Hey everybody, welcome back to the Elon Musk Podcast. This is a show where we discuss the critical Crossroads, The Shape, SpaceX, Tesla X, The Boring Company, and Neuralink. And I'm your host Will Walden. If you're anything like me, you appreciate when things are made super easy, especially when it comes to managing your money. That's where current.com steps in. It's not just any banking service. It's designed for you, the
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So if you're looking to step up your banking game and get a sweet $50 bonus in the process, head to the show notes, use my special code, and join thecurrent.com revolution. It's banking, but not as you know it. It's better. Today, we're gonna take a trip back. All the way to December. 13th 2022. When Elon Musk said he was going to remove 1.5. Billion Twitter accounts. It's from the archives. Take a listen.
It's interesting. So Elon Musk bought Twitter a little bit ago for about $45 billion. And ever since the purchase, it's been kind of a roller coaster of emotions. He fired half of the staff, so half of the people that were on the moderation team and also engineers and also business people behind the scenes, they're all gone. So it's a slim line team and they're working forward in a way that is going to bring Elon's
vision to life. And this vision is going to be something that's never really been done before, which is an all in one platform, which is going to be chatting, text, crypto king, video, audio, everything under one platform. So that really hasn't been done. It's been done in WhatsApp, but it's also something that's never been done sort of in America at this point. So Elon is building that platform and this gets back to SpaceX eventually.
So I wanted to let you know that that is not just about Twitter today, but we have to set it up so we know what's going on with Twitter and how it's going to affect SpaceX. So Elon can have the staff trying to cut money, you know, trying to trying to get the money situated because he spent $45 billion on this and he has to move forward with his plan to build this thing and to make it profitable.
But since he has joined up, there's been other things that have been happening at Twitter as well. So Elon kind of opened up the floodgates for all the people that have been banned before to come back out of the platform. You know, all the people with hate speech etcetera have been let back on the platform. And he's a, you know, he's a absolutist when it comes to free speech. So he wants everybody to speak their mind.
He wants everybody to talk about the things that they want to talk about and he wants to give everybody no matter what your leaning is. And he wants to give you a platform to talk about what you want to talk about. And I understand that. You know, it's it's a noble thing to do. Everybody should be free to say whatever they want to say. Then the consequences of those things should be with the other people that are on the platform. And you should be able to talk it out.
You know, like that's how that's how he feels. You know, just talk it out, figure it out. Now, some of this stuff, some of this speech is, you know, protected under the Constitution. Of course you can't incite violence, things like that. You're not supposed to do that stuff. There's laws about that. You're not supposed to do that. And he said he's going to follow the law of the land as much as possible on his platform. Right. But this is where it gets kind of dicey.
When those people came back in, there was a flood of trolls as well that came back through. And apparently those trolls started off on 4 Chan, which is a place where if you're not familiar with it, it's full of trolls. And if if you've never been there, don't. It's like if you don't want to see it, don't go there. It's it's not a not a pleasant place but it is an interesting place to visit on the Internet and if you, if you're really
inclined, go check it out. But I would, I would suggest highly against it. But it's it's interesting. So they all hung out there and they thought of an idea, hey, let's troll the Internet and let's make a fake Eli Lilly account, right. And this account is a pharmaceutical manufacturer. So they said, hey, we're going to make insulin free. This was a fake account, a verified fake account. You know, you can pay the $8 to
get a verified account. They paid the $8, got a verified account and duped everybody into thinking that that's the real Eli Lilly. And the real Eli Lilly was like, no, we didn't say that. What are you talking about? So the $8 check mark thing on Twitter kind of got canned, right? Immediately it got cut off. Eli Lilly lost a bunch of money. Investors pulled out of the company because they thought that this was real.
So the stock price tanked a little bit and people pulled out and they were like, we can't really trust this. So Elon in his wisdom said, OK, $8 check mark not good enough. So we're going to put more check marks. We're going to check mark the people that are paying the $8 just to verify that you're a human, you're going to have to
pay more if you are. You know, if you work at a company, say if you're an executive at a company, you're going to pay X amount of dollars, you're going to get an executive check mark and the name of the company will be in a little icon underneath your profile. And also a government person, you know, somebody that works in the government, you can have that attached to your Twitter profile. So you're going to have to pay for that check mark as well. So different checkmarks for
different people. Understandable. You know, hey, if you could take a second and hit the subscribe button and the like button, it would really help out the channel. But it's going to help you out even more because you're going to start seeing more SpaceX NASA Space Flight content in your feed, not just for myself, but from other creators as well. And it's going to help you out actually a lot more than it's going to help me out.
So please just take a second hit, subscribe, hit like and let's get back into the Elon Musk content. So you can discern between a real account and not a real account. And you have to have those certain sort of e-mail addresses or some sort of way to identify yourself in order to get that check mark. So if you're Eli Lilly, you know, for, for instance, you'd have to have an Eli Lilly e-mail address verify your Twitter account so you can verify that you work there.
OK. So no more of the trolls getting a hold of the other people's accounts because they're not secure anymore. OK. So that's the thing that Elon's working on right now. OK, so this all comes back to SpaceX, I promise. So those are the things that advertisers on the platform on Twitter looked at and they said, hey, this doesn't look like it's
very stable anymore. And we don't really want to spend our money on a place that is going to give everybody, including the trolls, ways to say racist things and bigoted things and horrible things to other people. We don't want to be associated with that. So we're going to pull all of our money out. Half of the advertisers, the big advertisers that were spending millions of dollars per month pulled out of Twitter and said we don't want this anymore, we're going to pause our ad
spend on Twitter, right. So there goes millions of dollars down the drain for Twitter immediately since Elon took over. Now when Elon saw this, he got, he got mad. You know, he was just like, how can't, like, why can't you understand what I'm doing here? And also, look, we've had these working relationships for a long time. There's always been trolls. So he confronted the people and he berated them, according to
some news article that I read. I can't remember where I read it. I'm sorry, could be the Financial Times. I apologize. You don't have that up right now. But I read it this morning and it was a reputable source. So take my word for it. Sorry, I don't have it up. The fact is that apparently he went in there and he kind of yelled at people and, you know, kind of said, hey, you should be spending your millions of dollars here and not postponing it because I got this under control.
So take that with a grain of salt as well because you never know where the Internet information is coming from, right? Could be just somebody, also a troll, could also be somebody that works there but also has a, you know, has a vendetta against Elon or one of his companies or something like this, right. So millions of dollars, hundreds of millions of dollars are going away from Twitter.
So I think you know where I'm going with this moving forward, the Internet has kind of turned on Eli Eli Elon and has turned him from this person who's going to rise up and pull people out of horrible places such as, you know, with Tesla, you know, you're trying to remove carbon emissions from the, from the auto industry, right, by using electric vehicles. That's cool. Like EVs are great for that, you know, and they're like they're great technology.
So moving that forward was a huge deal. And also, you know, solar panel roofs, great idea, use the energy from the sun, renewable sun comes out every day. You know, there's there's unlimited source of power from the sun. Use that power from the sun to generate battery power and your house, and you continue to have continuous operation of your home and the energy and that you need for your appliances and the other things in your house. OK, that sounds like an awesome idea, right?
And then you have SpaceX, which is this gigantic rocket company that's sending rockets to the International Space Station. People on board, those rockets, they're going to be sending people to the moon in a lunar Starship variant. And also people that are investing in SpaceX think, you know where I'm going here, the people that are investing in SpaceX are investing billions of dollars every year to keep the
company moving forward. So some of those people, and I'm not saying this is actually happening yet, I'm just saying this could happen in the future. Some of the people that may have wanted to invest in Tesla and there could be, you know, let's just put a a random number on here, let's just say 1 billion dollars, 1 billion with AB dollars. And that's a a certain amount of people. That said, I don't know what Elon's up to now I'm kind of sketched out. I don't know what's happening.
So I'm gonna pull back my 300 million. Yeah, my $300 million for now, and I'm not going to put it in the next round of funding for SpaceX. Now, can Elon bring in other investors to help him out and get that funding anyway, or could he sell off some of his stock in Tesla to fund SpaceX going forward? There's a possibility of that, but the sentiment about Elon, Elon has changed tremendously from this person that was going to help revolutionize everything and change humanity as a whole
to somebody who's cutting jobs. And also you know, he's a horrible person and the sentiment online is that it it's completely changed. If you look at the rhetoric on even on Reddit from the last three to four years, even a couple months ago, everyone was 100% for Eli. You know there is a a couple of detractors here and there, but most people were like, hey, that's a there's a guy doing some cool stuff, you know, he's making those rockets that's
cool, including myself. I'm like, hey, he's doing some cool stuff. He's making those rockets. He's making those rockets go to the International Space Station and also Starship etcetera. But now people are kind of changing their tune. You know they're they're saying things like he's not fit to run so many companies because he's so, he's so stretched between all of these companies doing all these things that he can't do all of it.
You know, they've they've been saying that for a long time, but now it's kind of showing through a little bit. People are seeing it through the cracks, but it's out public. And Elon even puts it out in the public and talks about it in the public on Twitter all the time. Like he's he's kind of a guy that was like, hey, I love Twitter. I love to talk on here. I love to make memes, I love to make funny things go on on Twitter.
But now he owns it so he can kind of do whatever he wants with it. So it's a private company now. He owns, you know, Twitter, so he can make it whatever he wants to make it. And he doesn't need to rely on outside investment other than advertisers or the investment that was already put into Twitter in the 1st place. And the reason why he bought Twitter, The user base is huge one and if it was the technology that they had, you can build that. Like I could build Twitter.
If I really want to do it, I can sit down and I can read a or watch a a React build, build Twitter with React JS tutorial on YouTube. So it's not the technology. I can get that done in an afternoon, you know, that's no big deal. Elon could do that himself if you wanted to. But it was for the user base, the millions and millions of people of active users that he bought Twitter so he can build his x.com platform moving
forward. Now is this going to hamper some people from investing in SpaceX in the future? I think the diehards will always be there. I think people that are interested in Space Flight and interested in Starship will always be there. And possibly this could shift the focus from private investment of SpaceX into SpaceX going to a more public route if the sentiment dies down from the private investors. And I'm not an an investment guy, you know, so this is not
financial advice. I wanted to let you know that now, not financial advice, but I want to let you know that there's a possibility that within the next X amount of years, SpaceX could be thinking about going public where you could buy shares of test or sorry, SpaceX, and you could buy shares of SpaceX because of this fallout from something like Twitter is if Twitter goes bust, if Elon just goes like, I can't save it and we're going to lose a bunch of money.
Sorry everybody, you know, what are you going to do? But you know, Elon's, you know, he's not perfect and nobody is. So moving forward, if that happens, maybe the vision of Elon, maybe the outlook of of Elon is going to be a little bit
changed. And maybe they're going to have to move SpaceX from, say, a privately owned company and privately funded company to something that's more public like Tesla, where you can have thousands of investors and, you know, you could, you could build a gigantic successful company sort of like Boeing. So maybe SpaceX is going to be
the next Boeing, who knows. But I'm, I'm excited and I'm eager to see what happens in the near future because it could be really interesting or it could just be nothing. You know, there's there's a whole part of it that's just like, maybe this is just Internet drama, you know, maybe it's just Internet drama for now. And people will wake up and they'll say, hey, you know, this is going to be a a, like, no big deal.
And we're still gonna invest in SpaceX because we understand the value of SpaceX, which is bringing humanity to space and bringing like sending humanity to Mars and sending people back to the moon and sending people to the International Space Station and also launching satellites, launching Starlink satellites, bringing connectivity to everybody in the
rural areas of of the world. There's a possibility people are just gonna be like, yeah, we understand, like that's cool, and we're going to spend our money there because we know that that's a successful business. They keep making money, and it's a whole other thing than Twitter. Like, Twitter's kind of a it's a technology company. SpaceX is a technology company, too, but they're a very successful technology company. And Twitter is his new kind of hobby thing. You know, like that.
You think? A lot of people think like that too. Hey, thank you so much for listening today. I really do appreciate your support. If you could take a second and hit the subscribe or the follow button on whatever podcast platform that you're listening on right now, I greatly appreciate it. It helps out the show tremendously and you'll never miss an episode and each episode is about 10 minutes or less to get you caught up quickly.
And please, if you want to support the show even more, go to patreon.com/stage Zero and please take care of yourselves and each other and I'll see you tomorrow.