Part Two: I Do Not Like Elon Musk Very Much

with you when we can be around pun Sophia. That will be a very fun day, especially if my fans in the A t F push that paperwork along. I have a lot of a lot of A t F fans well, because I only talk about wanting the FDA to raid me like I don't have any I'm not starting to fight with the A t F because I know they'll burn down my whole compo. Oh ship. I made a Waco. Sorry, this was also that I could do a Waco. That was all for a Waco. That you built that entire thing up just to bring up

Waco again. I did, I did, And it's going to take two years now for me to get my fucking suppressor. I'm gonna get rated by the a t F for starting a cult in the woods before I get to pick it up, and then they'll burn it down along with seventy children keep waking. The A t F would think that you wacoing is hilarious, they would. I bet they laugh a lot about Waco in the A t F. I mean, it could be longer than two years. We

know that they're terrible at communicating. Yeah, I've spent like literal like tens of hours in the last two weeks going into like boogaloo Facebook groups and sub creddits and like stuff like that, and like there's so many Waco memes. They love that fucking Waco uh Netflix show, which was like one of the most irresponsible TV shows I've ever seen. Electric Boogaloo. What did you say? Yeah, like like the

civil the second Civil War. That's like the right wing meme for like they want to start another civil war. It's the boogaloo, that's what they call it. That's how

ship happens on the internet. Now, Oh gosh, all right, so there's like thousands of people on Facebook trying to make a civil war happen because they want to get to use all of their fancy guns and they also really hate the a t F because of Waco, and so they have a ton of Waco memes about like shooting a t F agents, And it's fine for them, but the fucking anti for kids who throw oranges at

cops get like arrested tear guest for vandalism. It's great the mix of how law enforcement responds to these things. Were talking selective law enforcement? Were you talking about the Waco mini series with McCauley Culkin's brother you're talking about I didn't know he was in it, but I think that mini series wildly which Caulkin here in Rory's you

didn't realize there was a coin in there. It's an incredibly irresponsible series because while it does accurately I think depict how irresponsible the government was, it makes fucking David Koresh look like a cool dude when he was lighting. No he was not, but I don't know. It's it's fun. Fun when you starts where they like show him and it makes him look like he can actually sing and hiss like a rock star. That that scenes, Yes, yeah,

like he's a cool rock star. They even try to make the fact that he had teenage brides less up. It's weird. Netflix really went to bat for David Koresh in a way that's kind of baffling. It's like, that's a weird. It's an interesting enough story. If he and the A T F both suck like and they made him hot, he's not that he was picked. No, he the guy they picked I think looks exactly like him. I will give them that. They cast it like he looks and just started his career as a model. I know.

But if you look at pictures David Koresh like they they fucking I think they actually kind of nailed the look. They had nothing to contribute to this. I have not seen it at all. Yeah, I mean it's not, Oh, you're not a Koresh fan. You're not full korushing on korush. No, I am not a corrush. You are so fucking wrong. Okay.

I'm looking at a side by side his face. One of them is holy nipples hard, and one of them is like, oh send me when I will tell you right now, when I start my cult and get taken down by I V the F D A or the A t F. It's a fucking roll of the dice, which one actually burns down our compound and all of our children. Um, but when they take me down and then make a Netflix movie that whitewashes all of my many crimes, make sure Ian McShane plays me. He doesn't

look like me or sound like me. But that that is my wish and it's up to both of you to make sure that happens. No, no, no, no, it can't be him. Who do you think should play him? Like? Maybe give Jared Letto like like some like Oh no, no no, but that's nice that you think I'm more muscular than Jared Letto. I do appreciate that Sophia does any of Jared letto eyes? Oh, now that part it hurts. I'm trying to think of. I think that's the only nice thing about Jared Letto is his eyes. Are you

kiding me, Robert? I think we should just got full circle and have you played by Jeremy Renner. Okay, alright, Leyeah, let's do it, fuck it, Yeah, let's have Renner in there. I'm I'm down that, I'm down with that casting. Yeah, all right, we've we've figured out when when my Waco movie happens. This has been a very Waco start to the part two of our Elon Musk podcast. Yeah, let's let's get back to talking about Ellen. Hey, thanks for having me, by the way, Thanks thanks for coming on,

Thanks for coming on. I do want to I do want to start because like I've been thinking about what you said at the end, and I really don't want this to be a situation whereby people are like going after you because like they think that I was trying to be fair to him. I was. I want I like there's a lot of ship we're gonna talk about today that he did bad. I honestly think the worst thing he did is his failure Kitch played Koresh. Sorry I sat her aside? Are we still come on so hot?

That is such badcasting? You Look, it is the official position of this podcast that David Koresh that is not true. It Look, we have to we have to acknowledge David Koresh is sculpted. ABS have to right the side by side where it says one of these things is not like the other. David Koresh is hot, Elon Musk is bad, And I will that that is the stance that I want all of the Elon Musk fans hate listening this to take out of this is that I officially endorsed

David koresh is hot. That's important. I officially endorsed you to continue this podcast. Hello listeners, this is Sophie. Robert is out reporting at the current riots happening in Portland right now. But he wanted to make sure that we had this correction in part two of this episode. Uh, he incorrectly labeled author Ashley Vance as is she and he is a he. And Robert also wanted me to mention that his book Elon Musk Tesla, SpaceX and the

Quest for a Fantastic Future is a wonderful book. You can find a link to that book under the footnotes in part one. Now back to the episode. The thing that I condemn Elon most for is and the reason I think it's someone important to understand, like how fucked up his childhood it was, is that when you have an experience like that, a good person should have that make them into a better person, a more empathetic person, right, Like,

that's how what you hope to like. You and I both talked Sophia about how like we got bullied a bunch and dealt with a bunch of ships like that, and I think it made us both into people who sympathize a lot with people who are being victimized. Elon Musk did not take that out of it. He did take the thing where like he clearly hates bullies, but he also just basically uses that as an excuse to say that everybody who rightfully criticizes him as a bully.

He clearly didn't learn the most important lesson of his childhood, which should have been that a lot of people in the world may be forced to serve and horrific militaries or stay in countries that they can't stand elite to live in, and that it is like an act of evil to stop people from trying to find a better life. And instead he was willing to like shut his fucking mouth and work with an administration that was doing his best to cut off other in need kids in a

similar situation that he was in himself. He did not let that turn him into a more empathetic person, and that is something that he should be morally condemned for, as well as everything else we're about to talk about. Yeah, I think that's a really good where you could have gone, Like they're by the grace of God, go I instead of fuck these kids, I made it out funk these kids.

Fuck them. They weren't lucky. Yeah, you know, it's not even I would have a little bit more respect for him if he was like a hardline right winger being like, no, I think like I have very strong opinions on immigration because with racist piece of shit. No, it's all money related, yeah, exactly, he wanted to keep his nice government contracts. Exactly. It's all money related, yeah, yep. Ashley Vance spends the book of her biography of Elon Musk outlining the entrepreneurs history

of business, setbacks and successes. And you can find that story in a lot of places. I'm not going to spend a huge amount of time discussing his products the technology behind them, are giving play by plays of every acquisition in his history. She writes a lot about his cool technology, and it is cool. I've driven a Tesla a couple of times and their neat Uh he didn't make them. Um yeah. Anyway, in Musk and his brother

headed to the US. They started their time with a road trip and the summer before Musk had to get started in his degree, he held a couple of internships in Silicon Valley. The tech industry was a natural fit for Elon. He developed a reputation as an obsessive worker who was willing to put in impossible hours, a reputation that has followed him his entire career. When he was interning,

he had the idea for his first business. A salesperson for the Yellow Pages walked into one of the offices where he worked and tried to sell his startup on the idea of an online listing add onto their normal Yellow Pages listings. The pitch was poorly delivered, and the guy clearly didn't know anything about the Internet, but Ellen

saw a glimmer of promise in the idea. In he and his brother Kimball formed Global Link Information Network, which changed its name to ZIP too because Global Link Information Network is a ship name. Uh. The idea behind ZIP two was to convince businesses to create web press talking that a guy named Kibble isn't good at naming stuff. I think I think Musk is the bad nam er for reasons that will become clear. He actually has kind of an early history of sucking at naming companies and now.

The idea behind ZIP two was to convince businesses to create web presences on a searchable business directory that also had a maps component. Obviously that's a good idea because it's the way everything works now. Uh. In in very ahead of the curve. Uh. And if you've read any story about a scrappy tech startup in the Bay, you know the story of ZIP to Elan and his brother started alone own in a dicky office with the toilets backed up, yeada, YadA. They had no money. Uh, the

shoestring budget, all that bullshit. This is not exactly true. Like all of these stories, the scrappy underdog entrepreneurs had much more funding than they tend to emphasize. In Musk's case, Zip two was formed with the help of twenty eight thousand dollars of his dad's money. Um. Yeah, he doesn't like to talk about that. Uh. Sometimes he openly acknowledges it. I think sometimes he lies. I don't know. Yeah, Ashley Vance acknowledges this, but in a way that tries to

make it seem like it wasn't a big deal. She writes, quote they were more or less broke after getting the office space licensing software and buying some equipment. For the first three months, of zip to his life. Musk and his brother lived at the office. Uh, they had a small closet where they kept their clothes, would shower at the y m c A. I'm so sorry. Oh could they have sold any of their free floating diamonds? I

mean sorry? Uh, fucking what was it? Em I'm sorry there, Emerald mon they left the emeralds behind with dad and just took twenty eight grand of his money. That's it, just a small just a small amount, you know, like twenty eight you know, it's not like a Trump size loan, but it is significant, right, Like, And like I'm sure he's like he's not lying when he says, you know, we were on a shoestring budget. But the fact that you had a budget is because your dad was rich.

Like that's the point. The point is not that it was easy to start a business on twenty eight grand. It's that most of us don't get twenty eight grand to start a business and do not have an emerald mind to fall back on. Yes, yes, don't have dad's emerald mind money to fall back on. Yeah. So, like most entrepreneurs in a similar position, Ellen doesn't like to

talk about the privileges that made his success possible. In this case, I suspect some of its pride, but I think some of it's also the fact that he hates his dad um and probably doesn't want to admit that his dad helped a lot. I suspect that if you were to get him to be honest about this, he would blurt out something like, I earned that money by putting up with his ship my whole childhood. But that's

me editorial thing on Elon's mind a little bit. ZIPP two grew rapidly, and this is probably due in part to the fact that Ellen put in fundamentally lunatic hours to build his company. One of his early employees recalled to vance quote, almost every day, I'd come in at seven thirty or eight am, and he'd be asleep right there on that bag. He had a bean bag. Maybe he showered on the weekends. I don't know. You get the feeling that Must didn't shower a lot. That's why Must.

That totally makes sense now, the all of these the thing that is emphasized. I worked as a tech journalist for a while, so I've little read a lot of biographies about a lot of tech guys, and they all smelled terrible, and so did their little offices. When they started, they were all fucking nasty. It's not hard. You get your best ideas in the shower, yes, just they get their best ideas by forming like a fucking a crown of scrutal sweat around their fucking draw string pants. I

don't know. I used to work at Google. Yeah, and some some the engineer areas would sometimes get must Yeah. There's a smell that engineers have, engineer stink. Yeah. It was Musk's manic level of devotion and obsessive work ethic that endeared him to the venture capitalists who investments helped ZIP to grow into a viable business. They saw him as, in the words of one employee, willing to stake his existence on building this business. He told one investor, my

mentality is that of a samurai. I would rather commit seppuku than fail. Um. Yeah, I would die for Global Link Incorporated. Yeah, I would die for the Yellow Pages. Yeah. But zip to success was also heavily dependent on the good will of friends that Musk and his brother made during their time at Canada. Their buddy Greg Corey was critical, giving them six thousand dollars when they left for California to start their company, he became a co founder and

his past real estate and business experience were crucial. Ashley Vance Rights quote the Canadian had a knack for calming musk and ended up being something of a mentor. Really smart people sometimes don't understand that not everyone can keep up with them or go as fast, said Derek PROUDI and a venture capitalist who become ZIP to his chief executive officer, Greg is one of the few people that Ellen would listen to and had a way of putting

things in context for him. Kourie also used to referee fist fights between Elon and Kimball in the middle of the office. So and his brother's exactly the kind of I expect from peoples and bits totally. Yeah, and it's the thing that it's the thing that is true also about Facebook, where it's like, yeah, it should be against the law for teenagers to start businesses. It's actually it's bad for a lot of reasons, in part because they

never grow out of being teenagers in their heads. Yes, he had office fist fights with his brother, and Kimball's insistent that he was the only person Ellen ever fought physically. At least one uh SpaceX employee has accused Ellen of being physically aggressive with him. Um, but that came years later, so we'll talk about that maybe a little bit later. Kimball claims that neither he nor his brother quote have the ability to reconcile a vision other than our own,

which I think is totally accurate. I don't think Kimball's lying at all about that. Um. The fights ended after Ellen ripped some of the skin off of his fist. I think because he missed a punch and hit something else and he had to get a tetnis shot. Uh. Corey told them both that they had to stop fighting in the office after that, which you shouldn't have to tell people. But whatever, boys, boys, keep it down in

the office of the business. You're trying to start of the business, your courting investments for fewer fist fights on the floor when the investors are in the room. Yeah. By the company was off the ground and running, Elon, a self taught coder, was largely replaced by a team of new professional coders who rewrote almost every line of code that Ellen had put in. There was a good

reason for this. Elon's code was functional, but tended to be idiosyncratic, difficult to update and expand over time, difficult for other people to work on. Handing over control for this was difficult for him. He had particular trouble with the fact that professional coders wanted to work normal human hours. He tried to get them to go without sleeping for days at a time, but they were unwilling to do this for some reason. He tried to get them to

stop breathing and willing for some crazy reason. Aren't you guys willing to die for my vision? No, it's the Yellow Pages, but Internet Ellen, like calm, calm, the funk down people are not still the business. Yeah, yeah, that is an important point you make, Sophia. One of the things that I think that I have learned reading all this is that like Ellen makes a big point now about how all of his business is. His goal is like saving the world, Like SpaceX is to save the

human race by getting us off the planet. Tesla is to save the human race by like putting it into fossil fuel use. And he talks about that enough, and a lot of reviewers act as if he just believes it, And I'm sure he has convinced himself that he believes that you get the feeling though from his fucking Yellow

Pages business. He's always needed to be able to claim that his businesses are that important so that he can justify the fact that he is an unreasonable workaholic that fox over people in them, like he had to find a business that he could claim was critical to the future of the human race so that he could act like the asshole he's always acted like in business. That's that's I think core to him. Oh, totally, you're right

on about that. And it also reminds me of like a lot of comedians who are like, no, where art is I mean, like as a comedian whenever people are like, hey, you know what, where art is okay? And like sometimes we have to like do stuff to like for our art and like it's it's fine if we're dicks, Like it's gonna make for great jokes and stories later. It's like, you can't do that other people's expense. Man, I have I have endangered myself and the people around me for

my career. I fucked up and been very unreasonable and unfair and relationships for the sake of my career. Um, there's a lot of men, in particularly men who wind up succeeding under capitalism, who have that aspect to their personality. And it's not a good thing. It's bad. It's bad that I do it. It's bad that Ellen does it. It's a bad thing to do. Um. It's not just men. A lot of women have it too, But I guess men get away with it. I think more because it's expected,

and I think it's sometimes has admired. They're like, well that's what you have to do. If you want to become a Steve Jobs, you have to fucking be a dick, Like that's what it is. Yeah, Yeah, And you get a lot of positive reinforcement as a man for being an unreasonable workaholic. Like for years before it started to be a problem in like my romantic life and my personal life, I got praised a ton for like what a hard worker I was, And it was like I

wasn't actually being praised for working hard. I was being praised for working unreasonably. Um, but it's my husband is the same way. Yeah, it's rewarded. You can make a lot of money doing that. Term the greatest movie ever, even though you leave for seven years to fucking figure it out, you know, and don't see your fanis you know, Sophia. You don't talk about your husband James Cameron often. Um, and he's he's right in the background as we talk,

working on another fucking submarine. Like enough with the submarines, James, God damn it. Uh um yeah, thank god. So uh yeah. Um. The business did well. ZIP two did really well, and success made Ellen into a more confident person, giving him a sense of control that he'd lacked in his early life. He slowly learned to tone some of the less productive

aspects of his personality down. His wife Justine later claimed quote, Ellen is not someone who would say I feel you, I see your point of view, because he doesn't have that I feel you dimension where things that sleeemed obvious to other people that weren't that obvious to him. He had to learn that a twenty something year old really shouldn't shoot down the plans of older senior people and point out everything wrong with him. He learned to modify

his pavior in certain ways. And this is true objectively because he got good at dealing with money people, but he only learned how to communicate more carefully with people he needed things from Uh, Doris Downs Zip to his former creative director, later recalled I remember being in a meeting once brainstorming about a new product, a new car site. Someone complained about a technical change that we wanted being impossible. Ellen turned and said, I don't really give a damn

what you think and walked out of the meeting. For Ellen, the word no does not exist, and he expects that attitude from everyone around him. This is again Advance his book to always spun as a positive thing. And the thing that Vance will point out is that like and and that employees who both like and hate Ellen will point out is that his trigger is being told something can't be done. You always have to present him with

an alternate option of what can be done instead. And again that's often seen as like no, this is like a good management practice, that's part of his success that like he makes his people always present him with another option. But it really is rooted in the fact that he can't hear no. He can't be told no. He's not learned that, which is good. Sophia, Yeah, I mean that's actually first wife down Yep. Clearly be just a great

learning of lessons for him. No. Ever, and it's interesting that he did learn how to modify kind of the noxious aspects of his behavior around people. He needed money from UM. That is really telling, and he doesn't want to with his employees, so he feels fine taking like acting that way around them anyway. That's good behavior. ZIP to continue to grow and it it did consistently lose money,

but obviously in Silicon Valley that doesn't matter. UM and the VC money kept trickling in enough to keep it alive until the company was purchased purchased by Compact in February of nine for three hundred and seven million dollars in cash. Ellen walked away with bucks himself. Yeah, he got about twenty two million out of that, and he left the company immediately because he didn't actually really care about this project. He just wanted to get rich off

of it. UM and Yeah, when he talks about this in the present day, his chief lingering frustrations with his time seemed to be number one that the coders he worked with weren't as good as him. He always talks about like how he had to correct their funk ups and like everyone else, always talks about the fact that his code wouldn't have worked in a real product and like needed to be fixed by people who knew how

to actually code um in a productive way. Uh yeah, and he also is really angry that he never got to be CEO because everybody agreed that he was bad at dealing with people and wouldn't let him be CEO. So that's what he was angry with walking out of his first business. So uh, he spent a million dollars immediately on a on a McLaren, which is some sort of fancy rich person car that there's there's not many of them, so rich guys love it because there's only

like sixty Oh I'm just like you. I'm a rare, precious, precious you know, muscle that's me. Yeah yeah, by car there's just like may really precious and rare and special and expensive. And he needed to be unique even more because like, not only did he need to get the car that's like the fancy car that almost no one gets to have, but he also couldn't be like a normal rich guy and like have it be like his fancy special car that he drives when he wants to

be fancy. Like he was famous for treating it like ship and like letting it get dirty and like fucking it up, hitting curbs curbs, and he bragged about it. It's important to people that people that he knew that he had this unique car and that he treated it like ship, like he needed other folks to know that about him. I would literally throw this money in a garbage disposal, bra I don't care, Okay, I just throw it.

I don't care disposal. I'm cool. When he had the car delivered, he had CNN show up at his house to film the delivery. The interview caught Ellen at an interesting point in his life, when he was clearly elated by his new found wealth, wildly cocky, and far too young to know how off putting all of this is. Ashley Vance writes, quote the whole time, he looked like a caricature of an engineer who had made it. Big Musk's hair had started thinning, and he had a closely

cropped cut that is tuated his boyish face. He wore an all two big brown sport coat and checked his cell phone from his lavish car, sitting next to his gorgeous girlfriend, Justine. Justine moved to California, by the way,

and he seems spelled by bound by his life. Must rolled out one laughable rich guy line after another, talking first about the ZIP two deal receiving cash as cash, I mean, those are just a large number of Ben Franklin's and next about the awesomeness of his life there it is, gentleman, the fastest car in the world, And then about his prodigious ambition. I could go and buy one of the islands in the Bahamas and turn it into my personal fiefdom. But I am much more interested

in trying to build and create a new company. So he's just like a real asshole about this and patting himself on the back during it. He's like, I could have done another rich guy thing, but I'm doing this rot guy thing that I think is better. Yeah, that's what happens when you give a rich kid in his early twenties twenty two million dollars of his own I'm not like other rich guys. Yeah, I'm making a space company or what I'm gonna make it. Well, not yet. First,

he wants to make an internet based bank. Uh So he rolls most of his money that he got from gets from the sale into x dot com, which is this his idea for an internet best based bank, and what's unusual about this is that most tech millionaires, like who started new businesses after their first hit, got other people to put in the money. And this is something that Musk is rare about. Musk is that he he put most of his own fortune into X dot com um and this this was really uncommon. And the reason

why is because he wanted control. He wanted to be CEO this time around, and so putting in the majority of the funding gave him control and meant other people could have less of a say over his vision and couldn't say no to him. Now, from the beginning, there were conflicts at x dot com based on the alon's behavior. One of his co founders was a guy named Fricker, who had moved from Canada to help start the business

and was frustrated by Evon's attitude. Fricker wanted to create a straightforward where I'm so sorry, it's really boring here during this podcast, just in my life. So Fricker wanted to create a straightforward online bank, like he didn't see why it needed to be a big deal. It was like, yeah, people, the internet is the thing. Now people are gonna need

a bank. This seems like a thing we should do and make money, whereas Elon was like, no, we're going to completely change the banking system and the way that banking has done will never be the same, And it had to be like this big fucking deal for him, whereas this guy was like, Yeah, we could just make like a bank app thing online and that will be a thing people want. Ellen it had to be a bigger deal for Elon, and Fricker accused Musk of overhyping

their product and eventually attempted a coup against Musk. So five months after x dot com was founded, Fricker and most of the best engineers in the company all left to form their own business. It says a lot about Musk's personality that very few of the people at the company sided with him in this personal dispute. You get

the feeling they all found him very frustrating. But Musk kept going, and he was able to hide x dot COM's internal problems from Mike Moritz of Sequoia Capital, who put in a major investment that allowed Elon to hire are more engineers to continue his vision. One former employee later recalled, you look back and it was total insanity. We had what amounted to a Hollywood movie set of a website. It barely got past the venture capitalists. The x dot com office was tiny and cramped and by

all accounts disgusting. One employee recalled, it was this massive adolescent men that worked so hard it stunk so badly in there. I can still smell it leftover pizza, body odor and sweat. He's so lucky that he isn't Jewish. If he had like just come out and been like, I'm going to change the banking industry, people would have just said all kinds of anti Semitic ship for him to him for the rest of his fucking life. It would have followed him around. Yes, this was the one

time anti Semitism might have helped us all out. But alas if only oh man yeah uh in a company filled with broken souldman who worked way too hard on a damn banking app must work the way too hardest, putting in twenty three hours a day to everyone else's twenty. Uh. That's a bit of an exaggeration, but it's how he describes it, and probably not super far off from the truth, just based on what we know of him. By Thanksgiving of x dot com was live and it worked. It

was not the only game in online banking town. However, Max Levchin and Peter Teal were working on a competing product at exactly the same time. They called it Confinity, which is a ship name. But Teal and company also picked an objectively good name for the service. They called it PayPal, which is a way better name than Confinity, or than X dot com, which sounds like a porn side. Well, it's actually what I heard. What I heard is that X dot com got bought out by Exhibit and became

X to the Z dot com. Oh, I don't get the joke. I understand there's a joke. I just don't get it. It's fine. You need to know who Exhibit is. I know enough for for the both of us that so thank you. So yeah. In March, so they competed for a while and we're basically like running both companies out of business by fighting with money. Uh. And so in March of two thousand they decided to merge um

personality crop conflicts cropped up almost immediately. Uh and it I hate Peter Teal is honestly more deserving behind the bastards than Elon Musk. He'll get one at some point because he is a real monster. Um, but he comes

off as the more reasonable person in the fight between them. UM. So the big issue is that Peter Teal and everyone else at the company thought PayPal was a better name for their service, and Elon Musk was in love with X dot com because he'd come up with it and he was not willing to come from bias, and he was objectively wrong. But it's also such a little kid named to like, he's like X dot com And if that's taken, what about dot com? And if that's yeah,

it's it's silly. There's a lot that's been written about the Apaul Mafia, which is what all these guys came to be known as in this period, and I'm I'm just not going to talk much about it because I don't find it interesting and fuck it. But yeah, I should just let you know that that's a term you here a lot, and I don't care about it. I'm

not gonna go into much detail about PayPal because it's boring. Um. What's most important is that there was a split between Musk and Teal, and Teel actually resigned from the company two months after the merger. Peter Teal is a huge piece of ship. But it really seems like Musk was more of a problem here, given this was the second time in less than a year that a co founder of the company that he worked at had quit after an argument with Ellen. Uh. Yeah, so that's interesting. UM.

X dot com had other issues. The company picked up new users at a huge rate, but it's infrastructure was not able to handle the loads, so the site collapsed regularly. Uh. Fraud was rampant, and the business lost tons of money as a result of stupid shit. Uh. And I'm gonna quote from Ashley Vance's book Now. As x dot com became popular and its transaction volume exploded, all of its problems worsened. There was more fraud, there were more fees

from banks and credit card companies. There was more competition from star ups. X dot com lacked a cohesive business model to offset the losses and turn a profit from the money it managed. Ralof BOTHA, the startups chief financial officer and now a prominent venture capitalist at Sequoia, did not think Musk provided the board with a true picture of x dot COM's issues. A growing number of other people at the company questioned Musk's decision making in the

face of all the crises. What followed was one of the nastiest coups and Silicon Valley's long illustrious history of nasty coup's. A small group of x dot com employees gathered one night at Fanny and Alexander, a now defunct bar and Paulo Alto and brainstormed about how to push out Musk. They decided to sell the board on the idea of Teal returning a CEO. Instead of confronting Musk directly with the plan, the conspirators decided to take action

behind Musk's back. So the coup plotters acted right as Elon Musk left for his honeymoon with Justine. They actually married months earlier, but hadn't been able to celebrate it because Elon Musk is a workaholic. Uh. So he finds out that they're ousting him as CEO right after they land in Sydney, Australia. Um, and he immediately leaves the honeymoon to go try to win his company back because that is where I what she said when that happened. She's so excited. Yeah, he loves me. Yeah. So Ellen

and Justine land in like Australia. Yeah, and he just like books a trip back right away. He didn't get his way, though. Teal took over. X dot Com was rebranded as PayPal, and according to the folks who worked there, Ellen did take this eventually. Well, Um, he didn't blow the company up or anything, although we probably could have tried. With new, better management and a much better name. PayPal took off in July two. eBay offered one point five

billion dollars for the company. The board accepted the deal, and Musk got two hundred and fifty million. This shuck out to about a hundred and eighty million dollars after taxes. Question, Justine stay and enjoy Australia by herself and have a good old time. Was that mentioned? Because that's what I'm Yeah, I think, so, I think, Yeah, I hope. So she writes fantasy novels, which wasn't initially very supportive of, and then made fun of her four around his friends. Um,

because that's the kind of guy he is. What a shitty piece of ship. Yeah, my husband made part of my career behind my back. Yeah he would be dead. Yeah yeah, yeah, don't don't ship talk your spouse's career. Unless your spouses Elon Musk, then absolutely do ship talk your spouse's career grimes. Start a fucking book club just so people can come over and rag on your husband with Yeah. So like, hey, Ellen, you've seen any space lately? I don't know how to I don't have a good

joke yet. Give me a minute. Yeah, thank you, eat it. And while you take that minute, that'll teach you it's time for something else, Robert. While you take that man, Hey, hey, rocket man, why don't you burn out your fuse alone? Because you're incapable of intimacy? There we go, Bam, that was weird. Um, But anyway, you know what's not incapable

of intimacy these products and services. We're back. We're back from those incredibly horny products talking about the equally probably horny Elon Musk, but horny for business, horny to save the world. That's Elon Musk in this period. So uh, as everyone I'm sure knows, Ellen takes all his money he makes from eBay and he throws it into Tesla SpaceX and his brother's business, Solar City. UM. Ashley Vance's book gives a good blow by blot blow account of

how this all went down if you're interested. Solar City next door to um Circuit City, Yes, yes, yes, Party City, corner from Party City, yes, around the corner from both. It's in the city block of Lincoln City. I don't know it. Tesla started out as some other dudes electric car company, So Elon Musk didn't start Tesla, which is should be obvious because it has a good name. And

as we've learned, Elon Musk cannot name a business well. Um. But Musk like the idea behind Tesla, and he pumped in a bunch of funding to become part of the business. He also introduced the founders to a genius battery building engineer whose research must had helped to fund, so he does get some credit. Um. And around the same time, Musk also started SpaceX, the company grow out of conversations and research that Musk had started to fund between a

bunch of space nerds. In essence, Elon had money and he used a bunch of it to gather a group of smart astro nerds together and get them talking. The rough goal at first was to try and send mice to Mars and then send them back to Earth alive, which is a cool idea. The scientists he was talking to thought that they could do this for like twenty million bucks. The plan gradually evolved into the idea of building a robot greenhouse and launching it via rocket to Mars.

The greenhouse would mix Martian soil with Earth soil and squared out tiny bits of oxygen, and in the Martian atmosphere would send video feedback to Earth, so people could, you know, see plants growing on Mars, which is a cool idea. That would be a neat thing to see plants growing. Love to watch that. That's the most I've ever been interested, uh so far in Yes, what he's been inventing, I mean, PayPal it's a fine I guess, no, fuck it, it's a cool about this fucking space garden.

That sounds to bring me a space tomato from Mars. Yeah, a space tomato from Mars. You could, honestly, yeah, I would kick starter that. Yeah. And when you tell stories like that, you can see why space nerds fell in love with Elon Musk at this period. That's a fucking cool thing to want to do. Um And it's a cool thing if you have tens of millions of dollars to put money into um. Since Elon had a lot of money to spare, like obviously he could actually make

this happen. He flew to Russia with a rocket scientist he knew to see if the Russian government would sell him a rocket, and they were totally down to sell him a rocket, but they wanted way too much money. Um. So yeah, he decided to start SpaceX in order to

make space travel cheaper and get mankind to Mars. And gradually the goal switched from space Garden to make it cheaper to get satellites into the air and provide shipped to the I S. S. Which is like not a not cool thing to do, but it's not as cool as space Garden. I think we can all agree on that. No, and I can't eat that. That's most spaced tomatoes, you can. I mean, they do grow things in the I S S. So you can say he's contributing to space tomatoes, but

he's not contributing to Mars tomatoes. Right now? Yeah, for real, where the funk is my Mars Basil? That's why I'm waiting for. Yeah, funk, where's our Mars Basil? Elan, you fucking asshole, Oh my god, do you think they could make way bigger vegetables on Mars because of the weight thing. If they could make from what I understand that as big as my whole body, holy sh it, you can

make like giant. You could make a watermelon that reaches from Mars to the Earth and then we could eat our way to Mars inside of a water melon that protects us from space. Dude. Finally behind yes, giants space watermelon, space giant giant space elevator made out of a watermelon. Hell yeah. So um Musk has been pretty adamant from the beginning that his goal with SpaceX was to make

space travel cheaper and get mankind of Mars. That's always like the dream, like everything, Like he always emphasizes, like the goal is to get human beings to Mars so that we can become like an interplanetary society and you know, not get wiped out by a fucking rock or whatever. Um, And that's like the that's like the pitch that he's

gotten very good at giving. Um and both of Elon's big two companies that he founded with his eBay money have dreams like this from the beginning, Even before Elon, Tesla's goal was to make sweet luxury electric cars and use that money in the lessons from it to drive down the cost of building an electric car that could dominate the US auto market. Now, there is a big debate to be had as to whether or not either SpaceX or Tesla have ever had a chance of contr

beating to the grand goals set for them. They certainly have not achieved them um, and we'll discuss that a little later. But the fact that both of the companies were started with species life and death as the stakes um had some benefits for Elon. For one thing, they allowed him to inspire and motivate his work place with things beyond money. So you can have your workers work themselves into an early grave if they think they're saving the world, whereas it's hard to do that if they

think they're making the Yellow Pages. Right. Um, that's one benefit to a guy like Ellen. Um. The other benefit is that, like he didn't really want to make either of these companies public, especially not early, because that means you lose control if you have a public company of less control than a private company, and Ellen is a

big control guy. UM. So again, focusing on saving the human race is the goal for both companies allowed him to justify keeping control, which meant less money for his workers. Uh meant they didn't get to cash out their stock options, but also meant that he had the control he needed to see these dreams through and it makes it easier to sell people on that. From the beginning, both companies were based entirely off of the work and genius inventions

of other people. Tesla's founder, a guy named eber Hard, was a brilliant and is he's still alive, a brilliant engineer. SpaceX relied on a huge crop of genius rocket engineers. Musk did make his contributions, and he is a talented engineer, and on the engineering side he did some meaningful things, but they were also a mixed bag. For example, he insisted the Tesla Roadster have a carbon fiber body, which

necessitated a specific sort of paint. The paint happens to be very toxic, which has led to Tesla being fine tens of thousands of dollars by the State of California for polluting the air with land with toxic waste. So that's good. Carbon fiber is cool. Can't make an omelet without ruining all of the chickens ability to make eggs.

That is a very true statement. Sophia Musk is a hands on boss, and it's clearly important to him that he'd be seen as one of, if not the leading minds behind both of his big businesses, signature products and to those. In five Tesla got its first New York

Times coverage. It was very positive about company founder eber Hard and the other genius engineers, but it completely ignored Ellen when if Tesla's early employees later said, we tried to emphasize him and told the reporter about him over and over again, but they weren't interested in the board of the company. Ellen was furious he was living. But nobody puts Ellen in the corner. Okay, no, not ever.

The early buzz around Tesla was very positive, and they were huge problems with the car behind the scenes, though, which you'd expect because it's like a hard thing to do. The product was laid repeatedly, and it had issues that kept cropping up with the transmission and the body, and the cost ballooned, YadA, YadA. It became very clear eventually that Tesla's early engineers had wildly underestimated what their car

would cost. To make, and they had sold hundreds of pre ordered cars at a price way less than what the car would actually cost to make. I think they were selling them for like ninety thousand, and they found out it was gonna cost a hundred and seventy grand per vehicle. Um. And Musk had been the guy largely delivering the big speeches that had sold a lot of these cars and hyping them up, But he hadn't been

the guy that was responsible for fucking up the cost calculation. Um. That was eber Hard, and he does seem to have genuinely really fucked up at estimating what these cars would cost to make. And Musk used this funk up as an opportunity to push the company founder out as CEO, and so Ellen finally got to be CEO. Uh. There's certainly a case to be made that he was this was the right thing to do. Many early Tesla people will say that Eberhard did funk up badly and he

needed to be ousted at that point. Um. And you could say he needed to be ousted as badly as Ellen needed to be ousted in ordered for PayPal to be a success. But the whole endeavor led a tremendous bad blood between Eberhard and Musk, and the two men would snipe at each other for many years after that point. Um, now this is another thing I've seen folks online come after Musk four and I don't I don't like like the fact that he stole the company from this guy.

I don't know. It's debatable as to whether or not he did the right thing. He probably did the right thing for making Tesla into a profitable company. Uh, what's not debate bole is how fucked up it is that Elon Musk gets credit for building all of these wonderful devices that he did not build. A January article got the title how Elon Musk built a Tesla factory in China in less than a year. Obviously he didn't. He

never built a factory his life. In September two tho nineteen, Courts published an article titled Elon Musk is designing his rocket as fast as he can or undesigning. It was making a point about how he thinks, but like it

still gives the credit to him for like making this rocket. Uh, Musk gets a lot of credit in general for the wonders that his companies have produced in a two thousand seventeen Rolling Stone article, Neil Strauss opened by noting that Musk has not yet achieved either of the incredibly lofty goals he's set for tests that or SpaceX, but quote, what he has done is something that very few living

people can claim. Painstakingly bulldozed with no experience whatsoever into two fields with ridiculously high barriers to entry, car manufacturing and rocketry, and created the best products in those industries and measured by just about any meaningful metric you can think of. In the process, he's managed to sell the world on his ability achieve objectives so lofty that from

the mouth of anyone else they'd be called fantasies. And that's frustrating to me, because, uh, he did jump in without any experience to do very difficult, interesting industries, but he didn't create those fucking products. Um And yeah, it's frustrating. It's frustrating that the writers of Star Trek Discovery saw fit to give Elon Musk credit as a brilliant inventor.

They listed him next to the inventor of the warp drives that from Cochran as a genius scientific mind, which is bullsit Ship se from Cochrane lived through World War Three and made a fucking I mean, he's a fake guy, but whatever. It's bullshit to put Elon Musk at that

level because he's not a genius fucking inventor. Um. It is fair, I think, based on what I've read to say that he's probably contributes more to the development of his products than most CEOs do, but he is also not just sitting there making them as a general rule. Ashley advanced. His book goes into the into tremendous detail about the incredible sacrifices that space X Rocket Engineers UH

made to build the company's first successful rocket. They did it in like this this island off of the coast of Hawaii, and like lived on this primitive, humid like base for years that like didn't have like things that people normally need to have to be comfortable. They didn't see their family for like months or even years at a time. They sacrifice their health and social life because these like they believed in the dream of human space flight.

We're back, uh, listeners will hear this is seamless, but we just had an interruption for a mystery, and none of you will ever know and it's a it's it's a you won't We're not gonna tell. Sorry, suckers, suckers, suckers liking my work, said, suckers, But you really went hard. I turned it into learned. Yeah. The key to keeping an audience is to be like a little bit abusive to them, you know, like negging. You need the audience.

I think when you do that, because they feel like he knows we can take it, We're to and then they send you more knives. It's weird. You guys have a beautiful love it they do. I abuse them and they send me knives. And that is the healthiest relationship in my life. If anybody wants to send Robert a knife for me, I would take it. Just step why I Sophia, I was not considered in this factor. But okay, uh, Sophie, do you want a knife? No? No, no, that I'm not.

I've given you so many nice relationships that I wasn't part of that, and it's most functional all your podcast. Yeah, I know, I know. See that's because I habitually torpedo my relationships. But that's how it works. Were great, you know the problem. The real problem with this line of jokes Sophia is that if you start getting mailed a bunch of knives, you're not gonna know if it's because Elon Musk fans want you dead or because they really

enjoyed your performance. Okay, okay, let me amend my request. You can send a knife for Robert for me if it includes Oh I see, that's badass. I'd love that. Just so I know it's not aggressive. You can like draw a happy face on it if you want, or just include a little with a happy face so I know it's like a non threatening gift. Send her knives and smiley faces, which is the totally non threatening gift is knives in pictures of smiling faces. Everyone, No one's

creeped out by that at all. Let's move on. Hey, I know what I like. Yeah, So the thing I want to emphasize is, like, again, muskets all this credit for like he made like he's a rocket engineer, he like made these incredible space things, and it's like, I think, like there's a lot that actually is objectively incredible about SpaceX is rockets, including the fact that they like are capable of kind of piloting themselves back to the guard.

A lot of cool stuff has been done by engineers at SpaceX who are brilliant rocket designers and who sack or fist an enormous amount. Again, these guys had to live for years unlike an island base, with like very little in the way of comforts, like ignoring their families, because there were people who believed in this dream of getting to Mars and like sacrificed huge chunks of their youth to make these rockets work. It was an incredibly laborious,

nightmarish process in some ways, and they did it. And Musk was sitting in California watching test launches on closed circuit video and hyping up the company. Which is not to say that like as a CEO, he's not thinking probably make the case that he's one of the more valuable CEOs out there, which I also think he's still very overvalued. But anyway, it's frustrated to me that he gets so much credit and all these fucking engineers and the guy's actually doing the cool work but whatever, um yeah,

Must gets. The thing that's frustrating me most is that Must gets the credit for the successes of his workers while being able to blame them for his or for the failures of the company. One example of this came in March six. SpaceX had an important launch of its Falcon one rocket. The rocket wound up like fucking up

and blowing up and ship. Uh so it didn't work out, and this was made them push like the date because they had like contracts and stuff to put stuff into space and they couldn't get their rocket to actually work. Because Elon Musky used to build that those rockets when he was a kid with explosives and was like, I'm lucky I kept my fingers. Yeah, you're gonna put that guy in charge of your rocket. Yeah. He wasn't really like it was engineers and stuff who were like, it's

it's hard to do. It's hard to do there anyway rocket science Robert I am aware. Yeah, yeah, yeah, well, and like you would think a good boss would be like, no, it's fucking hard, Like it's nobody's fault. This is going to take some time to get right and like it didn't work this time, but we're going to get it right. Um. And that's kind of what Elon Musk like put out

to the world. But he also needed a scapegoat to blame for the investors and so he picked one of his hard working engineers who had been sacrificing his youth out on an island um in a very unfair way. And I'm gonna quote from Ashley vans Now. Musk and other SpaceX executives blamed the crash on an onion named technician. They said this technician had done some work on the rocket one day before the launch and failed to properly tighten the fitting on a fuel pipe, which caused the

fitting to crack. The fitting in question was something basic and aluminum b nut that's often used to connect a pair of tubes. The technician was Holman, who was like one of the guys living out there. In the aftermath of the rocket crash, Holman flew to Los Angeles to confront Musk directly. He'd spent years working day and night on the Falcon one and felt enraged that Musk had

called out him and his team in public. Holman knew that he'd fastened the b nut correctly and that observers from NASA had been looking over his shoulder to check the work. When Holman charged into SpaceX's headquarters with a head full of fury. Mary Beth Brown, Musk secretary tried to calm him and stop him from seeing Musk. Holman kept going anyway, and the two of them proceeded to have a shouting match at Musk's cubicle. Now, later investigation

proved that Holman had done nothing wrong. The culprit was the aluminum body of the rocket. Another board member later admitted that Holman quote kind of got blamed so they could get out an answer to the investors as to why the launch had not worked. And that's fucking shitty. And that's one thing that pisces me off about Elon Musk, because he gets a lot of credit when the rockets work, and he finds a hard working person to blame when

they don't. That's bullshit. It's like, yeah, literally the opposite of good leadership. When you're a leader, you take credit for both. You know, it's the it's the responsibility of of being the head of something. You take credit for the good and the bad, and you shield your people who work for you. I would go so far as to say that a great leader takes credit for the bad and gives credit to his subordinates for the good stuff. That's a really good leader that doesn't exist in the

tech world. So it was not even trying to go that yeah Hi, I was like, just be a good at decent boss and be like, yeah, the funk up is also on me. If you're gonna take credit for the good ship and when you are really a great leader, your subordinates will make sure that you get a lot of credit for the good stuff that happens. You don't do that yourself because that's being a dick. But anyway, whatever, fuck it. Uh So Mary Beth Brown, let's talk about

Mary Beth Brown. But he's not gonna stop being a dick, right because his social skills are just not very good as we've known like the whole time. Speaking of that, let's talk about his relationship with Mary Beth Brown. So, Mary Beth Brown was Musk's assistant at both SpaceX and Tesla from the beginning of both companies, and basically everybody who spent any time around either company in this period will agree that she was absolutely critical to both success.

Ashley Evance describes her as Musk's Pepper pots Um because there's a lot of fucking iron man uh tony start comparisons that made the Musk and for years she was the gateway to Elon Musk and his mediator because again, like you were just bringing up, he has no social skills. So she would keep people away from him when he was in a bad mood and unable to productively engage, and she would like tell people when it was a good line to talk to him because she was under

She was like the Musk whisper. She brought him his meal, she scheduled his time, him with his children, She picked out his clothes. She was his fucking mom. That was her job, right, That is so sad. I always felt so sad for Pepper and those fucking movies. Yeah, it's a bummer. Uh And it's a bummer. Yeah. I mean, at least he didn't have a weird relationship with her, I guess, but it was weird anyway, that that's a thing. But also he was like a fucking man child, as

all of these tech guys are. So. Vance credits Mary Beth Brown for helping to set up SpaceX's early culture and asking as a bomb whenever Musk would ruffle feathers and hurt anyone in any like a key a key employees feelings. She worked twenty hour days when Elon worked twenty hour days. She traveled with him when he would because he would he spends like two days a week in l A, two days a week in San Francisco, had his other company like he traveled around all the time,

So she this was like a fucking nightmare job. Um that she must have been obviously debt. She bought into the beliefs of the company, and it seems to be widely agreed that she was a very important part of both companies, especially as they started off. Um she played a huge role in in the that both were a success, and Elon Musk fired her in two thousand and fourteen. The story goes that she finally worked up the courage to ask Musk to be paid a salary in line

with what the top executives at SpaceX were paid. Shouldn't. She was one of the longest serving employees and a key part of the operation, and was forced to like live Elon's unreasonable schedule. She thought this was fair. Musk told her to go take a vacation and he would do her job himself and decide if he really needed her. When she came back, he told her that she was

unnecessary and fired her without ceremony. So that's cool. I remember reading about that and being like, that is the most insulting way to fire someone that's given so much of their time and life to you. To just make sure that they know that you think they're worthless before you let them go. That is so shitty for no reason. Yeah, to not just say like, well, I'm not going to do this and I don't need you anymore, but like, but first I'm going to devalue the decade that you sacrifice.

That's what I'm saying. That's so wild. That's like just the true example of someone being Yeah, of someone being so self absorbed that it is truly abusive to other people because they do not consider the other person's like feelings or their livelihood or anything. Yep. Cool, to be a billionaire makes you superhuman, it does very human case Alex Luthor more morals. Yeah, I mean, you know what,

at least Lex Luthor has an understandable life goal. He wants to murder Superman, and don't we all, Yeah, you have a sex I mean, for me, Superman is the f d A. But I get it, like, yeah, well you'll have an emesis Robert mm hmm. It's the f d A for everyone now, uh yeah, sorry. What he did with Marybeth Brown follows a pattern for Elon Musk. He hates being told no, um, he's being told anything

he doesn't want to hear. And every former employee you can find is very consistent about the fact that telling him you can't do something is the worst career if you can make. Musk is famous for reacting to this by telling people, Okay, then I'll do your job and I'll be the CEO of two companies, and then he fires them and does their job. And in the stories that get told, he always does the job well, and you know, the person goes away. And it is true that Musk is very smart. Uh he might even he

might even say he's brilliant at some things. Uh. It's also true that he has contributed to both of his companies. He has had a particular impact on the development of Tesla's vehicles. From what I can tell, he seems to have the same kind of gift that Steve Jobs has or had. Uh. And the gift is like the thing that Jobs did that made him special and that made him actually kind of worth the money he got paid as a CEO or more of it than most CEOs are.

Is that he he was really good at saying no to Like he knew to his employees when they would say, like, we think we've got this phone right, he knew, like he had kind of an instinctive knowledge of what people wanted to hold in their hands. And that's why the iPhone worked and other phones that were made around the same time smartphones early smartphones didn't work. His jobs understood. He like refused to let the product out until he knew that it was like going to feel good in

people's hands and to light people. And Musk did kind of the same thing with the Tesla, which is why people fucking love their Tesla's because it is a well, it's a car designed to delight people in certain ways. Like one of Musk's big contributions was insisting that the door handles do that thing where they like pop out and like it's silly and unnecessary, but also having driven one, like it's fucking cool as hell, and it makes people happy and loyal to the product because it don't like

has a Tesla and he fucking loves it. The amount of joy from driving it. I'm like, this is stupid, but it is cool. Yeah, it's cool. It's cool, and and must get some credit for a number of the really cool things about that car he has he does have. I think that the CEO to compare him most too is Steve Jobs, who was a monster UM but who was also UM had a skill, and Musk has that same skill. He's not a rocket engineer. He is someone though,

who understands. He understood something important that people wanted and and he was the first person who understand that thing. And as a result, UM he put out a product that delights people. And that's that's a that's a town. You can say it's not worth nearly as much as he's been paid, and I would agree with that, but it is a talent UM. So at SpaceX, however, Musk's main achievement seems to be pushing a policy whereby the company makes the vast majority of their spacecraft components in house.

This is a really weird thing to do that no one else in the rocket industry does UM, and it caused them to take years to get off the ground because they had to like invent everything from the ground up.

But it also allowed them to bypass a lot of the bloat that the heavily regulated space industry has um and has allowed them to do stuff like the radios that SpaceX put in rockets cost a fraction of the radios that like we're put in rockets before because they didn't like get into this Lockheed Martin bullshit where everything's like stupidly overbuilt and expensive like, and that it was a good idea um to do it this way. It seems like a policy that was successful in reducing the

cost of shooting ship into space. So whether or not you think that's good, it worked. My issue with Musk isn't that I think he's useless. It's that I think he gets way too much fucking credit, and that he uses the world saving goals of his company as an excuse to treat loyal and critical employees who do more of the work in a lot of cases than he does, like ship whenever he feels like they're getting in the way of what he wants to do at the moment um.

And I'm gonna quote again from Ashley Vance's biography. This is near the end of the biography. The rank and file employees tend to describe Musk in more mixed ways. They revere his drive in respect how demanding he can be. They also think he can be hard to the point of mean and come off as capricious. The employees want to be close to Musk, but they also feared that he'll suddenly change his mind about something, and that every

interaction with him is an opportunity to be fired. Elon's worst trait by far, in my opinion, is a complete lack of loyal to your human connection, said one former employee. Many of us worked tirelessly for him for years and were tossed to the curb like a piece of litter without a second thought. Maybe it was calculated to keep the rest of the workplace on their toes and scared. Maybe he was just able to detach from human connection

to a remarkable degree. What was clear is that people who worked for him were like ammunition, used for a specific purpose until exhausted and discarded. What a ghoul. Wow, Yeah, that's some baltimort ship right, just fucking sucking the all the I don't know, Yeah, I would say it's a bad thing to do. Death theater. They'd like, suck out all your life force right out of your out of your body and then just leave you all your warm memories and you just sucking die. That's how I feel

it is of your talent. Thank you the mentor I needed help. Thank you. Um You're the only person I would let make a Harry Potter comparison here. Thanks. I've earned it with my service, um, with my with my dead baby killer service. Um you have. I've graduated to not being on those episodes and I've never been less disturbed in my life. Speaking of babies alive babies, let's talk about thought And I was like, where, what how? But Sophie, you know who won't kill babies? Well, Raytheon

kills a lot of babies. Here's the thing about Raytheon. What do we all hate weddings? Nobody likes having to go to a wedding, And the dream of Raytheon is to make weddings a thing of the past, not just for people in Afghanistan, but for everyone all over the world. Yes, with Raytheon, we can all live in a world where no wedding gets to happen without a drone strike. And isn't that the world we all want to live in? No? I like weddings. Weddings are dope. There's an open bar

usually and I get free. What are you talking about, Robert, I mean, I don't want to be I don't want to be in a wedding. That's a lot of work. But like this makes no sense. Well it doesn't have to make sense because it's Raytheon, Raytheon wonderful. This is the ad break Yeah, adds, we're a and we're talking about Elon Musk's first wife, Justine. She famously wrote a viral article in two thousand ten after their divorce for Mary Claire. Its title is I was a starter wife.

That is one of the biggest article. That is where a lot of my information comes from. It's pretty it's a pretty good breakup article information. Uh. It followed on the heels of Justine's blog, which she had kept for like the entirety of their marriage and had regularly like written some unflattering things about Elon about that like then made it out like all sorts of like gossip rags and stuff would talk about it. Um. He did not.

He was not happy with that. Um. And also I kind of think it was her way of like striking back at him for like talking some ship about her career as a writer. Um, She's like Okay, then, well, I'm going to write about what a dick you are in my blog and then, oh, I bet you're gonna hate it a lot fucking more when it's about you. And what's very funny? It was very funny. Um, the article isn't funny, but that's funny. Uh So yeah, um, it's full of fun details and I'm gonna read one

of them now. As we danced at our wedding. At reception, Ellen told me I am the alpha in this relationship. I shrugged it off. You shouldn't do that, just as I was as I would later shrug off signing the postnuptual agreement. But as time went on, I learned that he was serious. He had grown up in the male dominated culture of South Africa, and the will to compete and dominate that made him so successful in business did

not magically shut off when he came home. This, in the vast economic and balance between us, meant that in the months following our wedding, a certain dynamic began to take hold. Ellen's judgment overruled mine, and he was constantly mark remarking on the ways he found me lacking. I am your wife, I told him, repeatedly not your employee. His response to that was, um that, Uh, if you were my employee, i'd fire you. Um, he absolutely would. Yeah, yeah, I'll fuck me. I'll fuck me so good, I'll fuck

me off. Have my own babies al raised, that'll show you nothing. Yeah, it's amazing. So yeah, that's great. Justine notes that after the first time she flew to Silicon Valley to meet Musk while he was building zip Too, he asked her how many kids she wanted. She said, one or two unless she could afford nanny's than she wanted for. He responded with a laugh and the reply, that's the difference between you and me. I just assumed that there will be nanny's. A good person says that

that's the thing about me and you. I I expect servants. That's the difference. I know. I'll have servants, slave servants, slave servants, servants, definitely servants my dad has. Which was it that my dad has? Yeah, not that, yeah, but

essentially that yes. Justine also claims that Musk had her meet with his lawyer two months before the wedding to sign a financial agreement that he assured her was not a prenup, but essentially was, and it had her sign away most of her rights, which does kind of suggest that Musk was planning on the marriage not lasting, which is kind of the point of the title of her article.

She also notes that during the marriage quote, no matter how many highlights I got, Ellen pushed me to be blonder, go platinum, he kept saying, and I kept her using, that's cool, but whatever. Yeah, it's hot when someone you love just tries to change you all the time. I love it. I That's what I've been told. That all women love to be changed by men, and just like all men like to be improved by women. People that want to not be loved for being themselves, yeah, everybody does. Yeah.

People just want to be told that their garbage and that they need to change. That's what people want to need is to be told their garbage, which is why I tell my audience that their garbage, so that they'll be better to try and impress me. Send you a knife, because they were like that felt good. Hurt me again, daddy, Yeah, yeah, hurt hurt me again, daddy podcast Daddy. That's exactly what it is. That's the slogan of behind the bastards. Hurt

me again hurt podcast daddy, So yuh. It is worth noting that this this postnup didn't really seem to matter. Justine what got what seems like a pretty fair settlement to me. She's rich as ship. She gets like eighty something thousand dollars a month in addition to getting like a couple million up front, and how like she's doing fine now it's it's it's she. She seems to be okay, but must did not treat her well um and was

a giant dick. And almost as soon as they broke things off, he flew to England and met to Lula Rightly, an actress who happened to be fourteen years younger than him. He hit on her by showing pictures of his rockets, and that seems to have worked. The two hung out for a night or two in England, and then she flew out to visit him. A few weeks later, when she'd been out in California for five days, he asked her to marry him. She was twenty two, so gross

and just like cliche. I'm like, dude, come on, come on, dude, like five days or I mean it was a little more than that, but not much, but you pathetic dude, so she said, yes, they got married. They got divorced soon after that, and Must tried to be on his own for like ten months, and then he got remarried to too Lula uh, and then they got divorced again.

When Ashley Vance published her book in two thousand fifteen, Musk was in the process of fixing things before fucking them up again with Riley, So her book doesn't really get into detail about what happened later. But that two seventeen Rolling Stone article certainly does. And it is a fucking doozy. I love that article also. Yeah, it opens right after he broke up with I wrote some famous lady, but it's Amber heard. Um, it's okay to call her

some famous lady, right What does she do? What's her thing? She's an actress and stuff. Yeah, and I'm gonna quote from that Rolling Stones article right now. He heaves a sigh and ends his effort at composure. I just broke up with my girlfriend, he says, hesitantly. I was really in love and it hurt bad. He pauses and corrects himself. Well, she broke up with me more than I broke up with her. I think This happened right before Musk had to launch the Model three, and he claims it made

his job Must harder, much harder. I've been in severe emotional pain for the last few weeks. Must collaborates severe. It took every ounce of will to be able to do the Model three event and not look like the most depressed guy around. For most of that day, I was morbid, and then I had to psych myself up, drink a couple of red bulls, hang out with positive people, and then like, tell myself, I have all these people

depending on me, all right, do it? So he talks about how he did it, and then he gets back onto the subject of his breakup. In the middle of this, he straight up asks Neil Strauss, is there anybody you think I should date? It's so hard for me to even meet people, which, uh, it's both so entitled and so pathetic at the same time. It's just like quite a mixture. Yeah, I don't know how to I don't

know how he would handle that as an interviewer. It's actually to Neil Strauss's credit that he managed to like not explode in awkwardness at this moment. That's like a nightmare. I would think of someone I hate, and then I would hook hook them up. Yeah, yeah, I would. I would get him to date. I don't know Ivanka Trunk honestly. Um, so yeah, it seems like that actually might happen. Okay, I'm gonna continue reading from the Rolling Stone article. He

swallows and clarifies, stammering softly. I'm looking for a long term relay hip. I'm not looking for a one night stand. I'm looking for a serious companion or soul mate, that kind of thing. And yeah, it's just like it's so bad. This is like the worst thing I can imagine happening as an interviewer. Um, it's just unbelievably awkward. Uh. I'm gonna quote from Strauss again. I did eventually tell him. I eventually tell him that it may not be a

good idea to jump right into another relationship. He may want to take some time to himself and figure out why is previous relationships haven't worked in the long run, which is like voice of reason here, that's amazing. Neil Strauss is the guy giving him legitimately good advice. Was like, maybe figure out what about yourself makes you incapable of staying in relationships. He needed Rolling Stone to tell him

to take it easier and figure out who he is. Yeah, yeah, it's weird that rolling Stone would tell him to take it easy. Normally that's the Eagles. Oh god, Wow, you are more of a dad than you've ever been. I know. That's the dada ist fucking joke I've ever made. You know, who's barely a dad? Elon get Yes, he's a terrible I feel like Jack O'Brien just took over your body. Thank you? Uh so? Yeah, Musk shakes his head and grimaces. If I'm not in love, if I'm not with a

long term companion, I cannot be happy. And this is Strauss again. I explained that needing someone so badly that you feel like nothing without them, nothing without them is textbook codependence, which, again Neo Strauss, author of the game, is the guy explaining very reasonably. Yeah, it's incredible. Have you looked inside yourself and realized you have a problem and maybe that needing people for the way that you do isn't psychologically sound? Neil Strauss. Yeah, I wrote the

book that made negging into a household term. And I want to tell you I think you might not be healthily approaching your relationships. Dude. That's like Michael Jordan being like, you have a problem with gambling. I'm gonna need to talk to you about that. You gambled too much. Yeah, it's like O. J. Simpson telling you you have problems with not murdering people. I don't know, probably shouldn't go

into that. It's like the A. T. F telling you you're not treating compounds with seventy some odd children in them, well with your tear gas that you think wacing a third time is going to be the thing that got you out of this. If I have a motto, Sophia, it's a b W always be wacoing. That's the That's the fucking way I run. It wasn't hot, Robert. You're going to have to get over it. I know, I

know I will. Uh so. Yeah. So Neil Strauss very reasonably tells Elon Musk that he's codependent to ship, and here's what comes next. Musk disagrees strongly. It's not true, he replies petulantly, I will never be happy without having someone. Going to sleep alone kills me. He hesitates, shakes his head. Falters continues, it's not like I don't know what that feels like, being in a big empty house and the footsteps echoing through the hallway, no one there and no

one on the pillow next to you. Fuck. How do you make yourself happy in a situation like that? Um? You spread the funk out on the bed and you sleep eagles style. That's what I do. What the funk are you talking about? You enjoy the ship out of your fucking single ass self. There you find a sex worker, group of sex workers whose personalities you enjoy, and you pay them very well because money means nothing to you,

and this way you're not emotionally damaging somebody. You can just pay someone to cuddle with you at night because you're a billionaire and you don't have to consistently be marrying these people and leading them in these very stressful relationships. That's an option for you, Ellen, It would be fine. Wait what question? What year was this? Though? Robert? This is think about how much needs to be solved in you, and like how unhappy you are with yourself that you

cannot stand to be alone. Do we think theory that he just heard the song hate Sleeping Alone by Drake one too many times and got it stuck in his head and decided that's how you're just going to live his life. No, but that's why I was at that. His emotions, the most he's probably ever identified with anyone, has been like when he just listens to Drake, he's like, ah, that's what emotions are like. He's like, hate, sleeping alone, got it, got it? Got it? I hate that. That's me,

Drake says it. So I believe it. So this interview keeps going on. Quote when I was a child, there's one thing I said, must continues. His demeanor is stiff, yet in the sheen of his eyes and the trembling of his lips, a high tide of emotion is visible, pushing against the retaining walls. I never want to be alone, That's what I would say. His voice drops to a whisper. I don't want to be alone. So yeah, that says a lot. Uh. But you know what says even more, Sophia,

Is it goods and services? No, it's a line in the article where Elon Musk kind of let slip that he might believe in race science. Oh I forgot about that. How could I have forgotten? Oh? My god? Of course, according to Musk's best guess, our personalities might be eight

percent in nature and nurture. And by the way, there's a number of lines where he makes similar kind of points in the biography that, like, on their own you might not notice, but when you put him together, it's like, I think some of that a lot of that apartheid ship rubbed off on Elon. Yeah, And again I want to be fair in pointing out like he tried to get away from it, but like some of that ship

is plugged deep into his head. And this is part of the problem with being a kind of person who can't take any criticism, is that you both wind up codependent and wind up pushing some weird race science ship because you're not able to take criticism about yourself. Anyway, that's good that he's nice to his servants, So yeah,

that's great. That's good stuff. Uh yeah, Now, so much has been written about Musk that it's very hard for me to draw a line on how much to include, or what is reasonable to critique him on, or what is even true about the guy, because there's a lot of disagreements and stuff. I included some statements by his dad and Elon claims his Dad as a liar and untrustworthy,

and that's definitely true. One thing I'm sure that longtime Musk fans will ding me On is not touching enough on the subject on the period when Musk nearly lost everything betting on Tesla and SpaceX. This is the most mythically significant part of Elon's career, and the basic story is that at one point, both Tesla and SpaceX had yet to prove themselves with their key products. Both companies

hemorrhaged money. Must had to throw in almost every dollar he was worth to keep them afloat, and he executed an intricate series of moods that just barely managed to bring in enough VC dollars to keep both companies solvent until their products proved themselves. It is true that Must risk much more of his personal wealth than most tech entrepreneurs do. It's also true that he was never in danger of being poor, and he always had a few

million dollars in reserves. And it seems to me that most people who write about el Un focused on the fact that he gambled of his wealth and ignored the fact that the remaining five percent was still enough money for him to live uncomfortably for the rest of his life without working another day, or as other people who are poor call it, not gambling, not really gain. You still have enough money for the rest of your life.

That's not gambling. Yeah. Yeah. I would prefer instead to report on the elements of Musk Musk's success that don't get covered often. For one example, reporting in two thousand fifteen by The l A Times revealed that Musk's three big companies had benefited from an estimated four point nine billion dollars in government support. This money came in a variety of forms, including tax credits and rebates for the

years of solar panels and electric cars. It is interesting to me that Musk's bravery and investing so much of his own money is always mentioned in stories about his success, but the fortunes and government money that made it possible almost never are. A lot of this money came in the form of money from states who desperately tried to convince Tesla or SpaceX to set up facilities in their backyard. Nevada gave Tesla one point three billion dollars in incentives

to build a battery factory near Reno. SpaceX also got twenty million dollars in development subsidies to build a launch facility in Texas. And that, Sophia and my dear friends on the Internet, brings us to what will be the closing anecdote of this episode, how Elon musk destroyed the small town of Boca Chica. You heard this story, Sophia. I think I was reading a whole threat about it

actually yesterday for the first time. Yeah, it fucking rules. Um, Boca Chica does not matter in the big picture sense of the world. It's a tiny, tiny, tiny retirement community in the village on the Texas post um and it has almost no I think it only had like two permanent residents. Like it's what you'd call a snowbird community where old people have their retirement homes and come to at the end of like during the winter, basically because

it's it's got a nice beach. Uh. And I read a really good Esquire article about the destruction of this small town by Elon Musk uh And it opens with a Texas Parks and Wildlife magazine quote from nineteen two quote. The schemes and dreams of developers to build on this beautiful and desolate area die hard, but diet they always have. And this is more or less sums up why the property values here have stayed low and why old people who aren't rich have been able to afford to have

homes here. Um. It's never been taken over by hipsters or developers due to its isolation and its proximity to Texas poorest city, uh and difficult geography. Booka Chica is a perfect place for old people to spend their golden

years without having millions of dollars. Um. It's no wonder that Elon Musk picked the area for his rocket test range, stating in two thousand and eighteen, we've a lot of land and nobody around, so if it blows up, it's cool, which because the Columbus was like, well, there's no one here in America, so we're gonna just take it. When they were definitely people here. Musk started working to get the land at two that's in thirteen, claiming he was

going to make the commercial version of Cape Canaveral. He pushed for two bills in the Texas State House, one to reduce a private company's liability over nuisance complaints and run from the city of Brownsville, which is the city nearby that would allow city officials to deny public access

to beaches when space flight activities were on the calendar. Incidentally, Sophia, the beach around Boca Chico was known as the poor People's Beach for being one of the only chunks of nice coastline in Texas that was free to use for poor people. I read about that, and also from what I understand, it was a key wildlife corridors. It is

a lot of turtles, a lot of turtles. Musk claimed that SpaceX would make twelve launches a year for its commercial operations and that one day a man would leave Brownsville and go to Mars, which is how he got the local government on board. This was a lie. The plan quickly changed. Basically, he was like, this is where we're gonna like Cindament to Mars from. And then what he actually did is like, this is what we're going to. This is where we're going to test all of our

rockets that will funk up and break um. So that's what it be. Can blow up in a fucking old people's houses. Yep, and SpaceX started running almost daily tests when they said they would be doing like once a month on experimental rockets that were very loud, often dangerous, and lead led to the beach being closed much of the time. The roads were increasingly blocked. Life blocked. Life was made almost unlivable for many residents due to the

constant construction and experiments. Musk started buying up Boca Chica piece by piece. He offered extant residence three times their property value, which stands generous until you realize that property values were extremely low, which these old people who work their whole lives to be able to live on this beach.

We're only getting enough money to buy like a tiny, like a tiny shitty place in like a city, like not a place like they had, which was a nice place where they got to be out in the middle of nowhere near a beach and live comfortably. Like they couldn't buy anything that was like what they were losing. Even though he was making this quote unquote generous offer because the property of values here were low, which is why he was able to anyways, fucking frustrating um and

it's also always extremely low. When people funk with children or old people, it's like yeah, dude, yep, yep. As I type this, the community is rapidly dying and being turned into an industrial test site for experimental space rockets. And I'm sure if you were to have an honest conversation with him, Ellen would say that this was a

necessary sacrifice for humanities future. After all, what a few old people's retirement houses really matter when measured against the quest to help mankind escape the surly bonds of earth. This is the line of logic that kind of follow through all of Elon's bad deeds. Yes, it sucks for them, but look at what he's trying to do. It's what people think when Tesla pays out eighty six thar in

fines for polluting the environment with their toxic paint. It's what people think when they read that he told this to a worker who missed a crucial event to witness the birth of his child. Quote that is no excuse. I'm extremely disappointed. You need to figure out where your priorities are. We're changing the world and changing history, and you either commit or you don't. Ellen, and I saying this, Um, yeah,

it's what people think. Would they read articles like this September two, nineteen Bloomberg piece about how Tesla repeatedly violated the National Labor Relations Act by repeatedly threatening and retaliating against employees for attempting to organize a union. Yeah, that's the ship that really fucking pissed me off to He's so much union busting, tons of union busting. Dude that tries to claim he's a socialist to me makes me laugh so hard. I'm like, bro, do you know what

socialism is? It would mean workers own the means of production and also have the ability to say no to you about some things, which, like Ellen, think about that. That is not what you're fucking doing at all, you weird dictator. Yep. It's also what people think when they read articles like the one published in eight Pril of

two thousand eighteen in The Intelligencer. This revealed the fact that quote company officials labeled toxic exposures, muscle strains, and repetitive stress injuries as personal medical issues or minor accidents requiring only first aid, lowering the official injury count at the factory, which is again one of the most dangerous factories in the country. But hey, it's okay because he's

trying to save the world. What's a few hundred thousand. However, many people in pursuit of one man's probably with the tiny dicks dreams. If I know one thing that's never gone badly in history, Sophia, it's a man having a dream about how to save the world that he's willing to sacrifice other people for. That always works. Yeah, it works great. But you know, I'm gonna retract my statement about people with small dicks. You know, doesn't mean they're worse.

That's in fact, I don't care. Elon Musk has a huge dick and he's an asshole. He's definitely as a huge dick, and I don't care, and it doesn't matter. And I don't know why I brought his dick into it. I'm now disgusted just picturing it. I know we've all become worse because of our exposure to Ellen. I'm blaming him for that. Great I'll join you. Thank you. Yeah uh. Some of those injuries and medical issues at the Tesla factory were caused by the fact that Elon hates the

color yellow. The Intelligence who reports on claims made in a Reveals News article quote. Among the more baffling the tales in the report are several sections about how Elon Musk's personal tastes superie to have affected the factory safety for the worst. His preferences were well known and led to cutting back on those standard safety signals. Musk apparently really hates the color yellow, so instead of using the aforementioned Hugh Lane, lines in the factory floor are painted

in shades of gray. Tesla denies this and sent reveal photos of rails and posts painted yellow in the factory. He also is not into having too many signs or the beeping sound forklifts make in reverse, all things that would seem important to keeping staff safe. It's just a matter of time before someone gets killed. A former safety lead set of the conditions in the factory. One employee attempted to call attention to these problems before eventually resigning.

I could, and probably should go on, but this article is too long already. We haven't even talked about the time Ellen accused that heroic Cave diver of being a pedophile, nor have we discussed the fact that, yeah, I know, he's so shitty. We haven't also discussed the fact that, once he got in trouble for slandering a hero he hired a convicted felon to stock that heroic cave diver and try to find dirt on him. That's another thing

that happens. But this article has to end at some fucking point, and the real question here, the thing that we have to ask, is whether or not anything Musk has made himself a part of or started is nearly as revolutionary or important as he claims it is. If this guy is really saving the old and bringing humanity into the future, uh, then you could say, or other some people would argue that a lot of his bad behavior is justified. At least that's the argument that could

be made. If he's not, then he's just a rich asshole who got richer by pretending to save the world so he could get jacked off by worshipful fanboys by while participating in the plunder of our planets diminishing resources. I cannot answer this question definitively, but derive it a fool that I am. I can quote one of the more self reflective chunks of Ashley Vance's book about Musk,

and I'm going to do that now. To close us out, the economist Tyler Cohen, who has earned some measure of fame in recent years for his insightful writings about the state of the technology industry and ideas on where it may go falls into that first camp and the great stagnation. Cohen bemoaned the lack of big technological advances and argued that the American economy has slowed and wages have been

depressed as a result. In a figurative since the American economy has enjoyed lots of low hanging fruits since at least the seventeenth century, whether it be free land, lots of immigrant labor, or powerful new technologies, he wrote, Yet during the last forty years that low hanging fruit started disappearing, and we started pretend think it was still there. We have failed to recognize that we already technological plateau, and the trees are more bare than we would like to think.

That's it, That's what has gone wrong. And his next book, Averages Over, Cohen predicted an unromantic future in which a great divide had occurred between the halves and they have nots and Cohen's future, huge gains and artificial intelligence will lead to the elimination if many of today's high employment lines of work. The people who thrive in this environment will be very bright and able to complement the machines

and team effectively with them. As for the unemployed masses, well, many of them will find jobs going to work for the halves, who will employ teams of nanny's housekeepers and gardeners. If anything Musk is doing might alter the course of mankind towards a rosier future, Cohen can't find it. Coming up with true breakthrough ideas as much harder today than in the past, According to Cohen, because we've already mined

the bulk of the big discoveries. During a luncheon Virginia, Cohen described Musk as not a genius inventor, but as an attention seeker, and not a terribly good one at that. I don't think a lot of people care about getting into Mars, he said. And it seems like a very expensive way to drive whatever breakthroughs you might get from it. And then you hear about the hyperloop. I don't think it is any intention of doing it. You have to wonder if it's not meant to just be publicity for

his companies. As for Tesla, it might work, but you're still just pushing the problems back somewhere else. You still have to generate power. It could be that he is challenging convention less than people think. That's where I want to end. Wow, Wow, why when? Why you excited for all the people who are gonna get piste off at us? Yeah? I mean, I can't wait for people to to tell me that I should probably die and that I'm a cunt.

I can't really wait. I'm excited for people to tell me that they're so unhappy that I'm confident in that I don't just giggle in the background anymore. I am excited for people to be briefly angry at me and then lose interest in being angry at me, because that's what happens when people get angry at ment on the Internet and instead focus their rage on Sophia. Because misogyny is very deeply boiled into our culture, and that slame

and funk all of you for that. Sorry Sophia. Yeah, I'm the one who wrote fourteen thousand words about how I don't like Elon Musk, so please do come after me. I will not respond to you, because I don't care what weird Elon Musk nerds say on Twitter. Um, but do mail us knives, either as threats or as a gift. Either way, we get knives. I want a knife as a gift. Again, include a happy face so I know it's it's chill. Yeah, I'll take knives as gifts or threats. Uh,

all kinds of attention are equal to me. All right, Sophia, you want to go out with a plug. Sure, I am releasing my first stand up album, Father's Day on Father's Day. Um, I don't have a father, so it's

gonna be really fun and you guys should listen. And you should also listen to my podcast for Day Fiance with Myles Gray and Private Parts on Known with Court Kosak shout Out and yeah, follow me Twitter, Instagram, So listen to Sophia's album so that you can understand what it's like not to have a father and understand what it's like to be Elon Musk's kids exactly. If that's the last dick we're ending on Beautiful