. As you'll remember if you
listen to podcast, David Popadoppolis and I reacted kind of
in real time to Elon Musk's comments in Qatar to
(01:33):
Bloomberg's Michal Hussein saying essentially he was going to spend
less money in political contributions.
Speaker 2 (01:39):
We're getting more indications here.
Speaker 4 (01:41):
We're getting a little bit of news, including some news
from Elon about what's happening, what he has planned. And
then the other thing I want to do is I
want to talk about X money, the big.
Speaker 2 (01:51):
New Twitter X credit card.
Speaker 4 (01:54):
This is the everything app. And we'll get into that
next from Kurt. But before we do that, so Elon's
future plans, Dana, I feel like we need a new
term for this. We need to say, what is this
a sleeping arrangement update? Because Elon went on X and
he essentially said that after having spent the last few
(02:14):
months sleeping on the floors of the White House or whatever,
he's got a new location that he plans to take
his rest.
Speaker 3 (02:22):
Well, he said, he's like laser focused on his companies, right,
and he's I mean today he's in Brownsville, Texas where
SpaceX is about to launch Starship yet again. But maybe
I missed this over the long holiday weekend. Did he
give like a bedroom?
Speaker 2 (02:36):
Yeah? May twenty fourth.
Speaker 4 (02:38):
In response to and we'll get to this with Kurt
to some news out of X fire at one of
the data centers, he said, back to spending twenty four
to seven at work sleeping in conference server factory rooms.
So apparently sleeping in the server room since it sounds
kind of loud. But in any case, he said, I
must be super focused on x XAI and Tesla plus
(02:59):
Starship launched next week. As we have critical technologies rolling
out as evidenced by X uptime issues this week, major
operational improvemcy to be made. Kurt, there was a fire, right,
that's what prompted this.
Speaker 1 (03:12):
There was so there was a fire at one of
X's data centers near Portland. There was an outage on
Saturday for a few hours for a lot of users.
I didn't personally experience it, but others did. And it's
not entirely clear if the fire and the outage were linked,
but the timing is certainly interesting. And then you have,
as you pointed out, Max, the comments from Elon basically saying, hey, look,
(03:35):
I need to start spending more time here. There's been
a lot of technical issues that I have to deal with.
You said, there should have been like a failure redundancy
that should have happened. What that means is that when
one of the data centers went down, the other one
should have picked up the slack and consumers should not
have noticed there was an issue. But that didn't work.
And so the fact that he's sitting here saying, hey,
(03:55):
look I need to get back to spending twenty four
to seven on the tech of these companies that I run,
I think is a signal that, you know, the fire
or the data centers, all of this stuff are sort
of intertwined.
Speaker 4 (04:06):
Yeah, was this a particularly bad one, Kurt? I mean
I did on Friday notice people complaining about it. Maybe
my ex usage isn't as sort of fanatical as it
once was, so I actually didn't personally notice this.
Speaker 1 (04:20):
I mean, it was bad enough that people notice for
extended period of time, which is sort of rare. You know,
I cover all these big platforms and max as you know,
and like, it's not uncommon for there to be hey,
thirty minutes people are having trouble on Instagram or TikTok
or x or whatever. What it extends beyond an hour
or two is when you start to scratch your head
(04:41):
and say, Okay, something meaningful happened here. I think Elon's
again his responses acknowledging that you know, that backup plan
that they had in place essentially did not work, I
think to me as a sign that this was you know,
it was it was worse than average. It wasn't like
the X was down for the whole day or something
like that, but it was a just a blip.
Speaker 4 (05:00):
I would say, yeah, and Dana, there's been a few
of these data points. I mean, you brought up the
fact that there's a starship launch. He's going to have
an event a live stream later today, I believe, noon
Texas time talking about Mars. He sort of seems to
be trying to focus publicly on the companies, maybe more
(05:21):
than the past. Also twenty third, just to point you
to a couple of other posts, I have come to
the perhaps obvious conclusion that accelerating GDP growth is essential.
Doge has and will do great work to postpone the
day of bankruptcy in America, but the proflicacy of government
means that only radical improvements in productivity can save the country.
Speaker 2 (05:41):
It almost sounds like he's.
Speaker 4 (05:43):
Declaring what like failure right, Like he's sort of saying,
you know, it turns out, actually, Doge.
Speaker 2 (05:49):
Didn't do that much. I need to focus on my
companies for the good of the country.
Speaker 3 (05:53):
I guess I'm very cynical about this messaging because I
feel like it's a very convenient narrative for a lot
of reporters in Washington to be like Musk is distancing himself.
Speaker 2 (06:02):
You know, Musk is.
Speaker 3 (06:03):
Giving up and going home and taking his ball and
like focusing back in his companies, and like everyone is
parenting the message that Musk himself wants to get out.
And the reason why he is trying to get this
message out is because he really wants Tesla's board to
give him a pay package. And you know, for better
or worse, Like Musk has that kind of messiah complex
of I alone can fix it. So now he's like,
(06:27):
I've got to deal with this data center issue at
X and like we're gonna roll out this ROBOTAXI in
Austin and we're going to go to Mars, And like
he's trying to signal to investors that he is focused,
because the big complaint of investors has been that he
was spending too much time on Washington. So so I
feel like this is a lot for his audience of
investors and board members. I mean, he's always kind of
(06:51):
micro focused and multitasks in a way that is sort
of unique in corporate America. But is he really giving
up like on the DOGE ambitions.
Speaker 2 (07:02):
I don't know.
Speaker 3 (07:02):
He's got all of his people still there. It's like,
is Steve Davis still the COO of Doge? Is Antonio
Grassia still at the Social Security Agency? He's got CIOs
in place, Like it's hard for me to imagine him
really sort of working so hard in Washington and just
like abandoning ship. I feel like this is optics more
(07:23):
than a real change.
Speaker 2 (07:26):
Yeah. I tend to agree with you. I do think.
You know, it's like two things could be true.
Speaker 4 (07:31):
Like one is, he could have less influence in Trump's
White House today than he did I don't know a
month ago. And also he could be more focused on
his companies, like on a day to day basis, and
also hardly moving away from politics. You know, he's still
very much focused on, you know, on his influence in Washington.
(07:53):
The other thing is, and I brought this up last week,
he's going to this Bloomberg event in Qatar or dialing
into the event and saying he's he's sort of spending
less time on less money on politics, but at this
in the same breath saying he's going to the White House.
Like that week we saw him at the White House
with the South African President Kurt. You know, X was
(08:13):
kind of in the favored position before it was Doge.
Speaker 2 (08:18):
Has X suffered like.
Speaker 4 (08:20):
You kind of see it going, you know, one of
two ways, but like, how have things worked at the
company as Elon Musk Musk's attention sort of turned away
from it.
Speaker 1 (08:30):
Yeah, I mean my understanding is that he's been quite absent,
which makes a lot a lot of sense. Right as
we've talked about he's he not only has four other businesses,
but that he's also you know, full time, halftime, part
time whatever in DC. I look at the Doge thing
and Elon and X more as a what does this
(08:52):
mean for the business of the company, not so much
even his time, his personal time, which is that I
think in January and February, when he's tweeting constantly, when
he's hanging out with Trump, when he's literally sort of
dictating US policy via his Twitter account or his ex account,
I think that gave X this continued influence. Right, you
(09:14):
kind of had to pay attention to it still because
it was still driving literal US policy decisions via his
X account. As Elon has the last month or two,
he has stopped tweeting as much about politics. He's obviously
saying he's going to step away from politics. And so
what I wrote last week in our newsletter was sort
of like what happens to X if Elon truly follows
(09:35):
through and steps away from politics, because he spent the
last year turning this thing into a political machine. Like
it the purpose of X for the most part was
to get Donald Trump elected and then to support his
agenda and possibly push his agenda in the ways that
Elon wants it to. And if that's not what he's
going to do anymore, like what is X, right, it's
(09:56):
not really a place for breaking news, It's not really
a place for the global conversation like it has historically
been because Elon pivoted so aggressively into politics a year ago,
and so I don't know, I'm sort of kind of
sitting around wondering, like, what does this platform become if
it's not a Donald Trump Elon Musk politics machine. I
(10:16):
don't know if either what I mean, you two have
both been on it for years as well. I'm curious
if you have thoughts on that, But like, what's the
identity of this thing now? It keeps morphine and I
think the political identity that he's created is sort of
crumbling as we're as we're standing here.
Speaker 2 (10:29):
I don't know.
Speaker 3 (10:30):
I don't really use x anymore. I lurk on it,
but like I locked my account and I don't have
it on my phone and I kind of like check
in like every once in a while, but like, I
don't use it. It is it is not the platform
that I joined over a decade ago.
Speaker 4 (10:49):
Well, I from when I'm still addicted. Although Kurt, to
your point, you know, I do think it loses some
of its vitality. We will in the second segment talk
a little bit about, you know, possible future identity for
x as A as a bank before we get there.
Speaker 2 (11:05):
I mean, there is a swirl of things, right.
Speaker 4 (11:07):
It's not just the fact that Doge hasn't cut as
much maybe as promised. It's not just the fact that
there are fires breaking out in Twitter data centers and
Twitter is going down. It is also, of course, you know,
Tesla and the fact that the sales are are still
despite Elon Musk's comments. You know, Elon Musk said last week,
(11:29):
yet you're bad for us, but it's bad for everyone.
Although as a report today essentially showing that Tesla sales
are way down, down by more than fifty percent, while
overall EV sales in the region are up twenty eight percent. Dana,
one thing I've wondered about. We've talked about the demand thing,
but if you look in that one big beautiful bill
that the Trump budget bill, it is not a great
(11:51):
bill for Tesla. And like the combination of Tesla's sales
and this kind of potential hit to the revenue in
the form of this budget build which takes away or
would take away EV tax credits, do you think that
could be pushing him away?
Speaker 2 (12:05):
I don't know.
Speaker 3 (12:05):
I mean, Elon has always sort of said that he
doesn't think there should be any subsidies whatsoever, whether it's
for evs or oil and gas. So I don't know
if that alone is enough to make him angry or
cause some kind of rift with Trump. I think that
tariffs are not good for Tesla, but like, fundamentally, like
he what he cares the most about is SpaceX and
(12:26):
he wants funding for a Mars mission, So I don't
know if he's willing to jennison one for the other.
But the any thing I pointed out about the European
sales is that like Tesla has a factory in Germany
that makes the model, why if these sales in Europe
continue to crater, there's gonna be real questions about like
do they keep this factory open or like do they
start scaling back production, Like you don't keep making cars
(12:49):
for a market that does not need them. And everyone
always sees the problems in Europe as like, oh, Elon
being so close to Trump, but it's really like it
was really Elon Musk supporting the AfD in Germany that
has caused this huge backlash in Europe. Like European consumers
are very concerned about what Elon is doing with Visa
(13:11):
v European politics.
Speaker 2 (13:12):
Trump aside, last thing, this SpaceX launch, Dana, what are
you going to be looking for here? Like he's saying
that twenty twenty six, right, He's that that's the goal
for like some kind of Mars demonstration mission.
Speaker 4 (13:26):
Do you have any sense of how far away we
are from that in terms of milestones that have to
be hit? To me from the outside, it seems like
a lot.
Speaker 2 (13:36):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (13:36):
I mean, that's a very ambitious, very aggressive timeline, and
Musk's plan is that like, not only will Starship launch
to Mars in twenty twenty six, but Optimist is going
to be on board. So he has a lot of
a lot writing on this and we'll hear from him
later today when he gives this, you know speech about Mars.
I mean, you know, he's always talked about going to Mars,
but now Starship does exist. They've had a couple of
(13:58):
launches that have haven't totally gone well, and so like
there's a lot riding on this one going better. I
think obviously he wants to show to Trump and a
NASA that like this vehicle is ready and that like
it can do all the things that it's supposed to do,
but you know, they're constantly tweaking with the heat shield,
and you know, there's all kinds of issues that they
that they still work out. And I think in the
(14:19):
world of space, you know, everyone will say space is hard,
and you learn by doing and you iterate, and like
what we might see as quote unquote failure is actually
just part of the design, iteration, engineering learning process. So
you know, SpaceX has always been very good at that.
But I mean, you know, the window to go to Mars,
it doesn't come around very often. So that's like a
(14:39):
big reason why he is pushing for this twenty twenty
six Dad.
Speaker 4 (14:48):
So in our first segment, you know, Kurt talked about
kind of like what x becomes, and I think that
is a big question.
Speaker 2 (14:56):
That's an open question. Of course.
Speaker 4 (14:58):
Last week we talked about Xai and this potential deal
that it had with Calshi, which is a predictions company.
You know, hours after we recorded that episode, Calshie actually
did a one eighty pulled the announcement on the Xai deal,
essentially saying that that x had not confirmed the announcement
(15:21):
or something like that. So it sounds like some sort
of either miscommunication or sort of a one eighty that
business is up in the air. But Kurt, the business
that I think feels actually a little bit easier to
get your arms around, if not necessarily, I don't know.
The most promising is money, right, the idea that Elon
Musk has talked about for years that he's going to
turn x Twitter into a bank.
Speaker 1 (15:44):
Yeah, and he has been talking about this. I was
thinking about this just last night as I was preparing
to chat about it. It was October of twenty twenty
two that he first, you know, took over Twitter and
was like, We're going to turn this thing into a bank.
He was telling employees that from the get go, almost
three years max. Where you know, we're summer of twenty
twenty five. Now, I think we can say after a
(16:05):
Memorial Day and we still haven't seen anything other than
sort of a some hints, some teases that something might
be coming. And the idea here, I think, to your point,
is easy enough to wrap your head around. I think
the execution is another thing. And then the adoption is actually,
in my opinion, probably the toughest hurdle for them to
(16:25):
get over. But let's talk just briefly about what this
looks like I mean, imagine opening your X account and
having a balance there right like essentially your your your
debit card, your your account, your debit account right there,
linked to your X account. Now, if I want to
send you money, Max, I could. I could shoot you money,
similar to Venmo. If I'm scrolling through my X feed
(16:46):
and I see an ad for something I want to buy,
I could click and I could buy it right there.
You know, he had talked about having a really high
interest yield on this, on the money that's in these accounts,
so you'd be incentivized to essentially use this as like
a safe account because you'd be making who knows how much,
but we'll say three, four or five percent on that money.
So that is the idea is like your X account
(17:09):
and your financial accounts are linked together, and what would
that do for you? Now, as we're now learning, it's
been almost three years they haven't launched anything. So technologically
this is clearly harder than they anticipated. I think they're
running into some regulatory issues. They're trying to get licensed
for payments in all fifty states. I believe they're in
forty one states. But you don't want to roll out
(17:32):
a product. When you know, if someone in New York,
for example, where they're not licensed, can't send money to
someone in California, like it just it doesn't really work
all that well if you don't have all fifty states.
And then the last thing is just adoption. Is the
average X user going to actually move their money from
a Chase or a Bank of America or something like
(17:52):
that and store it in X And I think that's
just an incredibly, incredibly high bar for a consumer to do.
Speaker 4 (18:00):
Dude, I don't trust X with my jokes, let alone
my you know, let alone my life savings. But that said,
there will be people, and I should just say the
reason we're talking about this, so you know, Elon Musk
as often, is kind of driving this with his with
posting on X. A Tesla owners group tweeted that X
money was launching soon. X Money being this you know,
(18:21):
financial service offered by the company formerly known as Twitter.
Elon wrote on May twenty fifth, so I believe that
was on Sunday. This will be a very limited access
beta at first. When people's savings are involved, extreme care
must be taken.
Speaker 3 (18:36):
I don't want my bank account to be in beta,
like sorry, like I just told like, I just would
never want my personal finances to be in beta mode
at an Elon Musk company like that. I mean, there's
already enough problems as it is with just like security
of data in this new world of you know, hackers
and the Internet and like online banking in general. Like
(18:59):
I don't know, I'm just I'm very I'm very like
old school with my banking and would not willfully share
my banking contacts with the social media platform, particularly one
that's like AI based and trying to use information to
train their algorithms.
Speaker 4 (19:15):
We're joking about this because of course the failwell and Twitter.
As Kurt knows well. He wrote a book about Elon's
takeover of Twitter, Battle for the Bird. This is a
company that has like has sort of for its entire history,
had technical problems even dating back to Elon. It definitely
doesn't convey like trusted secure. It's more like free wheeling.
(19:38):
Anything could happen. It's pretty much all the things you
don't associate with a bank. On the other hand, Kurt,
I mean you talked about the regulatory progress that they've made.
There was also this report that I believe you wrote
about back in January Musk essentially striking a deal with
Visa that would make Visa a payments partner X. I mean,
(20:02):
what is in place right now outside of the sort
of regulatory issue that you talked about.
Speaker 1 (20:07):
Yeah, so I believe they have licenses secured in forty
one states. So again that's just sort of bare bones.
You need that in order to operate in those states
to send money to other people or to businesses. So
they're working their way through that. The Visa thing, My
understanding of that is, you know, you would have some
type of card that is linked to your accounts SOL,
(20:28):
like a debit card for example, that you could literally
go out into the real world and walk into a
store and buy something with this card. And so in
order to do something like that, Max, you need partners
who do debit cards or credit cards, and Visa would
make sense. They're they're gonna need banking partners, right, They're
gonna need We know some of them, which of course
I can't call at the top of my head, but
(20:48):
we know some of them via their payments applications documents
that we've gotten from some of these states. We've done
Foyer requests to try and get those applications to get
a better sense of what it is that they're doing.
This will only if they are partnering with other financial
services providers, Visa being one, and then once you get
all of that stuff in place, you need to convince
(21:09):
actual people to do this, and we've talked about how
that's going to be a problem. But you know, a
Visa that's a well known name, that's a household name.
That's a good sign for them that they have partnered
with someone that people are familiar with and who know.
But I think that's sort of table stakes when it
comes to your money, right, Like You're not gonna sit
there and be like, wow, Visa, this is incredible. You're
(21:30):
gonna be like, yeah, that's what I expect. Like if
I'm going to be giving you my money, I expect
to have household names involved. And so they are, to
their credit kind of getting that. But I think that
that again is sort of the bare minimum at this point.
Speaker 3 (21:41):
What is the model for this? Is this what Weibo does,
Like is there payments on some of the apps in China?
Because I feel like Musk is very aware of what
consumer behavior is in China and there must be like
even though this might be going back to the early
PayPal days. Like this idea of making X the everything
app is that modeled on something that already exists elsewhere
(22:04):
in the world.
Speaker 1 (22:05):
I think everyone always points to we Chat in China,
this idea of you know, having entertainment, banking, social networking,
all shopping all in one location. The issue and why
I'm pretty skeptical that this is going to work, is
that several companies, including Meta and Mark Zuckerberg, have attempted
(22:25):
to do this already in the US without success. And
I think sort of the conclusion that I've come to
from having spoken with people about this over the years
is that the US market is just so fragmented already
that the idea of sort of putting it all back
together feels almost impossible. Right Like you go to Uber
when you want a ride, and you go to your
(22:46):
banking app when you want a bank, and you go
to X or Meta or TikTok or whatever when you
want a social network. And I think the consumer behavior
is just so different in the US than it was
in China, and in China it's controlled more, right, like
the government can basically control which companies, you know, get
get market share, or can sprout up and so it's
(23:07):
just not the case here. And so I'm pretty skeptical
this is gonna happen, in part because this is an
idea I've probably been writing about for like ten years
in the US specifically, and it just hasn't come to fruition.
Speaker 4 (23:19):
Facebook is way way bigger than X like, so, so
you're starting with a much smaller base of users, a
base of users that are not as addicted to it
as as people are of Facebook.
Speaker 2 (23:32):
Like, it's just it's just a much weaker position.
Speaker 4 (23:35):
In addition to like all the market challenges we talked
about as well as the political challenges, there is one
little wrinkle. I've seen a couple of reports suggesting that
when Elon Musk creates this X credit card, you will
be able to print your Twitter user.
Speaker 2 (23:48):
Name on it. Wow. Okay, I think that could change everything, Kurt,
because you know, throw.
Speaker 1 (23:53):
Out everything I've said to this point and let's let's
start from zero. No, I'm just kidding. Yeah, that sounds
like something that would happen, you know. I feel like
that's that's like the ex premium subscriber perk, right that
lures people into their eight dollars a month.
Speaker 2 (24:11):
I'm picturing you taking the team out to.
Speaker 1 (24:13):
The local you know, Buffalo wild Wings after a taping
and throwing down that visa card.
Speaker 4 (24:27):
Okay, so we just got through Memorial Day, you know,
twenty twenty five, or two to a third of the
way through a little more than that.
Speaker 2 (24:33):
But I wanted to look ahead to next year, and.
Speaker 4 (24:36):
We've been talking about all of these things that Elon
Musk is trying to do, the reasons why he wants
to sleep on the floor, sleep in the factory or whatever.
And what I'd like, Kurt and Dana, what I'd like
you both to do is sort of rank these from
most likely to succeed to least likely to succeed by
the end of twenty twenty six. So by the end
of next year, so the list goes a functioning flea
(25:00):
of robotaxis Tesla's trying to do that x money, surpassing
one of the big mobile payment apps in usage by
the end of twenty twenty six. Or third Optimist that's
Tesla's humanoid robot heading on a starship rocket to Mars
by the end of next year. Kurt Wagner, what's the
most likely of those?
Speaker 1 (25:21):
Oh man, I know you're going to pick me.
Speaker 2 (25:22):
First.
Speaker 1 (25:23):
Least likely is probably a full functioning fleet of robotaxis,
just because now I think that's actually the most likely
of those, like long term probably, but twenty twenty six,
I'm just not sold. I'll say the second least likely
(25:45):
is X payments. As we've talked about, I've already shared
why I'm pretty skeptical that that's going to take off.
And then I'm going to say the most likely is
the sending Optimists to Mars. And it's purely because of
the window that Anna mentioned earlier, how there's sort of
like limited windows that you can you can send these
ships on their way to Mars, And so I think,
(26:08):
you know, Elon will Again. I don't think any of
these things are very likely, but I guess of the three,
I would say maybe that one's most likely simply because
it has that time pressure built in of trying to
hit that window. So don't play this tape again at
the end of twenty twenty six. Let's let's burn this
one after this.
Speaker 3 (26:25):
I agree because I think also of all of the
things Elon cares the most about, Mars, like Mars has
been the animating force of his life for over two decades,
and like, you know, for whatever criticism you might have
of Elon, he's like what do they call it, like
a forcing function, Like he will bring the full force
of his personality and his ambition and he will drive
(26:48):
his team to meet that deadline because it is a
window and like Optimus is exists and is like walking
around and you know, like who knows if it's tele
operated or not. But like, I don't think there's anything
stopping them from putting an Optimist a couple of Optimist
robots on a ship and trying to send it to Mars.
Whether they get to Mars remains to be seen, but like,
(27:09):
I think that they will do everything in their power
to meet that deadline. And as we've talked about before,
President Trump mentioned it in his inauguration speech, and I
think that that is really the main thing that Elon
has always cared about.
Speaker 2 (27:22):
Okay, you guys are wrong.
Speaker 4 (27:23):
The most likely is the payment thing, because that's the
only one of the.
Speaker 2 (27:28):
Three that could conceivably happen.
Speaker 4 (27:31):
And like I don't again, like I don't know that
ex money can really take on Venmo or Zell or.
Speaker 2 (27:38):
Apple pay or Square.
Speaker 4 (27:40):
But to me, like you never know it like there
are no like technological barriers to that one. Succeeding that
one is just purely about perceptions about Elon Musk And
maybe I mean, I feel like it's a comment on
how difficult he like his position has gotten politically, that
(28:01):
that we have trouble picturing it, because I do agree
it's hard to imagine. I would say that the second
most likely is the Robotaxi fleet only because I think
like there's a lot of squishiness in that in that term,
and I could see defining it in a way where
Elon would allow himself to declare victory. I don't I
don't buy Optimist getting to Mars by twenty twenty six.
Speaker 2 (28:23):
Guys.
Speaker 4 (28:23):
I feel like it's it's gonna be tough. They got
to refuel the thing. They're like eight zillion steps there.
And like Danna does, does optimists actually work or we've
seen some videos? Like again, like, I don't know, I
don't know if I've seen enough optimists here to trust
him on another planet.
Speaker 3 (28:42):
Oh, come on, Optimist is gonna be babysitting your kid
and doing ballet and playing the piano.
Speaker 2 (28:47):
Come on?
Speaker 1 (28:48):
Well, new nickname for Max the contrarian.
Speaker 2 (28:52):
Name.
Speaker 4 (28:54):
Listen, I'm gonna sign up for X money right now,
get that credit card out, start and start buy you
guys things, and before you know it, ts.
Speaker 1 (29:03):
Up handedly push your prediction over the finish line. I
think that's a good idea.
Speaker 2 (29:08):
Kurt Dana, thanks for being here as always.
Speaker 1 (29:11):
Thank you Max.
Speaker 4 (29:19):
This episode was produced by Stacey Wong. Annam Maserakis is
our editor, Blake Maple's handles engineering, and Dave Purcell factchecks.
Our supervising producer is Magnus Henrickson. The Eloni theme is
written and performed by Taka Yasuzawa and Alex Sagiera. Brendan
Francis Newtam is our executive producer, and Sage Bauman is
ahead of Bloomberg Podcasts. A big thanks to our supporters
(29:41):
Joel Weber and Brad Stone.
Speaker 2 (29:43):
I'm Max Chafkin.
Speaker 4 (29:44):
If you have a minute, rate and review our show,
it'll help other listeners find us and we will see
you next week.
Host
David Papadopoulos
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