Citizen Elon, Episode 3: Vox Dei

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Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome President elect Donald J. Trump, First Lady Melaia Trump, and the Trump family.

It's around two thirty am, the night of the election, West Palm Beach, Florida.

Well, I want to.

Thank you all very much.

This is great.

These are our friends.

We have thousands of friends in this.

Incredible movement.

Pretty much everyone was expecting a close race, the polls, the pundits, even the candidates. But by midnight on the East Coast, we more or less new Trump had done it, and not just Trump.

Let me tell you, we have a new star. The star is born Nylan noh he is now He's an amazing guy.

By the next morning, it was official. Trump won Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, North Carolina, Georgia, every swing state but Nevada and Arizona. Later that week he'd win those two. Kamala Harris called Trump the next morning to congratulate him. Biden called two at four pm. Harris gave her concession speech.

I was relieved and grateful that we had a decision so fast.

Joan Donovan, again journalism professor, disinformation expert, spent a lot of time thinking and writing about January sixth of twenty twenty. She's been watching Elon Musk plus his army of followers and fanboys. In the months before the election, they posted so many conspiracy theories Democrats were going to steal the vote again. You can't trust the media and trust the polls. That anything other than a landslide victory for Trump is fraud. And so she figured if Harris wins, or even if

And so it's very difficult to know what they're going to do. People are planning different kinds of violence and destruction if Trump hadn't won again.

This wasn't theoretical fear. Post election things are mostly calm. Three weeks ago, not so much. Ballot boxes set on fire in Washington and Oregon and Arizona, bomb threats called into polling places in Georgia and Pennsylvania. Elon tweeting like a maniac. Felt like we were in a tinderbox and he was holding the match.

And so at least we know what the outcome is, we can accept that outcome and can move forward with some social assurances that the election had not been rigged.

There were so many warnings from both sides, from experts like Joan about the future of democracy. But then it worked. The person with the most votes won. Like Elon said when he brought Trump back on Twitter, the voice of the people is the voice of the gods.

I'm Max Chafkin. This is citizen Elon.

So we made it post election. Trump definitely won. Something else that's indisputable.

Elon won. How did he get there? How did he do it? James?

Are you there not hearing James from Flat Rocket? On November fourth, the night before the election, Elon scheduled one of his town halls. It was supposed to be virtual and it be live streamed on Twitter as usual. The event started late, a few things went wrong. Elon got frustrated.

You know, I think, let's uh, let's cancel this. Give him this in some technical challenges, and.

He announced instead of this town hall Q and A, folks should listen to the interview he'd done that day on Joe Rogan's show at two and a half hour podcast.

Good Joe Wrogan Experience.

First of all, thank you so much for buying Twitter. You're looking so much. I think you changed the course of history. I really do.

If you've ever listened to Rogan, you know the conversations wander. They started with video games.

Surgeons who regularly play video games make less errors.

How awesome eating meat is, how creatine is good for you.

Yeah, creatine is actually a neotropic, believe it or not, but.

Factory farming isn't. And about the exact right dosage of amphetamines in higher doses.

Man, I've seen people turn into just raging monsters. They're just angry, like extremely angry all the time.

Yeah, they're messed up.

They went through a long list of Elon's grievances, which basically boiled down to anything stopping him from making money is bad, if not evil.

They decided SpaceX was a target like Stalin's, like chief Torturer. One of his famous quotes was show me the man, and I'll show you the crime.

Right, And eventually they got to the White House Correspondent's Dinner twenty eleven. Rogan remembers Obama basically saying Donald Trump, you know what, You'll never.

Be president of the United States.

You see Trump and the ions going okay, I'm on the floor.

The degree to which they attacked Trump at that whitest Correspon Center was really so over the top. It was like making everyone uncomfortable. They twisted the knife big on Trump, and I was like, man, this is not good karma, you know.

And there it is a shared sense of grievance, humiliation, a revenge story.

Elon and Trump.

They really are the same person, and Elon seems to know it. But then Rogan brought up the impetus Obama wasn't roasting Trump for the hell of it. He was responding to the literal conspiracy theory Trump successfully spread about the president not being born in America. And what's funny is Elon went ahead and rewrote history.

He asked Rogan, was Trump actually saying that.

No, he definitely was.

He was definitely saying he's from Kenya.

Trump, Rogan said, he was actually a victim of a busted up information ecosystem, people wanting to manipulate him. Elon, though he stayed on message, he turned somberly, looked straight into the camera and said, men.

Need to vote. That is the biggest issue. So I'm just like saying, there's a message to the men out there. Vote like your life depends on it, because I think it does. Vote quote tomorrow like your life depends on it.

Nothing is more important. Oh.

For a few hours on election day, it seemed Elon worried he'd backed the wrong horse. He was quiet he'd gambled so much on Trump. The money, yes, but also his reputation. Tesla's customers they're fans of the old Elon Musk, not the guy who tweets about immigrants replacing white people. Mostly they're Kamala voters. In the late afternoon, Musk voted in Brownsville, right on the Mexico border. He posed for a photo op, then he got on his plane headed to mar A Lago, where Trump was. By eight thirty

It's kind of rare for people to change their strikes.

That's Josh Green again. He works with me at BusinessWeek. Josh was skeptical of Elon's commitment to politics, that is, before Elon started putting his money where his mouth.

Was, and the fact that he's kind of rocketed onto the scene no pun intended. What's exciting about Trump, at least from a journalistic standpoint, is there are always these new characters and storylines, and like, you know, Elon is like the star of Season two, Episode one of the Trump White House.

Elon's everywhere in mar al Lago on election night, Uncle Elon on Instagram and Trump's family photos, at meetings with lawmakers and DC on the phone with Vladimir Zelenski. Trump turns it into a running joke. Wherever he goes, Elon goes too.

You know, he likes his place.

I can't get him out of here.

He just likes this place.

He's done a fantastic job. Really an incredible miss.

Insult wrapped in compliments. We've seen it before. Trump has a long history of firing people. It was true on The Apprentice, it was true in the White House almost always.

You can see it coming, you know, when Trump starts to get annoyed with people.

You can kind of feel it in the Richter's scale in Washington, like, there will be little asides in Politico or Washington Post stories, and you know they'll be leaked anonymously by Trump aids, and then Trump himself will say something or tweet something belittling, like publicly humiliating him to sort of, you know, assert his dominance and express his annoyance, you know, and then all of a sudden, one day it will just be announced that, like, you know, he's no longer in the end circle.

Or that's one possibility. There's others too.

A week after the election, Trump officially named Elon the co head of the still unrealized Department of Government Efficiency. By the way, the Department of Government Efficiency doge. Elon named it for a cryptocurrency he likes. Trump says it will become quote potentially the Manhattan Project of our time.

So really, at the end of the day, it's what used to be in Washington, a blue ribbon commission. It's basically this kind of phony concoction that you whip into being to give important people something to do and something to talk about, hopefully draw some media attention. But that doesn't have any real power. And as far as I can see, Elon's DOGE office doesn't have any real power.

The thing is, and maybe it's because I've spent nearly two decades watching Elon star grow. Part of me thinks that Josh could be wrong, that Doge could have power. Either way, Elon's already won. In the days following the election, He's gotten richer, a lot richer.

By Friday of that week, his.

Net worth had gone up by fifty billion dollars. And that doesn't even account for money that could be coming in in the form of defense contracts or killed investigations into his business dealings, or new subsidies or regulations that could be tweaked to turn his money into more money. Already, Trump's picked Brendan Carr, a massive fan of Elon's, to run the fc SEE, which means Elon's satellite internet company, Starlink, is much more likely to get money from the government.

I asked Josh about this.

I don't know what the bright line is between just being like a kind of a human hurricane in Washington and like destroying these ethical and political norms and being an out and out authoritarian. But but it looks, you know, it looks more and more like we're gonna we're gonna test those bounds every day.

I don't know where we go from here. There's a case to be made that right now, Elon is the most powerful person on this planet, maybe in history too.

Elon Musk, he's a unicorn. He's suey generous.

David NASA professor meritith of history at CuNi and biographer, and I've.

Written a bunch of books, including biographies of Andrew Carnegy, William Randolph Hurst, Joseph Kennedy.

David's beat is really powerful men, and here he sees a lot of parallels with Elon.

Let me take but one example. He is not the first rich man to fund a candidate in the hopes of getting a quid or a quo for his quids, or however you say it, getting some sort of payback. What's different is that this is not dark money. His is anything but dark. I mean, it glows, it sparkles. He is out front saying this is what I'm doing, you know, and this is why I'm doing it, and that is unprecedented. In the past, huge donors to campaigns who saw it influenced thereafter kept it quiet.

Like Carnegie, the guy who built America steel industry. He was rich, like Elon or Hurst, who the movie Citizen Kane is literally based on, had mega cultural influence like Elon or Kennedy the original Kennedy had immense political influence like Elon, But David says those guys were mostly behind the scenes. They didn't act the way that Elon does.

The other thing that's new is that this guy has more He's more presumptuous than any business leader I've seen.

For instance, Elon's live Twitter interview with Trump back in August, when the idea of a government efficiency commission was first floated. David points out that was Elon's idea.

Nobody talked about him entering the government until he did. You know, if you look at if you listen to that interview, about fifty minutes in, Trump mentioned something about inflation, and Musk says, yeah, you're right, and I think we need a Department of government efficiency.

I think we need like a government efficiency commission to say, like, hey, where are we spending money that's sensible?

Where is it not sensible?

And would you agree that we need to take a look at governspending and have perhaps a government efficiency commission that just I mean, I think it'd be great to just have a government efficiency commission that takes a look at these things. And I'd be happy to help out on such a commission.

And Trump doesn't know what to do about it, and then he.

Says, yeah, you know, it's funny.

The thing that was surprising to me in that interview was how subservient he allowed himself to beat a Trump.

He was subservient, He rolled over on any number of questions. But then he saw his opportunity when inflation was mentioned, and he must have known this was what he was going to do, but he waited almost an hour to put in in his plug.

David says he wants not the first guy to try buying himself political influence. All three of his moguls, he calls it my moguls. By the way, that's what they tried to do too. But the presidents they helped put in office mostly ignored them focused on making their voters happy, which you know, that's democracy working this time. We don't know those moguls of the past. They didn't have Elon social media, following a newspaper, even a chain of newspapers.

I just see a lot of triumphalism.

Ellie Reeve again an expert on right wing extremism. We spoke with her in episode one. She says that Twitter has been different since Elon bought it, and especially since he came out in favor of Trump. It's not just that there's a lot of hate, it's that the people promoting hate have gotten less restrained.

Like I was just watching this video hosted by Benny Johnson, who used to work for BuzzFeed in other places, talking to him Trump official, who was saying joking but not joking, We're going to rain down hell fire when we take office. We're going to deport all these people and their kids and their grandparents, and it's going to be awesome.

Ten million people in growing anchor babies, their parents, their grandparents. We're gonna put kids in cages. It's gonna be glorious. We're gonna deport a lot of people. I will reign hell on Washington, DC. We've talked about this.

Like that's the kind of stuff.

I see real names, real faces saying the stuff you could only say anonymously ten years ago.

Elon says he bought Twitter to save free speech, to bring back the town Square. But I don't know. I'm not convinced what he's built. It feels less like a public forum and more like a soapbox for him and his side to stand on.

I have affection for my.

Three guys, my three moguls, Carnegie, Hurst and Joe Kennedy. I don't have the same affection for Elon Musk. I think in the long term, Elon Musk is more dangerous, is smarter, and has amassed a kind of political and cultural power that no one should have that kind of power.

Maybe it's that you have been able to figure out, like what matters to him beyond himself.

That's absolutely right.

What I can't figure out about Musk is what drives him. He says what drives him is he wants to go to Mars. At various times, he says what drives him is that he wants more smart children to be born. You know where the country is going to fall apart. At various times he wants to save the planet, and I don't know what's most important in the end. Somehow I think that he he has succeeded in so many different areas that he thinks he's godlike.

Something occurred to me Musk's favorite saying, the voice of the people is the voice of the gods. Maybe what he actually means is the voice of the people is whatever I say it is.

He can't be president, he can't be king, but he can be God. And I think the more he achieves, the more power he amasses, the more he thinks he is Zeus, you know, And it's you know, it's up to us to say, no, we don't want a Zeus. We want to live in a democracy.

What David's saying, I've been thinking about it.

Of course, it's dramatic, but it also captures the dramatic scale of Elon's ambitions and what we've made of them looking back. Something I got wrong about Elon from the start, when his whole thing was just rockets.

And climate change. He seemed like some.

Sort of superhero, like larger than life, more than just some guy Elon.

Musk is not zeus.

What he is, though, is a celebrity, and we've got a lot of say in that. After all, Fox popular the people we do make up hathy EQ.

Citizen.

Elon is produced by Lena Mesitzis, Rayon Harmonci is our senior editor, Blake Maples handles engineering and Emma.

Sanchez fact checking.

Brendan Francis Newham is our executive producer, and Sage Bauman is the head of Bloomberg Podcasts. Big thanks to the Elon Ink crew, David Popadopoulos, Naomi Shaven, Magnus Hendrickson, Stacy Wong listen every Tuesday for breaking Elon news. Thanks as well to our Bloomberg colleagues David Fox, Julia Press, Dana Hall, Sarah Fryar, Kurt Wagner, Josh Green, Mark Million, Margaret Sutherland, Alison Mobley, Jackie Kessler, Ariel Brown, Chris Nocenzo, and Albert Hicks.

I'm Max Schaft.

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