Front Burner - Elon Musk’s very bad year

Episode Date: December 18, 2023

Elon Musk kicked off 2023 by losing $200 billion in wealth. And the South African entrepreneur is ending the year with a series of blunders. X, formerly known as Twitter, is absolutely bleeding advertisers. Tesla, once his bread and butter, is facing a massive recall. And Musk’s reputation has shifted from media darling and climate saviour to ill-tempered, eccentric rich guy. So, what exactly went wrong in 2023? How has Musk derailed his public persona? And is there any hope that the CEO can turn things around in 2024? Paris Marx, host of the podcast Tech Won’t Save Us, explains. For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hi, I'm Damon Fairless. I don't think I'm alone in saying that 2023 has not been a great year. And it's been especially bad for Elon Musk. It could have been a good one.

He is, after all, one of the richest men on the planet. But largely by his own doing, he was a stinker. The South African entrepreneur kicked off the year in the headlines as the first person ever to lose $200 billion in wealth. And now he's ending it with a series of bogeys. If somebody's going to try to blackmail me with advertising, blackmail me with money, If somebody's going to try to blackmail me with advertising, blackmail me with money, go f*** yourself. X, formerly known as Twitter, is absolutely bleeding advertisers. Several of his companies are under increased scrutiny from regulators. Tesla, once it was bread and butter, is facing a recall of nearly all its vehicles sold in the U.S. And maybe worst of all, for Musk at least, his reputation has shifted from media darling and climate savior to ill-tempered, misunderstood, eccentric rich guy.

Paris Marx is here with me today. He's the host of the podcast Tech Won't Save Us, which recently did a four-part series on Elon Musk. And he's here to take stock of everything that went wrong for Elon this past year, how it's derailed his carefully crafted public persona, and whether there's any hope he can turn things around in 2024. Hey, Paris, thanks for coming on. Absolutely. Great to speak with you. It's great to have you. So it has not been a banner year for Elon, but things really started going south when he bought Twitter and then rebranded it X. X marks the spot where the little blue Twitter bird died.

X, that's the name that he wants to use for the so-called everything app that he's trying to build on the foundations of Twitter. Since the billionaire bought Twitter back in October, the company has changed its business name to XCore. So let's start there. It was never the biggest social media platform, but it did have a ton of influence. Activists could get noticed. News broke there first. And so because of those things, brands were there. But then he takes over. And Elon Musk makes a bunch of steps that undercuts what makes it good. there first. And so because of those things, brands were there, but then he takes over and Elon Musk makes a bunch of steps that undercuts what makes it good. So maybe we can start there

and you can walk me through what that process of undercutting looked like. Sure. So I think Elon Musk had a particular idea of what he wanted the platform to look like and what he thought a better Twitter would look like. And I think that it's been proven out now that his vision for that has not really aligned with what many users feel that would actually be, right? And so when he took over, he immediately changed how the blue check system worked. So that was kind of a symbol that showed you who was verified. This usually meant like accounts you could trust, accounts who represented people who would be really well-known or major brands or things like that. Elon wanted to get rid of that right away because he said it was a peasants and lords system. And so he wanted to make it so

anyone could buy their own blue check. And of course, that has proceeded in a few different steps. But initially when he did it, it meant that a ton of users immediately bought these checkmarks and impersonated a ton of major brands. One in particular, I believe, was called Eli Lilly. And someone kind of imitated this account and said that it was going to allow its insulin to be given away for free, I think it was, which obviously in the US market is not something that it would want. The company's stock price tanked by more than 4% and erased $15 billion worth of market value. And so then, you know, throughout the year, we've seen a number of major decisions around, you know,

letting more far-right figures back onto the platform, you know, white nationalists, extreme right-wing people who had previously been banned. And then Elon Musk's kind of, you know, own belief that he simply didn't need as many people as the company had hired. And so engaged in mass layoffs in a series of different times in order to really cut down the number of workers. And we've seen that's really affected stability and moderation and all these other things on the platform as well. talk about like reinstating right-wing personalities that like recently alex jones uh of info wars fame you know who was denying the sandy hook uh shooting is is now back on but but he was also

he was also suspending accounts too right like there were a number of accounts from kind of left-leaning folks that he suspended totally and i think the alex jones thing was actually quite shocking you know he's he's on ban a of different people. But so while he's been doing that, allowing all these people back on the platform, as you say, he's been banning people on the left who, you know, say things that he doesn't particularly like. You know, about a year ago, as we speak, he banned a bunch of journalists who were reporting on this Twitter account called Elonet, which kind of tracked the movements of Elon Musk's private jet. And Elon felt that, you know, he was being personally targeted and his safety was at risk. And of course, none of that was the case. But he went on this kind of mass banning spree

of journalists and anyone who was kind of tweeting about this account at all. Twitter CEO Elon Musk bowing to pressure and reinstating the accounts of several journalists he had banned. It caps off a tumultuous week for Twitter after Musk first suspended the account that tweeted the whereabouts of his jet and then the accounts of nine journalists who reported on it. um, you know, accounts that he felt, uh, you know, that he didn't particularly like, uh, you know, basically got banned, even though he claims that he's a big supporter of free speech, whatever that's supposed to mean. Yeah. Well, let's talk about that. Cause, cause there is a kind of delicious and maybe disconcerting irony about that, right? Cause, cause a lot of what he was doing to overhaul Twitter was, you know, under the rubric of free speech. So, so what does that mean to him? Like, did you have a sense of that? Yeah, I think it's pretty clear

that when he says free speech, he means that, you know, if you have a particularly bigoted view, a particularly racist or transphobic view that you want to put out into the world, you should not be stopped from doing that. And you should face no consequence for doing that. You know, and that is aligned with the type of people who he has been unbanning, you know, who have been banned for saying those sorts of things, right, who are on the right, who are white nationalists and things like that. And that seems to have really shaped his approach to, you know, speech moderation, how he feels the platform should work. And at the same time, you know, as we've been talking about, if people are critical of him personally in his actions,

then it's entirely possible that they might get banned just because, you know, they have kind of angered the big boss who owns the platform. So, you know, it's a particularly skewed version of free speech that, you know, aligns, I think, with his personal views and not so much what many people would consider kind of an objective version of that. Yeah, I think I've heard him referred to as a free speech absolutist, right? Yeah, yeah, which is clearly not true. Beyond his views of what constitutes free speech, how has his own ideology played into that? Can we kind of go into the sub-basement of his mind if we can go there? Yeah, absolutely. Obviously, it's hard to psychoanalyze someone who you've never met and don't know well, but based on all the reporting that's been done, based on the biographies that have been written about him, I think we can

kind of see that for a while, Elon Musk, you know, he did really believe that he was changing the world, you know, that he was kind of solely responsible for solving key problems in society, you know, like climate change and making humanity a multi-planetary species. But I think that we've seen a really notable shift over the past year or so where these things have gotten much worse, right? Obviously, when people see his tweets and see some of the statements that he's been making in recent months, you know, he's had some pretty unhinged interviews where he's told advertisers to F off or go F themselves.

Yeah, the deal book scenario. Yeah, exactly. And then earlier this year, he had one with CNBC where he was kind of very directly saying that he did not care if there were consequences for the types of things he's saying because he's been spreading conspiracy theories and kind of echoing some really vile things that users on the platform have been posting, you know, the types of people that he is encouraging and has, you know, removed the bans on. But then on top of that, you know, there's this kind of broader shift that I think plays into this too, right? Through the 2010s, for the most part, Elon Musk was praised as this man who was addressing these problems, right?

He was growing Tesla and making people interested in electric vehicles. He was pushing forward the space program again, after a lot of kind of disinvestment in at least the human side of the space program. You know, there were still a lot of robots and rovers and stuff going out there. But so he was generally praised for all these things. And then, you know, around 2018, we start to have this general reassessment of the tech industry, where after a decade or so of praise, people started to say, wait, you know, there might be some consequences to these tech companies like Facebook or Amazon, or, you know, the power that these men have accumulated. And that resulted in a lot more critical coverage of those companies and of Elon Musk as well. And you saw a number of powerful people in the tech industry in that moment really kind of recoil from, you know,

from journalism and really start to criticize journalists. But also, you know, because of the nature of how politics works in the States and other countries, you know, when he was investing in electric vehicles, the praise usually came from liberals and people who are more on the left. And then, you know, that criticism was coming from those same people who he could previously expect praise from. And so, you know, the people who then were more open to praising him at a time when, you know, these people did have much more power, much more wealth, you know, wanted to avoid regulations and higher taxes were people on the right. And so they were more than happy to, you know, realign their politics. You know, how much of a realignment was actually necessary there? I think we could debate, but to embrace the right much more. And we've seen Elon Musk

really go hard on this year, telling people to vote for Republican politicians, echoing kind of right-wing immigration politics, even going to the Texas border to kind of shame migrants and criticize them and things like that. So it's been a really notable kind of public change in the persona there. Yeah. And there really have been some major consequences. So I'm just thinking with the changes he's made to X, a lot of users have bailed and importantly, a lot of companies have bail right so ibm apple lionsgate bell media they've all pulled ads from the platform because well they don't want their brands displayed next to pro-nazi posts and musk isn't doing anything to win them back either there

was all of the criticism there was advertisers leaving we talked to bob i hope they stop you hope don't advertise you don't want them to advertise? No. What do you mean? If somebody's gonna try to blackmail me with advertising, blackmail me with money, go yourself. But. Go yourself.

Is that clear? I hope it is. Hey, Bob. If you're in the audience. Well, let me ask you then. So I guess I'm curious, how important are those advertising dollars to the platform? Yeah, they are actually very important. Before Elon Musk took over the company, Twitter was making about $5 billion a year, and about 90% of that was from advertising.

And so, you know, as the ad revenue declines, and as he scares the major advertisers away from the platform, that's a significant hit to the finances of the company. At a time when, you know, interest rates have been rising, Elon Musk took out a ton of debt, $13 billion in debt in order to finance his acquisition of the company. And then on top of that, of course, he has been trying to, you know, make new business models for the company, whether it's through subscriptions or charging for access to the API, which is, you know, kind of the data streams and things like that that come from the company. And certainly those have generated some new revenue, but it's not nearly as much as would be needed to make up the difference for all the last advertising dollars. And so it's a real hit to the company itself. And then on top of that, not nearly as much as would be needed to make up the difference for all the lost advertising

dollars. And so it's a real hit to the company itself. And then on top of that, it's just not as central, as you were saying, as it was before. Previously, this was a place where a lot of politicians would go. And during the Trump administration in particular, people were always watching to see what he was going to be tweeting. And that made news, right? Now, he scared off a lot of the journalists. Certainly some of them are still there, but they're not using it nearly to the same degree as they used to. You know, politicians

aren't using it the same way. You know, all of the kind of important people that made this relatively small platform much more impactful than it should have been are all kind of moving away from it now too, and that's going to have a serious impact on its continued relevance. Twitter, X is one star in his constellation of companies, so to speak. I guess I'm curious why things have gone so far off the rails at X when his other companies have been able to function comparatively well. Yeah. So there's certainly some debate over that, you know, and some people I think would point to this general shift that we've seen in Musk's kind of personality over the past year, right? Where he does seem to be more unhinged. I think that there's a bit of a deeper explanation there. One of the things that really stands out

when you look at, you know, the biographies that have been written about him, when you look at some of the reporting on his companies, is that, you know, Elon Musk has a history of making some bad decisions. You know, going back to his first company, he was removed as CEO by the board there, a company called Zip2. When he was in charge of PayPal, he was removed as CEO there as well. But then kind of as he moved into Tesla and SpaceX, he had the power and the wealth, you know, where he could make these decisions and not be challenged in the same way. And one of the things that we get from the reporting that's been done about those companies is that there do seem to be structures in place so that if Elon Musk makes a bad decision,

there are kind of accountability and checks and balances to ensure that it doesn't kind of mess the company up. You know, people like Gwynne Shotwell at SpaceX or Franz von Holzhausen at Tesla, you know, are able to ensure that if Elon Musk says something and it doesn't seem like it's good for the company, then they're going to take a few days and give Elon Musk time to reassess and then suggest to him that maybe that was a bad idea and they should do something else, right? At Twitter, it's very clear that that was not in place. And I think it's pretty clear that Linda Iaccarino, the NBC universal executive who he hired to become CEO, has not been able to kind of set up that those mechanisms to ensure that, um, you know, his decisions aren't seriously affecting the company. Um, and it doesn't seem like that's

going to happen anytime soon. I mean, the other thing that, that seems evident when we look at X is the varnish has come off in terms of revealing who Elon Musk is as a person, right? There's this mythology, I guess. Uh, so, So can you tell me how he was regarded, and I think more interestingly, how he wanted to be perceived? Yeah, absolutely. I think when you go back to Elon Musk's earliest days, when he's kind of getting into entrepreneurship and starting his first company, you can very clearly see that there is a concerted effort to start to build a narrative around himself, right? There are these stories about his bedroom being filled with books from, you know, kind of business

entrepreneurs, people like Richard Branson, trying to learn not just how to build a company, but also to build a public profile, right? And when he's removed from the board at Zip2, one of the things he asked the board is if he can still do media interviews for the company, right? Still kind of be the face to get that kind of connection with the media. And we see early on, you know, he's doing things like buying McLaren F1 supercars and getting CNN to come cover it. Just three years ago, I was showering at the Y and sleeping on the office floor. And now, obviously, I've got a million-dollar car and quite a few creature comforts.

And obviously I've got a million dollar car and quite a few creature comforts. And, you know, all these sort of things to try to make himself seem like this, you know, kind of greater than life sort of figure. Yeah, totally. And then he kind of inspires, you know, the representation of Iron Man and Tony Stark and all this kind of stuff. So it's fascinating to see all of those things. And then I feel like by, you know, kind of the early 2010s, even the latter half of kind of the first decade of the 2000s, we get into this reporting where, or this way of framing Elon Musk, where he is the man who is building electric cars and thus going to, you know, kind of save us from climate change. And he is building rockets and he's going to make us a multi-planetary species. When I graduated from college, there were three areas that I thought would be most impactful to the future of humanity.

The three were the internet, space exploration, and then changing the economy from a mine and burn hydrocarbon-based economy to one which is solar electric, which I think is going to be the primary but not exclusive means of energy and transportation. And basically anything he does kind of can't be questioned, right? Or he can basically do no wrong in the eyes of a lot of the reporting that is being done on him. And then, of course, the public profile that he has. But then when you actually dig into the stories of what is going on at his companies, you see time and again that the workers are reporting that they're being treated very poorly, that they're being underpaid, that they're being overworked and working incredibly long hours and being pushed to do so by Elon Musk.

In Walter Isaacson's new biography that came out in September, he describes this as a surge. Every now and then, Elon Musk will just get in this kind of mood where he's annoyed or something like that and'll just force the employees to work incredible overtime for some undetermined period of time for often no real reason at all, just because he feels that people should be working harder like this. And so, you know, I was seeing these sorts of stories of the dysfunction at his companies and, you know, how he was really acting with these people. And then seeing how the public profile and kind of the reporting on him didn't resemble this at all, right? And that frustrated me for a long time. And I feel like one of the things that really stands out from the past year is how much, you know, the kind of public perception of Elon Musk and, you know, what I

think the reality of the man is have really been coming much closer together. And I think many more people are seeing what I feel like I've been seeing for a really long time. He does seem to have built a filter bubble where he's surrounded by people who will only say yes to him, only tell him what he wants to hear. And he'll only receive information that kind of, you know, approves his biases or kind of backs those things up. Right. Which is, you know is a problem that I think a lot of people have when they go online and when they build these filter bubbles for themselves as well. But it's particularly damaging when it is one of the richest men in the world who has immense power because he controls key electric vehicle charging infrastructures, key rocket

launch infrastructures, and even satellite communication infrastructures where we've seen- Yeah, with Starlink. Yeah, exactly. Where we've seen him be able to make decisions around Ukraine's access to Starlink and that has affected their war plans or whether humanitarian organizations in Gaza

should get access to it and who should decide about that. And I think that these are decisions and these are things that we should be debating, But is that something that Elon Musk should be deciding? Or is it like our governments who are elected by us who should be deciding, right? I'll see you next time. entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. Hi, it's Ramit Sethi here. You may have seen my money show on Netflix. I've been talking about money for 20 years. I've talked to millions of people and I have some startling numbers to share with you.

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the great replacement theory as quote unquote, actual truth. Right. So I guess what I'm curious is, is this a change where, where's this coming from? is it new for him has he always been this way i i think it's a mix right i i think that he has long said things that did kind of adhere to certain conspiracy theories but weren't so outwardly conspiratorial for example he's been talking for years about um declining population rates and declining birth rates and and being really concerned about that but when you hear the language that he uses, his concern is often that it's quote unquote smart people who are not having enough children. And he has a really strong belief

that you can measure intelligence by IQ and that wealth is correlated to intelligence. So because he's one of the wealthiest men in the world, he's also one of the smartest men in the world. And I think that these are really harmful ideas and have really long kind of legacies that are associated with racism and eugenics and things like that. So I think that, you know, there were some of this there, but he wasn't nearly as outward about it. And he wasn't nearly as kind of, you know, radicalized, I guess you would say, as he seems

to be today. I also think it's profoundly sad. You know, when you talk about him posting transphobic content, one of the things we know is that he has a transgender daughter who has disowned him, who, you know, has publicly had her surname changed so that it's not Musk any longer because she doesn't want to be associated with him. And so as he's been posting all these things, he has said that he believes that his daughter was, you know, kind of affected by the woke mind virus and kind of brainwashed by cultural Marxism and all this kind of stuff. And, you know, he's a man that talks a lot about having children and the importance of families and stuff like that. You know, and I do think it's quite sad when you see,

you know, how he has a trans daughter and he still says these sorts of things. So, so we've been talking a lot about Twitter or X or whatever we're supposed to call it these days. Uh, but, but let's, let's talk about Tesla too. So, so in Sweden, the company has refused to recognize a union that was formed by the, uh, the mechanics there. And that led to a solidarity strikes across Scandinavia now. And so now things like dock workers are blocking deliveries of the cars, electricians, uh, are not doing maintenance and even garbage collectors aren't picking up the trash there. And then last week in the U S the company was forced to recall about 2 million cars. So what happened there? Yeah. So Tesla is facing a lot of challenges right now. It has gone through

a number of periods in its history where it's faced difficulties. It also has a long history of union busting and trying to stop union organizing at its factories in the United States and Germany. And of course, what we see in Sweden is service workers like mechanics, not a factory because it doesn't have one there. So beyond what we see in Sweden, the United Auto Workers, which recently had a successful contract negotiation with the big three automakers, says that it is going after automakers like Tesla in order to unionize the non-union manufacturers in the United States. And in Germany as well, the unions there have said that they are going after Elon Musk's factory to unionize it as well. So Elon

Musk has long opposed unions. And in a recent interview, he said that again, he sees it as a peasants and lords situation where apparently the unions are the lords and not the richest man in the world who owns the company. I think the unions naturally try to create negativity in a company and create a sort of lords and peasants situation. There are many people at Tesla who have gone from working on the line to being in senior management. There is no lords and peasants. Everyone eats at the same table.

Everyone parks in the same parking lot. And so Tesla right now, of course, everyone will know that we are making this big push toward electric vehicles, right? And that our governments, whether it's in the US or Canada or Europe or wherever else, are unleashing a lot of subsidies to encourage people to buy electric vehicles. And Tesla for a long time has had some of the key models that people would buy. So Tesla now is not only facing competition, but we also have seen in the past about six months that sales growth of electric vehicles has really slowed because it does seem to have hit this sort of peak where a lot of the manufacturers seem to have excess inventory and can't seem to be selling so much. And so there's a general challenge that's

hitting all of these automakers at the moment, and, and Tesla is not immune from that. Uh, and so it remains to be seen, you know, what is actually going to happen there, what it's going to look like for their future, because Tesla has also been planning a factory in Mexico and said recently that it won't be moving forward with it at the moment. Yeah. And I mean, just so there are those, you know, very real kind of business issues too, but also, you know, Tesla's are, they're kind of coming down in public esteem in a bit too. I'm just thinking, there's the new Netflix movie, Leave the World Behind. Yeah. So Teslas were these coveted cars.

They were the, going to drive us into the sustainable future. And now that autopilot feature in them is a, is a plot point. You know, you don't want to have associated with a company where in the movie, you know, the car's autopilot system gets hacked and starts running people down on screen. What are you doing? Should we flag them down? Maybe they know something. There's no one in that car! I'm curious, I guess, how central is the autopilot feature to that brand? And what

has this last recall done to the public's opinion of it? Yeah, it's absolutely central. One of the things that Elon Musk said about a couple years ago now was that if autopilot and self-driving don't work out, then Tesla is worth virtually nothing. Because one of the things that really stands out when you look at Tesla's valuation, it's a publicly traded company versus a lot of other automakers, is that it's worth massively more, even though it sells many fewer cars than, say, a General Motors or a Ford. And that is because investors believe that there's going to be some kind of massive payout coming in the future from self-driving systems and robo-taxis and things like that. But time and again, Elon Musk and Tesla have been unable to deliver on those features. And one thing, you know, you mentioned the big recall of

over 2 million vehicles, I believe it is that happened in the United States just recently. But over the past year or so, the regulators have really been stepping up enforcement and scrutiny in a way that they haven't for a long time. You know, there's been complaints about the system for years. There have been crashes that have been caused by these systems, you know, allegations that people have not been using them properly because, you know, they designed the system in such a way that it could be used inappropriately in areas where it probably shouldn't have been turned on. U.S. safety regulators have investigated nearly a thousand crashes involving Tesla's autopilot system. A Washington Post report found about 40 of these crashes were fatal,

including eight where autopilot was engaged on roads where it was not supposed to be used at all. And so now what we see is regulators really taking a look at that, making it seem like they are going to be putting much more forceful expectations on autopilot and on Tesla, you know, could mean even greater difficulties for Musk and for Tesla. And I should just mention too, when we're talking about a recall, this is really just a software update over the cloud. It still is technically a recall, but I just think it's important to mention that. Exactly. CEO Elon Musk put out a post on X saying that the company has a moral obligation to continue to improve safety systems. But they also make the point, they say that anecdotes of accidents and claims by lawyers are not hard data. And they claim hard data.

There's also the recent unveiling of the Cybertruck just last month, which is, I guess, funky looking, to be kind. What's that been like? How have people reacted to the Cybertruck? Yeah, I think it's been clear for a while that the response to the Cybertruck was not going to be great. This is supposed to be Tesla's kind of competition with the Ford F-150 and these major kind of pickup trucks, and it really doesn't seem like it's going to be that at all. It really didn't help that there was a video going around of the cyber truck stuck on a snowy hill and then yeah you know being rescued by a ford totally yeah i think if you're buying a vehicle like that you're going to expect it to be able to handle some more difficult terrain um but there have

been a number of vehicles that show the cyber truck having challenges on even kind of, uh, you know, not very steep inclines and things like that. And, um, you know, also looking awkward, I think doesn't help. Yeah. Yeah. So I want to mention another company that's not had a good year either, and that's SpaceX. So, you know, space exploration is, I think it's really one of the things that's kind of at the core of him, as I understand him. But its latest attempt at launching its Starship spacecraft was a failure.

It lost contact with mission control. And then one of its boosters blew up. Incredible views of our super heavy booster. And as you can see, the super heavy booster has just experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly. SpaceX is under regulatory scrutiny. What does this mean for SpaceX and for, I guess, Musk's goal of settling Mars? Yeah, I think it's mixed, right? I think, you know, there's been a lot of attention focused on the Starship, which is this really massive rocket that Elon Musk says is necessary in order

to get us to Mars, right? And as part of this larger project that he's been talking about for a couple of decades now. But I think it's also important not to lose sight of the fact that SpaceX's other business of, you know, rocket launches and things like that, that are not focused on Mars, but are focused on, you know, areas of space that are much closer to our planet is doing incredibly.

Yeah, exactly. Putting up satellites, bringing things to the international space station, even launching astronauts to the space station. That business is doing incredibly well. And SpaceX largely has it captured. So it's not just kind of the United States, US companies that are using it, but often other governments and even, you know, Amazon recently contracted for SpaceX to launch a bunch of its own satellites up into space, even though Jeff Bezos has a separate company called Blue Origin that's supposed to be doing the same thing. So SpaceX is really dominant in this field right now. And I would say that one of the things that stands out to me when I look at this is that I think the talk about Mars is often a bit of a distraction.

Like I think it's important to pay attention to what's going on with Starship because it is having serious environmental impacts. But I think that the narrative around, you know, this kind of future in space spreading humanity to multiple planets distracts people from, you know, the reality of what the company is doing when it puts many thousands of satellites into space. I believe SpaceX controls more than half of the active satellites in orbit right now, which is kind of shocking if you think about it, and actually does create serious risks both of satellite collision, but also can change the way that we see the night sky.

But then on top of that, you know, there's all of this power that must accrues by owning this key infrastructure of rocket launches and of satellite communications. So it's concerning that, you know, someone like Elon Musk has the power to make those decisions and has been able to corner these key infrastructures that we will all depend on. And that means that it's hard to reduce his power because he's already cornered, you know, these key things that we all rely on. He's already cornered these key things that we all rely on. So looking ahead more broadly for 2024 for Elon Musk, 23 has been a bit of a bust for him. Where do you think the next year is going to take him?

Yeah, it's hard to see any changes really coming, right? We're entering into an election year in the United States, which is going to be incredibly consequential. And you can be certain that Elon Musk is going to be very vocal and very involved in that, as he has been previously, associating with Republican candidates like Ron DeSantis or Vivek Ramaswamy. I think it remains to be seen what exactly is going to happen with Twitter or X, if it's going to change in any meaningful way that will make it more sustainable, or if, as Elon Musk warned in the deal book interview that he gave recently, you know,

it will kind of succumb to advertiser boycott, and then he will simply blame everyone else for what has happened, right? But it does seem to be that, you know, whatever happens in the next year, it's going to be, I'm sure Elon Musk won't be going out quietly with whatever happens and will be looking for attention and power the whole way. Right, Paris. Thanks so much. It's great talking to you.

Absolutely. Thanks so much. It was a pleasure. All right, that's all for today. I'm Damon Fairless. Thanks for listening to FrontBurner. I'll talk to you tomorrow.