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Let me tell you we have a new star.
A star is born Elon mars Juson Kennemy.
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 pay in full 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, a Bloomberg's weekly podcast about Elon Musk. It's Tuesday, April First, I'm your host, David Papadopolis.
Now.
On Friday night, Elon snuck out an announcement that, as longtime listeners of this show was a long time coming. His AI company Xai had acquired his social media company x And, a deal that values the new joint company at over one hundred billion dollars. Shades of Tesla buying Solar City, a sign of things to come in the world of AI. Both and then in Wisconsin today is election day for the Musk funded race between a conservative and liberal judge. The stakes are high, although perhaps not
as high as Musk has been suggesting. All this comes as Tesla's stock price has been ping ponged up and down by Tariff News and has protests of the brand show no sign of slowing down. To talk about X, were joined by one of our regulars, Max chaffickin Hello to you, Max, Hello, Papa. Okay, Now we're good. This is the first introduction of popns and our social media reporter and by far the best high school quarterback has ever been on this show. Kurt Wagner Kurt.
Hello, Hey, thank you for having me.
And later on Dana Hall, our other regular will swing by to talk Wisconsin politics. We actually have a surprise to start us off here. Max, You've got something that's coming later this week. Tell us about it.
Yeah, David, So later in the show. Not to spoil things, but we will be talking about a little bundle of joy that Elon has. But but I have my own bundle of joy that's coming in your podcast feed this week. On Friday, we'll have a the first episode of a new show called Everybody's Business.
It's I like that name. It's about business, it's and everybody.
It's a little bit like Elon Inc.
It's gonna be me and Stacey Vannox Smith, who people probably know from Marketplace, Planet Money, the Indicator. She's done tons of reporting about markets and business.
She's going to carry money. Yeah, she's going to carry the show.
And we're gonna have a rotating crew of other experts guests. It's gonna be fun and we're really excited.
For everyone to hear.
So you're gonna hear it in your podcast feed on Friday, and then for the next few weeks it'll be here in the e lining feed. But we're hoping that when the show launches for real in May, you will come over with us to our own.
No, we're not just hoping, we're insisting yet.
We're commanded this.
We're demanding. Right, you're dropping in in the feed on Friday, now, well Friday going forward, will that be the day it'll always come out on?
That will be the day it'll it'll come out on Friday kind of hopefully help people make sense of what happened in the world of business for the past few days.
Get ready for the weekend.
Yeah, that sounds great. Okay, very good. Okay, we're gonna start off here and talk about that late night news that broke on Friday, x AI purchasing x But to get us started here on it, we're gonna go back to December when one Kurt Wagner said this, I.
Got two predictions for this year for Elon Musk. The first is that he's gonna fold x social network formerly known as Twitter into Xai. So it's going to be a way for him to basically salvage that you know, struggling business, get investors away out bang.
That's what I'm talking about. Wagner. Huh.
I just feel like people spend huge sums of money on intelligence and various things.
They could just listen to our podcast and they would know what is going to happen.
Just listen to Kurt Wagner. Well done, sir. By the way, what was your other prediction and has it flopped on you?
Well, first off, thank you for having me back for this victory lap. This is all I've ever dreamt about since December. Honestly, I think my other prediction was that Elon Donald Trump will go on a boy's trip to visit I may have said Kim Jong un. But I think Vladimir Putin should fall into that camp as well, and I still think that's a real possibility.
He's on the verge of two for two. All right, that's very good, way, way way better than me. I'm oh for so far. But let's focus on this one. Give us a little bit of a little bit more of a cent. So what you were thinking at the time, and in turn, what your understanding of the particulars of this deal now is.
Well, I think it kind of shaped up how I thought, which is that it feels like this is a deal specifically tailored to bail out X investors, Right, and think about it this way. If you are an investor in X. A week ago, you had shares in what has mostly been a struggling social networking company with an ADS business that is about half the size that it was when Elon acquired it, with no real reason to think that
that was going to change anytime soon. Suddenly your investment is now part of an AI startup that is worth three times the amount of money, and you really didn't lose any money. Right, he acquired the company Xai acquired X at roughly the same price that he paid for it two and a half years ago. So you just take your money from a business that has low ups
to a business with very high upside. And I think this was really a way to make X investors whole and give them something more optimistic to look forward to.
Yeah, and I will say on that point that being made whole is a hell of a lot better than the way it looked at multiple points over the past couple years. I think Fidelity was marketing it down forty to fifty percent. The only thing to be clear on here is just being made whole and getting out even over a two and a half year period ain't great.
The S and P five hundred over that time period, Max chef gin up forty six percent, I will note, so really you could have just pretty much been blindly investing in the index and been up made a hell of a lot more money. But I want to talk for a second Max on kurtz first point, which is a bailout of X investors. We've seen this movie before from Elon, one Elon company buying another, or at least one Elon company buying a company he's closely affiliated with.
You know, Tesla and Solar City is this Teslas Solar City part du.
I mean, it's very similar, and I think, you know, we have anticipated not just Kurt's prediction, but on this podcast for like more than a year we've been talking about and I think it was actually Kurt also who first suggested this around the time when his book came out,
which everyone should read. But basically the idea that that x doesn't has sort of a diminished business outlook and that AI is one of the only ways that it can kind of find a way to find opportunity, and you had this sort of awkwardness where xai is training on Twitter data Xai. Many of Xai's shareholders are the
same as Twitter shareholders. The main distribution platform for Xai's chapbot, which is called groc is x So like it was weird that they were two separate companies to kind of begin with.
Of course, well maybe it was to have so the Ai company had a clean slate, didn't have any baggage with it. I think certainly there was a lot of baggage from x for sure.
And you know, Musk has operated his companies. There's a reason we call the show Elon Inc. Because Elon Musk runs his businesses like one conglomerate like Elon Inc. And what happened with Solar City is you had basically a troubled solar panel installer. It had looked really promising when Elon Musk started. They managed to get all these subsidies
from state and national governments to install panels. All of a sudden, you had all these other companies come in a lot of competition, turns into basically a low margin business.
Lo and behold.
Tesla acquires it and then sold as part of the Elon Musk master plan. And at the time the Elon Musk master Plan was around, you know, green energy, We're gonna sort of your and have electric cars, You're gonna have solar panels on your roofs.
There were, of course shareholder lawsuits because.
I'm not on the Tesla side, people saying hey, you're bailing out this company, you're diluting me. I'm getting screwed. Those lawsuits failed in the end, correct, Yeah.
I mean, and it's kind of for the same I think, well, there are probably other reasons too. But you know, we've seen this movie over and over where shareholders and Elon Musk companies have basically agreed that like they're going to just do whatever Elon Musk wants. That it's hard to separate Elon Musk. They've basically gone along with the story. I just told that all these companies are basically one conglomerate.
So my guess is that the shareholders of Xai, as much as they are, like Kurt says, bailing out a struggling social media company, they're probably going along.
With this as just as just the price of doing business. I do want to.
See also, by the way, in the case of Xai, it's a much smaller investor universe than you'd have in the case of Tesla, where you have I don't know, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of investors.
Perhaps Yeah, I do want to say, I think there's something here for these Xai shareholders. You know, as much as we're bailing out x the fundraising environment for AI companies is getting worse right now. If I were a prospective investor in a company like xa yeah, I would ask myself what exactly is the relationship between XAI and
x That would be like a risk factor. And in a way, I think this clarifies it makes it easier for Elon musk to potentially package this to investors, as much as it's kind of week funky that he's combined this like troll farm slash social network slash political influence project that is x with this like world leading chatbot or what.
Yeah, I mean, Kurt. That is a good point, right where you have had up till now a pretty funky intercompany relationship where you know, x and XAI do business together. It seems like at some point, right XAI pays x by, like I will buy you five cups of coffee, you know, at a star by an in turn, you know you will, uh, we'll let you babysit for our Like it was all sort of weird, funky account Like why not They're just like this just simplifies the whole thing. Hey, it's all just one big company.
I think that's right on paper.
This makes sense when you think, okay, an AI company is buying a giant social network that has this proprietary data set. It's going to help GROCK reach millions of consumers. Like all of those things make sense. Where they don't make sense for a thirty three billion dollar acquisition is that the owner of both those companies is the same person who already has control over them. So it's not as if x was going to go suddenly do some data licensing deal with open Ai, because Elon would never
do that. It's not as if Xai was going to go, you know, kick X to the curb and say, never mind, we're going to do our distribution over on Facebook, because Elon would never do that. So my point is that, while yes, this makes sense on paper, the lynchpin here is the Elon of it all, and because he owned and controls both companies, buying one of them for this amount of money to the other, to me feels like a weird financial transaction that didn't need to happen to get the benefits.
Yeah, no, I get it, but there is a face saving value here to be able to start. You got out, everyone got out whole hold.
But do you think Kurt anyone would use xai without GROC like without Twitter?
Does xai have a business?
I mean it has a business as much as open ai has a business.
Right like they would they would, They would.
Just have to find a different distribution model for their chatbots.
So right in a different set of raw material to train off of. And I guess this is My other question for you, Kurt, is this truly the future of social media companies? That they are largely just human social posting farms or fast sorties, some iteration of soilent in essence to feed the romance.
Well, let's think about it.
So x is doing this with xai, Facebook, Instagram are doing this with meta ai. Reddit has licensed its data to Google. What does that leave right? I think Snap has a relationship with Google as well. I believe so pretty much every social network out there is doing a version of this.
Now.
Is that the only reason for them to exist? I would certainly say no. But has this become a you know, maybe unexpected business opportunity for all of these places? Certainly that seems to be the case.
Okay, so there, I should keep posting. If I do post, if I were to post, which I don't, I should keep posting, appreciating that there's some other value out there beyond just informing the robots.
I presume someone follows you, David, I don't know, so can I.
Say that follower? Yeah, your follower might appreciate you still posting.
But all right, who invited Kirk to this show? Can I?
Was it you?
Max? Why do we have Kerk first of all gloating about his grand prediction and second of all talking the host. But I will just say x I do have a few followers, which is kind of amazing because I've never posted on it. Now, Max, he goes here from six companies in the constellation of e in to five, Does it make his life any easier, simpler? Same difference.
No, I think it's the same. Like I said, he was already running them like one company. I do wonder what this means for live front of the pod who, Kurt, I don't know. Do you have an understanding of what her role is going forward.
Currently CEO of x Yeah, thoughts Kurt, I don't know. And that was one of the questions I posed after this, right, is what does this mean for her? In the one hand, she could continue to run X in the way she's already doing that as sort of maybe a business unit of XAI.
Right, But as these.
Companies become closer and closer together, usually when there's a merger like this, you know, you merge HR and you merge sales, and you merge engineering, and so it kind of becomes a little bit unless they're going to keep X completely independent of Xai, which feel like it would defeat the purpose of this merger. It sort of also feels like it would erode her power, right because she's not going to have as many people reporting to her, as many divisions or whatever. So I don't know, I
don't know what's going to happen. She was obviously, you know, she was cheerleading this deal when it happened on Friday, and.
Well it could just be a nice opportunity to actually exit stage last year for her.
Yeah, yeah, but I don't know what's going to happen, is the short answer.
Got it?
Kurt Wagner, as always, thank you for joining us, sir, Congratulations on your brilliant December twenty twenty four prediction.
Thank you for having me hope to be back.
It's one of those things that may seem like it's obviously important in the state of wisconstant, but I think it could actually be important for the country as well, and maybe for the world.
So okay, we're joined now by our other regular Dana Hall. Dana, welcome back, he Hey, and Dan.
Of course.
Elon here is referring to the Supreme Court election coming up in Wisconsin. The vote ends today results. Maybe we'll know as soon as tonight. You have a terrific story out about the election this morning. Remind us of the particulars here.
Yeah, So, Wisconsin is one of the states that has an open, you know, open election for its Supreme Court justices. And Elon, as Elon does, is kind of like doubling down on this race in Wisconsin. He flew to Wisconsin on Sunday, gave a town hall. He also did some kind of like tell a call about the race last night. And this is all a time when there is enormous backlash two Musk being involved with politics and the Trump administration and Doge, but he is basically repeating his playbook,
you know, dangling money before voters. He wore a cheesehead on stage and like he sort of was like, you know, this is We've got to do this. People on his pack is texting everyone, and it'll be a real test of whether the political operation that he's built will endure beyond Trump and be able to impact these statewide races.
Okay, and the vote for the Supreme Court justice will whichever parties candidate gets it will effectively take control of the Wisconsin Supreme Court. Correct correct.
Right now, it's a seven member court. Four to three majority hangs in the balance, and you know state Supreme Court does. It looks at everything from collective bargaining rights, abortion rights, registricting. Registricting is always very important when it comes to determining House seats, and so in Elon's mind, this is like another fork in the road of destiny for civilization, and he is, you know, encouraging everyone to vote and really pushing it very hard in the final days.
One of the big questions we had at the time last week was would the value the money he's putting up ultimately be greater than the downside that he creates, But by attaching his name to the Republican candidate there, we weren't exactly sure at the time. Seven days later, any greater clarity on that point, well.
I think, I mean, there's no question that Elon's involvement is helping is shaping the contours of the race. I mean, a lot of people went to see Elon speak on Sunday night. His pack has door knockers, they are running digital ads on Facebook. I mean, he is very much swinging, helping to swing the race in the way that he
did when he barstormed across Pennsylvania for President Trump. But what's the different this cycle is that Trump himself is not on the ballot, and so it really remains to be seen how close this election will be and whether Musk's imprint had the suite that it did. Also, Elon is a far less popular person now than he was in October.
Yeah, I mean, Democrats are I mean Elon's involvement. He is going to be a factor sort of on the Democratic side. Democrats are tying this race to Elon Musk, which would have happened probably even if he hadn't given any money, frankly, because Elon Musk is like one of the most unpopular parts of the Trace of Dose.
Yeah, exactly.
But the fact that he's giving all his money, of course, is going to make those attacks stickier. That said, like the money that Elon's giving is so so so much like well, I don't think we Yeah, it's it's a little bit hard to even get your head around it. You know, last week how much what has been number? We don't know the total number because this is all
happening so quickly. You know, last week we had Ted Man here saying that you know, third party estimates were putting it around fourteen million dollars out of somewhere in the seventies. This is already the most expensive state judicial race ever. And that's before we saw all this additional spending. Those were that was mostly TV money. Now we're seeing Musk writing, I think my count, Dana is three million dollar checks thus formed.
I think that's right.
We've seen he's he's paying one hundred dollars per petition signer. By the way, all these payments are sort of designed to be like right up to the edge of the election law.
The senses they are indeed on the right side of the law.
Who knows, no, I don't think that sense is at all clear. We were seeing repeated legal challenges, and you know, even during this event, Musk acknowledged and he did He did the same during the twenty twenty four race.
He acknowledged. This is the point. The point is to to do these stunts and get media coverage when Democrats say you are breaking election law.
Dan, did you have in that story today a hard number on how much Musk has spent so far.
Well, the way that my brain thinks about the map is the race is above eighty million total Musk is put in I would say roughly twenty million. But to Max's point, like we're not going to get a final tally until later, but I would, I would. I think it's fair to think of like Musk has put in like a quarter or twenty five percent of all the spending there is.
Yeah, and I think we should think about twenty million. Again, Dana, this is a guestimate, but like it's a lower it's a lower limit. You know.
We just have to kind of remind our listeners that the conventional wisdom in Washington was Elon and Trump are not going to survive. They're going to have a big blowout. Doe's just going to be this like short lived experiment and then eventually Elon will take his ball and go home and focus on Tesla. That hasn't happened yet. Tesla stock is cratering, sales are going to be bad, and yet Elon is doubling down on politics and making it very clear that, you know, he it was not enough
to elect Trumps. He really wants to like keep the House of Representatives, and he's going all in on these state races. He's also giving money in Florida into some house races there. So this is like a longer game political play by Musk that Max and I have told our listeners and our readers about for months now, Like people have got to think wider about Musk's political ambitions.
Tell us a little bit about those votes in Florida.
Yeah, so you have two house races. One Florida's first, which is in the Panhandle. It's Matt Gates's seat. That race is thought to be you know, I mean, that's a very, very heavily Republican district, would be very hard for the Democrats to win.
Florida's sixth, which is the.
One where Elon Musk's pack came in at the very last minute, is also heavily Republican, although not as heavily Republican, and it looks like the Democrat might have kind of an outside chance at least to make it close. We've seen this kind of broader thing happen nationally where Republicans are suddenly realizing that the electoral environment be very poor. Trump pulled elist Stephonics nomination for UN Ambassador that was seen as another effort to sort of shore up the House.
So you're seeing and that's one of the reasons.
Like, and Elon, as you said, in Florida, he's pretty much involved, his packs involved pretty much in all these in one shaper.
No, I think.
I think the one we know about is Florida six, uh, the closer race, and he and it's not a ton of money. I checked yesterday and it was sixty thousand dollars. You know again, we're this is just a few days ago, so you know, you could imagine it going up pretty quickly, like if he does a TV buy or something. But that said, this looks like more of a last minute thing, not a you know where where Elon is reacting to the same thing that Republicans nationally reacting.
To like a holy smoke.
Oh no, we need to like do it, do anything we can to help. Wisconsin has been a much more deliberate, basically series of acts of political because the whole way there's huge number of employees canvassers on the ground, a lot of money. Like Dannis said, and you know, musk Is during this town hall basically said I don't expect to win now. Politicians and activists say that all the time in a way to like, you know, lower expectations. Maybe if he does win, then then he gets to
have a huge celebration. But but if you take him out of his word, I don't think we should think of this as like if Elon loses, he's out of Republican politics. My reading is he is no matter what after the Wisconsin Yeah, he is going to play. This is more like a signal of what is to come in the midterms rather than this is going to be a test for how he behaves in the midterms.
Yeah.
And Dana also referenced how his involvement, as we well know, is hurting His involvement in politics is hurting his company, Tesla, quite a bit, and when he spoke the other day in Wisconsin, he mentioned that this is what he had to say.
It's well, you know, my Teslis stock and the stock of everyone who holst Tesla's gone went roughly in half. I mean, it's a big deal. So not only is am I not getting I'm not getting paid definitely not stealing money and would never get away with it, but the value my Teslis stock is in half. So this is a very expensive job, is what I'm saying.
Can I just do a little fact check here, so the stock in half. I don't totally know what he's talking about it.
I mean, I suppose what he's talking about is that the stock is down from reaching its peak of like post Trump euphoria in December. I think it's not about forty percent, not quite half, but like it's still like about.
Where it was when the election happened.
And we've seen Elon express similar sentiment elsewhere he was well, I guess Tim Waltz was being mean to him, Like he's definitely in a in a sort of mode where he's primed to feel aggrieved.
But again, like, but here's the way to think about it, if you want to if you want to back him on the way he's framing the numbers. Trump wins. He plays a huge role in getting Trump elected. He's now in with the administration. He and his company stand to
benefit a lot from that. Hence Tesla rips sores. It's only when the true role he's going to play with Doge and what Doge is going to do and the havoc is going to reek that you really start to see the stock crater believe, I mean, perhaps coming down of it, I get to be backing Trump. I could be his big you know, financial arm. I could be tight with him and I don't need to do Doge. Why do I need to do Doge in in order to be close to Trump? I guess would be the
spin he's putting on it. But Den, while all this is swirling, you also had Trump announced auto tariffs, which we've been expecting a lot of tariffs, and a lot of tarriffs are apparently coming tomorrow. We didn't quite expect auto tariffs to come, and there's been a lot of debate as to whether Tesla benefits from these auto tariffs or is hurt by them.
I don't know why people, I mean I expected auto tariffs to come. I mean Trump campaigned on like America first, and Tesla's CFO said, we are our profitability is going to be hurt by tariffs on the last earnings call. So like what shape the tariffs took, you know, people
were confused about. I think I think what people have gotten wrong is they think that test somehow exempt from tariffs, and they're not because it's not just cars, it's parts, and Tesla does import a fair number of parts from other countries, and so they're not like immune from tariffs. They just start a slightly better position because they don't. You know, the cars that they sell the United States are made in the United States. They're not importing cars from Mexico.
It could be a big day tomorrow, right because we've Liberation Day. Well, we're gonna learn yeah, because it's liberation Day and we're gonna find out exactly how these tariffs shakeout. I mean, that's come on, that's wishful thinking. But anyway, there'll be some kind of tariff update. We're gonna get the results.
We're not gonna be liberated tomorrow.
We're gonna Dan and I will be staying up late, but most normal people will get the results from the Wisconsin election in the morning, and then TESLA is about to report what most analysts believe is going to be a very very, very bad quarter.
That's right. I did mean to ask this. This comes out tomorrow evening, Daniel, tomorrow morning, Tomorrow morninging. Okay, wow, it is, Yeah, it is a big day.
I mean, it could be like it's like a triple witchy.
It could be like a.
Perfect storm of bad. On the other hand, you know, maybe who knows, Maybe it's all good. Maybe maybe they romp in Wisconsin and and Tesla does a little bit. You know, the expectations are so low right now with Tesla's deliveries, you know, notwithstanding last week's conversation where you know, of course we talked to a bull, but like if you talk to a lot of analysts, they are very down on this because of the political stuff, because of what we've.
Seen from Europe.
So if you know, I guess there's a possibility he could surprise somehow.
Okay, super hard pivot here, Max, away from Tesla auto sales and tariffs. Let's talk babies, all right.
So this is baby number thirteen. I believe that we know thirteen. There are fourteen?
Well, there are fourteen. I guess it's like are we counting? Ashley's is number thirteen and Chavon's fourth is number fourteen, and we don't know the order in which they were born.
I was, can you show your math?
Max? Yeah?
So sorry, Yeah, this is in the order that we learned of the babies existing. Yes, this is maybe thirteen or fourteen. And essentially we saw sort of a Twitter spat between Elon Musk and the mother of this child,
Ashley Saint Clair, who is a conservative influencer. She showed up in sort of a paparazzi video, essentially saying that she was selling her Tesla in order to pay for the cost of, you know, raising your children because Elon Musk, according to her, has you know, cut her all, you know, basically essentially stopped paying as much in.
Child This is another thing driving consumers with one more Tesla owner who who if you were bearished before, you're bearish now.
Growing one step further than the sticker.
Musk responded, I don't know if the child is mine or not, but don't sell your car. Put him not against finding out finding out?
Okay, I don't know what that means.
But then she responded, well, we asked you to take a paternity test before the child was even born, and you refuse and you're a petulant child. Like it's just gotten very ugly. Laura Lumer is sort of adjacent to all this too.
It's just like, what's Laura she's attacking?
So so Ashley Sinclair because she is beefing with Elon Musk is now on the wrong side of the conservative Twitter ecosystem. They are, including Lumur, are kind of talking about her as a essentially as a turncoat and and worse.
You know, you can imagine some of the kind.
Of sexist tropes that are being deployed against the you know, the mother of one of his children, particularly locked in a you know, dispute over her child support. Obviously, it's it's not pretty. I can't imagine, and it does it does?
I have to say it is.
It is does show you maybe this was obvious, This is probably obvious to most normal people. But Musk has sort of gone around acting like he can have as many children as he wants without any negative consequences. And now we see, you know, he's in a dispute with Ashley Saint Clair, He's in a dispute with Grimes, who's a musician and the mother of another one of his children.
You know, it's it's getting messy.
Let's not forget about Vivian, his biological child, who is just on the cover of teen Vogue. She is being very brave speaking out and giving her side of the story about what it was like to have Elon Musk as a father.
Okay, we're going to rap, but as we do, Dana On Elon ink here you are the keeper of such things and I have to say, at the very beginning of this little segment, I was confused, what is the official number of children that you say? And as a result we say, Elon Musk currently has This.
Is the line that I use. Elon Musk has fathered at least fourteen children that we know of.
Very important. You use that you have that last.
Clad Very good, you know. I in hindsight, somebody in the December twenty twenty four predictions should have come up with a forecast on how many kids.
We had one a week Dan Harmony yeh senior editor and there on this very show. I can't remember, but she predicted more children and it has come true. No, no, no, no, but that's not a prediction.
Well she'll have more.
That's like saying the sun's gonna come up. How many children? Is really the prick that's gonna be one of my December twenty twenty five.
I feel like you're just ben because Chancer or whoever the hell you pick to win the derby runs.
This is injured runs this weekend. Max. Before I say goodbye to you and Dana, remind us one more time.
Yep, everybody's business. It'll be in your feed on Friday. Please let us know what you think and give us chance. We're really excited about this show and we think you're gonna really like it.
Terrific.
Max Dana, thanks as always, thanks for having us.
Thank you.
This episode was produced by Stacy Wong. Anna Masirakis is our editor, and Rayhan Harmansi our senior editor. Blake Maples handles engineering in Dave percellfactchecks. Our supervising producer is Magnus Henrickson. The Elaning theme is written and performed by Taka Yasuzawa and Alex Sudijira. Brandon Francis Newnham is our executive producer, and Sage Bauman is the head of Bloomberg Podcasts. A big thanks as always to our supporters Joel Weber and
Brad Stone. I'm David Papadoppolos. If you have a minute, rate and review our show, it'll help other listeners find us.
See you next week. Hey, there, don't go yet.
I want to tell you about a new series for my colleagues here at Bloomberg. It's called Levittown. It's about a technology that's moving faster than the law, about dozens of young women in a New York suburb who discovered manipulated photos of themselves in a porn website. Told there isn't much the police or anyone else can do, decide to fight back, joining a global battle against deep fakes. Please note the trailer for the show you were about to hear features adult themes.
Five years ago, this was a vast checkerboard at Potato Farms on New York's Long Island. Today this is Levittown, one of the most remarkable housing developments ever conceived.
Levettown, New York, America's first suburb, row after row after row of cookie cutter homes, the picture of the American dream. But recently, underneath the facade of perfect order, a group of young women found themselves in an AI fueled nightmare.
Someone was posting photos of many of the girls that we had gone to school with. There was one picture of me in a bathing suit, and I didn't have a bathing suit on anymore. It was just me naked, well not me, but me with someone else's body parts that looked exactly like my own.
Over the last few years, rapid breakthroughs and machine learning have made it a lot easier and cheaper to make real looking photos or videos of pretty much anything you can think of. But innovation comes at a price.
I felt gross.
I felt like I needed to take a shower. I felt like I wanted to cry.
I wanted to throw up, I wanted to scream.
This is a story about a technology that is moving faster than the law, where everyone is a suspect, even your neighbors.
It was always in the back of my head, like, oh, it's someone that I know. How you'll find out who that someone is? When you know so many people from school, soccer, all these things.
What we discovered in Levertown led us on a winding journey. I just always had in the back of my mind that any of them could.
Be the one.
Through the darkest corners of the Internet, they.
Call it an arms race between law enforcement and technology, and it's just we're losing.
We are absolutely losing.
Where online vigilantes and enterprising detectives are joining forces.
If you're given prey, you want to go and get it.
In this story, the victims flip the script, band together and fight back alongside some unexpected global allies.
I'm Margie Murphy and I'm Olivia Carvill. This is Levitown, a new Pops series from iHeart Podcasts, Bloomberg, and Kaleidoscope. Listen to Levettown starting on March twenty, first on Bloomberg's Big Take podcast. Find it on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.