Factually! with Adam Conover - Inside Elon's Twitter Takeover with Ryan Mac and Kate Conger

Episode Date: November 13, 2024

Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter was an unmitigated catastrophe on multiple fronts, but it’s hard to ignore how it ultimately became a powerful tool in helping Donald Trump get elected. Was this Musk's plan all along back in 2022, or just another example of his infantile, buffoonish behavior with no real consequences? In this episode, recorded before the election, Adam sits down with New York Times technology reporters Kate Conger and Ryan Mac, authors of Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter, to explore Musk's disastrous acquisition and its unexpected role in shaping American politics. Find Ryan and Kate's book at factuallypod.com/booksSUPPORT THE SHOW ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/adamconoverSEE ADAM ON TOUR: https://www.adamconover.net/tourdates/SUBSCRIBE to and RATE Factually! on:» Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/factually-with-adam-conover/id1463460577» Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0fK8WJw4ffMc2NWydBlDyJAbout Headgum: Headgum is an LA & NY-based podcast network creating premium podcasts with the funniest, most engaging voices in comedy to achieve one goal: Making our audience and ourselves laugh. Listen to our shows at https://www.headgum.com.» SUBSCRIBE to Headgum: https://www.youtube.com/c/HeadGum?sub_confirmation=1» FOLLOW us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/headgum» FOLLOW us on Instagram: https://instagram.com/headgum/» FOLLOW us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@headgum» Advertise on Factually! via Gumball.fmSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is a HeadGum Podcast. Hello and welcome to Factually, I'm Adam Conover. Thank you so much for joining me on the show again. We have a fascinating interview for you today, but I wanna tell you something about it before we get into it. See, a couple weeks back, I interviewed two incredible journalists on the show, Ryan Mack and Kate Conger,

about their new book, Character Limit, How Elon Must Destroy Twitter. As you all know, I am fascinated by Elon, all the incomprehensible and sometimes very stupid business decisions that he makes. And we had a really fascinating conversation breaking down the twists and turns of Elon's purchase of Twitter. Here's the problem. We recorded this interview before the election, and as a result, the tone and subject matter is a little bit different than what I would have asked had we talked about this after the election,

because since the election happened, we now know that Elon buying Twitter wasn't actually as stupid of a move as I thought it was initially, because Elon was able to use Twitter, or what he now calls X, to get Donald Trump elected, his best friend, and that means that he is about to have billions of dollars in government cash

Funneled directly towards him. Oh, and by the way, he's also gonna help run the United States government So the way we talk about Elon in this interview is not really reflective of what I think of the man today However, the interview again was really fascinating Ryan and Kate have so much insight about Elon, what makes him tick, why he purchased Twitter, and we do get into the politics as the interview goes on and talk about him using the site as a political weapon. So with that proviso, I know you're gonna love this interview.

Before we get into it, I wanna remind you that if you wanna support the show, you can do so on Patreon, patreon.com slash Adam Conover, five bucks a a month gets you every episode of the show ad free. And I am on tour right now coming up soon. You can see me in Batavia, Illinois, San Francisco, California, and a whole bunch of other great cities, Toronto, a bunch of other ones. Head to adamconover.net for all those tickets and tour dates. And now let's get to this interview with Kate Conger and Ryan Mack.

Ryan and Kate, thank you so much for being on the show. Thanks for having us. Honestly, on this channel, we talk about Elon Musk too much. He's too much fun to talk about. I've never heard of him. People, whenever we talk about him, people click and he makes me mad, I make a video, people click. This is my first time talking to people who have written a book on the motherfucker. So I'm very excited to talk to you guys

What like first of all? News about Elon Musk moves so fast How do you even approach putting it in a book which has to it has a deadline and like goes to print etc So we thought a lot about the story that we wanted to tell before really diving in. We did a lot of kind of outlining and storyboarding in advance to really think about what fit within this narrative and what didn't. But the final act of the book was sort of happening as we were writing, and it was a constant anxiety of what news is going to drop tomorrow that we have to find a way to

squeeze in and are we gonna add another chapter? And another not just dark maga now. He's dark gothic maga. That's his he updated his fucking slogan. Sorry keep going Yeah So the the final section and figuring out where we were gonna cut this story off and what we were gonna include That I think was maybe one of the more stressful parts of the writing process Yeah, I think our book was so confined though. It's it's the Twitter deal, right? And so there's a beginning, a middle and an end to it. And then there's like all these like spin offs.

You could go off and like explore him like and his baby mama's and his problems with the kids, which is in the book. And like, but it was all centered around this this larger event. So it was kind of nice, it was kind of confined. And then the end of the book, like Kate talked about, is him meeting with Trump. So then you can kind of see the progression of everything that happens.

It's like the end of season one cliffhanger. Sure. You've got him that far, now he's met with Trump. And then more stuff is gonna happen later, but you've got a nice ending. I mean, Elon's purchase of Twitter seems in many ways like this real inflection point for him and for the internet and for the broader culture. It was really to me the moment where like the entire public sort of clocked.

Hold on a second. Maybe the story this guy is telling about himself is like a little bit off or there's something strange going on here. What drew you to it as a topic? We you know, I've I've reported on Elon for a long time. It probably started in earnest in like 2017 2018 at BuzzFeed News and now we're at both the New York Times. We were just covering him pretty regularly.

We started doing the stories on the takeover or I mean the deal when he when he was rumored to be buying up shares and then eventually buying the company. And, you know, we just progressed into this daily rhythm of writing multiple stories on him a day on this takeover. It was insane. I mean, I think we've done like there were days we do three or four stories. Wow. You know, just the stuff we were hearing on the takeover and what was going on. And like all our reporting couldn't even fit into the pages of the New York Times.

Wow. So we decided, you know, that's, this is the moment we have to do a book. There's so much we're hearing, so much we can't confirm in the moment. We gotta come back to it, that it just made sense for us to put this thing together. And Twitter's always been such a canary in the coal mine

when it comes to online speech. It's easy to forget that it's a deeply unpopular platform. Right? It's like. Even the people who use it don't like it. Snapchat is far more widely used than Twitter. We never think about what's going on on that platform. Right?

Yeah. But it, everything that happens on Twitter ends up happening months or years later on other social media platforms. And so it's always been a really interesting spot to cover, especially if you're interested in online conversation and how to moderate that and what sorts of movements are starting online. Twitter has been kind of the beginning of that.

And then it spreads to bigger social networks. And so I was really interested in the political influence that Twitter had despite being so small and always found that fascinating. And I think that was one of the things that we saw that really drew Elon to it. He saw the influence, he found a way to tap in and dictate broader conversation from the platform. And so it was just a really interesting kind of step jump in his own power and influence, especially in politics. Yeah, it's interesting that, I mean,

I made fun of him a lot on this channel for like the deal being a money loser, at least at the moment I made the video, but he did it in order to gain power, right? Is that your contention? Yes and no. I feel like he in some ways bumbled into it. It was his favorite thing in the world.

I mean, we chronicle his progression and use of it through the years. And like a decade ago when he first joined it, he like hated it. Like he was tweeting very normie things. He was like, I'm at the ice rink with my kids and like I'm hanging with Kanye at the SpaceX factory. I mean, that's not very normie, but he he like didn't grasp like the purpose of the platform.

And at one point he was like, I don't know if I can do this anymore. And then like slowly through the years, he starts to realize like the power of it, that he can reach his fans directly, that he can push back on the media, that he can shitpost essentially at all hours of the day. And he comes to love it. And so by the time we get to him making the offer, it's his favorite place in the world. You know, in a way that a billionaire might buy

a super yacht or the Clippers or an island or whatever, whatever He bought his favorite thing and you know, he had enough money to do so and so we approach it from that first, I don't there wasn't like a 3d chess plan to be like if I buy Twitter I can then influence the election a few years later But certainly he's get he's gained a lot of power since then by running the platform, even in spite of the financial issues. I like the comparison to the Clippers to like a billionaire like Steve Ballmer.

And you know, Steve Ballmer often to me seems like the happiest billionaire in the world. Like he's just, he did Microsoft, whatever, maybe he's a good guy, maybe he's a bad guy, I don't know. He's just running a fucking basketball team. Like, yeah! You know, that guy. I don't know, he's just running a fucking basketball team. Like, yeah! You know, that energy. His arena, yeah. Yeah, his energy found the right home.

You know, like he used to chant developers, developers, now he chants clippers, clippers. Great. Good for Steve. Um, is it really that, was it that energy that brought Elon into it? Like just the enthusiasm for he just he just wanted to buy the roller rink or what? It really is. And, you know, he said in the beginning that he didn't care about the finances of the deal. And obviously, it's it's brought pressure to him since then. And he started to worry about how much money the company loses.

But, you know, I think it was just his favorite place to be. And I mean, you see it. He spends all of his time on X now. If turn on notifications for his posts your phone is buzzing all day all night and you know I think he also really objected to the way the company was being run by its former management he didn't agree with a lot of the content moderation decisions and kind of wanted to get in there and put his thumb on the scale. Is that the thing that like triggered him into doing it was content moderation? Like, because I remember being sort of a slow roll of him being, I'm thinking about buying Twitter and I mean,

he's clearly the kind of guy who operates by whim and then his whim starts rolling downhill and picking up speed and picking up its own force, but was it spurred by content moderation initially? It was one of the big concerns that he had. He was really outspoken about objecting to the ban of President Trump's account when that happened. And then right before he came in and made the offer to buy Twitter was when Twitter banned the Babylon Bee, which is like a right-wing satirical site that he finds really funny. And there's text messages that he was exchanging with one of his ex-wives at the time talking

about, you know, he should buy Twitter to bring back the bee. And it sounds so silly, but one of the first things he said to Twitter employees when he came into the company that night, when he acquired it, was that he wanted to reinstate the Babylon Bee's account. So it is these really kind of small, seemingly inconsequential content moderation decisions that really kind of needled him and got under his skin. I mean, the Babylon Bee is like, I understand it's popular in conservative circles, but it's just an onion ripoff website,

of which there are dozens on the internet. There's like the hard times, there's reductress, there's like a model that like a bunch of, so just to, and the website still existed. He still could have gone, I'm sure they had a mailing list. He was just mad that he couldn't see the tweets from his favorite right wing humor publication. I guess comedy really does have power.

We debate that a lot in comedy. But I guess comedy really does influence the world. Yeah. That's insane. I mean, how much was it, you said he sort of bumbled into it. And I remember that being a big part of the narrative that he said he was gonna do it and people started egging him on.

And then he, well, you'll tell me the real version. My memory is he made an offer, then tried to back out and then Twitter forced him to take it. So let's rewind a little bit, which is initially he quietly was buying stock in the company without telling anyone. And he blew past this disclosure rule that you have with the SEC, which once you hit a 5% threshold, you have to disclose your ownership stake.

Well, he didn't do that and amassed about a 9% stake in the company before he went public and was like, you know, I've become a large shareholder in Twitter. I love the platform and I bought all these all these shares. And so when that happened Twitter's board freaked out They thought you know, what's the best way we can wrangle him a little bit? So let's offer him a board seat. They offer him a board seat. He goes back and forth. He thinks it's a it's a good idea Why do they freak out like he owns a bunch of stock?

Just break down for me what the threat is to them at that point. Well, so they had had an activist investor in the stock, maybe two years prior to this, who came in and tried to force out Jack Dorsey, who was the CEO at the time. I kind of remember this. So it was like, they had just kind of been burned

by that experience and they had spent the next year in change appeasing that investor and trying to gently edge him off the board and limit his influence in the company. So they had just kind of cleared the slate on that. And then lo and behold, they have another activist coming in and it's just like, oh my god, we don't want to go through this again.

Or potential activists, but more of a chaos agent, right? You don't know what this guy is going to do. He pops off at any hour on Twitter. You know, what if we bring him in and make him our friend, you know? Right. He can be one of 10 or so voices on the board. Make him feel important. Make him feel important, make him feel listened to.

We got this, you know, he's gonna be our guy. And within like, so that gets announced. And then within a couple days of that, he's already arguing with the CEO. He is unhappy with the direction of product launches, with content moderation decisions, you name it. He's in the CEO, Parag Agarwal's DMs or text messages and just lighting them up.

And at one point he's just like, you know, fuck this. Like, I don't need to be on the board. I'm just going to buy the whole company and that's when you get the the kind of Start of the whole thing. So at this point Twitter's a public company with like a stock ticker and I'm right like it's that's That's pretty rare isn't it for someone to buy a public company and take it private? Like that's one of the things that's, I'm not a bearish in this world. It's incredibly rare. And I think, you know.

For an individual to do that. For an individual to do this. Yeah, I mean, these kinds of acquisitions may be a private equity firm, but even then, I mean, Twitter's huge. And so, you know, he is probably the only person in the world that has the wealth to pull this off and also the interest

I mean, this is not a company that was profitable by any means and so, you know Usually these kinds of acquisition targets are companies where an investor looks at it and says okay I can squeeze some money out of this right and he was like, I don't care about the money at all I just want to own the thing. Yeah, he's not trying to flip the house He's trying to like overpay for his dream house for like I want I just want this fucking thing right right right So you know it was just this thing of like oh, I want to own the thing I don't really care how much I pay for it. I don't really care if I earn money down the road I'm just going to acquire it and and so this deal is completely unprecedented in so many different ways

The the thing we have we compare it to in the book is Jeff Bezos buying The Washington Post, which is in the news now. But Jeff Bezos paid 250 million dollars for the post, roughly. I mean, 44 billion dollars is many magnitudes, like larger than that. And it is it is mind boggling when you look at the numbers and like how how he arrived at that number, which is 54.20 a share. The weed joke is in there.

Yeah, and that he, I mean, a big theme of the book is wealth inequality, how someone could amass this much wealth and then on a whim decide to buy a major social platform. Right, I mean, buying a newspaper is sort of a classic billionaire thing to do of like, you know, there's a local billionaire in LA bought the LA Times is a very similar story to Bezos with the Washington Post, but on a smaller scale, did the exact same thing with the Trump endorsement. But at the time, I was like, well, I'm a, I'm a local billionaire, and I want to just seem a little important, and I'll get to go to bigger parties, and I'll be a more important guy in town. And that's like the main motivation. But this is like a really a new thing

to purchase an entire, it's like purchasing a railroad or something. It's like a huge piece of internet infrastructure and not really for prestige in the same way, but for, I don't know, just like control or to have his whims be acted upon. Yeah. Well, there's something about those newspaper purchases or, I don't know, just like control or to have his whims be acted upon. Yeah.

Well, there's something about those newspaper purchases and things like that. It's more of like a quiet wealth, you know? It's this stealth luxury thing of like, oh, I'm a benefactor of this important institution. And the way Elon moves in the world is never very quiet. Yeah. Yeah, so it was a very bold, very noisy purchase.

And I think because he wanted to thrust himself to the center of the conversation and be the main character of it. So let's talk about the controversy of him buying it. Cause he, he makes an offer and then he tries to pull out, they force him to complete it, right? Right, so he makes an offer, $44 billion. Yeah.

He realizes it's way too high. The stock market at the time is falling. You know, the global economy is not doing well. Ukraine war is happening. And every other tech stock is dropping. Twitter is up because it's being propped up by his shareholders think he's going to go through with the deal. And he realizes that he's made a mistake. He needs to somehow get out of this deal or pay less money, essentially. But the problem is in in his rush to buy the company, he he told his lawyers, essentially, and his bankers to get this thing

done as fast as possible. I don't need to do due diligence. I don't need to sign any paperwork that's typical of these deals. These deals take, you know, months, if not more than a year to close. You know, there's a lot of work that goes into. Understanding the finances, making sure like making sure how you're going to run the company, understanding what's going on.

And he blew through all that to get that done in days, if not weeks. I mean, it was maybe 36 hours from offer to signing. Well, and how did he come up with a number in the first place if it was too high? So he, he based it off of a weed joke. He offered to pay $54.20 per share, which totaled up to $44 billion. And he's done this before.

When he offered to take Tesla private, he said he would pay $4.20 a share for Tesla. And then obviously didn't end up going through with that. But yeah, just a little shout out to his weird joke. I mean really deep mathematical calculations and valuation. I'm just, I'm just like... I'm... We can take a part of the overview. The things that...

You want it to make sense, right? I try to wrap my mind around the things that he finds funny. As someone who enjoys comedy, he seems to like to laugh, but he has no connection with weed. Twitter has no connection with weed. He simply, he knows the number 420 means weed and he thinks that that makes it a joke. Like it's so...

It's a higher level of comedy, I don't know if you understand. Yeah. It's like hard to, it's more than stupid. It's like hard to express how much that's not a joke. And yet he does these things. He says, I'm doing this because it's a joke. Yet it is not, that is not what a joke is.

That's just a number. To understand his psyche, he wants to be loved, but he also wants to be seen as funny. It's a big thing that drives him. And we can talk about this later. There's scenes in the book about him going to the Chappelle show. This is on SNL. On SNL, like the Chappelle thing was like really funny

because it deeply hurt him. But he is driven by this need to be seen as funny. Well, you have to tell me the Chappelle. I think I funny. Well you have to tell me the Chappelle. I think I remember, but you have to tell me the Chappelle story. Yeah, he came on stage with Dave Chappelle. After buying the company. Yeah, at a show in San Francisco and got booed. I saw footage of this.

Yeah, like Dave Chappelle was like, here's my man, Elon. And Elon comes up and the whole arena, boo. Yes, and it really hurt his feelings. And then he posted something on Twitter saying it was 10% booze and 90% cheers and then people made so much fun of him for it because they could see on the video That's not what happened. Then he deleted it Nobody is above deleting a tweet Even Chappelle was like so surprised in that moment. It was like such a misread of the audience.

Like Chappelle's killing it the whole night. He's doing everything, you know. And he brings out Elon. Like he's such a good like reader of energy and crap. Like he's the best. Like he's really good. And like then he brings out Elon. He just kills it.

Like kills the vibe. Well, this is because if you have, this is what people with money do. If you have money, you can convince everybody that you're fun to hang out with, because you give them money. Like it is beneficial to Chappelle to hang out with Elon. I'm sure there's many perks.

And when you're in the halo, I'm sure it's like, oh yeah, Elon's great, everyone loves Elon. I love Elon because of all the perks of hanging out with him. But the audience doesn't get any benefit from spending time with Elon. So they're not within the distortion field. He even did the, I'm rich, bitch. Like he had him like yell it.

And it's just like, I was just like so cringe. That's so embarrassing. And then he came out again. I think he like, yeah, there was like a back and forth. And the video is just- It's very uncomfortable to watch. Yeah. It's such a bummer.

And I mean, there's this story about him with the sink when he comes into Twitter with the, let the sink in. Right, let that sink in. So one of our quests for the book was to figure out who was forced to go out and buy a sink for Elon to pull out this joke. And we failed. That was one of our fail,

the reporting goals. It was something where we were like, we have to get the dirt on the sink and where it came from and what hardware store someone got sent to to get him a sink to do this joke. So, you know, if you're the sink purchaser, please email me.

Can I be honest? I almost like this joke because it's the kind of joke that like, comedians might make where it's so convoluted. So is it at some point he posted, I bought Twitter, let that sink in? So the let that sink in thing is sort of a broader internet meme and it's something that was sort of

an overused phrase on Twitter itself. So it's sort of an in-joke for the Twitter crowd. But people on Twitter will always post something kind of eye-grabby, attention-grabby, and then they'll let that sink in to kind of punctuate it. And it's like how reporters used to always plaster breaking at the front of their tweets, because you would get more retweets when you did that. So it's sort of like that. It's just like an engagement-baity thing.

Sure. It's just a cliche. Right. So then it became this thing where people would post the photo of like a Sink on a stand standing in front of a door like an open doorway and be like oh It let that sink in because the sink is gonna come into the house sort of making fun of the overuse of this phrase And so the best jokes are explained right? Yeah, yeah, the best jokes are ones where I have to talk for 10 minutes to explain This is all well and good, but so Elon's like I will be the sink so he was yes I am the sink. I'm the sink that is going to come in to Twitter They need to let me in correct, and he physically carried So he got like a porcelain sink basin

and had someone film him carrying this sink into the doors of Twitter on the day of the acquisition. The day before the acquisition. The day before the acquisition, that's right. And then posted the video on Twitter saying let that sink in. And just the idea that we are meant to watch that video and laugh, or go epic, a big win for Elon is,

it's memorable. It is memorable. It's not commendable. It's not, it's just, ah. I feel like there should be a class on Elon's comedy or lack of, there should be like, there's like an improv class on it or something. It's the thing that, like, I don't know.

Comedians do this thing where we try to go like, okay, why would someone think this is funny? Like, it's the writer's room thing of, why did you pitch that? There must have been a reason for the pitch. There must have been some core idea there. And so that's why it seems strange to dwell on these points, but it does seem to like, it makes you really curious about his psyche

and like what was he trying to accomplish with it? Part of it is owning the libs. Because there was, yeah. So there was, in the Trump era, so much of the Trump backlash and like lib Twitter was all about posting the most insane thing that Trump had done recently and then being like, let that sink in.

And so he's sort of playing with the liberal outrage and backlash against him in that moment, and kind of being like, oh, I'm gonna bait the libs with this purchase of Twitter. So there's sort of that subtext to it, but like. And bear in mind, he views the employees and executives at Twitter as that liberal, you know, it's a liberal arm, you know, of right.

And that's how the company's been run. That's why it's led to all these content moderation decisions he doesn't like. It's why it doesn't release good products. It's why the company doesn't do well financially. He attributed everything to this like amorphous idea of woke wokeism as like plaguing the company. So that's, that's where that sort of comes from. And so he's there to rescue the place that he loves essentially with this thing.

Got it. And so the let that sink in is that might be something that a woke liberal would tweet about why they're horrified and he's underlining it. Right. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right, well we've-

It took us 15 minutes to explain, but yeah. Okay, it almost makes sense. I wanna back up a second, because we did skip over. Sure. He tried to get out of the $44 billion purchase. Was there a moment where he really was like, I don't wanna buy Twitter at all. And then was forced to.

Yes. So over the course of that summer, he made the offer, he signed the agreement and then almost immediately, as Ryan mentioned, the economy started to shift and he said that he wanted to get out of the deal and called it off. He said, I actually just kidding. I don't have to buy this company anymore. And it created this really just bizarre situation where Twitter was then forced to sue him to pressure him into buying the company.

And I think it was just so odd because at the time, I don't there were almost no one at the company or on the board that really thought Elon would be a good manager and a steward of this platform. And yet we're forced to do that to deliver that 5420 to the shareholders. I think this is a key point because the board's duty is to shareholders. It's a fiduciary duty to get the best deal possible to maximize the value for shareholders. And so they've been locked into this decision to sell him the company because if they don't, the share price is gonna drop.

They know it because they can see what's going on in the rest of the market. So they could be sued by shareholders if they didn't allow it to happen. If they let him out of the deal. So this is like this weird bind that everybody is in where Elon starts to invade the company. I wanna take over the company.

The company is like, the board's like, no, no, no, please don't, we want to keep running the company. Then company is like, the board's like, no, no, no, please don't, we want to keep running the company. Then he makes an, but then he makes an offer that is so good, they are compelled to not just take it, but force him to abide by it, even though they don't want him to buy the company. And now he doesn't want to buy it either

because he realizes too much money. But they're, they're just like, what, like, like handcuffed together at this point. Yes, exactly. So crazy. It's a free market. They're just like what like like handcuffed together at this point. Yes Crazy The free market Pretty fucked up no one wants to buy

Milton Friedman's Like is yeah the free market That's when people are like forced to purchase companies that they don't want when the company doesn't want to be sold That's freedom, right? Yeah. It is when they sign a binding merger agreement, but yeah. So I mean, a bunch of shareholders must have made money on the sale, right?

Yeah. Some people were like, hey, good deal for me. The shareholders voted to approve it, almost unanimously, I think it was over 90% of the shareholders voted for it. Wow. Maximizing shareholder value. And then they were no longer shareholders because now the company's profit. They get like a check in the mail and they're done.

Right. Wild. So, this was something that I always had a question about with Elon psychologically. When he goes from, I want to purchase the company to hold on a second, this is a bad business decision. And now he's forced to. That's what fueled a lot of commentary, including on my part, about what a stupid thing he did. Did he reverse that again and re-embrace, okay, I'm excited about this? After he's been forced to follow through

on what he believes was a bad decision on his part. That's such a strange bit of whiplash. And then you gotta remember all the arguments he made to try and get out of the deal. You remember the bots conversation? He's a member and he was like, Twitter's overrun by bots and like, they didn't tell me this in advance

because I said I wasn't gonna do due diligence. And so like, that's why I should get out of the deal. Without, so he made this argument, which is funny because when he first announced the deal, he said, I'm buying Twitter to get rid of the bots. So his argument is like, I'm already going to fix this problem. So technically I'm aware, but not aware enough, but not aware. Yeah. So, yeah, it, you know, there are all these mental hoops

that we had to jump through to understand what he was thinking. Thank God there's no bots on Twitter. Yeah. Yeah. They're all gone. Yeah. I've never seen a bot in my life. But yeah, so we get down to this point in that fall where things in court are not going well for him. The judge is kind of seeing through the ridiculousness

of some of these arguments. And he also has a deposition coming up. And something that's interesting about Elon is that he has been avoiding speaking under oath very successfully for the last couple of years. He's been subpoenaed to testify to the SEC about blowing through the share limit that Ryan mentioned earlier.

And he's been ducking that deposition. So he has a deposition coming up in this lawsuit, doesn't want to do that. And I think his lawyers are also telling him at this point, look, you're going to have to buy this company one way or the other. And you can either wait for this court to force you to do it, or you can go ahead and do it.

And I think he preferred the option of seeming like it was his decision and he wasn't being arm-wrestled into making the purchase. So right before his deposition, he ends up calling the deal back on and going through with it. And I think once he did that, he started to get really excited about it again and came in with a lot of enthusiasm for what he was gonna do to the company. I got a great idea. Actually, this solves it.

I'm gonna send it in to Home Depot and that's gonna get me excited. And in that period, he also raised funding from outside investors. So he loops in a bunch of his friends. He gets about, I think, $7 billion in outside investment from large venture capital firms in Silicon Valley, from Qatar, you know, from other sovereign wealth funds. He has a major investor in Saudi Arabia who has about $2 billion worth of shares roll over his investment as well. And then he raises a bunch of debt from banks, including Morgan Stanley.

So he's lessened the burden on himself a little bit. It's not just his own personal money that's on the line. And he's done that by promising them these huge gains. Like, I'm gonna make this place, like the everything that people are gonna come here, there's gonna be billions of users. I mean, some of the projections that we saw were kind of absurd last around this time last year

He said it was going to be a dating app by now. So he has like three more days I think to make it a dating app Yeah, gosh, what else has he gone through? It was going to be a payments app like Venmo. Yeah Let's like zoom out on Elon a little bit. Like his whole thing as a, not as a billionaire, as an entrepreneur, as a whatever he has been, has been promising, making huge promises and raising money based on those promises. Most of which never pan out, a couple of which have.

SpaceX has done plenty, Starlink people are using, et cetera. But there's the absurd spectacle of the Tesla event SpaceX has done plenty, Starlink people are using, et cetera. But there's the absurd spectacle of the Tesla event a couple weeks ago where he had animatronic robots that he said would one day watch your kids, even though there's an actor controlling the robot. He doesn't have anything close to that sort of technology. Was he making those sort of claims about Twitter? Is that what was going on?

It's one of the most fascinating things about Elon Musk. And to give him credit, like he electrified cars and he brought the electric car revolution and he privatized the space industry. These are huge advancements he's made. Well, the government privatized the space industry. Sure. But he said, I'll take the check

and I'll build the robot, the rockets. And he built a successful rocket company that effectively lands rockets, you know, and is crazy, has a virtual monopoly on getting things into space. And so on one hand, yes, he's achieved all these things. On the other hand, he still makes these promises that have insane deadlines that he blows through. I mean, I think of everything from like the Cybertruck being bulletproof and like him throwing a ball through the window to, you know,

promising Twitter investors that he's gonna make it the everything app and it's gonna have billions of people and people are gonna buy subscriptions and all this stuff. And it's strange because those things probably aren't gonna happen. And like, I think he believes that they will and he's been able to convince other people that he'll be able to do that thing.

And like, it is like a dichotomy with him and it's just fascinating to me. Yeah, I mean, the question that, look, I'm a comedian, I focus more on the funny failures and on the successes, right? But like, when I look at the claims that he made about Twitter and the way that they have played out, and also three quarters of his claims about Tesla

and the boring company and all these ludicrous things that you can look at, this is never gonna work from the beginning. The two or three that did work well, I'm like, to me those seem like the outliers. I'm like, is the man like an idiot who had some help in those cases, right? He's like lucky in two or three cases,

but has figured out a way to spin a yarn that gets him a lot of cash and works out when there's some other factor, you know what I mean? Is there some, I don't know enough about SpaceX, is there some amazing number two at SpaceX that like actually makes the place run? Yes, that's exactly what it is. Okay, so like some fucking NASA level actual like manager. And who's like minimizing Elon's influence, like making sure he doesn't fuck it up too much.

Because like if you take what he did at any of these other companies and have him put him in charge of a rocket company, you're looking at explosions and death. That's what it looks like just based on the way the guy lives his life. There were explosions to start. Yeah. Of course. I don't know, I look at it from the view of an investor.

And if an investor is looking at him and they're like, if we had gotten in on the ground floor on Tesla, we would be multi-billionaires. Same thing with SpaceX. And so they're betting on him finding that that that pay dirt again, that pot of gold. And like he's he's proved he's done it twice from a financial perspective. He's he's been very successful twice. And so if he comes around and he says I'm going to put holes in the ground and I'm going to solve traffic or I'm going to put a chip in your brain that's going to solve paralysis and make you feel happy or I'm going to buy Twitter and create

an everything app. They're going to they're going to invest. I don't know. It's it's it's it is fascinating like. Well, it's a relationship building thing too. I think, you know, if you think when he comes to you with one of these pitches and you think, that sounds a little kooky, that sounds a little crazy, I don't know if he's going to succeed, maybe you write him a check anyway because that opens a door for you to participate in SpaceX's

future IPO or another investment opportunity that comes along with Elon. So I think some of these investments, particularly with X, it's about relationship building with him and kind of staying in the orbit and getting to write checks in those other fundraising rounds that might be more lucrative. Yeah, okay, I understand that. I understand how that helps people come in or helps people stay in his orbit.

It's just that the ones that I tend to focus on are the plans that he makes that are so ludicrous that if you know anything about the area, The Boring Company is a good example of this. The idea that he was gonna solve traffic by building tunnels is like if you know the first thing about urban planning whatsoever, you'd know that this is not a serious plan in any way and nor has it proven to be.

They just sort of seemingly forgotten about it. There's like one little one mile tunnel in Las Vegas that people drive back and forth through slowly So it's just I try to go in it. It didn't yeah. Yeah with the the Manager of the boring company is now working on Elon's super pack Well, he was also the guy who brought in to do cost cutting at Twitter when he took over so uh-huh It's I don't know if the boring company has that kind of strong manager figure like you're That might be the missing piece. I wonder if, let's get back to Twitter, but I do wonder if, you know, the Tesla shares

falling after this last demo and the sort of like wide scale derision that that event had is maybe like investors starting to wise up a little bit of like, okay, when he's under pressure, he will just make wilder and wilder claims that, oh wait, maybe we actually need to start thinking through rather than taking it easy. But then the week later, he has earnings where they announce profits that are better than ever

and the stock then recovers 15%. So, like we have forgotten about the fact that those robots at the RoboTaxi event were human controlled and the thing was on a movie set. You know, the stock is back to where it was before that, if not better. And if you're looking at the prospects for his companies, you know, he is probably Trump's biggest supporter at this point, has a potential role lined up in the White House. And there's a lot of fairly lucrative government contracts that are likely coming his way, if Trump does win the election.

And so, you know, it seems like a relatively good bet right now to be putting money on Elon. Hmm, hmm. Well, yeah, at least if the election's a coin flip, that's 50-50 plus whatever crazy variance he puts in. But whatever, I only bet 10 million on Elon, so maybe I'll make a billion later and maybe I'll lose it. And I'd argue even if in a Kamala presidency,

Elon is gonna be fine. Like, SpaceX is the only way pretty much to get things into space. The government is super reliant on it. Tesla, you walk outside on the street, you'll see a Tesla immediately. It's the dominant car, electric car manufacturer in the U.S. And I don't see that changing anytime soon. He's in a great position.

Yes, if Trump is who he wants to be in the White House wins, he's even in a better position, but I don't think it's not a bad thing if he is either. The cultural connection to Trump though, is like really interesting, especially vis-a-vis Tesla, because you know, Teslas are electric cars, they're purchased by the Ed Begley juniors of the world. You know, I don't think, look, we're here in LA, I know a lot of TV writers who did well over the last 10 years and bought themselves Teslas.

They're all embarrassed. They're all going, I'm sorry, I know, he's horrible. I'm looking at Rivians, those are nice. Like things have, there has been a cultural shift and- There's the bumper sticker, have you seen those? What's the bumper sticker? I bought this before I knew about Elon. Yeah, I've seen that on a couple Teslas.

Cars are so cultural, they're so identity based. There's a lot of people, like, the man has polarized himself. And there's a lot of people out there who look at a Tesla and say, that's a Trump mobile. And that to me is one of the most shocking things about his embrace of Trump is that like the branding implications of it for him and for the car company he's most closely associated with

are like wild, aren't they? But he doesn't think about that. It's not a concern for him. He's like, you know, he's made this mission for himself of electing Trump because he views it as an existential crisis. If Trump doesn't win, then this is gonna be the last free election ever in the US

is basically what he said. And so, yeah, he has given himself this personal mission of electing Trump and he'll deal with the consequences. I also think he knows that, like what I'll turn, like yes, you can maybe go buy a Rivian, you can buy a Ford EV, but like Tesla's still a pretty solid vehicle that has a lot of market share and I think we'll continue to go that way.

Sure, infrastructure wise, they've got the chargers and everything else and you know, they. I mean, all the other car manufacturers are relying on that infrastructure for their charging. Yeah, absolutely, which is like a huge fail. A lot of the story of Elon is the failure of the government, right? Is the government privatizing space flight,

Elon takes the check, the government failing to put EV chargers everywhere, even the state government of California failing to do that. So like Tesla's the only infrastructure. Everybody is waiting for, you know, everyone who's buying like a Hyundai IONIQ is like, I can't wait for compatibility with a Tesla charger so I can go on a road trip,

because like Hyundai ain't putting in the chargers and like the government isn't either. And so there's like a, I don't know, large societal failure that he is often reaping the benefit of. Mm-hmm. He's too big to fail. Like, I don't, he's so powerful. He's got so many hands and everything.

Yeah. And that's one of the themes of a book. Like, how do you deal with someone that is ungovernable, who is unregulatable? And we're seeing what that means for our society now. Yeah. Let's return to that point. I wanna finish the story of Twitter,

because we've wandered off with all this other fascinating stuff. He purchases it, they let the sink in. The month or two after that was like one of the most chaotic periods on any internet platform I've ever seen. So what goes down after he purchases the company? I mean, I think we were expecting it to be insane and it surpassed our expectations pretty quickly.

But he came in and, you know, Ryan mentioned this earlier, but had this deep suspicion of everyone that worked there, particularly the former management. So right away orders the firings of all the top executives and has the... Within minutes of closing the deal, yeah. And the only one who hap... I think everyone was anticipating this.

So the only one who happened to be in the building at the time was marched out by security. And then goes on this really radical cost cutting mission of laying off more than 50% of the employees who worked there. Eventually that number climbed to upwards of 75%. So just really slashing and burning at the company. And the chaos of that is hard to overstate. At one point, there was an employee who had left who was still getting paychecks and kept trying to contact the company and say, hey,

take me off the payroll. And no one was getting back to him because all the HR employees were laid off and he couldn't contact anyone. You know, there are there's this moment where he sends out an email to the staff saying, you know, if you want to stay here, you need to agree to work in an extremely hardcore fashion

and check this box if you're hardcore. So that was the only option in the form fill was to say, yes, I want to stay. And that meant everyone who didn't check the box was meant to be laid off. But no one put their name on a list to be laid off. So then you have the four remaining HR employees going through everyone at the company

trying to figure out who wants to leave, right? Because no one has said, hey, I want to leave. They only know who wants to stay. And so it's this process of elimination, trying to figure out who they're supposed to be laying off because they don't know. And they're calling up employees who are on maternity leave and say, or are on vacation and saying, hey, do you want to keep working here? Like, you didn't check the box. Or do you want to stay? Do you want to get laid off? What do you want us to do? So the way that all of these things were handled was just completely messy and chaotic and you know there's also this is all happening by the way while there's elections going on there's midterm elections in the United States and the presidential election in Brazil we're all

underway at this time and so there's these employees who are kind of desperately attempting to keep the platform afloat and keep these elections from being interfered with while, you know, people are getting logged out of Slack and disappearing out of the company. And they're trying to make their own decisions about what their futures are. So it's just an incredibly, incredibly messy period. My favorite scene is on the on the day he actually closed the deal was Twitter's company-wide Halloween party. Oh, yeah.

So there's decorations. There's like spider. Everyone's in costumes. And like. Well, Twitter would do their Halloween party for families. So people would bring their kids to the office and do like a little trick or treating in the company comments, the cafeteria, basically. So people's kids are there in like Spider-Man outfits treating in the company commons, the cafeteria basically.

So people's kids are there in like Spider-Man outfits. And like Captain America is over there and like people are crying in the corner because they know that people are getting fired or they're going to be fired. Jesus Christ. You're all getting snapped. It's like a very darkly humorous scene in a way. You couldn't write that up in a show. Okay, I understand you're trying to pitch this

as a business thriller mini series. I understand we're in LA, you're taking meetings right now. Hollywood call them, all right. They're gonna do the Theranos, we're gonna do the dropout, right? It's okay, I understand the five year plan, we're gonna get there. Please attach me, I would love to work on it.

We'll talk about that after, keep going. Yeah, so I mean, and then beyond that, he starts cutting, he starts cutting without regard for what things are needed for, he doesn't know why people have these jobs, so he fires them. At one point he's angry about how much they're spending on janitorial services, so he cuts the janitorial services

at the office, so there's no one to clean the bathrooms or empty the trash, and it's starting to get really smelly in there, and they run out of toilet paper. And so people are bringing in their own toilet paper from home. Jesus Christ. We got a photo from someone, which is kind of amazing, in one of the offices.

Someone brought their own toilet paper. But it's those like, you know those metal boxes that are in offices where the toilet paper's locked in so you can't steal it and take it home? Sounds like a giant rule. Right, so you also can't put your own toilet paper in because it's locked.

Yeah. So the person brought a metal wire, or like a hanger, and then Jerry rigged it to the side of the stall. So they had a spool. Why are people even working in the office? This is the Zoom era. He demanded everyone to come into the office

and said, if you don't come in, you're fired. You're not hardcore. You must come in the office, but also there'll be no toilet paper in the office. Correct. What a fucking... A lot of people are already anxious about pooping in office buildings. I know, I used to work with people, they'd always go to a different, you know, a lot of people are already anxious about pooping in office buildings. I know, I used to work with people

that always go to a different floor to poop, which I think honestly, own up to your own shit. Like, everyone on floor six knows you don't work on six. Where I was, I have a straight line view to the bathroom right now, so I can see who's. You can see, that guy has an account receivable. This is accounts payable, he's coming down here to shit. Yeah.

Just giving you something to receive. From where you work, that's what I said. Well, then there's this whole moment where he wants to figure out who's most productive at the company. And so he says, everyone print out all the code you've written in the past month. And so everyone's printing code.

And again, this is the Zoom era. So everyone's been called back to the office. Their laptop isn't attached to the printer. They don't know where the printer is and so they're all scrambling around lining up at the printers trying to get their code to print out I'm not I'm not a computer programmer. I took a couple of C++ classes in high school. I couldn't cut it I was more of a web developer type Do people often print code ever? No, this is not an exercise that makes sense. It's also not a great way to judge productivity. Is code even formatted to fit on an 8.5 by 11? Like Ryan said, you could write very elegant code

that does a lot in a short number of lines, right? You don't have to write paragraphs of code, necessarily, to get something to work. So this is all going on, the printers are running, and then one of the last remaining lawyers at the time comes running in and says, hey, you can't actually print the code. It's an FTC violation. We're under this consent decree

with the Federal Trade Commission to keep company information private because they'd had data leaks in the past. So we can't do this. So then they roll out these paper shredders and they're making everyone shred the code that they just printed. And they're having security guys shred people's backpacks and stuff.

And they have security guys standing there making sure everyone shreds their code so they don't violate the consent decree. Well, they could still weigh the amount of code that each person produced if Elon wants to put it on a scale. 15 grams of code. But both the, all these anecdotes get- 15 grams of code. All these anecdotes get to something which is like all the cuts like were meant to like prove people could be hardcore. Like it's just like he loves this sending this message.

Like we had this anecdote. I don't even know if it made it in the book, but of at one point he was running Tesla and the only free food they had at the factories was cereal. And at one point he just like, fuck you guys, I'm going to cut the cereal because like you guys need to be hardcore, you guys need to be dedicated to the mission. You're here to work, you're not here to eat, or fuck around, or do yoga.

You're here to electrify cars. And he thought he could bring that mentality to Twitter and make people hardcore, and make them believe in this mission of free speech, which he gave himself when he bought the company. And people were like, this is not, this is not gonna work for us. And people left in droves over that.

I mean, it's the, the reason you give out free food is cause it's cheaper than paying people. Like it's, it's a management trick to like. You get them to stay longer hours than they work in the office. And he's like, no, I don't need to trick you to stay You're gonna stay anyways and you're gonna work And I'm not even gonna pay you better

Like I'm just gonna like you you work for me you get the privilege of working for Elon Musk and that's actually what? executives sold Employees when they're trying to convince them to stay Are these he brought in these like other folks from his companies to lecture people on why they shouldn't leave Twitter. You get to work for Elon Musk, the guy who will take your toilet paper away. Yeah. But oftentimes the refrain is like,

Elon Musk has made millions for people at Tesla and SpaceX, you know? So if you work for him and you work hardcore, you can be a millionaire too. Yeah, yeah. And I assume there's some number of people who buy into this at Twitter, and that's like the new core.

Oh yeah, there's a lot of the people who have stuck it out are really loyal to him and to his vision for the company. You know, I saw an employee posting a while ago when Elon decided he was gonna get rid of the offices in San Francisco and move everyone to Austin. Right. One of the employees posted, burn the ships, you know. So there's there's these people that are like, we're going to follow him

wherever he wants us to go. And we're never going back. And we're, you know, 110 percent committed. And so that's the mentality of some of the self selecting quality to it, too. Like, if you're still there, you probably believe in what he does and who he is and Maybe you think you're gonna get rich, too It's kind of the same quality of like people that are still on Twitter There's a self-selecting quality and that's why the platform is shifted in the way that it has

In terms of speech and like what content is on there. So yeah. Yeah Yeah. What about the actual infrastructure of the platform? I mean, there were a lot of times it got very shaky. I remember reading stories about Elon getting involved in the physical moving of servers that was done in a very sloppy way. Can you fill me in on any of that? Yeah, so this was around Christmas of 22 or 23, 22. 22 right after he buys the company.

Yeah, so I believe it's at Christmas Eve. He's on his private jet going somewhere and got frustrated and demanded that the jet be turned around and flown to one of Twitter's data centers in Sacramento. And because he wanted that data center downsized. And so he goes into the data center with a couple of the folks who are on the plane with him and starts unplugging things. Implugged one thing and says one thing, one server thing. And then he says, see, the site still runs. You can just unplug all this stuff. It doesn't really matter.

Like, what's it doing? Again, the thinking is that the previous management has been inept. They've spent way too much money doing way too many things, and they don't need all these servers to keep the site up. But like, Elon doesn't actually, he's not like a server architecture genius or anything, right?

No, so this did start breaking things. Yeah, okay. Okay. Oftentimes with Elon, he has this thing of like, let's break things down to first principles. And that means like, you know, can we get things to the basic physics or chemistry or the science of it?

And if you tell me why I can't do something, you got to tell me what, like, what is the base reason for that? If not, I'm just going to do it and see what happens. And so that was the thinking of that. There was a cost cutting element to killing that data center. And he implements this crazy move to get those servers out of Sacramento into a different data center in Portland, which caused a lot of havoc.

There were a lot of outages at that time. I think Australia didn't have it for like a day and a half. And beyond that, beyond just outages, those data centers have a lot of tools that are used for content moderation or for data compliance or what have you, and so many things just went down completely, so. Yeah. Yeah, just an absolute mess.

How did they, I mean, I remember reading those stories as they were happening, and now it's almost impressive to me that Twitter still works at all, despite all of that. Like how cutting so many costs and killing all these servers, firing entire engineering teams. You had stories about the entire team

that built this foundational part of the service that is live sending tweets all across the world. Everything is completely live on Twitter. The entire team is fired. Now nobody knows how it works and it'll just keep coasting until it breaks and then no one will know how to fix it. That's what people were saying like a year and a half ago.

Why is it still running? So, I mean, I think it's actually quite impressive that this site hasn't had more outages than it has. It's had a couple pretty significant ones, but you see a lot of sort of decay around the edges, right? So like, if you're just looking at the top of your timeline and seeing what people are posting, that works pretty well. If you start to do any kind of scroll back or like deep search analysis,

which is what I spend a lot of my time doing, it's kind of like data polls of old tweets, none of that works anymore. Search functions don't work. And it's really, really difficult to kind of go deeper into the site than your first 10 scrolls. You also start to see things falling apart in some of the newer products on the platform. So for example, the audio feature spaces. Musk just had a space recently with Trump that didn't work. There's a full 45 minutes where he, you know, the richest man in the world is trying to host the former president of the United States in a live interview and it doesn't function. No one can hear each other. No one can log in. Trump can't even get in. Elon's getting kicked out.

And it's 45 minutes of silence. And you have to imagine if that happened on Fox. You know, if they were trying to host that kind of conversation with someone of that importance and they could not get it up and running, I mean, it would be a colossal failure for the network. And Musk claims that there was a cyber attack against Spaces that prevented it from working. He hasn't said a word about that by the way. He has not said a word about it since.

What happened to the cyber attack, dude? I don't know, maybe it was the bots. Call the FBI. I mean, and that whole feature, Spaces, that was pre-Elon's takeover, a feature they had built to compete with Clubhouse, which was hot at the time. And so now what is just sort of sitting around

and people are occasionally using it and they're not, he's fired so many people who are working on it. It works, you know, for an event like that where there's that many people, it's like super tough. But I would say this about Twitter's infrastructure is that it's pretty robust and it was built that way after years of having traffic failures and outages. But they got it to a place where it largely operates and that's a credit to past Twitter.

Yeah, I don't know. I could see a situation where it starts to degrade more and like Kate said, like if you start poking around, you'll find the holes. But it is strange. And Elon's fans will point to the fact that it's still online and be like, you know, I told you so. Like everyone is panicking about it going down, but you know, he's maintained it. Well, I think he said that too.

You know, he's pointed it to it as a way where he was You know Doubted and criticized by the public and and he was right You know he could cut costs in this way and tear out all this infrastructure and this site continues to work It used to work sort of a lot of a lot of features don't work at all anymore He was the one that pitched himself that he would improve the platform You know he would build on top of it And that hasn't been the case and we haven't even talked about how he's tanked the Advertising for example. That's what I want to get into next. Let's talk about that briefly. He I remember him

Well, first of all, there's the verification thing like the end of the verification regime Well, yeah, you get into it the end of the verification regime. Well, yeah, you get into it. Tell me about it. Well, so before the takeover, when Musk was pitching investors on why they should come into the Twitter deal,

the pitch deck he was showing them was saying that they were gonna move from an advertising revenue model to a subscription-based one, and people were gonna pay to use the service, and that was going to overtake and replace the importance of advertising. So pretty quickly when he came in he started trying to execute on that plan. Said we're gonna take away verification badges from everyone who has them and

we're gonna sell it for eight dollars a month. You can buy a verification badge. Anyone can become verified and it'll democratize the platform. It's also gonna build this big base of subscription revenue that Twitter has never had before. So he embarks on that process. It was extremely chaotic. Immediately start seeing people impersonating these big brands that advertise on the platform. I think Eli Lilly was the prime example of that, where someone got a verified Eli Lilly account and posted insulin is free now and then Eli Lilly stock tanks, you know, there's also someone posing as Nintendo. I think and Mario Mario. Yeah So we have a scene in the book where we're in the room with them and everyone's like we're trying to warn him about this And he thinks it's incredibly funny. Well, you you were reporting on this in the room you were there

We had we had some sources. Yeah, the sources are placing you in. We actually were in the reader. We were in the air vents. Yeah, we did not let Ryan into the building. OK, I'm sorry. I would have been shot on sight, I think. But that is good.

That is good. Narrative journalism writing. When you can place us right in the room. Thank you. OK. Where flies on the wall. Yeah. And he thinks it's funny. He thinks these these incidents, the Mario one specifically, was very funny to him. Without registering like, shit,

like Nintendo's a big advertiser, maybe we shouldn't piss them off because advertising is 90% of our business. Yeah. Nintendo's also famously like a very skittish company. And Nintendo's company, yeah. And beyond the advertisers, other people are like, what happens if someone impersonates like a fire department or like

the National Weather Service and says there's a hurricane coming like people like what is what's going to happen? And he thinks about it and he's like, you know, we're just going to shoot from the hip in real time. And someone then asked him, like, when do we know when to stop? And he's like, you know, if someone dies, basically is when we know when we've? And he's like, you know, if someone dies, basically, is when we know when we've hit, like, we've done too much.

And it says a lot, but like going back, the advertiser thing was such a- After someone dies is when you know you've gone too far. It's like, how do you know how far you've, how do you know how far to pull into your garage when you hit the wall, like, and you damage your car? Yeah, well, the car analogy is like full self-driving. You think of like releasing this onto the roads and being like, when have you gone too

far? Maybe when someone dies. And people have died. Yeah. Well, but that was their own fault. According to Elon, as he has said publicly about people who die. It's definitely not full self-driving. Even though he said it that way.

But like, you know, he made a lot of advertisers mad they drove him away He's gone through various cycles where he said Antisemitic or antisemitic adjacent remarks. He's told advertisers to go fuck themselves. Yeah, and this has cratered the advertising business to the point where I Don't know revenue is just down so much. Right I don't know, revenue is just down so much. Right. And like you said about Nintendo, advertisers are really sensitive about the context in

which their brands are appearing. And this has always been a problem for Twitter. You know, I remember during the summer of Black Lives Matter, Twitter's advertising revenue fell significantly because there was so much conversation about those protests on the platform. I didn't know that. So much sharing of videos of people being murdered that advertisers pulled back. They were like, you know, we're just going to pause and take a breather

because we don't want to pop up next to this content that's very emotional for people. Right. We Burger King, yeah. And... Yeah. I'm sorry? I was just making a Burger King joke. Oh.

Hahaha. So, it's always been a sensitive point for Twitter, and I think that Musk didn't really understand that. And when he took over, you know, he had explicitly said he wanted to get rid of a lot of the content moderation rules that Twitter had had in place. And that's something that advertisers very much wanted to be in place. They want to have that sort of like safe, family-friendly environment for their ads to appear. So they're already starting to pull back.

Then we see this impersonation wave, you know, and this rise of hate speech on the platform. Something that happened right after the takeover was a lot of people started kind of trying to test Musk's boundaries and posting a lot of hate speech to see what would happen to their accounts, if they would get taken down or censored or whatever. So there's this huge influx of hateful content and a lot of the guardrails have come off.

And so advertisers paused spending, they kind of backpedaled and took space from the platform, which Elon took incredibly personally. And he claimed that advertisers were essentially trying to censor him by withholding their ad dollars from Twitter. They're trying to force him to moderate content. Yeah. And he saw it as a form of manipulation.

And so, you know, then you saw him go on stage at a New York Times conference actually and tell advertisers to go fuck themselves. And that didn't help. Advertisers didn't come back to the platform at that point. You don't like being told that? You know. So here's, this is what I'm thinking as we're talking about this.

About like, again, looking at all of Elon's businesses and how he's able to get this investor cash and all this. I understand where, you know, you can do something like you can cut costs that way, you can destroy the server infrastructure and make the product work less well, you can drive away the advertisers. If you actually don't care about it

being a profitable business, if he blows $44 billion on the company and then he's like, well, I've already lost money, so who gives a shit, I'm making enough money somewhere else. I do this sometimes in my own life. I'm like, I'm not gonna, fuck, I'm getting screwed on this thing. Well, I'm not enough money somewhere else. You know, I do this sometimes in my own life. You know, I'm like, I'm not gonna, fuck, I'm getting screwed on this thing. Well, I'm not gonna go broke.

I'm still making enough money, so whatever. You know, I'll write it off as a loss and who cares? But like, if you're someone who's investing in Elon, like you're not, like the attitude that he's taken towards this company where he seemingly has no regard for its success as a business whatsoever. In fact, he seems to have the opposite.

He is driving away. The customer is the advertiser. It's an advertiser based business. The fact that he's telling the advertisers to go fuck themselves is like, wouldn't that worry people who are interested in the health of the rest of his businesses? Yeah, I don't think they love it.

And I think, you know, and if you're a debt holder on that Twitter deal, it's a horrible deal. It's like historically one of the worst, if not the worst since the financial crisis. And he pays about a billion dollars in servicing that debt a year, which is nuts. But if you're also one of his other investors who have invested equity into Twitter,

yes, maybe you think, you know, your Twitter investment is down. But look at this other thing he just built up. He just built up this AI company in XAI. There's a valuation now that's more than $20 billion in that company. It's just taken the data from Twitter to build an AI company.

And if you invest in that, you've just seen your valuation go from essentially zero to 20 billion dollars. So there's like this like plus minus game that we're playing here, where he can create shareholder value, essentially from thin air. You know, it's it's. Yeah, it's crazy. Yeah, I know, it's, yeah, it's crazy. Yeah, I mean, it brings me back to the central contradiction of the guy

because he does things that are so ludicrous and funny and stupid, right? That like, I might did a video a year and a half ago just called Elon is just dumb, right? And I believe that on a lot of levels that the guy in many ways is a deeply stupid man. And yet, he has figured out how to, like, I don't know, manipulate the culture that we live in

where I, myself, despite disliking him, make countless videos about the guy. You know what I mean? Like, he has centralized the attention economy in himself. So clearly it's part of why he bought the company, because Twitter drives the attention economy. He's in the middle of it. He thrives off the attention. He's deeply Trumpian in that way, right?

Just always bring the news cycle back to himself, whether it's good or bad. And here we are participating in it. Yourself said, you guys, you were writing three or four articles a day, wrote a book because of the gravitational pull that he has, right? Like surely part of the reason the book was written,

no offense, is because, well, a book about Elon will sell, right? Like if all of us in the media are like looking at, all right, what do people actually wanna read about? That's what you end up writing about. It seems like such a bizarre contradiction to me because everything that he, all these individual things he does are so counterproductive and yet there's some deeper power that he seems to have over the rest of us.

Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, his influence I think is very important and I understand the fatigue with Elon and just thinking, oh, God, I can't hear another thing about whatever stupid thing he's done today. But I mean, it's so fascinating to me to take a mainstream social media platform like Twitter once was and convert it into sort of an explicitly political and partisan space. You know, what he has done now with X is what all these other offshoots tried to do after Trump was banned from Twitter. You know, the truth socials of the world, the rumbles, like all these sort of explicitly

right-wing social medias that popped up and thought everyone's going to flock to us. Yeah. That didn't happen. So, Elon bought the audience and he brought the right wing content to that audience instead of trying to drag the audience to the content. And I think that that has the potential to be incredibly influential to kind of take these conspiracy theories and these sort of fringe views and platform them to a massive, massive audience.

And you know, we'll see how that plays out in the coming weeks. But yeah, he's been able to buy and create an incredibly, incredibly influential media ecosystem for himself. Yeah. We haven't even discussed changing the name of the platform to X. We haven't even, we've been saying Twitter the whole time.

And you said X and I was like, oh my God, we didn't even fucking get into this. Again, one of the things that like, no one is even calling it X. Like I try sometimes, because you know what, it's not Twitter anymore. The old Twitter we knew is dead. It's now X.

And yet, it's just hard to fucking say. Like as a brand name, it's bad enough that you just don't wanna say it. What is the deeper story there? Well, why? He's had an obsession with the name X for a long time. His original payments company was called X.com. You remember that?

Which became the precursor to PayPal. He loves the letter. He actually bought that domain at a significant cost back in the day, even in the early, late 90s, early 2000s. But yeah, he's just loved the letter. He's named his kid X essentially, the one with all the weird letters and numbers, but they call him X.

And when he bought Twitter, he had this vision that Twitter would build on the previous vision he had for that payments company. So he was like, you know, why don't I just rename it X.com? Which torched immense brand value. It's just like it's like you have you. Every brand wants to be a verb. Yeah. Yeah. He bought a Kleenex or he bought, you know, Google.

Yeah, exactly. Coke. Like it's one of the great brands of the century. It's like buying Google and you're now B.com. I don't know, it's like, it's just weird. But it's his vision for it. Has he made any attempt to build all of these features that he has talked about, about it being the everything platform?

Because I have seen none of them. There's like, there's the Grok AI and a couple of things that it like, like sweeteners for the subscription product, but there's no transformation of the platform. He's put more video into it, right? He's made it more like tick-cocky. I think one of the things that like,

if you're really bullish on Elon, you think he is gonna be a success. You're looking for innovation from him because of the sort of incredible technological advances he's been able to pull off at his other companies. And I think one of the things that is interesting about this deal is that he hasn't been able to deliver that kind of game-changing innovation to X that he has in these other areas like electric vehicles, reusable rockets, right? So payments is maybe happening. The company is still applying for the licenses to be able to transfer money,

and so that could come about someday. Ryan mentioned there's a little bit more video now in the platform than there was before. They've tried to do a couple of deals with video content creators to make almost TV shows for X. Remember the Don Lemon. Yeah, sure. The Don Lemon show that kind of flamed out. video content creators to make almost TV shows for X. There's the Don Lemon show that kind of flamed out. Tucker has his show there now.

But these are areas where there's already, I mean like online payments, there's already three or four servers. There's Venmo, Cash App, Zelle. Like Twitter payments, X payments aren't beating Zelle. Zelle is like the bank's Twitterelle is like the bank's payment system. He's not gonna beat the banks. It's like that could be a nice little business maybe

if it grows as a way to send money. It'd be like Apple Cash. People use Apple Cash, but it's not like defining the world. Same thing with video. There's plenty of online video. Like those aren't disruptive innovations to add them to Twitter That's what's strange to me about it. Yeah. Yeah, and I think I Think that's kind of what's missing here

Right is there like the the Midas touch that you on is supposed to bring to the companies that he owns We haven't really seen it with X and we haven't really seen a lot of transformation of the platform other than the name change Yeah, why it seems like again, it's really not a business proposal for him. It's a it's an ideological Yeah, exactly. He has this ideological project. So how did he? Become so, you know, I guess yeah overtly right-wing right? Like what was the transformation there? Did it just come from being on the platform? I think that's a big part of it, that he spends so much time on the platform,

he consumes almost all of his news and information comes from the platform. And so you really see him kind of going down the rabbit hole on some of this stuff. But there are a couple of things that happened, particularly over the course of the pandemic, that I think started to shift him more explicitly to the right. One was the COVID lockdowns here in California

that shuttered his Tesla factories, and he was really upset about that and felt like the state was going too far. There was this kind of leftist overreach into controlling his business that he had a strong reaction to. Around the same time, one of his children was coming out as transgender, beginning her transition, and that was something that he also took really personally. He has spoken about it since and basically said that his view on it is that the woke mind virus stole one of his children from him

and that she's essentially dead to him now. And so those two things happening in pretty quick succession, I think shifted him to the right. In 2021, he also started kind of beefing with the Biden administration because he was excluded from an electric vehicle summit that was held at the White House. He wasn't invited because he's sort of been anti-union. Biden obviously has had strong union support. Right. And so then he kind of kicked off this big feud with Biden and started criticizing him more and more aggressively ever since that point.

And then in recent times you get this kind of, you know, he's so steeped in right-wing online culture now and he's been obsessed with immigration. He's been obsessed with election security and election fraud. He's just gone down the rabbit hole and he's now embracing things like the conspiracy theory that Democrats are importing immigrants to then change the demographic of the country and make sure there's no more free elections because everyone's just gonna vote Democrat. Which is specifically an anti-Semitic conspiracy.

Which is the great. The Jews are doing it. The great replacement theory, yeah. And he was chastised for that. It's what caused the advertisers to leave in the first place, which then led him to say, go fuck yourself a year ago. Yeah.

And now he's just embracing it. It's just like, this is his main thing that he pushes online. If you go back to Springfield, he was the one pushing the Haitian immigrants, eating pets. His Twitter feed is just grievances of the right now. Yeah.

Yeah. It's a play all the hits essentially. I guess my question for you guys as you spent so much time and thank you for spending so much time thinking about Elon so that we don't have to. You still do though, right? Oh, I still do all the time. And honestly, I look I'm as much of a victim of the information ecosystem as anybody else. I see the Elon headline and I click on it and I go, Oh, that's fucking crazy. I gotta make a video. You know, like it, I, I am locked into it just as much as he is. You know, I feel like we're all, we're all trapped in there with him. You know, uh,

I'm on Twitter less than I used to be, but, or I'm on X less than I used to be, but I still, you know, it's still like where the crazy shit is going down a lot of the time. You can't, he did buy something that was too big to fail in a way and stopped it from fully, it didn't fully collapse, so we're sort of stuck with it. But you described him as being too big to fail in his businesses.

But the sort of degree of brain worms that he has has gotten so extreme. The stuff you're talking about, the Haitian migrants and et cetera, it's not true. Like, these spreading conspiracy theories that are false, and it strikes me that on a certain level, like when you get that divorced from reality,

that must interfere with your ability to run a business, right, to be a person with efficacy in the world. There's been plenty of other people who have torched themselves by going down that road. Like, I wanna compare them to the fucking MyPillow guy. But you know, like, there's- Oh no, the pillow business. Not the pillow business.

And you know what, his pillows are doing better than ever. There's a connection. The MyPillow guy sent pillows to the office. Yeah. After the takeover. There were pillows around the office that people would use to sleep. So there's the MyPillow connection.

When they're taking photos of themselves sleeping on the floor to impress Elon, they're using MyPillows. Great branding. Incredible. But like, is, do you think that there is actually existential risk here to his overall project of going so far down this rabbit hole, you know, or not?

Maybe, but he hasn't faced a repercussion from it. Like the US government isn't gonna pull a SpaceX contract because, you know, he started a conspiracy theory online that threatened voting, for example, or the election. Are they not? I mean, there's a California commission. Right. Which was then batted down by Newsom.

Uh-huh. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. He hasn't... I think the real risks are more to his legacy. I think he had prior to this done a very good job of painting this picture of himself as sort of a generational entrepreneur. Someone with a unique level of brilliance and talent, right?

And then the X project has really corrupted and tainted that image. And I think we've compared it a couple of times to Henry Ford and sort of his, you know, his genius and technological ability kind of making this huge advancement. And then also, you know, his decision to run essentially like a neo-Nazi newspaper and promote anti-Semitic views, you know, it taints his legacy. And I think it makes you think about sort of the

complications and corruptions that come with that kind of power. And I think that's what Elon has really done to himself in this process, you know, has kind of taken that hero's narrative of himself that he's spent his entire life crafting and kind of destroyed it. Yeah, he used to be compared to Henry Ford in one way, but now he's still being compared to Henry Ford in the other way. But at the same time, I mean, Henry Ford, people, when they talk about his anti-Semitism and his hate,

it's always the parentheses after that, well, you know he was anti-Semite, right? Like it's the thing you say after you talk about him. There's still plenty of Henry Ford museums and shit all over the country. I'm sure that do not mention that stuff as clearly. And, you know, as much as I like to think, okay, Elon's torture.

You want to see when someone does stuff that is this hateful, this stupid, this divorced from reality, you want to see come up. And yet when I'm like, man, you know, when I'm 90 and man, you know, when I'm 90 and Elon is hopefully dead, because he's a little bit older than me, you know, what is the overall legacy gonna be?

I'm not sure it's gonna be that, you know, about all the bad shit. He might still be able to pull his legacy out a little bit. We have that much power, you can control what people think of you. Sure, when we go to his museum on Mars, we'll see what they put in the displays. Yeah, Ryan's head.

Yeah, wow. Maybe still make it to Mars. Congrats. I really take your point though, about the amount of power that, I mean to be able to buy a mass communication platform, almost destroy it, still have tons of people use it to such an extent that it is influencing a presidential election.

And then we have to sit around talking about it. The best we can do is discuss it all day. I think you made the point earlier about inequality. It's a massive amount of power for one person to have. That's the problem with billionaires writ large, right? Well, the question has always been in the misinformation ecosystem, how do you get these fringe conspiracy views

and inject them into the mainstream, right? Like people, when QAnon was starting, that was something you had to really seek out and go and find. And you had to go like searching for the Q drops and figure out how to embed yourself into the conspiracy. And then some of that was starting to be brought onto Twitter by these accounts that were then sort of promoting the Stop the Steal movement and participating in January 6th, right?

And it slowly seeped into the mainstream. And what we're seeing now is sort of a reversal of that flow chart, where instead of it starting in this tiny audience and kind of making its way into bigger and bigger accounts, it's starting on this huge platform and automatically being delivered to this very wide viewership. And so there isn't-

And pushed by the largest follower. Right, the account with the most followers on the platform. And so it's just really accelerated that narrative process, I think. Whereas, you know, maybe over months you might see a movement like QAnon develop. Perhaps now we're talking about hours days. Yeah, the Haitian migrant conspiracy lie

was like instantaneous. It spread so quickly. It started on Facebook and then, but picked up by Musk, you know, and pushed immediately. And then it was all anybody could talk about for two weeks at the end of that. Jesus Christ, where do you see this going?

Like in the future, like, do you think that he ever gets bored of Twitter, he ever sells it, you know? Or is this just, or X, I guess? Does he just hold onto it forever? I mean, I think X for him right now is very successful. He wanted it to be a ecosystem that was all about him where he was driving the narrative and that's happening.

He wanted to sort of free it from the clutches of the liberal censors and he's succeeded in that and now his own account is explicitly right-wing and a lot of the other accounts that are most popular on the platform are other right-wing accounts. So I think by some of the measures he set out for himself, he's been incredibly successful. I don't necessarily see him getting bored with that

or walking away from it. Yeah, he doesn't need to make money off of that part of his business like he's seems to be willing to just lose money on it Forever right at the same time X as a platform. I think will wane It'll have its its People that use it and love it. We've been making the comparison to something like Yahoo mail, for example, which people, you know Right, like if you're going to sign up for an email account today, you might go to a different platform But they're still using Yahoo mail. And love it and they're not going to migrate away from it

But X is not adding users, it's not growing there's now alternatives like blue sky and threads out there that people are going to and spending time on. And that's gonna be his legacy that he is, you know, bought the thing he loved. He has transformed it to what he wants it to be. And, you know, it's gonna continue, I don't know, down this path and it's gonna shrink and we'll have his fans, but that'll be it.

I mean, it's an incredible story, and I really hope you sell it as a mini-series. Um, and please- To anyone listening, yeah. To anyone listening, please attach me. I wanna be on the staff. You wanna play Elon? Uh, yeah, actually.

I think I'd be pretty good. I think I could do it. No, I wanna be the guy who he fires as soon as he walks in. Well, thank you so much for being here. This has been incredible talking to you. The name of the book is Character Limit. It's out now.

You can pick up a copy at our special book shop, factuallypod.com, slash books. Where else can people find you on the internet, Kate and Ryan? We are everywhere on the internet now. We haven't really decided like where to exodus to from Twitter. So we're on Twitter, we're on threads, we're on Blue Sky, we're on email. Yahoo mail. We're bringing Yahoo mail back.

You could find us all over the internet. Carrier pigeon, yeah, whatever. Instagram, smoke signal. Oh my god, great. At the very least now there's multiple platforms you have to figure out how to post on simultaneously. And that is one of the things Elon has brought to us is that now there are multiple things. Yeah, please add us on LinkedIn. Oh, that's a dangerous one.

Add us to your network. Yeah, that's too far. It was absolutely incredible having you. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you. Thank you. Well, thank you once again to Ryan and Kate for coming on the show.

Again, if you want to pick up a copy of their book, factuallypod.com slash books is the URL. And when you buy there, you'll be supporting not just this show, but your local bookstore as well. If you want to support the show directly, head to Patreon.com slash Adam Conover. Five bucks a month gets you every episode ad free. For 15 bucks a month,

I will read your name in the credits of this very podcast. This week, I want to thank Game Grumps, Paul McCollum, Rick J. Nash, Birdie Coates, Howard and Kevin, Fatim, Merkan, Michael Lurer, Cam and Darren Kay. Thank you so much for your support. Patreon.com slash Adam Conover if you'd like to join them. My tickets and tour dates are at adamconover.net coming up soon. Denver, Batavia, Illinois, Austin, Texas, San Francisco, a bunch of other cities as

well. AdamConover.net. Of course, I want to thank my producers, Sam Roudman and Tony Wilson, everybody here at HeadGum for making the show possible. Thank you so much for listening and I'll see you next week on Factually.