Taylor Lorenz’s Power User - The Riskiest Bet in Tech History: Elon Musk's Most Dangerous Company Yet

Episode Date: June 24, 2026

SpaceX just pulled off the biggest IPO in history and made Elon Musk the world's first trillionaire. But is it all built on a fantasy?SUPPORT MY WORK: Buy a paid subscription to my newsletter at usermag.co       Support my work on Patreon: http://patreon.com/taylorlorenz In this week's episode of Power User, I sit down with Ryan Mac, the main New York Times reporter covering SpaceX and co-author of Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter, to unpack how SpaceX went from a startup mocked by aerospace veterans to a $2+ trillion company that governments, militaries, and your retirement fund now depend on.We trace the full story from the early rocket explosions, the near-bankruptcy before Falcon 1 reached orbit in 2008, the NASA contract that saved the company, and how reusable rockets and Starlink turned SpaceX into an unstoppable money machine with 10,000 satellites in orbit. We dive deep into Elon's trillion-dollar bet on "orbital data centers," his plan to move AI infrastructure into space, the acquisition of xAI, the Cursor deal, a possible Tesla–SpaceX merger, and his 82% voting control that makes him almost impossible to challenge.Is Elon Musk now too big to fail? Has he escaped the gravity of accountability? Or will his dreams of putting data centers in space come crashing back to Earth? And if/when that happens, who's left holding the bag? Ryan and I get into all of it.In this episode: – How SpaceX was founded and almost died – Why Starlink became the company's cash engine – Reusable rockets, barge landings, and the "chopsticks" catch – The plan to put AI data centers in space (and why experts are skeptical) – Inside the record-breaking SpaceX IPO – How index funds and 401ks got pulled into SpaceX – Elon's 82% control and the road to "Elon Inc" – Whether Musk is now the most powerful man on Earth

By 2024, when he was supporting Donald Trump, he was only worth about $250,300 billion. He had influenced an election and installed a candidate that he wanted. And now his net worth is almost quadruple that. Over the past two decades, SpaceX has transformed from a startup mocked by aerospace veterans into a company so critical that governments, militaries, financial markets and technology giants now depend on its success. The company's stock recently jumped 20% after going public. in the biggest IPO of all time, making Elon Musk the world's first trillionaire. SpaceX is becoming a crucial infrastructure layer for the modern world.

And now as the AI boom drives trillions of dollars into computing infrastructure, SpaceX is on the forefront. Elon Musk wants to put all the data centers in space, and he's betting trillions of dollars on this idea. But how did SpaceX get here? How did it become arguably the most powerful company in the world? And has SpaceX made Elon Musk truly too big to fail? Or are his orbital data center dreams doomed to come crashing back down to Earth?

To discuss all of this, I have Ryan Mack here, the co-author of the book Character Limit, How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter. He's also the main reporter covering SpaceX for the New York Times. Hi, Ryan. Welcome to Power User. How's it going, Taylor? So to start off, I want to dig into the origins of this company, really before it became so ubiquitous. And all of our retirement accounts were getting invested in this thing.

When did Elon Musk found SpaceX? And what was he hoping to achieve? Sure. So Elon Musk founded the company in 2002. And it stemmed from a problem he had. He had just sold PayPal to eBay and cleared, I think, more than $100 million in the sale of that company. And wanted to kind of invest in a number of ideas that he had. One of the goals that he had was to get terrestrial life to Mars.

And he started with this idea of getting plant life, actually, to Mars to explore the idea of whether or not they could get something there. And he ran into this problem that, you know, launching things into space is not very cheap. You know, he went to the Russians to try and buy a rocket from them. They kind of laughed him out of the room. Existing kind of solutions of getting things into orbit, much less to Mars, were prohibitively expensive. And so he thought, I'm just going to create a company by myself.

How hard could it be to make rockets? And that's where the company stem from. And he invested tens of millions of dollars into this thing, spent the rest of the money on solar ideas and eventually Tesla. But that was kind of his baby at the time, that this idea that he would build a rocket company simply to get things into space and privatize the launch industry. And how did it initially go in those first few years? It seems like SpaceX was maybe not his most famous company, but definitely played a major role in this origin story of Elon Musk. because this modern day, Tony Stark, you know, he's going to take us, you know, into the intergalactic space. No, he's not the first rich guy to have this, you know, this has been long the goal of many people that accumulate a significant amount of money.

With him, though, he is the one that executed on it and was able to drive this idea and not lose faith or confidence in his own idea. And so he looked at these rockets and said, these things are so expensive, I could engineer these things along with my teams for much cheap. And there was a lot of trial and error in those early years. There were a lot of explosions. They had this location in the South Pacific where they were launching from. And there were kind of three test launches that failed miserably.

And in 2008, they were kind of on their last legs running out of funding. And they eventually got this rocket, the Falcon One, into space in 2008, which then led them to sign a contract with NASA. And so there was a lot of struggle in those early years. But Elon really bet on himself and this idea that he could do it.

and do it for cheaper. And that's kind of the main idea behind this thing, that these rocket launches could be significantly cheaper and eventually that these rockets would be reusable, which would drop the price even lower. So after that sort of pivotal moment of success in 2008, when they show this promise, they get this huge investment from NASA,

they sort of continue on. What happens at SpaceX next? I'm assuming the company is scaling, but how does the company evolve through the early 2010s? There's a lot of things. And again, this is not a company at the time that was really being paid attention to. Like, I think most people don't notice those companies until they actually start doing things. And, you know, it's not like SpaceX wanted to publicize these failed launches necessarily. And there wasn't really like a touchpoint. Like, you know, with Tesla, you see their cars every day on the road.

With SpaceX at the time, there was really no average human touch point for that. So it's like, you know, it's kind of in the background as he's running Tesla. But there were still a lot of challenges that the company faced at the time. You know, was this a viable business? Were they going to get contracts out of this? That was a big question. Could they successfully get things,

not just into space, but to the International Space Station. That was what their contract was for. And so they built this thing called the Dragon capsule to ferry things once they got into space to the ISS. Eventually, Elon wanted to build a satellite internet service called Starlink.

And this was not a new idea that he came up with, this idea had existed already, but it was so expensive because it just cost a lot of money to get satellites in a space. His kind of innovation was that he owned rocket launches, right, and eventually developed Starlink around this and was able to essentially create his own payload to get into space, so much so that he now has 10,000 satellites in space for Starlink, and it's the main revenue driver of the company. When was Starlink actually founded? I mean, is it this like subcompany or was this sort of some project?

because I think a lot of people don't really totally understand why. I mean, for me, I was like, well, I guess, like, what is it? The same kind of Wi-Fi you could get in a plane, probably a dumb sort of like belief. But like it really, I think, transformed a lot and did a lot for Elon, you know, in terms of like the power that he was amassing. In the most simplistic terms, most people get Wi-Fi in their home. You know, it's piped in through wires. You have a router. It broadcasts your signal to your home.

That's how you get internet that we understand today. With Starlink, it's different. you know, there is a constellation of satellites in lower Earth orbit that beam signal down to these ground terminals that then, you know, communicate with the satellites, and that's what essentially powers the internet. The problem with that is that, one, it costs a lot of money to get those satellites into space. So anyone that had this service or a similar type of service, which did exist, I think of these satellite phones, for example, it was just so expensive. And it wasn't cost effective. but because Elon and SpaceX owned the means of getting things to space, and they made their rockets reusable, it became much cheaper.

And so Starlink became a viable thing. They also developed kind of technologies to allow these satellites to communicate and pass signal between one another so that you don't lose signal necessarily when your satellites go off into a different area in orbit, and they put enough satellites up into space where it became, you know, a pretty reliable service. And so Starlink now does, it's the main revenue driver of the company,

does about, I think, $4 billion in profit a year for the company, an operating profit. And it's, you know, it's used in Ukraine in war zones, for example. It's used in disaster zones. And it really has not solved, but provided a pretty viable solution to low connectivity places around the world. Still has a long ways to go in terms of adding users and operating countries that necessarily don't want them there.

Right now, I think of places like India, for example, where there's been a lot of barriers to entry. But that has been a viable business that started around 2016, 2017, and really grew in the 10 years since. Yeah, it seems like it started at this really pivotal time for Elon as well. Like, I mean, this was like, I think when people still thought of Elon as this like badass guy. He's like, yeah, he's bringing the internet to the world. He's building cool cars. Like maybe he had sort of been a little bit more reactionary. But this is before like the cave dive.

diverse, you know, pedogate scandals before he sort of like, I guess, got red-pilled publicly. So what did Starlink do for him in terms of his public image and his ability to amass more power and influence around the world? I mean, you mentioned the war in Ukraine eventually, but it seems like the company positioned him as this sort of like international tech like power player in addition to making him, obviously, much more richer. Yeah, I would go back to 2016, which is when the Starlink idea came into formation at the end of that year, I believe, into 2017.

But also that year he was running Tesla, which was becoming pretty successful. and growing and selling more of more of its cars on the road. This was before the Model 3, but the Model S existed. In 2016, he also announced Starship, which was going to be the largest ever rocket. That's SpaceX was developed. And the idea behind Starship is to get people to Mars. That's the ultimate goal.

And so he announced that thing. And so it really felt at that time that he was beginning to, you know, garner a presence beyond the valley. People might have known him, But now you get this kind of cool CEO. He's running two companies. Tesla's growing. I love electric cars.

You know, it's good for the environment. Oh, he has this crazy rocket company. He's going to take people in ours. That's kind of crazy but attractive and like a big idea. And he spouts off on Twitter. He wasn't, you know, doing his fomenting riots posts or race posts or whatever or immigrant, anti-immigration posts. But he was very real on Twitter and posting.

And that's when he kind of, I think, came into the public eye. a lot more in 2016. And that, I think, was a very formative moment in terms of his public image and gave him a lot of the foundation for what we see today. If you're watching this video and you like my work, please support me on Patreon via the link below or buy a paid subscription to my tech and online culture newsletter

at usermag.co. That's usermag.com. I don't have any long-term brand partnerships and a lot of my content is effectively demonetized. I've lost major brand deals for speaking out on certain issues and for challenging power. As you can imagine, advertisers are not exactly eager to work with somebody who covers a lot of the topics that I cover and talks about the things that I talk about. These videos I make are entirely funded by you and I can't continue to make them without your support.

So if you get any value out of the videos that I create and you want me to be able to create more, please support me on Patreon or Substack via the links below. On Patreon, I do bonus episodes, monthly Q&A live streams and post frequent updates about my work. My substack newsletter gives you a bi-weekly roundup of everything that I'm seeing and reading and paying attention to online. You can also get my newsletter on Patreon. Once again, the links to everything are below in the description. Every dollar of your support makes such a difference. It's interesting how, I mean, SpaceX, as you mentioned earlier, it was always in the background. It was never like the most scrutinized or the most covered of his companies.

Obviously, you had people that cover the aerospace industry writing about it. But, you know, most people think of Tesla. Most people eventually think of him for Twitter. So I want to kind of move people forward, right? Like COVID hits 2020. Obviously, Elon gets even more radicalized. His Tesla factories are forced to shut down. What's happening with SpaceX during these years?

SpaceX was not affected by COVID. Because it was a government contractor, SpaceX employees continued to go to the office and work. I actually wrote a couple stories for my job at the time at BuzzFeed about some of the concerns that SpaceX employees had because they were, you know, forced, not forced, but they went to work. You know, had to go to work for their jobs and, you know, they took their kids to childcare still. And so what are they mostly working on during this era?

And like, how is the company evolving through the first half of the 2020s? Starship building that, continuing to work towards launches with the Falcon Rockets, which were the existing kind of work courses at the time, building at Starlink as well. The 2020 Starlink was not what we know it as it was today. You know, they're still developing it. And, you know, continuing to prove out that there was a viable business model to getting things into space. You know, now these days, SpaceX does a launch every couple days. That seems normal.

In 2020, that was not the case. And it was still kind of a very fledgling business, even though by that point it was almost 20 years old. So SpaceX is petering along. They're doing these rocket launches. What would you say is like the big formative moment for this company at this point? I'd see there's a couple. And like space nerds would point to many of them. You know, this company was doing things

that no other company could do, starting with the landing of a booster on a barge in the middle of the ocean. You know, the idea of that happening is unheard of. Most rockets go up. They come down. They're unusable because they crash land or they crash in the ocean and they're done.

But SpaceX's big proposition was, we'll do this cheaper and we can reuse rockets. And the re-landing of the rocket booster, which I think was in 2017, 2018, was a big proving point for them. Other milestones include, you know, bringing, I think, astronauts back from the ISS. There was the moment in 2024

when they landed a rocket and caught it essentially with these things called they called chopsticks, but two kind of long arms, which allowed the company to say, you know, we can not only do a rocket launch in a day, but we can catch it, refuel it, and potentially make it possible to launch again in that same day. And so SpaceX's vision is that, you know, they're going to do multiple

launches a day and, you know, anything you need to get into space, you can get to space through them. So there's these very, like, you know, eye-catching achievements that they've done that have given people inspiration. You know, I don't think the general public necessarily pays attention to this stuff as much. Again, this is not like a Tesla where you see a Tesla on the road every day. These are things you have to seek out. But now, given the attention around the company, starting to hear about it more. And obviously the pivots that Elon has made in recent months with AI and this company, you know, it's kind of coming to the public line more and more.

So SpaceX is doing these like kind of fantastical things like you mentioned. I kind of remember seeing the video maybe of the barge of it landing on the barge or maybe it failing to land on the barge. But I feel like there were these like videos of things, as you mentioned, that people kind of couldn't believe could happen happening. And I don't know if any other company was really even competing in this area at the level that SpaceX was. As you said, most of the time, this stuff is being done by governments, not even private corporations. I think of the rise of AI as playing an increasing role in SpaceX. It seems

like this is another kind of moment for the company where a chat GPT is launched in 2022. Obviously, Elon Musk had co-founded Open AI, has been involved in the AI world for a long time. He eventually releases XAI. What role does the AI boom start to play in SpaceX? Yeah. So he founds XAI. He fully. holds X, the formerly company formerly known as Twitter, into XAI, but he starts to want to be involved in these AI companies with foundational models. You know, he has GROC, for example, this chat bot. But then he makes this very crucial pivot, or bet, I guess, in that SpaceX has a role to play in the AI boom. And the way he sees that is through these things called orbital data centers.

They're concepts. They're not proven ideas by any means. But the idea that you can put a data center into space, into orbit, and power AI because it'd be closer to the sun. You can harness the sun's energy. And you can essentially beam what you need back down to Earth. The idea being you don't have to deal with any of the terrestrial problems. No resources are being taken from Earth. You don't have to deal with pesky neighbors who are protesting you. And you have this abundant access to the sun's energy that's always sunny in space.

It's actually so crazy. I remember the first time I heard of it. about this plan. I was talking to some data center activist who was like, oh, yeah. And you know, there's the plan to send the data centers to space. And I'm kind of taken by it. Like it sounds really fascinating. Obviously, as you mentioned, you know, data centers have been this huge issue.

No one wants a data center in their backyard. And yeah, it seems like why shouldn't we put these servers up in space where they can harvest endless energy from the sun and just circle around and give us, I guess, unlimited AI power through satellites or something like it, it kind of makes a lot of sense. Also, it would solve the. The cooling issue, right? Space is very cold. You wouldn't need extra water. Now, I'm sure it's not as easy as it seems, but it does seem like this really compelling kind of out-of-the-box concept to solve this data center issue and, as you mentioned, play a major role in the infrastructure of AI. TLDR, though, it's not as easy as you think.

Surprise, surprise. I mean, I've read a lot of stuff about this and a lot of bear cases, as well as bull cases, you know, that we've seen the bull case in that it's SpaceX, you know, who's bet its whole company on it. Again, SpaceX, buy. XAI or acquires XAI. You know, that's where Elon bet on the company. But this idea of orbital data centers in space is not proven. You know, the cool, yes, it's cold in space, but the idea of radiating heat is an issue. How do you get that heat off of these satellites? How do you protect it from solar radiation? Talking about things like space debris and what does that mean for people on Earth looking at

the stars? You know, there's all these kind of unknowns and also knowns that people have tried to raise concerns about and questions about for sure. Not to mention, it's still fairly, I mean, yes, SpaceX has lower the cost to get things into space, but like it's not like they're doing multiple launches a day like they want. So yeah, it's a largely unproven concept, yet Elon has bet heavily on this, you know, again, he bought XAI with SpaceX. He merged the companies. And this is within the last year. You know, he has pivoted his company to focus on orbital data centers. And he's made it a crucial part of the company's plan so much so that he believes that there are

trillion dollars of market opportunity here if they're able to get this right who in silicon valley is buying into this because elin as you said he comes up with these fantastical plans everybody likes to say well we said he couldn't do it before but now he's done it but as you've reported there's also a lot of times that elin has said that he would do something and it never happens like that's like i would say like a lot of his claims right we're still not on mars he's actually not that much closer to getting us there. And so, you know, when it comes to putting these data centers in space, has he made any sort of meaningful progress toward that goal? Or is this more sort of like narrative building in Silicon Valley for investors to get people hyped up and sell them on this

fantastical dream and ultimately deliver something like, I guess, significantly less than that? They put up a video showing the concepts and their progress in developing these concepts. But again, their concepts. Is it blueprints? It sounds like a hype video. Yeah. And yet they've gone out and raised $75 billion on the idea, or this being a crucial part of the idea, you know, in this IPO that happened recently. And in some ways, Elon is really the only person that can do that. In spite of all his missed promises and missed timelines, you mentioned Mars a couple years ago, he said around this time we'd be getting people to Mars and getting, you know, shuttles to Mars. That clearly hasn't happened. But I think he has this kind of unique quality in being

able to sell people the next great vision. You know, if this isn't a not happening or this hasn't happened over here. Look over here. There's this kind of new shiny thing that I'm now focused on. And his supporters who sort of have a point will point to the idea of, you know, actually, you know, maybe he didn't hit this timeline, but eventually he'll get there. Or maybe he didn't hit this timeline, but actually he did all these other things that people said he couldn't do and he proved them wrong. So I'm in a bet on him anyways. And even if he falls short, he's still able to sell the next idea or do, you know, a slightly less crazy thing that's still really cool, that makes a lot of money.

And so he's been able to convince people to invest in him time and time again because of this. And yes, we can talk about his failed promises till we're blue in the face. We just wrote a story about the amount of missed promises that he's had. I have a folder of tweets of all his crazy promises about turning Cybertruck into a boat

or having bulletproof windows at Cybertruck. Or at one point he said he would put rockets on one of his car, Tesla cars, and to be able to fly. You know, he says fantastical things all the time and just seems to never be held to account for them. Or investors will simply look past it and be like, actually, he may not have put rockets on cars, but he's now telling us about oral data centers. I'm going to buy into that. And there is just a unique quality to that that I, you know, I just haven't seen in any other chief executive or person on the planet. Yeah, it's quite bizarre.

I mean, he is really like a very, I guess, unique character in that way. and his companies are very unique. At what point is the decision made to have SpaceX go public? And how does Elon Musk sort of engineer what ultimately becomes one of the world's biggest IPOs? So I think it's very interesting because it's around November of last year where he starts talking publicly about orbital data centers. And everyone's like, where is this coming from? You know, this was not an original idea from him. Other tech people had talked about Eric Schmidt being one of them, the former CEO of Google,

had bought a company called Relativity to explore the idea. Google was getting involved in it. But Elon starts talking about online. He starts to double down. And he starts to say, you know, this is actually the focus of our new company. The company had a private share sale where they told their employees, you know, orbital data centers are a new focus. And by the way, we may be exploring an IPO.

And the whole point of an IPO is it's a singular opportunity to raise a large amount of money. And everyone kind of been chopping at the bit for SpaceX to go public. So Elon develops the idea for orbital data centers within his company and then says at the beginning of the year, you know, they start exploring this idea for an IPO. Because, again, they need something to sell to investors. And so the hype keeps building around this idea. They make it central to the business plan. Other ideas pop up as well. He's talked about putting a human colony on the moon and, you know, building a factory on the moon.

And ironically, I have a tweet of his from a year ago where he said the moon doesn't matter. But he starts to have these like new ideas and then he puts this together and they go and sell this to investors in their IPO, you know, intending to raise $75 billion in the raise. And you know, he gets what he wants. And as of today, the company is worth more than $2 trillion dollars as of, you know, its market valuation. Yeah. I mean, it also, it's the largest IPO ever.

It makes Elon Musk a trillionaire. But there's also some sort of like unorthodox ways. he was able to make this IPO happen, right, just in terms of government approvals? I think there was a lot of question marks as to, you know, every company has to file these financial filings and prospectuses for their IPO and, you know, the things that they put in there, I raise a lot of eyebrows. I think one of the things that raise an eyebrow for me, for example, was at one point they said our total addressable market is like $28.5 trillion, which is like close to the GDP of the U.S., which is just kind of amazing.

I mean, there were a lot of things around this IPO that raised eyebrows. One that a lot of people have talked about are the fast tracking of this company and its stock into public indexes so that it can be bought by index funds. Some indexes relax their rules to allow that to happen. And what essentially that means is that, you know, a lot of people have retirement funds or just general funds invested into indexes that trace the market. And by allowing SpaceX to kind of subvert some of these rules or allow them into the indexes faster, these funds will then start just buying up SpaceX shares because it has to match whatever's in the index.

And so there's going to be a lot of in coming weeks buying of the company through these index funds that will continue to prop up the stock for sure. Yeah. And I feel like that's kind of terrifying in a way because suddenly we're all sort of slightly invested in this company. these fantastical claims. And I don't know, I mean, if these claims fall apart and SpaceX sort of starts to crumble or struggles to kind of make this quite fantastical. And as you mentioned, very unproven idea of space data setters happen. Elon Musk is still going to walk away a multi-billionaire, if not a trillionaire. But all of us could be left like holding the bag, it feels like.

That's a concern. And there's a lot of other concerns that experts have raised around this company surrounding Elon's control. He has 82% voting control. He has a super majority of votes. He can't be challenged in terms of the decision making at the company. He's removed a lot of the ability to sue the company in shareholder matters. So shareholders are essentially forced to go through arbitration. And that's key because at Tesla, he faced a lot of these shareholder lawsuits that challenge his pay packages or challenge his decision making. And he is essentially removing that as a means of, of questioning his power. And so if you're an investor in SpaceX, you're investing in it whether you don't have any say essentially. And you can sell the stock if you want, but in terms of decision making,

you're essentially betting on Elon. And for the average person, average retail investor, or the average person who has like a retirement fund that maybe doesn't necessarily love that, they're gonna find out that they partially support this company as well. And yeah, it's maybe not a great feeling because you have no control. Yeah. And in the meantime, SpaceX, it seems like, is also going off and doing things like buying cursor,

this like AI coding tool for $60 billion. You reported recently that Elon Musk might try to merge SpaceX and Tesla. It seems like this company is going in a lot of different directions. But it also feels like a lot of sort of consolidation is happening, where Elon is trying to kind of, I guess, like wrap up a lot of his business interests into this like mega corporation. Elon Inc. Yeah.

I think as this company becomes more valuable and trades in the stock market, you know, it's developed a sort of currency for itself, which is its own shares. At the evaluation right now, I didn't check the stock price today. It was a little down, but it's above $2 trillion. That gives it a lot of purchasing power. And while the cursor deal had already kind of been discussed and had been agreed upon, they were able to close that very quickly because the stock had gone up. You know, the market cap increase on that.

covered that acquisition costs alone. And you can see how that will play out if Elon really wanted to buy Tesla. You know, he has 82% voting control at SpaceX. He can unilaterally decide to do that. And if the valuation of SpaceX remains high, you know, that that share swap becomes a lot easier because Tesla shareholders may not object to it because they're getting, you know, this great stock that has such a high valuation. You know, that is kind of the direction things are heading in right now. A lot of people are speculating that. Even when executives are questioned about an IPO day, they didn't shut down the idea. They said, you know, basically it's whatever Elon wants.

And that's how they've always operated. I think what's interesting at Tesla is that he does not have the same control he has at SpaceX. His ownership voting control, and Tesla is different because it only has these kind of common A shares that allow one vote, whereas at SpaceX he has these super voting shares that have 10 to 1 votes. But at Tesla, he only has about 20% of the company. So merging Tesla into SpaceX would give him ultimate control. And he's, you know, essentially already done business deals between the two companies.

For example, SpaceX has bought hundreds of millions of dollars worth of cyber trucks from Tesla. So, you know, I think that's the natural progression of things. And we may see a combined Elon ink in the not so distant future. Yeah, it seems like, I don't know, he's just building more and more power. And SpaceX has become this like, really, I would say, like, otherworldly kind of super corporation that we haven't really seen before. I can't think of any like corollaries in terms of this type of business. I mean, it's just so much bigger. And, you know, maybe the IPO is reflective of that.

It's just it's on a scale that most corporations will never reach. I think he's reached a point where he is too big to fail. I've said this many times before. And he's escaped the gravity of accountability. You know, when someone is worth a trillion dollars, and I don't think we've discussed this enough of like, I don't think people can fathom how much a trillion dollars is. Like, if you think a billion dollars is a lot, like, try a thousand of that. You know, and it's like, we just, we don't have a scale for wrapping our heads around what you can do with a trillion dollars.

By 2024, when he was supporting Donald Trump, he was only worth about 250, 300 billion dollars. You know, by that time, he had re-bought a whole company for himself. He had influenced an election and installed a candidate that he wanted. And now his net worth is almost quadruple that. I mean, with money comes power, and we're about to see, what happens when there is this kind of extreme wealth inequality at the very top. Yeah, he truly is, I would say, like, maybe the most powerful man in the world, just given his vast and endless amount of resources.

I wouldn't dispute that. Well, Ryan, thank you so much for joining me today. I can't wait to continue to read all of your reporting on all this. Thanks for having me. All right, that's it for this week's episode. If you like my work, please, please, please buy a paid subscription to my substack newsletter at usermag.co. That's usermag.com.

It's one of the best ways to ensure this podcast can keep publishing. You can also support me on Patreon via the link below. On my Patreon, I do monthly Q&As. You can get my newsletter there as well. I do bonus content and more. Also, if you're watching the show on YouTube, it actually really helps if you listen through Spotify. I'm now in Spotify's creator program. So if you can't afford a subscription, just listening to the show on Spotify actually helps me significantly.

I'll be back next week with a brand new episode of Power User. See you then.