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Worst case scenario if our planet falls apart, we can all go to Mars with the other man that we love and trust.
Elon Musk, You are right, check it out, Doc Mega.
Yeah, but seriously, I run the country now, and it's gonna be like one of my rockheads. You know, that's super cool and super fun. But this slideshads a good blow up and everybody dies.
Ha ha, I'm Doc Mega. See in the White House, US say, us say, well.
Elon Musk is now the richest person on the planet.
More than half the satellites in space are owned and controlled by one man. Well, he's a legitimate, super genius, legitimate.
He says.
He's always voted for Democrats, but this year it will be different.
He'll vote Republican.
There is a reason the US government is so reliant on him.
Elon Musk is a scam artist and he's done nothing.
I think anything he does, he's fascinating the people.
Welcome to Elon Inc. Bloomberg's weekly podcast about Elon Musk. That was from Saturday Night Live, sending up Elon Musk's big week in politics. Today is Tuesday, November twelve. I'm your host, Max Chafkin, standing in for David Papadopoulos. It's hard to believe that the election was only a week ago. It feels to me anyway like Elon Musk has been vice president for years, which is only slightly a joke, because Musk's role in this election has been staggering. Today,
we're going to break that down in multiple ways. We are joined by our regulars, Sarah fryar head a Big Tech coverage Hello, Sarah, Hello, Dana Hull are one and only Elon Musk reporter, Hey, Dana.
Elon belongs to all of us, Hey, Hey.
And then later on we'll be joined by a new guest, Tom Maloney, a member of Bloomberg's wealth team, who will come and talk to us about Musk's money before we get there. Just to catch people up if you weren't following this on Twitter or on the news or wherever else. Elon has basically been camped out in mar A Lago for the week. He went there for the victory party and Dan I think he actually did leave briefly to go to Texas, but more or less, he's with Trump
now right. He's at the right hand of the soon to be president of the United States.
Yeah, I think he briefly went home to Austin, but then he went back and there's all these photographs of him, like sitting around with Trump at the golf course and hanging out with the whole extended Trump clan, and he posted something about how like it was a great first day of the transition team, Like he is totally camped out there and like talking to foreign leaders.
Sarah, what is going on with this aspect of kind of like the Elon Musk transition era or whatever, Like these family photos. There was a family photo on election night, I believe, posted by Kai Trump, who's Trump's granddaughter, where like all the Trump's are there, but there's no Millenia and no JD Vance And then there's Elon Musk.
Is Elon trying to what do we take away from this?
He's getting his money's worth. I mean, I think we've always known that Donald Trump is a bit of a favor operated president, and Elon Musk just gave him the biggest favor of all, helping him score the presidency and giving him the full support of a media organization in x And that is loyalty that Trump recognizes, and it is going to be very powerful. It's going to make that whole forty four billion Twitter acquisition worth it if
he can maintain the relationship. So now it's really important that Musk, I guess, continued to show up for Trump and continue to stay on his side because there's a lot at stake. There's the government contracts, there's influence over over future policy, there's influence over foreign policy. He may have a hand in picking the Senate majority leader. This is this is a key moment for Elon Muskin and honestly for Donald Trump.
Elon's foreign policy, as far as I could tell ahead of the election, is sort of twofold. He's he's a peacenick, I guess like he's He has made comments about not wanting to have too many wars happen, and he's also very much in favor of maximizing the contracts that are given to his companies. Dana, were you surprised by this call with Zelenski, the president of Ukraine, especially given Musk's all separate relationship with Vladimir Putin, the president of Russia.
Not really, I mean the sense that I got was that, like Trump and Elon were probably just like hanging out and world leaders recalling and like, so Trump put them on speaker and sort of let them know that Elon was there in the room. That could be wrong, but that's like, that's my assumption, And no, I think it's like very very normal Elon. I mean, Elon is like a transnational actor, right, he has relationships with foreign governments on his own, independent of our State Department, and he
talks to foreign leaders all the time. So like these are people that Musk also knows. I think it's just where it's unprecedented for government to sort of operate this way. I mean, we've never had a corporate CEO or a billionaire like literally right there like side by side with the President elect, helping to shape the transition team and like taking all these calls with foreign leaders in such
a stark way before. So that's what's really striking. But it doesn't surprise me that the Trump patched Elon in or that Elon.
Is doing this. Yeah, I believe we've also seen reports of calls with the leader of Turkey as well as I think, Dana, you sent me a news story this morning about a Serbia right kind of a near East portfolio, I guess for now, Sarah. You mentioned also domestic politics, Elon sort of created a poll, I guess, to see who should be the Senate majority leader.
We're talking about a man who sees no boundaries between his companies. He mix and matches talent where he needs it to go, whether that's a SpaceX or boring or X. He has certain people that he really trusts, and certain people who are as allies and certain people who are as enemies, and he doesn't really see the silos of like, this is the team for boring companies. So I'm you know, cannibalizing that if I take them to neuralink, whatever thing
is on fire, he turns his attention to. And so this is a moment for him to just go into launch mode really with the US government.
Okay, so in the next couple of months, there's going to be this jockeying among all these people who who want to have influence in the White House, and I feel like we're maybe already seeing a little bit of that.
Jocking.
Howard Lutnik went on CNN and he described Musk's role in the you know, in the new administration in what I would say are kind of narrow terms. He said, Oh, he's going to write some software and then give us that software. He's gonna he's not going to be part of the government. He's not going to be making decisions. What do you make of that? Like, and do you think is that how Elon understands it? Is that actually what he's going to do what's happening right now?
Also, it just is so imagine you could just write software and give it to the government and say here you go, Now your government's fixed. Like, that's just not how the government works, and that's not how Elon works.
What I imagine might happen is We've talked about this before, but the Department of Government Efficiency, the DOGE leadership type of job that Trump is thinking of giving Musk would really allow him to be in charge of slash and burn the way he was at X. I imagine him going into these agencies and saying, who are your most productive people? Who can you afford to lose? Send me a list of your accomplishments this week and every week. You know, how many lines of code have you written?
Like that sort of thing that he did it X and replicating it for the US government to the extent that the law allows him to.
I think one question I have is just about the epics of it all. Like today, John Paulson, who a lot of people had been floating to be Treasury Secretary, basically came out and he said, like, I'm ecstatic that Trump is in office, but my complex financial obligations would prevent me from holding an official position and President Trump's administration at this time. So Paulson is basically a no for Treasury secretary.
So I love that. Imagine having such complex financial arrangements.
No one has more complex financial arrangements than Elon Musk. He runs six companies. SpaceX is an annoy ormous government contractor, Tesla is a huge beneficiary of the Inflation Reduction Act.
So like, that's my big question, Like is this doge thing just an advisory role that allows him to keep all of his companies, And in that sense, if it's only advisory, like what is the actual remit or does he actually have like a job job in the government, And in which case does he have to abide by ethical rules or are those ethical rules about to go out the window.
I mean, my take is that he's definitely not going to join the administration. I feel like Trump has said it. Lutnick said it the other day. You know, Trump has said repeatedly on the on the stump during the campaign, like he doesn't have enough time to do this. And I think you're right, Dan, and like it's not just because it would be complicated in the John Paulson sense, although who knows what's behind that complication. It's that Elon
Musk doesn't want to right the whole point. And I think he's made as clear of like joining the administration or taking on an advisory role is so it can help his companies. It's not like he doesn't want to give that the That's the whole point of this is my reading. But I do think it makes you wonder how long could this last? And like should we already be on Like, you know, Elon Musk Trump feud watch.
I think you're gonna see some real tests of Musk's power this week, right, Like who is the Senate majority leader going to be? Like Musk has thrown his weight behind Scott, who's like not particularly popular among the Senate.
So like is the non Maga wing of the Republican Party going to try to be like a check and balance to that and similarly, like a least stephonic right, like Musk was saying, Oh, she's great, but she should really stay in the house, But she's not staying in the house, like she's just been nominated to be the delegate to the un So like Musk isn't getting everything that he wants, even though he's being very public about
what he wants. And so it'll just be interesting to see, like behind the scenes within the Republican Party, like what efforts are ma to kind of be a check on what seems to be his unbridled power right now.
It would be hard if you're a politician and you have to be feeling the whiplash of Trump's leadership already, right he changes his mind based on who he talked to last, he tweets about it or posts about it, and then the whole government has to shift to be loyal to something like that and then simultaneously be loyal to Elon Musk, who has similar behavioral characteristics of you know, being very strong minded about what he thinks is the
best way to do things that seems very difficult. And also the idea that Musk is is very much in the spotlight you know, on stage pictured with Trump. For how long is Trump going to be able to seed the spotlight to Elon Musk?
Okay, So huge week for Elon in politics and there's gonna be lots for us to talk about in the weeks to come.
But it was.
Also a huge week for Elon's bank account. And to break that down, we have the perfect guest, Tom Maloney, a member of Bloomberg's wealth team who has been crunching the numbers on Elon Musk's wealth and is coming to talk about it.
Tom, Thanks for being on Eloni. Thanks bys Tom. How wealthy is Elon Musk?
He's worth more than three hundred and thirty billion, so he's very near he's wealthiest ever, which was about three hundred and forty billion. About two thirds of that comes from Tesla stock and options, and then a big chunk of that comes from SpaceX that's valued about two hundred and ten billion earns forty two percent of that then XII, Twitter, Neuralink boring company kind of around the rest of that album.
So were you on the well team, were you guys like preparing for what happened last week? I mean, and if people don't know the Tesla stock went up like crazy. I think was around forty up to forty percent as of yesterday, I believe as a Monday, and that sent Musk's wealth up, I don't know, from the election night to now, what's the game been.
More than seventy billion. And just to put that in context, seventy billion is the net worth of Charles Koch, who's the twenty second richest person on the planet, and Musk has out of that in a week.
Yeah. I found this really interesting just because, like before the election, and you know, we've been telling this story over several years of all the problems at Twitter. He's possibly lost I don't know, twenty or thirty billion dollars Sarah right on on the acquisition of Twitter. But it's like he made it all back in three days.
It's wild And this is what we were talking about when he acquired Twitter, right, Like, this is really not about the money now.
Right.
If you look at Twitter and you look at what it makes and what it does and how big it is and how it's shrinking, there's no way that's worth forty four billion, And that's exactly what financial analysts looking at as But you know, our colleague Kurt Wagner how to call him this week, forty four billion looks cheap if you're Elon Musk and you have as much money as he does to gain this level of influence over the US government and the future of policy.
Yeah, I think we need to start. I mean, and I feel like if you've been listening to this podcast for a year, you are not going to be surprised. But like, there aren't like what six companies, and I guess now a seventh company with America Pack. There's like one Elon Musk conglomerate. And Twitter is the media arm of the Elon Musk conglomerate, right, Dana.
Oh yeah, absolutely, one hundred percent. And like we need to stop kind of thinking of it as like this failing business that has alienated advertisers and is losing users left and right. Like it has served it is serving its purpose as a megaphone for Musk his politics for now the Trump administration, I mean, for every you know, journalists and epidemiologists and climate scientists who's like leaving X
to go join Blue Sky. A lot of Republicans are now using it because it really it is like the media arm of the Republican Party, and it's kind of become what truth Social set out to be a while ago. And so yeah, I think your framing is totally right.
Max.
This is the media wing of ELIN Inc.
Tom, have you started thinking about or is it worth starting to think about an exit for Twitter? And when you guys are thinking about valuation of Twitter, like, how much is it worth if Tesla's valuation goes up forty percent just based on kind of like the magic of having President elec Donald Trump, Like, what does that do to Twitter's valuation?
How does that affect his net worth? Yeah?
Look, that's a good question. Could he tenant into a mainstalk? I mean you look at Trump media and technology, right, It's got truth Social, which is made like a million dollars lost quota. It's financially it's terrible, and yet it's valued at something like seven or eight billion dollars. So Twitter, by that comparison should be with multiple multiple times of that.
One of the things that Elon said right up right before the election, and he reiterated it in a tweet this morning was the idea that America pack is going to continue putting money into politics. And I think part of why he's doing that is because it's a way to you know, create some leverage over what's happening in
the White House right now. Tom, Like, can he just spend a couple hundred million dollars every couple of years without without incident or like, at what point do those liquidity problems that we've talked about with Elon Musk, the fact that like most of his net worth is in Tesla stock and options, when does that start to become a problem.
Like, I think a couple hundred million is pretty easy for him to come up with. I mean, he ran into problems when he bought Twitter, and that's when he had to sell a bunch of Tesla shes. There were margin calls, there were problems with his margin loan that was you know, forty four billion dollars and that was a big purchase, right and that was a struggle for him. But coming up with half a billion dollars a year at this point, that's that's pretty straightforward. We don't know
much about liquidity at this point. He's margin loan with Tesla stock has come down a lot. They limited that to three and a half billion after the Twitter fiasco. He could probably borrow against SpaceX. That's a private company, so it's a little bit trickier in terms of liquidity, but for private companies, it's probably the most liquid one in the world, or at least right up there. So he has ways of raising money, and certainly coming up with that sort of money I think is very easy for him.
How do you think about what SpaceX is worth and how much what this stuff that we've heard about and talked about and that Dana and I on the on the Citizen Elon podcast which is all about the election that we've talked about, like, how do you figure out how that's going to be how much that's going to be worth to Elon?
I mean, from a perspective evaluation, we only care about what it's worth now. But if you're asking what is going to drive his wealth in the future, I mean you've got to think SpaceX and XAI is where the most potential is, especially with Tesla. But it's worth versus you know what its revenue is and how many cars it's selling. It's it's hard to imagine the trajectory it's on now kind of continuing indefinitely, and it's come down
a lot in the past. I mean, Mosca is the only person in the world who's lost more than two hundred billion at some point as well. So he's always had a volatile fortune and that's because of Tesla SpaceX though, So that's a company that is a huge amount of potential and XAI, even if that was worth as much as open Ai, then that would boost his fortune by multiples, you know, he would add another one hundred billion or something to his fortune.
Did SpaceX's value also go up overnight when Trump got elected?
No, well we don't. We look at when it was last valued, So that was back in June when it did a fundraising at two hundred and ten billion. Do I think it's worth that now, No, I think it's probably worth substing.
But in terms of the Bloomberg model, which is what you're citing exactly, the big appreciation is just.
In his Tesla shares.
I'm guessing most of it he's added about the seventy bills that he's added in the last week comes from his Tesla sches. This year he's added about one hundred billion, and I think the rest of that comes from XII and SPICEX.
Sarah, just stepping back a minute from Elon Musk and just looking at the world of Silicon Valley, how do you think this is going to be processed by like the other you know, want to be oligarchs in the tech industry, the people who you know, there are a lot of people who really look up to Elon, Like are people just seeing this as like, oh my god, this his bet paid off, Like now I need to somehow either get close to Trump or get get into politics, or like how is this playing kind of in the
wider world of Silicon Valley.
I think there's sort of two camps that I see. There's the the people who are now going very silent because they don't want to ruffle Elon's feathers or Truan's feathers or you know, try to make any waves and they want to stay in good graces just for being technologists. And then then there are people that are clearly trying to angle to to have to think about like how Elon got what he got, and I'm sure that we'll see a lot more trying to replicate that success for
their businesses. I do think that there might be a backlash to all this culturally, Like I think that there was already you know, and I think you and I were talking about this yesterday, Max, like the era of like tech optimism about growth and designing the future, and we were just seeing a lot of like cultural backlash to the idea of Musks so close to the government and like what that might mean for all of us.
And then there are people that hope that his proximity to Trump means that Trump's climate policies won't be as much of a disaster.
I love the theory that like Musk isn't actually right wing Mega, He's just like pretending to be right wing magass so he can sort of trojan horse it and like get into the government and then can vince Musk that they's trojanhorsing it and is going to convince Trump that electric vehicles are great, windmills aren't so bad, solar energy is the future, and I mean, if that came to pass, that would be remarkable. I don't believe in that theory personally, but that is a theory.
Yeah. I mean, I feel like it's totally runs counter to almost everything he said and Trump said over the last year. Right, all right, Dana, we are going to let you go and get back to the important business of reporting on on the crazy things that are happening.
I'll see you soon. Thanks for being here.
Take care.
So Sarah brought up this idea of a tech lash, and I think we actually got a preview this week and we're going to talk about it for our semi regular feud segment few to the week, and this one stars cultural icon Olivia Rodrigo against I guess guys who want to go to space?
Let's give a listen the guests my vig.
Okay, this is a very odd specific question that I ask guys on first dates. I always ask them if they think that they would want to go to space, and if they say yes, I don't date. I just think if you want to go to space, you're a little too full of yourself. I think it's just weird.
Uh, Sarah, she's talking about Elon Musk, right, Oh?
Absolutely. I mean I think that this is a theme I've also seen in it is. It's really not just Elon Musk. It's this idea of like men who are so disconnected from human connection and how to actually develop human connection. They're so deeply invested in this Musk world
and like the Manisphere. I've seen other kind of tech lash cultural tweets like this and memes where people are like, oh, if you suggest that I use chat GBT to solve a problem on the first date, Like, I'm you know, you're not going to get a second date.
I think this is really bad for Elon Musk.
I mean, I know this is not obviously you know, this isn't a ROBOTAXI you know, crashing or something. This isn't this isn't a rocket failing to launch. But this seems like the canary in the coal mine that could pretend what Sarah is talking about tom a you know, monumental tech lash, a tech lash where basically all the cool people decide that like Elon Musk and anybody like him doesn't belong in their community.
I mean, what do you make of this?
How are you incorporating this into the Bloomberg billionaires model?
I feel like Musk has always wanted to be cool but has always been on the outside, and this is just kind of more of the same. Right, So is this really going to change his trajectory in any way?
I don't think so.
I mean, it's just one more blow and he's going to just continue with his quest to go to space and hopefully he'll make more like minded people on Moss.
So Sarah, again, I don't want to make too much of this, but in a more in a more serious sense, like do you think that this could like slow things down culturally? I mean, I think we probably need to get ready for some version of, you know, resistance to point zero, and maybe a resistance that's more directed at tech guys than the last one was.
I mean, just look at the reasons that people voted for Trump on a macro scale, Like people are unsatisfied with how expensive everything is, how difficult life is, how much childcare costs.
You know, when people are.
Dissatisfied with the state of their lives and their spending power and their futures, they vote for the alternative. And in a moment like that, saying well, let's just go to space, is it's like, well, let's just forget about fixing the stuff that is broken on Earth and stop trying to do anything about it and instead invest in some future that is very expensive and who knows if it'll work.
Fine words, Tom, No, but I gotta say I've always kind of wanted to go to space. So I feel a little bit hurt by Rigo's comments.
Sarah, what do you think is going to space a a red flag?
No? I don't.
I mean, I don't think so.
I think.
I mean like I'm a tech reporter, right, Like I think innovation is cool, but I also think that there are other problems that people on Earth probably want to be solved first or in conjunction with that.
Let's leave it there. We'll be paying attention to those problems in the Weisa come, Sarah, Tom.
Thanks for being on Elon Inc.
Thank you, Thank you.
This episode was produced by Stacy Wong. Anna Maserakas is our editor and Rayhan Harmanci our senior editor. The idea for this show also came from Rayhan Blake Maple's Handles Engineering and Emma Sanchez fact checks. Our supervising producer is Magnus Henrickson. The Elin is written and performed by Taka Yazuzawa and Alex Sigierra. Brendan Francis Newnham is our executive producer, and Sage Bauman is the head.
Of Bloomberg Podcast.
A big thanks to our supporters Joel Weber and Brad Stone. I'm Max Chafkin. If you have a minute rate and review our show. It'll help other listeners find us, and we will see you next week.