This week on Everybody’s Business , Max and Stacey explore the future of friendship. With OpenAI and Meta ramping up efforts to give chatbots personalities and emotional intelligence, the hosts ask: could an AI ever truly be your friend? And will this lead to the downfall of humanity? Reporter Sarah Frier joins the conversation. Then, Lights, Camera... Tariffs? President Trump wants to slap massive new taxes on films shot overseas, arguing it’s a national security issue. Bloomberg’s Lucas Shaw s...
May 09, 2025•34 min
It’s no secret that Elon Musk isn’t a big fan of the US Securities and Exchange Commission. He and his companies have been the subject of a plethora of investigations and regulatory scrutiny over the years (who can forget the infamous words “ funding secured ”?), and there’s currently a probe of Musk’s acquisition of Twitter shares . But only recently have Musk’s minions begun to ramp up their efforts to shrink the SEC. And while the “Department of Government Efficiency” has hugely missed the ma...
May 06, 2025•32 min
In the fifth (top secret) episode of Bloomberg Businessweek’s new podcast Everybody’s Business, hosts Max Chafkin and Stacey Vanek Smith look the first 104 days of the Trump administration--particularly the last 4. Businessweek editor Brad Stone joins to discuss Amazon's face-off with Trump, the GDP's downturn and the resignation of Mike Waltz. Then David Papadopoulos joins from the sidelines of the Kentucky Derby, where he explains why betting on the races is softening and why retirement is oft...
May 02, 2025•31 min
Today marks the 100th day of the second Trump administration. It also means it’s been about 100 days since Elon Musk transformed the US Digital Service into what he and Trump contend is a government cost-cutting initiative named after Musk’s favorite crypto coin. With the Trump news cycle more intense than ever and Musk the fastest moving part of it, today’s episode of Elon, Inc. attempts to make sense of the past three-and-a-half months. What we do know is that the “Department of Government Eff...
Apr 29, 2025•32 min
In the fourth (top secret) episode of Bloomberg Businessweek’s new podcast Everybody’s Business , hosts Max Chafkin and Stacey Vanek Smith grapple with the rise of the Man-o-sphere. Elon Musk is backing away from Doge, but his legacy will linger, and Max reveals the man behind Doge (hint: it’s not Elon) Then Sarah Frier joins the show to talk about the former talent agent who introduced President Trump to the Manosphere and how he politicized the space. And how one clip of President Trump talkin...
Apr 25, 2025•34 min
Last year was a big year for Neuralink, Elon Musk’s brain implant company, seeing as it made headlines by successfully inserting a chip into a human’s brain . Soon the world may marvel at a quadriplegic man playing chess using nothing but his mind. And while there are other companies in the field of neurotechnology, Neuralink has received outsized attention thanks to its deeply controversial founder. His ultimate ambitions are lofty—including characteristically extreme claims of products that ca...
Apr 22, 2025•35 min
In the third (semi-secret) episode of Bloomberg Businessweek's new podcast Everybody’s Business, Businessweek Editor Brad Stone fills in for Max Chafkin and joins Stacey Vanek Smith to talk trade war winners an losers. Though uncertainty still surrounds many of the Trump Administration's tariff policies, some trends are starting to emerge. Brad and Stacey select their winners and losers based on what we know so far. And Harvard University is making headlines this week as it pushed back against T...
Apr 18, 2025•32 min
It’s tax day in the US, and the Internal Revenue Service is reeling from more potential firings courtesy of Donald Trump, Elon Musk and their “Department of Government Efficiency” or “DOGE.” But DOGE headlines seem to have abated of late. What does it mean? Has Musk turned his gaze back to his actual businesses? Has the media’s attention span run out? Are the South Africa native’s efforts to terminate tens of thousands of government employees and shutter federal agencies—potentially in violation...
Apr 15, 2025•27 min
In the second episode of Bloomberg BusinessWeek’s new podcast Everybody’s Business, Max Chafkin and Stacey Vanek Smith talk market turmoil. The stock market has been on a wild ride ever since the Trump Administration put sweeping tariffs in place, but it was trouble in the bond market that seemed to get the President’s attention and inspire the White House to hit pause on the tariffs. Tracy Alloway of the Odd Lots podcast joins to help explain. And what does a big, global company like Apple do i...
Apr 11, 2025•33 min
When Donald Trump unveiled that big list of countries and their respective tariffs, the markets reacted immediately by nosediving. In the days since, business leaders, tech founders and global CEOs have been making noise about how their companies will be negatively impacted. And even though Elon Musk is now part of the Trump administration, he’s also jumped into the fray, feuding with Trump adjutant Peter Navarro on (where else?) X. This is the biggest split between Trump and Musk we’ve seen yet...
Apr 08, 2025•33 min
In the first episode of Bloomberg Businessweek’ s new podcast Everybody’s Business , Max Chafkin and Stacey Vanek Smith try to make sense of “Liberation Day”—Donald Trump’s recent introduction of steep tariffs on imports from seemingly every corner of the globe. Will these taxes "fix" the economy like a hammer helps a headache? Or are they a tool to change an unsustainable system of global trade? Then Businessweek editor Brad Stone joins to discuss reported recent attempts of Amazon’s Jeff Bezos...
Apr 04, 2025•32 min
On Friday night, news broke that Elon Musk was merging his company X with his company xAI—a move that this very podcast, Elon, Inc. , had predicted last year. This week, a campaign for the Wisconsin Supreme Court looms very large, as Musk is again spending millions of dollars to (Democrats contend) try and tilt an election in the Republican Party’s favor. Today, we talk about what the Friday night news means for Musk’s financial world and what the Wisconsin race means for his political future. T...
Apr 01, 2025•37 min
Elon Musk’s leverage over the Republican Party, made plain by his threats to finance primary challenges against anyone who fails to fully support Donald Trump, comes from his multibillion-dollar bank account. Recently, he’s decided to spend some of that money on behalf of the party. In Wisconsin, Musk has spent upwards of $13 million to sway a state supreme court race that has ramifications for Republican control of the US House of Representatives. To discuss this, host David Papadopoulos is joi...
Mar 25, 2025•33 min
Elon Musk has been making news at a furious pace as he seeks to dismantle wide swaths of the federal government at Donald Trump’s behest. His behavior has certainly been enough to fill the pages of Judd Legum’s new publication, Musk Watch . The newsletter, an offshoot of Legum’s Popular Information Substack, launched on Inauguration Day. Since then, he’s used his background in law, journalism and digging through public records to keep track of the South Africa native and what he and his “Departm...
Mar 20, 2025•27 min
In some ways, Elon Musk had a quiet week—if making news on a daily instead of hourly basis counts as quiet. This week on Elon, Inc. , the panel— Max Chafkin, Dana Hull and Bloomberg Businessweek columnist Amanda Mull—discusses Mull’s latest story about the wrong turns Musk has taken with the Tesla brand. And while Tesla dealerships and Supercharger stations are increasingly the focus of anti-Musk ire , the panel ponders the future of SpaceX and Starlink, especially as the latter is seeing growth...
Mar 18, 2025•35 min
He may be the world’s richest person and a personal pal of Donald Trump, but even Elon Musk can have a bad week. Not only has Tesla stock continued to crater as consumers worldwide turn their back on the South Africa-born multibillionaire ( some violently ) but his right-wing social network X was hit by sporadic outages he blamed on hackers. Even one of his SpaceX rockets blew up, raining debris down on the Earth and endangering passenger airliners . A big part of Musk’s waning popularity is of ...
Mar 11, 2025•34 min
While Elon Musk is busy in Washington, his publicly traded company has been suffering. Having skyrocketed in the immediate aftermath of Donald Trump’s election, Tesla is now in free fall and increasingly a target of protesters. Every weekend, more people have shown up at Tesla dealerships across the US with signs and chants, demonstrating against Musk’s effort to gut federal regulators and agencies while firing tens of thousands or workers with Trump’s blessing. Overseas, it might be even worse ...
Mar 04, 2025•33 min
Personnel Management (OPM) sent out an email seemingly to all federal employees instructing them to send back a list of five things they accomplished the previous week. Over on X, Musk posted that failure to do so would be tantamount to resigning. Confusion reigned as departments scrambled to advise employees on whether to follow the order from Donald Trump’s wealthiest assistant. This week, Bloomberg Businessweek’s Max Chafkin chats with Bloomberg social media reporter Kurt Wagner about this em...
Feb 25, 2025•49 min
Elon Musk and his assistants have reportedly spent the past week dropping in on federal agencies ranging from the US Department of Education to the Department of Energy, the Social Security Administration and the Internal Revenue Service. The result has been the potentially illegal disclosure of personal financial and health data belonging to tens of millions of Americans. Accompanying these visits has been the summary (and again potentially illegal) termination of thousands of federal workers b...
Feb 18, 2025•19 min
Federal judges continue to declare most of Elon Musk’s activities in Washington to be probably illegal as the question of whether his 78-year-old boss will trigger a constitutional crisis becomes more pressing. At the same time, Musk has been making news in Silicon Valley, with a report Monday that he and others want to buy OpenAI. The proposal may have been a feint, but Sam Altman did take the opportunity to make Musk look small. The OpenAI chief executive said no thanks to the $97.4 billion of...
Feb 11, 2025•36 min
Elon Musk has been in Washington a few weeks now, and he and his team of Silicon Valley adjutants show no signs of stopping their efforts to (illegally, many legal experts say) dismantle portions of the federal government in the name of Donald Trump. This weekend, we discussed how the Tesla co-founder and far-right billionaire was given access to a central component of government—the mechanism by which the Treasury distributes trillions of dollars authorized by Congress. Today, Max Chafkin discu...
Feb 04, 2025•32 min
In a week of unprecedented action (and chaos) from both Elon Musk and the Trump administration, breaking news this weekend brought the Elon, Inc. team together for an emergency episode. The New York Times broke the news, and the Washington Post followed, that Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency was given access to the Treasury Department’s payment system. This system, which handles a big chunk of the government’s money transfers, including Social Security, is normally administered by a sm...
Feb 02, 2025•22 min
It’s that time of year: quarterly earnings for Tesla are tomorrow. Regular Elon, Inc. listeners will know that means a new bingo card is here (and you can play on the Bloomberg Terminal at BNGO). But that’s only one of the many breaking news items about Elon Musk—another is today’s announcement that Visa is partnering with X to deliver banking services to the social media platform. To discuss all of this, host David Papadopoulos is joined by Max Chafkin, Dana Hull and editor Craig Trudell to tal...
Jan 28, 2025•40 min
Just as mobile banking revolutionized our relationship with our money and led to a plethora of new tools for management and investing, the proliferation of crypto and blockchain technologies have opened up all manner of new investment opportunities that go far beyond what early Bitcoin adopters could’ve imagined. This episode is sponsored by Coinbase. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Jan 26, 2025•19 min
Tariffs, crypto, deregulation, tax cuts, protectionism, are just some of the things back on the table when Donald Trump returns to the Presidency. To help you plan for Trump's singular approach to economics, Bloomberg presents Trumponomics, a weekly podcast focused on the Trump administration's economic policies and plans. Editorial head of government and economics Stephanie Flanders will be joined each week by reporters in Washington D.C. and Wall Street to examine how Trump's policies are shap...
Jan 23, 2025•2 min
All eyes were on Washington, DC, this past weekend, when Elon Musk joined Donald Trump’s inauguration events bigly, as our once and current president would say. The news was flowing throughout, including changes to the nascent DOGE project and a very controversial hand gesture. Also controversial? Musk’s ongoing video game scandal, in which influential gamers have accused Musk of not actually getting to the upper echelon of a few games by himself. To discuss DC, host David Papadopoulos is joined...
Jan 21, 2025•32 min
On Monday, Bloomberg News broke the story that Chinese officials were considering allowing Elon Musk to buy TikTok—something that, if it happened, would be earth-shaking for a whole host of reasons (though Elon, Inc. listeners heard us discuss the possibility months ago). Host Max Chafkin talks to Bloomberg social media reporter Kurt Wagner about what a Musk-owned TikTok could mean for the US (and China). Then Bloomberg political writer Joshua Green joins Chafkin and Musk reporter Dana Hull to u...
Jan 14, 2025•33 min
For those who haven’t been following Elon Musk’s voluminous and combative X posts about the UK—good for you. It’s a confusing situation where Musk backed and then renounced fellow right-winger Nigel Farage, and then tried to taint Prime Minister Keir Starmer with a “scandal” tied to when he was a prosecutor. Starmer, for his part, said “a line has been crossed” with Musk’s messaging. Musk then made an X poll asking people, essentially, if it was time for a coup in the UK. David discusses this wi...
Jan 07, 2025•38 min
Over the holiday break, Elon Musk was busy making news on X, furiously posting his way into a multipronged fight with ultra-right wing MAGA luminaries Laura Loomer and Steve Bannon about immigration visas. But over the past 24 hours, two other stories arguably overshadowed the civil war in Trumpland: a deadly Cybertruck explosion in Las Vegas and some surprisingly bad sales numbers from Tesla. David Papadopoulos is joined by Max Chafkin and Dana Hull to break down the news. See omnystudio.com/li...
Jan 02, 2025•28 min
As we established in our last podcast —an episode recapping 12 months of ups and downs and ups for the world’s richest man—this was a unique year for Elon Musk. This week, our look back continues—along with a look forward—in the second part of a holiday special of Elon, Inc . Host Max Chafkin is joined by Elon Musk reporter Dana Hull, tech editor Sarah Frier and special guest Ryan Broderick, host of the podcast Panic World and founder of the Garbage Day newsletter. Together they play some games ...
Dec 30, 2024•34 min
