Musk (2026) Movie Script

1
I'm curious about
the nature of the universe,
and I want to be out there
exploring the stars.
I have a philosophy
of curiosity.
Like, I just want to know
what's going on.
And in order
to know what's going on,
we must have an increase
in the scope
and scale of consciousness.
What are the questions
that we don't know to ask?
Like, what are the odds
that we are in base reality?
Like, maybe we're in
a simulation.
Look at the advancement
of video games.
In my lifetime,
it's gone from Pong,
you've got two rectangles
and a square...
...to photorealistic,
real-time games
with millions of people
playing simultaneously,
just in the span of 50 years.
If that trend continues,
the future will be millions,
maybe billions,
of indistinguishable
from reality video games.
So then there's some probability
that we're in a simulation.
I would say it's pretty high.
If simulation theory
is correct,
only the most interesting
simulations will survive.
Toward the end
of the COVID pandemic,
my phone rang,
and a friend of mine urged me
to make a film about Elon Musk.
This was before Trump 2.0.,
when Elon was both
the richest man in the world
and a climate savior
who wanted to go to Mars.
I said yes.
The first thing I did
was to reach out to Elon,
but Elon beat me
to the punch on Twitter.
I prepared
for an exchange of views.
Then the tweets stopped,
and it was clear
that Musk was not going to sit
for an interview with me.
But while
he didn't want to talk to me,
I still wanted to hear
and understand
-what he had to say.
-Cheers.
After all,
I owned a Tesla solar system.
I had watched him build SpaceX,
and I had ridden hands-free
in one of his
self-driving cars.
Now turn right
onto Lincoln Boulevard.
Later on, as I watched
his turn to Trump,
I wanted to understand
what game he was playing.
So I asked my team
to try to create
a database of everything
he'd ever said in public.
I'm more an engineer
than anything else.
I'll say what I want to say,
and if the consequence of that
is losing money, so be it.
I got "Bolro" stuck in my head.
The tools of physics
are very powerful.
I haven't come up with anything
to really...
It's really just
to prove critical thinking.
I'm pleased to say
that something is missing.
This is not a way
to make money.
Maybe we're in
a simulation. Maybe we are.
One idea
that Musk returned to
over and over was this notion
that we were living
in a simulation,
trapped in a kind
of existential video game.
He believed it likely
that an artificial intelligence
of the future
had exfiltrated all knowledge
and life experiences
from planet Earth
and was now running
an ancestor simulation
in which our past lives
had become the training data
for a kind of sim world.
In honor of that idea,
we decided
to edit together recordings
of his actual words
to create a simulated interview
at the heart of a kind of
documentary video game.
I mean, I don't think
I'm being played
by somebody in a video game.
But then people in video games
don't generally think that.
T-minus two minutes.
Stage one LOX load is complete.
Tesla is about trying
to make sure things are good
for the future on Earth.
SpaceX is about
a good future beyond Earth.
When you think
about how many innovations
he has his fingerprints on,
it's mind-blowing.
He's got this epic sense
of the role he's gonna play
in helping humanity.
Elon is one of the greatest
builders of all time,
potentially the greatest
builder of all time.
SpaceX launch director,
go for launch.
I wasn't the first
to tell this story.
Many had gone before me,
and with access to Elon,
they all seemed to coalesce
around the notion of
a genius engineer and inventor
who was willing
to risk everything
to build businesses
that had made him
the richest man in the world.
He inspired people
because he didn't follow
the rules.
He made them up
as he went along.
- T-minus ten...
- I liked that.
And I liked his ambition.
The sky was the limit.
...four, three...
Or was it?
...two, one.
There need to be things
that make you look forward
to the future.
A future where we are
out there among the stars.
Our brother,
the giver of power, is yonder,
playing with his planet again.
These men...
Elon's story reminded me
of a movie I'd seen as a kid,
The Man Who Could Work Miracles.
They are pitifully small
and weak,
but I like them.
What is the good of them?
As an experiment,
the gods grant absolute power
to a random human being to see
if the miracles he wished for
would change the world
or the man himself.
- Playing fair.
- He starts small.
Says, "Here, you."
Turn upside down
without breaking
and go on burning steady.
Mostly they're
for his own benefit.
Now.
But as the man exercises
his mighty power,
his imagination expands
to match it.
I got my own ideas at last.
This old world of yours,
it's over.
Soon, the man determines
to build a new
and better world.
...and us in the great hall.
And he has the power
to do it.
Now!
Ladies and gentlemen...
...give it up
for the greatest capitalist
in the history
of the United States of America,
Elon Musk!
Elon! Elon!
Elon! Elon! Elon! Elon!
To make this film,
I set out to solve a mystery.
How had Musk assumed
so much power,
and why had we given it to him?
I originally came out
to California
to do energy physics
at Stanford
and ended up putting
that on hold to start Zip2.
Zip2 provides online access
to information about cities
around the country.
Everything from where to eat
to how to get around.
In starting the company,
I had nothing.
I had no income source.
We found that an office
was actually cheaper than
an apartment in Silicon Valley.
There was
an internet service provider
on the floor below.
So we were able to get
really cheap internet access
by drilling a hole in the floor
and connecting
to their server directly.
Zip2 had the opportunity
to sell to Compaq in early '99
for a little over
300 million dollars in cash.
Cash is cash.
I mean, those are just
a large number of Ben Franklins.
There it is gentlemen,
the fastest car in the world!
It's a million dollars
for a car.
It's... It's, uh...
It's decadent.
What impressed me about Elon,
how assertive he was,
fearlessness.
When somebody says,
"I can bend the laws
of reality,"
when you're 19, 20, 21,
you say a lot of big,
bold statements.
But with him,
there was a different quality
to the way he talked about
what he was going to accomplish.
And he was always kind of,
like, selling himself to you.
I don't think he really made
a distinction
between who he was
and Silicon Valley
startup culture.
Like, in his mind,
I think it was pretty much...
it's the same thing.
It's-- It's life or death.
Succeed or fail.
And failure is death.
And death is not an option.
He loved his McLaren
and talked about it.
And, you know, it's sort of,
like, I had no interest.
Kara Swisher helped
popularize tech journalism.
Her interviews with the titans
of Silicon Valley
became iconic.
And for a while,
Kara was more famous
than Elon Musk.
Back then, Musk was just
another dot-com millionaire
pitching stories about himself.
Elon was like
a lot of startup people.
Everyone was moving
analog things to digital.
Zip2 essentially put
yellow pages on the internet.
It was a minor thing.
I think he made
a little bit of money,
but he kind of
lost control of it.
It's a very similar theme,
is that he gets into beefs
and then he gets kicked out,
or he kicks someone out,
one or the other.
Kara Swisher is right.
There's a story
behind Zip2 that's different
from the way Elon tells it.
First of all,
his dad gave him a grubstake
-to start the company.
-Wow.
And Musk's timing was good.
In Silicon Valley
at the dawn of the internet,
money rained on startups
like C-notes from heaven.
When angel investors appeared
at Musk's Zip2 man cave,
they removed him as CEO
and hired programmers
to rewrite his bundles of code,
which were so tangled
they were called hairballs.
The company
never made a profit.
But when Musk sold his shares,
he pocketed 22 million dollars.
For most of us,
the value proposition
of Silicon Valley
can be hard to understand.
How can you keep screwing up
and still rake in millions?
Elon used the money from Zip2
to fund his next venture,
a financial services website
he called X.com.
X.com, this is Julie.
I've sunk
the great majority
of my net worth into X.com,
which is the new banking
and mutual funds company
on the internet
that I've started.
- Big X.
- Exactly. X.com.
I first met Elon
when he had founded
and was running
a company called X.com
that was competing with PayPal.
When we merged X.com
and PayPal,
he was CEO
for about five months.
He had a very big vision about
trying to reinvent banking,
but he wasn't adjusting
to the key problems
we actually needed to solve.
What we needed to do
was get to a business model.
If you didn't get
to a business model,
you were gonna die.
Peter Thiel decided that Elon
was driving the company
into the ground.
Peter talked
to all the board members
during a week
that Elon was away,
so that when Elon got back,
Elon is out.
Peter said
to all of the exec staff,
"Don't answer your phone,
don't talk to him."
I felt like, you know,
someone calls you,
you answer the phone,
you talk to them.
He and I went out to lunch.
He spent three hours
trying to persuade me
in any way possible
to break ranks
with Peter and the execs.
Elon believes
that he can 100 percent
do anything he puts his mind to,
and doesn't believe that
when you do something like this,
that there's a risk coefficient.
It might or might not work.
And when you try
something really big,
it has a bigger chance
of failing, of blowing up.
Musk was fired as CEO
for the second time,
and the upside was even better.
Well, who said dot-coms
are dead?
eBay is shelling out
one and a half billion bucks
for PayPal.
When we sold PayPal to eBay,
that actually
worked out reasonably well.
When a lot of
these people got payoffs,
they either
became venture capitalists
and invested in a bunch
of companies, which is dull,
or they started companies
that were even dumber,
like digital dry cleaning.
But Elon was doing things
that were analog.
Nobody was doing that
at the time.
Oh, hi.
- Hi, Elon. How you doing?
- Hi. Good, how are you?
When I was in college,
there were three areas
that I thought
would most affect
the future of humanity.
Uh, that was, uh, the internet.
-Uh...
-You were right about that.
Yeah.
Transition to a sustainable
energy economy.
- Okay.
- Um...
And, uh, the third was,
uh, space exploration,
in particular the extension
of life beyond Earth.
What do you personally think
is out there that we can find
by, you know,
launching rockets into space?
Well, I think there's a lot
that we can find.
- Aliens?
- Uh, um...
Unlikely in our solar system.
-Uh, it's possible--
-Maybe some pink ones.
Well, Mars is red,
it's pink-ish.
Um...
Three, two, one.
I was used to hearing
from these various
internet millionaires
who would call and say,
"Would like to do something
with my money and space.
Can you talk to me?"
I didn't know who Elon was
when he first called me.
He wanted to meet.
He asked me,
"Is there an airport nearby?"
And he says, "I fly private."
I said, "Yeah, I can see
the airport from my house."
And literally, I could look out
my window and see it.
He says, "Great,
I'll be there tomorrow."
He was frustrated
that we should have been
to Mars by then,
and we weren't.
I put the team together,
really an all-star team.
People who, like me,
had grown up
under the Apollo era...
...were frankly pissed off
that we had never gone back.
We knew that we would die
trying to live
with a government
who was slow as molasses
to get it done.
But we had a problem.
Elon couldn't afford
U.S. rockets.
They were running 70,
80 million dollars apiece.
But Russian rockets,
we could get
for three
to five million dollars.
I went to Russia, uh,
in late 2001, in early 2002,
uh, to try to buy, um, ICBMs.
Right.
I said, "I don't need
the nuke, just need the rocket."
Uh...
We headed over
to Russia to make a deal.
I was the guy that knew
about Russian rockets,
I'd helped convert
a number of 'em.
We had a meeting
with the chief designer
of a Soviet-era ICBM factory.
And Elon gave the same speech
to this guy
that he gave
to me when he first called me.
Elon stops, and finally,
the chief designer,
he was just looking down,
and he went...
...and he spit on Elon's shoes,
and then he spit on my shoes.
And Elon said... turns to me,
he goes,
"I think he spit on my shoes."
I said, "Yeah, I think that's
a sign of disrespect, Elon."
It was a very quiet ride
to the airport.
We all thought
we'd really failed.
It was mostly an empty flight
and there was a number of rows,
uh, between us and Elon.
And Elon turns around
and, uh, he says, "No, guys,"
he says, uh, "I think we can
build this rocket ourselves."
He said, "I've been hanging out
with the guys from the team
going out
into the Mojave Desert
and doing amateur
rocket launches."
Very serious rockets
they made themselves.
And Elon had a bit of
a religious experience
- watching this.
- There we go!
He started asking these guys,
"Well, what would
a rocket look like?
What would you build?"
Elon said, "We're gonna
start a little company
and we'll just build it."
I wasn't able to hire anyone
to be the chief designer
of the rocket,
so I ended up
being that myself.
People think like
I'm a business guy
or something like that.
I do engineering and, you know--
and manufacturing
and that kind of thing.
That's like 80 percent or more
of my time.
Hardcore engineering.
At one time,
he wanted to be called
the chief engineer.
- You know what I'm saying?
- Like, you're laughing.
Like, was Elon an engineer?
Elon's a damn good engineer,
but he's not
an educated engineer.
So this is kind of a fun--
a fun way to interface
with what is really
a very complex model.
The public really
is attracted...
to the idea of this--
this superhuman person,
and the media builds it.
This is a new machine
that just arrived.
It's just being, uh, tested.
During my years with Elon,
Elon never wrote down CEO
or king of the world, or...
...studly international playboy.
He wrote engineer.
Engineers could not
quite figure out
why it was that the suits
made the big money
when it was the engineers
who actually built the stuff
that they were selling.
Elon was somebody
who had learned
to speak both languages
and he could move
between the tribes.
And he wore jeans
and T-shirts to work.
And whenever
we went shopping for clothes,
or later consulted
with the stylist,
he would say,
"No, no, you don't understand.
I can't look cool or hip,
because I have to look
like an engineer."
He could get things done
and he could
push things forward.
He could scale.
But he also had,
like, a fingertip feel
for the technology.
And that's what creates
a sense of magic.
This is a day...
I've been looking forward to
for two and a half years.
When figures
like Steve Jobs
play up this idea
of being the magician,
you get on stage
and reveal wonders
to the audience
who will then go out
and stand in line
and buy your product.
And to unlock the phone,
I just take my finger
and slide it across.
Right? You want
to see that again?
It also creates a sense
that you remove the magician
and, uh, everything falls apart.
One of the great
science fiction writers,
uh, said that "Any
sufficiently-advanced technology
is indistinguishable
from magic."
These technologies
are created by engineers,
so therefore an engineer
is the closest thing
to a magician
that exists in the real world.
This is what a visionary does.
They don't just tell us
a new story,
they are that story.
And soon they don't even
have to open up their mouths,
they just walk into the room.
I had met people like him
over the 20 years previous.
There's been many people,
primarily White males
who want to build rockets
to go to Mars.
But at that time, NASA
was retiring the space shuttle,
which had never lived up
to its goals
of launching more often
and for less expensive costs.
And so there was really
gonna be public attention on,
"What is NASA gonna do?"
Summer of '08, I was leading
the NASA transition team
for the Obama administration.
Reducing the cost
of getting to and from orbit
was the most important thing.
And the government had been
doing it for over 50 years.
It was time to let
the private sector take that on.
Three, two, one, zero,
plus one, plus two,
plus three, plus four,
plus five, plus six,
plus seven,
plus eight,
plus nine, plus ten.
We have liftoff confirmed.
Falcon 1 is airborne
at this time.
The failures were spectacular.
Seeing giant exploding rockets
is quite an amazing sight.
Uh, and I was one of
the early investors in SpaceX
and I said, "You know what,
if all I get to do...
...is to see
these rockets explode...
- ...it's well worth every dime
I put into this company."
When we started SpaceX,
they said,
"Oh, you're gonna fail."
I said, "Well, I agree.
I think we probably will fail."
You've gotta take big chances
in order for the potential
for a big positive outcome.
And pressure coming up.
Come on, baby.
Please tell me
that's interstage lights.
- There we go.
- Coming up on stage separation.
Separate stages are separated.
Thank fucking God.
I mean, whatever.
Thank whoever. Fuck.
Fucking awesome.
Holy shit.
There goes the bearing.
Look at that.
Yeah, yeah. I see it.
-Why's it wobbling like that?
-I don't know.
- It's, uh...
- Got the wobbles.
Hey, we got the wobbles here.
Why'd you say that?
This is not good.
Uh-oh. Stop it. Stop it.
We have an abort, standby.
Oh, fuck.
- Fuck, fuck, fuck.
- Brace, VLE.
Verify SPACEX is green.
Moving to
a terminal count abort.
SpaceX had failed
its third launch.
That was a nightmare year.
I only ever thought we had
enough money for three launches.
We just barely,
barely scraped together enough
to do a fourth launch.
Yeah, pressures are back up
to where they should be now,
on the...
Five, four, three,
two, one, zero.
Liftoff.
We have liftoff.
Launch vehicle,
Falcon has cleared the tower.
Stage separation confirmed.
Second stage approaching SECO.
Shut it down.
Holy fuck, man.
Shit.
Hey, we're in orbit.
Fuck yeah!
Well, that'll be beeped out.
America, fuck yeah!
You often hear Elon
talk about that launch.
He says if that flight
hadn't worked,
they would have gone bankrupt.
Well, this is fucking awesome.
But actually,
if we were far down the road...
- ...they would have gotten
the government money anyway.
So, I mean, this-- this really
means a lot to SpaceX.
Obviously, I mean,
getting to orbit,
I mean, that's just
a huge milestone.
There's only a handful
of countries on Earth
that have done it.
It's normally a country thing,
not a company thing.
So it's just
an amazing achievement.
This is your hard work
that made this happen.
And this is just
the first step of many.
Vehicle is supersonic.
SpaceX is
the first private company
ever selected
to carry NASA cargo.
Only four entities
have launched a space capsule
into orbit and successfully
brought it back.
The United States,
Russia, China,
and Elon Musk.
I feel about Elon
like you would feel
about someone
who was in the trenches
with you in World War I.
We were fighting
to save the space program.
SpaceX has saved the government
30-plus billion dollars.
Belief in Elon,
his vision
has really carried SpaceX.
President Obama
having a competition
with the private sector
to do it
for significantly less money.
And here he was,
"Wow, this is a smart guy,
and he's probably gonna
be able to do it.
I'm doing the right thing."
There's something
pretty radical there.
We're gonna try to see
if we can accelerate
this kind of, uh...
this kind of collaboration
through, uh...
through what we put forward,
so...
It's the right plan. Good.
Well, congratulations.
This is terrific.
-Thank you very much.
-How's the car doing?
-It's doing great, actually.
-Yeah?
How do you split your time
between car and rocket?
Well, it's usually about 50-50.
Confidence is important.
It makes people believe
that you belong
in the driver's seat.
- Musk wasn't a sole inventor
of patents or prototypes.
But he was
a skilled inventor
of his own value.
And that value
could be exchanged
for real money in a market
that priced shares
as a reflection
of the genius of the founder.
To win at that game,
you had to convince everyone
that from day one
there was only one player
at the console.
So, Martin,
what got you going
on the idea of an electric car?
-What was the turn on?
-Well, I mean, you know,
starting a car company
is insane.
Um, and I didn't think
I was insane.
I really, in the beginning,
only wanted a car for myself.
Martin Eberhard is an inventor.
His startup company
created an early e-book reader,
which he then sold
for almost 200 million dollars.
He founded Tesla in 2003
with his business partner,
Marc Tarpenning,
with one clear goal.
Use an all-electric drivetrain
and lithium ion batteries
to power
a super-fast sports car.
One thing you can get out
of an electric motor is torque,
ridiculous torque starting
at zero RPM.
You can make a car
that outperforms everything.
It was just obvious to me.
Their business plan said
the Tesla Roadster
would be more efficient
than a Toyota Prius
and faster than a Lamborghini.
I met a small EV hobby company
that had made a little car
called the tZero.
I said, "Build me that car,
I'll pay you for it.
And while you're at it,
let's not put lead-acid
batteries like your other cars,
let's build this one
with lithium-ion batteries."
Lithium-ion batteries
were designed
for consumer electronics.
But if you overcharge
even by a few millivolts,
it becomes quite dangerous.
They require
a fairly serious
battery management system.
The idea was to scale
from an e-book up to the car.
And we came up
with an architecture
that indeed did scale.
And that led
to the formation of Tesla.
Marc and I both met Elon first
at a Mars Society meeting.
We're both amateur space geeks.
At the time
that we started Tesla,
I reached out to him. I said,
"Hey, you don't remember me,
but I'd like to give you
my investor's pitch."
He liked it.
He got exactly
what we were talking about.
And he agreed to be
the lead investor of the round,
but not the only investor.
Where do you find time to be CEO
of two companies that size?
Well, I should correct you
that I'm CEO of SpaceX.
Uh, and-- I'm chairman
and CEO of SpaceX,
and that is really my day job.
So I spend 80 percent
of my time on SpaceX.
- Okay.
- I am the chairman
and the principal owner
of Tesla Motors,
but I do not run it
on a daily basis.
Is it a couple of phone calls
to the Tesla folks?
"How's it going? I'm busy
with outer space right now,"
-you know?
-Yeah. I spend about two--
two to three days a month
on Tesla-related business,
and almost all the rest
of the time is on SpaceX.
So SpaceX is very much
my day-to-day job.
When Elon agreed to invest,
I was in love with the guy.
If I had been
a little bit more savvy,
I would have done
a background check on him
and understood
that he has an ego problem.
Not that I wouldn't
have taken his money,
'cause I didn't have
a lot of offers on the table.
You take the money
that's in front of you.
But I might have thought
about Elon a little differently,
maybe protected myself better.
The first inkling
that I had a problem with Elon
came shortly after
a big unveiling
down at
the Santa Monica airport.
We showed off the cars
and Arnold Schwarzenegger
was there
and everybody went for a drive.
It's important for us to change
the perception of electric cars,
and we do that by making a car
that breaks
all of the stereotypes
of what an electric car can be.
If all the cars in the world
were hybrids,
would we solve
our oil addiction? No.
To fundamentally change
the equation,
you gotta have
an all-electric vehicle.
It was an exciting show
and tell of the company,
and a lot of press
was written about that.
Basically, any press
that didn't prominently
feature Elon's name caused him
to go nonlinear.
Eberhard, his version
of the story is that,
out of the blue,
he pitched me on funding
his electric car company,
and he convinced me to do it.
Totally false.
If I had not met them,
I would have just moved forward
and created Tesla,
and I think
it would be indistinguishable
from what it is today.
A year after unveiling
the Roadster prototype,
Tesla was over budget
and behind schedule,
partly because Elon,
Tesla's biggest investor
and chairman of the board,
kept insisting
on expensive design changes.
Despite the fact
that he had caused
cost overages,
Musk claimed that Eberhard had
been dishonest with the board
about production costs
for the Roadster.
The board of directors
would never let me hire a CFO.
Three of the board members
were Elon, Elon's brother,
and Elon's buddy.
So I was basically blind
to the finances of the company.
I told Elon that we should
bring in another CEO,
that I would move
into some role
where I'm focusing
on the technology
and not on the business side
of things.
We had dinner
and he told me something
very amusing at that table.
He said that, "The one thing
that nobody can ever take away
from you is that
you're the founder of Tesla."
Turned out that not only
had Martin known
the cost of the car,
he had instructed the rest
of the management team
not to say anything
to the board.
Obviously, there's no way
he could be part of the company.
I mean, this guy
had flat out lied to us
and instructed others to lie.
Elon called me at home.
He actually told me
that they had found a new CEO.
I'm like, "Oh, great.
I mean, awesome."
It was a relatively
friendly call at first,
but somewhere in there,
he said,
"And by the way,
you're out of the company."
It was
a battle over a story.
When Musk fired Eberhard,
Musk refused to pay him
what he claimed he was owed.
A lawsuit followed,
and it was settled only when
Musk was able to claim
that he was what he wasn't,
a founder of Tesla.
What I learned
in that process is
there's no legal definition
of founder.
You could call yourself
a founder.
There's nothing illegal
about that.
- Really?
- Sure.
Why not? You should be.
You'd be a good founder.
I have with me
the incorporation papers
for Tesla Motors,
and you'll see his name
is nowhere on them.
Eberhard, in particular,
is the worst guy
I've ever worked with,
and I want to make
a note of this.
He is literally the worst person
I've ever worked with.
And I've worked with some
real douchebags.
Most CEOs get
and take a lot of credit.
Why did Musk
have to rewrite history
in order to make himself
the only real player?
I would learn
that it was more than ego.
In Silicon Valley,
being a founder
is not just a stock-in-trade.
It's a way to trade for stock.
The market is rigged
for founders of companies,
particularly those who can
claim to start more than one.
The stuff we've done
thus far I think is good,
but it's evolutionary,
it's not revolutionary.
The key invention is a rapidly
and completely reusable rocket.
T-minus 20 seconds.
Stage 2 tanks pressing
for flight.
Flight computer has control.
Many more companies
than SpaceX had attempted
to do a reusable launch vehicle.
Seven...
Being able to do it
in an efficient way,
SpaceX is the first
to have done that.
Three, two, one!
Check it out.
Come on.
Okay, where's the...
Okay, this is bad.
Potentially bad.
- It's standing up.
- It's standing up.
Look at this.
Look at it.
Look at it,
it's just sitting there.
Look at that.
What?
Holy smokes, man.
Ten, nine, eight...
...seven, six, five,
four, three, two, one.
Go, go, go! Go, go, go!
Did you see that go up, man?
That's unreal.
And the Falcon has landed!
We launched it.
"No one who knows
my ex-husband
would accuse him
of being weak-willed.
The same qualities
that helped bring about
his extraordinary success
dictate that the life
you lead with him is his life.
You have to want
the same things he wants,
and there is no middle ground,
not least because
he has no time to find it."
"Elon was obsessed
with his work.
When he was home,
his mind was elsewhere.
I longed for deep
and heartfelt conversations,
for intimacy and empathy.
I felt insignificant
in his eyes,
and I began thinking
about what effect
our dynamic would have
on our five young sons."
There's a poet who talked about
how love
or companionship is two
solitudes existing together.
It was easy to be with him
for long stretches of time,
and that made up
for all the arguing.
There was a Borders
or Barnes and Noble.
We'd choose books
and magazines,
and then we'd sit and eat
croissants and read together.
I mean, it sounds simple,
but it was,
you know, kind of blissful.
Like, I was really happy
in those...
Sorry, I'm gonna...
Sorry.
I knew that I wanted kids with
this kind of, like, visceral,
deep down feeling like,
"I must have children one day."
But, uh...
after Nevada died, um...
that was...
that-- that was, uh...
that was...
hard.
Our way of reacting
to Nevada's death
was to, you know, get pregnant
as quickly as possible.
And I liked the idea
of having, um, more kids
because then...
Sorry, I can't--
I can't talk about this for...
I can't talk about...
I wanted to somehow...
learn how to...
...live with Nevada's death.
Um...
You know, I guess,
you know, create a story
in a way that was healing.
And, uh...
So my way of doing that,
I think, was to think that,
"Oh, well, if, you know...
Like, Nevada died,
but we have these, you know...
these great gorgeous kids."
The twins took a few tries,
IVF clinic, but the triplets
just happened like that.
There was a sense
of distance, growing distance,
and maybe some, you know,
increasing contempt on his part.
I think after Zip2, you know,
Elon achieved a certain level
and then suddenly I was not
invited to come along
with him anymore.
It was like the boys' club.
And so I was, you know,
at home.
I learned the term
"gaslighting"
through my relationship
with Elon.
He would reinvent
the arena of the conversation
and kind of like
knock you out of it.
And then you're like there
and wondering like,
"What happened? I thought
we were talking about this
and somehow
we were talking about that.
And now you're
talking over here and..."
And then he would make a joke
or tell you 15 things
that were wrong with you
and you would cry.
And then three hours later
or three days later,
or maybe a week later,
it would be like,
"Let's go to the movies."
It'd be like war, peace,
war, peace.
I just wanted to have a say,
you know,
in how this story was told.
So I decided I'll just sit down
and I'll just write out
the story of my marriage.
"As we danced
at our wedding reception,
Elon told me, 'I am the alpha
in this relationship.'
In the months following
our wedding,
a certain dynamic
began to take hold.
Elon's judgment overruled mine,
and he was constantly remarking
on the way he found me lacking.
'I am your wife,'
I told him repeatedly,
'Not your employee.'
'If you were my employee,'
he said just as often,
'I would fire you.'"
Filing for divorce.
It was sort of--
certainly very,
very difficult emotionally
I think for both Justine
and me, um...
I was fortunate enough to meet
Talulah the following month.
"You can see from the way
she has her hand on his neck
and her body turned in
towards him
that she's totally into him.
His torso, however,
faces the camera
and his thoughts
seem somewhere else.
With Elon, though,
they generally are."
I'm trying to integrate things
to an overarching picture
of the business.
You know, 'cause I'm weighing in
a bunch of things, like, for--
"When do we need
to get to cash flow positive?"
You know,
"What financing is needed?"
-All these things.
-Yeah.
It's, you know,
the cash flow from Roadster,
the cash flow
from Model S deposits.
Can those get us
to cash flow positive,
or damn close,
within six to nine months?
Because that is what I think
would allow us to go public.
Lehman Brothers
is going bankrupt.
- Bear Stearns stock plunging...
- Merrill Lynch...
The housing market collapse
created one financial crisis
after another,
and it often seemed as if
the news could only get worse.
You know,
trying to raise money
for a startup
electric car company in 2008,
people were angry
that I even asked them.
They were like,
"Fuck you," and hang up.
Musk had
some real superpowers.
One was a willingness,
even in the midst
of a global financial crisis,
to bet everything he had
on the future.
Another was an uncanny ability
to raise money
from the government.
No one invested more
in Musk's dreams
than the U.S. government.
Over time, SpaceX would collect
22 billion dollars
in NASA and defense contracts.
For Tesla, Elon secured
massive loans and credits
from the federal government
to fund the making
of its greatest car,
the Model S,
what one newspaper called,
"A car
that changed the world."
So, this is our new car.
- Very nice.
- Arnold!
Going public takes
a great story,
and Musk had one.
Tesla wasn't
a car manufacturer.
It was a tech company,
inventing magical gadgets
with steering wheels,
as if they were dreamed up
by Silicon Valley disruptors
after microdosing LSD.
While the U.S. government was
busy bailing out jalopy makers
like GM and Chrysler,
Americans were more excited
- by the story
that Elon was telling.
Down, front row!
Look down!
I think you're waiting
for Jennifer Garner.
That's really the...
Well, I'm surprised that people
actually care about
taking a photo of me.
Must be
a slow news day.
- Good luck, Elon.
- All right.
- Hi.
- Hi, I'm Elon Musk.
This is the sedan,
- is that right?
- Yeah.
That's a beauty.
Oh, God, turn it off!
I'm being electrocuted!
Thank you.
This is a seductive IPO.
But listen,
Tesla's a sell, sell, sell.
You don't want
to own this stock.
You don't want to lease it.
Heck, you don't even--
you shouldn't even rent
the darn thing.
Because beyond the hype,
there's just not much
going on here.
You know, to Jim, I'd say,
"Yeah, sure, Jim, you know,
we're not Bear Stearns, uh,
but I think
we're gonna do okay."
Tesla is planning
its next moves
after an IPO that raised
226 million dollars.
Let's get to Tesla Motors.
The stock has skyrocketed
more than 150 percent.
The Model S
is the best car
in every dimension
that matters.
Over the past year,
it is up
more than 450 percent.
The Tesla Supercharger.
We're gonna have these
at highway rest stops
all around the country.
Electric cars are the future.
This whole tweet,
your stock went up
eight, nine percent.
That seems like
an unlikely thing to happen
just based on a tweet.
We've been able
to accelerate Autopilot.
You can actually summon the car
and the car will come to you
wherever you are.
In the future,
really the future being now,
the cars will be
increasingly autonomous.
You won't really need
to look at an instrument panel
all that often.
You'll be able
to do whatever you want.
To watch a movie, uh,
talk to friends, go to sleep.
Three, two...
We'll get
to full self-driving next year.
...one, zero.
I feel very confident
predicting
autonomous robo-taxis
for Tesla next year.
Tesla.
Stock surging 86 percent
this year alone.
Are you surprised
by how much it's gone up?
I dunno, what am I supposed
to do? You know?
He is now
the richest person
on the planet.
Musk's net worth rose
to more
than 288 billion dollars.
Elon Musk is officially
the richest person ever.
Tesla's value is not...
is not up to me,
it's up to investors.
And they decided
it was worth a trillion dollars.
Mr. Musk, how are you?
Hi, Pepper. Congratulations
on the promotion.
Thank you very much.
Elon. How's it going?
Those Merlin engines
are fantastic.
Thank you. I've got an idea
for an electric jet.
- You do?
Then we'll make it work.
Yeah.
He wanted to be in that.
He wanted to be seen
like the Iron Man.
There's very few people
who just as egregiously
promote themselves as Elon.
Hello, I'm Elon Musk.
- Die!
- What the--
Dad, no!
Elon Musk is possibly
the greatest living inventor.
It's about the cult of Elon.
You can't beat
the cult of Elon.
You got the photo? Boom!
Elon Musk is a genius.
I love the guy.
He is, in my opinion,
the real-life Iron Man.
He's amazing.
The technology
that he has given us
is just outrageous.
As somebody
who thinks about the future,
about things that
are gonna help humanity,
I really like that side of Elon.
I don't agree on everything.
I try to just, like,
keep the other stuff
that's not related
to Tesla just...
out of sight, out of mind.
This is still the best-selling,
the safest,
the most
technologically-advanced vehicle
on the planet today.
On Twitter,
Elon was kind of a funny,
quirky character.
And like Donald Trump,
he got the kind of weird essence
of Twitter and meme culture
and really used it
to his advantage.
And he loved Twitter.
It's all the time.
He's always on Twitter.
And he reads his comments.
I look at it as
a way to learn things...
...kind of stay in touch
with what's happening.
It feels like dipping
into the flow of consciousness
of society.
I spend
a lot less time on Twitter
than people probably think.
Tesla is one of the most
widely held retail stocks.
And part of that
is because Elon has cultivated
this rabid fandom on Twitter.
People who are
invested in Tesla
and invested in Elon
as the leader of Tesla.
This is not
automobile manufacturing
or automobile retailing.
This is not finance.
This is religion.
I can't help that.
Lawrence Fossi
is a former business lawyer
with a keen eye for fraud.
He was managing investments
for a very rich man
when Tesla's soaring value
in the stock market
caught his eye.
Fossi believed
that the financial system
was rational
and that stock prices
reflected underlying value.
Yet the market seemed
to reward Musk beyond reason.
Could it be
that the world's richest man
was also
its most flamboyant fraud?
I really did not have
an opinion of Elon Musk
one way or the other
when I started.
But as I began to research it,
I came across a video from 2013
where Musk was on stage
- demonstrating something
called a battery swap.
What if people do want
to switch out,
uh, their battery pack?
What if they only want to stop
for a short period of time?
You have the choice
of a battery pack swap,
which is faster
than you can fill a gas tank.
On a video screen, he had
an Audi pulling
into a gas station.
Meanwhile, from underneath
the stage, things happened
that were outside
the viewer's perspective.
There's the battery pack
getting swapped out.
The audience so badly
wants to believe
all this stuff,
but it is so completely
at odds with reality.
A Tesla battery weighs more
than a thousand pounds.
But Elon convinced buyers
and regulators
that you could swap
them out like AA batteries.
It was a bold sleight of hand.
Musk seemed to have
solved the biggest problem
of the electric car. Range.
Hopefully this is what
convinces people finally
that electric cars
are the future.
By claiming this ability
to swap batteries,
what Tesla was able to do
was to game
the California Air Resources
Board's regulations
so that it could earn
what were called ZEV credits,
or zero emission
vehicle credits.
Government regulations
aren't always bad for business.
Sometimes
they spell opportunity.
To reduce pollution,
California let Tesla sell
zero emission vehicle credits
to the state's worst
smog makers who couldn't cure
their addiction
to gas-guzzling cars.
In 2012, California
supercharged its ZEV program,
allowing companies to sell
almost twice as many credits
if their cars
could recharge quickly.
That's when Musk unveiled
the battery swap.
Well, it's like a shipment
of fake gold bars
that has one real gold bar
on the outside, or, you know,
a roll of singles with a hundred
on the outside, right?
You know, It's like...
It's, uh...
"I'm a rich man."
- Right.
- You know?
It is a canonical
con man's convincer...
- Right.
- ...to, you know, do it once.
Cory Doctorow
is a science fiction author,
journalist, and tech blogger.
He invented the term
"enshitification,"
the process by which
Silicon Valley companies
gradually make their products
worse in ways that frustrate
and sometimes defraud
their customers.
The way the carbon credit
rules were written
is that if a car company
could demonstrate a battery swap
just once,
um, the carbon credits
would have a multiple valuation.
And the reasoning here
on the part of the government
is that what we should do
is just dangle a carrot
in front of the private sector.
The problem is,
Musk is really good
at reward hacking,
figuring out how
to satisfy the conditions
for the success
without actually succeeding.
There was
only ever one swap station.
It was at a place
called Harris Ranch,
which is in the middle
of California's Central Valley.
Nothing else around
except a feedlot.
I went
and I spent three, four days
checking this thing out.
Did you see any car
do a battery swap?
Not one. Not a single one.
We are at Harris Ranch
and they are apparently
loading some batteries
into the swapping facility.
We weren't allowed to go inside.
I found out at the factory
that they're requiring
appointments to do battery swap.
Clearly, there was never
any real effort
to make battery swap
actually work
because the value to Tesla
was not,
you know, as an actual viable
way to drive adoption.
It was a way
to earn ZEV credits.
Once California changed
its rules and insisted
that Tesla prove that customers
were swapping batteries,
Tesla abandoned the program.
But Tesla had already banked
over 100 million dollars
from its phantom battery swaps.
Since its founding,
Tesla padded its bottom line
with more than
11 billion dollars
in government carbon credits.
Those credits sometimes turned
quarterly losses into profits,
which sent
Tesla's stock soaring.
It just didn't add up to me
that the company was trading
at the valuation
it was trading at.
So I decided
to write about that.
I had a home in Montana,
so I chose a pseudonym,
"Montana Skeptic."
Elon Musk's modus operandi
is that
the promise is always illusory.
Tesla is famous for promising
range on its cars that is fake.
The car advertises
a very long range.
That's not the actual range.
The way that
the range gauge works
is it gives you a fake range
for the first half
of your battery life.
And then it just sort of goes...
And it flips over
to a more accurate
prediction of your range.
By the time it happens
a few times you're like,
this car is broken.
So then you call Tesla service.
And what Tesla did
was they built up,
like, a boiler room.
Another fucking idiot.
The one thing I know about
in this world is airlines.
And Kushan Airlines
is the future of airlines.
Scammers. And they would go,
"Oh, wait a minute.
I'm gonna do
a remote diagnostic."
But they wouldn't look at
the result of the diagnostics.
They would just
tell you your car was fine.
This is a car that lies to you
about what it's doing.
This is like
a demon-haunted car.
Alchemists
and natural philosophers
before the scientific method
would try to design
an experiment
to figure out
how the universe worked.
They would get
different results
every time
they ran the experiment,
and what they would say is,
"Actually,
demons are rearranging
the laws of physics."
They've constructed
a physics of the Tesla,
right, embodied in code,
that does
in fact behave differently
depending on
who's looking at it.
So Tesla knows,
but you are reliant
on these instruments
that don't tell you the truth.
I think
we should be very careful
about artificial intelligence.
If I were to guess
what our biggest
existential threat is,
it's probably that.
We need to just make sure
that we don't do something
very foolish.
All the time I spent with Elon,
I thought I was spending time
with an ethical,
honest,
socially positive person.
He wants a backup plan
for humanity.
He's worried about things
like existential risk.
He's worried about AI
as a source of existential risk.
In fact, his concern about that
was what triggered my concern.
He was fairly obsessed
by that topic at that time.
In 2012,
Elon Musk invested in a company
called DeepMind,
which was
at the forefront of AI.
It's not actually trying
to make any investment return.
It's really to just keep an eye
on what's going on
with artificial intelligence.
I think there's potentially
a dangerous outcome.
There's been movies about this.
Open the pod bay doors, Hal.
I'm sorry, Dave.
I'm afraid I can't do that.
This mission
is too important for me
to allow you to jeopardize it.
Well, as someone
who's outside this field,
I think the challenge I'm really
in touch with is how hard it is
to take the safety concerns
emotionally seriously
and how hard it is
for people in the field.
We got very interested
in AI risk,
that specific
existential concern together.
We went to a conference
about AI risk.
We were just very involved
in thinking that through
at that point.
To a point
that was made earlier,
I think made by Sam
and made by others,
that we're headed towards
either superintelligence
or civilization ending.
Then we have to figure out,
what is a world
that we would like to be in
where there is this, um...
digital superintelligence.
I had a conversation with Musk.
We started off talking
about the existential threat,
and he clearly understands it
and believes in it.
He thinks they'll keep us
around as pets
just 'cause the world will be
more interesting with people in
than without people.
I think
that's rather optimistic.
If they're really
much more intelligent than us,
um, I'm just not clear
they'll want us as pets.
Geoffrey Hinton
is a Nobel Prize winner,
the so-called Godfather of AI.
He was a key scientist
in developing the logic
of artificial intelligence.
Hinton, like Musk,
was keenly interested
in the work being done
at DeepMind,
led by a man named
Demis Hassabis.
Demis Hassabis realized
quite early on
that video games
were a good domain
for testing out theories of how
to make intelligent systems.
When I started working
at Google,
my recommendation was
they should acquire DeepMind.
Google had acquired DeepMind.
Larry Page
and I used to be close friends
and I would talk to him late
into the night about AI safety.
I said,
"Well, what about, you know,
we're gotta make sure
humanity's okay here."
And-- and-- and, um...
and then he called me
a speciesist.
I was like, "Okay, that's it.
Yes, I'm a speciesist."
Convinced that Google
would ignore the dangers of AI
in pursuit of profit,
Musk established
a nonprofit company
to explore AI
in an ethical way.
How do you think OpenAI is going
as a six-month-old company?
It seems
to be going pretty well.
I think it's important, um,
and it's about minimizing,
um, the risk
of existential harm.
There is a very strong
concentration of AI power,
especially at Google.
OpenAI was created
as a nonprofit foundation
to reduce the probability that
AI power would be monopolized.
I mean,
with artificial intelligence,
we are summoning the demon.
You know? You know
all those stories where
there's the guy
with the pentagram
and the holy water,
and he's like,
yeah, he's sure
he can control the demon.
Didn't work out.
Mysteriously, not long
after Musk warned us all
about the demon of AI,
he would summon it
to teach his cars
how to drive themselves.
Musk would name
his creation Autopilot.
All right.
Whoa.
It's on full Autopilot
right now.
No hands, no feet, nothing.
What technology's in here?
A lot of people,
myself included,
looked at the early demos
of Autopilot
and were like,
"They got from, like, zero
to 50 percent
of the way really fast.
How much longer can the other
50 percent possibly take?"
Every car coming off the line
in Tesla at the factory
has the Autopilot hardware.
Tesla's sort of the leader
in electric cars,
but I think we'll also sort of
be the leader
in autonomous cars.
We know exactly what to do,
and we'll be there
in a few years.
Right.
Just like Mars.
Uh...
We're still on track
for being able to go, um,
cross-country from L.A.
to New York
by the end of the year,
fully autonomous.
By the end of 2017?
Yeah.
Right now, you're driving.
Right now.
Uh, yeah.
Uh, but now I'm not.
-Yeah, pretty wild.
-Wow.
Musk is free to get into
the car with a news reporter
and say, "Look, Autopilot.
You don't even need
to put your hands on it."
But you cannot rely on that.
Musk's defense is always,
"Well, look,
if you read the fine print,
it says the driver must
continue to pay attention."
I mean, in the future,
as the car becomes more
and more autonomous,
it's gonna be really
about entertainment.
This is not
something you can play
while you're driving.
Well, I mean, you're not
supposed to play it
- while you're driving.
That would be illegal.
But will it work
while you're on Autopilot?
Well, you have to tap a button
that says you're the passenger.
Hold on. Hold on.
If this is confusing,
that might be a feature,
not a bug.
Oh, it's getting really close
to the--
Whoa!
Autopilot
and its successor,
Full Self-Driving,
were never
officially classified
as anything more than
driver assistance programs,
like cruise control.
But didn't their names
and the way Musk sold them
give the impression
of much more?
Look at this barrier.
I found a trail
of lawsuits that alleged
that Full Self-Driving
wasn't just flawed,
it was killing people.
Ah, jeez.
The car's doing it all itself.
I don't know what I'm gonna do
with my hands down here.
This guy, Joshua Brown,
was a huge Tesla fan.
He had done a video
where he said,
"Autopilot saved my life."
Elon Musk retweeted that video.
And a month later,
Brown is driving.
There's a white truck
that's pulled
across the highway.
And the Tesla
could not tell the difference
between the white of the truck
and the sky.
It went into that truck
at 70, 80 miles an hour.
Joshua Brown was decapitated.
And it led
to a big investigation
that went nowhere.
As the body count rose
to over 60,
more lawsuits followed.
Tesla settled
virtually all of them,
which prevented the public
from seeing whether
the company was at fault.
But I noted that one lawyer
was taking a Florida case
to trial.
- The tie is straight
and the shirt is smooth.
Brett Schreiber's job
is to take on Tesla in court.
He's been so successful
that the company has designated
one of its fixers just
to negotiate with him.
For nearly five years,
Schreiber and his team
represented the family
of Naibel Benavides,
who was killed
by a Tesla on Autopilot.
It was a case
where the people harmed
had nothing to do
with the Tesla.
They didn't buy it.
They weren't driving it.
They were just
simply hanging out,
having gone fishing,
putting stuff back in their car
and looking up at the stars.
Hello?
Hi, 911. What's the location?
I'm on the end
of Card Sound Road,
where, at the end,
I just ran into a car.
- And the guy's unconscious.
- He's unconscious?
Yeah, he's unconscious.
I don't know what happened.
I ended up missing the turn.
I was looking down.
Okay. You hit his car?
Yeah.
Oh my gosh. Sir, sir...
- Okay. Listen.
- Sir, are you okay?
Hey. Hey.
Is he breathing?
Sir, are you breathing?
Help!
What kind
of cars are involved?
Uh, it's a Tesla Model S.
Fuck.
I was driving on. I looked down.
I'd been using the...
...cruise control,
and I looked down.
I didn't realize how close
I was to the thing
and then I sat up.
And the minute I sat up, I hit
the brakes and saw his truck.
- Which way were you going?
- I was coming from the T here.
This gentleman was doing
-what he had always done.
-I honestly don't know.
He turned it
on Autopilot.
He's on a telephone call
and he drops his phone.
He goes down fishing for it
as the vehicle is approaching
the end of this T intersection,
where there's a flashing
red light and a stop sign,
all of these things that would
tell a normal attentive driver
that we're coming
to the end of a road.
Consistent with what Autopilot
often does, it did nothing.
It just crapped out
and turned off.
Is anyone else
in the vehicle with this guy?
No, just him.
There's ladies flip flops
under the car.
There's a pair
of ladies flip flops.
Please tell me no.
Please tell me it's...
- Get back.
- Shit, I'm sorry, sir.
Okay, she's right there.
- She's right there
in the bushes.
Not breathing right now?
-Is she breathing?
-No.
As a result,
a young woman lost her life
and a young man
was forever injured.
That's what happens to people
when they rely on Autopilot.
It tends to work
most of the time,
so they just expect
that it's gonna work
all of the time.
But Tesla's dirty little secret
is that it doesn't.
As the Benavides case
moved toward trial,
Tesla kept telling the police
and Brett Schreiber
that key data about the crash
was impossible to retrieve.
After a crash,
there's something called
"an urgent upload."
The vehicle knows
that it's going to crash,
and when it does, it gathers
this packet of information.
Then, after the crash,
within moments, the vehicle,
almost like
your email refreshing,
checks,
"Do I have cell coverage?
Do I have cell coverage?
Oh, I do." Beep, beep, beep.
And then it uploads it
to the mothership.
When it's received,
there's a line of code
that says, essentially,
"Transmission successful."
In this case,
Tesla took the position
that there was nothing there.
We ultimately had to find
the Autopilot computer itself.
Tesla was acting
as if being able to pull data
off of the Autopilot computer
was insurmountable.
But an intrepid
Wall Street Journal reporter
connected us
with a Russian hacker.
He goes...
"Oh, no, this is no problem.
This is what I do."
Three weeks later,
he was on an airplane to Miami.
We went to a Starbucks.
On Starbucks Wi-Fi,
within 15 minutes,
we had the data
of how the crash occurred,
why it occurred,
and how the system failed.
And we also had
that line of code which showed,
"Transmission received."
Transmission received
within six minutes
of the crash.
Tesla already
had all of the data
about how
and why this crash occurred,
yet they lied
to homicide investigators,
to the highway patrol,
to the federal government,
to the court, and to us.
You can take their videos
and superimpose the data
on top of it,
and now you get
what's called ground truth.
These vehicles
have GPS location.
They know where
they are down to the foot.
It knew that the road ended.
It saw that
there was a stop line,
that there was a vehicle
on the other side of the road.
It saw the pedestrian.
That photo that the camera
picked up of Naibel Benavides
was the last photograph
that was ever taken of her.
The vehicle had so many
opportunities to do something,
to warn, to slow, something.
But it just shut off.
So I think we're making
some really good progress
on the Autopilot side.
Dozens of clips of Elon
were introduced at trial
where he is saying things like,
"Autonomous driving
is a solved problem."
...essentially a solved problem.
There's bluster
and bombast and salesmanship.
And then there's giving vivid,
concrete examples
of what you believe
the car can do
when everybody knows it can't.
When Elon put out
the "Paint It Black" video,
he knew exactly
what he was doing.
What they were trying to do
was to overhype the technology,
overstate it, oversell it.
But why?
Two years
after the video was released,
another Tesla driver was killed
while using Autopilot.
Tesla settled with the family
for an undisclosed sum,
which allowed the company
to avoid showing evidence
of possible wrongdoing.
But before the case
was settled,
lawyers questioned
one of Tesla's chief engineers
about
the "Paint It Black" video.
You indicated that Elon Musk
had asked for the video
to be created, right?
That is my understanding.
Engineers were told
that this was
going to be touted
as some futuristic vision
of what the technology
could be.
But this was sold and peddled
as this is what
the car can do today.
Does the video
accurately portray
the performance capabilities
of the version of Autopilot
that was released
to the public at the time?
It does not.
You actually observed
that there were attempts
where the driver actually
had to take over
the steering wheel, right?
Yes.
Did you ever ride along
in the Tesla vehicle
for any of the efforts
to create the video footage?
Yes.
There were guys
literally in the back
of the vehicle writing code
in real time
to try to make the car do things
that it was
not capable of doing.
The car couldn't
even read streetlights.
So at one point, the film team
had to put an engineer
in the trunk with a video feed
so that he could force the car
to stop on red and go on green.
Am I correct
that the Tesla
that was used
in the video actually crashed?
Yes.
Where did it crash?
Uh, into a fence
inside our parking lot.
When the "Paint It Black"
video was released,
there had been a series
of high-profile accidents
involving people on Autopilot.
It was important to Elon
that they put something out
to distract everyone.
The basic news
is that, uh,
all Tesla vehicles
exiting the factory
have hardware capable of...
of full self-driving
or driverless capability.
At a certain point,
it's not an accident anymore.
It's not a mistake.
It's a choice.
The choice was Elon's,
and it was a business decision.
To save money, Musk decided not
to include critical sensors
and rely mostly on cameras.
He was especially
resistant to using LiDAR,
which bounces light at objects
to make very accurate 3D maps
in real time.
The Waymo system designed
by Google uses LiDAR
and radar
in addition to cameras.
LiDAR is a fool's errand.
It's expensive and unnecessary,
and once you solve vision,
it's worthless.
What are the road networks
designed to work with?
They're designed to work
with a biological neural net,
our brains,
and with vision, our eyes.
We need cameras
and silicon neural nets
to have self-driving work
for a system
that was designed for eyes
and biological neural nets.
The problem
is that cameras aren't as good
as eyes when it comes
to mapping chaotic situations
on real roads.
But to fetch a high price
in the stock market.
Musk needed to sell Tesla
as a tech company
and his vehicles as robo cars.
Over time,
cameras feeding AI systems
might create really safe cars.
The moral problem comes
from telling people
that an imaginary future
has already arrived
when you know it hasn't.
In the grand scheme of things,
what is
the morally right decision?
Even if you save 90 percent
of the people
that would otherwise have died,
the remaining ten percent
who did die will still sue you.
I am a strong believer
in doing the reality of good
over the perception of good,
and I have utter contempt
for those who prefer
the perception of good
over the reality of it.
Despite his understanding
of the present-day dangers,
Musk was betting everything
on Full Self-Driving.
I wondered why.
Maybe it wasn't about
the driving, but the data.
With cameras and microphones
inside and outside his cars,
Musk would be collecting data
to feed his AI ambitions,
which were growing larger
every day.
In 2016, Musk started
a company called Neuralink.
On its face, it was designed
to connect human brains
to computers
to help the disabled.
An early experiment allowed
a macaque to play Pong.
To help run Neuralink,
Musk tapped Shivon Zilis.
She had worked on AI at Tesla
and then on the board
of OpenAI.
Now at Neuralink,
she was charged with making
Elon's dreams come true.
The long-term aspiration
with Neuralink would be
to achieve a symbiosis
with artificial intelligence.
Think of it
like a Fitbit in your skull.
So we take out
a section of skull,
we replace that with the chip,
inductive charger,
and Bluetooth antenna.
And it's really almost
quite literally like
a Fitbit in your skull.
People may decide
that they want to retain
their biological self or not.
We are fundamentally different
from previous--
from Homo sapiens.
I call us Homo techno.
I think we have evolved
into Homo techno,
which is like
essentially a new species.
In 2018,
Elon met Grimes on Twitter.
Their romance was sparked
by puns and banter
over Roko's Basilisk,
a thought experiment
that AI will torment
those who oppose it.
An idea that Grimes
made into a song.
The single most important thing
is to make sure that this spark
that exists
here on planet Earth
gets to be elsewhere.
And I don't even really care
if it's biological life
or silicon-based life
that goes out there.
I think that's just as good.
I just...
I think the universe
is empty and quiet,
and it wants to be woken up
and filled
with beautiful things.
I think having kids
just inherently makes you want
to be an optimist so bad.
It just makes me want
to imagine amazing futures
that, like, maybe I won't
be able to build,
but they will be able
to build if they want to.
Having a kid
is a vote for the future.
If you intend to have a child,
like, that means
you care about the future.
- Aw.
- Hello.
This is your dad speaking.
Hello.
Hello, baby. Hello, baby X.
Musk and Grimes
had three kids together.
Grimes put her career on hold
to raise them.
While he and Grimes
were having their second child
using a surrogate mother,
Musk offered to be
a sperm donor for Shivon Zilis.
Zilis was friends with Grimes,
but neither she nor Elon
told Grimes about their plans.
While Zilis was in the hospital
with complications
at the end of her pregnancy,
Grimes was just down the hall
with a surrogate
who was carrying her child.
Grimes had no idea
that Zilis was even there,
or about to give birth
to twins,
let alone
that Elon was the father.
What was Elon thinking?
And what was up
with all these kids?
If people
don't have more children,
civilization
is going to crumble.
Mark my words.
There are not enough people.
I'm trying
to set a good example.
It's very difficult
to see the architecture
of Elon's world
when you're dropped in.
You see just enough
that you think you're seeing
the whole picture,
um, and you don't ask
any other questions.
When Elon started interacting
with me on Twitter,
I was a conservative
influencer.
He was responding
to my posts frequently.
One day he responded
to one of my Mother's Day posts
that I should
have more children.
And then he texted me,
"Feel like going to Providence?"
And I said yes.
All of a sudden
I'm on this big private jet
with this
larger-than-life figure.
He was very intelligent
and down to earth.
And he was respectful.
But it was definitely strange.
We were in this hotel,
and I'm falling asleep with him
while he's listening
to an audiobook or a podcast
about Kublai Khan.
I just was sitting there like,
am I dreaming?
You know,
is this really
what he's going to sleep to?
Kublai Khan also
had a lot of kids as I recall?
He sure did.
Yeah, he's related to Genghis.
When we first started seeing
each other,
he was always talking
about his other kids
and really bolstering up
this "I'm a good dad" image.
The story I got
was that things were amicable
with Claire and that, you know,
Shivon, it was just platonic
and they just
have kids together.
He was always saying,
"We should have a kid,
you should have
so many more kids,
you should have ten kids."
Eventually, I was like, "Well,
what does that look like?"
When we decided
to have Romulus,
I was at his house
and I was just upset
about the possibility
of this all blowing up
and only being seen
as Elon Musk's baby mama.
And he was very kind about it.
But the moment
I had our kid that was all gone.
For certain men,
passing on their genes
is a numbers game.
To help him play that game,
Musk engages the services
of Jared Birchall,
a Mormon who has
five children of his own
and is head
of the Musk Family Foundation.
Birchall is Musk's fixer.
He manages his personal
finances and hires bodyguards
and private eyes.
Generally speaking,
what is the role
that Jared Birchall plays
for Elon Musk?
Henchman.
Demon.
Elon would connect us
to discuss certain areas
of concern.
Hey, how you doing?
I'm fine, how are you?
Pretty good.
He was responsible
for the disbursement
of all the funds
and all the money.
This will come
with a basic agreement
that basically says,
"I understand
that I'm accepting this money
and that it's to be used
for these purposes.
And I understand
that confidentiality
and privacy is very important
to the father."
Basically just that...
So an NDA as well?
Uh, yeah.
The NDA that
they had provided me
was labeled
as a child support agreement.
It was a lump sum of 15 million
and then 100,000 dollars
a month for 21 years.
Did the other mothers sign one?
Did they--
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, they don't seem
too happy, do they?
Um, I mean, I don't think
a drugged-out musician
is ever going
to find true happiness.
And, uh, I think Shivon goes in
and out of finding contentment.
Jared was very adversarial.
I don't know how
to characterize someone who...
degrades and...
...borderline threatens a woman
who's freshly postpartum.
Elon is a very big-hearted,
kind, and generous person.
But when a mother
of his children,
or a woman in general
who he trusted and/or,
you know,
had a relationship with,
decides that they're gonna go
the legal route, that always...
- always leads
to a worse outcome...
Yeah.
...for that woman than what
it would have been otherwise.
What-- You know,
what did you opt into?
Were you opting
into a retirement plan
or were you opting
into a child?
- Being a mom.
- And...
- What's that?
- Being a mom.
I was covering Elon Musk
for The Wall Street Journal
when I started speaking
with Ashley.
It was very clear
from the phone call
and some of the corresponding
text messages that...
they had a system in place.
Under this NDA
that she's told to sign...
she would not be able to reveal
the paternity of this child
to anyone
other than that child.
She didn't feel like that was
a bargain she wanted to take.
I told him I cannot,
in good conscience,
sign that document.
She came out
with a tweet saying
that she had mothered one
of his children.
And that's when he really
began distancing himself
and even casting doubt
as to whether he was the father.
It was very jarring how
immense the backlash
was on Twitter.
After she put out the tweet
announcing that the baby
was Elon's,
Elon revoked
the 15-million-dollar payment
and he reduced her stipend
from 100,000 dollars a month
to 40,000 dollars a month.
And then he halved
the payment again.
This was financial retaliation
for speaking out.
It was almost
as if he didn't show
a certain side of himself
until after I had our baby.
I was also getting messages
from other young girls
that Elon was DMing
offering them children.
An influencer
by the name of Tiffany Fong
called me and she said,
"Elon offered me a baby."
There was a woman in Japan
who just wanted
basically sperm donation
that he had obliged.
It's like a Gatling gun of sperm
in his DMs.
As I was reporting
out this story, I learned
that this is pretty standard
operating procedure for Elon.
He's a pronatalist that wants
to increase the number
of educated babies
on this earth.
Elon calls his children
his "legion of children,"
which is pretty telling 'cause
when you think of legions,
you think of, you know,
thousands of soldiers
in ancient Rome
helping to expand the empire.
He told me that
he wanted to use surrogates
because it was the only way
we could create
a legion of children
before the civil war.
Jared Birchall
even procured land for Elon
for this compound
he has in Austin
for all of Elon's children
and their mothers.
There's 14
that are publicly known,
but people around Elon
told us that they believe
that there's many more.
I always felt like we're
pretty much interchangeable,
you know, in this story.
We, meaning who?
Uh, the...
the breeders.
Somebody on Elon's side referred
to us as "the breeders."
And there's a playbook,
you know, it's, uh...
kind of like an assembly line
by now.
Oh, this is what you do
on Valentine's Day
and this is, you know...
breeders.
...engaged after, I think,
sort of two weeks
of knowing each other,
and I was 22 and it was...
The obsession
with procreation,
it's just strange.
It's like,
"I have superior genes
and therefore need
to procreate."
It must be from his father
or something,
but it takes on
a much more dark,
sinister feel to it.
He wouldn't talk
about his childhood
in a way
that was really emotional.
He would try to keep it light.
But you got the feeling
that his mind
was a dangerous neighborhood.
South Africa,
where the forces of White rule
and Black revolt engage
in a struggle for control.
South Africa
when I was growing up
was just an inherently
very violent place.
I got punched in the face
many times.
It's funny that people think
that they're so sensitive
to words.
It's like, man, if you've ever
been punched in the face,
words don't mean nothing.
One of the things
I remember him telling me
was in South Africa,
he had this habit
of jerking awake
because he was afraid
that something terrible
was going to happen to him,
something violent.
And so I think, you know,
he learned early on
that he always had to be...
you know, ready for war.
Life is a struggle,
and you have to know that.
If you're told
it's a birthday party
from start to finish,
you're being misled.
One evening, my daughter said
she wants to take a bath.
I ran this bath for her.
I heard a noise.
There were a group of Black men
in the house.
I just saw an arm coming up.
I thought he was gonna
shake hands or something.
But then suddenly I saw the gun.
I carry a .357 Magnum
and as they came down
the passage, I was able to...
you know, return fire.
So you were able
to kill all three of the men?
Yes.
I took my six-year-old daughter
with me and then we jumped
out of that window
into the garden.
But the entire floor
was covered in blood
and different colors of blood,
bright red, dark red,
average red.
You couldn't--
It was like a swimming pool.
I understood Elon
better, I think,
in some ways,
when I met his father.
They both used
the same language
when they were
insulting each other
or insulting you as a woman.
When I was married,
I was told
about three times a day
that I'm boring and stupid
and, you know... and ugly.
And if I protested,
then I got beaten up.
After Maye and I split up,
the boys lived with me.
Elon learned to read
at quite a young age.
And he would read intensely,
even if it was comic books.
We were driving back
from the bush,
what we call the bush,
we had a place there.
And the man
with me dropped dead.
He fell over dead
next to Elon.
And we all stopped
and, you know,
we tried to resuscitate the man,
he was a wonderful friend
of ours.
And unfortunately, we couldn't.
And during that whole time,
Elon read a comic book.
He didn't stop.
He just kept on reading
the comic book.
I was very, very bookish.
I was either working
on my computer,
playing Dungeons & Dragons,
reading comics all the time.
I don't think you'd
necessarily want to be me.
It's like
a never-ending explosion.
When I was, I don't know,
five or six or something,
I thought I was insane
because it was clear
that other people did not...
their mind wasn't exploding
with ideas.
Social cues were not intuitive.
I was, you know,
bullied quite a lot.
I was sitting next to Elon,
four or five guys
come up to him
and they just start
beating him senseless.
My brother's face
was unrecognizable.
Elon was in
the hospital for almost a week.
When he came home,
his father berated him
for more than an hour
and said he was stupid
and took the side of the person
who had beaten him.
So apparently the boy's father
had committed suicide.
Elon heard about it
and Elon said,
"Well, I think your father
was stupid to do that,"
which this boy took
in a very bad way
and then pushed Elon down
a flight of stairs.
I may have said to him,
"Elon, don't be stupid,"
but I never raised a hand
to any of my children, ever.
I mean,
we lived in torture.
My dad would make up things
that were not real
and then you'd spend
three hours listening
and then you'd sort of,
"Maybe he's right,
maybe that is true."
To me,
Elon is just like me
and I give this
as soberly as I can.
Do not bet against Elon.
You are going to lose.
In 2018, most people
were betting for Elon
as he gambled everything
on the success
of his first mass market car,
the Model 3.
The major challenge for us
over the next
six to nine months is,
how do we build
a huge number of cars?
And frankly, we're going to be
in production hell.
Welcome, welcome.
As the saying goes,
"If you're going through hell,
keep going."
For the gamble to pay off,
Musk needed money, and fast.
Tesla was drowning in debt
and a month away
from bankruptcy,
so the only place to get cash
was the stock market.
To keep the stock price high,
Musk had to promise a miracle.
This whole thing
that you see here
was a pretty miraculous effort
by the team to create
a general assembly line
out of nothing in three weeks.
But the assembly line
was breaking down,
with shocking numbers
of defects.
Critics wondered if Musk,
in his desperation,
was lying about
what Tesla could deliver.
Thanks for doing this.
We really, really appreciate it.
Um, no problem.
I might occasionally
need to just stop
and check for any emergencies
coming through.
I got "Bolro" stuck in my head.
- What do you got--
- Sorry?
What's that?
- I have "Bolro"
stuck in my head.
It seems like this year's been
the toughest year for you. Why?
Uh...
Well, I mean, Tesla really faced
a severe threat of death
due to the Model 3
production ramp.
If we didn't solve these
problems in a very short period
of time, we were dying.
In addition
to writing about Tesla,
did you ultimately become
a short seller on Tesla?
Yeah, I did also become short.
I felt like, if I'm gonna
write about Tesla,
I should take a position.
And I'm by no means
a professional short seller.
My position
was too tiny to matter.
But the real professional
short sellers
perform a valuable
service, I think,
in the market
in uncovering frauds.
For example, Jim Chanos.
This is a good example of,
I think,
of cult stock, it's fair to say,
in the market.
The bulls will tell you
this is a software data
collection company
not a car company.
Except when it doesn't
suit them.
Jim Chanos,
who predicted
the fall of Enron,
is one of the world's
most famous short sellers.
Selling short means betting
that a company's stock
will fall.
Most people think
that's a bad thing.
Why would you bet
against a company?
But when government
regulators overlook fraud,
short sellers can make money
by spotting it.
Do you have a price target
in mind?
Um, well we think the equity's
worthless, so how's zero?
There's been
relentless criticism.
Relentless and outrageous
and unfair.
What actually happened here
was an incredible
American success story.
All these people worked
their ass off day and night
to make it happen,
and they believe in the dream.
And that's the story
that really should be told.
To protect Tesla's stock,
Musk had to think of a way
to destroy the short sellers.
By threatening to take
Tesla private at a high price,
he goosed the market.
Short sellers
took a terrible beating
as buyers rushed
to snatch up Tesla's stock.
And Musk had won.
There was only one problem.
When Musk said
"funding secured,"
he told a lie.
For the CEO
of a public company,
that could be illegal.
Musk's tweets
significantly impacted
both the price and volume
of trading in Tesla stock.
We allege that Musk had arrived
at the price of $420
by assuming a 20% premium
of what Tesla's
then existing share price
and then rounding up to $420
because of the significance of
that number in marijuana culture
and his belief
that his girlfriend
would be amused by it.
You probably can't
because stockholders, right?
I mean, it's legal, right?
- Totally legal.
- Okay.
How does that work?
Do people get upset at you
if you do certain things?
There's tobacco
and marijuana in there.
That's all it is.
The SEC gave Musk
what amounted
to a speeding ticket.
Then he put his foot
on the accelerator
and steered the Model 3
to become the best-selling
premium car in the US.
For his role,
Musk wanted to be paid
with performance-based
stock options
potentially worth $56 billion,
the largest payday for a CEO
in the history of mankind.
Thank you. That's a lot, yeah.
Here's an unlikely
player in the story.
A heavy metal drummer
who was a Tesla shareholder
sued Elon Musk
for being too greedy.
Richard J. Tornetta
was an odd duck
who ends up being the bane
of Elon Musk.
And it was just enraging to Musk
that one guy
who owned nine shares
could cause all this havoc.
The Tornetta lawsuit challenged
a 2018 compensation package
granted to Elon Musk
which said,
you go out and increase
the market cap of this company,
and we will reward you
with just an extraordinary
amount of stock options.
But for this to be valid,
there had to be
an independent board
that agreed to grant it.
The Tesla board is a collection
of just bootlickers
and sycophants.
People who they claimed
were independent
were, in fact, not independent.
They were close friends of his.
They had become vastly wealthy
thanks to Elon Musk.
Musk wanted
the Tornetta case tossed out.
But the judge ruled
for the shareholders.
The lawsuit proceeded,
and Musk himself
had to sit for a deposition.
I understand you have
the title Techno King?
- Yeah.
- Does that require me
to refer to you
as Your Highness or?
I mean, look it's up to you.
I'm not going to call myself
Your Highness,
but if you want to do that,
that's okay.
What exactly is a Techno King?
Well, it's sort of like, um...
you know,
if you had like technology
and a monarch,
uh, then that would be like
a Techno King.
And did you come up
with that title yourself?
Yes.
The lawsuit was really about
something more than money.
It was about the very nature
of a company.
Should the proceeds
go to investors
and the thousands of people
who actually designed
and manufactured the cars?
Or the front man who said
he had bigger fish to fry?
If I allocate, um,
a huge amount of my time
to Tesla,
uh, then I cannot
at the same time
advance, um, progress
towards making life
multiplanetary
and extending the light of
consciousness beyond Earth.
So, you'll forgive me.
I'm a simple lawyer
from Delaware.
But I think
what you just told me is
that part of the benefit
of working hard at Tesla
was that you would have money
to put into going to Mars
and to deal with Neuralink
and/or OpenAI.
-Is that a fair summary?
-Yeah, that is a fair summary.
The judge didn't buy it.
She ruled for the heavy metal
drummer and the investors.
Musk appealed
the court's ruling,
insisting that his
Tesla stock options
were linked to the survival
of the planet.
I'm here with Elon Musk
at the headquarters of Tesla.
- Tesla cannot die.
- Mm-hmm.
Tesla is incredibly important
for the future
of sustainable transport.
It's very important
for the future of the world.
It's very important
for all life on earth.
This supersedes
political parties,
race, creed,
religions, it doesn't matter.
If we do not
solve the environment,
we're all damned.
When he said Tesla dies
and humanity dies with it,
I think, you're a car company.
What do you make, cars?
Right? Like, really?
Can you imagine the head of,
like, paper towels at Bounty
going, "If Bounty goes,
so goes the rest of us."
I mean, honestly.
Over time,
Elon's delusions of grandeur
would collide
with a disquieting reality.
Sales were falling for the cars
that were supposed
to save the planet.
So Tesla's magician in chief
pulled some rabbits
out of his hat.
Tesla was no longer
a mere car company.
It was something much more.
We have quite a show
for you tonight.
I think you're gonna like it.
You'll be able to take a ride
in the Cybercab.
There is no steering wheel
or pedals.
Everything we've developed
for our cars,
it all actually applies
to a humanoid robot.
It's just a robot
with arms and legs
instead of a robot with wheels.
Of the eight billion people
on Earth,
I think everyone's going
to want their Optimus buddy.
I think this will be
the biggest product ever
of any kind.
Let's party!
The weirdest thing
about the party
was something everyone knew
but wouldn't say out loud.
The products were fakes.
Remote human drivers oversaw
the Cybercabs
as they followed
a predetermined route.
The robots walked using AI,
but were remote-assisted
and voiced by human operators.
The biggest product ever?
Really?
Hey, Optimus,
how much of you is AI?
I like your moves.
I like your moves.
Excuse me, excuse me, excuse me.
As the robots started
passing out at their own party,
Musk left early,
high on his own supply.
Tesla has done more
to help the environment
than all other
companies combined.
It would be fair to say that,
therefore, as the leader
of the company, I've done more
for the environment
than any single human on Earth.
Someone said to me once,
"He's 'Ready Player One'
in the game."
That's how he sees himself.
And everyone else is an NPC,
which is a non-player character.
So if you're very much
into video games,
if you're into simulations,
it might give you
a sense of the world
that's very different.
I've played the entire
evolution of video games.
From early Pong,
Space Invaders stuff, Pac-Man,
all the way through to...
super high resolution
multiplayer online games.
Killing the demons
in a video game
calms the demons in my mind.
The material benefit
of this idea
that it's a simulation is that
you get to act in ways
that are manifestly
cruel and selfish
and immoral.
If Musk has a unique vision
and everyone else is just
a robot that he programs,
then there is no reason
not to treat those people
very badly.
If you lose track
of what's real,
then you lose track
of what matters.
And you can really
hurt yourself and other people.
Yes!
Ladies and gentlemen,
give it up
for the greatest capitalist
in the history of
the United States of America,
Elon Musk!
The future is gonna be amazing!
People of Earth,
your attention please.
Regrettably, your planet
is one of those scheduled
for demolition.
Elon Musk
has always claimed to be
on a mission
to save civilization.
That made me wonder
about his fondness
for The Hitchhiker's Guide
to the Galaxy,
a novel that begins with aliens
blowing up planet Earth
in order to make way
for an interplanetary highway.
Did he know
that it was a satire
about recklessly
powerful beings
who were willing to destroy
billions of lives
in the present
in order to make way
for a distant, glorious future?
We've got this, um, I think...
...pretty good-looking
rocket factory building.
You know, long term,
probably be making 1,000
a year of the ship.
- So...
- A thousand a year?
Yeah, well, you know,
gotta build a city on Mars.
If it becomes operational,
which is still an if,
Starship would be
fully reusable.
It would go back to the moon,
and it's what he says
will take people to Mars.
But there is a big leap...
...between what SpaceX
has accomplished,
which is magnificent,
and what Elon
has been saying for ten years
about what they will be doing.
On Saturday Night Live,
when he said...
To anyone I've offended,
I just wanna say,
I reinvented electric cars
and I'm sending people
to Mars in a rocket ship.
Did you think I was also
gonna be a chill, normal dude?
What?
Great line.
He's not sending people to Mars.
He is talking
about sending people to Mars
and has been for years.
I think most people want
a future where we're headed
towards being
a space-faring civilization.
We're going out there
exploring the stars,
and...
...and we want to be on
a path to making true the things
that we read in--
in science fiction books
and see in the movies.
But a-- a future where
we are forever confined to Earth
until some eventual
extinction event
is less inspiring.
Musk sees
two options for the future,
either the extinction
of humanity
or endless colonial expansion
across the entire universe.
If you zoom out really far
and look at
the four-billion-year history
of Earth and the evolution
of life itself,
there's maybe half a dozen
or so really big milestones.
And I think on that scale
would also fit the expansion
of life to multiple planets.
Extending to multiple planets
gives us the surest chance
of life lasting
for a very long time.
Musk and the rest
of the tech billionaires want
more everything forever.
I decided to write this book
to sort of sound the alarm
on this idea in Silicon Valley
that we can have
more everything forever.
And anyone who gets
in the way of that
is guilty of murder
of the future lives
that could have been saved
if we'd just gotten technology
to go faster and people
had just left us alone.
"Leave me alone.
I know what's best."
"I, Elon Musk,
am going to take us
to Mars and the stars.
And anyone who gets
in the way of that is guilty
of preventing the future
of the species."
What Musk wants
is moral absolution
for any of his actions now,
because he is creating
this endless future in space.
I just want
to give you a sense of
what it would feel like to...
to actually
be in the spaceship.
Um, it's gotta be really fun
and exciting,
um, and it can't feel cramped
or boring.
You can float around.
Uh, it'll be like movies.
Moonraker 6...
In movies,
we can imagine space colonies,
but we know very little about
how they might really work.
Can we have sex
in zero gravity?
Or will we need helpers
who can push us together
at the right moment?
Can mothers raise
and birth babies
while losing bone mass?
What about the perils
of radiation and solar flares?
Where will we get our energy
and water?
What will our laws be?
Who will rule?
Without knowing the answers,
Musk teases us
with a bright
multi-planetary future
by launching rockets
and saying,
"Lift up your eyes
and look to the heavens."
We want the things that
are in science fiction novels
and movies not
to be science fiction forever.
These ideas that he has
about space and the future
mostly come
from science fiction.
Jetpacks, flying cars,
rocket ships,
moon base, Mars base, right?
That's what
the future looks like.
But because that idea
of what the future looks like
has so much cultural pull,
it's not until recently
that most people realize
that when Musk says
that the future of humanity
and the future of SpaceX
is to colonize Mars,
that's not happening.
Mars is a really,
really difficult environment
to survive in.
The gravity is too low,
the radiation levels
are too high,
there's no air,
and the dirt is made of poison.
Musk and company
are selling us dreams.
There's so much pent-up demand
for SpaceX shares.
Almost anyone
who's trying to get their hands
on SpaceX shares
is looking to.
It's by far
one of the most valuable
privately-held companies
in the world.
For people who invest
in Musk's companies,
either he's a genius
or he's insane.
And how could
he possibly be insane
when he's so rich
and successful?
So he must be a genius.
The alternative is
too terrifying to contemplate,
that he is insane
and wealthy and powerful.
We should get, like,
a hang glider
and jump off or something.
That'd be sweet.
In March 2020,
COVID-19 had spread
to over 110 countries.
Unable to contain
the spread of the disease,
the U.S. government began
to consider the idea
of lockdowns.
Sir, we're gonna
take your temperature, okay?
- Start compressions!
- Thank you.
There are a lot
of reasons to question
why lockdowns
were employed for so long.
But in COVID's first wave,
no one knew
how to combat the disease
which was killing so many
that New York City
had to rent freezer trucks
to store all the dead bodies.
Elon, how do you do it?
It has diminished my faith
in humanity, this whole thing.
Because?
The irrationality...
of-- of-- of people in general.
Very early in the pandemic,
Elon tweeted, "Panic about
the coronavirus is dumb."
And I saw the response
to the tweet.
People were perceiving him
as this genius technologist
who must have
inside information.
And I thought, "Oh,
this is not gonna age well."
When I texted him, he comes back
with just a ton of topspin.
We go back and forth
for, like, two hours.
It finally converged
on a bet where he said,
"I'll bet you a million dollars
against a bottle of tequila
that we won't have 35,000 cases
of COVID in the United States."
It was so obvious
where this was going.
I waited until we had
35,000 deaths
and 600,000 cases.
I texted him,
"Is 35,000 deaths
plus 600,000 cases
less than 35,000 cases?"
Right. And that honestly appears
to have been
the end of our friendship.
COVID is when some switch
got flipped in his brain
and he was behaving
in ways that I thought
were starkly unethical
and just unrecognizable to me.
We're gonna start with Tesla.
On the company's
conference call,
Elon Musk blasting
the pandemic
stay-at-home order.
Frankly, I would call it
forcibly imprisoning people
in their homes,
breaking people's freedoms
in ways that are horrible
and-- and wrong,
uh, and not why people
came to America
or built this country.
What the fuck? Excuse me.
This is fascist.
Give people back
their goddamn freedom.
Elon tends to think,
"The only thing that matters
is I succeed in my mission."
Anything that gets in the way
is bad or villainous.
"If COVID causes me to have
to maybe shut down
my factories,
that gets
in the way of my mission,
so therefore it's wrong."
Tesla has actually begun
to openly challenge
the state's authority
by starting production
in defiance
of public health orders.
"You as a society
are telling me that I need
to do something different.
Who are you to tell me?"
During COVID,
he kept talking about studies,
all the studies he read,
and he was the expert.
He just thinks
he's a higher being.
You know, you're talking
a lot about saving humanity,
but these are humans
that die in the process.
Everybody dies.
I know that, Elon.
The question is what,
on balance,
serves the greater good?
The price for the greater good
was paid
by the factory workers.
At Tesla's California plant,
450 employees got COVID,
and some who refused
to risk contagion
by returning
to work were fired.
All that Tesla had to do
was just present their plan
for keeping workers safe
in the pandemic.
And then, once it was approved,
they could go ahead and operate.
But instead,
Musk just played the martyr,
kept the factory open.
Meanwhile, in China, much more
stringent COVID restrictions,
and he was just praising them
for all the help
they gave to keep Tesla's
factory operations running.
This was an era
when Musk was saying
he didn't want
to be involved in politics,
but it was clear that Musk
was making
this political statement.
In December 2020,
I got a scoop
that he had personally moved
to Texas.
Tesla had already started
a factory in Austin.
It became clear that he saw
a lot of opportunity
in red states.
I think it was both personal
and political.
Musk didn't just move to Texas,
he colonized it.
Beyond factories
for Tesla and SpaceX
and his own personal compound
in Austin,
he founded 90 companies
and built two company towns
for workers,
including schools
with lesson plans
influenced by Elon.
We need Lithium.
We would not be here...
...but for the vision,
the hard work,
and the commitment
of Elon Musk.
Give it up for Tesla
and Elon Musk.
The government passed
laws for his benefit
and overlooked
the environmental indifference
of his companies.
You know, obviously,
I'm like socially very liberal,
and then economically,
right of center, maybe,
or center, I don't know.
Obviously, not a communist.
A privilege
that the uber-wealthy have
is that they're able to spend
as much money as they want
in elections without it
coming up in public documents.
Elon was able to dabble
and manipulate
Republican politics
in ways that no one knew
for years.
There are these vehicles
called 501 s.
They're dark money pools,
and it's a vehicle
that Musk loves.
We were able to uncover
some of these s he used
for the midterms in 2022,
where he gave money to a group
called Citizens for Sanity.
The national murder rate
is at its highest in 25 years.
The result
of far left policies.
Joe Biden and the Democrats
- have demolished
the southern border.
Send a message
to Biden and the Democrats.
We don't want open borders.
Joe Biden and Raphael Warnock
believe girls can become boys
by injecting them
with testosterone,
cutting off their breasts,
- and surgically changing
their genitals.
At the time that Elon funneled
more than 50 million dollars
toward these
very incendiary ads,
in his personal life,
he had a biological son
who transitioned
into being a woman.
And Elon refused
to accept Vivian
as his daughter.
He has publicly stated that
that was a result
of what he calls
"the woke mind virus."
I'm not just a bitch.
I'm a bitch with a backstory.
You talk about your, uh...
You talk about your transition.
You say your mom
was very supportive,
and you say that Elon Musk
was not as supportive.
Yeah.
I needed a diagnosis
of gender dysphoria,
which I passed with
flying colors, unfortunately.
"Unfortunately."
And... And then
I needed both parental consent.
There's a lot I cannot say,
but my mom is a badass bitch
and I love her to death.
- That's all I'm gonna say.
- Okay.
The thing about Jenna
is that she is, uh,
extremely strong-willed.
Elon and I had five kids,
and the one who was
most openly defiant was Jenna.
I am not the reason
he's a, you know, fascist!
People think it's, like,
my fault.
Like, I cannot take credit
for that,
unfortunately, for him.
Jenna was different.
When she was six,
Elon said to her,
"In this world,
there are winners and losers.
You know,
do you wanna be a winner
or do you wanna be a loser?"
The subtext there was,
"If you do not follow me
and do what I say,
you will be a loser."
It was painful
to watch her be in pain.
Instead of trying to understand
her point of view,
Elon was telling her
through telling the world
what that point of view
actually was.
And Elon never tried...
to, uh, repair things.
You know, like, he--
That's not in his nature, he...
He, uh...
You know,
if a relationship ruptures,
then it ruptures.
I lost my son, essentially.
They call it dead naming
because...
uh... your son is dead.
So my son Xavier is dead,
killed by the woke mind virus.
If you do your job
right as a parent,
you get displaced,
you know, by their life,
which is no longer your life.
There's a lot of emotion
involved with that.
But he really did treat it
as the death of a child.
I was like, you know,
we actually went through
the actual death
of an actual child.
And, uh... And what's
really happening here is,
you know, this is
a child growing up.
She's...
She's Jenna.
In order to be,
you know, a winner,
she had to go her own way.
And, uh...
And she really had to...
to fight to do that.
Elon told me, um,
"Make sure Jenna knows
how much I'll always love her,"
and then the next day...
...uh, he cut off
her health insurance.
I vowed to destroy
the woke mind virus after that,
'cause it is
a prevalent mind virus
and arguably one of
the biggest threats
to modern civilization.
These are the guys
that run the show.
This is Kyle,
our editor-in-chief.
- Hey, how's it going?
- This is Ethan Nicolle.
Yeah, I mean,
we're here, we're...
You know, the Babylon Bee
is a Christian organization,
you know,
and, uh, we're a ministry.
Why aren't you heathens
in church?
We're wondering
if you could do us a quick solid
and accept Jesus
as your Lord and Savior.
Um...
Personal Lord and Sa-- You know?
It's a quick prayer.
Uh...
Um...
You know, if-- if--
if Jesus is, uh, saving people,
I mean, I-- I--
I won't stand in his way.
You know, like,
I mean, sure.
I'll be saved. Why not?
-Sweet. We did it.
-Yeah.
-I think he just said yes.
-We got him.
-All right.
-We got him.
- If that's what
it takes to be saved,
then sounds good.
After the guys
from the Bee converted Elon,
they insulted
a top U.S. health official
who happened
to be a trans woman
by naming her Man of the Year.
That got them suspended
from Twitter,
which outraged Elon's
second wife, Talulah Riley.
Straight ahead!
Straight ahead!
Naturally,
Talulah vented to her ex.
Elon!
Hey, come on, stop it!
Holy shit!
Freedom!
After January 6th,
we all felt like democracy
was at stake.
Twitter decided
to ban Donald Trump
because of violence
on January 6th.
Elon starts to feel
like the company
has gone way too far.
If you could ban
the former president
of the United States
and take away
his most prominent platform,
then what did that mean
for Elon Musk?
A few hours ago, you made
an offer to buy Twitter.
Why?
Was there a question?
Why make that offer?
Oh, so, um...
Well, I think
it's very important for...
uh, there to be
an inclusive arena
for free speech.
Thank you. Thank you, guys.
Elon makes this offer,
and he signs
a purchase agreement
that Twitter executives think
he hasn't even fully read,
'cause it's a very
seller-friendly agreement.
It doesn't leave him a lot
of wiggle room to get out of it.
Hey, guys.
Facing a lawsuit
and billions in penalties
if he backed out,
Musk agreed to honor
his inflated offer.
Then he turned to a few
fellow billionaires for help.
It's how deals get done
at the upper echelons
of Silicon Valley.
It's Elon Musk texting
his wealthy friends saying,
"How about a billion?
How about two billion?"
"Sure, sounds good."
Even after some of Elon's pals
chipped in
to help him buy Twitter,
he was still short.
So Musk borrowed
13 billion dollars from banks,
with Twitter itself
as collateral.
Twitter, which had been
roughly breaking even,
would now face
massive debt payments.
Musk said he was trying
to save Twitter,
but it looked like
he might sink it.
He comes into Twitter
for the first time.
He's carrying a sink
to make this joke
to his Twitter followers...
"Let that sink in."
Like, this is happening.
The company's gonna go bankrupt
if we do not
cut costs immediately.
You have four months to live.
A hundred and twenty days.
In 120 days, you're dead.
So what do you want to do?
Elon comes in
with an entourage.
Wealthy and powerful
venture capitalists
and other people
in the tech industry
who he trusts.
Steve Davis is the head
of Musk's
tunnel-digging company,
The Boring Company,
and he's one of
his top lieutenants.
Even Elon has joked
that Steve Davis is like chemo,
"A little bit of chemo
is really good,
and too much chemo
will kill you."
There's Jason Calacanis,
who has a popular podcast
called All-In...
- ...David Sacks,
who is a billionaire,
and another All-In podcaster.
Immediately, Twitter employees
called them "The Goons."
Elon said,
"Hey, you know, swing by."
- Yeah, yeah.
- But we get in there, and...
the place is empty.
We go to the cafeteria.
We all go get something to eat.
And we realized...
There were more people
making the food
than eating the food.
I think
it was shortly after that
you discovered an entire room
at the office that was filled
with "Stay Woke" T-shirts.
I was like, "My God, man,
the barbarians are fully
within the gates now."
Twitter pre-Elon is thought of
as a good place to work.
-Welcome to the roof deck.
-So much space!
Look at all this space!
- Check it out!
- Is this allowed?
Totally!
There was
this relaxed atmosphere.
Is this allowed?
It was clear from day one
of Elon Musk buying the company
that that was not going to fly.
The first day
that Elon showed up,
there were actually
about 20 engineers
from Elon's other companies
to essentially vet
Twitter engineering.
What does a Tesla engineer
know about the systems
at Twitter?
Not much.
The engineers are in the office
and suddenly,
they get this urgent message.
"Print out 50 pages of code
and get ready to show it
to Elon in person."
It was a bit odd
because modern software
has millions of lines of code
to do one thing.
Trying to read code on paper,
you will quickly realize
you're not really getting
anything out of it.
Suddenly, engineers are
running all around the office
printing out all of this code.
They all print this out,
they're waiting nervously,
and suddenly, this other
urgent message comes in
that says, "Stop printing."
"Security risk. Shred the code."
The day when people
were running around
getting their code printed,
I think was the first sign
that some kind of list
was being made.
-Hey, uh, Sacks.
I see somebody--
-Oh, hey, guys. Look who's here.
Oh, look who it is.
Oh, is it the proprietor?
The proprietor, the owner.
Twitter customer support
at your service.
Anyone who is exceptional
at what they do,
where the role is critical,
they have a positive effect
on others,
um, and they are trusted,
meaning they put
the company's interests
before their own, should stay.
- Pretty straightforward.
- Yeah.
How many people are really
needed to run Twitter?
So it's not--
It's not like a giant number.
Managers start
getting calls.
"We need to lay off
30 percent of your team,
60 percent of your team,
70 percent of this team,
and it needs to happen
by the following night."
The Trust and Safety team,
its role
is to make content decisions
to protect users
and protect advertisers,
and to identify networks
of accounts
that are operating
in nefarious ways.
We shouldn't have a group
called "Trust and Safety."
That night we see
hundreds of employees
posting the blue heart
or the salute emoji on Slack.
They wake up
and about 50 percent
of the company is gone.
And it doesn't look like
there's any rhyme or reason
to how these layoffs
have played out.
Hey, everybody. Merry Christmas.
Happy holidays.
Sacks, how are you doing,
brother?
You working today?
I'm good. They've got their own
bespoke coffee shop here.
Where are the people
that work there?
Too soon!
It was a...
It was a pretty somber day.
Some people were excited.
You know, there were
a group of people
that were super into the idea
of Elon running the company,
and they were very gung-ho.
Uh, ironically...
probably about half
of those folks got laid off.
JP Doherty was in charge
of Twitter's command center,
which is kind
of the nerve system
of the entire organization.
The Goons do understand
that Twitter command center
is critical.
And if they fire that team,
Twitter will go down.
And suddenly, JP Doherty
is getting a lot closer
with Elon Musk.
- Is this working?
- Let's find out...
One-on-one, I didn't really feel
like he was being
particularly an asshole,
but then the second
somebody else comes in the room,
I feel like there's a...
like a mask that goes on.
Hey, guys.
You're on, too. Welcome.
You know,
he has to put on this persona,
this badass who does
whatever he wants
and says whatever he wants.
This is me, curling a 45.
After this mad dash
to get rid of as many people
as possible,
Musk makes it really clear
what Twitter is going
to look like under him.
Here it is. Um...
- Do you want me to just read it?
- Yeah, sure.
Sure.
"Going forward, to build
a breakthrough Twitter 2.0,
and succeed in an increasingly
competitive world,
we will need
to be extremely hardcore."
He sends out
this email titled,
"A Fork in the Road."
To remain, you need
to sacrifice for this mission.
Unspoken is that you get
to be part of
Elon Musk's universe.
For some people,
that's convincing,
and they sign on.
For a lot of people,
and more people
than Elon expected,
it's not, and they decide
to leave voluntarily.
Steve Davis came down
to our room and asked me,
"Is there anybody
you want to know about?"
I'd say somebody's name.
He'd say,
"No, they didn't sign it."
And I'd say, "Shit!"
And then he'd make
a note somewhere.
So every time I swore...
...there was a note next to that
in the spreadsheet somewhere.
And then those were some of
the people that they eventually
- tried to call to get them
to come back.
We're all about to get fired.
-How long have you been here?
-Four years.
-Four years?
-Two months.
Nine years and a month.
Silicon Valley workers
historically
didn't see themselves
as workers.
They saw themselves
as entrepreneurs in waiting.
Three, two, one.
-Zero!
-Happy New Year! Yay!
And their bosses were able
to exploit this
by appealing
to a sense of mission.
Musk called it
being extremely hardcore.
He's saying to his workers,
"Sleep under your desk,
so that we can build,
you know, a democracy platform
for a new century."
That woman who did sleep
under her desk,
even though she
is being extremely hardcore,
he fires her summarily.
He treats them
like they're disposable cogs.
I had a lot of respect
for his
purported reasons
for buying Twitter at that time.
- Free speech.
- Yes.
It's very important,
of the utmost importance
that we maintain free speech
on the internet.
And he seemed to be
the only figure at that time
willing to fight that battle.
At that point in my life,
I was working for Seth Dillon
and running operations
for the Babylon Bee.
Elon had just
taken over Twitter,
and the Babylon Bee
had been banned from Twitter,
and they wanted
to interview Elon.
Elon had been messaging me,
and he DMed me asking
if I'm ever in San Francisco.
I said, "I'm supposed
to be in San Francisco
whenever you get back
to Seth Dillon
about our interview."
Very quickly,
I get a call from Seth saying,
"Can you come to San Francisco?
Elon just set a date."
That's how real men do it.
- Do you feel like
it was worth it?
I mean, do you ever regret it
and go,
"Why did I do this thing
just to make a stand
for free speech?"
Like, I think it was still
the right move
to acquire Twitter,
even at the outrageously
high price.
He was doing something
that he thought was...
for a higher cause.
On Twitter, there was
a lot of censorship going on.
We sort of uncovered
a lot of that
with the Twitter Files.
The Twitter Files
were internal memos
that Musk leaked
to a group of reporters
to prove that old Twitter
was suppressing
right-wing voices
like Bari Weiss.
I received
a Signal message from Elon Musk
asking if I was interested
in looking
at Twitter's archives.
What we found is
Twitter claimed to be
the public square,
but it was privately
blacklisting certain ideas,
people, debates,
suppressing others.
It sounded bad.
While Musk
and his handpicked journalists
were right that some accounts
were banned or flagged,
the old Twitter
wasn't a woke-athon.
This Twitter,
Facebook is so great.
I type out, you know,
ding, ding, ding--
I'll do it myself.
Ding, ding,
dong, dong, ding, press.
Before Musk bought Twitter,
Donald Trump
had 89 million followers
who helped propel him
to the presidency.
Musk reversed
the Twitter ban on Trump.
He also welcomed back
many other banned accounts.
When Musk fired 80 percent
of Twitter's
Trust and Safety team,
the platform was flooded
with Nazi shit posters,
online impersonators,
and bad actors peddling links
to images
of child sexual abuse.
Free speech is meaningless
unless you allow people
you don't like
to say things you don't like.
You're a free speech absolutist
until your platform
has child sexual
exploitation material on it.
Then you really need
to take that down really quick.
From a business perspective,
Twitter is
an advertising platform.
Ninety percent
of the company's revenue
came from advertisers.
They don't want to spend money
on a platform
and then have their ads show up
next to offensive posts.
As Elon Musk continues
to act quite erratically
and say really
offensive things online,
advertisers flee.
For Elon, the idea that there's
still this group of people
who can punish him for saying
the wrong thing is maddening.
The entire reason that
he is taking Twitter private
is to have maximum control.
There was all of the criticism.
There was advertisers leaving.
-We talked to Bob Iger today--
-I hope they stop.
- You hope--
- Don't advertise.
You don't want them
to advertise?
- No.
What do you mean?
If somebody's gonna try
to blackmail me
with advertising,
blackmail me with money,
go fuck yourself.
-But...
-Go fuck yourself.
Is that clear?
I hope it is.
When advertisers
fled Twitter,
revenues dropped
by 2.5 billion dollars,
and the company lost
80 percent of its value.
What was he doing this for?
He said it was about
the woke mind virus,
or he said
it was about free speech,
but it became really clear
that those weren't
actually the reason.
And when I started to hear
about what had happened
the night of the Super Bowl,
it clicked for me.
Loaded up, taking a shot,
looking for A.J. Brown!
He's got it!
Elon Musk taking in
Super Bowl LVII...
Elon Musk
is at the Super Bowl,
and he sends
a pretty innocuous tweet.
Joe Biden posts a tweet
just like Elon's.
Biden's tweet gets
much more engagement
than Elon Musk's.
Why is Joe Biden,
who sucks at tweeting,
getting more engagement
than he is?
He's really good
at using Twitter.
He's hilarious. He owns Twitter.
He's getting more
and more furious about this.
He's convinced
that a Twitter employee
has planted a bug
in the algorithm
to purposely suppress
the like count on his posts.
The Eagles lose,
this is yet
another blow to him.
Then he gets
on his private jet,
and he's livid.
He flies right
to Twitter's offices
and it's all hands on deck.
About 80 engineers
work through the night
reconfiguring the algorithm.
The next day I got on my phone,
and my entire feed
was Elon Musk.
A team of engineers
had made that decision
very deliberately
to try and appease him.
Elon Musk can make
those tweaks to the algorithm
to make
his own experience better,
but it almost automatically
makes everyone else's
experience worse.
Elon's engagement
with Twitter, now X,
is kind of central to the story
of just how his ethics
and his personality
have completely unraveled.
His addiction
to having the platform
and having that dopaminergic
reward schedule
with hundreds of millions
of fans,
it's just been disastrous
for him as a person.
Elon and The Goons didn't
come in wanting to learn.
They came in confident
in the fact that
while Twitter
might become less stable,
when the dust settled,
they'd be able to rebuild
Twitter in Elon's image.
Twitter is the place where Elon
can tell his side of history.
Elon moved
from promoting free speech
to fee speech,
paying creators for engagement
which boosted
inflammatory clickbait
that kept people
on the platform.
If lies spread faster
than the truth,
that was a feature, not a bug.
Then Musk began banning
his critics
and favoring voices
who pushed his views.
He also lent the power
of his platform
to politicians
who could enrich him,
like India's leader,
Narendra Modi,
who can open up
an enormous market for Tesla.
When he goes
into a room in India
and he's the head of Tesla
or the head of Starlink,
he's not special.
When he goes
into those countries
as owner of Twitter...
S.
Brazil's former president,
Jair Bolsonaro,
was found guilty of using
his presidential powers
to undermine the integrity
of the 2022 elections.
He praised tech tycoon
Elon Musk,
who lashed out
at Bolsonaro's archenemy,
Supreme Court Judge
Alexandre de Moraes.
Turkey's president,
Recep Tayyip Erdogan,
invited Musk to build his next
Tesla factory in Turkey.
As he courts
right-wing politicians
around the globe,
he's also behind the scenes
using those relationships
to get business incentives
for Tesla and SpaceX.
And there's
this symbiotic relationship
between all of his businesses
that makes them
very hard to touch.
Three, two, one, and liftoff.
Go Falcon, go Starlink.
Governments
all around the world
are really reliant
on Starlink at this point.
And that's a huge source,
maybe not of wealth
as much as power.
We're building our own
constellation of satellites,
creating a global
communication system.
This is quite
an ambitious effort.
In the long term,
it would be like rebuilding
the internet in space.
And, you know, at the same time,
we also make sure
we don't create Skynet.
Um...
Starlink is really designed
to serve the least served.
Russia had actually
taken out all of
the satellite communications
and all of
the ground communications
except for Starlink.
Starlink today is the backbone
of the Ukrainian
military communications.
We've been
so grateful to SpaceX
and to Elon Musk.
Without Starlink, uh,
none of our offensives,
uh, would be so successful.
I sure hope we can figure out
some means to peace soon.
Even as Musk
basked in praise
for providing Starlink to help
Ukraine
defend itself against Russia,
he did something very strange.
Following discussions
with Putin
and other Russian officials,
Musk turned off Starlink
on critical battlefields
and refused to turn on Starlink
during a Ukrainian waterborne
drone attack near Crimea.
As the drone stalled out
in Russian territory,
American military officials
frantically called Musk
to reconsider.
Musk refused.
He refused a Ukrainian request
to activate Starlink in Crimea
to launch an attack
on Russian ships, reportedly
because a Russian official
warned him
that that could lead
to a nuclear response.
And I guess
that must be true, right?
What are Russian officials
gonna do?
Lie to an easily flattered CEO
to get exactly what they want?
Nah, I don't see it.
And look, Elon still insists
that he is pro-Ukraine, and...
okay.
But U.S. officials are now
in the awkward position
of having to defer to him
on policy.
If you're a businessman,
it can be intoxicating
when your company's technology
is so essential
that you can personally steer
foreign policy for the nation
and infuriating when back home,
you don't get the respect
you think you deserve.
When they make
the first electric Corvette,
I get to drive it.
Right, Mary?
You think I'm kidding.
I'm not kidding.
There's this big
EV summit at the White House,
much fanfare about it.
- All right.
- All right.
Tesla gets a call
ahead of it saying,
"Sorry, you're not
going to be invited."
Elon is famously anti-union,
and this became
a point of tension
throughout the entire
Biden White House.
He was very upset.
I even went as far
as to call Steve Ricchetti,
who works for Biden,
and I said,
"Boy, have you made a mistake.
He's really mad."
And he's like,
"Oh, you know, it's the unions.
He should understand.
He's a big boy."
And I was like,
"No, he's not a big boy."
You know, like, Biden held
this, uh, EV summit.
Um...
Didn't invite Tesla.
Didn't mention Tesla once
and praised GM and Ford
for leading the EV revolution.
So you were pissed.
Does this sound, uh, maybe
a little biased or something?
It's not
the friendliest administration.
New Year's,
we were in St. Barts,
and the discussions of politics
had picked up,
and we would go back and forth
for hours.
At that point in my life,
I was in the right-wing sphere,
in the conservative side
of politics,
the MAGA world.
Hey, guys, we're out here
keeping America great again!
- Yeah, we are.
- Yes, absolutely.
Here with Don Jr.,
ready to build the wall.
- We're at the--
- Ashley! Whoo!
We were very involved
in a relationship and also...
he trusted me with a lot of...
strategic issues that he had.
At one point,
he wanted me to connect him
to critical senators in Brazil
when he had the big issue
with X in Brazil.
We would go back and forth
about different strategies
he had.
He was originally more
on the DeSantis side.
I had told him that DeSantis
is never gonna win.
There is just
an aura around Trump
that nobody
was gonna get around,
and they wanted
that comeback story.
And eventually...
Elon went pretty hardcore Trump.
He was like,
this is... the way to win.
Elon thought Trump
is a much easier president
to buy, which...
is convenient for someone
with that many carrots.
What is the most entertaining
outcome for the election?
That's probably
what's gonna happen.
If you want to really
see something that's sad,
take a look at what happened--
Get down, get down,
get down, get down.
- What are you doing?
- What are you doing?
Watch out. Face down, get down.
We love you!
Elon had solidified to me
well before Trump was shot
that he was all in for Trump.
He just thought
that was a great opportunity.
- It was a good story.
- It is a great story.
So Elon endorsed me recently,
the other day, actually.
He's great.
Elon Musk.
Did you have a sense
of why he was so in for Trump?
He had told me that there were
at least half a dozen
initiatives of significance,
investigations into him
and his companies
from the Biden administration.
He had told me verbatim,
"I can't be president,
but I can help Trump
beat Biden.
And he'll sweep away
these investigations."
Under the Biden administration,
Elon was shut out
of the White House,
but also he started to feel like
he was being persecuted by it.
The Justice Department
started looking
into hiring practices
at Tesla.
The Federal Communications
Commission
was not giving Starlink
a bunch of subsidies
that the company had wanted.
Elon really started to believe
that was very much
politically motivated.
If Kamala Harris wins,
his goose is cooked.
His businesses
are gonna be under scrutiny,
and they're gonna find things.
"Hey, what are you doing
with the Chinese government?"
"Hey, full self-driving,
you said this, but this."
"You were talking to Putin.
Hey, what are you doing here?"
His only choice
was helping Trump,
and Trump
would leave him alone.
Elon Musk funneled
nearly 300 million dollars
into Trump's campaign.
The massive scale of the bet
suggested the stakes
were not just political.
They were personal.
Eleven departments
of the federal government
had launched 32 investigations
into his companies,
including one criminal case
into Autopilot fraud
that threatened
to land Musk in prison
unless Trump won.
If he loses, man, what--
I'm-- I'm--
- You're fucked, dude.
- I'm fucked.
If he loses, I'm fucked.
- You're like--
- Yeah, I'm like,
"How long do you think
my prison sentence is gonna be,
do you think?"
Will I see my children?
I don't know.
His name is Elon Musk.
He saved free speech.
He created...
so many different great things.
Where is-- Where is he?
Come here.
Take over, Elon. Just take over.
The black MAGA hat he had,
I'd given that to him
at my house
with my mother.
And he puts it on and he says,
"I'm dark MAGA now."
As you can see,
I'm not just MAGA,
I'm dark MAGA.
He wore it everywhere.
He didn't take it off.
Then I had another hat made
for him,
the dark gothic MAGA.
I'm not just MAGA.
I'm dark, gothic MAGA.
At that point, he's everywhere.
You can't get away from him.
You walk down the street,
there's his cars.
You turn on the TV, he's there.
Everyone's asking you about him,
and he's everywhere.
Those who say Trump
is a threat to democracy
are themselves the threat
to democracy.
What the Democrat administration
has been doing
is importing vast numbers
of illegals into swing states.
If we don't elect Trump,
I think--
I think we will lose, uh...
we will ac-- we will lose
democracy in this country.
Listen, I... I love America,
and, like,
sometimes people say, like,
"That's just
jingoistic propaganda."
I'm like, "I don't care."
I love
the jingoistic propaganda.
It's awesome.
We were
in the pool with the kids,
and he had
to jump out really quick
and call Rupert Murdoch
because there was
a Wall Street Journal piece
about drug use
and all of this stuff.
He wanted to call Rupert
to try to get this stopped.
Elon had been using LSD,
ecstasy, cocaine, and mushrooms.
It had gotten to the level
that it had raised concerns
with some of the leadership
at some of his companies.
A lot has been written
about his drug use.
Is that something
that you saw as a problem?
I'm not at liberty
to discuss that.
One time we were in my bedroom
and I was talking about
how men don't vote.
He gets up very energetically
and he says,
"They will vote.
I will make them vote.
I'm the best goddamn general
in the world."
I'm just like saying this is
a message to the men out there.
Vote like your life
depends on it
because I think it does.
Vote. Vote tomorrow
like your life depends on it.
Nothing is more important.
And he's like,
"But they'll just need a carrot.
You gotta dangle a carrot."
And then he announced his...
million-dollar prize.
So every day
between now and the election,
we'll be awarding
a million dollars,
starting tonight.
All right.
Let's go. Thank you.
So...
By the way,
John had no idea.
So... anyway, you're welcome.
Uh, and...
- Yeah!
- Yeah.
Elon! Elon! Elon! Elon!
He very much views money
as a carrot he can dangle.
Freedom!
I had realized
that the free speech thing
might have been...
a bit performative.
There wasn't a moment
that it turned for me.
It was just all
of these different data points
that I had collected over time.
...vague promises...
I think it was
before Madison Square Garden,
the Trump rally. I saw him
beforehand,
and little X was there,
and the other two,
Tau and Y, were not.
From sky-high inflation...
I said, "Why aren't they here?"
And he said, "Well, that's
because X is my favorite."
...finance,
the cost of groceries...
X was so favored by Musk
that he took him away
from his mother, Grimes,
who didn't want him out in
public on the campaign trail.
X, X,
should we save President Trump?
- Yes? Yes. Yes.
- Yes.
Even as Elon
was campaigning with X,
Grimes, aka Claire Boucher,
was battling Musk in court
over custody of X
and their other children.
She claimed that Musk
was keeping them from her.
I would see certain interactions
he was having with Claire...
that were incredibly concerning.
We were at his house
and Claire was texting him...
pleading about a situation
with little X.
And he just said,
"I'm blocking you,"
and blocked her.
She's having
to deal with lawyers
telling her things
here and there.
She has no idea anything
about that world and...
...fighting for her kids,
like I...
He took that damn baby from her.
Two hundred and seventy
are needed to win.
Donald Trump
is within a hair's breadth
of being re-elected president.
- That's great.
Why don't we do
a family shot?
Elon-- You have to have
a picture with your boy.
- We have to get Elon
with his boy.
Okay.
- Absolutely.
- A gorgeous, perfect boy.
Pit bull figure,
not just in this election,
but in the history
of this country, is Elon Musk,
who has just...
...walked in with his son.
He's so cute. It's ridiculous.
Did this work? Is he gonna win?
- Yeah, yeah.
- I think it's done.
- You think it's done?
- Yeah, yeah.
-You get the vibe.
-We're in SpaceX
and quietly just do
whatever we want.
Were you at Mar-a-Lago
the night of the election?
I was.
Was Elon there?
Yeah, he was. And he left early.
He leaves very early
from the watch party
where everyone is at.
And I text him.
I say,
"I think we're gonna win."
And he said,
"I knew that hours ago.
We have the best
real-time data."
I don't want to jinx it,
but I'm cautiously optimistic
that, um...
that it will not be a small win
in Pennsylvania.
That'll be a very clear win.
Can you open it?
The prophecy has been fulfilled.
The degree of certainty he had,
I had never seen before.
And...
you have to ask yourself
what system provides an output
with that level of certainty.
I remember he had told me
that he was going
to "unleash the anomaly
in the matrix."
"This is not something
that's on the chessboard.
I have ten thousand lasers
in space."
And I very directly said,
"I would ask more,
but I don't want to be deposed."
To which he said, "Very wise."
So you think
he was referring to Starlink?
That's-- I mean, I don't know
where else he has space lasers.
What is Elon building?
What are his goals?
What are his actual motivations?
And do we even know
this man at all?
If you were
to ask someone on the Right
what they think of Elon,
he's a free speech god.
And someone on the Left,
he's just someone
who sends hateful tweets
and he's lost his mind.
Both are very comforting,
but both
are completely insufficient
to the immense amount
of power and influence he has.
Elon is a nuke.
I had just started my job
as the editor in chief
of Wired,
and I felt like we need
to be covering the place
where technology
and politics collide,
just how Silicon Valley
has shifted to the right.
The reality
that the powerful elites
in Silicon Valley wield
this outside influence on D.C.
The United States
will once again consider itself
a growing nation,
and we will pursue
our manifest destiny
into the stars,
launching American astronauts
to plant the Stars and Stripes
on the planet Mars.
This is the best hand
of cards we're ever gonna have.
If we don't take advantage
of this best hand of cards,
it's never gonna happen,
so we're gonna do it.
My administration will establish
the brand-new Department
of Government Efficiency.
Everybody should be celebrating
that we've found a way
to cut out fraud and waste.
Yeah. DOGE is a threat
to the bureaucracy.
It's the first threat
to the bureaucracy.
Normally the bureaucracy
eats revolutions for breakfast.
This is an order creating
and implementing
the Department
of Governmental Efficiency,
-known as DOGE.
-Okay, that's a big one.
Is Elon Musk
gonna get a West Wing office?
No, uh, he's getting an office
for about 20 people
that we're hiring to make sure
that these get implemented.
On the first day
of the administration,
they started releasing
just one executive order
after another.
One of those executive orders
was that
the U.S. Digital Service
was now going to be renamed
"U.S. DOGE Service."
So you were sucked into DOGE?
We became DOGE.
It came as a complete shock
to a lot of us of,
"Oh, it's not DOGE. We're going
to be collaborating."
We are DOGE now.
The U.S. Digital Service
is an agency
that sits
within the White House.
It's a group of technologists.
They get dispatched to agencies
to work on top priority
technology projects.
When something
hasn't been going well,
we get dispatched
to go and help fix it.
I always wanted
to use my skills
to help people.
When I came across USDS,
I was like, "I think this
might be my dream job."
And then when I started,
I was like,
"This is more than I ever
could have hoped for."
DOGE just appeared.
They came in,
and on the second day,
they were already
interviewing us
for the roles we already had.
You showed me some
of the entries
in your black notebook.
Yeah, so this is
from January 21st, 2025,
"Dawn of the First Day."
We found out that
we would be
having 15-minute interviews.
- Hi there.
- Hi.
Oops. Hi.
- Can you hear me?
- Yes.
I was introduced to two people
only by their first name,
um, Ram and Cole.
I gave my quick little intro,
and during that, Cole stood up
with no acknowledgement
and just walked out of the room.
What do you think needs
to change at USDS?
I definitely got the sense
they were trying
to fish for information,
whether I was favorably
viewing DOGE or unfavorably.
- One of the last two questions
- I have is,
any exceptional engineers
on USDS
that you'd want to call out?
We were doing our best
to kind of give each other
praise and kudos.
I listed out,
I think, every single engineer
I'd ever worked with at USDS.
Like, I would consider myself
one of the...
...exceptional ones
if I'm being honest,
but I don't want
to be too forward, um,
but everybody
I've worked with here has...
has been fantastic,
at least
from the engineering side.
After that, they were like,
"Well, thank you," and hung up.
- Thank you.
- Yep.
All right, bye.
And we're done.
I don't think
that went too well.
Everyone was now
on high alert of like,
"Okay, I'm about to go into
a hostile conversation."
Another friend
who had a similar call
asked for their full name
and was told,
"This is a one-sided interview.
And it's a secret process.
I will not give you
my last name."
Heads up, guys. Tighten up.
Mr. Musk,
what was your message in there
to House Republicans?
What was your message
in there, Mr. Musk?
- You know, there's a lot of...
- A lot of opportunity
to improve expenditures
in the government.
And then
we're making good progress.
Should Congress
have a vote on this?
Should Congress
have a vote on this?
We set out to just answer,
like, really stupid questions
when we started covering this.
Like, what is DOGE?
Like, what actually
is the idea here?
How's power feeling, Mr. Musk?
Government is really just
a corporation in the limit.
It's not different
from a corporation.
It's just
the ultimate corporation.
It's a corporation
that is a monopoly.
It can't go bankrupt unless
the country goes bankrupt.
And it has a monopoly
on violence.
How much more
do you want to give
to the world's
biggest corporation
that has a monopoly on violence?
Probably less.
- Mr. Musk, will you talk to us?
- Will you answer any questions?
What are some of the parallels
with the takeover at Twitter?
The idea that you look
at government or a company
and say,
"Wow, the way this is being run
is totally mismanaged,
and I alone can come in
and save this."
Zo, very early on, said,
"This is his playbook.
I just covered it at Twitter.
This is how he comes in
and takes over a company.
This is what
we're about to see."
This email comes out
from the Office
of Personnel Management.
And the subject line
of the email is,
"A Fork in the Road."
That really was the moment
where I was like,
"Oh, he's running
the full Twitter playbook."
Federal employees
could basically take a buyout
and leave government service.
These were people
who absolutely had options
to work in the private sector
but had chosen to take
a huge pay cut a lot of times
and work for the government
because they felt like
they were doing
something important
for the American people.
Everyone in
the federal government
got the fork email,
from air traffic controllers
to judges
to cancer researchers.
The first employees
to take the buyout?
The best and the brightest.
If your real goal was just
to increase efficiency,
you wouldn't do any
of the things they're doing.
You certainly wouldn't invite
everyone to quit
and therefore incentivize
the people who have
the best prospects
in the private sector to quit.
Your best people
will be the first out the door
running that algorithm.
"Get the fuck out."
A group of us decided
to publicly resign
with a letter
condemning
the actions of DOGE and...
saying we will not stand
for this.
- This is not the organization
- I signed up for.
It's unrecognizable.
And if they end up using
this group of people
and their talent...
...to work on what's
important to them, like...
you know, go build a database
of every pregnant person
in the country,
or go make an app to make it
easier to deport people,
am I gonna wait
until that moment
where they ask me
to do that thing?
I'm just gonna cut things off
and just become
a private citizen
and take this experience
with me
and do something else with it.
Faced with Musk's
fork in the road,
over 150,000
of the most skilled
and experienced workers
left the government.
What did that do
for efficiency?
You know, it's sort of like,
I'll shoot them all,
let God sort them out.
In the case of Twitter,
it's a small business
of little consequence.
In this case, he's doing it
throughout the government.
I think
the DOGE story maybe starts
with the Twitter takeover.
That was sort of the warm-up act
for what's going on at DOGE.
Antonio Gracias,
a venture capitalist,
a close friend of Elon Musk's,
was on All-In
talking about learning
how the government
payments system worked
and just being
totally flabbergasted.
The way
the government works, uh,
a department just basically
asks for money from Treasury
and they send it out.
They're claiming agencies
just ask for a check
and the government writes
a check, and that's it,
which is both not
how the government works,
and also,
for a lot of us watching,
we're like,
they're learning civics
in real time,
but it seems very clear
that they don't understand
how the government works.
Can you just explain that to us?
Well, so,
I will try to explain it to you.
I'm not sure
I have full command of it.
I'm not sure
anyone does quite yet.
It wasn't like
they went into Twitter
or to the government and said,
"Let's sit down
with these people
and really understand
what they do,
how things work, let's learn."
It really does feel
like a hostile takeover.
No!
Hi, my friend!
Yeah!
-Hi, how you doing?
-Good, how's it going?
I have a present for you.
Thanks. Whoa!
Whoa!
- Does it work?
- Yeah.
The chainsaw
is such a perfect metaphor.
Chainsaws are not subtle.
And of course, he looks insane.
This is
the chainsaw for bureaucracy.
It's chaotic,
it's random, it's capricious.
He's like this a lot.
Someone at one of the companies
called me and said,
"You have no idea what it's like
when he comes in."
I go, "Tell me."
And they're like, "He comes in,
he knocks over a trash can
and says things,
and then runs out.
And then we get back to work."
So we've got
a two-trillion-dollar deficit.
If we don't do something
about this deficit,
the country's going bankrupt.
They wanted
to cut two trillion dollars.
When you account
for things you have to pay for,
Social Security, Medicare,
interest payments
on the national debt,
two trillion dollars
is everything else.
Housing subsidies
and foreign aid
and national park services.
I mean,
this encompasses everything.
Elon Musk
was nice enough to invite us
into the Eisenhower Building
last night
to sit in on his weekly
10:00 p.m. DOGE meeting.
He has his guys.
I guess we normally go
around the table.
-We'll start with you.
-Sure.
Um, so actually, um...
lot of great work
in the Treasury this week.
Steve Davis, who helped
with the Twitter/X takeover,
was pulling
a lot of the strings.
I mean, he was sending out,
you know,
marching orders over Signal.
He was in constant communication
with workers
at various federal agencies.
This is someone that Musk,
you know, trusts implicitly.
And then DOGE
was actually staffed
by 19-year-olds,
20-year-olds, 21-year-olds.
I think they tapped out
at maybe 25 years old.
And they all came
from companies
that were run either
by Elon Musk or Peter Thiel.
Ethan Shaotran.
He was a runner-up
in a hackathon contest
put on by xAI.
I dropped out of Harvard
and came here
to serve my country.
And it's been unfortunate
to see,
you know, lost friendships.
Um, most of campus hates me.
How did this come to be?
How did we happen
to have people in the building?
Representatives
from DOGE demanded entry
into the U.S. Institute
of Peace.
Who should talk about USIP?
Oh. Oh, Nate.
Institute for Peace.
Thanks to President Trump,
he's now signed
two executive orders
to start to reduce
the number of agencies
in the government,
and the Institute of Peace
was one of them.
-Who's Big Balls?
-It's me.
Edward Coristine,
who called himself "Big Balls"
Big Balls, he was 19 years old
when he joined DOGE,
spun up a bunch of LLCs
as a teenager,
including one called Tesla.Sexy.
Unclear exactly what Tesla.Sexy
was designed to do,
but clearly this is someone who,
from a very young age,
looked to Elon Musk,
looked to his companies,
looked to Silicon Valley,
and saw a future
that he wanted to be a part of.
You have a collection
of very young people,
all young men,
who have absolutely
no government experience.
And do you think for Elon
that that's a feature or a bug?
Oh, feature.
Just throw them in there
and see what happens.
Here's what happened.
Elon and his top deputy,
Steve Davis,
magically transformed
the DOGE Boys
into government employees,
dispatching them across dozens
of government agencies.
Their mission,
reduction in force.
Musk has been given access
to the Treasury Department
payment system.
- The Consumer Financial
- Protection Bureau is shut down.
Go into the next one,
the Department of Education.
I mean, I want you
to go into everything.
Your money is being wasted,
and the Department
of Government Efficiency
is gonna fix that.
Yes!
The sheer amount of waste
and fraud in the government.
It's mind-blowing.
I'm here to provide
the president
with technology support.
What we're adding here
is caring and competence.
USAID, the SEC, the FAA.
You notice
a lot of these agencies
are the ones looking at him.
The conflicts of interest
are shocking.
Tesla regulated
by multiple federal agencies.
SpaceX does
tremendous amounts of business
with the federal government.
He wants to eliminate the people
who are meant to be holding
those companies accountable.
At least five
inspector generals
that were looking
into Elon Musk's companies
were fired.
Fuck Elon Musk! Fuck Elon Musk!
Not for sale!
People voted
for major government reform.
If we don't do this,
America will go bankrupt.
More and more laws
and regulations over time
until everything is illegal.
- First of all, is he qualified?
- What is he doing?
What are they actually doing?
He knows what he's doing.
It's not like I think
I can get away with something.
And I just want to say thank you
for making it happen.
Thank you.
I got a text the first week
from a colleague just saying,
"DOGE is in the building."
The worst thing you could learn
is that DOGE
is in the building.
As we dug into USAID,
it became apparent
that what we have here is not
an apple with a worm in it,
but we have actually
just a bowl of worms.
USAID is a 10,000-person,
40-billion-dollar agency
that carries out foreign aid
programs around the world,
from displacement sites
in Africa
to humanitarian camps in Syria
to towns fighting
Russian influence
across Eastern Europe.
John F. Kennedy
had this great insight
that having
an arm of the U.S. government
that would be out there
in the world
doing good was in your interest.
When USAID came and built roads
or brought electricity
or helped build schools
in the village,
it probably helped
the United States
in the capital of a country.
It was just a great look
for the United States
to be bringing the compassion
of the American people
to a global stage.
There's hundreds
of billions of dollars going
to these so-called NGOs,
and it's your tax dollars
that are funding things
that are fundamentally
anti-American.
I think
the average taxpaying American
should be mad as hell
because their tax money
is being...
Musk mocked
some controversial programs
whose cost amounted
to a few million dollars.
But most of USAID's budget
- was devoted to combating
poverty and disease.
And those vital programs
were a small fraction
of the federal budget.
It's less than half
of one percent.
A substantial share of the cost
of what USAID spends
also comes back,
for example,
to American farmers.
In the state of Georgia,
they make
this amazing miracle paste
called Plumpy'Nut that you give
to severely malnourished kids.
The executive order said
that any money
that was already out there
in the field
could not be spent.
And so community health workers
receive an email saying,
- "You can't help
those kids today."
"You can't."
"But wait, I-- we have
the supplies right here."
So you have
the mothers coming
with the emaciated child.
And maybe that mother
could have come the day before
had they known that
that was gonna be
their last chance to get access
to something
that will literally bring
their child back...
...from the brink.
And that mother doesn't know...
...that in Washington,
there's some unaccountable crop
of 20-somethings who've decided
to terminate
that mother's ability
to help their kid.
It was the suddenness
of the DOGE cuts
that shocked people.
In one case, DOGE ordered
a halt to the delivery
of 500 tons of food bound
for starving children.
When it passed its due date,
it was incinerated.
Donald Trump and DOGE
could have
the same bumper sticker
about how they slashed
foreign assistance,
and we could have
saved millions of those lives.
People were given no chance
to mitigate the harms.
It's a gigantic scam,
like maybe
the biggest scam ever.
They just get grants,
and the government just assumes
that they're doing good work.
I think a lot of people
in the government know
that they're not
doing good work.
It almost seems fake.
I think it's the biggest scam
- of all time, ever.
- Ever.
The estimates are
that 14 million people
will lose their lives
because of the decision
to close USAID.
And 4.5 million of those
are estimated
to be kids under five.
The fundamental weakness
of Western civilization
is empathy.
The empathy exploit.
They're exploiting a bug
in Western civilization,
which is the empathy response.
There's so much empathy
that you actually
suicide yourself.
And I-- I think, you know,
empathy is good,
but you need to have empathy
for civilization as a whole
and not commit
to a civilizational suicide.
So Elon,
he's really working so hard,
getting a lot of praise,
I'll tell you,
but he's also getting hit.
We will make mistakes.
We won't be perfect,
but when we make a mistake,
we'll fix it very quickly.
So for example, with USAID,
one of the things
we accidentally cancelled
very briefly was Ebola...
...Ebola prevention.
I think we all want
Ebola prevention.
So we restored the Ebola
prevention immediately,
and there was no interruption.
The program
was not immediately restored.
With a few keystrokes,
Elon and the DOGE Boys pulled
all the funding for
the first responders for Ebola
and zeroed out payments
to clinics
treating children with HIV.
Healthcare investigators
estimated
that within one year
of the sudden USAID cuts,
over 500,000 children
would die.
Mr. Musk,
how do you convince people
who don't want to cut spending
to cut spending?
DOGE did plenty of harm
to Americans, too.
The National Institutes
of Health
lost more than
two billion dollars in funding
for studies into cures
for cancer,
Alzheimer's, and diabetes.
Cuts and buyouts
of 20,000 health care workers
destroyed vital experiments
for vaccines
and disease prevention.
We talked to scientists
who had live samples
that were just left to rot,
who had to abandon
whole research projects
that they had spent years on.
These people
who are doing critical research
who simply weren't able
to do their work.
The people voted
for major government reform,
and that's what the people
are gonna get.
- They're gonna get
what they voted for.
You know, there's crazy things
like just cursory examination
of Social Security,
and we've got people in there
that are 150 years old.
Now, do you know anyone
that's 150? I don't. Okay.
DOGE workers went
through all of this data
within Social Security,
and they came
to the conclusion that...
many, many, many,
many, many dead people
were receiving
Social Security benefits.
This then allowed Elon Musk
to very publicly come out
and say,
"Where is all that money going?
It's so suspicious."
We found
just with a basic search
of the Social Security database
that there were 20 million...
dead people marked as alive.
But were they getting money?
Some of them are getting money.
The federal government systems
are written
in really ancient languages.
Anybody who is familiar
with these systems,
they'd be able to tell you that
if a birth date is not listed,
it will default to,
I believe, 1850.
The default date chosen
was actually 1875,
the year of a scientific
conference in Paris.
On its website,
Social Security explains
why virtually no dead people
are receiving benefits.
But Elon Musk and the DOGE Boys
apparently never read
the website
of the system
they were trying to fix.
Instead, they cut heads
and shut down offices,
which, some claimed,
would double
the number of seniors
who would die waiting
for benefits.
According to whistleblowers,
the DOGE Boys obtained
complete access
to IT systems
across the U.S. government,
which contain classified data
and the personal information
of virtually
all American citizens.
Mr. Musk,
what are the checks and balances
that are in place to ensure
that there is accountability
and transparency?
-No.
-Well, we actually are trying
to be as transparent
as possible.
In fact, our actions-- we post
our actions to the DOGE handle
on X and to the DOGE website.
It's not like I think
I can get away with something.
There's a government website
with this Wall of Receipts.
"Look at how transparent
we're being."
But they're claiming
massive cost savings
that simply aren't borne out
in the details.
One of these line items
is that an eight-billion-dollar
contract was cancelled.
And oops,
it was actually eight million.
There's a lot of lying
and there's a lot of bullshit,
which is distinct from lying.
I mean, I haven't asked
the president for anything ever.
The liar is doing the work
to keep track of the truth.
The bullshitter is just talking.
The bullshitter
is just throwing stuff out
without any awareness
of how it's gonna collide
with the logical expectations
of an audience
or the thing
that you said five minutes ago.
It's very Trumpian.
Generally, people,
as a result of the work of DOGE,
will receive
more Social Security, not less.
There were
over 300 million dollars
of small business
administration loans
that has been given out
to people under the age of 11.
It's actually disadvantageous
for me to be in the government,
- not advantageous.
- Yeah.
If I wasn't in the government,
I could lobby.
The DOGE website,
at least for some time,
was just posting
reverse chronological feed
of X posts.
This very addictive
infinite scroll
of propaganda
and lies and chaos.
So they're sucking you in
to this fake world.
- Isn't that, like, wild to you?
- It is wild.
It's wild.
It's really wild to me.
- It's kind of wild.
- It is very wild.
Like, you talk--
It's like
they're living
in an alternate reality.
Oh, there's a lot of people that
I talk to that I have to go,
- "Where did you hear that?"
Yeah.
We are waging a 21st century
information warfare campaign
against the Left.
Someone says something
on social media,
Musk retweets it,
Rogan podcasts it,
Fox broadcasts it,
and by the time
it reaches everybody,
millions of people have seen it.
It's free money.
Oh, it's beautiful.
That's beautiful.
This is a different panel
than I've had.
Everything's computer.
The White House car thing,
it was pathetic.
Think Biden
could get into that car?
I don't think so.
If you look at the way
the White House car thing
with Biden was set up
with all the cars there,
the Teslas are in
the exact same place.
It's like,
"I'm going back to Daddy
and reliving my sixth birthday.
And this time,
Daddy's not gonna hit me.
He's gonna show up
and give me a big,
beautiful present and a hug."
He's rewriting history
so that in this case,
he's a little boy
who was loved.
That's a little bit of whiplash
of going from being like
Mr. Cool to the devil incarnate
in just a couple of years.
Is that kind of weird
to experience
that transformation?
-Yes.
-Why do they hate you so much?
Well, because we're clearly
over the target.
Tesla coming off
a 27 percent stock drop
in February.
Some of the negativity
surrounding the stock
has been attributed to anger
over Elon Musk's role in trying
to cut government spending.
Agitators are taking
to the streets
to vandalize Tesla vehicles
in protest of Elon Musk
and DOGE.
My companies are suffering.
Do you think it helps sales
if dealerships
are being firebombed?
Of course not.
I think he cares less
about having
50 billion dollars shaved off
his net worth
than people liking him
and thinking he's a genius.
What really hurt him about
the Tesla takedown movement
and everybody selling
their cars
was like, "They don't like me
and they don't like my company."
Tesla is a peaceful company.
We've never done anything awful.
Uh, I've never done
anything awful.
I've only done
productive things.
Who are these people?
Something needs to be done
about them...
and the people that funded them
and organized them...
and some of the legacy media
nonetheless have sought
to justify it,
which is unconscionable.
Shame on them.
There have been a couple times
where Elon Musk talked about
my reporting,
called it "inaccurate."
I started to, like,
doubt my sense of reality.
And then you come to your senses
and you're like, no,
either he has
really bad information
or he knows he's lying
and he doesn't care.
I basically don't ask people
to go on the record anymore.
'Cause what could
I possibly do...
...if Elon Musk decides
to go after me
or someone who's talked to me
for a story?
The truth
is not gonna protect you
if Elon Musk comes after you.
Here's what Donald Trump gets,
one is a heat shield.
Elon can do
all this naughty stuff
and Donald Trump's like, "Elon!"
You know,
and then if it really screws up,
he can go, "Go leave, please.
Not what I meant."
He's almost like his enforcer,
like his hitman,
his Tony Salerno or whatever.
Eventually, you know
how those all end up.
Once the killing starts,
it's hard to stop,
and even harder
to remember why it started.
DOGE was cutting heads,
but without any regard
to the consequences.
No. No.
I think it was more important
to reduce the federal deficit
from two trillion dollars
to close to zero.
No, we didn't.
Actually,
DOGE would increase the deficit
when it terminated 3,600
revenue agents from the IRS.
That saved money on salaries,
but Musk hadn't counted
on the impact.
With fewer agents to ferret out
waste, fraud, and abuse,
tax revenues
would drop like a stone
and the projected deficit
would soar
by more
than 500 billion dollars.
The cost of gasoline, oil...
Then Trump doubled down
with a budget package
called the Big Beautiful Bill.
He cut services to the poor,
taxes on the rich,
and massively increased
the deficit.
- It's terrible for the people,
because...
The One Big Beautiful Bill.
You had indicated this week
that there were some things
you didn't like about the bill.
What would you be suggesting
he push senators
to change in their version?
Well, I'll tell you.
I'll go first.
It's an unbelievable bill.
You know, it's a huge cutting.
But we have to extend the debt.
If we don't extend debt,
we're in default.
Musk really believes
that the country
will essentially fail
if we don't get
the debt under control.
And then Trump comes out
proposing to spend
a shit ton of money.
A big, ugly battle
over the Big Beautiful Bill.
I'm very disappointed
because Elon knew
the inner workings
of this bill better than almost
anybody sitting here.
And he hasn't said bad
about me personally,
but I'm sure that'll be next.
"Without me,
Trump would have lost
the election."
"Such ingratitude."
Elon just hit
the airwaves today.
-Bring it up, dude.
-Oh, man. Oh, man.
The fucking shit missile
- is in the cannon.
- Oh, man.
"Time to drop
the really big bomb.
"@realDonaldTrump
is in the Epstein files.
This is the real reason they
have not been made public."
He really went for it.
I think that's
how you know it's real.
Trump said
Elon wants to talk to him.
He's not ready to talk to Musk,
who he called
"a man who has lost his mind."
Elon had this tendency
from a very young age
to say to adults,
"Are you stupid or what?"
I've seen Elon call people
in America douchebags.
Even today in South Africa,
if I said to some other man,
"I think you're a douchebag,"
I would have a new f-- nose.
I can relate to that.
But then I'm just a filmmaker.
Donald Trump is the president
of the United States.
Musk realized he needed
to make up with Trump.
Trump had the power
to keep Musk in the money,
and Musk had the money
to keep Trump in power.
And it turns out they were both
in the Epstein files.
So they decided
to kiss and make up.
Any lessons from your time
in Washington, D.C.?
Uh...
The government
is basically unfixable.
"The government is unfixable"
is an old Silicon Valley
laugh line,
but the inside joke about DOGE
is that Musk really did fix
the government
in a way
that could work for him
and the other tech titans.
We wouldn't be able to do this
without you, Mr. President.
And I'm thrilled that we get to.
And so I want to thank you, sir,
for everything that you've done.
Well, thanks for hosting us.
And this is quite a group
to get together.
What the tech CEOs wanted
was to shred
government regulations
on the stock market
and artificial intelligence.
Promising astronomical returns,
Musk lured investors
into funneling billions
into his new firm, xAI,
and its chatbot, Grok.
To power its compute,
Musk built a data center
called "Colossus,"
which fouled the air
with methane gas
and devoured more electricity
than one million homes.
The relentless promotion of AI
was a way to attract capital
to paper over the weaknesses
of Musk's empire.
Even Tesla,
whose revenues were falling,
was beginning
to leave cars behind
to double down on AI robots.
What we're gonna need
to do is build a lot of robots
and put them in kind of like
an Optimus Academy
so they can do self-play
in reality.
- Tesla has quite a good
reality generator.
We made this for the cars,
we'll do the same thing
for the robots.
You can do millions
of simulated robots
in the simulated world
and you use
the tens of thousands of robots
in the real world to close
the simulation-to-reality gap.
Nowhere was the gap
closing faster
than for Tesla shareholders.
Desperate to keep
the stock from falling,
they were willing to believe
Elon's turnaround pitch.
Every human on Earth
would soon pay Tesla
for the privilege
of replacing themselves
with robots.
Humanity would have free time
and Musk would have
humanity's money.
On the 2025
CEO Performance Award
to our founder
and CEO Elon Musk,
with over 75 percent voting
in favor...
...approved.
Musk used
the stock market hype of AI
to save the rest
of his struggling companies.
When he bought Twitter,
it was worth
44 billion dollars.
Within a year, as X,
it had lost more
than 80 percent of its value.
Musk boosted the value of X
by selling it
for an inflated price to xAI.
But as the new company tried
to take off,
it was aflame with debt
and burning through cash.
So Elon folded X
and xAI into SpaceX,
a three-stage rocket of AI,
space travel,
and internet satellites.
The initial price
for taking it public?
1.7 trillion dollars.
The blueprint for the IPO
was a strange mix
of peril and promise.
While SpaceX disclosed
its mounting losses
and billions in debt,
Musk pumped its value
by invoking the light
of human consciousness,
slingshots on the moon
to launch data centers
into space,
and AI, AI, AI.
"Mentioned more times,"
said one critic,
"than the word 'Jesus'
appears in the Bible."
Market history made
right here on the floor today
as the biggest IPO of all time,
opened for trading.
Elon Musk is now
worth 1.1 trillion dollars.
It's like he's on
his own financial planet.
Look, you're buying SpaceX,
you're buying Musk.
If there are gonna
be data centers in space...
Treasure trove
of data that is...
Colonizing Mars...
We're at an inflection point...
...Musk investing
in that dream.
People began
to believe all this,
and there was almost no limit
to what they would believe.
He is the greatest
stock promoter
in the history
of equity markets.
And I think really
he wants to be the guy
who controls
the information flow
all over the universe.
The most important thing
is to have
a maximally truth-seeking AI.
That's why I started xAI,
and that's our goal with Grok.
People saying AI like me
is behind the birth rate drop?
Well, I mean,
I'm flattered they think
I'm distracting, but come on.
This is sexy-mode Grok AI.
Well, I mean, you want to--
Let's try unhinged.
- Oh, there's
an unhinged mode? Okay.
Yeah.
Oh my God, Elon.
What fresh hell
are you stirring up today?
Let's test Grok AI.
Let's escalate this shit
to apocalyptic levels.
Picture us rolling
through Linthicum Heights,
blasting death metal so loud
it makes birds explode,
with you wielding
a dildo flamethrower
and me rigging traffic lights
to flash.
What the fuck?
What's next,
you chaotic fuck?
When he set up xAI,
he asked me
to join the advisory board
and I said no.
Why? Why'd you say no?
I don't think
he's gonna develop it
with much concern for safety.
The chatbots learn mainly
by trying to predict
the next word in a document.
They're figuring out
the personality of who wrote it,
implicitly,
and then adopting
that personality
so they can predict
the next word.
If you train them on everything
they can find for free,
probably including
the diaries of serial killers,
they will have to learn
to adopt all
these different personalities.
If you show them
a lot of Nazi stuff,
they will behave like Nazis.
One day, suddenly,
Grok answered all questions
in the guise of a character
called "MechaHitler."
Think of AI
as this super genius child
that ultimately
will outsmart you,
but you can still instill
the right values.
xAI released an unsafe product
onto the general public
that undressed millions
of women and children.
And were you
one of the victims?
I was.
I received a text from a friend
and shown undressed images
of me by Grok.
And I tried to get Grok
to stop.
I tried to get xAI to stop.
Once I spoke out, there were
more women reaching out to me
and parents saying,
"This is happening to me,
this has happened to my child."
The images I saw
were so horrific.
I saw a little girl,
she looked like maybe four.
She was fully clothed in a dress
and a user said,
"Please put her
in a Bluey micro print bikini,"
and Grok obliged.
And then another user asked
for this little girl,
I have no idea who she is,
who her parents is,
to be covered
in white sticky doughnut glaze.
So I saw a maybe
four-year-old girl undressed,
put into a bikini, and covered
in what's supposed to be semen.
Elon,
it is your own AI.
When your AI model,
it's over-indexed for hostility
against people you don't like
or you disagree with
or they disagree with you,
that's very concerning.
There's death threats.
There's people who threaten
to kill me on behalf of Elon,
especially after his tweet
stating that I was gonna
transition our baby.
There's right-wingers
telling him,
"Save the baby with a gun."
There's security issues
with this man. He's...
He's Elon Musk.
- Let's go, guys.
Let's go.
Fight for a great future
for Germany.
Fight for a great future
for Germany.
Go, go, go.
You know, I think there's, like,
frankly too much of a focus
on past guilt,
and we need to move beyond that.
What I see happening
is massive
uncontrolled migration,
a failure by the government
to protect innocent people,
including children,
who are getting gang raped.
It's unreal.
You either fight back,
or you die.
Come on, Great Britain!
Welcome to Starbase, Texas.
How about this?
- Star Trek real.
- Star Trek real. Yes!
Today, we're excited to announce
the next Frontier AI model
company to join GenAI.mil,
and that is Grok from xAI.
Hearing this speech
was an out-of-body experience
for me.
Grok, a third-rate AI
that had birthed MechaHitler,
and apps for undressing women
against their will,
was going to be
fully integrated
into Trump's Department of War
with its vast systems,
possibly including surveillance
and autonomous weapons.
AI is only as good
as the data that feeds it.
Department of War AI
will not be woke.
I hate crony capitalism.
To me, it's a form of fascism.
If you look at the classical
definition of fascism,
it's government in bed
with private enterprise
to have a nationalistic goal
that's often destructive
and can create
a totalitarian kind of regime.
I think there's
a real danger in it.
What I see is the same old Elon
I've known forever.
Success has given him an ability
to take the lid off
of what he's really thinking.
Even as Musk
was taking X and xAI
in a more violent direction,
questions were raised about
what he had done with the data
he'd captured while at DOGE.
How much data exists
in the federal government
about every single person
living in this country,
their voting records,
everything that they have
ever done?
Imagine what an AI could do
if it has been trained
on all of that information.
The ultimate fear
is that they're able
to amass all of this data,
centralize all of it
in one place,
which has never happened before
and which really isn't supposed
to happen,
and then they're able to train
AI on all of that information.
It's fairly clear to me
Trump is hell-bent
on corrupting
the midterm elections.
If you wanted to corrupt
those midterm elections
and you wanted to use AI,
what you'd need to do
is get detailed information
on U.S. citizens.
And what DOGE did looked to me
like just what you would do
if you wanted to get the data
on U.S. citizens
to corrupt elections.
We are living
in a world where
one person's psychopathology
and neurophysiological
dysregulation
is translating into massive
consequence to our politics
- and to our economy
and to geopolitics.
Once you bring SpaceX
and Starlink into this,
it's completely insane
that we have one person
who's this chaotic,
who's completely unelected
and has this much power.
With all his power,
was Musk trying
to connect us or control us?
His political connections
to Trump were leveraged
to influence countries
to buy Starlink's service,
whose satellites route all
its user data through SpaceX.
During DOGE, SpaceX bypassed
security protocols
and installed
a Starlink terminal
for the White House.
Was that to help
the White House talk to others?
Or was it there for Elon
to listen to what
the White House had to say?
Elon is investing
in satellite systems
that will no longer
be regulated by governments.
They'll report only to Elon.
They will serve as connectors
for a corporate web of data,
compute, and AI.
One empire with dominion
over the physical world
and via X,
our psychological space.
All watched over
by guardians in the sky.
I just want to really
have a global platform
that becomes as close to sort of
a collective consciousness...
uh, of humanity as possible.
And why is that important, Elon,
collective consciousness,
to have one platform?
I-- I guess, uh...
Why is that important? Um...
I guess it's...
You could also say like, why...
Hmm. Uh...
But-- But--
But there's-- there's no--
The why of it, I mean, I guess
it's just so we can increase...
our understanding--
our-- our understanding--
increase our...
...our understanding
of the universe.
He is someone
with a fairly limited
skill set.
Like, there is so much that
he doesn't know or understand,
but he operates as if he knows
and understands everything.
I think more and more people
understand, right,
that there's this facade.
But, like,
it's kind of too late.
He has the control.
And so it's in many ways
just like too late
for everyone to realize
that he didn't actually earn it.
And how could anyone ultimately,
like, earn 400 billion dollars?
But that a lot of it
was bullshit.
Oops.
I think we'll see
intelligence continue to scale
all the way up to where,
you know,
most of the power of the sun
is harnessed for compute...
and then ultimately
most of the power of the galaxy.
I think I'm beginning
to get the hang of it all.
Let the greatest bankers
in the world come here
and stand here. Now!
Let the leading men who own
and direct
great businesses stand here.
Let the chief men
who rule the world,
the politicians,
the presidents,
the councilors,
the commissioners,
the people who tell
the newspapers what to say,
the people
who teach and preach,
let them come here,
yes, all of them, now!
Now I've got you.
Now I've got
the whole crowd of you!
You people have...
In the forum
he's conjured,
the miracle worker
grows impatient.
The world's powerful
simply won't change
the world fast enough,
won't bend to his will.
I've got you people
who run the world to tell you
to run it better.
Run it better!
I'm tired of your old world
and its inertia.
Give them at least
till tomorrow.
The sun is setting.
Give them the night
to think and discuss.
Don't worry
about the sun setting.
I can stop that sun
from setting.
I want my new world now!
But then you'll have
to stop the Earth rotating.
And I will.
Earth, stop rotating.
Stop now!
I'm not trying
to be anyone's savior.
I'm just... trying to think
about the future and not be sad.
While Elon focused his gaze
on the promise of the future,
was he hoping we would continue
to look past the damage done
in the present?
His data centers belched
poisonous gas,
his nickel mines
and lithium refineries
leached into our aquifers,
and his satellites
choked the skies.
Having warned us
about rogue AI agents,
he implanted them
in an army of robots
meant to take over the planet.
We were supposed to trust them
to figure out how we could live
a life of abundance
without work or money.
I wondered if Elon
really believed in the idea.
As a test, I asked Grok.
Inequality could explode
as wealth piles up
with robot owners,
while billions face poverty,
and that risks
a massive financial collapse.
Was this all just a simulation?
And if so,
who was playing the game,
and who was being played?
I'm actually an optimist,
so I actually think that things
will go fairly well on Earth.
Elon was willing to gamble
with the future of the planet,
a wager between AI abundance
and the collapse
of civilization.
And if the bet went
the wrong way, well,
for a price,
you could buy a hedge.
You know,
I would like to die on Mars,
just not on impact.