Elon's Porn Problem (and Tesla Headache)

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Well, Elon Musk is now the richest person on the planet.

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He says he's always voted for Democrats, but this year it will be different.

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Alon Musk is a scam artist and he's done nothing.

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Welcome to Elon, Inc. Bloomberg's weekly podcast about Elon Musk. It's April second, twenty twenty four. I'm your host, David Papadopolis Bright and early this morning, Tesla released their first quarter delivery and production report and it was disappointing, so disappointing that Tesla scher sank seven percent in a matter of minutes. But if you're an X user and you opened X to follow that news this morning, odds are that you saw a little bit of Tesla news and

Yeah, this was very ugly. I mean there's no there's no two ways about it. This was like a horrible, terrible, no good, very bad start to the year. And yeah, they delivered three hundred and eighty seven thousand vehicles, which is like an eight point five percent drop from the number of cars that they delivered in the first quarter a year ago. And so basically Tesla has a demand problem.

And to that point, Max, I mean it is indeed, as Dana said, something we've been over before. But I think with the result like this, it's, you know, it's becoming more and more acute and louder and louder that it is just an enormous problem having a CEO for as brilliant as he may be, and all the things he may have done for Tesla, whose worldview is so misaligned with that of his customer base.

Yeah, I mean it's almost like if you spend eighteen months embracing like a extremely niche, extremely polarizing, borderline racist ideology, you're gonna turn some people off. I mean, like there's a reason like car companies, like when they advertise cars tend to embrace pretty like classic tropes, apple pies, American flags. They don't necessarily lead with cat turd and like freaky videos from the border. And that's of course what Elon

It's shrinking.

In fact, Hey, Dan, you had actually seen early this morning a tweet that you thought was spot on on this topic.

So Ross Gerber, who's like a long time former teslable, lives in Santa Monica, California, guy tweeted this morning basically, Tesla can't sell its cars due to Elon's behavior. Let's stop blaming the Houthi rebels or German environmental terrorists or a recession that never came or interest rates. Only one person responsible for this.

You know, and this guy, Ross Gerber, I mean, for years was like the most reliable testlable. He basically would cheer on anything they did with extreme enthusiasm. And I guess it's a credit to his intellectual honesty that he's come, you know, he's basically gone one to eighty on this. But I think it's also sort of Gerber like many people really bought into the ev story the environmentalist story. Uh, he is not on board for the crazy right wing signaling.

Dennat to that point. Is this merely a window into the broader EV market woes or is a fair amount of this problem in addition to those broader woes a Tesla and Elon problem right now?

Well, you know, the long arc is that like the world is still moving towards electrification, so like that trend is not going away, but the like rapid double digit year over year growth that like investors had become expected to is no longer happening. And Tesla as the market leader here in the US, is going to be like the Canary and the Cold Mine in terms of that. So you've already seen like a lot of other automakers like pull back on their plans, Like people are now

Going to do?

And I mean, the other thing that I really noticed about this this press release was they don't break out sales of the cyber truck. And I know, David that you were very excited about the cyber truck, but they're not even telling us how many cyber trucks they made, much less delivered.

Which probably means that the number is somewhere between like twenty and fifty I suppose.

Well, the other thing that's super interesting about Tesla's release today is for the first time they talked about energy storage which is you know, Tesla sells these big batteries to utility companies like PG and E, and they deployed you know, over four thousand megawat hours of energy storage

I will say, you know this on this question of is it a growth stock without growth, The way it becomes a growth stock is the full self driving thing.

And I think you know so much of that.

The valuation the sort of like it's worth ten times what other car companies are worth based on the number of cars they've sold. The reason for that is because investors and even a lot of analysts have bought the story that Elon Musk has been selling about Tesla as not a car company as much as an AI company, as a as a basically essentially a Silicon Valley company that only looks like a car company. And I think that's why we saw. You know, Dana made a very

I will just say this, Dana, though, there's one group out there in the in the Tesla investing universe that is thrilled, which is the short sellers, the group that Elon Musk hates, the people who have bet against Tesla stock. I saw a report the other day that said they are up billions and billions of dollars this year. So at least someone out there apparently is raking it in. Okay, So Max and I are now joined in the studio by our very own Rayhan HARMANCI, senior editor of the

Hey John, thanks for having me on.

Thank you for being here. Okay, So, Rayhan, we're gonna start with you. Give us a little bit of the long arc of Twitter and X and pornography.

Oh Man.

Well, in a previous life, I was a tech culture reporter at BuzzFeed, actually with John, and this is like twenty twelve. Twitter was only a few years old, and even then porn was a huge issue. Porn is always an issue, and every time there's an opportunity for users to upload things.

People are going to upload sexual content.

Twitter has had long had a reputation as being maybe let's say, more open to porn than other social networks. Albeit they employed content moderation teams and you know, did their best to eradicate offensive material. But over time there's been a lot of funny, little mini scandals, like people might remember that in twenty seventeen, the Senator Ted Cruz liked a bit of sexual content that spawned a lot

Just tweeted the words sex gift.

So this has been happening, but it's worth noting that this issue has not been helped by elon cutting content moderation teams in general at Twitter. And you know, there's like a lot of really awful and criminal types of pornography that are also on the platform and that make content moderation you know, illegal necessity.

So the other day, I believe you told me that you have a friend of yours who said, you know, Rayhon, actually I go to X specifically for poor.

Yeah, I was really fascinated by this. I have a friend who only uses X for porn. He made an account simply to look at porn. And when I was like looking up older stories about Twitter and porn, I found some stories from like I don't want to say's like twenty seventeen where like hopping to posts interviewed sex therapists about why people.

Are going on Twitter for porn.

So clearly this is a long standing practice for some people, and I think that at least the stories I read were suggesting that you can search for porn on X in a way that makes it less obvious you're looking for porn as opposed to going straight to pornhub or porn website.

So maybe for some people that has appeal. There was a.

Recent number that came out showing that X had experienced a growth in users who are like younger men in their like late teens, early twenties, So maybe there I don't know, there's there's fewer content moderation. Speech is getting freer and freer every day on X. You know, maybe people are noticing and looking at you more.

This friend is not Ted Cruz. So John, what in general are you saying in your reporting on the proliferation of pornography on X?

Well, the existence of porn that people are like looking for on purpose is kind of the crucial context here, Like Rayham was saying, Twitter has been a kind of a porn friendly site for a long time. It's a

Truly, more so than other social media.

Much more than for example, metas products, Facebook and Instagram have very strict rules about nudity, Whereas on Twitter before Elon Musk bought it, After Elon Musk bought it, you could enter a variety of terms, some of them pretty benign, into the search bar and find like hardcore pornography, people having sex on video, just right there in the feed. So it's like, oh, that's always been a pretty remarkable difference between between Twitter and NX and most of the

Yeah, your piece really dug into those spammers and some of the spam tactics they used at to be that have gone viral frankly for that matter on X, What more or less is the model and how does it work? This model that seeks to hap into the fact that just generally speaking, there's a lot of nudity and porn on X.

So the thing that went viral on X is this sort of like funny construction that was showing up in the replies to all kinds of posts. It would be a piece of history trivia, a piece of breaking news. It would be an argument between two people that had gotten really intense, and then here comes a spammer in big block texts spaced out with weird symbols saying pussy in bio or some variations.

And that's not and it was not germane to the conversation, not at all.

I mean, you know, sometimes incidentally it is that goes viral on its own, but this was it was so visible that it really became a meme. And this is a meme that is sort of like getting extra traction because of the platform stance on spam, and in particular because of Elon Musk's like complete fixation on bots and spam. It's like, you know, in the lead up to the purchase, through the purchase, after the purchase, it's just this constant

You actually opened your piece with those words. If our Twitter bid succeeds, he wrote back in May of twenty twenty two, we will defeat the spam bots or die trying.

That doesn't include the third option, which is just like everyone gets kind of riled up and is like confused.

About what you know.

It's just like this, it's such a funny thing. It's such an undeniably funny like turn in this saga of the you know, Elon Musk Twitter acquisition and that it just it sort of had to go viral, and it sort of stayed viral, helped by the fact that these bots are still around. This started happening early this year and it has sort of remained pretty visible.

So the pib bots, as we will refer to them henceforth in this family friendly show, are still as prevalent as ever.

It sort of varies day to day, like they're clearly working really hard to stop them. Some days I won't really see anything, other days I'll see them constantly. They are, i should say, evolving a little bit. You've got a whole bunch of different funny constructions that they're using. The one that I've seen a lot lately is my crazy boobs in Bio, which is like a you know, completely normal thing that people say.

It's this human evolutions as right in front of our eye.

You get fasaurus versions of that too that are absolutely delightful. But anyway, it's yeah, it's it's very very visible, and what it is is a pretty basic, like scale based spam tactic. What was remarkable about this is that it exists to promote very old fashioned, extremely unsavory flirt sites, dating sites where users are funneled through a whole bunch

You did, God bless you. You did it for all of us.

So we don't have to Yeah, and you know, I'm getting married in two months.

So max is this just a case of Elon Musk the true libertarian, just saying, heck, let's just give the people what they want. They want sex and nudity. Knock they can knock themselves.

Well. I mean, I think it's fair to say, based on like Elon's tweets and like his fondness for risque memes, that this is a man who's not totally averse to you know, online pornography and so I and also he's of course a libertarian and somebody who I think genuinely like thinks.

This stuff should probably be okay.

But that, of course is at odds with the fact that trying to run a large media company with major advertisers, which is what ostensibly he's trying to do, you cannot have a lot of porn. And there's a reason why, you know, pharmaceutical companies don't really want to sell their you know, heart disease medications against porn. Even Viagra does not want that. Nobody wants it if you're like a big advertiser. Disney does not want to sell Disney Plus

There's a reason why.

When they talk about what they do, they don't say, yeah, we're a great place to find adult content. They talk about the cooking shows and the you know, and other stuff like advertisers don't like this, and you know, this is just like a way in which Elon Musk's worldview is at odds with the realities of the media business. I think there's all so an extent to which, as John's saying, you know, he talked about getting rid of

And if you get the AI you know, the AI scam spam, then you've got the trifecta. It's something.

But also you guys, like I think part of this is that like x is completely unable to moderate itself, Like who could forget when there was deep fake porn of Taylor Swift? Like yeah, you know, the God of America. Like Twitter just simply deleted the ability to search for the words Taylor Swift, Like they couldn't moderate.

They sort of panicked and they didn't know what they hit the new keys.

For days, you couldn't search for one of the most popular search terms on a platform.

Well, that's that's that's worth it sizing like this isn't just a funny, you know, meme spam thing that's showing up in a bunch of replies. You can't really search for very much these days without seeing something that you don't want to see.

Well, this is what Rayhon keeps alleging.

I mean meetings I have.

I have made it clear that while I don't follow proactively any sex workers, I see a lot of porn in my feet and I was looking into it this morning, and a lot There are a lot of people commenting on Reddit and other places who are like suggested tweets now include spot like before you follow tab is filled with pornography.

So John post the gutting of X's content moderation team. How reportable is this stuff and how easy or difficult is it to get it filtered out?

A lot of the same basic mechanisms are in place. You flag content, it gets reviewed. Mostly that's not how the spam is getting dealt with. This is getting dealt with sort of invisibly, with a lot of like behind the scenes algorithmic identification and then a bunch of contractors feel are now, who are you know, basically looking at the outputs from these you know, algorithms and saying, okay, this is actually spam. We should identify this and get

One thing that's kind of funny and almost redeeming about this story is that the PIB thing has now become a meme. I think your story had this tweet It was like Merrion Webster's Dictionary did a tweet that it was like words in bio. You know, it's become like it just like a Twitter are just swallowed, like is a culture unto itself and in some ways has been able to absorb this kind of scammy, sad phenomenon and turn it into its own thing, And in a way that's redeeming almost.

When Xai announced that they were, you know, revealing a lot of details about how groc works and how the underlying model works, they posted a PIB meme. They said weights in bio from the official Grock account, Like this is they're not even They're like.

They're leaning into it.

It's like they have no choice.

I do think part of the issue here is that, like fewer people are using Twitter right now, notwithstanding you know those who are going there for porn, and then you have the porn scammers who are riding on top of that. But all of this is kind of a problem when your numbers are going down generally, because then it gets hard to like you don't really want to delete those those accounts. You could want to keep the numbers moving the right time.

Correct. So is there a school thought inside of X that says, hey, when given lemons, let's make lemonade, let's lean into as part of our new business model pushing adult content on X.

Well, there were stories.

Last week though that X was going to be testing some kind of adult content feature. I mean, it has rolled out for the past year or so, various like paid mechanisms, including like I think something about like paid video. Although if X really wanted to make money off of all the porn on its site, there's like a lot of reasons why that would.

Be difficult, right, They tried before the acquisition to develop basically a competitive set of features for OnlyFans. They were talking about kind of like a Patreon's but clearly influenced by OnlyFans fan follower model that fell apart. I remember it was I believe the Verge that reported on this, in part because of concerns about c SAM and you know, illegal pornography and non contentional content, and this was something that they figured out pretty quickly with a like quick

Right because, as you said, it's simultaneously overwhelming the site and driving away a tizers who would otherwise be there, but at the same time they can't monetize it in a way.

I mean, the winners really are my friends, right, my good friends who are now able to see more free porn that X cannot control at all.

And like, I think it was a big tal in hindsight when he changed the name of the company to X and had quite properly appreciated it. So John, Indeed, when you drilled all the way down and you click through, and you click through, and you know you got the pib spam and you followed it all the way to its logical conclusion, you found that I think it took you to a link called Provocative Neighbors, which in turn is run by a Dutch company.

Yeah, this is like normally you can't figure out who's running these kinds of sites. You know, it's pretty well concealed through anonymous domain registrars and all this stuff. One of the sites that you end up at was you know, pretty candidate about what they do and who runs them.

I mean, do we think that is he almost giving up his war on spam? You know now that like Grock is tweeting out these memes and like, you.

Know, it was really clear how committed he was to the war on spam. He did as as Kurt Wagner brought up several weeks ago, he was frustrated, I guess from the spam replies he was personally getting. But you know, a lot of that war on spam, you know, if you if you remember Back was about trying to wiggle his way out of the Twitter deal, right like, he sort of cooked up the war on spam in part at least because he realized that Twitter was was not worth as much as as he.

Not worth forty four billion dollars.

Man, It's definitely not worth forty four billion dollars. If a big part of the business is the business that John's talking about, if you're in like the porn business, you're basically cut.

Off from a big part of the normal, Like.

Financially, you become like a pariah state of sam.

And again, totally, you know, it is not compatible with running a mass media company. It is not compatible with running like a public company on a major exchange.

I mean, with that very small handful of exceptions.

So John, will we have you back in a year's time to report about whatever the new PIB is at time? Is X going to be more a wash and porn or will they have figured finally the bots problem out?

I think one one way to make a guess about that is to look at what's going on with like the Blue checks and verification because to some extent, I do think that current Twitter, current x leadership has kind of given up on conventional like spam countermeasures. They're still doing a lot of it. They have to, otherwise the

I mean, there's like this old chestnut that pornography is always at the edge of innovation, Like that was true in like times where like you know, filmmaking and video recording became popular. That was true in the early Internet days. Like I think that spam always finds a way, but also like sex always finds a way, you know, And so like brute.

Forcing these memes.

Is one way I think AI obviously is going to present more and more opportunities.

Wait, are you saying, Rahan, that this is the leading edge that we're going to follows. We're no, no, that, like you know this, these this you know, huge amount of porn on X is only the beginning for a new wave of general content on X Maybe is the rest of I mean, catch up with the I'm saying.

That the ex user base is you know, they're.

Growing demographic as young men. I'm saying that AI is flooding the market, and whatever tools exist to defeat it, I think are only matched by tools that will circumvent for.

Our PIB for what it's worth, will be pod in bio. Right, all right, John, thank you very much for joining us. This was great anytime, Mac great to be here.

Ray Hunt thanks.

This episode was produced by Stacy Wang, Naomi Shaven and Rayhan Harmanci are senior editors. The idea for this show also came from Rayhan Blake Maples handles engineering, and we get special editing assistants from Jeff Grocott. Our supervising producer is Magnus Hendrickson. The Elon Inc. Theme is written and performed by Taka Yasuzawa and Alex Sugiura. Brendan Francis Newnham is our executive producer, and Sage Bowman is ahead of

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