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.
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.
He'll vote Republican.
There is a reason the US government is so reliant on ed 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. It's Tuesday, April sixteenth, twenty twenty four. I'm your host, David Papadopolis. Today we have Tesla on our minds first and foremost. There's been a flurry of news in the wake of the company's dismal first quarter sales, a management shakeup, a midnight announcement of layoffs, and yet another plunge in the stock. On a happier note, for he's heading off to India soon to meet with Prime Minister Narandra Modi.
It's an important trip for him and for sales of Tesla's and Starlink satellites, and a controversial one for X Plus, now this is important. We have an update on Elon's feud with Coachella. Honestly, I have no idea what the hell happened here, but apparently it sounded something like this, for the love of God, but Max Chafkin. Max will explain to us later what that's all about. But we're gonna talk Tesla first, and so Max our Bloomberg Business Week Reporter extraordinaries here.
With us a lot resisting the urge too yet.
Yet but wait, and we also have Dana Hall, Elon Reporter extraordinaire and by the way, a scoop machine. Hello Dana, Hello, Hello. Okay, so Dana, starting with Tesla. The news came out late Sunday night. They're laying off a large number of workers. What exactly is going on?
Yeah, so just to step back for a minute, Tesla has over one hundred and forty thousand employees globally. Periodically, Elon musk freaks out about the economy, about sales, about their growth, about capex, about their need to cut costs, and wax wax a large percentage over the weekend. All these employees were like bracing for layoffs. There was all these text messages my phone was blowing up. We hear
they're coming, We hear they're coming. And then like after and then on Sunday evening, at eight forty five pm Pacific, people started getting emails that they were being let go. And then Musk sent out an email to the company. I think it was after midnight. I was asleep. I woke up and it was already out, basically saying that they were restructuring the company and they were laying off
more than ten percent of their workforce. And just put this in perspective, this is the largest reduction in force in Tesla's history. They've never done ten percent before. And the chatter within the company is that it's more than ten percent. It's actually we've heard that it's more like twenty percent. And people are still waiting for other shoes to drop. So this is by no means over. And I think what's interesting is that Wall Street typically likes
it when companies do layoffs. It's this sort of awful secret that layoffs are good for shareholders.
Wall Street likes Blood Landing.
Yeah, yeah, this had the opposite effect, Like the stock was down yesterday. Granted, everyone's also worried about World War three, but like, this is not improving the stock at all. And the people that were laid off, I have just had the most harrowing conversations with employees. Some people got the email at three thirty in the morning, and the email else saying that you were laid off went to
your personal email. So if you like woke up and commuted to work and didn't check your personal email, you like got to the office and like your badge didn't work, or like the security ran out and we're like, sorry, you can't come into the building. So layoffs are always brutal, but there's a lot of pain and angers right now.
Very haphazardly, it would appear max to that point on the stock it's a almost forty percent this year. Why is the market interpreting it this way?
Well, so two things. One is Wall Street likes layoffs because you know, it's perceived as keeping expenses under control, friendly to shareholders and so on. Wall Street does not like erratic behavior, does not like surprises. And I think that this is both surprising and a little bit confusing. Right. It's like Elon Musk during the last earnings call was talking all about ramping up production of this new model
that's going to save Tesla's sort of growth issues. This is supposed to be a growth stock, right and of course there are ways in which some cost cutting, right size and whatever you want to whatever euphemism you want to use, can be compatible with that. But it just feels like there was a sudden shift in strategy that is not being explained super well. The second thing is context. Tesla stock is way down because there are more They are making more cars than they can sell, and that
is a big problem. That be a problem for any company, but it's particularly problem given that Elon Musk has said for years and years and years that the big problem is they weren't the demand was unlimited. The big problem was manufacturing. So basically the markets for many people, I think their understanding of this company is sort of broken.
It's also a really big problem for Tesla because they don't have a dealer network. They sell directly to consumers. So when they have forty six thousand cars in inventory, they are holding that inventory on their books.
That is a drag on.
Their profit and they report earnings on Tuesday.
Explain that a little more. Dana. So typically an enormal model with Ford and GM and others. This isn't a Ford and GM problem. This is a problem that the dealer. The dealers are choking on that.
Supply, right, So, like typically dealers have the inventory and they do all the tricks in the book to try to move cars off of their lots. But Tesla doesn't have dealers. Tesla sells directly to consumers, so when there's excess inventory, it is on the corporate balance sheet, not the balance sheet of a dealer. It's like all Tesla.
So it's just like another drag And it's not a surprise that like Tesla decided to do this before earning the earnings call next week that said, we've been bracing for I've been bracing for layoffs for weeks now because in February we broke the news that like Tesla managers were asked this question of like is this employee's role critical? And so we sort of knew that something was up, it was just a matter of like when and how severe.
But yeah, this is severe, and uh it also just is they've hired like crazy in certain departments, Like they're hiring all these AI and optimists and JOJO people, so but now they're cutting like across the board pretty severely.
That's the part that I guess. I wonder if it's just to a certain degree reflection of musk speed. You ramp up, it's the speed of light, and then when things go against you, yeah, you just and so maybe there's an element of that in this case. Here you both have factory workers who are losing their jobs and white collar workers who are losing their jobs. In the past, hasn't attended to mostly just be the white collar folks.
Oh no, No, when they cut, they cut across the board. It's everything. It's engineers, it's hr it's recruiting, it's white collar, it's support, it's policy, it's legal, it's manufacturing. They're cutting across the board.
So two other things in terms of just the sort of weirdness. One is Elon Musk has been saying for a long time that Tesla's FSD, which is like where he's supposedly going email full self driving, which has now been called full self driving parentheses supervised, as pointed out last week, kind of a weird name for a product. But in any case, he's been saying, based, yeah, it costs twelve thousand dollars one hundred and ninety or one hundred ninety nine dollars a month. But it's going to
get more expensive over time because it's so valuable. If you have a robotaxi, then you could send your car out while you sleep. As we've discussed, David, this is your retirement plan. You could pay hard, you might not pay for more. You might pay more, right, but no, but suddenly there was a sudden price cut of full self driving, So you suddenly have this weird reset of
a bunch of the basic underpinnings of this company. The last thing just to build on with Dana is saying it's not just that they have a huge and a huge bunch of cars that are sitting on their books. They've been cutting prices super super aggressively for a very long time, for like a year now. It's like you've cut prices like crazy. There's a limit to which they can discount.
I think at this point, you cut prices super aggressively with the idea that was going to help you move greater quantities of volume, and it's just not happening at all. I mean, you've cut prices and your volumes are stagnant. Dana, part of these layoffs there are two very big names of people who are leaving. Two top executives tell us about them and what we know about their departure from the company.
So Tesla only has four named executive officers. One of them is Drew Biglino. He's the senior vice president of Engineering and the Energy Division. He was basically the de facto CTO. He really kind of rose to prominence after J. B. Strabo left the company. He stood with Elon at the battery day that they did a couple of years ago. Like Drew was an engineers went to Stanford like very well known, like diehard Tesla employee. He resigned on Sunday, and Tesla.
Even put out he resigned, Dana or he was resigned.
He resigned. I'm pretty sure never say absolute, but I am pretty positive that he resigned. In the eight that went out today, Tesla said that he resigned. So that's just like a big loss in terms of institutional knowledge. Drew oversee a lot of the battery development for the forty six eighty cells that Tesla is trying to make in house. And then the other key person who resigned, which was almost more shocking to me, was Rohan Patel who is the vice president of Business Development and Policy,
basically like the lead DC guy for Elon Musk. Anytime Elon Musk goes to Capitol Hill, what if he's like meeting with Schumer and talking about AI like Rohan was right by his side. Rohan used to work in the Obama White House, was like the architect of this whole India strategy. And you know, Rohan was also the executive that would push back against media stories on X and was very vocal and had just like a big social media presence in terms of trying to set the record
straight in terms of reporting on the company. So those two people leaving, it's a sign to me that this is just not like a normal layoff. This is the company is shifting strategy. And some executives are at a point where in their careers where they're like, you know what, I'm out, I'm not gonna do this, I am it is a good time for me to pass the torch, like I'm gonna spend time with my kids, like you go do your ROBOTAXI thing.
So with rohuntel as Dana points out, former Obama White House figure also very much a ev sustainability somebody who's kind of interest in this. If you look at his background, right, he's done a lot of work on climate stuff. Of course, big part of Tesla's DC strategy is selling a company, has been selling the company as a climate solution. His
departure on top of this other one. It's like it's basically two guys who are really bought into EV's maybe the probably the two most important people at the company besides Elon Musk having to do with EV's, and they're both out.
With the collapse in the price yesterday and the collapse in the price we saw at the opening of the session today, this company is now worth less than a half a trillion dollars, still an awful lot of money, But at its peak, Tesla was worth one point three trillion dollars. It is now declined in value eight hundred billion dollars, which is a lot of money. Dana and Max, I will hit you guys with an anecdote I heard over the weekend from my mother. My mom's a source
of lots of information in good Tibbets. A neighbor of hers she noticed the other day suddenly was not driving his Tesla, and she said, what happened? To your tesla. He said, no, I decided I cannot abide mister Musk. I'm getting rid of it. He got rid of it. He essentially was too embarrassed to own it, and he
replaced it with an all ev BMW. I'll just say this, it's come up in the past, mister Musk, for all he's done for this company, for making it that company at some point was worth one point three trillion dollars, and for all the brain power and so on and so forth, he probably is about the worst brand ambassador in the history of the world right now in terms of alienating his core customer base.
Max, I'm hesitant to go that far, just because he is a branding genius and this trillion dollar plus valuation, which was totally bonkers by any normal you talk to any autoanalysts, right, it's it's so crazy, it's confusing, right, And it's like entirely about Elon Musk's force of personality.
But are you conflating that is the value of the stock, and that is the fanboys who pile into the stock. Yeah, that's different, I feel like to a certain degree than in Connecticut.
Well, I think it's so First of all, I think it's all connected. I think that the Tesla brand is complicated, and it incorporates obviously like climate change and like doing something, and but also it also incorporates the kind of success narrative around Elon Musk. I agree with you, David, that it's been like an incredibly self destructive period. I've been
thinking a lot about King Lear. I mean, it feels like Musk is in this kind of weird destructive late stag, Like he's just like looking at the world around him and looking at all these assets and like one by one undermining them in various ways. And you know, this pivot to software, which of course makes financial sense, it really runs counter to a big part of the Elon
Musk brand and the Elon Musk mythology. The whole big thing that people would talk about with Elon Musk, the thing that got people so excited about Elon Musk is like, this is a guy that builds stuff. Right the rest of Silicon Valley they're just making apps, and here's Elon Musk, industrialist.
And industrialist of our times.
I'm going to push back a little bit on this, guys, because if you read Masterplan Part duh from twenty sixteen.
Because you chied in me last week, Dan, I read it. I spent all weekend reading it.
Do you read it like one hundred times?
Sure?
Okay, autonomy has always been part of the plan, and so it's not real it's to call it a pivot to autonomy. Yes, it seems like it's clearly a pivot that the robotaxi is taking priority over the twenty five thousand dollars consumer facing car. But like Elon has been upset yes with autonomous cars for like a decade now. I mean, he's been promising this forever, and I think what has changed just that he's very confident about FSD version twelve, so confident that they dropped beta from the name.
They have all this data, they think it's going to work. He's all in, and he's just basically, we've got to spend all this money now on compute. We've got to really reorient the next phase of the growth is going to be the robotaxi. I don't think investors are fully buying it. But it's also like the message, the messaging has been so murky that it's not a problem as to why.
So, first of all, my answer to your question is no. I read it, and I read it ninety nine, I read one hundred times. But that is the issue. If you are going to save the Earth from climate change and we are going to stave off the worst effects of climate change, is the cheap Tesla not significantly more important than the robotaxis.
Well, you won't need to sell as many cars to consumers if the robotaxi can just operate twenty four seven and drive you around when you need to get where you need to go. And the robotaxi is still going to be electric. So there's like climate arguments to be made about optimizing the vehicles on the road, and like why do we have so much traffic because people are driving so much like we could have. There's like a lot of arguments around the climate imperatives around a robotaxi.
But yeah, it still seems like a big shift, like the company is at this big inflection point and not everyone is on board with it, including some executives.
Apparently electric cars have downsides, right, and when making a car is an expense, you know, is carbon intensive, but come on, like one of these things is real. It's a car, they work. You can buy them their electric motors, and one of them is imaginary. There is no Tesla full self driving car. There is no robotaxi. There is no clear pathway to getting a robotaxi. What we have right.
Now is there really why is there no clear path?
It's going to require a regulatory overhaul that would be BACTLL, a redesign of our infrastructure, it would be it's a massive undertaking that has not even begun. And again, as I said, like last week, you have companies that are much further along on this kind of regulatory thing and they are struggling. Cruise GM big company invested a ton of money in getting its cars on the road, getting its robotaxis on the road, had to pull them off. And so it's just there is no clear path here.
So autonomous is not just hard, it's really really hard. I get it. Okay, very good. All right, We're gonna move on to mister Musk's big upcoming trip to India. So we're now joined by Dan Flatley, a national security reporter here at Bloomberg, and Dan, along with Dana and Max, is going to tell us all about Elon's big trip coming up to India. Dan, when does it start and what exactly is on mister Musk's agenda here.
So the visit itself is sort of timed at the beginning of elections in India, so the elections will take you almost a month to sort of roll through the whole country. But essentially there's something to be gained by both parties in this, and that Musk he's trying to get beyond the US, beyond China, trying to reach new markets, and Mody is sort of trying to promote this pro business agenda, and so both parties have something to gain
from this. Of course, Tesla's under a bit of strain at the moment because some not great results in terms of the valuation and some layoffs and things like that. So you know, it comes at kind of an important time both politically and for business reasons for both of these individuals.
Now Dan, knowing what we know about Elon and knowing a bit what we know about mister Mody, are these two are simpatico in their views of the world.
Yeah, I mean I think that Musk is sort of has kind of cultivated this image not only as a thought leader but also somebody who's become more and more interested in politics. And in that regard, he has cultivated relationships with folks like Modi, folks like Javier Milay in Argentina, other sort of free market enthusiasts, let's call them. You could call them authoritarian. You could say potentially that some of the leaders in these governments where he's visiting have
authoritarian tendencies or certainly trying to stay in power. So this is sort of part and parcel of his idea of having not just influence over the world of technology. And so yes, there's sympatico in that sense, and certainly it's a reach beyond sort of the kind of the normal places where folks like this would go to that kind of influence.
Now, Max speaking of strong regimes, authoritarian esque regimes, as he travels to India, what does our sense of how this is being received over in China, which is also a very important market for Misty.
Yeah, so we've seen this with consumer electronics as Apple has attempted to diversify its supply chain. China has kind of tended to view India's efforts to encourage, you know, people to set up manufacturing operations there as in competition with them with China. When China banned the iPhone in some government offices last year. It was viewed by some
as a response to Apple's efforts. And what we saw ahead of this visit is the Global Times, which is essentially a government controlled newspaper running an editorial saying, oh boy, you know, Tesla's making a big mistake. This is going to be a lot harder than Elon Musk thinks, you know, essentially at least dumping cold water on this, if not maybe a subtle warning to Elon Musk over what China might see as an effort to diversify to get to
invest less in China and more in India. So I think that is going to be a real challenge for Elon Musk. The other thing is like the Indian electric car market is small.
Yeah, let me ask you that perhaps the eb market is smaller in India now, but is there potentially a gold mine down the road for the company.
Yeah.
I mean interestingly, this is one of the areas in which Elon Musk and the Biden administration are kind of aligned. The Biden administration, for a lot of different reasons, but some national security reasons, has put a lot of focus
on India as a counter to China. And so there is potentially some not just business benefits that could come from this alliance between Elon Musk and the Rendra Modi, but also some national security dividends that could come in the sense that if Musk is able to get in there, if Tesla's able to get in there and develop the electric vehicle industry in India or develop the technological capabilities of that country in ways that haven't previously been seen,
it could provide a counterweight to China. And ultimately that is something that not just the Biden administration, but national security folks here in Washington across Republican and Democratic administrations want to see.
There's another opportunity for Tessel here, which is that they are really trying to diversify away from just selling cars. You know, they're all in on the robotaxi, this promise of autonomy. But they have an energy division, and the big driver of their energy division is the megapac, which is these massive batteries that are sold to utility companies.
And India has a real infrastructure problem when it comes to electricity, and you cannot develop an electric car market unless you have a pretty stable, reliable source of electric power and megapack is a big solution for that, right because it allows you to store solar and wind, and it's been hugely popular here in the US and in
markets like Australia and the UK. And so while everyone is waiting to see if there's this big announcement that Tesla's going to open up an electric vehicle plant in India at some point down the road, I think we should also watch to see what they say on the energy side of that equation.
Right, And then as you talk about that, it also reminds me of just going back to their first segment of our show here in which we talked about how bad sales have been for Tesla and how much demand is drying up. And I guess I just wonder, in the abstract, Jesus, does Tesla really need another factory in the world.
Not right now? So they had their they so basically their over capacity right now? Are they are not selling the cars They ended the quarter with forty six thousand cars in inventory. They already announced plans to build a plant in Mexico, which has not really broken ground yet, so they don't need a third plant now, No, not at all, which is why like any announcement. I think I would be surprised if there's like a firm deadline as to when that investment would take place.
Especially we're getting all these signs that they're either scaling back or pausing or killing the This more inexpensive car max.
Isn't the argument that and this is what the inter tubes tell me that in order to penetrate the Indian market, which will be the authority is down the road, an enormous ev market, you need to make cars in India. They will only allow you to import so many from.
They're gonna Elon Musk Is gonna need to make some kind of concession to Mody to allow him to at least import cars.
And Tesla got what they wanted because India lowered the tariffs. That was the big thing, like in terms of concessions like India's rea.
So they were the tariffs. But because the promise has to be though, all right, I'll lower the teriffs for you now. Oh and by the way, you got to where's your ears have to invest?
Right? Right? And there's been some I think there have been some reports of Teslas sourcing more, more parts and so on from India. So there probably are intermediary steps. But remember Elon musk Is, as he's told us before, between two growth waves, really struggling with the stock price showing up in India. As you said, David, huge market potentially anyway, right, small market now, but a lot of people.
It does maybe help him change the story from no one will buy their cars to look at all this growth on the.
Hurricket now tapping into the world's hottest market. Look at us go Dan. Another key product that mister Mosque would be looking to sell in India is Starlink and the Starlink satellites. We've seen how they've been used now on battlefields across the globe, but moreover just in remote parts of the world. India certainly has lots of remote parts. Is this a big push here? Is this part of his push to get Starlink there? Yeah, certainly.
I mean I think that that was one of the one of the focuses of his talks with Javier Milay of Argentina, and I expect that it will be part of his discussions with Mody and the Indian government as well, because, as you mentioned, David, Starlink and SpaceX these are services that land even more squarely in the national security realm. This is something that is squarely in the national security sphere, and it's something that I'm sure that he'll be talking
about with Mody. But he's also there's lots of back and forth between US officials about how this should be controlled, how should be regulated, whether it should be regulated, how it's being used, and is it being used counter to US interests. So these are very active discussions that are happening not just abroad but also here in the United States. So it'd be very interesting to see where they land on that.
So he's just on the heels of another meeting last week at a Tesla plant with the Argentine President Javier Milay. Now he's about to head off to India to see mode this Milays visit beyond two libertarian cool dudes taking funny pictures together, what was the purpose of it and what does it do for mister Musk.
You know, hard to say exactly what the larger business
or geopolitical purpose of this meeting would be. Obviously, these are two sort of fellow travelers, as you say, as the libertarian school of thought, but there is an interesting line to be drawn between both Musk's engagement with Argentine government and the Indian government in that a lot of what Musk has done over the years has been heavily dependent on some sort of government policy or intervention in some way or other, whether it's with SpaceX and the
rocket programs, whether it's with ev credits or other sorts of things with Tesla in some of the earlier days of its history. So there is, despite Musk's libertarian leanings, he does have a lot of ties to governments around the world, both here in the US, in India, in
Argentina and other places China certainly. So it's an interesting kind of paradox in the sense that he has this very free market orientation and yet he does need to talk to governments quite frequently in order to make sure that his companies are positioned in the best possible posture
to do business there. And so I'm certain that while there may be no deliverables quote unquote, as they say here in DC from that meeting with Melee, there certainly is a relationship growing there and in other places as well, that he wants to maintain.
Just it really feels like we've talked on this podcast about geopolitical Elon this kind of globe trotting figure who's going to Italy and going to Auschwitz and meeting with NT Yahou and so on, And it really feels he's getting a lot of very impressive sort of pr opportunities, and this MODI one would be one. I think the MELA one maybe ranks a little bit lower in terms
of I for my impressiveness. But what I'll say is Elon has, as Dan saying, historically, been incredibly effective at basically extracting concessions from governments, figuring out what he has to give and getting what he wants. And with China, right when he opened up in China, he got the Chinese government to change the rules for foreign auto manufacturer. They're the first, the only car company from the US that doesn't have a joint venture, that doesn't have a
domestic partner. And I don't think it's clear the current iteration of geopolitical Elon feels kind of scattershot and half baked and somewhat you know, maybe like they're sort of paying attention to how this might affect Tesla, but also he seems to be thinking a lot about how it's going to play on X and it's like we're caught halfway between genuine diplomacy and mugging for social media.
The other word I just want to mention is lithium. So a big part of the whole ev strategy is where you're getting your raw minerals from. And we have this whole we're all waiting for, like final Treasury guidance about thirty D and the foreign entities of concern and which like you can't get minerals via China, and there's all these loopholes that automakers are lobbying for, and it's like a whole big thing in DC, as dan Well knows.
But Tesla needs to get their raw materials from somewhere, and Argentina is a big source of lithium, so there could have been like a real supply chain strategy there. But it seems also that like Elon's geopolitical Elons World Tour is often like touring around with the autocrats of the world, like Bolsonaro, and it's like there's this brethren of rising autocrats. Oh seem to be the places where he is spending his time.
Yeah, Max, And it seems like at times he's willing to give up some of the free speech stuff that he feels so strongly about on x in exchange for access to these.
Yeah, and look like Elon Musk in the past, caving essentially to demands of Turkey or various other countries that are restricting speech in ways that maybe he personally doesn't disagree with. That's what every tech company does. This thing
in Brazil feels like more of an aberration. It's kind of part of what I'm trying to say, like, it feels more like breaking from what had been what had felt like a consistent, coherent strategy to something that is more scattershot and that looks like what it looks like, that looks like a guy who wants to brow down with some cool guy dictators.
I was looking at some of Musk's tweets or posts i should say, recently, and reading some of the stuff that he said, some of the reporting on his sort of management style, and it sort of strikes me that one of the things, one of the things that he may have in common with some of these more authoritarian type leaders is that he has a vision for the future. He seems to have a very definite idea of the
way that things should be done. And that kind of vision is one could say, or one might argue, is more easily implemented in a strong authoritarian government where democracy is messire change is hard to implement, there's a lot of pushback, and so he may feel that he has a better chance of implementing this vision.
I don't think we should sleep on this lithium thing, because that is hugely important. That's hugely important for Tesla And who knows, like maybe the weird memes and the cool photos and stuff with melee are just a distraction for like a major commodity deal.
That that's true, Argentina does have a good amount of lithium. Dan, thanks again for joining us.
Thank you.
Now to our feud of the week. Let's all listen to.
This. This is a.
Difficult thing to explain, but we're having a major technical air where all the song timbers are.
Double speed and I have not practiced the math because I'm not fastened math. But I am going to I am going to.
Handy this.
All right, Let's try this again, y'all.
Don't trudge me for being bad at calculating things.
So so Max, I mean I don't know, man, I mean, help me out. Here, what is going on.
I don't know about you, David, but that makes me really confident about Robotaxis going forward. That is Grimes. That's Elon Musk's former partner, the mother of some of his children, performing is the word.
At She was performing at Coachell.
She was attempting to do DJ stuff, and she was attempting to mix two different tracks. I think I've gotten really deep on on DJ reddit and essentially she was unable to master her mixing board. And over the course, they're actually several or maybe more than several clips just like this where she's stopping the set and screaming and really and true frustrate real, I cannot get this through this phone tree right now. I've been pressing zero a million times and they won't. I cannot get a human.
It was some serious frustration. And of course this has absolutely nothing to do with Elon Musk, except again that Grimes is his ex or I don't know who knows.
It has to have something to do with the on the show. I will I'm going to bring it back.
Don't worry. Elon Musk has a long running feud with Coachella, so in certain ways Grimes is just you know, getting in on an pre existing feud, which, as I understand it, began in twenty twenty when Elon Musk tweeted that Coachella sucked and that it was better five years earlier when you could discover new bands. And I went back to twenty fifteen to.
Try to figure out which new bands.
Well, I don't know which band he found, but Drake performed there Steely Dan, so a couple possibilities for the unknown bands that Elon may have discovered at Coachella in twenty fourteen or twenty fifty Dan.
If nothing else got you listening to that, it's hard to listen to. You have to feel bad for grind.
Oh yeah, it's hugely embarrassing. You're like a DJ and you can't mix on the fly, and you're in front of this crowd of people, and she's so frustrated that she's screaming in agony. That's that was terrible.
There were moments of last week's podcast that we sounded very similar.
I I kind of liked it as a performance. Honestly, would you have first of all, would you have known if she hadn't screamed in frustration? Right?
So, I feel like this is a big moment for her.
In a way, you're giving people their money's worth bye bye. So by engaging with the material rather than just like pressing your space bar and your laptop and letting it go.
This is if you actually think about it. Then so Elon both sticks it to Coachella, right, which who he really doesn't like at all, and at the same time he boosts Grimes his career.
So I also want to say, what do you want to say? Well, two things. One is to tell Grimes this was an impressive performance by any normal measure. Grimes was delivered to the stage in a gigantic mechanized spider, and then she actually apologized for this spider. Uh no, No, never apologized for the spider. She apologized for the screw up, essentially blaming the help. He was like, the problem here
is that I didn't do it myself. It was the staff screwed up, which is definitely I think how Elon we played it as.
Well, probably so then we shouldn't feel bad for her. No, and but actually not only she would not feel bad for because you just told us this is gonna this is gonna make her career. This is her breakthrough. Moment. I'm sure she should thank the staff is what she should be doing here.
I don't know that I said that. I think what I said is that this was a more interesting performance than Grimes might have otherwise delivered.
What I can say about this performance, it is the first performance by Grimes that I've ever heard in my life. That I will say.
There is so much good content on the internet about this. There TikTok's rating. They're like seven different screams and people rating the different screams with different energy. DJ read it is all over this. You could you can go down a deep rabbit.
But yeah no, And to that point, Max wasn't isn't there. One of the theories being bandied about is that this was Elon sticking it to Grimes as well.
So I've seen two different theories. One is that Elon hacked. Elon and Grimes are in the middle of a custody battle, as we've talked about on the show, that Elon hacked her DJ equipment to embarrass her. The other theory is that some people have noticed that some of these videos from Coachella have been taken down, that Elon is suppressing, you know, shadow banning. If you will the people who are having fun at Grimes's expense. Of course, these two
theories are are in complete contradiction. I will say the shadow man theory basically, anytime anything happens on Twitter, pre Elon, post Elon, people complain about shadow banning. So I don't think that Elon has been twiddling the knobs on the algorithm, hitting the sink beat button on the algorithm, if you will, to try to suppress Grimes is thing. I think the Coachella hacking scenario again very far fetched, although maybe slightly less far fetched than the ex hacking scenario.
And for our listeners, you should just know that Max is wearing a tin foil hat as Lazy's out for us here.
Kids, if you're an aspiring DJ, you what you want to do before you get up on stage and Coachella is have a backup mix that's ready to go so that you this doesn't happen to you.
Here we go.
That's it.
That is the uh.
That's frankly, that's the single biggest takeaway the entire show. This episode was produced by Magnus Henrickson, who is also our supervising producer, Naomi Shaven, and Rayhan HARMANSI are senior editors. The idea for this very show also came from Rayhan Blake Maple's Handles Engineering, and we get special editing assistants from Jeff Grocott. The Elon Inc. Theme is written and
performed by Takea Yasuzawa and Alex Sugiura. Brendan Francis Newnham is our executive producer, and Sage Bauman is the head of Bloomberg Podcasts. I'm David Papadopoulos. If you have a minute, rate and review our show, it'll help other listenerspot find us. See you next week.
Mhmm.