for Musk to go so aggressively in favor of one candidate, completely alienating the other candidate, is a huge deal, especially considering the vast amount of government contracts that his sort of sprawling business empire holds. So, this is a totally unique state of affairs. He's not just endorsing; he's campaigning. He's very confident that Trump's going to win, and he's using his social platform to really push that narrative. Hi, I'm Derrick Robertson. I am a reporter for Politico and one of the authors of the Digital Future Daily newsletter. Hi, I'm Amanda Hoover. I'm a senior correspondent for Business Insider. Hi, I'm Christine Moy. I'm a tech policy reporter for Politico, and I also help write Digital Future Daily. It's now becoming more difficult than ever to separate Musk, the political figure, from Musk, the businessman. Derek, let's start with you. You know, why is Musk's endorsement of Trump so significant, and specifically his growing affinity toward MAGA politics? It is because he sits at the intersection of a couple of

different trends in American life. One being the increasing importance of tech firms to governance and to public life. The other is the simple fact that he's the world's richest man. You tend to have a lot of weight to throw around when you have more money than everybody else. Third is that unlike other businessmen, he does not feel the need to hedge or equivocate in his political support whatsoever. Yeah, you wrote about Henry Ford, and you know, you said that in comparison to right even those historical examples like his wealth and his influence is just so immense like there's not really it doesn't match up in terms of scale. Yeah, that's right. You have to go back to the kind of gilded age, but truly his wealth is, you know, it is like a Carnegie, like a Rockefeller, and the scope of his business empire is similar to that. So, it beggars modern comparison even when you think of people as wealthy as Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg even before right. He aligned himself firmly in Trump's camp like he.

Musk has always exerted influence through Twitter. Now, act um what are the ways in which he's done that and how have you seen that change since he's bought Twitter. So much has changed about the platform. He really scaled back a lot of moderation, like let other accounts, including Donald Trump, come back onto the platform. We're seeing him posting increasingly his political views, and those views have shifted and changed. There was also, you know, some new data from The Washington Post showing that Republicans are getting followed way more on X than Democrats. But it kind of shows like the feelings that some people get, I think, when they're on there, that it seems like there's a lot of elevation of praga views. There's obviously like lots of Miss and disinformation that Musk himself posts. He really just is like this huge presence on X that people see, even if they don't follow him, you know. He ends up in the feed, so it's really become a very powerful way for him to put himself in front of so many.

people like looking through his feed. Like, how much do you see parallels? Mean, you know, is he just repeating what Trump is saying, or are there areas where he, you know, you see kind of key differences, or he's diverging from, you know, Trump's views? There are places where they meaningfully differ. Trump is vehemently anti-, Musk is arguably the most, almost inarguably, the most important EV manufacturer ever. I won't do my Trump impersonation. I will spare everybody that. But he was like, uh, you know, Elon has softened me a little bit on electric vehicles. He, I like him, and he's good to me, so maybe we'll be a little easier on electric vehicles. So, there are these weird, uh, asymmetries between their policy platforms. So, do you find, like, M's rise in American politics most recently, uh, surprising at all? It's a good question. I'd be interested to hear your perspective on this as well, Amanda, because as somebody who's focused on the platform. Because when I think about Musk's rise as a political figure, I

think about the centrality of social media platforms to American life. Elon becoming this political does not surprise me because he is a creature of the open, chaotic internet that I grew up on, with, you know, forums that did not include algorithms and had no moderation whatsoever. That environment tends to highlight extreme views. It's such a unique situation almost that he's in because you really, you know, if you see Mark Zuckerberg post on Facebook, it's very like buttoned up and it's a PR like, Yeah, official. Yes, it's official. Even when he's wearing his, uh, Zuck, uh, hoodie. Yeah, yeah. You just, you don't really see many social media platforms acting the way that a user does, you know? And because Musk was a user of Twitter when it was that, and he loved it, his whole, like, acquisition of it and his intent with it is just so different than how other owners of these platforms operate. And obviously, of these big platforms, their owners still have tremendous sway. He's the person that we

like see interacting though, and we get to see like his thoughts and his intentions. He's, you know, spelling those out more. This is going to, this might sound like it's a bit of a tangent, but I promise it's not. I was on a podcast yesterday where somebody asked me to talk about the Matrix and the popularity of like the red pill meme in right-wing circles, which is exactly what we're talking about here when we talk about like audience capture and the filter bubble. But this interviewer asked me, you know, do you think the is responsible for introducing this rhetoric into the world and sort of like driving people into their respective Echo Chambers? And I said no because the conditions for this happening already existed. Some film or some like meme or some cultural device would have come along and unleashed that idea regardless of whether the Wachowski like sat down and made a movie where people wear long leather trench coats and like fight each other in uh in the sky. What do you make of the fact that he

uses and operates the platform as if he doesn't care if it makes money because yeah I think you know there's a the surface level read and my initial impulse is like well he's the richest man in the world he has all these other businesses who cares if it makes money but also his ownership of Twitter is based on an incredibly complicated like high leverage debt program like the 4 million dollars for this this platform that has always struggled financially that's just the long history of it and then immediately as he changed moderation rules like the advertiser's fled it's not really considered a safe place to advertise he really does operate it like he does not care if it makes money and I think that that is risky I think a lot of people are surprised it's still alive because of the way that he's operating it even with the amount of people he's laid off people thought that it wouldn't even be able to function yeah he's a sincere ideologue like I don't believe he cares.

whether it makes money because he has a Messianic belief that like free speech and defeating the woke mind virus are necessary to ensure the survival of humanity. It sounds like risible, probably to like many of the people who will be listening to this podcast, but it's a completely sincere and deeply held belief. Well, it might, you know, all pay off for him. Trump has said that if he wins, you know, he'll appoint Elam to a newly created role. Um, he'll lead the department of government efficiency. Um, appropriately nicknamed Doge. How many details do we have about exactly what that type of role entails and like and what ways he could use that road to, you know, Curry favor and influence for his businesses? Very few details. He's talked a lot about what he wants to do. Elon Musk is very obsessed with reducing waste in government. He has kind of an old school libertarian bench. He wants to, you know, strip away regulations. He has frequently compared the government to uh blo wear, which is a very nerdy term from

the world of computer programming where you have a piece of iterative software. Think about Microsoft Word, and you just redevelop Microsoft Word every year. There's a new Microsoft Word, and the code in it becomes so archived that the 25th iteration of it is not as nimble and responsive as the second or third iteration. This is the way he thinks about government. Not that's not my analysis, he's literally said that. So, I think he wants to strip down government, remove regulations, do pretty normal Republican stuff, frankly. How much do we know about his tussle of regulatory agencies? You mentioned some of them, and which ones would kind of be immediate targets maybe as he, you know, if Trump hands him kind of the scissors to do that. That's a good question. He tends to talk about this kind of thing in generalities and not the policy specifics that the three of us might tend to traffic in as reporters for our respective publications. But, you know, environment is a major concern for him. He loves to tell a story about how a

California regulator forced him to take a seal out of a harbor and make it listen to Sonic booms on headphones in order to see what the effect of Rocket launching would be on the seal habitation. He thinks that was a bad idea. I will refrain from editorializing about whether or not it was because I don't know enough about this. So, I think you would have an all-out war between Musk and his environmental and lower-level regulators, and I don't think we should lose sight of the fact in talking about all this that when you head up a department that is devoted to managing regulations around a company that you financially directly benefit from, that raises a slew of Ethics questions that our fellow reporters at Politico have covered fairly extensively. So, he's waiting into an even more interconnected Thicket of policy risks than I think he faces right now. But you know, M actions aren't just limited to US politics. Like, there was a bombshell report by the Wall Street Journal that he and Russian President

Vladimir Putin had apparently been having regular contact for two years, you know, including this past year when he's like, We've talked about going all in and trying to get Trump reelected. This is another thing that is unprecedented in recent history. I don't want to use the U word here necessarily, um, it's unique. I'll use another e word. The issue is not speaking to Vladimir Putin. The issue is that, uh, we are supposed to have one foreign policy as a country. This is the sort of unique element of Musk's calls with Putin, essentially somebody with direct control over battlefield conditions between a geopolitical friend and a geopolitical foe of the United States, doing unilateral diplomacy with the foe in that setting is something that has raised a lot of alarm bells in Washington. Yeah, almost immediately there were calls from right, the head of NASA, um, the top Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, basically saying we should investigate. They stopped short of saying, you know, we should pull away his security clearance or anything like that.

um, but you know, you looked into, in your conversations, you looked into this question of what kind of repercussions are even possible here. NASA itself has become increasingly dependent on Musk for, you know, on SpaceX, right, for access to the International Space Station and also, you know, for launches. When NASA decided that they were going to start regularly contracting with private companies to ferry people to and from space, they decided that they needed to have more than one contractor because, in the case that one of the contractors failed, it would be important to have a backup. They did this, and Boeing has essentially failed to produce reliable transportation to and from space. So, SpaceX, the other contractor, is the only one who is reliably shuttling around astronauts for NASA now. You have this major point of leverage that Musk has over the United States government, which is that you need me to get you to the moon in the coming years, which is, you know, a plan of NASA's through the Artemis project. And I don't know

if there's an easy remedy for that, aside from just scrapping the EMIS project or delaying it massively in order to incorporate another contract or fix the WOS that Boeing has had. One detail that was really concerning to right former officials was the fact that he was - they had a conversation where he was asked about not activating Starlink over Taiwan as a favor to Chinese President Xi Jinping. Just as an example of the kind of conflicts of interests that have happened or that could come out of this. Yeah, Starlink is currently not active in Taiwan. Musk has repeatedly - he's very dovish on Taiwan, meaning that, you know, he's - I think he literally once said, like, It is inevitable that Taiwan will be reunited with China. So this is all insinuation, but it's not easy to see why people in Washington who are more vested on the Taiwan side of this equation are very concerned about that. Is Musk an anomaly or is he

representative of a bigger role that Tech Bros and billionaires like him have to play in our electoral politics going forward. I would lean toward representative of a new influence. Take for example somebody like Sam Altman, who nobody knew his name roughly two years ago, and now he's on Capitol Hill constantly, strongly influencing AI policy decision-making, strongly influencing energy policy in many ways because of the extreme thirst for electricity that his products generate. So, you have a federal government that all of us know all too well is, you know, stymied by Congressional gridlock, partisan back and forth, you know, bureaucratic sclerosis, etc., combined with a dynamic and extremely wealthy Tech sector. It's just a, aams Razer simplest possible answer to this is yes, Tech will have more influence going forward, and remains to be seen what that will look like. I kind of doubt it will look like Elon Musk because he is quite the SW generas individual, but yeah, I think his personality is not something that will be really copied or repeated, but that

he's, you know, we're seeing in this election cycle just more and more Tech leaders and Venture capitalists being in favor of trump, pushing for that like less regulation, things that would benefit them, whereas, you know, we traditionally thought of Silicon Valley as more left-leaning, and obviously, a lot of the people that work, you know, beneath these leaders are liberal, so there's definitely a disconnect there. But more and more, some of these leaders are feeling, you know, emboldened to be in support, just not to the extent that Musk is. The pressures we were talking about earlier, you know, that Silicon Valley Executives might face when deciding whether or not to be an outright partisan, they weigh far more heavily on media Executives, and Musk has, you know, said he's representative of, right, a new wave of media, right, right, you know, X, to the extent that X is a publishing platform, which he explicitly wants it to be, you know, they, if you pay Elon Musk a certain amount of money every month, you

can post the New Testament on X in a single post or something. Now we've gone kind of far afield from Musk, but it is interesting that he sees himself as revolutionizing media as well. Do you think there are any other platforms that come close to challenging X, you know, in that mission? There's definitely, I think, the platforms that have arisen, you know, to try to fix the problems of, you know, when it was Twitter. The biggest one probably is Meta Threads, a very similar platform that like totally just boomed when it first opened because it was so easy to sign up. You know, if you had an Instagram account, you had a Threads account if you wanted like immediately. But the activity there, even though there are a lot of users and it's a space that is more advertiser-friendly because of moderation, it's not the same draw. You know, even if they have a lot of users, a lot of the other platforms that tried, you know, they were more niche, but they really made themselves focused on civil dialogue. Like that was their

selling point. They were like, We're going to focus on trust and safety. Several of those really didn't make it and had to shut down. There are some that are, you know, still slowly building, but they one is Spill, which is like a Twitter-like platform that caters more towards black and LGBTQ+ communities. It really is about elevating those, so we see that one is like having some success and having some growth, but they're at like, I believe the last was half a million downloads. You know, that's compared to like Twitter's peak. It's a much smaller place. I know there are probably lots of features of X that I just have not really looked into using because I'm actively trying to reduce the amount of time I spend on there. From outside, you know, intelligence firms, users are dropping. Yeah, you know, the recent estimates that I saw were like 150 million active users, and it was down even from like a month before. You know, he's not adding enough to make it an

appealing place to people that aren't already on there. It feels like those of us who are on there because we've been on there and we'll, you know, keep posting until or if it ever shuts down. Y. What do you guys think is going to happen to Musk? You know, he said that if Harris wins, he thinks he'll be jailed. Um, you know, if Trump wins, he obviously has this new position, providing that Trump falls through with that. I mean, I think he said as well that even if Trump wins, that there's going to be like financial hardship for the US for a bit. I think that's the thing he said a couple of days ago. So it's like, I don't feel that this is, you know, whichever way the election goes, it seems that even Musk thinks um that there's going to be a lot of change, a very hard time, you know, not just for him but for the country, the country. So how he plays into that and what he continues to do after, I think it's going to

to be interesting. I think he'll always be posting, elevating these views, you know, in this right-wing conversation on X. But it will be interesting to see how he really pushes back, if that changes his rhetoric, if Harris wins, if he takes on a role in the Trump Administration. I don't see how he could possibly have time, given that he has to post on X a hundred times a day and run multiple companies. But it'll be interesting to see where he goes from here. He's one of the most economically dynamic and significant Americans on the world stage. He's not going anywhere. The way he would orient himself toward a Harris Administration is an interesting question to me. You know, after he wakes up on November 7th or 6th or 8th or whenever we find out when the results of the election are, he will realize that he has to do business with this Administration. So I think he'd probably find himself in that scenario in a situation where he is having to do the thing that business people do every day.

even ones who don't jump up and down on stage about how excited they are about Donald Trump, which is figure out how to balance the regular trade-offs that come with working with government. Now, on the Trump side, if he does enter government as he's promised to. The thing about Trump is that he doesn't really like sharing the spotlight. Yeah, you can see that on the stage. Yeah, and he doesn't like the perception that he's not in charge than it was than it would be with Musk. Should he find himself at loggerheads with Trump, which I think is far more likely than it seems right now, given the major romance between the two of them. So, in certain ways, I almost think it would, his life would be more difficult under a second Trump Administration than a Harris Administration, given those two hypothetic that we're just playing out. [Music]

How Elon Musk is Reshaping American Politics As 2024 Elections Heat Up | Business Insider

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