Empire: World History - 381. Musk, Bezos & The New East India Companies (Ep 1)

Episode Date: July 26, 2026

Are modern tech corporations the new East India Company? What is the dark history behind Silicon Valley? What do Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos have in common with Cecil Rhodes? In this episode, William and Anita explore the sinister origins of Silicon Valley and the striking parallels between today’s tech billionaires and historical imperialists. They discuss the rise of tech companies like PayPal, X and Amazon, and how they have followed the historical template set by the East India Company.  Summer sale is here: get an annual Empire Club membership for an extra 20% off with code SUMMER26. That's ad-free listening, early access, every bonus episode, and full access to our exclusive members' series. Sale ends August 31st, so grab it before summer's over.   For more Goalhanger Podcasts, head to www.goalhanger.com. Email: [e-mail] Instagram: @empirepoduk Blue Sky: @empirepoduk X: @empirepoduk Assistant Producer: Imogen Marriott Editor: Bruno Di Castri  Social Producer: Charlie Johnson Producer: Anouska Lewis Executive Producer: Dom Johnson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community, discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcasts, add free listening, and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mpowerpoduk.com. So we've got some very exciting news for you. We've sold out our first show, but we've got a second show at the rest is fest in September. We have a brilliant line-up, incredibly topical one, two. We're calling it three Ayatollahs, an Iranian dynasty. Delighted to say we're going to be joined by a great friend of the show, Ali Ansari,

one of Britain's foremost experts on Iranian history. He is an excellent storyteller. Ali, just tell us what are we going to be chatting about? Well, we will be exploring big questions like how is the influence of the Ayatollahs shaped Iran since the 1979 revolution? does the Islamic Republic's grip appear to be fracturing and what role have other nations played in shaping Iran's fate? And we're going to unpack one of the most fascinating and urgent stories in the world right now as the regime faces economic pressures, regional setbacks,

and a disillusion younger generation, but in many ways a revitalised revolutionary guards call, what comes next for a great civilisation that has outlasted many, many empires? Ali, we always love having you on this podcast. cannot wait to have you join us on stage. And I can't wait to get into the discussion. You can expect sharp analysis, you can expect vivid storytelling,

and of course you can expect the usual chaos that comes about when we're on stage chatting to each other. The rest is fest runs from the 4th to the 6th of September at London's Southbank Centre. General sale is on now. Just head to southbank centre.com.ukukh, to find out more. Hello and welcome to Empire with me Anita Arnand. And me, William Duremberg.

Now on this podcast, you know, we like to discuss the history of territorial expansion. We like to look at ruthless leaders, looking to dominate their realm, unbelievable wealth, generated by extraction. This week, it's sort of something different, but also the same on Empire. We're going to use this historical view to analyze the emperors of today. I mean, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Sam Altman, you know, these modern corporations that dominate the world just as the East India Company did 400 years ago. And, you know, there is a template that was set for this modern corporate dominance. And it was set in 1599 by exactly the East India Company. This is an interesting conversation, an ongoing conversation I've been having with William over the years.

It was a private business that grew to control half the world's trade. It raised a 260,000 man private army. It was roughly that army twice the size of the British army. And you know, there's a quote, William, that kind of hangs in my head about the East India company, which you could apply to some of these mega corporations today. The EIC was famously critiqued back in the 1700s by Baron Thurlow as having neither bodies to be punished nor souls to be condemned. They therefore do as they like, quote unquote. So it could sound like a statement made about the modern tech corporations of today, I would suggest.

This is something I've been thinking about a lot lately. As you know, I've spent a lot of the last 25 years writing four books on the East India Company. And when I wrote that first book of that series, Google was still the type of bowling. Jeff Bezos was still in his garage. And the only sort of figure that we knew about who had made money out of computers, as we thought of it, in those days was Microsoft and Bill Gates. Four books on the East India Company's astonishing gathering of power later, the world seems to have come a full circle. And the same thing that you see in India in the 18th century, which is the corporation powerful enough to buy

the world, the man who sold the world. You know, the idea that you could have so much power that one of the things you can do with it, obviously, is buy an army, which the East India Company did. And the East India Company did not conquer India. through white men, you know, sailing in ships over from Britain. They went to India, they borrowed money from Indian bankers, and they bought brown mercenaries, and this extraordinary power, but also to have the power to corrupt the politicians at home.

We're going to talk more about this later on in this episode. Oh, we've got so much to talk about. But there is so much here. And reading your work, pulling this all together, and reading your notes, Alita, it just teed off this incredible sense. Did it get your juices running? It got my juices running.

I'm very pleased. Because, you know, what I wanted to do for this episode is, you know, before we get to the new imperialist, we like whenever we look at an empire to look at its origin and the roots, where did it start? You kind of mentioned one of the myths that goes with the birth of this era of new emperors. And it is, you know, the man in the garage. And I think we're going to get into the fact that that is not actually, strictly speaking, true in many of the examples that we have.

I've got a good parallel to it from the 1600s, though, for later. Save it, save it. Because I want to go back to the origins of Silicon Valley, because, you know, that actually has a fairly dark history of its own. And it starts, Willie, with the marriage of corporate power and mass data collection. And believe it or not, it begins in the 1880s, so much earlier than you could possibly imagine, with a man called Herman Hollerith. Now, Herman Holleris

realized that he could turn human beings into patterns of holes on a punch card and he got this idea from watching a train conductor punch actual physical descriptions of passengers into their tickets. So, you know, you'd have a little hole saying, this is the hole for blonde, this is the hole for heavy, this is the hole for skinny, this is a hole for child. It was such a brilliant system. He thought,

why can't I just use this and roll it out? And he is so successful that he uses that same technology that he has become enamoured with. to count the 1890 American census. Now, before that, it took two years to count up the people for a census, and if not longer. But Holler, I thought, you know what, I can make a lot of money if I can do this quickly,

but I can make extraordinary amounts of money. If I rent out the machines instead of selling them, that will force the customers to buy the punch cards from me and buy the machines from me again and again and again forever, you know, that sort of closed loop of business. And so, you know, this idea of renting out tools and of using data to make you rich, you know, something that isn't real. It's information is something that goes right back to the 1880s.

And that's just fascinating. I had no idea about this. But his punch card firm eventually became IBM, didn't it? Absolutely. So IBM stands for international business machines. And it's, you know, Hollerith's idea, very lucrative idea. is transformed into an empire, the first tech empire I would suggest, by a man called Thomas Watson. Now, Thomas Watson is a rum-old character, let me tell you, because he almost went to prison

for being incredibly ruthless and, you know, employing illegal anti-trust tactics at his previous company. Couldn't happen today. Never. Never. But this is the man, he builds a new sort of cult-like culture at this new organisation called International Business Machines. And let me tell you what I mean by a cult.

So at nascent IBM, there were mandatory uniforms. Everybody gets issued with Think notebooks. This word think is all over the place. More than that, there are corporate hymns that have to be sung by employees at the start of every day. So, you know, it really is like when you walk in and you are in your uniform and think, think, think, think, think, everything called Think, Think, Think, Think, Think. Watson never takes his jacket off, even on the hottest day, and that then inspires all his minions to do the same. There's no drinking allowed.

And the company's songbook is one of those precious things that every new employee has. To the point where there is one song, I mean, tell me how this is different from any kind of cult leader, where all of the employees have to say, Mr. Watson is the new man we're working for, he's the leader of the CTR, he's the fairest, squarist man. We know. You know, so it's like completely batch it, a sort of loyalty to a corporate entity. We often think of history as being about the story of nation states. And since the Victorian period, history has been taught always as nation state against nation state.

But we forget that there's another battle going on, which is the corporation against corporation, corporation against it. There's many other ways you can look at this. And it's so fascinating to do that. Now, the corporation and the state collide horrifically, or specifically, the IBM and the state collide in 1933 in Nazi Germany. Tell me about that. How does this punch card technology get used almost immediately for the darkest of purposes? So this is a really fawny part of the history of IBM. And IBM has always insisted we didn't know what they were going to do with our technology. they just used it. In 1933, IBM's German subsidiary won a contract to run the census for the Nazi regime. And they used exactly that hollareth punch card technology. Once it would identify who was traveling on a train,

this time it was used to identify every Jewish person in Germany. And Watson, that man who I was describing a little while ago who people sang hymns to, even accepted a medal from Hitler in 1937. And he only returned it, after, you know, the war was turning in 1940 and it was clear, you know, this is not a good thing to have. Now, one of the most interesting things in your notes, Anita, was the origin story of Silicon Valley, which again, I'd never read. Completely new to me. Tell me about that. Well, it's kind of, you know, it's for a place that has so much sun in California, pretty shady. So, 1947, there's a man called William Shockley. And he and his colleague, they invent the first transistor, which later become the microchip, which will later be used.

every smartphone used by 70% of the global population today. And this man Shockley sets up his company near Palo Alto in California, partly to be near his aging mother, which is sweet. I love that story. The whole of Silicon Valley is there because of an aging mom. It depends where your mom lives, you know. But also, you know, you've got a cheap workforce. You're able to do industrialization because this is a place that used to have trees and fruit picking.

You know, so you've got labor around you. This is the grapes of Roth territory, where all the... those that the labor moves from the dust bowl to California to pick oranges. Pick fruit. Oranges, right, exactly. And this is a huge story in Indian migration as well because a lot of Punjabi farmers end up going to California because they know how to pick fruit. But that's aside. Yeah, 100% true.

How interesting. Yeah, loads of interesting things. But the thing is that what used to be called, the Santa Clara Valley gets renamed Silicon Valley because Shockley's dream just explodes. It's huge. But he's not very good at running people, is he? He's nuts. He's paranoid. He's domineering. He's impossible. There's like, you know, there's, there are some wonderful stories. One famous episode, his secretary cuts her finger. And he demands to know whether somebody was trying to attack him and whether it was meant for him. And he makes the whole organisation take lie detector tests to find out who was responsible if it was actually an

fact, an attack on his person and his secretary just got it in the finger. So you know what, this is not good. And the people who are working for him, who by absolute definition are going to be very bright people, because you're working on cutting edge technology, they start leaving. And you have this, you know, just as we're saying, you know, leads into a company, you've got a mutiny here as well, because there is a mutiny here in Silicon Valley where some of the people who are like, shockly, you cannot be treating us like shit anymore. They just walk. out. They just go. Eight of the brightest young engineers leave and, Shockley, in his usual magnanimous way, cause him, the traitor is eight. They go these eight brilliant people and

they go and find a financial backer and they start this new company, Fairchild Semiconductor. And two of those eight, Robert Noisse and Gordon Moore, will go on in 1968 to found a company that you may have heard of. It is called Intel. It goes back to 1968. It goes to, isn't it amazing? These stories are so gloriously older than you might think. So, you know, you could say, and I will say,

that the whole of Silicon Valley grows out of people fleeing one terrible boss. You know, every great chip company in America can trace its line back to the traitorous eight and that walk out because this guy was tangibly a nutter. So that's the history of the technology of the location that laid the foundations for the emperors of our age if we want to use that terminology. But what about the people? Well, I mean, you mentioned this, didn't you, at the beginning, that when Google was a type of bowling action or a number, that Bill Gates was the only trick in town. And his rise to become the youngest billionaire in the world by the age of 31. It's often mythologized as this sort of bootstrapped. a speckled young man, slaving away in a garage, self-made inventor. But actually, you know what? He was born into money.

So, you know, the Gates family were well connected. He went to an elite private school. It gave him really rare, early access to a computer terminal. I mean, it's one of the only schools that had a computer terminal. And he's interested. He's absolutely is brilliant. And he's clever and master's programming. In 1975, Gates and his maid, a man called Paul Allen,

Paul Allen, yeah, another important founder of this whole world. They go to a computer manufacturer and they say, you know what, we've got new software for your Altair computer. And before writing a single line of code, they tell them, we've got new software. They haven't written it. They've just said, we've got new software. And it basically pays off. You could say it's a bluff that pays off because they get a big contract. And then they scramble to create the program and they do it in just a few weeks.

And upon this, Microsoft is launched. And, you know, this key cornerstone of Gates' business approach, you can see it replicated again and again and again by TechBrow emperors who say, you know what, I've got something that can do that, I can fix that. They don't at the time, but then they will very, very quickly. But also more important than that, this concept of software as paid intellectual property. That sort of starts around this time. That's a new idea, is it?

Absolutely a new idea. absolutely. So in 1976, after discovering that computer hobbyists, you know, they're doing what he did, which is sort of ferret around and look for software and repurpose it, they're copying his code and they're sharing his basic software on paper tapes. And Gates writes this open letter to the community. And he says, you know, software is not a gift to be shared. It is a product to be licensed and continuously paid for. And this transforms the entire business into, you know, a toll booth model, much like those punch cards that, you know, you're in a loop where you just keep paying. You don't just sell the physical product, but you own the infrastructure and you own

everything else that, you know, runs on it. So this whole idea of him being, you know, the plucky young kid in long, long socks with glasses and just making it, his mother in 1980s, she had connections with IBM's chairman. And she sort of has a chat with IBM's chairman and says, I've got this wonderful son called Bill Gates, and he's doing this wonderful stuff with, you know, Microsoft. It's a new company. And she gets in the meeting. Microsoft has the meeting with IBM. And through that meeting, Microsoft secures the contract to provide IBM's operating system, which eventually corners the entire personal computer market in the world. So, you know, we're talking about, forget riches of creases. This is, you know, on the cusp of everybody having

computers. Yeah. Amazing. And we've lived through this. We can remember a world where the word, there were no personal computer. I remember the first laptop I ever saw, the Toshiba that my elder brother had. But in the 80s and 90s, Bill Gates was the tech billionaire at the top of the tree. But obviously by 2000s, there was a new emperor in town, Jeff Bezos. And you say he wasn't self-made either. Yeah, let's talk about his garage. Everyone's got a bloody garage. Did you just want to have a look at it? It's California. There's not a real ride.

Yeah, okay. Well, look, Jeff Bezos is born in Albuquerque in New Mexico in January, 1964. And actually, he has a beginning that is genuinely difficult where some of the others are not. Yeah, his mother, Jacqueline, is 17 when he's born, still at school. And the marriage to his biological father, a guy called Teg Jorgensen, barely lasts the year. And Jorgerson drifts out of the picture completely. and in comes Bezos. Tell us about who Bezos is.

Well, so Miguel Bezos is such an important figure, by the way, in Jeff Bezos's life. I love that he's Latin. He's Latin. Everyone is slagging off Latin immigration, that it is actually a Latin man who saves the day for Abazard. Well, look, you know, the second father is charismatic. He's everything kind of that Ted isn't. Ted's quite straight and dry. And Miguel is a Cuban immigrant, you know, with big dreams.

and he is one of those people who has that real Cuban success stories. He comes to America alone as a teenager, fleeing the revolution, worked his way through university, became an engineer exon. Marius Jacqueline adopts her four-year-old son and then gives him his name, Jeff Bezos. And I've seen an interview to Jeff Bezos, who says, as far as he's concerned, Mike is his real father. Because Miguel takes the name Mike. Mike is his only father, his real father. And there's a really, actually, if you want to waste a couple of hours, there's a very fine news report, you can find it, where his actual birth father, who doesn't know Jeff Bezos is a multi-billionaire, somebody finds him and says, do you know that your son is Jeff Bezos?

And he just sort of discovers it, and he's living quite a poverty-stricken life, you know, and doesn't know about it. But anyway, so Mike Bezos is his role model. And then he spends his summer on his grandfather's ranch in Texas. Again, that doesn't sound hard up. Have you got a granddad with a fancy Raj? Well, you know, Miguel opens the world to Jeff. You know, they have financial stability after having a really tricky start with his very young mother and absent father. And he spends his time on the ranch and he, you know, learns to do work with his hands, but also in the shadow.

Let's not forget. It's not your regular rancher. Regional director of the American Atomic Energy Commission, by the way. Okay. It's like, you know, a man with a ranch on the side. So this is the man who teaches Jeff Bezos, self-reliance, because he has to go and muck out the horses. But also, you know, he's inside the Cold War Science and Defense Machine. Even by osmosis, you know, he's got family members who are not just working for Regional Director of the American Atomic Energy Commission.

The boy is, though, I mean, there's no two ways about this, is a genius. because he's formidably clever. There is this great story about him as a toddler. He takes his cot apart with a screwdriver. I love it. Because he wants to see how it works. There is a garage in this.

You'll be pleased. It actually is. The toddler taking his cot apart with the screwdriver slightly sounds like Washington with the cherry tree. It sounds like already a myth made up about the child. He's still alive. Well, I mean, you know what? It's possible.

it's one of those stories that's replicated in biographies, some of which are complementary and some are not. He does do garage as laboratory because, you know, he sort of tinkers around with things in his garage. He has the space to do that. High school valedictorian ends up going to Princeton. He wants to be a physicist, but he runs into people who are simply better at physics than he is, and he says, well, I'm not going to be a phys. If I'm not going to be the best one, I'm not going to do that. So he switches to electrical engineering and computer science instead. And then like so, many of the clever, clever people at this time, you follow the money and he goes to Wall Street. And he becomes a senior vice president by his early 30s. So this is a path of wealth, security,

safety, all of the things that Miguel has kind of shown him that you work for. But also brilliance and entrepreneurial and financial notes. Yeah. And it's a comfortable, you know what, it's a super highway. Lots of people have gone on this highway. They've done it. But in 1994, he reads. a single statistic that detonates his life plan. And it is that the use of the internet is growing at 2,300% a year. So just, I mean, let me say that again. In 1994, use of the internet was growing at 2,300% a year. So he quits. And he and his now famous wife, McKenzie, who writes the first business plan and keeps the first accounts, drives across the country all the way to Seattle.

and he writes the plan the way. He starts an online bookshop in a rented house and he runs it out of a wait for it. The garage! This is a garage. This is where I have to tell my East Indy Company parallel because Thomas Smyth, who's the man that founds the East Indy Company,

for the first 10 years at the East Indy Company, runs it out of his attic. It's in his own house as well. Really? Literally. Oh, that's funny. The first thing is the East Indy Company. Yep.

Oh, that's funny. Many different levels, same idea. I've often wondered why books. And, you know, the reason given is because there are more titles than any physical shop on planet Earth could ever stop. But a computer can hold all of it. And he's decided, well, that's what I'm going to do. He says, I'm going to call it Amazon after the biggest river in the world because he's not thinking about books. He's kind of thinking about everything. You know, this motto that he scrolls into the company's bones is get big, fast,

you know? I got a little insight here. Bizarrely, maybe rather than probably, I spent quite a bit of time in Seattle, because we have a Jai Portage Festival satellite there, which you find out of it was brought there by Mimi Gates, who was Bill's stepmother, but that's a different story. But one of the things that's famous about Seattle is it's got one of the very best

independent bookshops in America, which is called the Elliot Bay Book Company. And the guy that runs that, Rick Samerson, says that Bezos never came into the bookshop, because he never, ever reads. But McKenzie does. McKenzie's a big reader, is in there every week. That's very, but he recognises that there is money to be

But you know what? He doesn't make it immediately because for years there's no profit in this business. He pours every penny bag and he drives prices down. And this is the model. You drive prices down. You widen the range and come on over here if you think you want to compete with a shop that is happy not to make money for a while and will have every title you could possibly want. It's a real disaster for many bookshops because how do they compete with that? Bezos works out that the vast bank of computers, Amazon built to run its shop, can be rented out by the hour to everyone else. And he goes from selling shops to owning the ground the digital world stands on. The toll booth again. The road belongs to him.

And again, there's East Undercompany parallel there because the East Indic Company makes itself established by force. It is a mercenary outfit very quickly. After Battle of Placie, it becomes this huge rental of mercenary services. and all the local rulers, first of all in the Carnatic and then in North India, use the East India Company's army as a mercenary outfit. So this is the idea that, again, that you can rent something out endlessly, whatever the key thing of the moment is. Yeah, well, I mean, I don't know whether the parallel goes even further.

Did the East India Company ever buy out newspapers or own newspapers? It banned newspapers. The banned newspapers, and it's set fire to printing presses. I know. But Bezos isn't doing that. I mean, you know, he ends up buying the Washington. Post with private money. He ends up buying a rocket company, Blue Origin. And we'll discuss a space race in a little while when we bring on Mr. Musk. Alon Musk. Yeah. But just before we leave

the Jeff Bezos story, I should say something about McKenzie, because I find her really fascinating. So they divorced in 2019, and it was the largest divorce settlement in human history. She received about a quarter of the couple's Amazon stock, which was worth $38 billion at the time. she's the, you know, she is the richest woman in the world. Desos keeps voting control over the shares, but she has the money. And the next thing that she did, I think makes her pretty extraordinary. She signs a giving pledge and starts giving all the money away at extraordinary speed, billions and billions of dollars in unrestricted grants to charities.

And unrestricted grants are brilliant because what they do is they say, you know what, I'm not going to tell you what to do with this money. It's not I want you to build a hospital or an orphanage. you do you. You know what you need to do on the ground. This is unrestricted. If you want to spend it on something as unfashionable as, you know, sanitation, go ahead and do it. If you want to do it on, you know, collecting data, go and do that. It's unrestricted. And it makes her sort of the queen of mega philanthropy and one of the most significant donors of all time. I've got another little Easter DeC Company, Amazon parallel, before we move on to this one. There is this moment in the 7th, I think it's 1740s, when the East India Company has not paid its rental on the land for Madras, which it had rented from the Mughal governor of the Carnatic, the Nawab. And so he realizes at some point that he hasn't got his rental money. And so he rides with something extraordinary, like 50,000 cavalry and just surrounds the young city of Madras, which at that point is only a few thousand people and set up.

hasn't got any military to match it. And he expects the company to send out some soldiers and fight him. Instead, it sends out one man, this very clever Italian Nicola Manucci, who tells the story in this book. He speaks perfect Persian, and he goes up to the Noir, he seeks an audience, and he says, you know, you can massacre us all. We've got a handful of cannon here. There's no contest in military terms.

But we will just go after this, and we will move our business. from the Carnatic, up the coast to one of your rivals, and they will become rich from our trade. It's their craftsmen whose goods we'll sell. It's the taxes that we pay to them, which will finance their treasury. It's their ships that we'll use for moving things up and down the coast, and you will be poorer as a result.

And it's this idea that a company can just choose where it's going to plonk itself and negotiate, use that. as leverage to negotiate the best possible rates for itself, which is why everyone's ended up in Ireland at the moment. Right. Exactly. And everyone will fall in line because they're too big. You know, there's another parallel. I thought I was all very, very clever by thinking, oh, you know, this parallel with big tech companies and the old sort of founding members of huge empires that we have talked about. But we're not the first, actually, to do this Amazon, East India company parallel, because in 2020, when Bezos revealed that Amazon was

going to invest one billion dollars in India, local. sellers protested against Amazon's monopoly and they all held up signs saying second version of East India Company. So these are workers, you know, often subsistence workers and local sellers saying, this is happening all over again. Anyway, look, we're going to take a break. And after the break, we're going to be talking about our final tech emperor for today, at least, Elon Musk, if you do like this, sort of towing and throwing between the past and the present, let's know we might do the same for others. I want more already.

I'm so excited by this. I know, it's good, isn't it? It was actually, it was very, very exciting to work on this and do all the reading for this. We will talk about Elon Musk. What does he have in common with Cecil Rhodes? Join us after the break. Welcome back. So in this half, shall we talk about Elon of Musk? Let's do it. Let's do it. Okay. Born in Pretoria, South Africa, June 1971. And the first thing to say is, because he doesn't often say it, he wasn't a poor child. This isn't a poor background, okay? The family was wealthy.

Has he claimed that he's poor? Well, I think it's the kind of, you know, if it's a direct quote, I don't know about it. But it is often the thing that's wound around these guys that they were, you know, sort of penniless nerds who suddenly, you know, had the brilliant idea and became enormously wealthy. But the background of Elon Musk is that his father was an engineer and property developer. and he had a share in the output of emerald mines. So, you know, big house, planes, fast cars. Shares in emerald mines, sounds good. We can all do with that, yeah.

It's not eating gruel, is it? And coming up with brilliant ideas. And this is apartheid South Africa, and they're growing up in a white suburb. So it's, you know, insulated, it is comfortable. That is not to say it's a happy childhood. I'm not saying that at all, because if you read any newspapers or profiles,

you'll know that this is a complex. complicated family. His parents divorced when he was about nine years old, and for a while he chose to live with his father, a decision which he has openly said he regretted eventually. It wasn't a happy marriage. It just wasn't. And, you know, Musk and his younger brother, Kimball, who's quite a character, actually, look up Kimball Musk, if you have a chance. He's always wearing a Stetson as far as I can make out. They decide to live with their dad. And Elon is small, he's bookish. He likes Lord of the Rings, doesn't he? obsessively likes Lord of the Rings and science fiction and his encyclopedia. And actually, Elon was bullied quite badly. And at one point he's beaten so severely that he's taken to hospital. And there's a detail here that the family still argues about. The father's account of why the beating happened is different from Elon. Elon Musk, the way he tells it, or the way it has been told by those close to him,

is that he was bullied because he was nerd and put into hospital. Errol has suggested that beating wasn't random and it followed some kind of incident in which one of the boys had lost his father to suicide and Elon said something a bit shit to him and it kicked off from there. We don't know. We don't know. But we do know that Elon Musk was a brilliant child. And at just 10 years of age, he teaches himself to program from a manual. And at 12, he writes a little video game called Blaster. And he sells it to a magazine for a few hundred dollars. I mean, this is you. you know, a little kid doing big ideas and also doing business at a very, very young age. At 17, Elon leaves South Africa. He does not want to be conscripted into the army of the apartheid state. And he comes out against apartheid at this point, doesn't he? He does. Whatever we think about some of his other racial ideas and his tweets would lead us to believe that he believes, he's firmly against apartheid at this point. And he has a Canadian mother so he can claim a Canadian

passport. And he does. He moves to Queen's University in Canada and then makes a transfer across to the University of Pennsylvania where he takes a degree in physics and economics. So he's an immigrant to America. This is the important point. And then, you know, there's this famous two days, the two-day story of Elon Musk. It's extraordinary. In 1995, he's accepted to do a doctorate at Stanford in California right in the heart of the valley, right? You know, that sort of Silicon Valley. That sort of Silicon Valley, cauldron that is bubbling around him. And he lasts on his doctorate for two days. And then he walks out because he thinks, actually, you know what, this is kind of beneath me. The internet is about to change the world. And I'm not going to be watching this from a lecture hall. So he leaves.

So with his Stetson wearing brother Kimball, who's also around at this point, he builds a company called Zip 2. It's all about city guides and maps for newspapers, putting themselves online. It's not particularly glamorous, and it's quite hard. He sleeps in the office, he showers in the gym, all that sort of stuff, codes through the night. And there's one very nice detailed impress investors. He builds a big plastic shell around a very ordinary computer to make it look bigger because he wants to impress his potential investors with the idea that Zip 2 is powered

by some huge, massive computer. So the showman is there from the start along with the engineer. Yeah, and you know, sort of as the showman, you can understand. why it's important and exciting for this story to be woven around these characters. You know, garage, bootstraps, gruel, you know. More. Seed money for, you know, his first company. Because Elon says, you know, he raised it himself from outside investors.

His dad, it has to be said, not entirely helpful to Elon throughout his life. It says, you know, he put money in two. And, you know, he says, yes, okay. maybe he did. The point is that, you know, this is the same thing as Bill Gates, I suppose, that you've got this two track of reality. You've got the one where the brilliant nerd charms, you know, the angel investor. And the other one is, you know, actually they were born into money and understood the language of money and had contacts with money. So I mean, I'll just, I'll just leave it there. What happened to Zip 2, though, Willie?

Zip 2 is the first big sort of moment when Elon cashes in. He sells it in 1999 to Compact computers for around $300 million and his share is a cool $22 million and he does the thing that defines him he doesn't stop, he takes almost all of it

and pulls into the next bet which is an online bank called wait for it, x.com X.com and in 2000, X.com merges with a rival run by a young man you may have heard of Peter Thiel and then

emerged company becomes PayPal. And out of that, you know, you've got this group of people, the so-called PayPal Mafia, who go on to build or fund what feels like half of Silicon Valley. And Musk Musk is actually pushed out, isn't he? He is. They fall out big style. He's pushed out as chief executive in a boardroom coup. While he's on the plane on his way to his honeymoon, very nice strategic detail. That's how you do it. I mean, it's such an out, okay. But, you know, he keeps his stake. And when eBay buys PayPal in 2002, he makes major money, seriously, seriously rich from that. So after that PayPal marriage breaks up, hits the dirt, Musk goes his own way,

and he does this unthinkable thing. He takes this massive payout and bets the lot. Again, this is a thing that Musk does. And, you know, you know this stuff. He creates rockets. He creates cars. He establishes SpaceX, you know, buys Twitter. you know, all of this kind of stuff then comes later.

And again, this resonates with you, doesn't it, Willie? Because you're seeing parallels with another time and another person. So what I'm thinking of is that picture from Trump's inauguration when you've got all these guys all lined up in the front row. And again, this is another East India company thing that's very, very strong. Because when we think of the East India Company, if we think about it at all, it's very much toppling governments in India. so they topple the moguls and the Marathas and the Sikhs and so on. What we don't understand so much is how they're undermining or certainly influencing the body politic at home. Yeah.

Within a century of East India Company being founded in, I think 1670, about 70 years in, they're having to renew their contract. And the governor of the East India Company goes to the Tower of London because he's caught handing brown paper envelopes for the cash to MPs, like Mohammed al-Faid. And the East City Company realizes at this point that it's got to play its cards more carefully and it kind of invents corporate lobbying. It is the first corporation to realize that to run a corporation successfully you've got to have control in Parliament

and in order to control the Parliament, what you do, you pay for the election of MPs and you give donations. And so in a sense, the East Indy Company's most toxic legacy is this idea that... Big money buys politics. And it buys politics. And just to give it.

give you the scale of it, these things also puts its own people into politics. So they come back, these guys go out at 16. They make a fortune in India, looting India. They come back at 30. They go straight in and buy Rottenborough and a large house in Yorkshire or Shropshire or wherever it is. And by 1780, one third of the MPs in Parliament

are ex East India Company men. Four-fifths of the MPs in Parliament have East India Company shares. And this mysterious alchemy begins to take place which we silty today and which we saw effectively in that front row in Trump's inauguration, whereby the interests of corporation become mysteriously the interests of the state. And just one final thought, the ExxonMobil, the old Bush administration. This is not new with Trump and Silicon Valley. If you look at the reasons for the invasion of Iraq and the relationship between big oil and the Bush family, there is the interest of ExxonMobil to, which donates the campaign money for half of the Republican Party, which is deeply embroiled in the whole business of Iraq. We would not have gone to Iraq war without that.

Well, and just again, talking about Musk and political influence and where those lines have been so completely blurred. He doesn't just own his own companies. He's got a rocket program that the American government uses for space research. He owns a satellite network, Starlink, that has an impact on the course of the war in Ukraine, certainly when he decides to turn it on and off. Yeah.

Twitter I mentioned, which is now X, you know, the public square. So you've got sort of discourse as well. And the whole question of the algorithms promoting some views and suppressing others. All of that. And so, and you know, then the culmination of that is although, you know, so the tech boroughs in that picture. One person also, maybe we should do a little parallel where there's Cecil Rhodes, not just, you know, there's sort of African links,

but their approach to the world. I mean, just remind us, first of all, Willie, who Cecil Rhodes was. So Cecil Rhodes is someone that it's really astonishing we haven't done a whole series on yet because he's a crucial figure. Fascinating. And again, we are taught to think of most of history

and particularly the business of imperial expansion as being about the nation state. You know, Britain sends off a fleet to such and such a place and conquers it. In reality, a lot of it is corporate. As we've seen in some of our recent episodes, you have not just the East India Company, but you have the Africa Company,

which does slaving. You have the Hudson Bay Company, the Rhode Island Company, the Virginia Company, which are the first corporate colonizers of much of the American coast. And Rhodes is later than that. Rhodes is 19th century. But he is someone who puts the same idea of corporate money into expansion in Africa. And he's escaping a tyrannical father, emigrates South Africa at the age of 17. He enters a diamond trade as a teenager.

And he eventually finds the De Beers Diamond Company in 1888. So these are these young, sort of prodigious little talents who are, you know, again, maybe sort of chased around by tyrannical fathers. But they have, you know, they have a great deal of Naos and the connections. They suddenly do. To suddenly fly off on their own. Anyway, he eventually, of course, he becomes the most powerful agent of British imperialism in Africa. And he uses his fortune to help the state grand. Abland, Resources and Labour.

He becomes a member from our Kipling series. He's a great friend of Kipling. Kipling doesn't go back to India for a while because he's got his own house given to him by roads in South Africa. And eventually he becomes the Prime Minister of the Cape Colony and founds Rhodesia. And he plans to build a rail and telegraph line

from Cape Town to Cairo to connect all the British African colonies. And of course, it's still one legacy of that, is the Rhodes Scholarships which continue, which include people like Bill Clinton, who's a Rhodes Scholar. Yeah. He has these very racist ideas, that there is a white race

who've got to be encouraged to take over the world and to guide it through the next. He believes that imperialism is something benign, which will save the world. But again,

you know, these are ideas. So what are you, what are you thinking of with the parallel with Musk? I'll tell you. So, I mean, you know,

Rhodes is telegraph line. To me is a bit like Starlink. Okay. So, you know, you own communications, you know, very good. You know,

like that communications. and heavily funded by and heavily relied upon by a state, by a defence apparatus. And you can see why the British would really rely on Rhodes' lines and why Starlink is so important to others. Also, you know, Rhodes believed that extending British rule across the entire globe was in the best interests of humanity. And that kind of largesse speaking, that's Musk all over. Does Musk want to save humanity? He wants to save humanity because he wants to colonise Mars, saving humanity from lethargy and destruction. Okay, so that's where he's coming from.

You know, that's what we're going to do. Rhodes famously declared that pure philanthropy is all well in its own way, but philanthropy plus 5% is a good deal better. It's a great quote. Isn't it? Let me say it again. Pure philanthropy is all well and good, but philanthropy plus 5% is a good deal better. And, you know, some may say Musk's follows a similar blueprint.

You know, this obsession with space exploration to save humanity. is also, by the way, enriching him billions of dollars in taxpayers, you know, funding for SpaceX and government contracts. And I suppose, I mean, look at their ultimate desires. So there is this story that's attributed to Rhodes that once he was looking up at the night sky and Willie, he was in tatters of despair. Why? Because he couldn't colonize them. And he lamented these vast worlds that will forever be out of reach, if I could. I would annex them.

Now, you know, over a century later, Mosque is going up there as fast as he could. So, you know, there is something, I think. Anyta, was that quote definitely by Rhodes? Well, I mean, the quote was given to journalist W.T. Steed, who we think a lot of, who wrote the book, The Last Will and Testament of Cecil Rhodes in 1902.

I mean, he died on the Titanic, so we can't ask or interrogate that any further. But, you know, W.T. Steed, let's say yes. Let's say yes. So, you know, this idea of colonising space. You know, these are the new colonial projects, if you like. Is it feasible? Are we heading towards that world of the avatar where you've got mining companies landing in?

They think so. I mean, like Musk said in a 2014 interview, you know, that my rough guess is that for half a million dollars, there are enough people that could afford to go and would want to go, but it's not going to be, you know, a vacation jaunt. It's going to be saving up all your money, selling all your stuff. like when people move to the American colonies. I mean, he said it, word for word. This is the new project. By the way, we've got in our second episode,

the Empire of AI, which is a different kind of colonialism that we're going to be talking about, not of the stars that roads couldn't quite reach or of lands, but of thoughts, ideas and influence. So, I mean, do join us. We've got an excellent, excellent guest for that. Can we talk about one other thing,

which I really want your take on, because I started it off the podcast with it. You know, that fabulous quote of not having a body, not having a soul, and not having accountability. This is the Lord Chancellor. And what you didn't say, which is very nice, is that it's in Westminster Hall at the beginning of the impeachment of Warren Hastings. And he stands up at the bar. Warren Hastings is standing there about to be impeached. And he says, corporations have neither bodies to be punished nor souls to be condemned. They therefore do as they like.

You do that very well. 1786, is that? Yeah. So how does it all come crushing down with the East India Company? Do you see any parallels between what we're seeing today and what happened back then? So obviously there are a million parallels. But the crucial point, as you say, is how did the East India Company end up being taken over by the state rather than the other way around? because at this point, when you've got a third of the MPs as East India Company ex-employees

and four-fifths of Parliament possessing East India Company shares and promoting its interests, it's the tail wagging the dog that what the East India Company wants, the East India Company can get in Parliament, and it can push through legislation decided by the directors, and it can become law. Now, how does that move to a situation where, in the end, in 1858, the East India companies wound up and the Times says with less fuss than a regional railway bankruptcy. And the answer is extraordinary greed and the mistakes that this generates.

And in this particular case, there is a famine in India in 1770. Now, this is not unusual because India in the pre-modern age has numerous famines because monsoons occasionally fail. This year, in fact, looks like a year that the monsoon is going to be. inadequate in India and this will lead to hardship but it won't lead to starvation because people have put grain aside for exactly this occasion

and this has always been the Indian way that you have responsible kings who build granaries and they put the grain in in fat years and then you take it out and give it to people or sell it in lean years. The East City Company doesn't do this and there's a massive

death half a million people die but they still send their sepoys out to gather the full tax revenue that they will need to make their profits. And they report at the annual general meeting that full taxes have been gathered by force, despite the famine, and the shareholders at the AGM vote themselves an increased dividend from 10 to 12.5%. The next year, of course, there's nothing. And so when the tax collectors go out, they can hang as many people as they like,

but there's no more money because they've just drained it all. And the East India Company cannot pay its bills. And in a few months, one bank after another collapses like Domino's. First of all, it's the Air Bank in Scotland. Sixteen other banks go down. And in the end, the East Indy Company is too big to fail because it is the biggest employer in Britain and they cannot let it fail.

So what happens is that the government, after a lot of shilling and shallying, buys a 51% share in 1784. It's something called the Regulating Act. And it becomes 51% owned by the British government. therefore, from that point, it becomes a state interest. And when the state wants to finally kill it dead, which decides to do in 1858 after the Great Uprising,

the 1857 Indian Mutiny that we did a whole series on, they can do it simply because they've got the votes in Parliament. But whether this lot will be so easily crushed is another story altogether. I mean, you'll use the R word. And, you know, at the time of recording, I mean, I won't give you the figure of how much Elon Musk is worth, because it fluctuates wildly. You know, he was a trillionaire when his company went public.

But we, you know, we'll keep an eye on it. But then I think it went sort of down quite a lot. I don't know where it will be when you're listening to this. So I think, you know, I think regulation might be the thing that makes the difference even here. You know, you had something that was sort of, you know, hugely inflated, colossal and then collapsing. And then, you know, you have a state come in and say, actually too many people are involved, too many people are employed, we rely on it too much, so we will take it and regulate it. And that is an argument that it's been made even now, and they sort of, you know, the tech,

the aristocrats, you know, of technology. Look at the EU doing its arm wrestling with the tech pros today about, you know, the whole question of whether they go to let X operate the way it is at the moment and so on, the safety measures for children and metta and all this stuff. Yeah. So that wrestling is beginning, but it's tending to happen in Europe rather than America. You could argue because they're all sitting in the front row with the tramp on speed dial. Well, look, it's been such a fun conversation.

Thank you so much for listening and watching and letting us do these little sort of flights of fancy from time to time. Well, thank you, Anita, for digging all these gems up. It's wonderful. If you like, if you want more, we can do more. Honestly, I was absolutely doing backstroke in the most extraordinary stories. We're really interested to hear what you think about the subject. If you're a member, you can join in the conversation and our chat community on Discord sign up today.

Following the link in the description and our next episode, Outsa Corka, it's about the Empire of AI with Karen Howe. Early Access for Club members. It is really a brilliant episode. Till the next time we meet, it's goodbye from me, Anita Arnamb. And goodbye from me, William Durember.