Bulwark Takes - Elon's Worst Day: Baby Mamas, Spaceship Crashes, Stock Tanks, DOGE Embarrassments & More!

Episode Date: March 7, 2025

Tim Miller and Sam Stein review Elon Musk's terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day, from being demoted, spaceship bursting to bits, Tesla stock continuing to plummet, and continued issues with his many baby mamas.

Bettering your business takes working with the best. With the James Hardy Alliance, you gain access to leads, training, networking, and support from the number one brand of siding in North America. Achieve new levels of success by joining the James Hardy Alliance today. Hey guys, it's Tim Miller from The Bulwark. I'm finally back with my partner Sam Stein. When somebody has a horrible day, I want to discuss it with Sam Stein, particularly when it's somebody that is detestable uh and that's elon musk you know i had a boss once this was kind of a cringe thing we made fun of them for this but they called it uh when they had a bad day you know bad horrible no good day

they said that they were alexandering and i do think that it's possible that elon is alexandering possibility Elon is Alexandering today. Just a few facts about his day. Tesla stock is down 5.6% just on the day. We'll have more on that. He was demoted. You and Andrew Edgar did a great video on that already. We can do that a little more. The SpaceX Starship had its second failure in a row, leading to a spectacular shower of debris. This one was a double negative for Elon because the debris kind of splashed back onto his other job. The FAA, which is overseeing the FAA. They had to halt some flights into several Florida airports. It was so much debris. Yeah.

He's still in a legal battle with his fourth baby mama and um i guess this wasn't today but i i as i mentioned the cyber trucks were just being absolutely pelted with beads at mardi gras uh in a glorious fashion so uh i don't know which one of the you've already talked about the demotion so which one of the other ones do you want to uh start with there for elon or do you have any big picture thoughts on his day well no i think you covered the big picture it's uh he doesn't had many bad days in the past like 10 years like these awards were just mad right so like this this feels a little abnormal um there's also this big wall street journal piece out tonight uh which kind of gets at the tesla component of this and it i mean to a degree i guess this is predictable but like absolute falling off the cliff popularity among democrats in terms of owning a tesla like

it used to be a source of pride to earn that car because it's so environmentally conscious compared to the other automobiles and now i think there's one quote and there's like it's like driving around in a big red mega hat and so people just don't want to be in a Tesla anymore. And I think that kind of gets to the pelting of the Cybertrucks. I mean, look, I'm not a big car person, so don't take my word for it. But I think the Cybertrucks are ridiculous. Like, they look ridiculous. They're monstrosities. They're so big.

And putting aside even the association with Elon, I don't think I would drive one of those. Um, but now they become again, symbols of, you know, just mega politics. And that was Elon's choice. I mean, he made this decision. Um, he might benefit in the long run from it cause he's got all these good government contracts that he could probably get his hands on. But in the interim, at least for today, it's been a financial punch in the nuts. Yeah. Just a couple other things on Tesla, then, if we're going to start there. Sure. Dave Portnoy of Barstool had a viral tweet going around where he was like, I own Tesla stock. Maybe Elon should get back to work. Get back to work. No, there's something to it. Let's pause for a second.

There is something to it. I was thinking about this in preparation. Like, is he not accountable to the shareholders of Tesla? Like at some point, aren't they going to be like, yo, your stock is like just falling off a cliff and like you need to focus on this. Look, I looked it up like on January 29th, 2021. So this is like right when Biden, first week of Biden, stock was selling at 264 a share. On January 17th, 2025, this is last week of Biden, 426 a share. So pretty substantial growth during the Biden years.

This today, it's back down to 263 a share, right where it was the first week of the Biden presidency. And I just think if you're a Tesla shareholder, if you're on the board or whatever, and you have a stake in this company, I would be pissed. I think Porno is absolutely right here. It's like you have fiduciary responsibilities to make this company work,

and you're not helping. If anything, you're hurting. Yeah. It's down just 29% this month. This month, down 29%. That is opposite of the rocket to the moon. You know, like you're going to the center of the earth. So that's negative.

That's interesting, though. I didn't realize it's below, I guess. It just hit today where it was at the first week of Biden's term. So, you know, four years of fairly steady growth. I mean, it was plus and minus. It's not the height of COVID. Obviously, it went down a little bit and then it went back up. And then there's all this tension with Biden over the fact that Biden didn't invite him to the EV Summit and all this stuff.

And of course, Biden was pushing for every car company to go into electric to level the playing field. But through it all, Tesla really progressed in terms of stock value. And then it's all been pissed away in the short period of time since Donald Trump's election. Well, that's a shame. All right. And then to his other business that he's supposedly running, SpaceX.

Boy, why don't we show the video there of the SpaceX? Was it a crash? What do you want to call it? Yeah, it was an explosion. Yeah, let's do that. Oh my god. I just saw that starship blew up. There it is.

Holy that's a lot of debris it's a lot of debris uh that's a lot of debris i mean it happened in texas and it was halting flights going into palm beach it's like everywhere so like i mean it's actually quite pretty to look at but i'm sure elon it's like oh my god again this is like the second time in a month right i feel like we just experienced this yeah explodes mid-flight second time um if you want to know how serious this is uh i pulled up at elon musk on x and his last tweet was three hours ago, as we sit here right now. Starship launch attempt now! Exclamation point SpaceX.

It's infuriating, isn't it? I mean, Elon has gone three hours without tweeting. He has done two retweets. He has done two retweets. But for Elon. And this is a man. Have you ever seen that serious yeah about like how many of the hours of the day that he tweets and he's tweeting basically everything

except for like five to seven a.m um so like that's not true i woke up from morning joe today and like my four youth was just like unbelievable it's like like elon tweets it's unbelievable but yeah he's gone quite conspicuously silent on the spacex so that's a bad sign um and then i haven't had a chance to watch your watch your egger video but uh i mean the demotion whatever you want to call it like just this notion that like that he has to be reined in that trump is saying things like use a scalpel i don't know if i believe how much of this actually is going to happen like he's still going to be able to run roughshod around uh the government but like there have been now a series of things where they've had to pull back you know right um

so this is what egger wrote about and what we were talking about which is and i'm with you like back. foreshadowed that they're going to actually do bigger, more dramatic moves in the spring when it comes to government reduction. So I don't particularly think this is the end of Doge, but that being said, this is the first time that Trump has really publicly kind of pushed back against Doge or called into question how much power it should have. And then on top of that, I mean, every day, multiple times a day, there's some sort of embarrassing headline about how JV the operations are, how little they know, and how badly they're screwing things up.

Agencies that have to be rehired, personnel that are critical that would let go, lawsuits that expose how stupidly they organized everything the revelations of the the staffers having like weird ties to like fringy groups and stuff like that the cuts that they posted having to be taken down because they weren't real yeah they exposed the cia black side today there's so much crazy shit happening we didn't even get to that on the youtube page that they accidentally exposed the cia black site when they like listed our buildings i saw that viral tweet but i'm not i haven't seen the accompanying articles i've been hesitant about it okay we're not sure that's true

yeah well i i the fact that we think it might be true is like concerning it fits a pattern which is i mean they the story with the sites is that they posted something like 430 government buildings that they thought would be good to sell. And among them were literally the departments. Like, let's just sell the Department of Justice headquarters. What the fuck? The Department of Energy? If you looked at the Department of Energy building, it is like this Soviet honeycomb. Brutalist bullshit, yeah.

Who is going to buy that? I thought we should buy it. I honestly thought we... The bulwark? Move into the Department of Energy? Yeah, like create a little Venmo fund that people could contribute to and we'll just move into HUD.

It's ours. Who's going to buy it? But the fact that they did this, at the same time that they're doing this, everyone has to return to work policy. that might just be malicious on the car and they want people to like work in the halls and the stairwells but it's also just it's so hackneyed it's so poorly executed and i i just wish i i know people are like well he's a genius and this is exactly what he did at twitter and, this is just a corporate takeover strategy. And it's like, yeah, but that didn't work.

Right. Like Twitter lost severe amounts of value. The company had glitches all the time. The product hasn't been made better. It's just been made like more dumpster fire-ish. And we kind of like that, I guess. Community notes is good. You like me. that's fine he

made it he made a nice little part but beyond that it's like just because he had a template and he's adopting the same exact template for government i don't think that makes him a genius it just means he has a template that he can't you know improvise off of or do things differently around and so to me this just is it exposes a lack of creativity or thoughtfulness and i think you know all these headlines it may not diminish him in trump's eyes all that much but it's enough to cause embarrassment that trump feels the need to like at least go public and say you know we're reigning him in a little bit and eventually i don't know i look maybe i'll be right maybe i'll be wrong to me this looks just like an unbelievable

shit show that is going to completely consume the government but i know but to a point where like like the problems become so real that they're like they have to be addressed like at this point you know there's and and at that point trump starts looking around and he's like i need somebody to blame for that well yeah and that's the thing I think that's the big point that people are missing, which is we're only two months in, not even, no, we're like a month and a half in. Yeah. Jesus Christ. I mean, the problems that we've, that have been created by Doge are real, but they're not like that comprehensive, right? Like, yes, firing like the nuclear safety crew is really bad. But what would have really been bad is if like you fired the crew and then like we had a real

problem at Los Alamos, right? Like that's really bad. Firing the food inspectors is bad, especially during bird food. But like, what if we have like a really severe salmonella outbreak? I mean, it goes across the board. At some point, the real world actually does intervene in a more severe way than it has to this point so far. And that's when things get really rocky. I mean, again, we are just a month and a half away. Speaking of the real world intervening, I think that there's some signs that some balls are being dropped for Elon. Well, give it away.

Well, in addition to the spectacular shower of debris over some signs that some balls are being dropped for elon uh you know i just gave it away well in addition to the spectacular shower of debris over at space hex and tesla stock dropping and like doge being a complete clusterfuck we did we got together the two of us to discuss ashley clinton st claire his fourth baby mama but i we i don't think we've discussed together the what happened a couple days ago with grimes, the third baby mama. Grimes, who I love, and I will broach no criticism of her. I know some people aren't for it. I will always be for Grimes.

She was tweeting at him begging to answer his phone because they have a sick kid and she needed him to get on the line to deal with something. This is somebody that is in way over his head like if you have a baby mama that is posting publicly please call me your child is sick like and meanwhile you are like manically tweeting and the two companies you run you run are like dealing with major crises i i just yeah it seems like he like really does not have his handle on things i guess well it's not just one baby mama tweeting i'm it's two baby mamas and then on top of that like you have all these problems around the government and then your rocket exploded for the second time and

your companies are like losing like billions upon billions of value that's bad it's not good if you were if you were the evp of the rocket company and you just had your second explosion you're kind of like i need the ceo around the clock you know like i've done crisis communications for companies back in the day when i was a pr man and it's like when there's a real crisis of the company like you you need the CEO to be kind of around all the time. And you would think so you would think so. But I mean, I just don't understand again, we talked about this in the first week, but like, where does he have the time to do any of this? I mean, it's, it's so severe. There's so much going on. He's so in demand and he's,

you know, obviously he's focused so much on the government and I, you know, I don't want to get too much into the psychoanalytical stuff. But I do think, frankly, that there's something wrong when you have two mothers of your children begging you to return calls and you're just not doing it. And I think you need to probably reconsider where your priorities are. And who knows what is going on privately that we don't know about. But to me, that like a real red flag um and yeah of course if your rocket ship explodes you should absolutely stop what you're doing and focus on doing that again it gets back to like accountability he doesn't really have any he just goes about and does his business uh he you know he really harms

people in ways that i think people don't appreciate like the amount of tip line stuff we get from people who've lost their jobs and whose spouses have lost their jobs their lives have been ruined but for him it's like nothing and so you know eventually you think this stuff catches up but in the in the moment you're sort of wondering like is there something that he wants to like will there be ever a time where he feels like he needs to recalibrate or is he just like flying by the seat of his pants at all hours on ketamine basically um probably the latter uh probably federal government folks the bulwark.com slash tips if you're dealing with anything the book.com such tips you're doing anything you want to share with us as far as uh uh federal government job

displacement or crazy shit that's happening. If you see Elon shows up or big ball shows up. Yeah. Just get the pollwork.com slash tips. Tesla shareholders. Good luck. Please send us tips. Yeah.

Yeah. You let us know if you're having any concerns about the fiduciary responsibility and baby mamas, you can send us tips as well. All right. Sam Stein. We don't know you yet and you feel compelled to tweet on him. Just send us a tip and stuff. Yeah. We'll be seeing you soon. Thanks, Sam. Thanks for doing this. Thanks, Tim. Glad to have you back, bud.

Bye.