The Daily - Elon Musk Launches Into American Politics

Episode Date: November 13, 2024

After single-handedly remaking the auto industry, social media and the global space race, Elon Musk is now turning his attention, and personal fortune, to politics.Over the past few months, he became one of the most influential figures in the race for president, and on Tuesday Donald J. Trump tapped him to help lead what the president-elect called the Department of Government Efficiency,Kirsten Grind and Eric Lipton, investigative reporters for The Times, explain what exactly Musk wants from the new president, and why he is so well placed to get it.Guest: Kirsten Grind, an investigative business reporter at The New York Times.Eric Lipton, an investigative reporter at The New York Times.Background reading: Mr. Trump tapped Mr. Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to lead a new “Department of Government Efficiency.”Mr. Musk helped elect Mr. Trump. What does he expect in return?For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

From the New York Times, I'm Rachel Abrams, and this is The Daily. After single-handedly remaking the auto industry, social media, and the global space race, Elon Musk is now turning his attention, and personal fortune, to politics. Over the past few months, he became the single most influential figure in the race for president, and now the emerging White House of Donald Trump. Today, my colleagues Kirsten Grind and Eric Lipton on what exactly Musk wants from the new president

and why he's so well poised to get it. It's Wednesday, November 13th. Kirsten, we spent the last few months watching as Elon Musk really became kind of the face of Donald Trump's campaign for president. And in the days since he won, Musk has only increased his proximity to President-elect Trump. And last night, of course, Trump announced that Musk would lead a new government agency. What will Musk's specific role in the Trump administration be?

Late Tuesday evening, Donald Trump announced a bunch of new appointments to his new administration. And included in that was this role for Elon Musk. What Donald Trump said is that Elon Musk will be leading up this completely new government department focused on efficiency. Efficiency is something that Elon Musk has been obsessed with for years. And basically, it's just showing how much power Elon Musk is going to have in this administration and how much Donald Trump respects his opinion. Kirsten, you've covered Musk for years. Did any of this surprise you? So I'm an investigative reporter who has written a lot about Elon Musk. And I have to say, I could have never predicted this political transformation that has happened over the last year. For him to

become so involved in politics after really staying out of it for most of his life and career, staying out of it for most of his life and career and being in the room with Donald Trump on election night is a metamorphosis I definitely was not prepared for. How did we get from a guy you would never have expected to get into politics to someone who's about to potentially serve the White House? The thing to understand about Elon Musk is that he really believes his goal in life and his mission is to save humanity. He has made it his focus and the focus of all of his companies to save the world. For example, he started SpaceX more than two decades ago with the goal of getting humanity to Mars in case something happened to Earth. He was an early investor in Tesla and became its CEO because he was worried about fossil fuels.

And he's become the world's richest man by doing all of these ventures. But how do we go from that and from him wanting to save humanity, possibly by colonizing Mars to basically becoming a key supporter and really a surrogate for Trump. It's a very unusual and unconventional transformation. For most of his early career, he had leaned Democratic, but really he just wasn't into politics at all. And for the most part, he stayed out of it. But there's a few

things that happened in the last four years that really started to shift his outlook. So let's start in 2020, the pandemic. All of California this morning now under a shelter in place order. California had tons of stay at home restrictions on residents and businesses, and most of Elon Musk's company operations were in California. And Musk speaks out as what is happening right now? He is extremely anti-regulation, hates to have the government or really anyone tell him what to do. This is fascist.

And so the fact that he was going to have to close his Tesla factories because of the pandemic made him so angry. This was not freedom. Give people back the goddamn freedom. And finally, he threatened and then ultimately did move factories out of the state. Wow. So this really pushed him over the edge, what happened in California. It really did. But then something happened the next year in 2021 that was even more angering to him and which seems like a small thing, but has been something that he's like never been able to get over.

Please, everybody sit down. Please, please, please. The Biden administration held this electric vehicle summit. And I also want to thank the leaders of the big three companies for being here today. And they invited all the big car makers from all over the country to go. When they make the first electric Corvette I get to drive it. Except for Tesla and Elon Musk. You know like Biden held this EV summit. Elon was furious. Didn't mention Tesla once and praised Jim and Ford for leading

the EV rest of the revolution. So you are pissed. Does this sound maybe a little biased? And he has never been able to let this go, this snub from the Biden administration. It's not the friendliest administration. Well, I'm from, yeah, seems to be controlled by the unions of Charlie Keaton. And basically, it created so much tension between Tesla and the administration that

that also kind of set him on his political journey. So it sounds like the Biden administration is on notice at this point that Musk is really upset and it's not just for business reasons, it's really becoming kind of personal. That's right. But it also becomes ideological too. Because remember around 2022, he buys Twitter, renames it X, and he basically says he buys it to make it a free speech platform. He especially thinks that conservatives had been censored on Twitter.

Remember, at this point, Donald Trump had been kicked off Twitter and other conservative voices, and he wants it to be this sort of place for free speech of all kinds. And around this time, he really starts to see a shift in what he is posting about on X. And it becomes way more focus on what he's called the woke mind virus. What this basically means is, for example, diversity, equity, and inclusion measures, transgender rights, pronoun use. All of that seems to be angering Elon Musk significantly on X. And he starts posting about it more and more. So it's very possible for adults to manipulate children who are having a natural identity crisis into believing that they are the wrong gender. Yep.

And I want to bring up this other thing that to me really shows how far down this rabbit hole he had gone. Why are you willing to make this an issue? Do you think? Well, it happened to one of my... Which is that his daughter Vivian, who's one of his older children, had come out as transgender. I was essentially tricked into signing documents. And Musk claimed in an interview that he was tricked into signing these medical forms for Vivian and allowing her to do her

transition when she was 16. This was before I had really any understanding of what was going on and we had COVID going on and so there was a lot of confusion. That he had not been aware of this basically. They call it dead naming for a reason. Yeah. And he said in this interview that she had been killed. Killed by the woke mind virus. So I vowed to destroy the woke mind virus after that. And we're making some progress. She had some choice words back to him and also said that he was not tricked into signing those forms. But the whole incident just

really showed how his thinking has changed and been radicalized over these last few years. Another example of his ideological transformation is immigration. And that's kind of ironic because Elon Musk himself is from South Africa. But over the last couple of years, he starts really focusing on illegal immigrants. And he keeps talking about how he feels the Democratic Party is allowing in these illegal immigrants so that they can get a majority and win the election. So he's just espousing this conspiratorial rhetoric right out in the open on his own platform.

That's right. And it's really this ideology that is so different from what you saw from him even just a couple years earlier. Okay, so all of that helps me understand how by 2024 Musk is increasingly aligned with right-wing ideology. But when do he and Donald Trump actually get together in some meaningful way? So it's a little hard to tell because Musk's world is very insular, but you can kind of see why at this point he and Trump are so aligned. So the two people are so similar. Really? Like how? I mean, they both have immense wealth and power, but they both act like outsiders and victims. I think this

one is maybe the most important, which is that they both think the system is broken and they both really think that they are the ones to fix it and they refuse to stick with the status quo. We know at one point earlier this year, Musk met with some billionaire friends of his, one of whom was encouraging him to get involved in the campaign and to donate, which would be pretty normal for someone of his stature and wealth. And then we know at some point earlier this year, he did also meet with Trump. And then by June, he had established a super PAC ready to invest in Trump's campaign. So can you just break down for a second, what does that support actually look like?

It is above and beyond what a normal donor would do, that's for sure. So his super PAC has donated more than 100 million. That would be kind of normal for a billionaire or another donor perhaps. But what has been unusual is the super PAC, which is called America PAC, was in Pennsylvania knocking on doors. They knocked on 11 million doors in battleground states. Come on up here, Elon. But the most amazing thing to me has been watching him at these rallies. The energy in this room is incredible. Right up on stage, he was with Trump. America's just not, not just going to be great.

America is going to reach heights that it has never seen before. The future is going to reach heights that it has never seen before. The future is going to be amazing! He was just right out there with him, almost like he was running for president. You guys are awesome. Honestly, this is like… But wasn't this man trying to run like six companies and colonize Mars? How did he have time for all of this? Yes. Well, that's a very good question. He has a lot of good people running his companies. But meanwhile, to take it back to his whole life's goal, which is to save humanity, that's actually exactly what he thinks

he is doing here. And in fact, he has said recently that he still really did not want to get into politics, but that he had to because civilization was on the line. So that again is why he is out there. And on election night, there's this big family photo with Trump, their kids, their grandkids, and there's Elon Musk just right beside them. And in the few days since the election, he's basically been camped out at Mar-a-Lago. He was reportedly on this phone call with the Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky and Trump. He's been advising Trump on cabinet positions. And then as we know, on Tuesday night, he got his own position appointed.

And we've just never seen anything like this. This super billionaire Elon Musk suddenly with all this potential power in the federal government. After the break, I talked to my colleague Eric Lipton about what Musk stands to gain from a Trump White House. So, Eric, we just heard from our colleague Kirsten Grind that it has not taken Elon Musk very long to insert himself into this emerging Trump presidency in a way that feels without precedent frankly. And you've been looking into exactly what Musk could stand to gain from access to a

Trump White House. But first, can you just remind us, what is Elon Musk's current relationship with the federal government? I think it's underappreciated the extent to which Elon Musk has relied on the federal government to help build his own wealth and the size of his companies. He has at least 100 different contracts pending with the federal government with 17 different agencies. The majority of that work is with SpaceX, which has really owed its existence largely

to the federal government. NASA kicked it off by giving SpaceX the money that it needed to build the Falcon 9 rocket, which now puts almost all of the world's cargo into orbit each year, more than every other nation in the world combined. Oh, wow. And SpaceX alone has gotten $10 billion worth of contracts from the federal government over the last five years

to deliver stuff to space. That includes cargo to the space station, astronauts to the space station, spy satellites, missile defense systems, and dozens of other items for the federal government. And it's unlike any other commercial space company in the history of the United States in terms of the extent of its dominance

and the money that's going to it to provide those services to the federal government. So government contracts really made Musk in a way, like he's clearly been very successful under the status quo. So that sort of makes the question of what more is there for him to gain? I mean since Musk created SpaceX back in 2002, he's been completely fixated with getting humans to Mars. And one of the things that incredibly frustrates him is when he encounters paperwork requirements and regulatory slowdowns, he often comments about how he can build his rockets faster

than federal bureaucrats can move paper from one side of their desk to the other. It just totally burns him up. And that's in part what has motivated him to get more involved in politics. He thinks it might give him the power to help defang them and to limit their power and to reduce what he considers to be redundant or ridiculous requirements to help wipe away some of this slowness that really frustrates him. And Musk was clear during the presidential campaign that he wanted to be named to a position in the future Trump government that would give him the power to help oversee significantly cutting back on

federal regulations, federal employees, and federal spending. He liked to jokingly call this the Department of Government Efficiency, nicknamed DOGE, which is the same name of one of his favorite crypto coins. Musk has a tendency to love little names like that that he can repeat that are insider jokes. And he would be sort of this superpowered czar overseeing the reach of federal government operations and looking for ways to eliminate what he considers redundant federal regulations and cutting as much as two trillion dollars in federal spending, which is a crazy and really unachievable goal. But that's what he says he wants to do.

Which is basically the position that Trump just announced for him with this new government department that's in charge of making all kinds of cuts across the government, kind of spiritually similar to what Musk did with Twitter. Yeah, Trump likes to tell Musk that he's super impressed with what Musk was able to do at Twitter. He jokingly calls him cutter-in-chief. He sees Musk as having an incredible capacity to find ways to reduce cost and get rid of waste. And in fact, at Twitter, when he bought it, Musk of course cut something like two thirds of its staff

and it's a bit bumpy, but X does function without more than two thirds of the people that it had when he purchased the company. So Trump has confidence that Musk is the guy that he needs to actually really significantly cut federal regulations and spending. But a tech company works a lot differently, obviously, than a government agency. Like it doesn't really seem feasible that he could just go in, slash a bunch of jobs overnight, like what he did with Twitter, and have that work the same way.

Yeah. And a level of reduction in spending and regulations that has never been achieved before in the history of the United States. And when it comes to actually cutting federal regulations and laying off federal employees and cutting federal spending, this is a process that obviously Congress participates in and it is a very hard thing to do.

There's a constituency for every little agency out there. And so it is a lot harder than simply announcing one day that you're laying off thousands of people at a private company that you own. How do you think all of this is actually going to play out? We don't know what Elon Musk's first targets would be, but there's a couple of examples that frustrate him in terms of conflicts that he's had with federal regulators. Probably the best example is with SpaceX and what he's trying to do down in Boca Chica,

Texas, near the Mexican border, where they're testing out the Starship rocket. And they have repeatedly caused some environmental damage in that area. And it's right on the edge of a National Wildlife Refuge and a state park and as they were developing the rocket they were repeatedly disregarding what the Fish and Wildlife Service and the Interior Department said was the limits on their operations. What exactly were those limits? I mean for example recently on one of their launches there's so much power that comes out of these rockets, it sent sand and rocks flying into the nearby state park and it destroyed a bunch of nesting

areas for the local bird population and ripped open the eggs and destroyed the nest of the birds that were there. I saw that right after the launch. I walked out into the area once they cleared it for the public and the egg yolk was there staining the ground. And that's another matter that's being investigated by Fish and Wildlife Service for potentially harming migratory birds. It's something that frustrates him and he thought that our coverage of it was so offensive

he said he would restrain from having omelets for several days as he was so he thought it was so ridiculous that we were even worried about these nests that were destroyed by his launch. So you can imagine that the EPA would be the first target on his efficiency to-do list. I wouldn't be surprised if that's one of the first places that he goes and he looks to try to roll back some of the regulatory powers that it has. But that certainly would not be the only agency that he would go after. I mean, all you had to do is look at Tesla and he is being currently or recently investigated or sued by really an acronym soup of federal agencies, the Equal Opportunity Commission,

the National Labor Relations Board, the Securities Exchange Commission, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the Department of Justice, of course the EPA, all of them are looking at Tesla and suggesting that it has overstepped the law. I mean most importantly there is concern about the autonomous driving tools on his cars and whether or not they've been involved in fatal accidents. But they're there everything having to do with you know disrupting union activities, who he hires at his auto factories and whether or not he's properly treating refugees and people who have asylum.

I mean, he is the subject of so many different simultaneous investigations. It really frustrates him. And that's another part of the reason that he's active with Trump is he wants to crush those investigations. And it's likely that many of them will now be shut down. So everything you've laid out so far, Eric, it helps us understand why Musk's own personal business interests could benefit from the regulatory environment that he's potentially going to be reshaping.

But is this all legal? It seems to me that what you've outlined could be a major conflict of interest. It's going to create a conflict of interest that really has few precedents in American history. Here's a guy who has 10 billion dollars or more of ongoing federal contracts. He has a couple dozen pending federal investigations and lawsuits that he's targeted in. And of course, there are federal conflict or interest laws that prohibit just this kind of mixing of duties and violating them could be a federal offense. So how is it possible that Elon Musk could simultaneously play the role of trying to cut back on federal regulations if he is himself being regulated? And the announcement we saw from Trump on Tuesday night actually sort of hints that they recognize

that there's this clash. And they're attempting to sidestep it by suggesting that Musk would somehow be the leader of this new federal Department of Government Efficiency, but he would do it while remaining, quote, outside of the government. So basically he can have the ear of the president but not have the formal government position and all the conflict of interest headaches that come with it.

Yeah it's a lot more attractive but this is a very murky arrangement and all of this assumes that Trump and Musk are gonna stay on good terms. They are two personalities that have a history of exploding with people that they've been close with, with business partners, and even some of their most trusted employees. And so they're guys that also hold grudges and are a bit impulsive.

So there's no guarantee that this is a relationship that's gonna last. So after all of this, your investigation and how it revealed the various ways that Musk's potential reshaping of the government could benefit him, what is your big takeaway? I think the thing that's really fascinating and that we at The New York Times are going to be watching closely

is the extent to which this new administration is one that's going to be defined by the desires of billionaires. And the first Trump administration was really more focused on things like the oil and gas industry and the Christian right wanting to see more appointments to the Supreme Court. But the array of economic interest being pushed by billionaire donors to Trump in this second term is much broader and Their buddy buddy relationship with Trump is much tighter. I mean, it's the crypto industry. It's artificial intelligence It's the tech industry and the antitrust approach that the government has to the tech industry

There's a bunch of players that have surrounded Trump and Elon Musk is at the center of this crew. Many of these folks are friends of Musk and he is sort of the ringleader of the whole group. And I think that they are going to have much more influence in what happens in the White House and across the federal government in the next four years. Right. I mean, billionaires have always had some sort of influence in government, but we just haven't really seen the proximity that you've outlined between this incredibly

rich and powerful man, the world's richest man and the President of the United States. Yeah, I think that it's just a different set of players at the table this time around who have such vested interest in so many sectors of the economy that reach, you know, really across the playing field. Oligarchs is too strong of a word, but we are entering a period where people with immense wealth are interacting with a president who is known and has a history of being extremely transactional. And these are folks that now helped Trump get a second term and are expecting to see a return on that investment.

Eric, thank you very much. Thank you. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. President-elect Donald Trump has nominated military veteran and Fox News host Pete Hegseth as his defense secretary, but his lack of relevant experience has already generated pushback. Hegseth is one of several political appointees Trump has picked in recent days, including

South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem for Secretary of Homeland Security and House Representative Elise Stefanik for Ambassador to the United Nations. Trump is expected to meet with President Biden at the White House later today. It's part of a longstanding tradition of the outgoing president greeting the new one. outgoing president greeting the new one. Today's episode was produced by Ricky Nowetzki, Olivia Natt, Rob Zipko, and Luke Vanderplug. It was edited by MJ Davis Lynn, Brendan Klinkenberg, with help from Chris Haxel.

Contains original music by Dan Powell and Rowan Nemisto, and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsberg of Wonderly. That's it for The Daily. I'm Rachel Abrams. See you tomorrow.