Behind the Bastards - Part Two: I Do Not Like Elon Musk Very Much

Episode Date: June 4, 2020

Robert is joined again by Sofiya Alexandra to continue discussing Elon Musk. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. I'm Alex French. And I'm Smedley Butler. Join us for this sordid tale of ambition, treason, and what happens when evil tycoons have too much time on their hands. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian trained astronaut? That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new

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you get your podcasts. Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, the only podcast where the host just got an email from the ATF asking him to sign some documents so that I can get a suppressor for my AR-15. So that's exciting news. Wow, that's quite a weird flex. Congratulations, dude. Thank you. I'm just really excited that I only have to wait another 12 months to get it. I'm excited to at some point get to shoot guns with you when we can be around people again. So that will be a very fun day, especially if my fans in the ATF push that paperwork along. I have a lot of ATF fans. Oh, yeah, that's awesome. Well, because I only talk about wanting the FDA to raid me. I'm not starting to fight with the ATF because I know they'll

burn down my whole comp. Oh, shit. I made a wake-up. Sorry. You wake-up. You're fully just wake-up right now. This was all so that I could do a wake-up. That was all for a wake-up. You built that entire thing up just to bring up wake-up again. I did. I did. And it's going to take two years now for me to get my fucking suppressor. I'm going to get raided by the ATF for starting a cult in the woods before I get to pick it up. And then they'll burn it down along with 70 children. Sorry, I keep wake-oing. You keep wake-oing. I think the ATF would think that you wake-oing is hilarious. They would. I bet they laugh a lot about wake-o in the ATF. I mean, it could be longer than two years. We know that they're terrible at communicating.

Yeah, I've spent literal tens of hours in the last two weeks going into like Boogaloo Facebook groups and subreddits and stuff like that. And there's so many wake-o memes. They love that fucking wake-o Netflix show, which was one of the most irresponsible TV shows I've ever seen. Electric Boogaloo? What did you say? Yeah, like the second Civil War. That's like the right-wing meme for like they want to start another Civil War. It's the Boogaloo. That's what they call it. That's how shit happens on the internet now. Oh gosh. All right. So there's like thousands of people on Facebook trying to make a Civil War happen because they want to get to use all of their fancy guns. And they also really hate the ATF

because of wake-o. And so they have a ton of wake-o memes about like shooting ATF agents. And it's fine for them, but the fucking Antifa kids who throw oranges at cops get like arrested to your guest for vandalism. It's great. The mix of how law enforcement responds to these things. Were you talking about the wake-o miniseries with Macaulay Culkin's brother? Is that the way you're talking about? Oh, I didn't know he was in it, but I think that miniseries was wildly. Which Culkin? Heron? Rory. I didn't realize there was a Culkin in there. It's an incredibly irresponsible series because while it does accurately, I think, depict how irresponsible the government was, it makes fucking David Koresh look like a cool dude when he was like,

no, he was not. But I don't know. It's fun. Like the scene when he starts, where they like show him and it makes him look like he can actually sing and is like a rock star, that scene. Yes. Yeah. Like he's a cool rock star. They even try to make the fact that he had teenage brides less fucked up. It's weird. Netflix really went to bat for David Koresh in a way that's kind of baffling. It's like that's a weird, it's an interesting enough story if he and the ATF both suck. And then they made him hot. He's not, he wasn't picked. No, he, the guy they picked, I think looks exactly like him. I will give them that. They cast it like he looks just like started his career as a model. I know. But if you look at pictures, David Koresh, like they fucking,

I think they actually kind of nailed the look. Nothing to contribute to this. I have not seen it at all. Yeah. I mean, it's not. Oh, you're not a Koresh fan. You're not fully Koreshing on Koresh. Oh man. No, I am not a Koresh. Robert, you are so fucking wrong. Okay. I'm looking at a side by side's face. One of them is fully nipples hard. And one of them is like, oh, send me, send me. When I will tell you right now, when I start my cult and get taken down by Ivy, the FDA or the ATF, it's a fucking roll of the dice, which one actually burns down our compound and all of our children. But when they take me down and then make a Netflix movie that white washes all of my many crimes, make sure Ian McShane plays me. He doesn't look like me or sound like me, but that

is my wish. And it's up to both of you to make sure that happens. No, no, no, no. It can't be him. Who do you think should play him? Like maybe give Jared Leto like some like muscle. Oh, no, no, no, no. But that's nice that you think I'm more muscular than Jared Leto. I do appreciate that, Sophia. Doesn't he have Jared Leto eyes? Oh, now that part hurts. I'm trying to think of it. I think that's the only nice thing about Jared Leto is his eyes. Are you kidding me? Robert, I think we should just go full circle and have you played by Jeremy Renner. Okay. All right. Yeah, let's do it. Fuck it. Yeah, let's have Renner in there. I'm down with that. I'm down with that, Castiel. Yeah. All right. We've figured out when my Waco

movie happens. This has been a very Waco start to the part two of our Elon Musk podcast. Yeah. Let's get back to talking about Elon. Hey, thanks for having me, by the way. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for coming on. I do want to start because I've been thinking about what you said at the end and I really don't want this to be a situation whereby people are like going after you because they think that I was trying to be fair to him. There's a lot of shit we're going to talk about today that he did bad. I honestly think the worst thing he did is his failure to learn from his- Oh my God. Taylor Kitch played David Koresh. What? Sorry, I set her aside for a while. Are we still- Come on. He's so hot that it's such bad casting. Thank you.

Look, it is the official position of this podcast that David Koresh was hot. That's insane. That's not that, Robert. You're insane. Yes, it is. That is not true. Look, we have to acknowledge David Koresh's scoped at abs. I really wish that listeners could see what Sophia is holding up right now. How dare you. She's holding up the side by side. I am seeing it. Where it says one of these things is not like the other. Look, David Koresh is hot and Elon Musk is bad and I will- That is the stance that I want all of the Elon Musk fans hate listening this to take out of this, is that I officially endorse David Koresh as hot. That's important. I officially endorse for you to continue this podcast. Hello listeners. This is Sophie. Robert is out reporting

at the current riots happening in Portland right now, but he wanted to make sure that we had this correction in part two of this episode. He incorrectly labeled author Ashley Vance as a she and he is a he and Robert also wanted me to mention that his book, Elon Musk, Tesla Space X and the Quest for a Fantastic Future is a wonderful book. You can find a link to that book under the footnotes in part one. Now back to the episode. The thing that I condemn Elon most for is, and the reason I think it's so important to understand how fucked up his childhood it was, is that when you have an experience like that, a good person should have that make them into a better person, a more empathetic person. You and I both talked, Sophia, about how we got bullied

a bunch and dealt with a bunch of shit like that. I think it made us both into people who sympathize a lot with people who are being victimized. Elon Musk did not take that out of it. He did take the thing where he clearly hates bullies, but he also just basically uses that as an excuse to say that everybody who rightfully criticizes him as a bully. He clearly didn't learn the most important lesson of his childhood, which should have been that a lot of people in the world may be forced to serve in horrific militaries or stay in countries that they can't stand to live in, and that it is like an act of evil to stop people from trying to find a better life. And instead, he was willing to shut his fucking mouth and work with an administration that was

doing his best to cut off other in need kids in a similar situation that he was in himself. He did not let that turn him into a more empathetic person, and that is something that he should be morally condemned for as well as everything else we're about to talk about. Yeah, I think that's a really good where you could have gone like there by the grace of God, go I instead of fuck these kids. I made it out. Fuck these kids. Fuck them. They weren't lucky. You know, it's not even, I would have a little bit more respect for him if he was like a hard line right winger being like, no, I think like I have very strong opinions on immigration because of a racist piece of shit. No, it's all money related. Yeah, exactly. He wanted to keep his

nice government contracts. Exactly. It's all money related. Yeah. Yep. Ashley Vance spends the book of her biography of Elon Musk outlining the entrepreneur's history of business setbacks and successes. And you can find that story in a lot of places. I'm not going to spend a huge amount of time discussing his products, the technology behind them or giving play by plays of every acquisition in his history. She writes a lot about his cool technology and it is cool. I've driven a Tesla a couple of times and they're neat. He didn't make them. Yeah. Anyway, in 1994, Musk and his brother headed to the US. They started their time with a road trip and the summer before Musk had to get started on his degree. He held a couple of internships in

Silicon Valley. The tech industry was a natural fit for Elon. He developed a reputation as an obsessive worker who was willing to put in impossible hours, a reputation that has followed him his entire career. When he was interning, he had the idea for his first business. A salesperson for the Yellow Pages walked into one of the offices where he worked and tried to sell his startup on the idea of an online listing add-on to their normal Yellow Pages listings. The pitch was poorly delivered and the guy clearly didn't know anything about the internet, but Elon saw a glimmer of promise in the idea. In 1995, he and his brother Kimball formed Global Link Information Network, which changed its name to ZipTube because Global Link Information Network

is a shit name. The idea behind ZipTube was to convince businesses to create web presence. Shocking that a guy named Kimball isn't good at naming stuff. Kimball. I think Musk is the bad name for reasons that will become clear. He actually has an early history of sucking at naming companies. The idea behind ZipTube was to convince businesses to create web presences on a searchable business directory that also had a maps component. Obviously, that's a good idea because it's the way everything works now. In 1995, it was very ahead of the curve. If you've read any story about a scrappy tech startup in the Bay, you know the story of ZipTube. Elon and his brother started alone in a dinky office with the toilets backed up,

yada yada, they had no money, the shoestring budget, all that bullshit. This is not exactly true. Like all of these stories, the scrappy underdog entrepreneurs had much more funding than they tend to emphasize. In Musk's case, ZipTube was formed with the help of $28,000 of his dad's money. Yeah. He doesn't like to talk about that. Sometimes he openly acknowledges it. I think sometimes he lies. I don't know. Yeah. Ashley Vance acknowledges this, but in a way that tries to make it seem like it wasn't a big deal, she writes, quote, they were more or less broke after getting the office-based licensing software and buying some equipment. For the first three months of ZipTube's life, Musk and his brother lived at the office. They had a small closet where they kept their

clothes and would shower at the YMCA. I'm so sorry. Oh, could they have sold any of their free-floating diamonds? I mean, sorry. Fuck him. What was it? Emeralds. I'm sorry. They're emerald mines. No, they left the emeralds behind with dad and just took $28,000 of his money. That's it. Just a small amount, $20,000. You know, like $28,000. It's not like a Trump-sized loan, but it is significant, right? I'm sure he's not lying when he says, we were on a shoestring budget, but the fact that you had a budget is because your dad was rich. That's the point. The point is not that it was easy to start a business on $28,000. It's that most of us don't get $28,000 to start a business. And do not have an emerald mine to fall back on.

Yes. Yes. Don't have dad's emerald mine money to fall back on. Yeah. So like most entrepreneurs in a similar position, Elon doesn't like to talk about the privileges that made his success possible. In this case, I suspect some of it's pride, but I think some of it's also the fact that he hates his dad and probably doesn't want to admit that his dad helped a lot. I suspect that if you were to get him to be honest about this, he would blurt out something like, I earned that money by putting up with his shit my whole childhood. But that's me editorializing on Elon's mind a little bit. Zip 2 grew rapidly. And this is probably due in part to the fact that Elon put in fundamentally lunatic hours to build his company.

One of his early employees recalled to Vance, quote, almost every day I'd come in at 730 or 8am and he'd be asleep right there on that bag. He had a beanbag. Maybe he showered on the weekends. I don't know. You get the feeling that Musk didn't shower a lot. That's why Musk, huh? That totally makes sense now. Yeah. All of these, the thing that is emphasized, I worked as a tech journalist for a while, so I've read a lot of biographies about a lot of tech guys and they all smelled terrible. And so did their little offices when they started out. They were all fucking nasty. It's not hard to shower once a day, guys. Have you ever heard the thing about how

like you get your best ideas in the shower? Yes. Just fucking get in the shower, tech man. They get their best ideas by forming like a fucking, a crown of scrotal sweat around their fucking drawstring pants. I don't know. I used to work at Google. Yeah. And some, the engineer areas would sometimes get musty. Yeah. There's a smell that engineers have. We all know it. I'm sorry, musky. Yeah. It's engineer stank. It was Musk's manic level of devotion and obsessive work ethic that endeared him to the venture capitalist whose investments helped Zip2 grow into a viable business. They saw him as, in the words of one employee, willing to stake his existence on building

this business. He told one investor, my mentality is that of a samurai. I would rather commit seppuku than fail. Yep. I would die for global link incorporated. Yeah. I would die for the yellow pages. But Zip2's success was also heavily dependent on the goodwill of friends that Musk and his brother made during their time in Canada. Their buddy, Greg Corey, was critical, giving them $6,000 when they left for California to start their company. He became a co-founder and his past real estate and business experience were crucial. Ashley Vance writes, quote, the Canadian had a knack for calming Musk and ended up being something of a mentor.

Really smart people sometimes don't understand that not everyone can keep up with them or go as fast, said Derek Proudian, a venture capitalist who becomes Zip2's chief executive officer. Greg is one of the few people that Elon would listen to and had a way of putting things in context for him. Corey also used to referee fistfights between Elon and Kimball in the middle of the office. Wow. That's exactly the kind of shit I expect from Kimball's and Bits, totally. Yeah. And it's the thing that is true also about Facebook where it's like, yeah, it should be against the law for teenagers to start businesses. It's actually bad for a lot of reasons in part because they never grow out of being teenagers in their heads. Yes,

he had office fistfights with his brother. And Kimball's insistent that he was the only person Elon ever fought physically, at least one SpaceX employee has accused Elon of being physically aggressive with him. But that came years later. So we'll talk about that maybe a little bit later. Kimball claims that neither he nor his brother, quote, have the ability to reconcile a vision other than our own, which I think is totally accurate. I don't think Kimball's lying at all about that. The fights ended after Elon ripped some of the skin off of his fist, I think because he missed a punch and hit something else and he had to get a tetanus shot. Corey told them both that they had to stop fighting in the office after that, which you shouldn't have to tell people,

but whatever. Boys, boys, keep it down in the office of the business you're trying to start. Of the business you're courting investments for. Fewer fistfights on the floor when the investors are in the room. Yeah. By 1996, the company was off the ground and running. Elon, a self-taught coder, was largely replaced by a team of new professional coders who rewrote almost every line of code that Elon had put in. There was a good reason for this. Elon's code was functional but tended to be idiosyncratic, difficult to update and expand over time, difficult for other people to work on. Handing over control for this was difficult for him. He had particular trouble with the fact

that professional coders wanted to work normal human hours. He tried to get them to go without sleeping for days at a time, but they were unwilling to do this for some reason. He tried to get them to stop breathing and ingesting food. Aren't you guys willing? But they were unwilling for some crazy reason. Aren't you guys willing to die for my vision? No, it's the yellow pages, but internet, Elon, calm the fuck down. You're not saving lives, buddy. People are not. That is an important point you make, Sophia. One of the things that I think that I have learned reading all this is that, Elon makes a big point now about how all of his businesses, his goal is saving the world. SpaceX is to save the human race by getting us off the

planet. Tesla is to save the human race by putting it into fossil fuel use. He talks about that enough and a lot of reviewers act as if he just believes it. I'm sure he has convinced himself that he believes that. You get the feeling, though, from his fucking yellow pages business. He's always needed to be able to claim that his businesses are that important so that he can justify the fact that he is an unreasonable workaholic that fucks over people in them. Like, he had to find a business that he could claim was critical to the future of the human race so that he could act like the asshole he's always acted like in business. That's, I think, core to him. Oh, totally. You're right on about that. And it also reminds me of a lot of comedians who are

like, no, we're artists. I mean, as a comedian, whenever people are like, hey, you know what, we're artists, okay? And sometimes we have to do stuff for our art. And it's fine if we're dicks. Like, it's going to make for great jokes and stories later. It's like, you can't do that at other people's expense, man. I have, I have endangered myself and the people around me for my career. I fucked up and been very unreasonable and unfair in relationships for the sake of my career. There's a lot of men and particularly men who wind up succeeding under capitalism who have that aspect to their personality. And it's not a good thing. It's bad. It's bad that I do it. It's bad that Elon does it. It's a bad thing to do. It's not just men. A lot of women have it too.

But I guess men get away with it, I think more because it's expected. And I think it's sometimes as admired. They're like, well, that's what you have to do. If you want to become a Steve Jobs, you have to fucking be a dick. Like that's what it is. Yeah. Yeah. And you get a lot of positive reinforcement as a man for being an unreasonable workaholic. Like for years before it started to be a problem in like my romantic life and my personal life, I got praised a ton for like what a hard worker I was. And it was like, I wasn't actually being praised for working hard. I was being praised for working unreasonably. But it... My husband is the same way. Yeah. It's rewarded. You can make a lot of money doing that.

People are like, avatar is the greatest movie ever, even though you leave for seven years to fucking figure it out, you know, and don't see your family and shit. Yeah. You know, Sophia, you don't talk about your husband, James Cameron often. I'm so mad at him. God damn it. And he's right in the background as we talk, working on another fucking submarine. Like enough with the submarines, James. God damn it. Thank God I have the hurt locker. Yeah. Thank God. So, yeah. Yeah. The business did well. Zip2 did really well. And success made Elon into a more confident person, giving him a sense of control that he'd lacked in his early life. He slowly learned

to tone some of the less productive aspects of his personality down. His wife, Justine, later claimed, quote, Elon is not someone who would say, I feel you. I see your point of view because he doesn't have that I feel you dimension where things that seemed obvious to other people that weren't that obvious to him. He had to learn that a 20-something year old really shouldn't shoot down the plans of older senior people and point out everything wrong with them. He learned to modify his behavior in certain ways. And this is true objectively, because he got good at dealing with money people. But he only learned how to communicate more carefully with people he needed things from. Doris Downs, Zip2's former creative director, later recalled, I remember being in

a meeting once brainstorming about a new product, a new car site. Someone complained about a technical change that we wanted being impossible. Elon turned and said, I don't really give a damn what you think and walked out of the meeting. For Elon, the word no does not exist. And he expects that attitude from everyone around him. This is again, in Vance's book two, always spun as a positive thing. And the thing that Vance will point out is that employees who both like and hate, Elon will point out is that his trigger is being told something can't be done. You always have to present him with an alternate option of what can be done instead. And again, that's often seen as like, no, this is like a good management practice that's part of his success that like he

makes his people always present him with another option. But it really is rooted in the fact that he can't hear no, he can't be told no, he's not learned that, which is good. Sophia. Yeah, I mean, that's how he wore his fucking first wife down. So, yep, clearly, just a great learning of lessons for him, no, ever. And it's interesting that he did learn how to modify kind of the noxious aspects of his behavior around people he needed money from. That is really telling. And he doesn't want to with his employees. So he feels fine taking like acting that way around them. Anyway, that's good behavior. Zip to continue to grow. And it did consistently lose money. But obviously, in Silicon Valley, that doesn't matter. And the VC money kept trickling

in enough to keep it alive until the company was purchased by Compaq in February of 1999, for $307 million in cash. Elon walked away with 22 million bucks himself. Yeah. He got about 22 million out of that. And he left the company immediately, because he didn't actually really care about this project. He just wanted to get rich off of it. And yeah, when he talks about this in the present day, his chief lingering frustrations with his time seem to be number one that the coders he worked with weren't as good as him. He always talks about like how he had to correct their fuckups. And like everyone else always talks about the fact that his code wouldn't have worked in a real product and like needed to be fixed by

people who knew how to actually code in a productive way. Yeah. And he also is really angry that he never got to be CEO, because everyone agreed that he was bad at dealing with people and wouldn't let him be CEO. So that's what he was angry with walking out of his first business. So he spent a million dollars immediately on a McLaren, which is some sort of fancy rich person car that there's not many of them. So rich guys love it because there's only like 60. Oh, I'm just like you. I'm a rare precious, precious, you know, muscle. That's me. Yeah. Yeah. By a car that's just like me, really precious and rare and special and expensive and just like really unique. And he needed to be unique even more, because like not only did he

need to get the car that's like the fancy car that almost no one gets to have, but he also couldn't be like a normal rich guy and like have it be like his fancy special car that he drives when he wants to be fancy. Like he was famous for treating it like shit and like letting it get dirty and like fucking it up hitting curves, curves. And he bragged about it. It's important to people that people that he knew that he have this unique car and that he treated it like shit. Like he needed other folks to know that about him. I would literally throw this money in a garbage disposal bra. I don't care. Okay. I just fucking throw it. I don't care. Disposal. I'm cool. When he had the car delivered, he had CNN show up at his house to film the delivery. The interview

caught Elon at an interesting point in his life when he was clearly elated by his newfound wealth, wildly cocky and far too young to know how off-putting all of this is. Ashley Vance writes, quote, the whole time he looked like a caricature of an engineer who had made it big, Musk's hair had started thinning and he had a closely cropped cut that accentuated his boyish face. He wore an all too big brown sport coat and checked his cell phone from his lavish car sitting next to his gorgeous girlfriend, Justine. Justine moved to California, by the way. And he seemed spellbound by his life. Musk rolled out one laughable rich guy line after another, talking first about the zip two deal, receiving cash as cash. I mean, those are just a large

number of Ben Franklans and next about the awesomeness of his life. There it is, gentlemen, the fastest car in the world. And then about his prodigious ambition, I could go and buy one of the islands in the Bahamas and turn it into my personal fiefdom, but I am much more interested in trying to build and create a new company. So he's just like a real asshole about this. And patting himself on the back during it. He's like, I could have done another rich guy thing, but I'm doing this rich guy thing that I think is better. Yeah. That's what happens when you give a rich kid in his early 20s, $22 million of his own. I'm not like other rich guys. I'm making a space company or whatever.

I'm going to make it. Well, not yet. First, he wants to make an internet-based bank. So he rolls most of his money that he gets from the sale into x.com, which is his idea for an internet-based bank. And what's unusual about this is that most tech millionaires, like who started new businesses after their first hit, got other people to put in the money. And this is something that is rare about Musk, is that he put most of his own fortune into x.com. And this was really uncommon. And the reason why is because he wanted control. He wanted to be CEO this time around. And so putting in the majority of the funding gave him control and meant other people could have less of a say over his vision and couldn't say no to him. Now, from the beginning,

there were conflicts at x.com based on Elon's behavior. One of his co-founders was a guy named Fricker, who'd moved from Canada to help start the business and was frustrated by Elon's attitude. Fricker wanted to create a straightforward- I don't even know where. I'm so sorry. It's really boring here. Not during this podcast, just in my life. That was so funny. So Fricker wanted to create a straightforward online bank. Like, he didn't see why it needed to be a big deal. He was like, yeah, the internet's the thing now. People are going to need a bank. This seems like a thing we should do and make money. Whereas Elon was like, no, we're going to completely change the banking system. And the way that banking is done will

never be the same. And it had to be like this big fucking deal for him. Whereas this guy was like, yeah, we can just make like a bank app thing online. And that'll be a thing people want. Elon, it had to be a bigger deal for Elon. And Fricker accused Musk of overhyping their product and eventually attempted a coup against Musk. So five months after x.com was founded, Fricker and most of the best engineers in the company all left to form their own business. It says a lot about Musk's personality that very few of the people at the company sided with him in this personal dispute. You get the feeling they all found him very frustrating. But Musk kept going and he was able to hide x.com's internal problems from Mike Moritz

of Sequoia Capital, who put in a major investment that allowed Elon to hire more engineers to continue his vision. One former employee later recalled, you look back and it was total insanity. We had what amounted to a Hollywood movie set of a website. It barely got past the venture capitalists. The x.com office was tiny and cramped and by all accounts, disgusting. One employee recalled, it was this mass of adolescent men that worked so hard. It's stunk so badly in there, I can still smell it. Left over pizza, body odor and sweat. He's so lucky that he isn't Jewish. If he had like just come out and been like, I'm going to change the banking industry. People would have just said all kinds of

the anti-Semitic shit for him, to him for the rest of his fucking life, it would have followed him around. Yes, this was the one time anti-Semitism might have helped us all out, but alas. If only. Oh man. Yeah. In a company filled with broken sold men who worked way too hard on a damn banking app, must worked the way too hardest, putting in 23 hours a day to everyone else's 20. That's a bit of an exaggeration, but it's how he describes it and probably not super far off from the truth, just based on what we know of him. By Thanksgiving of 1999, x.com was live and it worked. It was not the only game in online banking town, however. Max Levchin and Peter Thiel were working at a competing product at exactly the same time. They called it Confinity, which is a shit name,

but Thiel and company also picked an objectively good name for the service. They called it PayPal, which is a way better name than Confinity or than x.com, which sounds like a porn site. Well, it's actually what I heard. What I heard is that x.com got bought out by exhibit and became x to the z.com. Oh, I don't get the joke. I understand there's a joke. I just don't get it. It's fine. You don't need to know who exhibit is. I know enough for the both of us. That was so funny. Thank you. They competed for a while and were basically running both companies out of business by fighting with money. In March of 2000, they decided to merge. Personality conflicts cropped up almost

immediately. Peter Thiel is honestly more deserving of Behind the Bastards than Elon Musk. He'll get one at some point because he is a real monster, but he comes off as the more reasonable person in the fight between them. The big issue is that Peter Thiel and everyone else at the company thought PayPal was a better name for their service and Elon Musk was in love with x.com because he'd come up with it and he was not willing to compromise and he was objectively wrong. But it's also such a little kid named to like. He's like x.com and if that's taken, what about 42069.com and if that's taken, titty. It's silly. There's a lot that's been written about the PayPal mafia, which is what all these guys came to be known as in this period. And I'm

just not going to talk much about it because I don't find it interesting and fuck it. But yeah, I should just let you know that that's a term you hear a lot and I don't care about it. I'm not going to go into much detail about PayPal because it's boring. What's most important is that there was a split between Musk and Thiel and Thiel actually resigned from the company two months after the merger. Peter Thiel is a huge piece of shit, but it really seems like Musk was more of a problem here. Given this was the second time in less than a year that a co-founder of the company that he worked at had quit after an argument with Elon. Yeah, so that's interesting. x.com had other issues. The company picked up new users at a huge rate, but its infrastructure

was not able to handle the load. So the site collapsed regularly. Fraud was rampant and the business lost tons of money as a result of stupid shit. And I'm going to quote from Ashley Vance's book now. As x.com became popular and its transaction volume exploded, all of its problems worsened. There was more fraud. There were more fees from banks and credit card companies. There was more competition from startups. x.com lacked a cohesive business model to offset the losses and turn a profit from the money it managed. Reloff Baltha, the startup's chief financial officer and now a prominent venture capitalist at Sequoia, did not think Musk provided the board with a true picture of x.com's issues. A growing number of other people at the company questioned Musk's decision

making in the face of all the crises. What followed was one of the nastiest coups in Silicon Valley's long illustrious history of nasty coups. A small group of x.com employees gathered one night at Fannie and Alexander, a now defunct bar in Palo Alto, and brainstormed about how to push out Musk. They decided to sell the board on the idea of Teal returning as CEO. Instead of confronting Musk directly with the plan, the conspirators decided to take action behind Musk's back. So the coup plotters acted right as Elon Musk left for his honeymoon with Justine. They'd actually married months earlier but hadn't been able to celebrate it because Elon Musk is a workaholic. So he finds out that they are ousting him as CEO right after they land in Sydney, Australia.

And he immediately leaves the honeymoon to go try to win his company back because that is where Elon's priorities lie. That's what she said when that happened. She's so excited. Yeah. He loves me. Yeah. So Elon and Justine land in like Australia. Yeah. And he just like books a trip back right away. He didn't get his way though. Teal took over x.com was rebranded as PayPal. And according to the folks who worked there, Elon did take this eventually well. He didn't blow the company up or anything, although he probably could have tried with new better management and a much better name PayPal took off. In July of 2002, eBay offered $1.5 billion for the company. The board accepted the deal and Musk got $250 million. This shook out to about $180 million after taxes. Question.

So Justine stayed and enjoy Australia by herself and have a good old time was that mentioned because that's what I'm wondering. Yeah. I think so. I think so. She seems like a neat lady. Tell us everything. Yeah. I hope so. She writes fantasy novels, which Elon wasn't initially very supportive of and then made fun of her for around his friends. Because that's the kind of guy he is. What a shitty piece of shit. Yeah. If my husband made part of my career behind my back, he would be dead. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Don't don't shit talk your spouse's career unless your spouse is Elon Musk, then absolutely do shit talk your spouse's career. Grimes. Grimes, please. Yeah. Start a fucking book club just so people can come over and rag

on your husband with you. Yeah. So like, Hey, Elon, you've seen any space lately? I don't know how to. I don't have a good joke yet. No, it's good. Give me a minute. Yeah. Thank you. So. He's gonna really, he's gonna eat it. And while you take that minute, that'll teach him. It's time for something else, Robert, while you take that. Hey, Hey, Rocket Man, why don't you burn out your fuse alone? Because you're incapable of intimacy. There we go. Bam. That was weird. But anyways, you know what's not incapable of intimacy? These products and services. What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, Hey, let's start a coup. Back in the 1930s, a marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the US and fascism.

I'm Ben Bullock and I'm Alex French. In our newest show, we take a darkly comedic and occasionally ridiculous deep dive into a story that has been buried for nearly a century. We've tracked down exclusive historical records. We've interviewed the world's foremost experts. We're also bringing you cinematic, historical recreations of moments left out of your history books. I'm Smedley Butler and I got a lot to say. For one, my personal history is raw, inspiring, and mind blowing. And for another, do we get the mattresses after we do the ads or do we just have to do the ads? From iHeart Podcast and School of Humans, this is Let's Start a Coup. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows.

I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the

iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI.

How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back. We're back from those incredibly horny products talking about the equally probably horny Elon Musk, but horny for business. Horny to save the world. That's Elon Musk in this period. So as everyone I'm sure knows, Elon takes all his money he makes from eBay and he throws it into Tesla, SpaceX, and his brother's business, SolarCity. Ashley Vance's book gives a good blow by blow account of how this all went down. If you're interested. SolarCity next door to CircuitCity. Yes. PartyCity. Around the corner from PartyCity. Yes. Around the corner from both.

It's in the city block of Lincoln City. I don't know. Fuck it. Tesla started out as some other dude's electric car company. So Elon Musk didn't start Tesla, which should be obvious because it has a good name. And as we've learned, Elon Musk cannot name a business well. But Musk liked the idea behind Tesla and he pumped in a bunch of funding to become part of the business. He also introduced the founders to a genius battery building engineer whose research Musk had helped to fund, so he does get some credit. At around the same time, Musk also started SpaceX. The company grew out of conversations and research that Musk had started to fund between a bunch of space nerds. In essence, Elon had money and he used a bunch of it to gather a group of smart astro nerds

together and get them talking. The rough goal at first was to try and send mice to Mars and then send them back to Earth alive, which is a cool idea. The scientists he was talking to thought that they could do this for like 20 million bucks. The plan gradually evolved into the idea of building a robot greenhouse and launching it via rocket to Mars. The greenhouse would mix Martian soil with Earth soil and squirt out tiny bits of oxygen into the Martian atmosphere, would send video feedback to Earth so people could see plants growing on Mars, which is a cool idea. That would be a neat thing to see plants growing on Mars. I would love to watch that. That's the most I've ever been interested so far in what he's been inventing. I mean, PayPal? It's a fine, I guess. No,

fuck it. It's a cool ass idea. Tell me more about this fucking space garden. That sounds time as hell. Fuck yeah. You bring me a space tomato from Mars? Fuck yeah, space tomato from Mars. You could honestly, I would kickstarter that. Yeah. And when you tell stories like that, you can see why space nerds fell in love with Elon Musk at this period. That's a fucking cool thing to want to do. And it's a cool thing if you have tens of millions of dollars to put money into. Since Elon had a lot of money to spare, like obviously, he could actually make this happen. He flew to Russia with a rocket scientist he knew to see if the Russian government would sell him a rocket. And they were totally down to sell him a rocket, but they wanted way too much

money. So yeah, he decided to start SpaceX in order to make space travel cheaper and get mankind to Mars. And gradually the goal switched from space garden to make it cheaper to get satellites into the air and provide shit to the ISS, which is like not a not cool thing to do, but it's not as cool as space garden. I think we can all agree on that. No, and I can't eat that. That's no space tomato. You cannot. I mean, they do grow things in the ISS. So you can say he's contributing to space tomatoes, but he's not contributing to Mars tomatoes right now. Yeah, for real. Where the fuck is my Mars basal? That's why I'm waiting for. Yeah, fuck. Where's our Mars basal, Elon? You fucking asshole. Oh my god. Do you think they

could make way bigger vegetables on Mars because of the weight thing? They could make carefully from what I understand. As big as my whole body. Holy shit. You can make like giant. You could make a watermelon that reaches from Mars to the earth and then we could eat our way to Mars inside of a watermelon that protects us from space. Dude, finally a dream I can get behind. Yes. Giant space watermelon. Giant space elevator made out of a watermelon. Hell yeah. So Musk has been pretty adamant from the beginning that his goal with SpaceX was to make space travel cheaper and get mankind to Mars. That's always like the dream. Like everything, like he always emphasizes like the goal is to get human beings to Mars so that we can become like an interplanetary

society and not get wiped out by a fucking rock or whatever. And that's like the pitch that he's gotten very good at giving. And both of Elon's big two companies that he founded with his eBay money have dreams like this. From the beginning, even before, Elon Tesla's goal was to make sweet luxury electric cars and use that money and the lessons from it to drive down the cost of building an electric car that could dominate the US auto market. Now, there is a big debate to be had as to whether or not either SpaceX or Tesla have ever had a chance of contributing to the grand goal set for them. They certainly have not achieved them. And we'll discuss that a little later. But the fact that both of the companies were started with species life and death as the stakes

had some benefits for Elon. For one thing, they allowed him to inspire and motivate his workplace with things beyond money. So you can have your workers work themselves into an early grave if they think they're saving the world. Whereas it's hard to do that if they think they're making the yellow pages. That's one benefit to a guy like Elon. The other benefit is that he didn't really want to make either of these companies public, especially not early, because that means you lose control. If you have a public company, you have less control than a private company. And Elon is a big control guy. So again, focusing on saving the human race as the goal for both companies allowed him to justify keeping control, which meant less money for his workers meant

they didn't get to cash out their stock options, but also meant that he had the control he needed to see these dreams through and it makes it easier to sell people on that. From the beginning, both companies were based entirely off of the work and genius inventions of other people. Tesla's founder, a guy named Eberhard was a brilliant and is he still alive, a brilliant engineer. SpaceX relied on a huge crop of genius rocket engineers. Musk did make his contributions and he is a talented engineer. And on the engineering side, he did some meaningful things, but they were also a mixed bag. For example, he insisted the Tesla Roadster have a carbon fiber body, which necessitated a specific sort of paint. The paint happens

to be very toxic, which has led to Tesla being fined tens of thousands of dollars by the state of California for polluting the airward land with toxic waste. So that's good. Carbon fiber is cool. Can't make an omelet without ruining all of the chicken's abilities to make eggs. That is a very true statement, Sophia. Musk is a hands-on boss and it's clearly important to him that he be seen as one of, if not the leading minds behind both of his big business's signature products. In 2005, Tesla got its first New York Times coverage. It was very positive about company founder Eberhard and the other genius engineers, but it completely ignored Elon. One of Tesla's early employees later said, we tried to emphasize him and told the reporter about him over and

over again, but they weren't interested in the board of the company. Elon was furious. He was livid. But nobody puts Elon in the corner, okay? Nobody. Not ever. The early buzz around Tesla was very positive and there were huge problems with the car behind the scenes though, which you'd expect because it's like a hard thing to do. The product was delayed repeatedly and it had issues that kept cropping up with the transmission and the body and the cost ballooned, yadda yadda. It became very clear eventually that Tesla's early engineers had wildly underestimated what their car would cost to make and they had sold hundreds of pre-ordered cars at a price way less than what the car would actually cost to make. I think they were selling them for like 90,000

and they found out it was going to cost like 170 grand per vehicle. Musk had been the guy largely like delivering the big speeches that had sold a lot of these cars and hyping them up, but he hadn't been the guy that was responsible for fucking up the cost calculation. That was Eberhard and he does seem to have genuinely really fucked up at estimating what these cars would cost to make and Musk used this fuck up as an opportunity to push the company founder out as CEO. And so Elon finally got to be CEO. There's certainly a case to be made that he was, this was the right thing to do. Many early Tesla people will say that Eberhard did fuck up badly and he needed to be ousted at that point. And you could say he needed to be ousted as badly as Elon needed to be ousted

in order for PayPal to be a success. But the whole endeavor led to tremendous bad blood between Eberhard and Musk and the two men would snipe at each other for many years after that point. Now, this is another thing I've seen folks online come after Musk for and I don't, I don't like, like the fact that he stole the company from this guy. I don't know, it's debatable as to whether or not he did the right thing. He probably did the right thing for making Tesla into a profitable company. What's not debatable is how fucked up it is that Elon Musk gets credit for building all of these wonderful devices that he did not build. A January 2024 gen article got the title how Elon Musk built a Tesla factory in China in less than a year. Obviously he didn't, he's never

built a factory in his life. In September of 2019, Quartz published an article titled, Elon Musk is designing his rocket as fast as he can or undesigning. It was making a point about how he thinks, but like it still gives the credit to him for like making this rocket. Musk gets a lot of credit in general for the wonders that his companies have produced. In a 2017 Rolling Stone article, Neil Strauss opened by noting that Musk has not yet achieved either of the incredibly lofty goals he set for Tesla or SpaceX, but quote, what he has done is something that very few living people can claim painstakingly bulldozed with no experience whatsoever into two fields with ridiculously high barriers to entry, car manufacturing and rocketry and created the best products in

those industries and measured by just about any meaningful metric you can think of. In the process he's managed to sell the world and his ability to achieve objective so lofty that from the mouth of anyone else, they'd be called fantasies. And that's frustrating to me because he did jump in without any experience to do very difficult industries, but he didn't create those fucking products. And yeah, it's frustrating. It's frustrating that the writers of Star Trek Discovery saw fit to give Elon Musk credit as a brilliant inventor. They listed him next to the inventor of the warp drive, Zephyrm Cochrane, as a genius scientific mind, which is bullshit. Zephyrm Cochrane lived through World War three and made a fucking, I mean, he's a fake guy, but whatever, it's bullshit

to put Elon Musk at that level because he's not a genius fucking inventor. It is fair, I think, based on what I've read to say that he's probably contributes more to the development of his products than most CEOs do, but he is also not just sitting there making them as a general rule. Ashley Vance's book goes into tremendous detail about the incredible sacrifices that SpaceX rocket engineers made to build the company's first successful rocket. They did it in this island off of the coast of Hawaii and lived on this primitive, humid base for years that didn't have things that people normally need to have to be comfortable. They didn't see their family for months or even years at a time. They sacrificed their health and social lives because they believed

in the dream of human spaceflight. We're back. Listeners will hear this as seamless, but we just had an interruption for a mystery, and none of you will ever know. We're not going to tell you. I'm not going to tell you. Fuckers. Fuck you for liking my work. I said suckers, but you really went hard and turned it into fuckers. Yeah, the key to keeping an audience is to be like a little bit abusive to them, like negging. You neg the audience. I think they like it when you do that because they feel like, oh, he knows we can take it. We're tough. And then they send you more knives. It's weird. You guys have a beautiful love of it. They do. I abuse them and they send me knives, and that is the healthiest relationship in my life. Hey, if anybody wants

to send Robert a knife for me, I would take it. Just FYI. Yeah, since Sophie and I, well, wait, I was not considered in this factor, but okay. Sophie, do you want a knife? No, no, no, that I'm not. I've given you so many knives. Relationships that I was in a part of that and most functional. Produce all your podcasts. Yeah, I know. I know. See, that's because I habitually torpedo my relationships. But not ours. That's how it works. We're great. You know, the problem, the real problem with this line of jokes, Sophia, is that if you start getting mailed a bunch of knives, you're not going to know if it's because Elon Musk fans want you dead or because they really enjoyed your performance. Shit, okay, okay, let me amend my request. You can send a knife for

Robert for me if it includes, oh, I see that's badass. I'd love that. Just so I know it's not aggressive, you can like draw a happy face on it if you want or just include a little note with a happy face. So I know it's like a non-threatening gift. Send her knives and smiley faces, which is the totally non-threatening gift is knives and pictures of smiling faces. Everyone, no one's creeped out by that at all. Let's move on. Hey, I know what I like. Okay, Robert. Yeah. So the thing I want to emphasize is like, again, Musk gets all this credit for like, he's a rocket engineer. He made these incredible space things. And it's like, I think there's a lot that actually is objectively incredible about SpaceX's rockets, including the fact that

they like are capable of kind of piloting themselves back to the ground. A lot of cool stuff has been done by engineers at SpaceX who are brilliant rocket designers and who sacrificed an enormous amount. Again, these guys had to live for years on like an island base with like very little in the way of comforts, like ignoring their families because there were people who believed in this dream of getting to Mars and like sacrificed huge chunks of their youth to make these rockets work. It was an incredibly laborious nightmarish process in some ways. And they did it. And Musk was sitting in California watching test launches on closed circuit video and hyping up the company, which is not to say that like as a CEO, he's not hanging probably make the case that he's one

of the more valuable CEOs out there, which I also think he's still very overvalued. But anyway, it's frustrating to me that he gets so much credit and all these fucking engineers that guy is actually doing the cool work, but whatever. Yeah, Musk gets the thing that's frustrating to me most is that Musk gets the credit for the successes of his workers while being able to blame them for his or for the failures of the company. One example of this came in March 24, 2006, SpaceX had an important launch of its Falcon one rocket. The rocket wound up like fucking up and blowing up and shit. So it didn't work out. And this was it made them push like the date because they had like contracts and stuff to put stuff into space and they couldn't get

their rocket to actually work. Because Elon Musk used to build those rockets when he was a kid with explosives and was like, I'm lucky I kept my fingers. Yeah, you're going to put that guy in charge of your rocket. Yeah, he wasn't really like it was engineers and stuff who were like, it's it's hard to do. It's hard to do. It's literally rocket science, Robert. I am aware. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Well, and like, you would think a good boss would be like, no, it's fucking hard. Like it's nobody's fault. This is going to take some time to get right. And like, it didn't work this time, but we're going to get it right. And that's kind of what Elon Musk like put out to the world. But he also needed a scapegoat to blame for the investors. And so he picked

one of his hardworking engineers who had been sacrificing his youth out on an island in a very unfair way. And I'm going to quote from Ashley Vance now. Musk and other SpaceX executives blamed the crash on an unnamed technician. They said this technician had done some work on the rocket one day before the launch and failed to properly tighten the fitting on a fuel pipe, which caused the fitting to crack. The fitting in question was something basic and aluminum B nut that's often used to connect a pair of tubes. The technician was Holman, who was like one of the guys living out there. In the aftermath of the rocket crash, Holman flew to Los Angeles to confront Musk directly. He'd spent years working day and night on the Falcon one and felt

enraged that Musk had called out him and his team in public. Holman knew that he'd fastened the B nut correctly and that observers from NASA had been looking over his shoulder to check the work. When Holman charged into SpaceX's headquarters with a head full of fury, Mary Beth Brown, Musk's secretary tried to calm him and stop him from seeing Musk. Holman kept going anyway, and the two of them proceeded to have a shouting match at Musk's cubicle. Now, later investigation proved that Holman had done nothing wrong. The culprit was the aluminum body of the rocket. Another board member later admitted that Holman, quote, kind of got blamed so that they could get out an answer to the investors as to why the launch had not worked. And that's

fucking shitty. And that's what one thing that pisses me off about Elon Musk, because he gets a lot of credit when the rockets work and he finds a hardworking person to blame when they don't. That's bullshit. It's like, yeah, literally the opposite of good leadership. When you're a leader, you take credit for both. It's the responsibility of being the head of something. You take credit for the good and the bad and you shield your people who work for you. I would go so far as to say that a great leader takes credit for the bad and gives credit to his subordinates for the good stuff. That's a really good leader that doesn't exist in the tech world. So I was not even trying to go that high. I was like, just be a good, a decent boss and be like, yeah, the fuckup is also

on me. If you're going to take credit for the good shit. And when you are really a great leader, your subordinates will make sure that you get a lot of credit for the good stuff that happens. You don't do that yourself because that's being a dick. But anyway, whatever, fuck it. So Mary Beth Brown, let's talk about Mary Beth Brown. But he's not going to stop being a dick, right? Because his social skills are just not very good, as we've known, like the whole time. Speaking of that, let's talk about his relationship with Mary Beth Brown. So Mary Beth Brown was Musk's assistant at both SpaceX and Tesla from the beginning of both companies. And basically, everybody who spent any time around either company in this period will agree that she was

absolutely critical to both success. Ashley Vance describes her as Musk's pepper pots, because there's a lot of fucking Iron Man Tony Stark comparisons that made the Musk. And for years, she was the gateway to Elon Musk and his mediator. Because again, like you were just bringing up, he has no social skills. So she would keep people away from him when he was in a bad mood and unable to productively engage. And she would like tell people when it was a good line to talk to him because she was under, she was like the Musk whisperer. She brought him his meal. She scheduled his time with his children. She picked out his clothes. She was his fucking mom. That was her job, right? That is so sad. I always felt so sad for pepper and those fucking movies.

Yeah, it's a bummer. And it's a bummer. Yeah. I mean, at least he didn't have a weird relationship with her, I guess. But it's weird anyway, that that's a thing. But also, he was like a fucking manchild, as all of these tech guys are. So Vance credits Marybeth Brown for helping to set up SpaceX's early culture and asking as a balm whenever Musk would ruffle feathers and hurt anyone, like a key employee's feelings. She worked 20-hour days when Elon worked 20-hour days. She traveled with him because he spends like two days a week in LA, two days a week in San Francisco at his other company. He traveled around all the time. So this was like a fucking nightmare job that she must have been obviously dead. She bought into the beliefs of the company.

And it seems to be widely agreed that she was a very important part of both companies, especially as they started off. She played a huge role in the fact that both were a success. And Elon Musk fired her in 2014. The story goes that she finally worked up the courage to ask Musk to be paid a salary in line with what the top executives at SpaceX were paid. Since she was one of the longest serving employees and a key part of the operation and was forced to like live Elon's unreasonable schedule, she thought this was fair. Musk told her to go take a vacation, and he would do her job himself and decide if he really needed her. When she came back, he told her that she was unnecessary and fired her without ceremony. So that's cool.

I remember reading about that and being like, that is the most insulting way to fire someone that's given so much of their time and life to you. Huge amounts. To just make sure that they know that you think they're worthless before you let them go. That is so shitty for no reason. Yeah, to not just say like, well, I'm not going to do this and I don't need you anymore, but like, but first I'm going to devalue the decade that you sacrificed. That's what I'm saying. That's so wild. That's like just the true example of someone being, yeah, of someone being so self-absorbed that it is truly abusive to other people because they do not consider the other person's like feelings or their livelihood or anything.

Yup. Cool to be a billionaire and makes you superhuman. It does. Very human. Okay, so Lex Luthor morals. Yeah. I mean, you know what? At least Lex Luthor has an understandable life goal. He wants to murder Superman and don't we all? Yeah, he kind of sucks. I mean, for me, Superman is the FDA, but I get it. Like, yeah. Well, you all have an emesis, Robert.

It's the FDA for everyone. Now, yeah, sorry. What he did with Mary Beth Brown follows a pattern for Elon Musk. He hates being told no, he's being told anything he doesn't want to hear. And every former employee you can find is very consistent about the fact that telling him you can't do something is the worst career if you can make. Musk is famous for reacting to this by telling people, okay, then I'll do your job and I'll be the CEO of two companies. And then he fires them and does their job. And in the stories that get told, he always does the job well and, you know, the person goes away. And it is true that Musk is very smart. He might even, you might even say he's brilliant at some things. It's also true that he's contributed to both of his companies.

He has had a particular impact on the development of Tesla's vehicles. From what I can tell, he seems to have the same kind of gift that Steve Jobs has or had. And the gift is like, the thing that Jobs did that made him special and that made him actually kind of worth the money he got paid as a CEO or more of it than most CEOs are, is that he was really good at saying no to like, he knew to his employees when they would say like, we think we've got this phone right. He knew like, he had kind of an instinctive knowledge of what people wanted to hold in their hands. And that's why the iPhone worked. And other phones that were made around the same time, smartphones, early smartphones didn't work. His Jobs understood he like refused to let the product

out until he knew that it was like going to feel good in people's hands and delight people. And Musk did kind of the same thing with the Tesla, which is why people fucking love their Teslas because it is a well, it's a car designed to delight people in certain ways. Like one of Musk's big contributions was insisting that the door handles do that thing where they like pop out. And like, it's silly and unnecessary, but also having driven one like it's fucking cool as hell, and it makes people happy and loyal to the product because it delights them. My husband has a Tesla and he fucking loves it. The amount of joy he gets from driving it. I'm like, this is stupid, but it is cool. Yeah, it is cool. It's cool. And Musk gets some credit for

a number of the really cool things about that car. He has, he does have, I think the CEO to compare him most to is Steve Jobs, who was a monster, but who has also had a skill and Musk has that same skill. He's not a rocket engineer. He is someone though who understands, he understood something important that people wanted. And he was the first person to understand that thing. And as a result, he put out a product that delights people. And that's a talent. You can say it's not worth nearly as much as he's been paid. And I would agree with that, but it is a talent. So at SpaceX, however, Musk's main achievement seems to be pushing a policy whereby the company makes the vast majority of their spacecraft components in-house. This is a really weird

thing to do that no one else in the rocket industry does. And it caused them to take years to get off the ground because they had to invent everything from the ground up, but it also allowed them to bypass a lot of the bloat that the heavily regulated space industry has and has allowed them to do stuff like the radios that SpaceX put in rockets cost a fraction of the radios that were put in rockets before because they didn't get into this Lockheed Martin bullshit where everything's stupidly overbuilt and expensive. And it was a good idea to do it this way. It seems like a policy that was successful in reducing the cost of shooting shit into space. So whether or not you think that's good, it worked. My issue with Musk isn't

that I think he's useless. It's that I think he gets way too much fucking credit and that he uses the world saving goals of his company as an excuse to treat loyal and critical employees who do more of the work in a lot of cases than he does like shit whenever he feels like they're getting in the way of what he wants to do at the moment. And I'm going to quote again from Ashley Vance's biography. This is near the end of the biography. The rank and file employees tend to describe Musk in more mixed ways. They revere his drive and respect how demanding he can be. They also think he can be hard to the point of mean and come off as capricious. The employees want to be close to Musk, but they also fear that he'll suddenly change his mind about something

and that every interaction with him is an opportunity to be fired. Elon's worst trait by far in my opinion is a complete lack of loyalty or human connection, said one former employee. Many of us worked tirelessly for him for years and were tossed to the curb like a piece of litter without a second thought. Maybe it was calculated to keep the rest of the workplace on their toes and scared. Maybe he was just able to detach from human connection to a remarkable degree. What was clear is that people who worked for him were like ammunition, used for a specific purpose until exhausted and discarded. What a ghoul. Wow. Yeah. That's some Voldemort shit, right? Just fucking sucking all the, I don't know. Yeah. I would say it's a bad thing to do. Death Eater,

they suck out all your life force right out of your body and then just leave you all your warm memories and you just fucking die. That's how I feel it is and someone saps you of your talent. Sorry. Thank you to mentor. I needed help. Thank you. You're the only person I would let make a Harry Potter comparison here. I'm so proud. Thanks. I've earned it with my service, with my dead baby killer service. I've graduated from not being on those episodes and I've never been less disturbed in my life. Speaking of babies, alive babies. Let's talk about Elon's wives. I thought that was an ad musician. I was like, where, how? No. But Sophie, you know who won't kill babies? Oh. Well, Raytheon kills a lot of babies. Yeah, I was gonna say. Here's the thing

about Raytheon. What do we all hate? Weddings. Nobody likes having to go to a wedding and the dream of Raytheon is to make weddings a thing of the past, not just for people in Afghanistan, but for everyone all over the world. Yes, with Raytheon, we can all live in a world where no wedding gets to happen without a drone strike. And isn't that the world we all want to live in? No, I like weddings. Weddings are dope. There's an open bar usually and I get free. What are you talking about, Robert? I mean, I don't want to be in your wedding. Raytheon hates weddings. I don't want to be in a wedding. That's a lot of work, but this makes no sense. Well, it doesn't have to make sense because it's Raytheon. Raytheon, wonderful.

That's this. This is the ad break. Yeah, ads. What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the US and fascism. I'm Ben Bullock. And I'm Alex French. In our newest show, we take a darkly comedic and occasionally ridiculous deep dive into a story that has been buried for nearly a century. We've tracked down exclusive historical records. We've interviewed the world's foremost experts. We're also bringing you cinematic, historical recreations of moments left out of your history books. I'm Smedley Butler and I got a lot to say. For one, my personal history is raw,

inspiring and mind blowing. And for another, do we get the mattresses after we do the ads or do we just have to do the ads? From iHeart Podcast and School of Humans, this is Let's Start a Coup. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man Sergei Krekalev is floating

in orbit when he gets a message that down on earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated

two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back and we're talking about Elon Musk's first wife, Justine. She famously wrote a viral article in 2010 after their divorce for Mary Claire. Its title is I was a starter wife. That is one of the best articles. That is where a lot of my information comes from. It's a pretty good breakup article. By information, I mean hatred. That's all.

It followed on the heels of Justine's blog, which she had kept for the entirety of their marriage and had regularly written some unflattering things about Elon about that then made it out like all sorts of gossip rags and stuff would talk about it. He was not happy with that. And also, I kind of think it was her way of striking back at him for talking some shit about her career as a writer. She's like, okay, then well, I'm gonna write about what a dick you are in my blog and then the whole world. She's like, oh, you hate writing? Oh, I bet you're gonna hate it a lot fucking more when it's about you and what a fucking dick you are. It was very funny. The article isn't funny, but that's funny. So yeah, it's full of fun details and I'm gonna read one

of them now. As we danced at our wedding reception, Elon told me I am the alpha in this relationship. I shrugged it off. You shouldn't do that. Just as I was, as I would later shrug off signing the post-nuptial agreement. But as time went on, I learned that he was serious. He had grown up in the male dominated culture of South Africa and the will to compete and dominate that made him so successful in business did not magically shut off when he came home. This and the vast economic imbalance between us meant that in the months following our wedding, a certain dynamic began to take hold. Elon's judgment overruled mine and he was constantly remarking on the ways he found me lacking. I am your wife, I told him repeatedly,

not your employee. His response to that was that if you were my employee, I'd fire you. Yeah, do your job. He absolutely would. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, fuck me. Oh, fuck me so good. Oh, fuck me. I'll have my own babies. I'll raise them. That'll show you. You're nothing. Yeah. That's amazing. So yeah, that's great. Justine notes that after the first time she flew to Silicon Valley to meet Musk while he was building Zip 2, he asked her how many kids she wanted. She said one or two, unless she could afford nannies than she wanted four. He responded with a laugh and the reply, that's the difference between you and me. I just assume that there will be nannies. A good person says that stuff. That's the thing about me and you. I expect servants.

That's the difference. I know I'll have servants. Slave, servants. Slave, servants, servants. Definitely servants. Not slaves like my dad has. Which was it that my dad has? Yeah, not that. Yeah. But essentially that. Yes. Justine also claims that Musk had her meet with his lawyer two months before the wedding to sign a financial agreement that he assured her was not a prenup, but it essentially was. And it had her sign away most of her rights, which does kind of suggest that Musk was planning on the marriage not lasting, which is kind of the point of the title of her article. She also notes that during the marriage, quote, no matter how many highlights I got, Elon pushed me to be blonder. Go platinum, he kept saying, and I kept refusing. That's cool.

But whatever. Yeah. It's hot when someone you love just tries to change you all the time. I love it. I, that's what I, I've been told that all women love to be changed by men. And just like all men like to be improved by women, people want to not be loved for being themselves. Yeah. Everybody does. Yeah. People just want to be told that they're garbage and that they need to change. Yeah. That's what people want and need is to be told they're garbage, which is why I tell my audience that they're garbage, so that they'll be better to try and impress me. Send you a knife because they were like, that felt good. Hurt me again, daddy. Yeah. Yeah. Hurt me again, daddy. Podcast daddy. That's exactly what it is. That's the slogan of

behind the bastards. Hurt me again, podcast daddy. Yeah. Hurt me again, podcast daddy. So, yeah. Sorry, sexy. Yeah. It is worth noting that this, this post-nup didn't really seem to matter. Justine got what seems like a pretty fair settlement to me. She's rich as shit. She gets like 80 something thousand dollars a month in addition to getting like a couple million up front and out like, she's doing fine now. She seems to be okay. But Musk did not treat her well and was a giant dick and almost as soon as they broke things off, he flew to England and met Tallulah Riley, an actress who happened to be 14 years younger than him. He hit on her by showing pictures of his rockets and that seems to have worked. The two hung out for a night or two in

England and then she flew out to visit him a few weeks later. When she'd been out in California for five days, he asked her to marry him. She was 22. That's healthy. So gross and just like cliche. I'm like, dude, come on. Yeah. Come on, dude. Like five days or maybe it was a little more than that, but not much. But you pathetic, dude. So she said, yes, they got married. They got divorced soon after that and Musk tried to be on his own for like 10 months and then he got remarried to Tallulah and then they got divorced again. When Ashley Vance published her book in 2015, Musk was in the process of fixing things before fucking them up again with Riley. So her book doesn't really get into detail about what happened later, but that 2017 Rolling

Stone article certainly does and it is a fucking doozy. I love that article also. Yeah. It opens right after he broke up with, I wrote Some Famous Lady, but it's Amber Heard. It's okay to call her Some Famous Lady, right? What does she do? What's her thing? She's an actress and stuff. Yeah. And I'm going to quote from that Rolling Stones article right now. He heaves a sigh and ends his effort at composure. I just broke up with my girlfriend, he says hesitantly. I was really in love and it hurt bad. He pauses and corrects himself. Well, she broke up with me more than I broke up with her, I think. This happened right before Musk had to launch the Model 3 and he claims it made his job much harder. I've been in severe emotional pain for the last few weeks, Musk elaborates.

Severe. It took every ounce of will to be able to do the Model 3 event and not look like the most depressed guy around. For most of that day, I was morbid. And then I had to psych myself up, drink a couple of Red Bulls, hang out with positive people, and then tell myself, I have all these people depending on me. All right, do it. So he talks about how he did it, and then he gets back onto the subject of his breakup. In the middle of this, he straight up asks Neil Strauss, is there anybody you think I should date? It's so hard for me to even meet people. Oh, it's both so entitled and so pathetic at the same time. It's just like quite a mixture. Yeah, I don't know how to, I don't know how it would handle that as an interviewer. It's actually

to Neil Strauss' credit that he managed to like not explode in awkwardness at this moment. That's like a nightmare. I would think of someone I hate and then I would hook them up with Elon Musk. Yeah, I would get him to date, I don't know, Ivanka Trump, honestly. So yeah, seems like that actually might happen. Okay, I'm going to continue reading from the Rolling Stone article. He swallows and clarifies, stammering softly, I'm looking for a long-term relationship, I'm not looking for a one-night stand, I'm looking for a serious companion or soulmate, that kind of thing. And yeah, it's just like, it's so bad. This is like the worst thing I can imagine happening as an interviewer. It's just unbelievably awkward. I'm going to quote from

Strauss again. I did eventually tell him that it may not be a good idea to jump right into another relationship. He may want to take some time to himself and figure out why his previous relationships haven't worked in the long run, which is like, it's pretty good advice. Neil Strauss is the fucking voice of reason here. That's amazing. Neil Strauss is the guy giving him legitimately good advice, was like, maybe figure out what about yourself makes you incapable of staying in relationships, Elon. He needed Rolling Stone to tell him to take it easier and figure out who he is. Yeah, yeah, it's weird that Rolling Stone would tell him to take it easy. Normally, that's the Eagles. Oh, God. Wow. You are more of a dad than you've ever been. I know. That's the daddest

fucking joke I've ever made. You know who's barely a dad? Elon Musk. Finally, you get on my level, Robert. Yes, he's a terrible fucking father. I feel like Jack O'Brien just took over your body. Thank you. So yeah, Musk shakes his head in grimaces. If I'm not in love, if I'm not with a long term companion, I cannot be happy. And this is Strauss again. I explained that needing someone so badly that you feel like nothing without them, nothing without them is textbook codependence. Neil Strauss, author of the game, is the guy explaining to Elon Musk very reasonably. You're codependent, bro. It's incredible. Have you looked inside yourself and realized you're the problem and maybe that needing people the way that you do isn't psychologically sound? Neil

Strauss. Yeah. I wrote the book that made negging into a household term and I want to tell you, I think you might not be a healthily approaching your relationships. Dude, that's like Michael Jordan being like, look, you have a problem with gambling. I'm going to need to talk to you about that. You gamble too much. Yeah. It's like OJ Simpson telling you you have problems with not murdering people. I don't know. Probably shouldn't go into that. It's like the ATF telling you you're not treating compounds with 70-some-odd children in them well with your tear gas. You think wake-oing a third time is going to be the thing that got you out of this triple wake-out? If I have a motto, Sophia, it's A, B, W. Always be wake-oing. That's the

fucking way I run. It wasn't hot, Robert. You're going to have to get over it. I know. I know I will. So yeah. So Neil Strauss very reasonably tells Elon Musk that he's codependent to shit. And here's what comes next. Musk disagrees strongly. It's not true, he replies petulently. I will never be happy without having someone. Going to sleep alone kills me. He hesitates, shakes his head, falters, continues. It's not like I don't know what that feels like. Being in a big empty house and the footsteps echoing through the hallway, no one there and no one on the pillow next to you. Fuck. How do you make yourself happy in a situation like that? You spread the fuck out on the bed and you sleep eagle-style. That's what I do. What the

fuck are you talking about? You enjoy the shit out of your fucking single-ass self, bitch. Yeah. You find a sex worker or a group of sex workers whose personalities you enjoy and you pay them very well because money means nothing to you and this way you're not emotionally damaging somebody. You can just pay someone to cuddle with you at night because you're a billionaire and you don't have to consistently be like marrying these people and leading them in these very stressful relationships. That's an option for you, Elon. It would be fine. Wait, what question? What year was this, though, Robert? This is 2017. Yes. Think about how much needs to be solved in you and how unhappy you are with yourself that you cannot stand to be alone.

Do we think that he just heard the song Hate Sleeping Alone by Drake one too many times and got it stuck in his head and decided that's how he was going to live his life? No, but that's why I was I bet that his emotions the most he's probably ever identified with anyone has been like when he just listens to Drake. He's like, oh, that's what emotions are like. He's like, hate sleeping alone. Got it. Got it. Got it. I hate that. That's me. Drake says it, so I believe it. So this interview keeps going on. Quote, when I was a child, there's one thing I said must continue says demeanor is stiff yet in the sheen of his eyes and the trembling of his lips, a high tide of emotion is visible pushing against the retaining walls. I never want to

be alone. That's what I would say. His voice drops to a whisper. I don't want to be alone. So yeah, that says a lot. But you know what says even more, Sophia? Is it goods and services? No, it's a line in the article where Elon Musk kind of let slip that he might believe in race science. I forgot about that. How could I have forgotten? Oh, my God, of course. According to Musk's best guess, our personalities might be 80 percent nature and 20 percent nurture. And by the way, there's a number of lines where he makes similar kind of points in the biography that like on their own, you might not notice. But when you put them together, it's like,

I think some of that a lot of that apartheid shit rubbed off on Elon. Oh, totally. Yeah. Yeah. And again, I want to be fair in pointing out like he tried to get away from it, but like some of that shit is plugged deep into his head. And this is part of the problem with being a kind of person who can't take any criticism is that you both wind up codependent and wind up pushing some weird race science shit because you're not able to take criticism about yourself. Anyway, that's good. He's nice to his servants. So yeah, that's great. That's good stuff. Yeah. Now, so much has been written about Musk that it's very hard for me to draw a line on how much to include or what is reasonable to critique him on or what is even true about the

guy because there's a lot of disagreements and stuff. I included some statements by his dad and Elon claims his dad is a liar and untrustworthy. And that's definitely true. One thing I'm sure that longtime Musk fans will ding me on is not touching enough on the sub on the period when Musk nearly lost everything betting on Tesla and SpaceX. This is the most mythically significant part of Elon's career. And the basic story is that at one point, both Tesla and SpaceX had yet to prove themselves with their key products. Both companies hemorrhaged money. Musk had to throw in almost every dollar he was worth to keep them afloat. And he executed an intricate series of moves that just barely managed to bring in enough VC dollars to keep both companies solvent

until their products proved themselves. It is true that Musk risked much more of his personal wealth than most tech entrepreneurs do. It's also true that he was never in danger of being poor and he always had a few million dollars in reserves. And it seems to me that most people who write about Elon focused on the fact that he gambled 95% of his wealth. It ignored the fact that the remaining 5% was still enough money for him to live uncomfortably for the rest of his life without working another day. Anyway. Or as other people who are poor call it, not gambling. Not really gambling. When you still have enough money for the rest of your life, that's not gambling. I would prefer instead to report on the elements of Musk's success that don't get covered often.

For one example, reporting in 2015 by the LA Times revealed that Musk's three big companies had benefited from an estimated $4.9 billion in government support. This money came in a variety of forms, including tax credits and rebates for the buyers of solar panels and electric cars. It is interesting to me that Musk's bravery in investing so much of his own money is always mentioned in stories about his success, but the fortunes in government money that made it possible almost never are. A lot of this money came in the form of money from states who desperately tried to convince Tesla or SpaceX to set up facilities in their backyard. Nevada gave Tesla $1.3 billion in incentives to build a battery factory near Reno. SpaceX also got $20 million

in development subsidies to build a launch facility in Texas. And that, Sophia and my dear friends on the internet, brings us to what will be the closing anecdote of this episode, how Elon Musk destroyed the small town of Boca Chica. You heard this story, Sophia? I think I was reading a whole thread about it actually yesterday for the first time. It fucking rules. Boca Chica does not matter in the big picture sense of the world. It's a tiny, tiny, tiny retirement community in the village on the Texas coast. And it has almost no, I think it only had like two permanent residents. Like it's what you'd call a snowbird community, where old people have their retirement homes and come to at the end of like during the

winter basically, because it's got a nice beach. And I read a really good Esquire article about the destruction of this small town by Elon Musk. And it opens with a Texas Parks and Wildlife magazine quote from 1992, quote, the schemes and dreams of developers to build on this beautiful and desolate area die hard, but die they always have. And this is more or less sums up why the property values here have stayed low and why old people who aren't rich have been able to afford to have homes here. It's never been taken over by hipsters or developers due to its isolation and its proximity to Texas's poorest city and difficult geography. Boca Chica is a perfect place for old people to spend their golden years without having millions of dollars.

It's no wonder that Elon Musk picked the area for his rocket test range, stating in 2018, we've got a lot of land and nobody around. So if it blows up, it's cool. Which is not true. Because there's always one Columbus was like, well, there's no one here in America. So we're going to just take it when they were definitely people here. Musk started working to get the land in 2013, claiming he was going to make the commercial version of Cape Canaveral. He pushed for two bills in the Texas State House, one to reduce a private company's liability over nuisance complaints, and run from the city of Brownsville, which is the city nearby, that would allow city officials

to deny public access to beaches when spaceflight activities were on the calendar. Incidentally, Sophia, the beach around Boca Chico was known as the poor people's beach for being one of the only chunks of nice coastline in Texas that was free to use for poor people. I read about that. And also, from what I understand, it was a key wildlife corridor. Yes, it is. A lot of turtles. A lot of turtles. Musk claimed that SpaceX would make 12 launches a year for its commercial operations and that one day a man would leave Brownsville and go to Mars, which is how he got the local government on board. This was a lie. The plan quickly changed. Basically, he was like, this is where we're going to send him to Mars from.

And then what he actually did is like, this is what we're going to test all of our rockets that will fuck up and break. So that's what it became. Blow up near fucking old people's houses. Yep. Yep. And SpaceX started running almost daily tests when they'd said they would be doing like once a month on experimental rockets that were very loud, often dangerous, and led to the beach being closed much of the time. The roads were increasingly blocked. Life blocked. Life was made almost unlivable for many residents due to the constant construction and experiments. Musk started buying up Boca Chica piece by piece. He offered extant residents three times their property value, which stands generous until you realize that property values were extremely low,

which means these old people who worked their whole lives to be able to live on this beach were only getting enough money to buy like a tiny, like a tiny shitty place in like a city, like not a place like they had, which was a nice place where they got to be out in the middle of nowhere near a beach and live comfortably. Like they couldn't buy anything that was like what they were losing, even though he was making this quote unquote generous offer, because the property values here were low, which is why he was able to, anyway, it's fucking frustrating. And it's also always extremely low when people fuck with children or old people. It's like, dude. Yep. Yep. As I typed this, the community is rapidly dying and being turned into an industrial test

site for experimental space rockets. And I'm sure if you were to have an honest conversation with him, Elon would say that this was a necessary sacrifice for humanity's future. After all, what if a few old people's retirement houses really matter when measured against the quest to help mankind escape the surly bonds of earth? This is the line of logic that kind of follows through all of Elon's bad deeds. Yes, it sucks for them. But look at what he's trying to do. It's what people think when Tesla pays out $86,000 in fines for polluting the environment with their toxic paint. It's what people think when they read that he told this to a worker who missed a crucial event to witness the birth of his child quote, that is no excuse. I'm extremely disappointed

it. You need to figure out where your priorities are. We're changing the world and changing history and you either commit or you don't. Elon denies saying this. Yeah, it's what people think when they read articles like this September 2019 Bloomberg piece about how Tesla repeatedly violated the National Labor Relations Act by repeatedly threatening and retaliating against employees for attempting to organize a union. Yeah, that's the shit that really fucking pissed me off too. Yeah. He did so much union busting, tons of union busting. This is how my dude that tries to claim he's a socialist to me makes me laugh so hard. I'm like, bro, do you know what socialism is? It would mean your workers own the means of production

and also have the ability to say no to you about some things we don't like, Elon. Think about that. That is not what you're fucking doing at all. You weird dictator. Yep. It's also what people think when they read articles like the one published in April of 2018 in The Intelligencer. This revealed the fact that quote, company officials labeled toxic exposures muscle strains and repetitive stress injuries as personal medical issues or minor accidents requiring only first aid lowering the official injury count at the factory, which is again, one of the most dangerous factories in the country. But hey, it's okay because he's trying to save the world. What's a few hundred thousand, however many people in pursuit of one man's

probably with the tiny dicks dreams. If I know one thing that's never gone badly in history, Sophia, it's a man having a dream about how to save the world that he's willing to sacrifice other people for. That always works. Yeah, it works great. But you know what? I'm going to retract my statement about people with small dicks. You know, it doesn't mean they're worse than anybody. That's, you know, in fact, Elon Musk has a huge dick and he's an asshole. He's definitely is a huge dick. And I don't care and it doesn't matter. And I don't know why I brought his dig into it. I'm now disgusted just picturing it. I know we've all become worse because of our exposure to Elon. I'm blaming him for that, Sophia. Great. I'll join you. Thank you. Yeah.

Some of those injuries and medical issues at the Tesla factory were caused by the fact that Elon hates the color yellow. The intelligence reports on claims made in a reveals news article, quote, among the more baffling details in the report are several sections about how Elon Musk's personal tastes appear to have affected the factory's safety for the worst. His preferences were well known and led to cutting back on those standard safety signals. Musk apparently really hates the color yellow. So instead of using the aforementioned hue, lane lines in the factory floor are painted in shades of gray. Tesla denies this and sent reveal photos of rails and posts painted yellow in the factory. He also is not into having too many signs or the beeping sound

forklifts make in reverse. All things that would seem important to keeping staff safe. It's just a matter of time before someone gets killed. A former safety lead set of the conditions in the factory when employee attempted to call attention to these problems before eventually resigning. I could and probably should go on, but this article is too long already. We haven't even talked about the time Elon accused that heroic cave diver of being a pedophile, nor have we discussed the fact that. Yes. Yeah, I know. He's so shitty. We haven't also discussed the fact that once he got in trouble for slandering a hero, he hired a convicted felon to stalk that heroic cave diver and try to find dirt on him. That's another thing that happens. But this article

has to end at some fucking point. And the real question here, the thing that we have to ask is whether or not anything Musk has made himself a part of or started is nearly as revolutionary or important as he claims it is. If this guy is really saving the world and bringing humanity into the future, then you could say or other, some people would argue that a lot of his bad behavior is justified. At least that's the argument that could be made. If he's not, then he's just a rich asshole who got richer by pretending to save the world so he could get jacked off by worship fan boys by while participating in the plunder of our planet's diminishing resources. I cannot answer this question definitively, but derivative fool that I am, I can quote one of the more self-reflective

chunks of Ashley Vance's book about Musk. And I'm going to do that now to close us out. The economist Tyler Cohen, who has earned some measure of fame in recent years for his insightful writings about the state of the technology industry and ideas on where it may go, falls into that first camp. In the great stagnation, Cohen bemoaned the lack of big technological advances and argued that the American economy has slowed and wages have been depressed as a result. In a figurative sense, the American economy has enjoyed lots of low-hanging fruits since at least the 17th century, whether it be free land, lots of immigrant labor, or powerful new technologies, he wrote. Yet during the last 40 years, that low-hanging fruit started disappearing and we

started pretending it was still there. We have failed to recognize that we are at a technological plateau and the trees are more bare than we would like to think. That's it. That's what has gone wrong. In his next book, Averages Over, Cohen predicted an unromantic future in which a great divide had occurred between the haves and the have-nots. In Cohen's future, huge gains in artificial intelligence will lead to the elimination, if many of today's high-employment lines of work. The people who thrive in this environment will be very bright and able to complement the machines and team effectively with them. As for the unemployed masses, well, many of them will find jobs going to work for the haves, who will employ teams of nannies,

housekeepers, and gardeners. If anything Musk is doing might alter the course of mankind toward a rosier future, Cohen can't find it. Coming up with true breakthrough ideas is much harder today than in the past, according to Cohen, because we've already mined the bulk of the big discoveries. During a lunch in Virginia, Cohen described Musk as not a genius inventor, but as an attention seeker, and not a terribly good one at that. I don't think a lot of people care about getting into Mars, he said, and it seems like a very expensive way to drive whatever breakthroughs you might get from it. And then you hear about the hyperloop. I don't think it has any intention of doing it. You have to wonder if it's not meant to just be publicity for his companies.

As for Tesla, it might work, but you're still just pushing the problems back somewhere else. You still have to generate power. It could be that he is challenging convention, less than people think. That's where I want to end. You excited for all the people who are going to get pissed off at us? Yeah. I mean, I can't wait for people to tell me that I should probably die and that I'm a cut. I can't really wait. I'm excited for people to tell me that they're so unhappy that I'm confident and that I don't just giggle in the background anymore. I am excited for people to be briefly angry at me and then lose interest in being angry at me,

because that's what happens when people get angry at men on the internet and instead focus their rage on Sophia because misogyny is very deeply boiled into our culture. And that's lame. And fuck all of you for that. Sorry, Sophia. Yeah, I'm the one who wrote 14,000 words about how I don't like Elon Musk. So please do come after me. I will not respond to you because I don't care what weird Elon Musk nerds say on Twitter. Truth. But do mail us knives either as threats or as a gift. Either way, we get knives. That's a win-win. I want a knife as a gift again. Include a happy face so I know it's chill. Yeah. I'll take knives as gifts or threats.

All kinds of attention are equal to me. All right, Sophia, you want to go out with a plug? Sure. I am releasing my first stand-up album Father's Day on Father's Day. I don't have a father, so it's going to be really fun. And you guys should listen. And you should also listen to my podcast, 420 Day Fiancé with Miles Bray and Private Parts Unknown with Courtney Kosek. Shout out and follow me Twitter, Instagram, the SOF. Listen to Sophia's album so that you can understand what it's like not to have a father and understand what it's like to be Elon Musk's kids. Exactly. It feels the same. That's the last dig we're ending on. Beautiful.

What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup. Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. I'm Alex French. And I'm Smedley Butler. Join us for this sordid tale of ambition, treason, and what happens when evil tycoons have too much time on their hands. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you find your favorite shows. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian trained astronaut? That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that

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