Scamfluencers - Elon Musk: Too Big to Scam

Episode Date: September 23, 2024

When Elon Musk bid to buy Twitter for $44 billion, he made headlines for the mess that followed — including flip flopping on the deal and immediately firing most of the site’s employees. In this special episode of Scamfluencers, Scaachi Koul talks with New York Times reporters Kate Conger and Ryan Mac about their new book Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter. They explain how Musk leveraged his Silicon Valley clout to take over, and tank, everyone’s favorite hellsite and we’re left wondering: is Elon Musk the ultimate Scamfluencer?Listen to Scamfluencers on the Wondery App or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen early and ad-free on Wondery+. Join Wondery+ in the Wondery App, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Start your free trial by visiting wondery.com/links/scamfluencers/ now.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to scamfluencers early and ad free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or Apple podcasts. Sarah, you're pretty active on Twitter, right? Or X, I know we have to call it X, but I just don't want to. Yeah, I'm never calling it X. Yeah, I'm still pretty active. What do you remember about the day it was announced that Elon Musk might take over Twitter?

I remember a lot of eulogies of people being like, well, I guess I'm not gonna be here anymore, and guess what? There's still freaking there because Twitter is an addiction. Well, my friend, today we're gonna talk about our good friend, Elon Musk. But we're gonna do it in a way that we know he'll absolutely hate, by talking to a few reporters from the failing New York Times.

It's June 2023, and Mark Zuckerberg is probably in Menlo Park, California, at the sprawling campus that serves as headquarters for Meta, the company he started as Facebook in 2004. Mark is a pasty white Harvard dropout who created social media as we know it. And right now, he's getting ready to launch a new app that might get him some sweet, sweet revenge. The app is Threads, and it's a direct competitor to Twitter. It's been eight months since Elon Musk bought Twitter

and took it private, and it hasn't been going great. He's fired 80% of the workforce, and advertisers have been fleeing in droves. Elon himself has suggested the company might declare bankruptcy. Of course, Meta is looking to take advantage of Twitter's slow-motion trainwreck. And there's some extra juice to this otherwise boring internet business rivalry. Mark and Elon kind of hate each other. Mark has criticized Elon for failed SpaceX launches and for being too alarmist about AI.

And Elon has dragged Mark over Meta's data privacy scandals. Some speculated that Elon took over Twitter as a way of sticking it to Mark. In fact, the moment that Elon signed the final paperwork to officially take the company over, he reportedly led a chant of, Fuck, Zuck. They both suck so bad,

and this is like embarrassing to listen to. Yeah, everybody's terrible. Well, naturally, Chief Twit Elon Musk can't let rumors of threads go without comment. So he goes on Twitter and responds to a tech bro talking about threads with this. Quote, I'm sure Earth can't wait to be exclusively under Zuck's thumb with no other options. At least it'll be sane. Was worried there for a moment. And then he added the happy sweating emoji. Sarah, can you read how another user replies to that post? Yeah, someone goes, better be careful Elon Musk. I heard he does the jujitsu now. And then there's a succession of laughing emojis,

crying laughing emojis, cat laughing emojis. You know, emojis people use when they're actually laughing really hard. Yes. And can you read how Elon replies to that? Yeah, he goes, I'm up for a cage match if he is, LOL. Well, Mark sees this exchange and he texts Dana White, president of the Ultimate Fighting Championship.

He asks Dana if he thinks Elon is serious. Mark has been getting heavy into Jiu-Jitsu lately, so he's not thrown by the idea of a literal physical altercation with the world's richest man, especially since Elon is more than a decade older than Mark. And because Silicon Valley is drenched in the kind of ego-driven macho grandstanding that would make even the liver king roll his eyes.

Dana calls Elon and reports back to Mark that Elon is in fact willing to move ahead with a fight. Mark isn't about to back down. The fight is so on. Mark keeps talking to Dana every single day for the next few days, hashing out details of the fight. Elon suggests it could take place in Vegas, then ups the ante, suggesting the actual Colosseum, the one in Rome.

Both agree that the fight should, in some way, shape or form, benefit a charity. But after Mark suggests a date for the match, about two months after he accepted Elon's challenge, Elon starts to get cold feet. He talks about needing an MRI on his neck and possibly surgery. Elon posts about needing to lift weights at the office because he's so busy. Mark fires off a response saying Elon hasn't confirmed a date and he's, quote, not holding his breath.

Then Elon texts Mark suggesting they do a practice round in Mark's backyard. Mark's had it. He fires off a post on thread saying quote, I think we can all agree Elon isn't serious and it's time to move on. And Mark may be able to move on, but everyone else is stuck with Elon Musk. He simply has too much money and too much power. Today we're talking to two reporters who literally wrote the book on how Elon acquired and ruined Twitter. And in the process tanked his image as a business genius and proved that there's one thing no amount of money or influence can cure. Poster's disease.

Polster's Disease. I'm in Dravama, and in the latest season of The Spy Who, we open the file on Klaus Fuchs, the spy who started the Cold War. It's the 1940s, and Britain hopes to beat the Nazis by making an atom bomb. But there's a traitor in the ranks. Klaus Fuchs, a German nuclear physicist and communist who's secretly working for the Soviet Union. Whilst helping Robert Oppenheimer on the Manhattan Project, Fuchs stashes away atomic secrets for his Soviet spymasters.

As he quickly becomes embroiled in a web of espionage, his double life threatens to unravel, leaving his true motives and final fate hanging in the balance. Follow the Spy Who on the Wondry app or wherever you listen to podcasts. Or you can binge the full season of The Spy Who started the Cold War early and ad-free with Wondry+.

If you're looking for a new football podcast to keep up with the latest action from the NFL and college football this season, ad free with Wondry app or wherever you get your podcasts. From Wondry, I'm Saatchi Cole. And I'm Sarah Haggye. And this is Scamfluencers. Today we're talking to Ryan Mack and Kate Conjure, two reporters from the New York Times who have covered Silicon Valley and Elon Musk for years. They co-authored the new book, Character Limit, How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter. The book recounts a time that both Sarah and I remember with Dread and Schadenfreude, that

six-month period in 2022 when Elon Musk put in an offer to buy Twitter, tried to back out of the deal, and then finally forked over $44 billion for everyone's favorite health site. The story raises questions about how Elon amassed his wealth and a reputation as a sterling business mind. Because the Twitter takeover was a masterclass in how to fail at business by really, really trying. And it leaves us wondering, is Elon Musk actually the world's biggest scamfluencer? I'm calling this episode, Elon Musk, Too Big to Scam.

Ryan and Kate, I want to start by talking about Elon's history. He was born rich. His father owned an emerald mine. But I feel like there was a time when people thought, this is a self-made man. Is that accurate? Where did that come from? To his credit, he is a pretty successful entrepreneur.

He started Zip2 with his brother, this kind of online directory in the early dot com era. He made tens of millions of dollars selling that company and then put that into PayPal, you know, or what became PayPal. PayPal was a huge success after it was bought by eBay. And then he took that money and put that into SpaceX and Tesla. And he kind of really bet on himself in those moments. Those companies went through some dark times

on the verge of bankruptcy and that kind of thing. And he kind of just continued to believe and kind of build those companies until where they are today, basically. Kate, what was his reputation in Silicon Valley before he bought Twitter? Did people think like, oh, if he touches something, it turns to gold? Or like, is this someone who was a liability?

100% the former people felt like he was a really brilliant investor, really good at picking businesses. And we see that play out with the Twitter deal where people are willing to give him money and invest in that deal without having a very clear picture of what the return is going to be and how he's going to make that business work. It also seems like he's just kind of a self promoter.

He really is unique from a lot of other executives in the fact that he can't stop himself almost from engaging in stories about him and engaging in his narrative building. Most other tech CEOs have an army of PR people and lawyers around them that really control their public persona. Something that's really unique about Elon is that he does not do that and seemingly cannot help himself from dabbling in the creation of his own narrative. I'll just go back to something like Tesla, for example. A lot of people think he is the founder and sole creator of that company.

And in reality, it was founded by two other people. He was an early investor and helped run the company and got it through some dark times. But just that alone, the belief that he started this company from scratch is not true. What was his relationship with Twitter like before he bought it? I mean, it seems like no one loved tweeting more than him, but what kind of a relationship did he have with the company,

both as a user and as somebody who was able to just text Jack Dorsey, who co-founded the company? So this is kind of crazy, because we traced his use through like blog posts and his own tweets, and his wife is on there, or his ex-wife, Justine. And she introduces it to him in like 2008, 2009. And he kind of is just like, what is this thing? I don't get it.

This kind of sucks. And actually, his early tweets kind of show that. He's like, I don't know if I can do 140 characters. I don't know what the point of this is. It's kind of what we were all saying. Yeah, exactly. Like, this is the era where people are like, I ate a hot dog for lunch, or I'm going to bed.

He was trying it out. He posted like a photo of an ice rink that him and his kids went to. He posted photos of him and Kanye, like on a visit to SpaceX. But I don't think he really really grasped it at the time. But then he started tweeting more about, I read this book today, and he's just started

getting some engagement. He didn't really delete any of his tweets. You can just kind of see how he starts to get comfortable with the platform and how his engagement starts ramping up. And by 2018, he is tweeting a dozen or more times a day. And now you get him tweeting probably, you know, some days it can be like more than 50 times. But, you know, in the early days, it was very kind of wholesome in a way.

Yeah. And I think you see him really ramp up in the sort of 2017 through 2019 era. You see him kind of grasp the idea that he can use the platform to speak directly to his fans and he can kind of go around the mainstream media and just put his own messages out there. And it, you know, it's very similar to Trump in a lot of ways of trying to create this alternate source of truth for the people that are the diehard fans and want to hear directly from him. And I think he recognized the power of that and then built a relationship with Jack Dorsey.

He would often reach out to Jack about things that were going on the platform that he didn't like, content moderation decisions that he disagreed with. He would DM Jack and be like, hey, what's going on with this? Then Jack would forward it on to the safety team to have them do an analysis just because Elon had complained about something. So he had this very intimate relationship with the platform. Jack Dorsey considered him his favorite tweeter. He's like the ideal celebrity CEO type who is

willing to say anything at any moment. It's such good engagement. To the point where they invited him to speak at their company retreat, where thousands of employees went to Houston, and they beam him in and have him interviewed by Jack Dorsey, and it's like, he is the epitome of, like, what they want on the platform. Obviously, they were friendly, but did Jack and Elon see the same potential in Twitter? Did they want it to be the same thing? You know what's so funny is they have all these conversations about that

where they seem very much to agree on where the platform should go and what should happen. The two of them talked a lot about trying to make the platform more open, more transparent, and get it away from the whims of Wall Street and advertisers. And then you see Elon take over and immediately start closing down the platform, shutting down the API so people can't access data, you know, really working against a lot of the openness and transparency that he and Jack were discussing. That it kind of feels like he was maybe just telling Jack what he thought Jack wanted to hear. Oh, so you think that was like the plan the whole time? Like he was just going to tell him whatever so he could get the company?

I don't even know if it's so calculated that he's really sitting there and thinking like, oh yeah, I'm just going to like lie to Jack and tell him whatever he wants to hear. And then he's going to sell me the company. But I think that he's very influenceable. And we heard about this a lot from people we spoke to for the book that you could sit down with him, have a rational conversation, he'd agree with the decision, and then 20 minutes later, he would have talked to someone else and changed his mind

and come back with a decision that was completely the opposite of what he had told you before. So why did Elon want to buy Twitter in the first place? It's still one of the fundamental questions that we are trying to answer, and, you know, he didn't speak to us for this book. But in all honesty, he had a lot of money. I mean, by the time he made the offer, Tesla stock was nearing all time highs. And SpaceX had more government contracts than ever was doing really well.

And he kind of just decided to take on a new challenge for himself. So Elon tried to back out of buying Twitter at one point. Why? This is truly a fascinating turn of events and it has so much to do with what's going on geopolitically and with the economy at the time that he makes the offer. So he puts his offer in April 2022 and we're sort of in the midst of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Tesla stock is at an all-time high. He's feeling very rich, and he puts in an offer that is well above the current share

price of Twitter. He offers $54.20 per share. Obviously, we had to have a $4.20 joke in there, as one does when making a multi-billion dollar deal. So he puts in this offer, it's a price that is quite high. And that is part of the reason why the board of Twitter acquiesced so quickly and agreed to the deal because it was just an unbeatable price. But very quickly, you know, the market turns, stocks start to fall. And he realizes almost right away that he has

overbid for the company. So starts messaging his bankers saying, hey, let's pump the brakes, let's put a pause on this until we can see what happens with Russia and Ukraine. Of course, at that point, he's already signed the contract. He's already signed the deal for 50-420, and there is no more break pumping. And we should bear in mind, he wanted this deal to happen very quickly. He pushed his lawyers to give them whatever terms they want, just get it over the line very quickly.

But so then why all this urgency? I think what he thought would happen was that the board would refuse and say no to his offer, and then he could launch a tender offer to Twitter's shareholders and kind of have this people's movement supporting his acquisition and get Twitter shareholders to eventually unload their shares at a price somewhere between where Twitter was currently trading and the offer of $54.20. But what the board did was said, yes, thank you, we will take $54.20 and then sign the deal. Everyone on that board understood that they had an obligation to secure the highest price

for their shareholders and that was the duty that they had to follow. Above and beyond, is this the right owner for a platform of this nature? And so they looked at the price, they thought it was too good to be true and it was, and they had to accept it. In Character Limit, you guys talk about how little thought Elon seemed to give to what it would actually require to operate Twitter. He didn't really do his due diligence

before signing the deal. It sounds like he was very much ready to back out of the deal. He seemed dismissive of Twitter, sort of in the same way he's like, oh, Zuckerberg just runs some like little social media company. I guess he thought this would be easy compared to Tesla. Is this sort of representative of like the kind of fly-by-night way that he does operate as a CEO, as a business owner? So this is very interesting because he doesn't really do this. He doesn't buy companies like this.

Even Tesla and SpaceX, there's very few acquisitions at those companies. And even at those companies, those things are thought out because there's like executive teams around him. If you think about the Twitter deal, though, it's his decision. He has advisors and stuff, but there's not like a team of executives that he's going to have run this thing, or at least from the get go. And he just wants it, right? He just wants it as his toy. He buys it. And he really doesn't think about the implications of, like, what does that mean for him?

Like, how much time is he gonna have to spend on it? What does he have to pay staff? There's, like, no precedent for him. And he's kind of flying blind. Do you feel like Elon ever had a concrete plan for what he wanted to do with the business? Did he have an ideal outcome for his takeover? Do you think that he achieved it?

I want to separate an idea for the business as an entity that makes money from the idea of the platform that is fun to hang out on. I think Elon has a lot of ideas about how he wants the platform to behave, and he has very few thoughts about how the business should operate and make money. And I think that that is kind of the core of a lot of the struggles that Twitter is having right now. But where he has really been able to make an impact on X is, you know, kind of transforming

this company into the ideal social platform for him. The accounts that succeed are ones that he likes. His own account has grown a lot and his engagement has grown a lot since the takeover. There's this moment where X decided to open source their algorithm to share publicly what was behind, which tweets get promoted and which don't. And someone discovered in that code there's like a tag that says author is Elon. So he was like boosting his own posts to kind of promote them in the algorithm. So he's sort of been able on the platform side to make his ideal world. And I think that he feels like that was a success.

And then if you look at the business side, obviously there's an incredible struggle going on right now for the company to make any money. This is a company that he paid $44 billion for it. And internally, it's now valued at $19 billion. He's halved the value in two years, basically. That's brutal. So he's erasing billions of dollars by the day. At a time when we're debating where policing is going, we're going to tell you where the police came from. They wanted me to write about the New York City Police Department, but without using

the words violence or corruption, which is effectively impossible. A story of how the largest and most influential police department in the country became one of the most violent and corrupt organizations in the world. It doesn't matter if you're a self-emancipated bar person or if you're a free... They're just sending people back to the south, kidnapping them. When officers with the power to fight the danger become the danger. I was terrified. I'm not going to talk to the police because they're the ones who are perpetrating this.

Who am I going to talk to? From Wondry and Crooked Media, I'm Chinjirah Kumanika, and this is Empire City, the untold origin story of the NYPD. Follow Empire City on the Wondry app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can binge all episodes of Empire City early and ad-free right now by joining Wondry+. In a quiet suburb, a community is shattered by the death of a loved wife and mother. But this tragic loss of life quickly turns into something even darker. Her husband had tried to hire a hitman on the dark web to kill her.

And she wasn't the only target. Because buried in the depths of the internet is the Kill List, a cache of chilling documents containing names, photos, addresses and specific instructions for people's murders. He turns to a journalist for help. That's me, Carmela. Kill List is a true story of how one writer uncovers a global conspiracy, taking matters into his own hands to warn those whose lives are in danger. And it turns out, convincing a total stranger someone wants them dead is not easy. Follow

Kill List on the Wondry app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can binge all episodes of Kill List early and ad-free right now by joining Wondry+. So, Ryan and Kate, you begin the book, Character Limit, with an anecdote about a senior data analyst who got to meet Elon in the early days after he bought Twitter. This data scientist studied hate speech and misinformation, and he was so shocked by the conspiracy theories that Elon was spreading on Twitter that he decided to confront his new boss.

He told Elon that, according to his research, only about 10% of the population is gullible enough to fall for misinformation like that. And then he submits his resignation. It seems like the perfect anecdote to begin the book, because it highlights how some of the public perception around Elon changes. It seems like his behavior started to really become erratic. Was he always like that, or did something crack? Well, one, I think he's been radicalized

in his own kind of filter bubble on Twitter. You know, in the same way that you might see your uncle at Thanksgiving ranting about QAnon. He's gone down those same rabbit holes. You know, there was the attack on Paul Pelosi, Nancy Pelosi's husband. And the kind of right-wing conspiracy at the time when that happened was that this was actually a gay sexual tryst gone bad, you know, and maybe this was all like a deep state ploy. Elon then goes and reads some of these conspiracies and he responds to Hillary Clinton, of all people on Twitter, about the attack

and is like, maybe the attack isn't all that it looks like. And he like includes a link to this conspiracy site. And for a lot of people, that was a shocking moment. This was days after he had completed the acquisition of Twitter. And people are like, how could you fall for this? This is ridiculous. This is like on its face, just so absurd.

Yeah. And I think as much as he uses Twitter as a source of his own truth, right? Where he's telling his own narrative, he's spinning his own mythos. He relies on Twitter as a source of truth. And so he is constantly seeing things on there that are not true or are misleading and just swallowing them whole. He's a guy that has built companies around this idea of like he can force things to happen. Who thought we could land and reuse rockets? And who thought we could electrify cars? He's

gone against the grain on so many conventional wisdoms and proven people wrong. Steve Jobs used to have this thing that people called the reality distortion field, you know, getting people to believe in things and to work in a common direction until it's achieved. He's taking these conspiracy theories, he sees a grain of truth in them, and he's like, I believe it therefore it must be true and therefore I can force it on my hundreds of millions of followers. SONIA DARA-MARGOLIS In your book, you guys talk a lot about how different he can be one-on-one versus in front of a crowd.

What is the difference between who you guys think he really is and then how he presents himself to be? Yeah, we talked to some folks who kind of mastered the ability to talk to him. There's sometimes you approach him, sometimes you don't. If you approach him, this is how you do it. And what we heard is, you know, one-on-one, he can be very reasonable.

He can be reasoned with, you can talk to him, you can point out why this vision that he wants might necessarily not work, or, you know, why we should try this thing. And he'll have a conversation and a dialogue as long as there's like a mutual respect. In groups, you would never want to do that. And there are examples in the book of people challenging him in groups, where he fires them on the spot. There's an engineer, for example, who says, you know, your tweets aren't getting as much traction or engagement because maybe you're not as popular anymore. And he fires the guy on the spot, you know?

And there is a projection of strength that he has to have. It's, you know, it's the ultimate ego kind of thing. He has to be seen as the smartest person in the room when you're in a group like that. How many former Twitter employees did you guys talk to? I think our count was more than 100, and at some point we just stopped counting. But, you know, he laid off 75% of the company,

of a company that had 7,500 people. What was that reporting experience like? Like, how did people who were laid off from Twitter feel about the whole situation, or even people who stayed? Twitter's sort of unique in that a lot of the people that worked there were very deep believers in the mission and the vision of the platform as a place for public conversation

and as a political tool. And a lot of them wanted to stay even after Elon took over because they wanted to try to rescue or protect the thing that they loved. And I think a lot of people went through like really sincere pain and grieving over the way that the platform has been destroyed. I've had conversations with people who are like in tears over what happened and feel really hurt by the way this has gone.

There were a good amount of people that when he came in, believed he could really turn the place around. You know, Twitter wasn't doing so well before Yvonne took over. It was kind of floundering as a company. It wasn't really growing. And some people really thought he'd be the shot in the arm that this company needed. Or some people saw an opportunity to climb the ladder.

They thought, you know, this is my chance to prove myself. I can get a promotion, or I could launch that feature that I've been so disregarded over by previous management. And ultimately, all those people that stayed on, a lot of them were just betrayed by him. They were either laid off, they didn't get the promotion they wanted, they left on their own accord

because they just saw the thing falling apart. There was some sense of belief in him and then just disappointment. There's also the third category of folks that I want to mention, which are people who are in Elon's inner circle or are firmly team Elon. Those people really believe in him and what he's trying to do or also, you know, want to show their own achievements within the Elon world and what they were able to do and what changes they were able to make to the platform.

Seeing themselves as these agents of transformation and that's sort of like the third category of people that I think we should mention because it's not only like disgruntled ex-employees who spoke to us for this book. How has Twitter changed since Elon took over? Like, what's the experience of using it like today? The platform for me is just, it's hard to wade through these days. You know, you get recommendations for Andrew Tate, for example. I don't follow Andrew Tate, but he keeps coming up in my recommended. Yeah.

I find it pretty unusable now. It feels like it's just full of junk mail. Yeah. And you look at the recommended tab and it's a lot of videos that are meant to, like, enrage. I got this horrible thing. Like, there was a murder video at one point, or people getting hit by buses. Yeah, it's just, like, really toxic stuff.

And at points there are breaking news kind of content, or, like, Gaza protests are happening at universities. That's probably the first place I'll check, because people are posting there. And there's still a utility for that, but it's degrading in a way. And if you go on there and your recommended tab is all Elon Musk, Andrew Tate and Cat Turd 2, I think that's a pretty unhappy experience for a lot of people. Or maybe it's not. For some people, they love it.

Ever since Elon put a serious offer on the table to take over Twitter, people have been predicting that the platform will die. We just talked about how it's degrading, but is it ever really going to die? And why hasn't anything replaced it? Yeah, I don't think there's been a critical mass to any particular alternative platform yet. And I think the other thing that makes Twitter so sticky is the immediacy, right? Ryan mentioned this for those breaking news moments. Twitter has a lock on that in a way that no other social platforms do. And I think it's because other social platforms have leaned so

heavily into algorithmic curation that something has to become wildly popular on those platforms before it surfaces. So you see this with Instagram, threads, TikTok. Something has to have hit success before it surfaces to you. The unique thing about Twitter was that Twitter maintained a reverse chronological timeline. So if you're interested in knowing what's happening right now, you can open Twitter and find that information very quickly.

You don't have to wait for it to trend or to be boosted by an algorithm. You can find it right away. And I think that that is something that has always set Twitter apart and makes it so critical in those kinds of breaking news moments. So given how messy the takeover was and how much of a disaster his time as the head of Twitter has been, do you think people still think he's a good businessman? I think people do. And I think people see him as,

if nothing else, a very smart investor. Even in spite of the Twitter deal, you see people who are still willing to invest in his businesses, loan him money, and think that he just has the power to prevail. I mean, on the merits of capitalism, he is still the richest man in the world by far. Like Jeff Bezos is tens of billions of dollars off. But is he a good businessman? Like I guess because he's accumulated the most wealth on earth, you know, and he has

established two very successful companies that many people invest in and people buy the products to and they have government contracts. So yes, but also the Twitter deal shows completely opposite, right? He's done very little right with Twitter. So on our show, whenever we talk about someone, we're always talking about if they are a scam influencer, which is someone who is a scam artist, but is kind of doing it because they want the influencer, they're using the influencer as a part of the scam.

Do you think the term scamfluencer applies to Elon Musk? On one hand, he has done a lot. You know, he's been very successful. He's brought about the electric car revolution, for example. But then on the other hand, you think of all these promises that he's made, getting to Mars, for example, by a certain date, which we haven't hit. And he's going to build a human robot, and then he has someone in a robot suit come on stage and dance.

Like, this is like crazy behavior. If anyone on the street were to go out and do what Elon Musk does, you would call them crazy. You would think they're an insane person. But we listen to him because he's had so much past success. And I think that's kind of the dichotomy of it. The question that I have about him always is, does he believe himself? Because you think, like, of a scammer, right?

If I'm scamming, I'm making up a lie and I'm tricking you into buying it. And he, to me, sort of crosses over that line into, like, believing in his own lie. I was trying to think of, like, how to categorize him in the scammer-verse. And he sort of reminds me a little bit of, like, an Anna Delvey-type figure, where it's like, yeah, I think she actually thinks she's an heiress. Like, I don't think she thinks she's lying anymore.

And I feel that way about Elon, too, where I'm like, I don't think that he thinks he's lying. I think he thinks he's telling the truth. And so he's sort of crossed over into believing his own narrative. Well, a lot of the scammers on our show, on other episodes we do, they want something as a part of their scam. They want money or they want to become famous. They want to influence other people or they just want to be infamous.

They'll take anything. What does Elon want? The thing about Elon that's so interesting and tender is, he really has this craving to be liked and admired. So much of what he does stems from that. Wanting the recognition of like, yes, I did it, I succeeded, I'm the best, I changed the world.

He talks constantly about how he's gonna be remembered and what contributions he's making to Earth in the future. And so I think that's really the goal for him, is to leave a legacy and be thought of in this very respected way. And of course, the more he doesn't get that, the more people criticize him, the more people mock things like the Twitter deal and say, oh my God, like, look at the value that you've destroyed.

The kind of, like, angrier and resentful he gets and doubles down on trying to prove himself as this sort of, like, mythical being. So, Elon and Trump have further solidified their very weird relationship. Trump is back running his mouth on Twitter, and when we're recording this, the two of them are about to sit down for a live interview together.

So what do you think Elon wants from his association with Trump? He wants power. I mean, more than anything. And he wants association with who he believes is the winner. Bear in mind, a year and change ago, he was supporting DeSantis. He had that launch event with DeSantis, very flawed and was buggy. But he was a DeSantis guy up until, I don't know, when Trump got shot. Earlier this year, he was exhibiting signs that he would go to Trump, but he didn't really express his support until right after the assassination attempt.

And that was obviously before Biden dropped out and Kamala's. So this interview with him is him doubling down you know he has his candidate he has started a pack to back this candidate and he just wants that association again and bear in mind their relationship is one of utility it's not like they're old friends they've talked shit on it's not a romance Ryan this is yeah yeah this is not a bromance this is they've talked shit on each other a lot, you know, and this is a marriage of convenience in a lot of ways. Getting Trump back on Twitter is kind of a white whale for Elon.

It was one of the first things that he tried to do when he came into the company. He spent a lot of time behind the scenes trying to convince Trump to come back. And, you know, with the upcoming interview that you mentioned, there's very likely to be a streaming component of that on X. And so Elon will be finally getting what he wants, which is to get Trump back on the platform,

which he thinks will be a really big driver of engagement and interest for X. Right, he posed it as a kind of free speech. Of course, we need the leader of the free world, the former leader of the free world on Twitter, sharing his thoughts, but it was really for engagement. He thought this would be a big boost to bring people back, scientists, and professors. Monica and I do three weekly shows with celebrities on Monday, experts on Wednesdays, and crazy stories from listeners on Fridays.

It's got an ample dose of irreverence, humor, and vulnerability. We regularly get sides of our guests that were previously unknown, and it is a celebration of all the messiness that makes us human. We like it here. We love it here. We're chatterboxes and it's a celebration of all the messiness that makes us human. We like it here. We love it here. We're chatterboxes and it's a good excuse to talk. Also, we're friends. Barely.

Hanging on by a thread. We're so excited to officially be a part of the Wondry Network. So follow Armchair Expert on the Wondry app or wherever you get your podcasts and subscribe to Armchair Expert on YouTube. -♪ And I feel like a legend... -♪ From reading your book, it's clear that Elon, in many ways, is objectively brilliant. But then again, he's also impatient,

unpredictable, paranoid, and willing to go to insane lengths for very, very, very stupid jokes. like that 420 bid he made for Twitter. And maybe even worse, he's susceptible to pretty ridiculous forms of misinformation. Such a strange contrast for someone a lot of people think could be the savior of humanity. Yeah, I think that's the thing, right? We think of these tech geniuses, these billionaires as, you know, they must know everything. They're so successful, of course, they're so wise. And what you realize is they're good in this one area, or they've been successful electrifying cars or putting rockets into space, but that doesn't mean they're necessarily good at

understanding social media or even parsing through what is factual information on the internet. Well, and I think, like, one of the interesting things about Elon is that there's a question of corporate accountability that runs throughout the tech industry. Have these companies become too big and too powerful to hold to account? And Elon is sort of, like, the peak example of that. He has become so rich, so influential, so powerful that there is a really open question of whether anyone can hold him to account anymore.

You know, it was the question that was hanging over the deal when he tried to back out of like, can he be forced to buy this company? Can a court actually force him to do it? And if it was anyone else, the answer would be yes, of course. But because it's Elon, it's like, well, the court could rule and then who knows? Maybe he still won't close the deal and be yes, of course. But because it's Elon, it's like, well, the court could rule. And then who knows? Maybe he still won't close the deal

and maybe he'll still refuse. And we've seen that after the fact that SEC has investigated the way that the deal happened. The FTC has come in and investigated things that went on at the company after the deal closed. And none of those investigations have really led to any kind of penalty or any effort to rein in Elon's behavior. Now that's not to say that that won't happen in the future, but it is very interesting to watch regulatory agencies,

enforcement agencies of the U.S. government go up against this person and then kind of fall back and not be able to hold him to account. And so the question of Elon is what can stop him? What can hold him accountable? And there isn't a really clear answer to that right now. And I'd build off that because it reminds me of something we talked about earlier is we're able to determine who's a scammer by who was essentially held to account, right? You have someone like Sam Bankman Fried, who was considered an amazing entrepreneur. He's a scammer because he was enforced upon and government took action. With someone like Elon,

I don't know who can take action against him. What is he accountable to? And I'm not necessarily calling Elon a scammer, but like you go back to the 2018 tweet where he says funding secured, he's gonna take his company private, which is the major securities violation. He gets off of that with a $20 million fine.

But what is $20 million to someone who's worth $200 billion? Is that going to prevent him from doing that the next time? There's no recourse, right? I think that's the fundamental problem with someone who is just that big. It's not just him. It's a problem with the tech industry writ large. And I believe it was the FTC that fined Facebook, Ryan. Yeah. Yeah. So they gave a record-breaking fine to Facebook,

I think the highest fine they've ever awarded. And the response to that was that Facebook stock went up because the fine was not high enough to meaningfully penalize the company. And Wall Street was happy with that amount, even though it was the largest fine that the agency had ever come down with before. And so you see this problem across the industry that these companies have kind of become too

rich and too powerful to meaningfully penalize, but Elon is like the magnification of that. Yeah, at some point someone just escapes the level of scamming, right? Like they have so much trust and institutional wealth and like backing behind them that can they really be a scam? Like you know, if they're a scam, then everything falls apart completely. And so everyone is invested in propping this person or this institution up, and they become too big to fail. I'm not gonna make that accusation of Elon.

Other people have, but it begs the question as to, how do we hold these people to account? Yeah, and I think, not to keep bringing up Anadelvi, but, like, Elan, I think, has taken and lost more money from investors than she ever dreamed of, and is still just floating along without the ankle monitor that she's wearing. The promotional material for your book describes it as the defining story of our time.

And maybe you guys wrote that yourself. I don't know. I bet not. But either way, I actually think it is kind of true. And that's also really sad. Why is a story about a billionaire who wants to die on Mars tanking a major corporation on a whim the story of our time? It shows we've reached the end of capitalism where someone is so wealthy, has so much power

that like on a whim, he can launch a bid for a whole company, usually other companies by companies or other corporations by companies. But like, this is a single individual making a decision to spend $44 billion at the snap of his fingers. What does that say about where we're at as a society? That he has that much power and control to do this. And he can use his company like a rag doll. He can pull it this way and one day he wants it and the other day he doesn't want it.

The next day he's trying to negotiate on price. The next day he's walking through the door and he's taking over and firing everyone. This is a single human being that has this much power. And I don't think we've ever really seen that play out in any other business deal, really. Yeah, it's really an exploration to the outer, outer limits of wealth and hubris and what those concepts can do

and the chaos they can bring when taken to their extremes. We've sort of attached ourselves as a society to the idea that the Internet is going to free us from restrictions around speech. And this is not just a Twitter thing. I mean, this goes back to the early, early days of the Internet, that this was going to be a free for all where communication could be uncensored. And that is the pursuit. And this is what happens when you get to the outer reaches of that galaxy and really push the envelope on the internet free speech experiment. It is kind of silly that that is the defining story of our time.

This rich guy who throws a tantrum and wants to spend his money, as I would panic buying a sports car or something, but he's buying a whole ass company, that's just funny. And I think our times are not serious. It's clearly something's going wrong here. Yeah, if Elon were not a scammer, I think the defining story of our time

would be flying cars or something like that, you know? Instead, we have the Twitter takeover. This is Elon Musk, too big to scam. I'm Sachie Cole. And I'm Sarah Hagge. If you have a tip for us on a story you think we should cover, please email us at scamfluencers at wonderi.com. Huge thanks to Ryan Mack and Kate Conjure. Their book is Character Limit, How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter. It's really, really, really good and I can

barely read. It's out now. Go pick it up. Eric Thurm and Olivia Briley are our story editors. Sound design by Sam Ada. Additional audio assistance provided by Adrian Tapia. Our music supervisor is Scaf Alaskez for Freesan Sync. Our managing producers are Matt Gant and Desi Blaylock. Our senior managing producer is Nick Ryan. Janine Cornelo and Stephanie Jens are our development producers.

Our associate producers are Charlotte Miller and Lexi Peery. Our producers are John Reed, Yasmin Ward, and Kate Young. Our senior producers are Sarah Enni and Ginny Bloom. Our executive producers are Jenny Lauer Beckman, Marshall Louie, and Erin O'Flaherty for Wondery. Wondry.