Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio news. Let me tell you we have a new star.
A star is born Elon pumped up on mars Uson Kennedy.
He is the Thomas Edison plus plus plus of our age.
Probably his whole life is from a position of insecurity.
I feel for the guy.
I would say ninety eight percent really appreciate what he does. But those two percent that are nasty, they are I'll pit in four post.
We are meant for great things in the United States of America, and Elon reminds.
Us of that we don't have a fourth branch of governments called Elon Musk.
Welcome to Elon, Inc. Bloomberg's weekly podcast about Elon Musk. It's Tuesday, February twenty fifth. I'm Max Chafkin, and today we have.
Another special episode.
We are bringing you a conversation we had live on stage at the on Air Fest in Brooklyn on Thursday, and it was all about Doge, featuring me your normal host, David Papadopolis, Bloomberg's Elon Musk reporter Dana Hall, and a special guest, McKenna Kelly of Wired Magazine, who, along with a bunch of other reporters at Wired has really been
all over the Doge story. We were so excited to talk to her about Elon's journey through the federal government, but before we get there, it was another chaotic, fascinating, wild weekend of Musk news, especially Musk news around Trump. On Saturday night, federal workers, including judges, nurses, office works, everyone received an email from the Office of Personnel Management the OPM, asking them to list five bullet points of
their accomplishments of the past week. And then on X Elon said if you didn't do that, then you would be fired. And there was confusion in the days hours of followed. You had government officials saying they didn't have to respond, Musk saying they would definitely be fired. And so we're going to break that all down and to do that. Joining me is Kurt Wagner, Bloomberg social media reporter and of course the QB one of this podcast.
Hey, Kurt, QB one, I appreciate that, IMAX.
Hey Kurt, all right, so Kurt, you read this email.
Let's start just tell us what happened, and I want to hear what you think is kind of going on, what Elon must be trying to do here.
So, yeah, as you mentioned on Saturday, federal employees received this email with the subject line what did you do last week? And the directive was to essentially reply to the email with a bullet pointed list of five things that they accomplished in their job. And I think it's sort of twofold here, right. The first is perhaps the obvious, like Elon is simply challenging people to justify their existence in the federal government, justify their job, justify their role.
And it's some thing that we can talk about, but that we've seen him do at Twitter over the years and some of his other businesses. The other thing that's sort of more interesting here, and again a bit of a repeat from Elon, is he believes that there are people who work at the federal government who actually do not exist.
Right.
His sort of theory is, if you don't reply to the email, maybe that's because you're not a real person, and therefore you know, we shouldn't be paying you. And again, this is something when he took over Twitter, before he paid out a big lump sum of restricted stock units. Right after he took over, he actually had executives at the company combing through to make sure, like are we
paying real people. He's sort of paranoid at this idea that companies have like ghost employees on the books or something like that, and so this would be a way to like find those people and eliminate them.
Apparently, the experience of being an employee receiving an email on a mysterious email on Saturday afternoon from a random email address not not signed by person saying you need to like come up with five bullet points and send this by Monday or you might be fired Like that?
Would I would? I would not.
This would be the.
Only thing I would think about for the next like seventy two hours if I were in their shoes, Like this seems like just pretty much an effort to like drive workers crazy, Like beyond verifying that they're real, is the idea just to like make them feel bad or something.
Well, I think there's an element of that, right, And you have to remember why this is happening in sort of the broader context that's going on right now, which is that elon Is is aggressively slashing the budget. He's looking for people to take buyouts, he's looking for people to resign and leave, right, and so the more kind of pressure you can apply to the workforce, be it implicit or in this case very explicit, right like do
this or you are fired. I think the more he thinks he's going to weed out sort of the people who don't really want to be there, those long time you know, kind of lifetime bureaucrats, if you will, who maybe are just arresting investing, as we would say in the tech industry. And so I do think part of this is the strategy just keep his thumb on people, make sure that they feel that there's constantly somebody looking over their shoulder, and you know, eventually people will weed
themselves out. That makes his job of cutting the budget even easier.
And just like with the fork in the road email, this was the email he sent about a month ago from the same email address. And Kurt, there's the other sort of point of comparison, which is that when you're talking about a private company, of course, like firing employees, laying people off is a pretty effective way of cutting costs. Not clear at least when we're talking about the federal budget.
Yeah, I think to your point, in a private company, usually salary benefits, you know, for one K match those types of like, employee costs are a much are pretty significant percentage of the overall budget, right, But I think and I don't know the specifics, unfortunately, but I think when you look at the scale of the federal budge, you're not going to have the same percentage of that sort of be wrapped up in employee and HR related costs, right.
And so again, I think this is as as much symbolism as anything, right Max, I mean, like, his whole thing here is that the government has bloated, that he's challenged, that these workers don't do anything, that they've sort of just been kicking back and cash and paychecks, you know, on the American taxpayer's dime for years. And so I think part of this is cutting you know, budget, but I think a bigger part of this might just be the symbolism of what it means to significantly reduce headcount at.
The federal post as HR strategy, right.
I mean, like, and I think that's part of why we're seeing so much confusion. That's why he's saying, Oh, you have to do this, Well, maybe you don't have to do this, maybe you do have to do this. Like, the point is not to get any kind of response. And clearly Musk has said already that they're not going to really read these responses. It's just the act of saying, look, you, federal workers, you're not doing anything.
I think that's right.
I think that there's a huge part of this that is reformative theater as much as it is effective government cutting.
Yeah, and it's a rhetorical question.
The goal here is not to legitimately find out, you know, hey, what are the two million federal workers doing, is to show them that he thinks that they're doing nothing. And I think more importantly, to show Donald Trump Republican voters, you know, Congress, that he is he is really doing something here. He's he's going to war with the quote unquote administrative state.
Right.
And I think these supporters of this strategy, their argument has been, well, hey, this takes what five minutes, Right, Like, if you're actually doing your job all week, you should somewhat easily be able to send over, hey, here's a list of five things. But to your point, Max, Like, that is not the intention of this, right Like, part
of it is to say, justify your job. But again, part of this is a sort of psychological warfare, right, make people uncomfortable, make people, remind people that he's sitting there watching every move that you make, and sort of, you know, challenge them in a way that I don't think a lot of people are used to being challenged.
So, Kurt, we're talking about like what Elon Musk may be trying to do in terms of his in terms of politically, in terms of the messaging, but like do you understand the plan practically? Like what are they going to do with these responses? And like is this really a money saving measure?
So I think it's a good question, right, because if you have two million people sending in five bullet points, like just manually to review that stuff in any meaningful well way seems almost impossible. And actually, again to go back to the Twitter days, I mentioned the whole challenge to engineers, Hey, print out your code to prove that you've been doing something over the last thirty days. You know, a couple hours after that, they were telling people, hey, shred this code.
We're not actually going to do these reviews. Right.
It was again sort of like a scare tactic that in that regard nothing came of it. So part of me wonders if this will ultimately you know, fall into that same bucket. If anyone will actually manually review this stuff, they'll just simply see, okay, who responded and who didn't and kind of draw a line there there was a report, and forgive me because I can't remember who who reported this. That perhaps AI right, right, they would use GROC to like, you know, quickly analyze this stuff.
I suppose that is a possibility.
But again, if we're looking at what he's done, historically, these types of challenges have mostly been performative, right, And so I part of me thinks that, especially with the scale we're dealing with here, with two million government employees, they just want people to reply to the email, prove that they are a real human being that exists within this government, and take all the people who didn't reply and deal with them separately.
Let's talk about the political fallout and the legal fallout, right, So one thing that happened is.
You had, you had some lawsuits. You had you had employee unions.
Who are already I've already tried to oppose Musk's authority to do this and OPM's authority to do this, adding this email into their you know, into the litigation.
Yeah, And advising federal workers to ignore this too, right, saying basically, don't take the bait, don't don't respond to this thing. There's a lot of confusion as to what people should or shouldn't do. And again, let's look back at a little history lesson we have from Twitter.
Max s.
You'll remember in November of twenty twenty two, shortly after Elon took over, he sent that fork in the Road email that we're all now familiar with because of the government example. But he sent this email fork in the Road to employees and said basically, click this button to commit to being hardcore and staying with the company. If you don't click the button, I will take that as
your resignation, and you know there's the door. Well, he is being sued, he being Elon is being sued by hundreds of employees who did not click the button, right and where they're terminated. And their argument, which has actually been pretty successful in court thus far, is that not replying to an email does not equate to a resignation.
Right.
So even if Elon says, hey, if you don't reply, you resign, lawyers and judges are not agreeing with that analysis. They're basically saying, you know, that's the equivalent of being laid off. And being laid off and voluntarily resigning are two very different things in the world of corporate America, because one of them yields a lot bigger and more
valuable severance than the other. It just got an update, believe it or not, this morning, heard from a former employee who's part of this sort of mass lawsuit that's going on. It's slowly but surely working in the employees' favor.
Twenty for twenty twenty employees who have gone through arbitration have all won full severance from Twitter for their layoffs, and so they're setting a precedent right now that the strategy that Elon used to cut costs at Twitter did not really work, or at least it delayed the payments, right, but he's still going to have to, it seems like, pay all these employees what they're owed, and so again sets sort of a bit of a precedent for what we might see here with the government as well.
There's another factor here too, which is that one of the cool things about taking over Twitter and sending out these aggressive tweets is that you are the decider, right like Elon Muskuld just like more or less. You know, of course, there was litigation he could just get away with, like firing people willy nilly. Now he has all these other constituents. And I think that's one of the most interesting things about this episode.
We had.
First of all, we had zero PM, perhaps because of the issue you just brought up, put out a memo essentially saying, actually, this is voluntary. We also had a bunch of cabinet officials, including cash Tell, the new director of the FBI, saying publicly or semi publicly, that staff
should hold off right. And this to me feels like a real first of all, a difference between what's happening at Doze and what happened at Twitter, but also perhaps you know, the beginnings of a real rift between Musk and other members of the Trump administration.
Yeah.
I mean, I think you hit the nail on the head with the most obvious difference here, which is that with Twitter and with all of his businesses, Musk is the boss, right, He is the official decider of things and has that control and power, and people might disagree with how he wields that power, but those are private businesses for the most part that he can do with
what he wants. He is, now, to your point, sort of operating in a federal government position, and not only that, but a position that people are very confused about in terms of the legality of all of these things that he's doing. Right, a lot of what he's doing is being challenged in courts, are being challenged by other politicians,
So the landscape is not equivalent. Even though he's sort of taking the same playbook that he's used as a CEO of a private company and applied it to a federal government situation, those are two very different arenas for him to be doing this, and so I think that is adding to a lot of the confusion and will add eventually to the inevitable legal situation that arises from this.
All right, So we'll be following this closely, Kurt, and we want to come back to you very soon to check in on all the other developments that are happening in the world of X. We've seen controversies around community notes, there's some weirdness around rock and I think we'll have to get to that all at another time, but for now, thank you for coming in.
We'll talk soon, but I still want you by the end of.
The day, Kurt to put together that list, So please get to work or ask Rock to do it for you.
Yeah, easy, easy. You can expect my resignation very shortly.
Max.
Thank you all right, Kurt Wagner, thanks for coming.
Thanks guys.
So Doge, we've been talking about Doge.
It has been operating as much as you can say it's operating anyway. For the past month, We've had a lot of things happen and we wanted with this next segment, which is from the live taping we did last week at the on Air Festival in Brooklyn, to kind of take a step back, give people sort of a recap.
On what's happened and a primer.
And again we brought in McKenna Kelly, who is a reporter from Wired has been doing a ton of reporting talking to federal workers it seems every day, to kind of help us do that. A couple of notes on this taping we were recording just as it was revealed that Elon Musk would be speaking at Seapack and that he had fathered another child, So you'll hear those come up. Although there have been a couple of beats to the story that we will not hit. We will not hit
Musk's kind of surreal appearance at Seapack. He looked, I don't know how to say this. He was more detached from reality than usual, wielding a chainsaw.
We also did not get at.
The paternity dispute that has since unfolded. I have no doubt we will get on to both of those topics on a later episode, but the conversation as a whole was really great and we thought you'd want to hear it.
Welcome Dylan Ink, Bloomberg's weekly podcast about Elon Musk. I'm your host, David Papatoppols, and we are live on AirFest in Brooklyn. I'm joined on stage by two stalwarts of the podcast. We have our number one muscologist at Bloomberg, Dana Hull. Daniel Welcome, he did. And we have Business Week writer Max Chafkin, Maxilo.
Hello.
And we have a special guest with this as well, from Wired, McKenna. Kelly.
Good to be here.
McKenna, thanks for joining us.
Don't forget the crowd, David.
There's a lot of people in your crowd, right, and we also have an enormous crowd here. Now it's standards thank you for having good Are you guys ready ready? Okay, So we are indeed gonna spend plenty of time talking doze here under a relentlessly pressing and driving Elon Musk. Doze has suddenly become perhaps the biggest story in the US, and you will come away I swear from this session as a doge expert. But we're gonna break the ice a little with some non doze news, actual non doze news,
if there could be such a thing. So I'm gonna go around here. I'm gonna ask each of you to tell me the biggest non doge in the world of Elon Musk, of course, the biggest non doge story you're tracking this week, Dana Hall.
Okay.
So, so Elon has spent a lot of time in the last twenty four hours tweeting about the astronauts that are on the space station, and also that he thinks the space station program in general should be ended two or three years earlier than originally intended.
These astronauts in the space station are soon.
Where So these two NASA astronauts have been on the space station since June. They went up there on.
A Boeing craft, and they want to come home.
No, they actually are very happy doing research. They are going to come home on a SpaceX vehicle.
And Elon is.
Like they've been stranded up there because of politics, which is not true, like NASA has said very clearly, like they're not stranded. They're doing research. The whole point of the ISS is like international cooperation. But Elon is fixated on this idea that the astronauts are somehow stuck there.
Wasn't Boeing's supposed to take them home.
Boeing was supposed to take them home, and NASA made the decision that it was safer not to send them home on a fire. They didn't fire them, they just made the decision let's keep them up here. We'll send them home on a SpaceX craft. But now Musk is like, oh, the reason why they're there is because of politics, which is not true. Like if it was because of politics, they could have come home earlier.
But they're atsuts happening though as soon as this week, and he's taking bringing them back to Earth. He's not taking them directly to Mars.
Correct, So SpaceX is going to bring the astronauts home problem in March. That's the latest. But Separately, Musk is also saying that the whole International Space Station program should be ended earlier, and ultimately he just wants to focus on Mars.
Okay, that's what you got there now, Max Chafkin.
So I wanted to pick a story that had nothing to do with which truly and it's clearly baby number thirteen.
But wait a minute, he's that's political too because of his whole like nadalism.
It's a conservative influencer.
You came here to talk about baby number thirteen. That's what you're bringing.
I'm excited about it.
Baby number thirteen. Elon Musk is danna say, girl?
Do we know it's a boy?
Okay? Cool?
All right? So anyway, basically, keep a long story short.
He has been having all these babies, and we learned, we learned of a new baby. And I say thirteen as if it's a definitive number, and I guess I feel compelled to add and Dana would do it if I didn't that that's thirteen that we know of, right, because he has said we.
Know the floor, we don't know what the sea is exactly.
Yeah, so but mckennath hinted at it.
But yeah, he's got this idea, and this is an idea that now I'm drifting into politics, but that has is taking off in kind of conservative intellectual circles that everyone needs to have more babies. It's called natalism, and Elon has kind of put a spin on that that involves repopulating the planet personally.
I guess tell us who the mom is.
Yeah, well it's it's Ashley Sainclair, who is a columnist or a media personality or whatever. For the Babylon Bee, which was the This is going deep into like Elon lore, but the Babylon Bee is like an Onion knockoff if you don't know it, it's kind of like an anti
woke onion or something. And one theory for like why Elon Musk bought Twitter for forty four billion dollars, laid off all the employees, became a conservative media personality, put three hundred million dollars in Donald Trump started taking apart all the stuff that we're doing today is that he was mad that Twitter banned the Babylon b So it all kind of comes together.
Okay, baby number thirteen McKenna.
Yeah, I'm not moving away from the politics unfortunately, but it does not don't relate it as much breaking news. Musk is going to speak at Seapack tonight. Wow, And it's wild to think about. Just like a year ago, before the first assassination attempt on Trump, Musk was still flip flopping right. He was this free speech warrior, bought Twitter, so he's leaning in this kind of like right word direction, this anti censorship brigade that he had. But now he
is just a full out. He's in a Republican white house, he is running all of this stuff, and he has made the full switch. And tonight he is one of the figureheads speaking at spe Seapack.
Well, he truly is all in. I didn't know that. So you are you breaking this as we speak?
Breaking it as we speak?
So who's sending the headlines on that? We got to get that out there.
Okay, Seapack if you don't know, it's the Conservative Political Action Committee And they're like very like Project twenty twenty five adjacent, Heritage Foundation adjacent, like there's they do Seapack and hungry Like.
Yeah, I mean this is where all the conservatives go to talk policy, meet each other, mix every year. It's like the conference for the whole party.
Okay, so we've got astronauts coming back from the moon. Max thinks he's got a baby over there. He's tracking, and we got must showing up at seapack. Okay, we're going to move on to doge, and we're going to go back as we think about dose. We're going to go back to the very beginning when the whole doze thing began. August of last year. Elon Musk is quote unquote interviewing Donald Trump, and as he's interviewing him, he raises the idea about, Hey, what about this doge thing?
I got this idea? What say you, mister President? And let's listen to that audio clip.
I think it'd be great to just have a government efficiency commission that takes a look at these things and and just ensures that the taxpayer money that the taxpayers are harder money, is spent in a good way.
And I'd be happy to help out on such a commission.
I'd love it if when.
You you're the greatest cutter, I mean, I look at what you do, you want to they go I won't mention the name of the company, but they go on strike, and you say that's.
Okay, You're all gone.
You're all gone, So every one of you is gone, and you are the greatest. You would be very good, Oh you would love it.
For a second, here in the audience, I want to hear from you. Clap if you feel like you have a good understanding of what doze is. Clap mak Okay, now, clap if you feel like you really kind of don't have a very good understanding at all. Okay, so that's more who don't than do? Kenna? You are all doze all the time right now? Wired, Tell these folks what they need to know about dose? What is dog? Give me a letter by letter the D the O.
Tell you what is the most granular level? True? It stands for the Department of Government Efficiency. It is in fact based on the shiba Inu DOJ meme coin whatever, a meme that Elon has used profusely over several several years. And first of all, it is a so called agency. It is not an actual agent. Well, it's real in some people's hearts and minds, but it is not an actual Well.
What makes an actual agency an actual agency? What do you need?
An Act of Congress? An Act of Congress? And so instead, I mean, I think he did this incredibly creatively, being able to subsume what was previously the United States Digital Service, which already was doing. It was created by Obama in the twenty tens to fix healthcare dot gov. If we remember, healthcare dot gov when it first rolled out, was completely unstable. It was like one of the biggest talking points Republicans
had against healthcare dot gov. So said, let's get a bunch of technologists from the private sector, Let's bring them in put them on two to three year tours. Right, this is like a tour in government because they could be making so much more money elsewhere in the private sector and brought them into government to make government more efficient. Like this is what it was doing like ten plus yearsage. It was Doge before Doge, and so Doge has now subsumed USDs as of this week. I heard they have
their all you know standing staff meeting on Tuesdays. And from what I heard about that meeting is that now Dough has created a bit of a firewall between like legacy USDs and then like the new Doge folks.
How many legacy people are still around?
There was originally two hundred and so one fifty of them now after Friday's layoffs, and now we have how many Doge people, which is not very clear. And they had the Doge folks that created essentially a firewall between Legacy USDs and Doge. They were not interacting. They had one meeting with a Doge representative in the whole month that it's been around. And so this Tuesday and the meeting that I'm talking about, these Doge folks, they had a meeting with these people and told them that it's
all Doge going forward, Like the teams are merging. If you're still here, you have not been terminated. Yeah, these teams are together, We're going to do.
You're going to be subsumed.
Yeah. Yeah, And so it's official. Everything has become Dune.
Did they all have to change their screen names to obscene?
Did they all require to be big balls or whatever?
You know?
I wish they could because now I'm thinking, wait, you can't just throw big balls in there like that without explaining Hold on one second, Max.
Many of the Doge employees are people that Musk and his associates found basically like on the Internet. They're like edge lord types, like like Elon Musk and I guess the most famous one is this gentleman the big balls.
So presumably not his god given no surprised.
I mean, it is weirdly like a kind of bizarro version of that moment that you're describing back in the Obama years, where a bunch of tech guys were like, yeah, government doesn't work, we are the ones to fix it, and they descend it on Washington, and I mean, I don't know, you actually probably have a better understanding of how well it worked. I don't think the Healthcare dot gov thing, although they did seem to keep it online, but it wasn't like some kind of shine.
I'm not sure that worked all that great.
I don't know if we all remember that as like the greatest moment of Silicon Valley's performance in history. And it's kind of happening again, but with this new weird elon Musk's beIN on it well, where everyone's like super mad at the establishment and tweel Max.
But if it's happening again, but it's I mean, I don't know that anybody realized that that service was even a thing back, you know, ten years ago. I don't think anybody in Western're in Washington, probably nobody noticed. Everybody has noticed OGE. It's certainly much more, much more high profile and making a lot more waves than its predecessor did. Okay,
that's how the group was created. What is like the one thing they should know about it in terms of how DOSEE is going about its business on Elon Musk's guidance day in and day out.
Well, now that they moved it outside of the opposite management and budget, this is all very boring bureaucratic stuff. Funny enough the fact that they hate bureaucracy, but they moved it underneath the executive opposite of the president, which means that they are reporting directly to the White House, which means like a lot of the records that they have are no longer for you.
So by not being foiable, they're not the kind of thing that the press can say, hey, we would like to put in a request for greater information.
Well, there's no transparency at all. Like the transparency is there is a website where it's.
Like a live feed from X or doge website, a.
Doge website where they're purporting to cut costs, but there's no transparency about like who DOGE is. So like an enormous amount of reporting firepower has been spent. Like who from Doge is showing up at your agency? Like, you know, have you seen their badges? Like are they like some of them are not even wearing badges, Like they're being very like circumspect about who they actually are, which flies in the face of this whole idea that this is a transparent effort.
Yeah, the way that it's been put to me, when like these Doge folks show up, they are boys in jeans wearing backpacks full of laptops.
Like this is how it's like they're literally that young.
Yeah, like nineteen to twenty five is the ages of a lot of these folks.
That they've hired, big balls.
Yeah, he is one of the youngest, that's right.
And then some of them are like venture capitalists who have like experience with private equity or like relative some of them are McKinsey consultants, Like there are like adult spit like in some cases.
Helped cut Twitter, right, Like see Davis who is one of the big cots cutters when the Twitter takeover happened.
Yeah, so now, Dana, you like to remind me frequently and you've drilled it into my head. How as we heard on that clip at the beginning. This idea of creating Doge to go out and gut the government and bring down spending is not a Donald Trump idea. It is an Elon Musk idea that he put in Trump's head and then he effectively appointed himself. Why is that for you such a crucial thing as we try to understand and conceptualize of what they're up to.
Well, two things.
I think that one thing to just know is just even the fact that we're all saying the name Doge is like Musk has already won because he's invented something that's not a department. He calls it a department, and now we're all using doge. It's entered the lexicon. So it's given is to give. It's been given this like gravitas. But for him, well, i mean, now the you know, no, but I mean, I'm just saying, it's like it's very clever how he got this, got this off the ground.
But for for Musk, it's all about regulation. So Musk has said over and over again that like, you know, he feels like the giant being held down, like American promise is being held down by all these like strings of regulation. And bureaucracy and we just need to like cut the strings in America will be great again. And all of his companies are highly regulated, like you cannot launch a rocket without the FAA approval, the fish and wildlife has to sign off on, like how it's you know,
messing up the wetlands. Tesla's autonomous or semi autonomous cars, like NITSA is investigating them. I mean every like he's got six companies, you know, the FDA in neural so he's very interested in what these agencies are doing. And if he can cut regulations, that is just going to help his businesses.
Yeah, no, very much the case. I mean, I guess for sure he had just about all of his companies I would think, in one form or another are subject to government regulation in some cases, the case of Tesla and SpaceX quite a bit. I mean, I guess for me, the one thing that stands out to me a little bit is whether ultimately Musk's Doze group is the right group to be doing this and this is the right way to go about it or not. Obviously that is a question that's very very very much still out there.
But the fact that it comes now and that there appears to be a certain amount of political will to tolerate it. That it comes in the wake of the greatest inflation surge in this country in a half century. I do not think is a coincidence. I think that's the way historians will look at it. I mean Musk in that interview back in August that when he states he does not talk about I want you to stop
regulating my companies. He says, you know, runaway government spending is driving inflation, and that's attacks on the American people. And it's true, parties of both sides, Republicans and Democrats, have driven the US fiscal accounts to the point where we are running absolutely unprecedented budget deficits, and that seemed to be to a certain extent untenable. Again, the big issue is whether we all feel like the American people feel like it's the Doze Committee that should be going
about bringing that under control. I mean, Max, I guess the question I'd have for you is whether you love Elon Musk or hate him. It is it's so seemingly improbable when we were doing this podcast as innocent young people a year or so ago, if somebody said to us, hey, in February of twenty twenty five. You're going to be talking about this and how Musk is running the show and he's the biggest story in the world. He's in the White House, he's doing all these things. We would
have said it's absurd. It does speak to his force of nature. Demon mode kind of aspect of demon mode is what he himself calls it.
Right, Yeah, I don't think I would have said it was absurd. I feel like part.
Of you coming why don't you tell us?
I mean, I just I think people who followed Elon Musk, although it is, I think there are aspects of this that are surprising. It's it's surprising that he is somebody who was ideologically McKenna brought this up earlier, you know, ideologically fairly centrist slash kind of like trying to be slippery. Is just like so full bore into maga Like that is surprising, But it's not surprising that he is trying to work it politically, like his entire career has been this.
He's just doing this.
But at such a different gale.
The way he has made money throughout his career basically is by some combination of politics and technology, like.
Working the levers of power. He did this with SpaceX.
SpaceX was as much as Musk likes to talk about it as this thing that he created or whatever, like the federal government essentially paid him to create it, We taxpayers paid him to create it, and Tesla is kind of it's a similar story. I mean, obviously Tesla has done some amazing things. I'd say clearly it's Musk's greatest achievement of his career, maybe one of the great companies built over the last twenty years. But it's also one that was very much built on the back of federal policy and.
Federal tax dollars.
So, like, you know, he's doing that again.
He's just he's just found this like really kind of amazing opportunity in terms of the moment that you described, the political moment, and maybe in Donald Trump, somebody who is perhaps uniquely open to these ideas, who's going to see the value of Elon Musk and he's going to be ideologically flexible enough to like divert his whole presidency. He's like diverted the whole Trump agenda into Elon Musk Land. Like that is that's kind of wild when you think about it.
No, that's fair enough. But I just want to say that I know you two think I don't listen to you guys. I listen to you guys, and so I know you always indeed describe Musk in that he's got that chameleon quality as right as an operator. What you know, he was tight with Obama, he was tight with maybe Big Bush to a certain extent. Right, he was Mine was like, he's like, I'm super pumped to work five, right,
and then with Trump won, he was there. But like I guess my question is, is this simply the chameleon changing his colors again, it's and going with the vibe in Washington, or it feels to me like he's become the vibe, he's setting the vibe. Is this a break?
I think I think that Max and I have talked for years now about how like he really shifted during the pandemic, and you saw like he started being flirting with COVID denihalism, He moved to Texas, he became increasingly anti immigrant, the whole thing with his trans daughter, and this is just sort of the culmination of that. But the other thing at play here that I'm going to keep hammering on is he does not want NASA to go to the Moon. He just wants to go to Mars.
Those two that are on the moon get him to Mars, right, Like why are they thing to come back?
And if you watch the inauguration speech, Trump said We're going to plant the stars and pypes on Mars by the end of my first term.
And Musk was like, yes, how awesome.
This is all about Mars.
This is all about Mars. And it's a quid pro quo, Like I gave you three hundred million dollars to get elected.
What I want return?
I want Doge and I want so much money, right, Like people are so focused on these like what could Musk get out of the CFTC maruld be?
How much is it going to cost to get to Mars?
I mean I haven't checked with my local Mars dealer lately, but like it's it's billions, if not tens of billions of dollars in contracts to SpaceX.
That's what it would be worth.
All right. Listen, speaking of big numbers, we got another clip that we're going to play on Doge cost cutting and what they're trying to do this is Elon and Trump in an interview with Sean Hannity earlier this week. Let's listen.
How much do you believe Elon and you've identified and waste for aud of vi as corruption now, and how much do you anticipate you sure, well, I think no, because it's so massive.
This is huge money. So which about.
As hard as they are, they're not going to find some contract that was crooked, you know, crooked as hell. I mean, there's going to be so much, isn't faut?
But what is that?
I think he's going to find a trillion dollars, but I think it's a very small percentage compared to what it is.
Okay, So the president says he's going to find a trillion dollars, presumably this is annually. I don't know, mckennath, what as far as your reporting shows and as far as with the Doze team is saying, how much have they cut so far from the US federal budget?
If you look at the website, it says fifty five billion.
Dollars five billion with the.
B yes, okay, and that is not accurate.
And we know that's not accurate.
How because we can look at the itemized feed and see that numbers. There was a figure they don't add.
What do so what in the itemized side, what does it add up to?
Yeah, I think if I remember correctly, was like sixteen right, sixteen billion.
But yeah, but even that's a little dice, Yeah, exactly, because like one of the there's an eight billion dollar contract in there, right, that's actually.
Diversity, Equity and Inclusion contract for the DHS. That's actually worth eight million, right, Yeah, it's eight million. Eight billion, which is eight billion is like how much the CDC has to spend every year.
Right, I mean, just so everyone's clear, the US federal annual budget is just shy of seven trillion dollars a year, right. When they throw around that trillion dollar number, it actually started. You guys were there at Madison Square Garden. You guys were there, and I think he threw out a two trillion dollar number.
At least he said at least fairly.
I think he said like fair.
Easy, fairly easy, which is basically cutting.
Like a third.
Yeah, and that's obviously which you.
Can't do unless you go after entitlement spending. So that's the other thing I want people to really think about. Like we were talking about Medicare, Social Security, the IRS, student loan program, like like, ultimately, McKenna, do you think that the goal is just to privatize wholesale pieces of this?
Yeah, I mean, like I think that's a fair assumption to make.
And every single privatize what like what would we be privately well, all kinds of.
So we've been seeing the first thing that these doage kids do when they get in is they attack contracts. Either they send one person in or a group of people in and they get to the acquisition service like whatever system each agency uses, and then they look at that and then they just start cutting things across the board. They're like control effing for like diversity, even if it's like biodivers And.
Do they have the power to unilaterally they have the power to unilaterally just pause it, stop it, block it.
Do they have the authority to do that? I think that's a legal question. But they are doing it right now.
How much pushback are we seeing increasing pushback from Congress and from the courts to say, hey.
Congress is totally supine. I mean, let's be honest, Like you are starting to see some Democratic members of Congress like get out the bullhorn and be upset about it. But in general, like Trump and Musk have support for this from Republicans, and the Democratic opposition has not been that strong. I mean, so the courts are like trying. I mean, the courts are like the check out and balance that's left. But Doge is moving faster than the courts can move.
Yeah.
I also want to point out too, like to think about how serious this all is, but also at the same time how unseerious it is, like the name Doge right as the name of this agency. And then the Democratic response. The first Democratic response was Chuck Schumer and Hawking Jeffreys having this presser where they announced a new
bill that they jokingly called Stop the Steal. And then at that at that press conference, Schumor had like a little laugh you went he he he, and everyone else in the press court and that presser said he he he too. So like it's it's very clear, like how unseerious people are acting about this.
Well, I guess when you're opening Salvos name it dose it's true. Okay. I want to move us on to the Musk Trump relationship, which appears by all accounts to still be going strong. We also have audio from that from that Trump Musk interview with Hannity earlier this week. Let's listen. Elon called me.
He said, you know they're trying to drive us apart. I said absolutely. Now they said we have breaking as Donald Trump has seated control of the presidency to Elon Musk. President Musk will be attending a cabinet reading eight. And I say, it's just so obvious. It's so bad at it. I used to think they were good at it. They're actually bad at it.
Okay, So there is actually another line in there, the very very beginning of the interview, almost right out of the gate Max, where Musk turns to Hannity and he says, is basically his opening statement is well, I love the president. I just want to be clear about that. And I I was sort of it was pretty shocking for me. The fealty, Like it's not the kind of posture and body language you usually get from Elon Musk.
Uh No, uh, it's it's kind of that.
That has been another surprise here, I guess is the is the relationship. I mean that clip to me is that's what they wanted out of the interview. They wanted to signal that Trump is in charge and Musk is okay with that, and and I think what's honestly like a little bit surprising if you followed Musk is that that he is has been willing more or less to in certain situations. You know, play second fiddle, b do the thing that you have to do if you want to keep Trump happy, which is defer to him.
So there, you know.
He's sure that said tech support.
I mean, throughout his life, Musk has always been the alpha male. But like in Trump, he's almost got this like dad figure, right, because Trump broke the mold for what a politician could be, and then Elon followed that and broke the mold of what corporate ceo could be. And they play off each other. I mean, Elon also tweeted some thing like I love him more as much as a straight man can love another man, and like.
I should go with thirteen children. So he you know, he's got a lot of people to love.
Okay, So one year from now we're on this stage again, will the Trump Musk alliance remain intact? Just yes or no? I don't want you guys usually give me these caveats and bolsh yes or.
No, yes, yeah, yeah, Okay, there we are.
The audience, do you agree with this? Yes? Is audience hates your aunt there there's no chance in how Okay, we're now gonna play the game. Enough about this doze stuff. And we're here at on AirFest surrounded by podcast enthusiasts, so we're gonna end with this game. Elon also is a big podcast fan and he appears on them all the time. So we pulled some clips, okay from Elon podcasts in twenty twenty four, and we're gonna play the
clip now. The clip is pretty brief, it's pretty tight, and it's short, and it's in what you guys have to do. I'm gonna go turn. You're gonna tell me what the hell he's talking about, what it's about, and you, Leach will give me a guess, and then we'll go. We have three of them, super confident here. Okay, all right, Number one, hit it.
Like I said, it's it's not like it's not gonna happen like overnight, but it's twenty years from now.
I have no idea.
But all right, Dana, I have no idea. I think he's talking about Mars. Maybe building a civilization on Mars.
Is gonna be a Mars max humanoid robots, humanoid robots McKenna.
Xually everything app becoming Actually.
Okay, who's with Dana mars in twenty years? Yeah, it's here. Let's let's hear noose. Okay, the humanoid robot? What were you? X? The everything out?
It's finally the everything appen, the everything.
App in twenty years.
Okay, the good ones were taken first.
Okay, let's hear it twenty years from now.
I think there's gonna be more more humanoid robots than they are here.
What I got.
Honestly, I'm shocked because I feel like in his head, twenty years is way?
Do you get the other two right? As well? We know the fix is in? Okay, number two?
Like He'll be like a good test if if you took a plane from Ellie to New York and you try to drop a bowling ball and hit somebody, your chances of success are basically zero.
By the way, I happen to know that's the case. I've tried that. It's really hard.
So success is hitting a person, I guess.
Okay, so what is he talking about? It's really really hard to hit someone in the head with the bowling ball if you drop it from a plane.
Is he talking about Starship eventually being city City?
I think, so you go Starship Starship FAA regulations around dropping things from airplanes or parts falling or whatever, or his rocket breaking, I.
Think I think you have an opportunity.
Was it when the rocket recently fell apart? And that was like the likelihood of one of the pieces over that island hitting someone who.
Likes to in his answer, nobody, crickets.
Max, you're the same.
They're all the same answer.
The truth of the matter is you're all wrong. Hit it now.
The reality is Earth can actually kindle a human population probably ten times longer than the current population.
You know, because you know you've got too many humans when you drop the bowling ball from the plane and you hit right, but until then, just keep going.
Should have gotten that long.
You did an entire story of you know.
Because he has talked about and that was f a A. But yeah, this is about we should all have more children.
I guess you did a big piece on this. I'm disappointed that. Okay, number three.
I speak with some authority and analogy in this area. This is.
This is impossible. This is our producer Magnus is trolling you, guys, this is impossible. If any of you get this, I will take from Mike Bloomberg a check for ten thousand dollars and I'll handle to you. Okay, again, the quote is I speak with some authority and knowledge, and there's no chance you're gonna get this. Kenny, it's it's pretty obscure. So think the think obscure.
The video game Diabolo Force just a good guess parenting.
So that's a These are funny guesses? Is anybody Dana's answer, Well, you have a guess? I think it's sections sections. Why do you think that? I think? Okay, cesarean section? So who likes no? Maxis got this audience stuff. Mechanic's should in the front, our random in the front with the with the black hat. Anybody like that Cesarian section? Okay, let's play the clip.
There's absolutely no need to do anything to farming change, no effect on the environment. It's it's totally fine. Stop attacking the farmers.
Cows about how does he know? What does he know about farm?
Well, Kimball, you know, it's like a big foodie.
I don't know.
He wears the cowboy. There's some authority there from Kimball. But wait, what's the full quote?
Don't have to worry about the cows because why he's.
Talking about climate change?
This was the member.
Yeah, he's saying, you know, don't like climate change, don't worry about don't.
Worry about the.
Possible We're getting the signal that we have to wrap.
We're getting We're getting the gong on the Gong Show. Okay, so we shall end it there. A big thanks to Dana, Max McKenna, and thank you all for joining us for this special episode of el in at on Air Fest. Keep tuning in. We'll see you next week Humanoid Robots.
This episode was produced by Stacey Wong. Anna Masarakis is our editor, and Rayhan Harmanci is our senior editor. Blake Maples handles engineering, and Dave Purcell factchecks. Our supervising producer is Magnus Henrickson. The Eloning theme is written and performed by Taka Yasuzawa and Alex Saguiera. Brendan Francis Newdham is our executive producer, and Sage Bauman is the head of Bloomberg Podcasts. A big thanks to Joel Weber and Bradstone.
I'm Max Schaffkin. If you have a minute, rate and review our show, it'll help other listeners find us, and we will see you next week.