It Could Happen Here - The Danger of Elon Musk

Episode Date: November 13, 2023

Ed Zitron, tech journalist, sits down to talk about how Elon Musk scammed his way into being a nation-state level actor.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadowbride. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of fright. An anthology podcast of modern-day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into tech's elite and how they've turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech

brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. Hey, I'm Jacqueline Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audio books while running errands or at the end of a busy day. From thought provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Listen to Black Lit on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. AT&T, connecting changes everything.

CallZone Media. This could be a giant disaster. Those were the words that Elon Musk texted biographer Walter Isaacson on a Friday evening in September 2022, claiming that the Ukrainian military was attempting a sneak attack on the Russian naval fleet in Sevastopol in the annexed region of Crimea. Musk had been providing Starlink internet to the Ukrainian military for months as part of their ongoing conflict against Russia's invasion, and the resourceful Ukrainians began using Starlink as a way to remotely control their kamikaze drones. Musk, having spoken to a Russian ambassador, saw Crimea as a red line that, when crossed, would escalate the conflict, potentially even provoking a nuclear retaliation.

And so he acted, disabling or, depending on who you ask, refusing to enable Starlink accessed in the Crimea region. When the Ukrainian drone subs approached their targets, they suddenly stopped communicating with their operators and eventually washed up ashore, harmless and impotent. While the specific details of this episode are hazy, the core truth is unambiguously clear. Elon Musk is a supremely powerful individual and, through action or in action, has the ability to influence the outcome of combat operations in the bloodiest war inflicted upon Europe in generations. It's a level of power typically only reserved for nation-state actors, not tech company CEOs. Throughout history,

we've seen plenty of examples of individuals and companies with outsized country-like power and influence. Musk isn't unique in that regard, nor is he the sole cautionary tale about why this shouldn't be allowed to happen. As a private individual operating within his capacities as CEO, he's unconstrained by democratic accountability. And as a private businessman, he has his own conflicts of interest, from Tesla's long history of sourcing aluminum from Russian companies to his contacts with the highest echelons of Russian leadership, including Vladimir Putin himself. Historically, the only real accountability mechanism for people like Musk has been the media. And yet in this case, the media has chosen instead to fate the

Elon Musk creation myth that he's a trailblazing real-life Tony Stark that will take humanity to the stars, rather than asking him any hard questions of any kind. This situation is the product of a media industry dominated by journalists seeking access to popular public figures, pulling their punches in the process. The most notable access journalist is Kara Swisher, who has spent decades covering the tech industry with a pantomime-like aggression, asking the quote-unquote hard questions without ever really pushing to the level of discomfort that might make a source unwilling to participate. Swisher famously, in an interview during the All Things Digital Conference in 2010, convinced Meta CEO, then called Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg to take

off his hoodie after asking him a challenging question about Facebook's invasion of privacy, only to be distracted by the design of the inside of what he was wearing, effectively objecting to her own line of questioning for entertainment purposes. Eight years later, Swisher would interview Zuckerberg about Cambridge Analytica and Russian interference in the 2016 elections, lobbing softball questions like, make a case for keeping Infowars on Facebook, and responding to Zuckerberg outright saying he wouldn't ban Holocaust and Sandy Hook deniers by asking how it made Zuckerberg feel when people said Facebook killed people in Myanmar. The Swisher House style is simple. Ask a big, meaty question and then fail to interrogate

a single answer in any way, shape or form. Around a month later, Swisher would interview Elon Musk, who at that point had aided harassment campaigns against reporters, called a man saving children a paedophile and had his companies face multiple allegations of sexual harassment and racism. When asked about his fights with the press over Twitter, Musk claimed that the Wall Street Journal, who Swisher used to work for, outright lied about investigation into Tesla's production figures. To which Swisher asked him if he realized the dangers of him saying such things about the press, and proceeded to help Musk paper over his claims, saying that he, quote, just doesn't like falsehoods. One of the richest and most powerful

men in the world sat before Swisher and her interrogation involved asking him simple questions about why he was doing things, lightly teasing him and saying that he looks, and I quote, rested in calm. To be clear, this is an ultra powerful billionaire. And this is a, was at the time, enterprising journalist who everyone looked to. In April 2022, the week that Musk announced the Twitter acquisition, Swisher gave a strange interview to James D. Walsh of the New Yorker, defending Musk, who had, of course, waived due diligence on the acquisition and did not seem to have a single clear plan about how he might run the site. She claimed that you couldn't pin Musk down, that he was quite

complex, and that we would be surprised about what he likes and doesn't like. Musk, who has invented none of the core products that make him rich, is a, quote, visionary that gave Swisher genuine answers, and arguably the most damning thing she could have said would call her back. That was her litmus test, that he would return her calls. Her ultimate defense of Musk was that, and I quote, inventors were very difficult, problematic people, and that moderation on Twitter was not working at the time of acquisition. These are all, of course, demonstrably false based on the events that followed, the growth of hate speech, the lack of accountability, the biggest face on the events that followed, the growth of hate speech, the lack of accountability that bigots face on the platform, and the fact that every third post seems to be some kind of spam bot, either selling t-shirts or pornography or cryptocurrency scams.

Swisher only turned on Musk when he emailed her, calling her an arsehole in November 2022, including a screenshot where, according to Swisher, she was actually defending him, saying that the US government should pay Elon Musk for Starlink. Since then, Musk has gone from a difficult-to-pin-down visionary to Kara Swisher calling his social network a, and this is agonizingly, horribly written, a thunderdome of toxic asininity. Swisher, it appears, only worried about what she'd called Musk's price of cocktail of ignorance and big ego until he was rude to her. One of the most famous tech journalists in the world, who has failed to take any real shot at any of the people she's questioned across decades of

doing this, has now been reduced to making epic dunks that sound like a 21-year-old Harry Potter fan trying to cast a spell. It's embarrassing. Swisher isn't the sole media figure guilty of having treated Elon Musk with kid gloves or treating his bloviating with otherwise undue credulity. This is a problem that affects almost every news outlet and reporter that covers billionaires. The assumption is always that billionaires will act with empathy, patience, and grace, three things that Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg, and their ilk totally lack. Failing that, one would suppose they'd act like a normal person, a losing proposition if you've ever read Jeff Bezos' texts. These people are not like us.

They do not experience human struggle. They don't have bills or bosses or fear of anything, let alone authority. Each and every billionaire is effectively above the law, and that is the place that you must start to understand them. It's deeply frustrating, especially when you consider the myriad of opportunities where the media could have taken Musk to task and held him accountable. Take Hyperloop, for example, Musk's concept for a high-speed mass transit system where pressurized capsules would hurtle between cities through vacuum tubes at speeds as fast as 760 miles an hour. Hyperloop, Musk promised, would allow commuters to travel between San Francisco and Los Angeles in as little as 30 minutes, and with the

network powered primarily by solar power, with no real environmental impact. If anything, this could have been a much bigger deal than Tesla. High-speed trans-air that doesn't burn fossil fuels could truly have changed the world. So what do you think happened? Do you think that Musk delivered on this? On this product that helped play a vital role in cementing his image as a real-life Tony Stark. Not only would it be faster and cheaper than anything currently in existence, but it'd be greener too. What followed was a gushing, or at least credulous, flow of media coverage, including from the Washington Post and the New York Times, both papers of record. It wasn't until the hype gradually died down that people began

asking serious questions about Hyperloop's viability. An exhaustive report published by the Transportation Research Laboratory earlier this year raises serious questions about the feasibility of Hyperloop, particularly when it comes to passenger transportation. Riders, it noted, would be exposed to extreme physical and mental stress, with the noise, vibrations, and rapid acceleration and deceleration inflicting an unknowable toll on the human body. Questions about safety still linger. And then there's the thorny issue of cost, with Hyperloop requiring an all-new infrastructure. Even the shortest routes would involve a multi-billion dollar upfront investment. These points were, for the most part, absent entirely

from the earliest coverage, presented by I Heart and Sonorum. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters, to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows. As part of My Cultura podcast network.

Available on the iHeartRadio app. Apple Podcasts. Or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast. And we're kicking off our second season digging into how Tex Elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, better offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone

from Nobel winning economists to leading journalists in the field. And I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse, and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge, and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough, so join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry, and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com.

On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian.

Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him.. His father in Cuba. Mr. González wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him.

Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace,

the Elian González story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The media also missed the fact that Hypeloop wasn't even a new idea. In the 19th century, countless inventors toyed with the notion of an atmospheric railway, where vehicles travelled through a near-vacuum environment on the momentum of pressurised air. A small demonstrator route was even built by Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the legendary British engineer who designed the first transatlantic steamship. While Hyperloop differed in some meaningful ways, it was still nonetheless, much like many Musk products, a derivative of an earlier idea. The boring company, Musk's hilariously named tunnel boring startup, earned similar credulous coverage upon its inception, driven in no small part due to

Musk's decision to raise working capital by selling branded flamethrowers, dubbed the Not-A-Flame-Thrower, to anyone that paid $500. This stunt aside, the Boring Company won praise due to its stated mission to reduce the cost of digging tunnels, which are often an inevitable and expensive part of road and mass transportation development. road and mass transportation development. Like Hyperloop, the boring company fed into the Tony Stark image of a billionaire that could, through sheer force of will, change the world and fix once-intractable problems. I quote Mashable when they said, Musk built machines to travel more efficiently on the earth and above it, so traveling through earth seems within the realm of his capabilities. If anyone can transform a seemingly absent-minded half-joke into world-changing technology, it's Elon Musk, said The Guardian. And then reality here. The boring company's first commercial project, a 1.7-mile tunnel in Las Vegas, where I in fact live,

wasn't a traditional road tunnel or part of an underground metro system. It was, in fact, far less impressive. A single-lane loop where human-driven Teslas ferried passengers between points of interest and the Las Vegas Convention Center and where traffic jams are a routine frustration for passengers. Other projects in other cities, most notably Chicago and Los Angeles, have either been cancelled or are on indefinite hiatus. There is nothing that the boring company has done. The tunnel in Vegas is useless. It's claustrophobic. It's ugly. Feels like being in an airport lounge except there's no food. It's strange. It doesn't feel like it solves a problem

other than how can Elon Musk get more attention? And that really is what he craves. Musk's wafer-thin skin, his volatility, and his propensity to over-promise and under-deliver has never been a secret. While he's been able, with some success, to obfuscate and misdirect through a well-crafted media persona, the clues have always been there. Musk's reality distortion field goes some way to explaining how he has managed to amass the extent of the power he has and how he's cemented himself into our nation's most vital industries like transportation, communications, infrastructure, and social media. He has a fairly consistent battle plan. He makes a big promise, he delivers enough to make the media

believe he's for real, and then he relies upon the fact that very few parts of the media will ever follow up with him. There is no challenging Elon Musk in the media. The thinnest amounts of criticism are usually met by a horde of crazed Tesla fans, or at times, Elon Musk himself. He's created a paper-thin media image built on the smallest, thinnest structures of reality. He has found a way to manipulate the media using his large amounts of power, money, and his few friends. Elon Musk is a danger to society. He's a capricious demagogue, desperate for more power and attention, and he will do whatever he wants, whenever he wants, wherever he wants, because we are societally unprepared for billionaires. It's no longer healthy or safe or honest to see Elon Musk as a dorky charlatan carrying sinks into offices or destroying social networks to settle insular beefs.

Elon Musk is a nation-state level actor, with a net worth larger than the GDP of Ukraine. He associates only with equally spurious reactionaries like Bill Maher, Ron DeSantis, and David Sachs, and he's easily influenced by anyone who agrees with his thinly backed beliefs. Musk isn't polarizing. He's polarization given life, an empty man made of contrarianism and grievances and he'll happily change the world based on his own personal beliefs as a result of our market-driven government and compliant media musk has caused and will continue to cause human suffering and actual death in his pursuit of fame power and capital it's time to stop treating him as just an entrepreneur, an investor, an executive,

or an industry blowhard. As a result of our market-driven government and compliant media, Musk has caused and will continue to cause humans suffering an actual death in his pursuit of fame, power, and capital. It's time to stop treating him as just an entrepreneur, an investor, an executive, or an industry blowhard, and see him as a man who has used his incredible wealth and status to twist the world to his petty, ignorant, and selfish desires. It's important to realize with complete clarity that Musk makes electric cars that are sold around the world and sells rockets to NASA. He runs Twitter, X, or whatever it's called these days. One of the largest communication networks in the world. And of course, Starlink, the satellite ISP used throughout the world that is specifically marketed to places that are otherwise inaccessible to traditional broadband.

This is not just a goofy Redditor posting epic memes and saying exactly anymore. Elon Musk has chosen to, and will continue to choose to, use his influence over these networks to interfere with global events, and because the media and the government has been so utterly tepid in their approach to him, he's accumulated such power and influence that he is, on some level, unstoppable. Since his acquisition of Twitter in 2022 and the subsequent layoffs of 6,000 people, Musk has revealed to the world his deep-seated reactionary beliefs and his noxious, pathetic victim complex. He has become obsessed with the woke mind virus, a term that he uses to vaguely refer to everything from progressive education on college campuses to

San Francisco's growing homeless problem. He's made Twitter's bot problem, one that he tried to use to cancel the original acquisition, significantly worse, littering replies with bots trying to sell you t-shirts or make you join the latest cryptocurrency scam, some of which even include Elon Musk's face. He took Twitter's verification system, a flawed yet workable solution to verifying whether a tweet came from the person who actually sent it, and turned it into an $8 a month premium account that verifies nothing other than whether someone is capable of completing a credit card transaction. And by destroying Twitter's trust and safety team, Musk has allowed the world's real-time communications channel to become one rife with racism and other hate speech, leading to Fortune 500 advertisers worrying that the network, and I quote,

perpetuates racism, which was raised in a semaphore story from earlier in this year. Musk has shown he is more than willing to do things based on not what's good for the world, his businesses, or his users, but on what will confirm his biases and protect his financial interests. As a result of these moronic and malicious choices, Twitter's valuation is tanked to less than a third of the $44 billion he paid for it, losing half of their advertising revenue and changing their name to X, which some have argued killed further billions of the original company's brand value. Being a selfish, ignorant, and gormless charlatan,

Musk has now blamed Jewish non-profit the Anti-Defamation League for ruining his company, claiming that the ADL had pressured advertisers into killing X slash Twitter. Musk had previously sued the Center for Countering Digital Hate, another non-profit that published research showing the growth in hate speech on the platform. Musk is now fine with the ADL because they resumed advertising, a deeply confused and utterly pointless exercise that only sought to further increase bigotry on his website. For all his statements around freedom of speech, Musk is the ultimate capitalist dictator, willing to use his money to intimidate and censor those who dare to criticize him. He's already done so on Twitter,

banning an account that tracked publicly available records of private jet flights, censoring over 400 tweets critical of Turkish President Erdogan in the weeks running up to an election, suppressed accounts critical of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and cut access to links to newsletter platform Substack when they launched a network competitive to Twitter. Musk is a propagandist willing to work with any fellow reactionaries who feel scorned by progressivism, personally helping Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis launch his campaign on Twitter and funneling money to alleged sex trafficker Andrew Tate through Twitter's creator Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora.

An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of Michael Duda Podcast Network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. podcast or wherever you get your podcast. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast,

and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel winning economists to leading journalists in the field. And I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God, things actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough.

So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. On Thanksgiving Day 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere.

Elian Gonzalez. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez. everywhere. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation.

Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On our nation's roads, Musk has created another problem. In March 2023, according to the Washington Post, a 17-year-old stepped off of a school bus on North Carolina Highway 561. As he stepped off, a Tesla Model Y, allegedly with Tesla's autonomous autopilot engaged, hit him at 45 miles an hour, throwing him into the windshield and leaving him lying

face down on the pavement. He thankfully survived, but broke and fractured his leg in the process. The incident, which the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is still investigating, is part of a growing list of victims of Tesla's open beta test of, quote, full self-driving. A buggy, dangerous software available on hundreds of thousands of Tesla vehicles, allowing users to let the car drive, which has resulted in the deaths of 17 people and led to 736 other injuries and crashes. In theory, activating Tesla's full self-driving lets your Tesla take the wheel, making turns, avoiding other vehicles, maintaining speed, avoiding objects, and theoretically helping you arrive safely at your destination. The problem is that this has

only ever been a beta, meaning that every new release involves some sort of new bug, such as the one that electric car blog editor Fred Lambert claimed tried to kill him in September 2023 by trying to veer at highway speed into the median strip on the road. One might imagine that such a thing is illegal, effectively unleashing beta software onto the world's roads without sufficiently testing it. Would, for any normal person, lead to imprisonment and a lifetime of fines. Musk, thanks to his incredible wealth and power equivalent to that of a small nation, has managed to avoid much scrutiny, with the occasional government investigations that never seem to go

anywhere. And despite a well-documented culture of racism and sexism, very little seems to happen to Tesla at all. This is because our society, in its government, its media, and its citizenry, is woefully unprepared to deal with billionaires. Musk is able to operate as a noxious, abusive, and reckless monster in public, using his companies as vehicles to lend himself money and political weapons with little scrutiny or punishment. On their own, one might fob off these concerns as one-time things, but the reality is there's a pattern of malicious and capricious acts, all one after another, again and again, done in broad daylight for all to see. Musk has shown he will push whatever

envelope he sees fit, and as Ronan Farrow's New York Magazine piece shows, there are very few people in the government, former and otherwise, anywhere really, not investors, not other members of the Silicon Valley elite, who are willing or able to get in the way. Musk is so unbelievably rich, well-connected and powerful, that he can push around just about anybody, even if they work for the Pentagon. Yet Musk's desperation for attention and adulation mean that he can be pulled in any direction that feels like it scorns his critics. And when his critics are pretty much anyone who isn't a right-wing lunatic, it almost guarantees he will continue to pal around with authoritarian regimes that will influence his remarkably malleable brain. The actual solution

would be to treat Musk as what he is, a dangerous entity with a higher GDP than Ukraine, and an ego that rivals their invader's president. Regardless of what happened in Crimea, Musk has the ability to know when attacks are happening and influence their outcome as a result of his for-profit, privately held satellite internet communications firm that the US government is paying for. Elon Musk is a nation-state global threat and must be treated as such. He must be treated as if he will make decisions based only on what he believes will benefit or amuse him. decisions based only on what he believes will benefit or amuse him. He's the Wish.com version of Bonds Ernst Stavro Blofeld, an offensive, charmless, and boorish monster that has successfully bought his way into the elite and found that no matter what he does, their patience

is unlimited and their scruples are few. Musk, like another high-profile narcissist, the former President Donald Trump, routinely finds himself ensnared in litigation, both from regulators and private individuals. Even though the government never really seems to actually do anything to him, the SEC is currently investigating Musk for securities violations concerning his acquisition of Twitter. This would be his third tryst with the commission, the first in 2018, the second in 2019. In both cases, very little happened. However, at the same time, he faces actions from former employees stiffed on severance pay, and from those who allege age and gender discrimination were factors in their dismissal from Twitter. For Musk, these lawsuits were unlikely to be anything other than a minor

annoyance, rather than any kind of existential threat, or something that otherwise curbs his most egregious of behaviours. There are people who could help. There are people that could sway Elon Musk. You know, people as rich as him. Tim Cook, Mark Benioff, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and the rest of the world's billionaires feel no need to correct Musk's behaviour. They don't need to interfere or even chide him for his disgraceful acts, because doing so would potentially make their actions and wealth more conspicuous, which is far more important to protect than free speech or human lives, or really anything that normal people face. They may act as if they have civic responsibility,

but the few people we have that could actually change things, the ones with the war chest to box out Musk, blocking X from app stores and excluding him from their circles, are sitting on their hands. One approach proposed by Stephen Feldstein in The Atlantic is to treat Musk's businesses as they are, vital to national security, and as a result, take them into public control when necessary. This wouldn't be without precedent. The legislation that allows this, the Defense Production Act, has been invoked 50 times since its inception, both in times of war and civil necessity, like the 2022 infant formula shortage. While Starlink would remain a privately held company, it would be obliged to prioritize the national need. Full nationalization, Falstein noted, would also be a

possibility if Musk failed to cooperate. Full nationalization would be a drastic measure, but at this point, what other options exist for Elon Musk? What other options exist for someone that is so reckless, so dangerous, so selfish, and so capricious? What options exist to deal with someone who has inserted himself into the most vital aspects of the American economy, making himself billions of dollars off of government subsidies and contracts? How the hell do you handle someone who has insulated himself from media scrutiny despite holding immense nation-state power? Musk is not a goofy weirdo or the real-life

Tony Stark. He's a fragile, mean-hearted ogre, one hell-bent on seeing his whims brought to life at any cost. The only way to write about this man, the only fair coverage of Elon Musk, the only clear perception of this man, is to frame him as a villain, a bigot, a bully, and a crook. But what do you do about the man who has everything? It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com

slash sources. Thanks for listening. You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow. Join me, Danny Trails, and step into the flames of fright. An anthology podcast of modern day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast. Apple Podcasts, or to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. Hey, I'm Jacqueline Thomas,

the host of a brand-new Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while running errands or at the end of a busy day. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Listen to Black Lit on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

AT&T. Connecting changes everything.