Hey, guys, welcome, Welcome to the Tesla shareholder meeting. And I just want to start up by saying, hot, damn, I love you guys. Yeah, we have the most awesome shareholder base. I mean, it's just incredible. Any public company, it's incredible.
Wow.
Well, Elon Musk is now the richest person on the planet.
More than half the satellites in space are owned and controlled by one man.
Starting his own artificial intelligence company.
Well, he's a legitimate, super genius, legitimate, he says.
He's always voted for Democrats, but this year it will be different.
He'll vote Republican.
There is a reason the US government is so reliant on him.
Alon Musk is a scam artist and he's done nothing.
Anything he does is fascinating to people.
Welcome to Elon Am Bloomberg's weekly podcast about Elon Musk. It's Tuesday, June eighteenth. I'm your host, David Popadopoulos. This week, we've got money on our minds, specifically Elon's victory. His pay package of some fifty billion dollars was approved by Tesla's shareholders last week. We'll dig into what that does and doesn't mean for his fortunes and for the company,
plus imagine if X became the new Venmo. Friend of the show, Kurt Wagner has a scoop on Elon's plans to morph x into a payments platform and some early steps the company has taken. And we'll also dig into another ex development, the disappearance of users liked posts on the platform and what's behind it. To talk about all things Tesla, we have our expert muscologists, Max Chapkin, BusinessWeek senior reporter, he Loo Max, Hot, damn.
I love you guys.
You know you beat me to that. So I was gonna say that here at the end I should clearly I shouldn't be at the beginning you said, hot damn. You love us all, and we all love you back. Dana Hull, our Elon Musk correspondent, Hello, Dana.
Awesome to be here.
And we have Jeff Feely, who covers Delaware courts for us here at Bloomberg. Hello Jeff Mooring. Later on the show to talk Ax, we'll have Kurt on and we're gonna have a special guest, Max Reid, who writes the Read Max newsletter and his covered tech for many years. Okay, Dana, So the shareholder vote or votes. There were actually multiple votes, but the biggest one on Elon's pay package took place last week. He won. What was the margin of the vote.
Was it similar to his victory way back when when this thing was approved in eighteen? Big or smaller? What did it look like?
It was roughly the same. Seventy two of voting shareholders vote to reratify Musk's twenty eighteen pay package. And what was super interesting was that going into the shareholder meeting like the day before, I thought the vote was very close. I mean, Tesla had been running this very aggressive campaign to engage retail shareholders. All of these people like Tesla, Boomer Mama and others were like urging everyone to vote. There was this huge, huge get out the vote effort.
Optimists was urging people to vote, and the sense was that they didn't have the institutional shareholders. But then on Wednesday, Elon Musk, who has a penchant for front running, basically ran the big revealed He posted on Twitter that the vote that he was winning by a wide margin. And we came to learn after the fact that Vanguard, the largest shareholder in the company after Elon himself voted yes.
For the pay package, and that was a bit of a surprise because they were a no in twenty eighteen.
So Max, I guess I wonder if at some level it shows that his get out the vote campaign was affected.
Yeah, Danna says, And this is for a company that is, you know, sort of famously against spending money on marketing and pr and on on these kinds of things. They went all out on this, on this effort, So in other words, spending it seemed more energy and even maybe more thought and time and so on into marketing. Elon Musk, as a guy worth really.
Wanted that money. I guess that included, of course, the slightly strong arm tactics of calling up Tesla employees who owned the stock and urging them to vote. You know, he was pretty pumped up about winning this vote. You guys heard at the outset his greeting the assembly meeting there. We have another clip of him here talking about where he sees the company and it's valuation going.
I think, just based on vehicle autonomy, we can we can ten x one ten x the value of the company. I believe that's what will happen, and it's just what what do you know? It's it's four twenty pm. Just noticed that.
I assume those pauses there are for the bong hits.
I feel like I get it in contact high, you know, listening to.
Him a little bit as well.
Uh, you know, we talk a lot about on this podcast about how, you know, there's sort of what Elon says and then how he says it. And he's saying pretty much the same things he's been saying for a long time, although the mood was you know, even loopier, even more sort of ebuliant.
Did I say that right than usual?
And and you know, full on loopy and and you know, investors historically have kind of responded to that if if Elon must seems like he's in a good mood, even if he's making weed jokes and awkwardly pausing and using a weird voice to say hot, damn, I love you guys, investors are sort of okay with it.
Yeah, Dan. At that point, the stock actually did pop both that day and the next day, So even though it was sort of expected, I guess it was a bit of a reassurance for those.
Tesla has always struggled with key man risk, and the key man risk in this case, was that if the package didn't pass, that Elon was gonna get pissed off and quit and walk away and take his like AI and robotics toys elsewhere. So it was like reassuring to investors to sort of see him in this happy, expansive, dopamine fueled kind of mood, you know, talking about not just like the next chapter of Tesla's history, but he
claimed that they are writing a new book. And then he threw out like all kinds of crazy numbers about how the valuation is just gonna skyrocket. I mean, they're gonna ten x, they're gonna see two hundred to three hundred percent year over year growth, and the energy storage they've got, the cyber trucks, they're going to optimize optimists. And then he thinks that it's possible for Tesla to achieve evaluation ten times that of the most valuable company today,
which would be a valuation of thirty three trillion. So, you know, we talk about Elon's moods. He was expansive Elon, And you know, these shareholder meetings are like religious revival events. I mean, people are so grateful to have a ticket to be able to say that they were in the room with this guy. But this doesn't mean that it's over. Like, yes, the shareholders voted to reratify the package, but the judge in Delaware still has to sort of sign off on that, and that is far from certain.
Yeah, so Jeff, give us the next legal steps here.
Okay, So these guys have tried to do basically a redo over the original package to fix the flaws that Judge McCormick pointed out in January. Nobody's tried to ever try to do this before. The section of the law they're using, lots of people say was set up for technical fixes, not substantive changes like this. So Judge Katie that's her local nickname, is not required to take notice
at all of the shareholder vote. She has to find a lot to issue a final ruling in the case, and that includes deciding how much the winning shareholders lawyers get in legal fees. There's a hearing July eighth to hear arguments on the legal fees. And I guess on Tesla's argument that they can, you know, now, they should be able to just reinstate its package because they've fixed all the you know, they've plugged all the holes the general belief in the bar around here is that this
is not going to affect her ruling. She's ruled on the package, she's found the flaws. They really didn't address the flaws. They made some weak attempts at trying to remove the conflicts, but having one person serve as the special committee is not what you would call best practices in good governance world.
Okay, And that's the thing, But Jeff, one of her concerns, if I'm remembering correctly, was that they kind of smooth played this one over on the shareholders and who weren't quite aware of what they were actually voting for when they voted for his pay package. And certainly, I would think no one can make that argument now. I think everyone was eminently aware of what they were voting for.
Yes, although they basically they being TESLA, were not very transparent about the idea that this didn't have any binding effect on the judge. Okay, They led folks to believe that if you vote yes, that Elon's going to get his dough, and that ain't.
So okay, right true, So they voted yes, he doesn't get his dough. Yet they're waiting for the judge now, to respond. Now, Dan, what happens if the judge says no yet again, is there any pay package in effect that all for him ers are essentially going unpaid in the horror of it, you know, a guy with whatever one hundred and fifty billion dollars or so going unpaid? But what is the current pay package in place?
So there's a couple avenues. I mean, Tesla will undoubtedly appeal if the judge says no, screw you. I'm not taking this like redo vote into account. My opinion from January still stands.
She's definitely saying screw you if she votes now.
Yeah, Tesla can appeal to the Delaware Supreme Court. They so, you know, keep your eye out for a filing on that after they have this hearing in July. But now Tesla has moved its legal incorporation to Texas. I mean, that's the other significant vote that happened at the shareholder meeting.
They are now.
Domiciled in Texas. It's where their headquarters has been for a couple of years now. But now they have another avenue because they could I mean, Jeff correct me if I'm wrong here, but they could do yet another revote in Texas and then only Texas law would apply. So that's sort of the endgame here. I mean, they're doing an end run around the Delaware court system.
This is going to go on and on though, because you have, first of all, I'm pretty sure that Texas has to respect Judge McCormick's ruling, or it should respect.
Judge McCormick's ruling, so they have to do a new pay package.
Meanwhile, you've got all of these lawsuits that were filed, you know, just under the wire, to all these shareholders who want to have cases in Delaware court. So this Delaware is going to have something to say about Elon Musk for some time.
Yeah.
Well, first of all, let's remember if Texas's business courts aren't even set up yet, they will not be set up until September.
What does that mean Texas has no business courts at all?
Right?
No, No, they have no court equivalent to Delaware's chancery court, which is the primary premier venue for corporate litigation in the country. They are trying to set up a competing court to the Delaware court, and their legislature enabled it in the last session, but they have not been able to hire judges, they don't have stuff codified. It's a we're a fair distance away from anybody being able to navigate a lawsuit in those particular courts. So that's number one.
Number two, we live in a rule of law the last time I checked here in country, and being a disappointed litigant and being unhappy about a court system is one thing, But you know, switching your state of incorporation because a judge ruled against you on one thing is so Elon, it's almost hilarious, Danna.
Before we move on, though, let me ask you this last question. Out of this shareholder vote or the shareholder meeting, were there any other votes of import that our listeners should know about.
Yeah, So two directors were up for re election, James Murdoch and Kimball Musk. They've both been on the board for a while. Kimball is obviously Elon's younger brother. Both of them them were re elected to the board with like pretty flying colors, So no surprises there. And I think it was just like a chance for Elon to take this big victory lap and for the retail shareholders who really came all out and got engaged in an active in.
A way that you.
I mean, frankly, retail shold shareholders typically do not vote in proxy fights. I mean, every once in a while you might have like a big proxy battle where there's like an activist shareholder trying to take over a stake in the company, But in general, like people own shares via their like mutual funds or in their retirement counts, and they're not like active participant in I guess what you could call shareholder democracy. But this was a real I mean, this was a real sense that they were.
And so going.
Forward, I'm curious to see how active these shareholders will be and if they will there will ever come a time where they're actually like opposed to what the company is saying.
Hey, Jeff Feely, before we let you go, sir, any final words of wisdom.
Well, I would not go to Vegas and put money down on Judge Katie allowing them to do a.
Right Well, I do gamble a fair amounts, hold on, do not go to Vegas and bet again.
I mean, you know, I'd put some money on the Eagles, but not.
Don't you know I could talk about the Mets on this show and mock Max about the Mets. We don't talk about the Philadelphia Eagles on the show. Jeff Feely, thank you very much for joining us.
All right, guys, see you take.
Care, Dana. Thank you for joining us.
Always the pleasure.
All right Now, Max, Chafkin and I are joined by Kurt Wagner, who covers tech for us here at Bloomberg. Hello, Kurt, hey, Hey, and Max read the author of the Read Max Substack newsletter.
Welcome Max, Thanks for having me.
Okay, so for the purposes of this, so we don't get confused here, we're gonna go with Max, Reid and Chafkin. Does that work? By the way, Max is a fantastic name. I mean, if we if our if we had another child, there was a boy we were gonna name h Max, just Maximilian Papadopolis. The kid would have achieved incredible things. Kurt Wagner, let's start with you and your and your scoop this morning that you head out with your colleague Aisha Counts, Elon and co. There X are advancing on
their plan for their Venmo like payments feature. We've known about this for a while, but you've encountered a bunch of new information. Tell us what you learned.
Yeah, we submitted public records requests in all fifty states because what X is doing right now is they're trying to get payments licenses in these states, and so we just you know, sent the regulatory agencies are r foyas and in eleven cases actually we got documents back and it gave us a nice glimpse into what it is
they're doing. So we've got some business plans, financial statements or charts, things like that that we're helpful not just to paint a picture of what they're doing on payments, but also just give us a bit of a sneak peek into X more broadly, because it is a private company now and we don't really get those updates like
we used to when Twitter was public. But the short version is they are trying to build a payments like feature where you would, you know, log into a dashboard on x dot com or the app, you could pay people, you could pay businesses, you could store money. The fees would be very minimal, so it would it wouldn't be you know, passed on the business aspects of this wouldn't be passed on to consumers, and you know, as you mentioned, David, like this this plays into this everything app idea that
Elon has talked about. You can't be in everything app if you can't use it for finances and money, and so they are very much in the process of trying to make this a reality. And even though Elon's sort of hinted at it and talked about it, I think these documents confirmed a lot of the progress and ambitions that.
They have now Max read the Everything app and in particular leaning into the financial parts of it, something that Elon has really kind of obsessed about for a long long time, you know, way back to his prior to his acquisition of Twitter.
Right, yeah, I mean twenty five years after he sold his first company, Zip to Go Zip two in the nineties, he wanted to launch an online bank, which he purchased the RX dot com for his URL in particular, maybe even more than the business plan has been a real white whale for him. But I mean, this is a sort of famous story. He launched X around the same time that Peter Teal and company launched what was going
to become PayPal Confinity. They were in this really cutthroat competition and eventually merged and Teal famously pushed Musk out PayPal became, you know, the leader at the time of payment apps, and Musk, I mean, depending depending on how you look at at Musk has perhaps been stewing for decades hoping to get peg into the world of online payments.
He bought back the x dot com URL from PayPal twenty seventeen, I think, and you know, this was one of the first things he was talking about when he was buying X. I think even before he bought X, he was talking up we Chat, the Chinese chat app.
A app that's as good as we Chat in China, and like in China you like live on we Chat. Basically, it's like yeah, everyone, everyone's like, like, you live on we Chat, you do payments, you do everything. It's like, yep, it's great. Basically we chats kick ass, and we don't have anything like we Chat outside of Taina. So I was like, my idea would be, like, how about if we just copy we Chat.
Hey, Honestly, the assent is more interesting in that clip than the substance.
You know.
One thing that Max left out of that story is that and I learned this when I was reporting my book about TIL. Some people think that the final straw for Elon Musk getting pushed out was an attempt to rename Among the things he did and PayPal was kind of a mess back then before before he got pushed out, was to try to rename PayPal, which at that point had a brand and a decent following and so on.
He tried to rename it X so so kind of exactly the same move we saw with Twitter when he did the renaming there.
He just loves, just loves that letter.
So, Kurt, best case scenario for Elon and the X crew, when is this feature being rolled out? What's their timeline? Like, I know that Elon's always wildly optimistic on his timelines, but what are they talking about?
Yeah, I mean they wanted it or want it by the end of this year. They had said in some of the emails we read that they were hoping to do someonce they had the majority of state. You know, they had payments licenses in the majority of states. They now have twenty eight, so technically they do have more than half. My guess is they would want more than you know, much closer to fifty so that people are able to actually send money.
But could they do They absolutely need all fifty to start or could you start with forty two.
You could start with forty two, but then you know there are people in eight states who can't participate, and it kind of.
What they are going to be losing out on. Jesus.
Well, yeah, but you know, imagine you have a friend there you want to send money to and you can't. It sort of limits the the you know, user experience, and I I think that's really the key, right, Like building this getting the approval is sort of the easy part in my opinion. I actually think the hard part here is going to be convincing people to use X in a way that they have never used it before.
Right.
Not only are there a bunch of existing competitors like Venmo out there that have market share, but it's a user behavior issue, Like how many people are going to suddenly say, yes, this app that I've used to you know, dunk on politicians or get my news for the past twenty years is suddenly going to be my bank. Like that's just not a logical jump for most people. And I think that's going to be the bigger hurdle than actually building the product.
Quick shraphole here, which of the I want to ask the two max is and Kurt, if you indeed, would you know, try this out, assuming, by the way, I'm going to throw in one hundred dollars for X. I'm going to give you all three hundred dollars because I'm sure they're going to do something like that. They're going to slip you a C note or something. They slip you a cnoe and say, hey, we want you to use it. Stop using venmo use X Max.
Jeff, Well, I'm going to look at what the interest rates are, you know, really very closely studied offering.
No, I'm not going to use the app that I doom scroll to do banking.
No next season, No, Max read.
Take the one hundred dollars and I'd make the minimum number of payments to get the hundred dollars out, and then I would never use it again.
It's a good answer, Kurt.
Yeah, I do the same. I mean, I'm not even comfortable really using Twitter DMS right now for privacy reasons, So I'm not going to be using Twitter for my banking.
Reading Kurt story and reminded it was like reading I feel like there's a really good illustration of how easy it is when you're very wealthy to like spend money on dumb things. Because clearly Elon Musk told a bunch of people, and I think there's some reporting to this effect as well. Like said, you know, essentially ordered his team to secure these permits. They're doing so at probably absurd expense.
Why is that? Why is why is securing permits incredibly expensive?
You have a bunch of you know, high priced lawyers, and you know it has taken years, and like, at the end of the day, even if they get all these permits, like Kurt says, you know, this is not going to be a big business.
Right. Let's even pretend, Kurt that it is a big business for the sake of argument. Let's say this thing takes off and holy smokes, everyone stops using Zel, stops using Venmo. They are xing exing money across the globe as they see it. Does it generate a lot of revenue for them? As they've laid out their model and the documents you've looked at.
They haven't put revenue projections into the documents we've seen. They have said that the fees are not really the main purpose here. Again, they wouldn't they wouldn't do fees for consumers. They would do a fee for a business. So if I buy something from you, David, you as the retailer might have to you know, pay one, two, three percent or whatever to X because the sale came
through their platform. For them. What they've said is the bigger businesses this idea that people will find X more valuable. Therefore they will spend more time on X, and that will make X a better advertising business, which is what they already do.
So the idea is that you buy your Cheech and Chung gummies with this with this payment platform, right, and that will cause Cheech and Chong to pay more money to X to advertise.
Well, let's go back to our hundred dollars example here. You know, Max, you have your hundred bucks sitting in your X account, and chich and Chong suddenly says, well, you're a more valuable target for them because you could make a purchase with one click right there in the feed, right, you can make an impulse buy, Oh this looks cool, and I already have the money sitting my account. Boom,
buy right there right. It just eliminates these steps that get to a sale, and their hope is that that will make X a more valuable advertising business.
Okay, Now, Kurt in doing the digging for this story, I believe you guys, you also uncovered some financials in the filings, right, a bit of a better look inside how the company is doing and what did you learn there?
No shock to focus on this pod because we've talked about this, but the business was not doing well last year. The numbers we got were from Q one and Q two of twenty three, so about a year ago, basically the first you know, full six months of Elon in charge, and X's revenue was about forty percent lower than the
year prior when he took over. They lost almost five hundred million dollars in the first quarter alone, And I think for me, not only did it confirm a lot of things that we've been hearing and trying to report right sort of around the company, but I think that it just sort of explains why this everything app idea is so important to Elon, because the current business plan that they have is just not working. It's not big enough.
And so if you are sitting there saying, hey, you know, we have a business that's half the size of what I acquired, you got to fill that in somehow. And so I think That's why this everything app and these payments are such a priority for them is because they're sitting there going we need to figure out how to make money from this thing.
But I guess Max read My question for you would be, this is in some little startup company now, I mean X formerly Twitter's been around for a while. You are now losing a half a billion dollars a quarter. At what point do you just say, all right, we're just throwing good money after bad here. This ain't working.
Are you asking me or are you asking hypothetical Elon Musk, because I'm not sure Elon Musk ever quite hits that point. I mean, for me, I would have said that nineteen months ago, but I also wouldn't have bought x Twitter or whatever. I mean, this is the funny thing about the everything app. And you could even hear it in that clip, which I believe was from before even bought Twitter.
The idea. I don't know if you're thinking we need to make this company really big if you just say the words everything app, that's the biggest thing there is. Everything is everything. But it's not precisely a business plan, is it?
You know?
We Chat is what it is because of a pretty specific situation about Chinese finance and banks and payments, and it evolved into that after a bunch of decisions made over the course of a couple decades. And it's really not the kind of thing that you can just walk in and say, if we if we crobe our payments into the uh you know, as we say the the appword, Cheach and Shong are selling me gummies and where camgirls have all kinds of things in their bios. It doesn't
strike me as as a natural fit. And I don't think it's the kind of thing that's suddenly can to leverage you into a Facebook sized company.
We know that this everything app thing is is, like Max is saying, like an uphill battle because every other tech company has in the US has tried it. Facebook
has tried it. You know, they all this is not like this is not like this is like the most obvious thing you could possibly think if you owned a social media But it's not some kind of this was real great epiphany, right, And they've all tried it and they've all basically failed for the reasons I'm Max saying, like the Internet is, it's a thing.
It's like a living thing. That's evolved.
You can't just sort of like snap your fingers and swallow you know, a whole section of the of the Internet where people have sort of locked in relationships with companies. But you know, one thing I've noticed as we've had this conversation, I mean, this thing with the everything app. Just take it seriously for a second. It's kind of similar to optimists, right, It's just like Elon Musk picking
the biggest possible thing. So like, what if I owned the means of production for everything in the entire world? Like he's basically said that, what if I own the entire Internet? That would be great? And you know he's
this is where he's honestly very good. I mean, as outlandish as those ideas are, and as outlandish it is for Elon to sit up at the Tesla annual meeting when Tesla is you know, worth five hundred billion dollars and is like, you know, way over valued relative to every other car company, to say, oh, we're going to be worth you know, thirty trillion, and people kind of take that no seriously.
But on that going back to that shareholder meeting, because actually that that's where my mind was going a little bit, Kurt. I know you were listening in early and you heard the clips, the raucous clips of the crowd egging him on and cheering him. You can't tell me that you can't take some of those enthusiastic Tesla shareholders and Tesla owners and get them on this everything app Come on, you can.
There were what three hundred people in that room? Sure users, right, I feel.
Like there were at least you know, five hundred, come on, at least five.
I mean, this is this is sort of the the subscription product that X launched on, you know, right after right, Like, you look at who kind of is subscribed to that, and I think for the most part it's people who believe in Elon and people who are Elon fans, and that is a small business for them. That is not a big enough business for this to work. So there's always going to be people no matter what he does. He sold he sold flamethrowers for God's sake, right, and
like people bought those. So like, no matter what he does, there will be an audience for it. But I think the question is is it at scale? And I don't think, you know, I think this will be tough to get to scale.
I got your currently everything app is going to be as important to X as the flamethrower was to test on. So some iteration of zero point zero zero zero zero one percent of revenue max read and other ex news the company has begun to hide to a certain degree your likes on posts. Tell us a little bit more about it and how we should interpret this.
Yeah, so last week some people poking around on Twitter realized that they were piloting a program where likes would be hidden. So classically, there are three actions you can do with a tweet. You can retweet or quote tweet it, you can reply to it, or you can like it, which has an ambiguous meaning. Let's say, but it's saved in a big list that is public or was until
recently publicly accessible on your profile. So if you're out there liking Cheech and Chong tweets, then anybody who goes to your profile can see all the Cheech and Chong tweets you liked. And similarly, I could click on a Cheech and Chong tweet and see everybody who liked that tweet. And when it was discovered that they were sort of figuring out how to hide these or they were playing
around with hiding them. Twitter's head of engineering tweeted that they were doing this because they felt like people were afraid of liking I believe the phrase he used was edgy content, that trolls would attack people who liked edgy content, that it would be used to damage them in some way.
You're not buying it, I take it.
I mean, I think that's actually I buy that. That is the literal reason that many of the people who
work at Twitter right now want to do this. It's hard for me not to associate a particular kind of political valance to that statement, by which I mean, I think there are people, maybe who work at Twitter, but a lot of people who use Twitter who are under the impression that there's all these kind of right wing statements that are getting made that people would like if they knew it would be hidden, but they can't like them because that edgy content is going to get them
attacked by trolls. Practically speaking, I think maybe what they're talking about is a kind of dynamic where prominent people politicians, hedge fund managers, celebrities are under you know, are engaged in a kind of constant back and forth. Let's say with the non prominent, non famous people on Twitter, and if you like something in err and cy I mean, I'm thinking, for example, of when Ted Cruise's account, Oh yes,
accidentally liked a still from a porno. This was back in twenty eighteen or whatever.
It was all time greatest moment in Twitter history.
I think yeah.
I mean, look from a pure traffic perspective, it's obviously hugely profitable to Twitter to allow likes to be open, because stuff like that is just going to generate all kinds of attention to traffic. But if part of what you want to do is protect your most prominent users, you might want to reduce the you know what you would call their attack surface like you don't you want to reduce the number of ways that people can as Kurt was saying before, dunk on politicians, dunk on on
prominent people. And to me, that's the sort of the kind of consistent thread through a lot of the product changes that Elon has brought through x Chafkin.
Beyond the great Ted Cruise example, do any other big ones come to mind over the years of celebs mean or Kurt?
I mean, you know, Max is saying, first of all, Max he wrote about this in his newsletter, which was great and really well argued.
I think he's totally right.
It's mostly about politics and this perception of essentially right wing content. But I will say I think a lot of this comes up with porn, and it's a lot of people, you know, liking content that's edgy in a in a sort of sexual way, because often I think because they don't quite realize that the likes are are public, Like like there's like in certain cases I think a.
Genuine oh wait a minute, you mean they are, But you know.
I also think, you know, just to play devil's advocate the light, Like I went back and looked at my likes from.
The last Do you like your likes now? No?
I hate them?
And it made and it just made me think, like mostly the way I was using this was kind of just to express what amounts to like a pro I have it, thank you or something for somebody. It's like really embarrassing. All my likes are like self praise. It's like they're really lame.
And it just made me feel.
It really like going back, it just made me feel really bad about myself, Like I probably only out of for every twenty likes only one what one out of twenty.
Was like a good joke, which I think is the way you're supposed to use it.
You know, Kurt Max is feeling a little bad about himself. Can do you have anything encouraging or positive to say him? Can you like him right now? In fashion? Yeah?
I like Max. I wouldn't obviously display that publicly on my Twitter. I'll say it here to you guys.
Yeah, I want to ask Max read though another question on this, the you know, question of whether a legitimate argument can be made for it or not. I know, you know, you feel at some level that this is also just potentially cover for people liking outright racist sort of tweets and or x'es and that sort of thing. But is it possible that something like, hey, I want to be supportive of the kind of anti woke types, who are you know again some sort of corporate diversity initiative?
But god, I can't quite get myself to do that publicly. Is that not potentially a thing? Yeah? Totally?
And I think, you know, we probably don't have to go all the way into racism or hard right whatever to sort of acknowledge that there's like Twitter is a complicated social space, and there's all kinds of trouble you can get into, varying degrees of real life trouble versus
just sort of having your Twitter experience be ruined. And I can recognize the value the user experience value to sort of feeling a little bit more free to lend your support to tweets, though you know, it's the kind of thing when you say that out loud, it feels a little bit ridiculous that this is like a user priority. Is that you want to make sure they're able to click the heart button as many times as possible, you know,
under anti woke posts. But I think the other sort of the other, the thing that this cuts again just to defend public likes, is I think that, you know, Twitter is not a particularly transparent social network. Social networks
in general are not particularly open or transparent. But I think that kind of transparency is really valuable, even to the limited extent that it exists in this specific case, not just for say journalists like me, who are you know, naturally just looking for ways to take down prominent politicians for liking you know, big butts posts or whatever it is that they're liking. But in a sort of broader sense, to have a sense of who on Twitter is looking at what and how they're looking at it.
Well, yeah, what was cool about the likes is there's a cost to liking something, which is that you have to you know, there's a cost of retweeting, which is that you know you're gonna I'm gonna blast my followers with this, like that would be the maximal way to show approval or whatever, and alike, although it's not, you're
not you're not spamming your feed, it's still there. And and now in a situation where you can just you know, like willy nilly, and you're never gonna have to defend your your likes and like, you know, you're just gonna you're gonna get liking.
I feel like it's, you know.
Just one more kind of inflation that we have to deal with now. Max reading Kurt, you heard that Max Chafkin is essentially embarrassed by almost all the likes he's ever put up there over the past.
I only went back to like two early twenty one. Maybe you're like pre twenty one, Maybe might.
Scrolled further back.
There were cool likes back there, but I don't know, just not enough funny jokes and just too much, you know, professional, Thanks.
For the support give us. For each of you the most embarrassing, like in hindsight, that you've encountered.
Max read You know, I have to I don't want to ruin the game, but I have to say I don't think anybody should be embarrassed by their likes. I'm here to preach a gospel of non shame and unembarrassedness about what you're doing online. I think if you're liking stuff that people that people praising you, if your mom is on Twitter sharing your articles, you should be liking that. Frankly, it's it speaks poorly of you that you're not liking those things.
You know, it's poorly of you.
Max, you better be You better be liking those So that's that's all.
This is good. This is good. So Max Chafkin is embarrassed by everything he's ever liked. Max Reid is embarrassed by nothing that he's ever like, or at least nothing that he'll admit to you here in front of all of us, Kurt Wagner, what is your answer, sir?
You know I didn't go back as far as Max did. That's dedication to go all the way to twenty twenty one or whatever it is. I noticed two themes. The first is, unfortunately, just like our friend Max Chafkin, I really basically you even look my direction and boom, I'm liking that thing. Like if you comment about my book, even if it's not a nice comment, boom, you get.
A like definitely thanks doing a lot of that.
Yeah. And then and then I also have a ton of likes from around the time when Elon took over Twitter, because I was using the like at that point sort of as like a bookmark, right, like, oh, I want to come back to this tweet. So I got a ton of Elon tweets. I got the sleeping bag tweet from that executive who slept in the office. You know. Yeah, it was good, No, it was good. I mean, I'm not I'm actually with Max Reid here, like I'm not. I wasn't embarrassed by my likes necessarily. I just noticed
that they fell into a couple buckets. It was like, I want to remember this for later for work, or you looked my way and boom, thanks for the attention, Like you get a life. So those were those were the buckets.
That's a bit much getting so are going forward? Are you gonna stop doing that? No, not at all.
Now you can't see now, you can't even see.
It probably doesn't matter, but you just like everything exactly. Okay, No, No, very good, Max read thank you very much for joining us. Thanks for having me, Kurt as always, Thank you as always.
I had a great time.
Thank you, Max Chafkin did. This episode was produced by Stacey Wong. Naomi Shaven and Rayhan Harmancier are senior editors. The idea for this very show also came from Rayhon Wait Maples handles engineering, and we get special editing assistants from Jeff Grocott, Antonio Muffarech and Arafat Jalasho Perry. Our supervising producer is Magnus Hendrickson. The Elon Inc. Theme is
written and performed by Taka Yasuzawa and Alex Sudijura. Brendan Francis Newnham is our executive producer, and Sage Bauman is the head of Bloomberg Podcast. A big thank you to our supporter Joel Weber. I'm David Papadopoulos. If you have a minute, rate and review our show. It'll help other listeners find us, see you next week.