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Listen. Honestly, I'm not meaning to offend you. You're an intense person. Where does that intensity come from? Let's boil that way. And I had a tough childhood? You did?
Yeah?
Huh so right.
Wilf Isaacson goes into it in the book. We only have a couple minutes left, so all right, too long to describe the one or two questions I can do, and then we'll call it.
Okay. Again, I don't mean to upset you. Why are you?
You? Just well you are must gives 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.
I mean legitimate.
He says.
He's always voted for Democrats, but this year it will be different.
Health 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.
Anything he does, he's fascinating people.
Welcome to Elon Inc. Bloomberg's weekly podcast about Elon Musk. The tape you just heard was a part of a very surreal, very strange interview between Elon Musk and the former CNN anchor Don Lemon. Today is March nineteenth, twenty twenty four. I'm your host, Max Chafkin in for David Popadopolis, who is on vacation recovering from the live taping we
just did at south By Southwest. You know, one of the funny things about planning this show, one of the exciting things about this show is the sheer number of Elon Musk news that comes out in any given week, and this one was no exception. All of his companies have been making news. There's been new in Earth and in space and in the media, and on X we're gonna be talking about all of that, talking about Tesla SpaceX and Starlink doing basically a Smorgesborg of Elon, if
you will. And then we're gonna get to that now infamous interview between Elon and former CNN anchor Don Lemon. You just heard a clip from that. Don Lemon's news show was supposed to appear first on X, but Lemon and MUCKs parted ways, essentially canceled the show after one episode after that interview, And we'll do that. So to break down all of this Elon News. We have Dana Hall, who is our four full time Elon Musk reporter. Hello Dana.
Great to be here.
And then later as we dig into the lemon of it all, we will be joined by Kurt Wagner, who covers social media for Bloomberg News. But first we're gonna start with Dana and these news stories a lot of big news. I'm gonna run through these, and I want you to tell me what, to your mind was the biggest one of the past week. So first, Tesla stock has been going way down, and Musk has lost his spot as the world's richest guy. I think he's in third now. SpaceX had a launch of its Starship Rocket.
It was I think kind of successful. Taiwan is developing a alternative to SpaceX's Starlink. And we got news about a new contract that SpaceX has with the US National Reconnaissance Office. Okay, so those are four stories. What's the biggest deal of those?
For I would say, of the four stories that you mentioned, I think the most interesting one is that this news that SpaceX has this huge contract with the National Reconnaissance Office. And it's not a new contract, it's a contract from twenty twenty one. But now we know that the NRO is doing it, and that's just like yet another sign that Musk has muscled his way into being this incredible part of the military industrial defense complex. And that is just like a huge thing that I think that people
really forget about Elon. He's always seen as you know, the bombastic owner of X, the CEO of Tesla, but his role as a military contry actor just says so much about his standing in the world and why the US government is so perplexed and be fuddled by this guy.
And this was a new contract, right, I mean a contract that was inked under the Biden administration. You know, Musk has talked a lot about you know, Joe Biden being against him, but as you I think have pointed out a bunch of times in this podcast, you know, Biden administration and people close to the White House can be frustrated with Elon Musk, but they also need him, and I think this is probably another, you know instance of that.
Yeah, they need him for a lot of things. I mean, strictly on the SpaceX side, they need SpaceX to ferry astronauts to the ISS for NASA, but they also need SpaceX to launch military satellites, and now apparently they also need SpaceX to help the Pentagon and the NRO develop spy satellites. So this is like a very big deal that Elon is in this role and that SpaceX is in this.
Role, right, And I mean the weird thing here is, at the same time this news of this contract and you know, evidence obviously of a pretty robust or growing military business with this thing, we're also seeing, you know, Taiwan essentially complaining or getting worried about the prospect of having to rely on an Elon Musk hardware and possibly developing its own sort of version of starlink. How do we reconcile those two stories.
Well, I think that you know, it's kind of like, no one wants Elon Musk to have a monopoly on space based satellites or space based Internet, and he is rapidly approaching approaching that, I mean, nobody else. He has more satellites for the Internet up and up in space than anybody else. And I think that Taiwan very you know, astutely kind of watching Musk and his relationship with China, is just very worried about that, and they want to protect themselves. So I think that that makes total sense.
I mean, there's been a lot of focus about what Elon Musk has said or not said about Russia and Ukraine, but the whole Taiwan China conflicts like here, you know, is just like equally important strategically geopolitically. It has a lot of implications, and Musk's has said some pretty like why things about China and Taiwan that are totally at odds with the Biden administration. And so that's like another geopolitical conflict to watch.
All right.
So just to stay on SpaceX, I mean, I think what most people who were sort of just watching cable news or whatever probably know about is this SpaceX launch which happened last week. This was the Starship rocket. This is what Elon Musk has previously called the big e fing rocket. I guess that will one day, in theory, could be sent all the way to Mars. The rocket sort of got into space and then it exploded. What's your take on this? This is like basically just a
par for the course or something. This is an in development technology. We shouldn't read into it one way or the other.
I think that media organizations really kind of miss how space companies view research and development, which is that you have to test a lot and fail a lot before
you achieve full success. And like I'm old enough to remember, you know, like in the early days when SpaceX would first try to land the rocket on like a drone trip, they would always miss, Like the rocket would land in the water, it would explode, it would like it would hit and fall over, and like we had story after story about like how the drone ship test failed, but eventually they nailed it, and now they do it all
the time and it's not a big deal. Starship is very similar, Like it was a big leap forward because it it cleared the launch pad and it it went for farther and faster than it had ever gone before. And yeah, then it like broke up on re entry. But like they did a lot, like it was very successful, Like in the eyes of SpaceX, it was the most successful launch to date, and so in the eyes of the company, this was a huge success and they hoped
to get back at it. I think they're aspirationally like six to eight weeks.
Yeah, my big question here is like what is the business for this giant rocket.
It's like way.
Bigger than their biggest you know, rocket Falcon nine or is it the Falcon nine Heavy? But like, do they know what it's gonna what the actual like payloads are going to be, and how they're gonna make money on this thing?
Eventually, if they a will to take humans to the Moon and Mars, that's the sort of goal. But because it's so big, they can launch way more satellites on it. So I think the biggest customer for Starship is star Link, like SpaceX can put a lot more of its own satellites into orbit using this much bigger vehicle.
Before we get to the next segment, I mentioned earlier that Tesla's stock price is way down this year, as is Elon's wealth. Dana, you never gave me your take.
Okay, So the process of a limit, Can I start with the least big deal?
Yeah?
I think the wealth ranking. I'm so bored of that. It's like the richest people in the world jockey back and forth, up and down, like it changes every day. Who cares, like whether he's the richest or number two or number three?
Okay, but I agree with you, But that's not the actual story. The story is that Tesla's stock it's down more than any other or it's sort of been neck and neck with another well known company, Boeing, which of course has had like plain parts falling off. Last I checked, Tesla had actually performed worse since the beginning of the year than Boeing. So the actual story is Tesla's stock has lost an insane amount out of its market share.
Tesla stock is way down this year. Investors are sort of frustrated. There's not like a real growth wave anytime soon. A lot is riding on the next generation vehicle. You're seeing Nvidia and all of these like big tech companies that make up the Magnificent seven get all of this limelight. But you know, Tesla's stock has always been volatile. I don't think it's like I mean, I don't think it's
like in a free fall. I just think that there's like a lot, you know, like it's not clear what the next big catalyst is going to be, and so that's what has investors kind of bummed out.
I mean, my ranking is almost the exact opposite of yours. For what it's worth, my ranking goes Tesla's. Tesla's stock followed by the launch, followed by the nro the star Shield Starlink contract with the US government, followed by Taiwan complaining about Musk's dominance. You know, I just think, like we're talking about somebody who I think, like what he does depends on how the stock is doing, on how he perceives his own how he perceives people are reacting
to him. And I think like these headlines saying that Tesla is the worst performing stock of the SMP. It's worse than even the you know, airline that can't keep the you know, parts of the playing together. You know, Elon is an extremely online guy. I do think that is really important. Although I completely agree Dana the wealth question is is not really relevant or that or that interesting.
I mean, when you're worth more than one hundred and fifty billion, you know, what's a few billion here there?
Yeah, I mean Elon is very aware of his own wealth, let's put it that way. He's not very liquid.
All right.
Now, we're going to get into the Don Lemon Elon Musk interview, and to do that, we're going to bring in Bloomberg News social media reporter Kurt Wagner. Kurt, Welcome to Elon Inc.
Hi Max, thank you for having me all right.
So Don Lemon former Sienna and anchor who was by his own account fired last year, you know, after a series of controversial appearances on TV during which he said that Nicky Haley was quote not in her prime, got into a racially inflected confrontation from Vivek Ramaswami. He announced that he was coming X because you know, he wanted a place for a quote, an honest debate without hall monitors. He promised his new show, The Don Lemon Show, would
be bigger, bolder, freer. Kurt, you watched it, Did it deliver on that promise?
I have to admit I probably didn't watch enough Don Lemon before this interview to fully compare er s.
It was big, but not necessarily bigger.
I'm saying it's big, but yeah, the jury still out on the bigger part.
I feel like, you know, this interview was really interesting to me.
It obviously like I ended up, of course watching the whole hour, and the second half was just so much more like awkward because you could tell that Elon was so visibly frustrated with what was going on that it started off, you know, even though he was asking sort of some confrontational questions.
Actually thought it started off okay.
And I was like, right, you know, there's kind of like he's asking the tough questions that we would all want someone to ask Elon if he was there. But the second half just got so uncomfortable to me because Lemon was really like needling him on certain specific things that it was very clear Elon had no interest in
actually talking about. And so you know, you saw that confrontation, which makes for I guess, you know, great great video content if you want to call it that, but you know, the interview.
Itself I thought got progressively worse.
Well, we should say just at the top of this segment that after the interview, Elon Musk essentially, according to Don Lemon, canceled what was supposed to be a deal to air the Don Lemon Show Bigger Boulder, Freer without Hall, Monitors, all that good stuff that it was already done. But basically by the end of the interview, as Elon Musk you know, walked away, you know, in frustration. It seemed Dana there were, like Kurt says, a couple of kind
of tough questions. Don Lemon asked, I guess about two related topics, drug use, and that the impact of that use on national security, which is that if Elon does it, it's good.
Yeah.
I think what was really interesting about the interview was that Lemon asked Elon Musk specifically about his usages of ketamine, which you know has been rumored about for years, and the Wall Street Journal had a whole story about Musk and drug use, and Musk was very open about it. He said, I have a prescription for ketamine. I take it for depression. I you know, sometimes have it helps me get out of these bad moods. I'm under a
doctor's care. I don't take it a lot. There are weeks when I don't take it at all, but like I take it, And investors should be happy with that because Wall Street fundamentally cares about execution.
Teesley is worth about as much as the rest of the car industry combined from nothing, So I know that's pretty good as a mention. We had the best LA Car autoth last year. So for investors work, if there is something I'm taking, I should keep take it.
This is Dana the I think what Matt Levine are kinbably called the Elon theory of management.
I think it's remarkable that we're in a day and age where as CEO is now talking so openly about his mental health. And I thought that the way that he answered the question was actually assuring to Tesla investors, because the interview aired on Monday, and like Tesla stock was up six percent yesterday, and we were sort of joking, oh, like investors like prescription drugs. But it was like he
just answered it forthrightly, He was honest about it. He was like, yes, like I take ketamine, Like what is the big deal? And ketamine is increasingly legal, it is used in all kinds of therapies for people with PTSD, and the Veterans administrations like it's very much where you know, the use of psychedelics and things like ketamine are very much where marijuana was twenty years ago in terms of just growing social exceptions and a growing body of research
that it can be an effective tool. And so I thought that Musk candled that actually very well, and it was kind of like now we've got like the drug use questions sort of like done. Like Musk affirmed on camera on tape that yes he has a prescription for ketamine.
Actually, Elon and his allies sharing these clips like using them to kind of you know, own or dunk on Don Lemon. The weird thing is, you know, ahead of this interview, Don Lemon, who is, like it should be said, making the most of this right, like he is not letting this opportunity go to ways. He went on CNN last week to essentially complain. He implied very strongly it had been the drug thing, although I don't think it was the drug thing, right Kurt.
I mean, we don't know exactly what part of the interview set Elon off to cancel this partnership, but I agree with both of you. I mean that was pretty early in the conversation, and I thought, I agree. I thought Elon handled it well, like he talked about it.
He didn't labor any of the points, but like we did get some answers, and I thought where it really went off the rails for me was like much later on towards the towards the end, when they started talking about Elon's views on speech and what Elon calls censorship and what Don Lemon was referring to as you know, moderation, and and like you could tell at that point that they just fundamentally disagreed on what Elon should be doing with X. And I felt like the end of that
exchange was the moment where, if I had to pinpoint, I would say he was just like, Okay, you know this guy, this guy's clearly not aligned with my views on what X should be and where it stands on the on the spectrum of free speech. And there's no way I'm giving this guy any money.
Yeah, totally agree. And you know, Don Lemon had not promised that Cringe would be a part of the show, but I definitely think in that moment it was. It was really a rough lesson. Let's let's hear a little bit of that exchange. So you said, if they kill the company, it's them, but doesn't the Buck stop with you?
I mean, you're on. I have to say, choose your question, Kathy.
That's five minutes left, okay, But so the same question you want to ask, the same question as you said that they are killing the company, but you're the head of the company, the Buck business stup of the I acquired X in order to preserve freedom of speech in America the First Amendment, and I want to stick to that and if that means making less money, so be it.
I mean that's.
Produce our questions carefully. I'm going to use that. I love that line.
Have you heard him speak to people that way, either of you.
I think that this is kind of classic Elon. He gets he gets like he's very sensitive, and he gets very he gets upset easily, Like I mean, like when he was at the deal Book conference at the Year Times, he got like pretty upset about the whole idea of advertisers blackmailing him and you know, told famously told them to go f themselves. And like I think he also gets bored, and his time is pretty I mean, it's for a guy who has run six companies, Like it's
amazing that he gave that. He that he talks so much and so openly all the time on all these events, but he gave this guy an hour, and I think he just got increased, seemingly annoyed, and like it was like I felt like we were watching, like I felt like a volcano was about to explode. And then like he gets like more and more kind of quiet and like intense as his rage is boiling beneath the surface.
I was going to agree he's done some Twitter spaces in the you know eighteen months or so since he's taken over the company, and there's been some moments where you know, they'll bring someone up sort of quote unquote on stage to ask a question, and the either ramble or they're they'll actually ask him a challenging question that he's not used to getting, and he'll sort of do the same, like he'll cut them off and or just completely change the subject and sort of dismiss that person.
So that that's where I've heard him do it before.
It really is a good reminder that like he has not allowed himself to be with a critic like he even here right even in this interview where he is is dealing with questions he doesn't like, where Don Lemon seems really be getting under his skin by pointing out, you know the obvious, which is like your CEO of this company, you keep saying Disney's killing it, but you know it's it's actually you, and Elon just can't take it.
I mean, it's a good reminder that these other interviews have been in extremely friendly conditions where where Elon is either with like Joe Rogan or Lex Friedman, one of these influencer types who is you know, kind of borderline sycophanic with him, or where he's like literally controlling the other participant's microphone like in an X space is a Twitter spaces thing, Kurt, he made good on his thread threat. It appears that Don Lemon show the partnership with X is gone. Where does the format?
Like?
Where does this?
Like?
Does this? Where does this leave the whole plan that they were going to have all these TV shows? How big a loss is Don Lemon for the Elon musk Linda Yakarino pivot to video strategy.
Yeah, this is what I wrote my newsletter on this week was that I thought the decision to cancel Don Lemon's contract or partnership was really the mistake here, not
anything that was actually said during the interview. I think, you know, as bad as both Elon and at times Don Lemon looked a in this interview, the issue was that that he bailed on this partnership and sent a signal to the entire media industry that partnering with X is you know, only going to work if you continue to make Elon feel good or make Elon feel happy or safe for whatever you want to say. And so you know, I don't think Don Lemon was necessarily going
to be the champion that carried X into profitability. But I also think that he, you know, they really really talked about this partnership, how important it was.
It was sort.
Of the he was like the face of this pivot to video and this like push towards more professionally produced content. And the fact that they got rid of him so quickly, to me, is just yet another sign that like Elon's impulsive decision making is hurting the business of X.
I sort of skimmed through something in the New York Post about like Don Lemon wanted a cyber truck and equity and like a bunch of money. Is that true? Like I couldn't figure out the sourcing of that. It seemed like a very strategic leak from the Elon side.
Sure, I don't know if it's true, but it it doesn't surprise me, Like, it sounds very believable to me that someone who is like trying to come up with a partnership would say, well, here's the compensation package I want, Like, let's negotiate this. The fact that they announced Don Lemon back in January, that Elon sat for this interview, and that they had not apparently one figured out that compensation package. And two that Elon was acting surprised at the format
of the show, right, that was his whole thing. He was saying, Hey, I'm bailing on this deal because this is just CNN but on X and it's like.
Would you think you were buying to talk about this?
Yeah, exactly, So you agreed to sit for a whole hour. Didn't you know that before you sat down?
So two things on this on the point of Dana made One is Okay, I don't know if Don Lemon asked for a cyber truck, but like, he's Don Lemon, he's a big star. He gets paid a lot of money, as like Kurt saying, to go on TV and if your ambition is to recruit other people like you know, Tucker Carlson also gets paid a lot of money. You know, Joe Rogan, who I'm sure Elon Musk would love on the X platform, gets paid a lot of money. Like
you got to deal with this kind of thing. And the approach of like kind of canceling the show, attempting to if in fact these were leaked deliberately, you know, attempting to embarrass you know, former star like it's not going to make the next deal any easier. And the other people that they announced at the same time, I think one of them is, you know, Tulsey Gabbert is kind of like an Alt Democrat, not a Don Lemon level star by any stretch.
No, Don Lemon was the biggest name for sure, and then Tucker Carlson, the other big name that we all thought was partnering with X, ended up sort of being like, well, I put my stuff on X, but I was never officially a partner. So it's like, even this effort to move to video has had a ton of fits and starts, and it's just again, this to me was a huge red flag for this whole effort.
The other thing, too, is that this is like, if you're really trying to make this a thing, you don't want every star to be focused on Elon Musk. If the only way to get video like viewers to an ex video is to have Elon on the video, like, that's a bad sign too. Right now, it often feels like X is just the Elon Musk, you know, reality show, And of course this Don Lemon thing forwards it, but it doesn't. It doesn't like allow them to build a business,
you know, in any way. I want to move on to a couple of the sort of weird political parts of this, of this interview, as well as some of the things that Elon's been tweeting about. What did you two make of Don Lemon's efforts to like press Elon Musk on his, for instance, endorsement of The Great Replacement or the tweeting the recent tweeting about these kind of immigration related conspiracy theories.
I think it was good that he brought that up and sort of, you know, attempted to have some kind of discussion about this. I think hearing Elon try and defend some of these tweets was really frustrating to me.
And I think the biggest issue that I took from this was that there was an exchange where Don Lemon said something along the lines is, well, don't you feel some responsibility to sort of, you know, know that the things you're tweeting are either accurate or as close to accurate as you can, Like, shouldn't you be kind of
doing your homework before tweeting these things? And Elon's response was essentially, well, the community will just fact check me if I'm wrong, and to me, it was such a disappointing glimpse into his thought process, which is, I'm just going to say whatever I want, you know, implications or consequences be damned, and I'm just going to put the pressure or the responsibility of actually determining whether I'm saying
true things on other people. And as we all know, by the time anyone fact checks him, or by the time anyone challenges him or whatever, like, the damage is oftentimes done.
Right.
He has reached hundreds of millions of people, he has he has stirred up his fans and supporters to probably say many of the same things. And it's just like, I just thought that was a really disappointing framework for him to basically say, it's not my responsibility to say to say thoughtful things, it's everyone else's responsibility to check me on that.
I agree with Kurt completely. He makes a really good point that, you know, Musk seems to be relying on this community notes feature on X to kind of fact check falsehoods, when if you had actual content moderation, you could nip that in the bud much more quickly. But that's not the business model.
Yeah, I mean, and I feel like we sort of saw some of the limits of that approach. Even in this interview, you know that the segment where Lemon was like attempting to fact check on the immigration stuff, I thought was like pretty weak and ended up just having Musk kind of repeat a bunch of the same falsehoods
and come off almost sounding reasonable. Like I feel like if this was on CNN, we would be talking about should CNN really be like, you know, spending this much time like giving air to these theories about like democrats secretly importing you know, illegal migrant you know, sorry, democrats secretly importing you know, migrants who are undocumented. Like the whole idea doesn't even make a lot of sense because,
as Don Lemon said, the migrants don't vote. But if you just listen to what Elon said, you might think, oh, okay, like he's very well informed. I want to switch to another thing. Dan, it's to stay with you. Why has Elon this did not come up on the Don Lemon thing, but Elon Musk has in addition to this immigration fixation, he has spent quite a lot of time on the topic of birth control and has been like tweeting about it, you know, over and over again over the past few months.
In February said hermonal birth control makes you fat, doubles the risk of depression, and triples the risk of suicide. That claim has been called into a serious question by actual experts. Is this just this is like some kind of weird fertility thing, Like, what's going on with this?
Our colleague Sophia Alexander and I have dug a lot into this. Yeah, musk is very worried about population collapse and the lower than fertility rates in the industry world, and he really thinks that people should have as many children as possible. He himself has ten that we know of, and he has funded like an academic at the University of Texas at Austin to kind of create this whole
institute that's all about fertility and population. And this is like a this is like a pet project of Elon's intellectually, and he is like very part of the whole like natalist movement. And it's super interesting. I mean, I think that there's a lot more to report out there, but this is this is part and parcel of that.
I think the people who would be bothered by Elon musk Man's plaining birth control to people have already either left or written Elon off because he's said so many misogynistic and sexist things over the years that like, people who would be bothered by this are sort of either not on X anymore or already shaped their opinion about Elon, And so I kind of feel like at this point, anything else that he says in that vein is sort of just like like, I don't.
Know, we've heard it, we've heard it before.
Obviously different content, but the same general idea, where like he is here to explain something that he probably shouldn't be trying to explain to anybody.
And I mean, just to put a button on this, like, this is not good for Linda Yakarino, this is not good for X, right, I mean, Kurt, Like, what's she doing right now? How do you imagine her? She's watching Don Lemon, you know, probably trying really hard, I guess, to cheer on the boss, but also what like just thinking like, oh man, this is making things a lot harder.
Well, this was the one question that I was really disappointed that Don Lemon did not ask, which was, how does Elon view his own behavior as affecting negatively affecting Ex's business right.
They got into this whole.
Idea of like the clip we played about how Disney Elon is saying Disney's going to bankrupt and ruin this company, and Don Lemon is saying, well, is is this your responsibility? And what I wanted him to say is like a lot of the reason advertisers are not spending money on X is not because they're worried about where they're going to show up in the feed. It's because they're worried about what you're going to tweet on any given day, and should you be changing your own tweeting behavior if
you want to save X? And he didn't quite get there, and I was disappointed that that that question wasn't asked, But it ties into what you were just asking Max, which is like, how does Linda continue to do this job right? Because every time she goes out and attempts to sell something or to promote something, or to lure Don Lemon to come bring his talk show to X, Elon sabotages it with his own sort of decision making
and behavior. And so everything we've heard is that Linda is totally bought into this guy, and totally bought into this mission. But like you have to imagine, at a certain point, she's saying, how can I continue to do this job when the one person who's my boss continues to undercut all of my efforts?
All right, So to end this show, we've got another feud. So you know, we've talked about some of the other big Elon fuse recently. You know Mark Cuban, the billionaire former owner of the Dallas Mavericks, a Bay Area pie baker, a Nobel Prize winning economist, a famous CNN host, And we can add Ruth Bader Ginsburg's family renowned Supreme Court justice now deceased. Her son got into a big dispute with Elon Muskin. I'm just gonna give you guys a
quick synopsis of this. So there's an award you may have been familiar with, the Dwight d Opperman Foundation's RBG Award, which has been awarded to quote women who have strived to make the world a better place for generations that follow their own, women who exemplify human qualities of empathy and humility, and who care about the dignity and well being of all who dwell on planet Earth. Now I'm not sure about this I'm not an expert in philanthropy and I'm not an authority on this, but I do
think a key phrase here is women. Previous honorees of this award have been Queen Elizabeth the Second, Barbara Streisan. The latest honorees include Rupert Murdoch and Elon Musk. This led to James Ginsburg, rbg's son saying it was a quote desecration of his mother's legacy, and the ceremony has since been suspended.
What I don't even I had never even heard of this award before?
Like what?
Like?
Who made this decision? It makes zero sense on so many levels, particularly like the humility part, Like what what so I haven't followed I haven't followed this, but is this This is a feud because now that the the Ginsburg family is feuding about the award itself.
Ginsburg Feasts versus Musk, I believe is the feud.
When I first saw this, I assumed that the foundation must be like really strapped for cash because they gave it to a Murdoch uh and Elon and the hope was like maybe they would donate or something like that, because otherwise I don't think it makes any sense that like it just truly sounds like an onion article or like a SNL skit or something, because other it just makes no sense.
Beyond that we.
Have talked about one sided feuds. I think this is the one sidedest of one sided feuds. I don't believe Elon has acknowledged this award or the fact that it's been withdrawn. Although this creates an opportunity for a furtherance of the feud, he could complain and insist that he's going to attend the ceremony. I was also like trying to rack my brain for again, like you, Kurt, like
what is the reason? And I believe like RBG, like very early in her career did defend take on a men's rights case and there was like interesting legal rationale. It was about women's rights ultimately. But maybe this is, you know, in recognition of Elon's role as a great, you know, men's rights poster.
I'm wondering when we're going to hear that the woke mind virus is the real enemy and the reason that he lost this this wonderful award.
Dwight Dio Oberman Foundation, Operaman Foundation, we are here, we are ready to explain this if you want to get in touch, and with that we'll leave it there. Thank you for listening Elon Inc. And thanks to Dana and Kurt.
Always a pleasure.
Thank you.
This episode was produced by Stacy Wong. Naomi Shaven and Rayhan Harmansi are our senior editors. The idea for this very show also came from Rayhan. Blake Maples New Dad handles engineering and we get special editing assistants from Jeff Grocott. Our supervising producer Happy Birthday is Magnus Hendrickson. The Elon Inc. Theme is written and performed by Taka Yazuzawa and Alex Sigiera. Brendan Francis Noonan is our executive producer, and Sage Bauman
is the head of Blueberd Podcasts. 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.