The Rise and Rule of Elon Musk
Summary
TLDRThis video script delves into the enigmatic figure of Elon Musk, exploring his early life, business ventures, and controversial leadership style. It scrutinizes Musk's acquisition of Twitter, questioning his motives for buying the platform and his inconsistent approach to free speech. The script challenges Musk's recent actions, suggesting they may be undermining his own vision for humanity's potential, and discusses the societal impact of his influence.
Takeaways
- π§ Elon Musk's mind is described as a 'storm', indicating his complex and intense thought processes, which are not always understood or appreciated by others.
- π Musk's business empire and wealth have been built through a series of innovative ventures, starting from programming at a young age to the establishment of companies like Zip2, PayPal, SpaceX, and Tesla.
- π‘ His motivation stems from a deep desire to expand human potential and explore the universe, which has driven him to push the boundaries of technology and science.
- π Musk's approach to business involves deep involvement in technical details, questioning everything, and demanding efficiency and speed, often leading to high-stress work environments.
- π€ He has a reputation for being blunt and abrupt, with a disregard for social norms, which can come across as both a lack of empathy and a strength in his leadership style.
- π£οΈ Musk's acquisition of Twitter was based on his belief in the necessity of free speech for a functioning democracy, aiming to make it a global platform for open dialogue.
- π After taking over Twitter, Musk implemented significant changes, including reinstating previously banned accounts and altering the platform's algorithm to amplify his own voice.
- π Contrary to Musk's claims of fighting government censorship, Twitter under his leadership has shown an increase in compliance with government censorship requests.
- π There is a sense of betrayal among some of Musk's employees and colleagues, who feel that his recent actions are undermining his original vision for the advancement of humanity.
- ποΈ Despite controversies, Musk's enduring belief in the potential for human achievement remains consistent, although his methods and impact on society have become a subject of debate.
- π The script raises questions about the role of social media in society, the responsibilities of tech billionaires, and the balance between free speech and harmful content moderation.
Q & A
What is the main theme of the video script about Elon Musk?
-The main theme of the video script is to explore who Elon Musk is, his background, his business empire, and particularly his motives and actions regarding the purchase and management of Twitter.
What was Elon Musk's first business move in tech?
-Elon Musk's first business move in tech was at the age of 12 when he invented a video game and sold it to a magazine for $500.
What is the significance of the company Zip2 in Elon Musk's entrepreneurial journey?
-Zip2, founded by Elon Musk and his brother, provided maps and business directories for online newspapers and was his first successful business venture, which was later sold for $307 million.
How did Elon Musk's companies revolutionize their respective industries?
-Elon Musk's companies, such as Tesla and SpaceX, revolutionized their industries by pushing the boundaries of technology and innovation. Tesla disrupted the automobile industry by mainstreaming electric cars, while SpaceX transformed space travel with reusable rockets.
What is the 'Twitter Files' in the context of the video script?
-The 'Twitter Files' refers to internal communications at Twitter that Elon Musk discovered after taking over the company, revealing instances of content moderation and censorship with potential political bias.
What is the claim about the political bias of Twitter's algorithm before Elon Musk's acquisition?
-The claim is that before Elon Musk's acquisition, Twitter's algorithm did not have a liberal bias; in fact, studies showed that the mainstream political right enjoyed higher algorithmic amplification than the mainstream political left.
How has Elon Musk's approach to free speech on Twitter been criticized?
-Elon Musk's approach to free speech on Twitter has been criticized for being hypocritical, as he has been seen to suppress certain voices, ban journalists, and allow government censorship, contrary to his stated commitment to free speech.
What is the 'All Maps Are Wrong' poster mentioned in the script?
-The 'All Maps Are Wrong' poster is a product designed by Johnny Harris, the script's narrator, featuring various map projections and is available for purchase by viewers interested in cartography.
What is the role of Ground News as mentioned in the video script?
-Ground News is a platform highlighted in the script for its ability to provide a balanced view of news stories by aggregating articles from around the world and allowing users to examine how news is being covered, including identifying biases.
What is the perspective on Elon Musk's impact on society presented in the video script?
-The video script presents a perspective that Elon Musk's recent actions, particularly with Twitter, are divisive and potentially harmful to society, undermining his own vision for the advancement of human civilization.
What is the 'Search Party' channel mentioned at the end of the script?
-The 'Search Party' channel is a new initiative started by Sam Ellis, a former colleague of Johnny Harris, focusing on deep dives into geopolitics and sports, and is a channel that collaborates with Johnny Harris's work.
Outlines
π€ The Enigma of Elon Musk's Mind
The script opens with a contemplative tone, pondering the complex mind of Elon Musk. It discusses the public's fascination and misunderstanding of Musk, delving into his background, business empire, and recent acquisition of Twitter. The narrator's quest to understand Musk includes interviews with various individuals who have had professional relationships with him, revealing a mix of admiration and animosity. The segment also touches on Musk's early life, his autism spectrum traits, and the hardships he faced, including severe bullying and an abusive home life. It sets the stage for an in-depth exploration of Musk's character and motivations.
π The Rise of an Entrepreneur
This paragraph outlines Elon Musk's journey from his early programming days to becoming a billionaire entrepreneur. It highlights his first business venture, Zip2, which was sold for $307 million, and the subsequent establishment of X.com, which later became PayPal and was sold to eBay for $1.5 billion. Musk's ambitious investment in SpaceX, Tesla, and Solar City with his earnings is emphasized, showcasing his vision for a multi-planetary human species and sustainable energy. The summary also touches on the innovative approaches of Tesla and SpaceX, including Tesla's open-source patents and SpaceX's reusable rockets, which revolutionized their respective industries.
π‘ Diverse Ventures and Controversies
The script moves on to describe the wide array of companies Musk has launched or co-founded, such as The Boring Company, Neuralink, Starlink, OpenAI, and xAI. It discusses Musk's playful side, which is evident in his ventures like selling flamethrowers and peculiar perfumes. The paragraph also addresses the serious side of his businesses, such as Starlink's impact on global internet access and the war in Ukraine. Furthermore, it mentions Musk's role in shaping public opinion through his companies and his recent foray into reshaping the media landscape with his acquisition of Twitter.
π οΈ The Intense and Demanding Leadership Style
The paragraph delves into Elon Musk's leadership style, emphasizing his obsession with detail and his hands-on approach to engineering and technical aspects of his companies. It reveals that Musk spends a significant amount of time interrogating every aspect of his projects to find the most efficient solutions. His leadership is characterized by questioning everything, pushing boundaries, and demanding accelerated timelines from his teams. While this has led to remarkable achievements, it also creates a highly stressful work environment and has earned Musk a reputation for being difficult to work with.
πΈ The Pursuit of Wealth and Power
This section discusses the psychological aspects of Musk's drive for wealth and power. It includes a revealing text conversation that suggests Musk thrives in conflict and finds calm periods unnerving. The paragraph highlights his acquisition of Twitter for $44 billion and his stated reasons for the purchase, focusing on his belief in free speech and the potential of Twitter as a global platform for open dialogue. It also touches on the immediate changes Musk implemented at Twitter, including the notorious 'Twitter Hunger Games' and his demand for an 'extremely hardcore' work culture.
π The Hypocrisy of 'Free Speech'
The script questions the authenticity of Musk's commitment to free speech on Twitter. It describes how Musk used algorithmic power to boost his own tweets and allowed the return of previously banned accounts, seemingly to amplify certain voices, including those of controversial figures. The paragraph points out inconsistencies in Musk's approach to free speech, such as his selective banning of journalists and his decision to censor Substack links. It suggests that Musk's actions may not align with his stated ideals and could be driven by a desire for attention and controversy.
π The Myth of San Francisco Liberal Bias
This paragraph examines Musk's claim that Twitter's San Francisco location biased its platform towards liberal ideologies. It cites a study showing that, contrary to Musk's assertions, the platform actually had a conservative bias in terms of algorithmic amplification. The summary highlights the discrepancy between Musk's beliefs and the empirical evidence, suggesting that his acquisition of Twitter may have been based on unfounded assumptions.
ποΈ The Reality of Government Censorship
The script addresses Musk's concern about government censorship on Twitter, revealing that internal communications showed instances of political bias in content moderation. It discusses specific cases, such as the censorship of the New York Post's article on Hunter Biden, as examples of Twitter's compliance with government requests. However, the paragraph also points out that under Musk's leadership, Twitter has increased its compliance with government censorship requests, which contradicts his professed dedication to free speech.
π The Betrayal of Free Speech Principles
In this paragraph, the script concludes that Musk's actions since taking over Twitter do not align with his stated motives of promoting free speech and combating government censorship. It provides examples of Twitter's compliance with government requests to censor content in Turkey and India, despite Musk's earlier criticism of such practices. The summary suggests that Musk's approach to content moderation is inconsistent and subject to his personal whims, rather than being guided by a clear commitment to free speech.
π The Consequence of Controversy
The final paragraph reflects on the broader implications of Musk's recent actions, suggesting that his pursuit of controversy and division may be undermining his own vision for humanity's potential. It discusses the sense of betrayal felt by some of Musk's former colleagues and employees, who believed in his grand vision but now see him contributing to societal discord. The script concludes by questioning whether Musk's current path is truly in service of his stated ideals or merely feeding his own need for attention and crisis.
Mindmap
Keywords
π‘Elon Musk
π‘Autism spectrum
π‘Entrepreneurship
π‘Innovation
π‘Free speech
π‘Controversy
π‘Risk
π‘Neuralink
π‘Starlink
π‘Government censorship
π‘Substack
Highlights
Elon Musk's mind is described as a storm, indicating his complex and intense thought processes.
Musk's purchase of Twitter and the mystery surrounding his motivations are explored.
The narrative delves into Musk's early life, including his experiences with bullying and his entrepreneurial start at age 12.
Musk's self-identification on the autism spectrum and its potential influence on his behavior and outlook.
Debunking myths about Musk's family wealth and his actual upbringing.
Musk's deep interest in computers, programming, and his first business venture selling a video game at 12.
Musk's philosophical motivations for his work, focusing on expanding human potential and understanding the universe.
The story of Musk's first company, Zip2, and its significant sale, establishing him financially.
The creation and success of X.com, which later became PayPal, and its acquisition by eBay.
Musk's investment in and transformation of Tesla, aiming to make electric cars mainstream.
SpaceX's revolutionary development of reusable rockets and its impact on space travel.
Musk's various companies and their collective aim to push the limits of human potential.
The controversial aspects of Musk's personality, including his treatment of employees and public image.
Musk's acquisition of Twitter and his stated goals for the platform, focusing on free speech.
Analysis of Musk's impact on Twitter, including changes in content moderation and government censorship.
Critique of Musk's approach to free speech on Twitter, highlighting inconsistencies and potential harm.
Reflection on Musk's overall vision and whether his recent actions align with his intended goals for humanity.
Transcripts
(soft music)
- I mean, my mind is a storm.
I don't think most people would wanna be me.
They may think they would wanna be me,
but they don't, they don't know.
- [Interviewer] Is your storm a happy storm?
- No.
- I've grown tired of hearing the name Elon Musk
and not really understanding what's going on.
Who is this guy?
Where is he from?
How has he built a huge business empire to become one
of the richest people in the world?
And what can we learn about his purchase of Twitter?
So I've been going on a deep dive,
finding everything I can about this guy,
his upbringing, businesses he's started,
talking to people who have worked with him,
who have worked for him.
Many of these people wanna remain anonymous
for reasons you will soon understand.
I've talked to people who love him, people who hate him,
people who used to love him and now hate him.
- If I were an employee at Twitter right now,
I'd probably just do your job,
don't let him know your name.
- So after a few months of reporting on this,
I feel like I finally have a handle on who this guy is.
I understand how he built his empire,
how he treats the people around him,
and the real reason I believe he bought Twitter.
- Elon Musk put in an offer.
- An unsolicited bid to buy the social media platform.
- [Reporter] $44 billion.
- So let me show you the rise and rule of Elon Musk.
- You're a super villain.
That's what a super villain does.
- [Elon] Yeah.
- [Announcer] He's addicted to drama, he's addicted to risk,
and whenever things seem to be going smoothly,
he almost has a compulsion to stir things up.
(soft music)
- [Johnny] Elon Musk was born in the summer of 1971
in South Africa.
From a young age, he was bullied pretty relentlessly
by kids at school for being scrawny and nerdy.
- You know, bullied quite a lot.
I got punched in the face many times.
- [Johnny] Musk would later say
that he's on the autism spectrum,
though he was never diagnosed.
It got really bad for young Elon.
Like one time.
- When he got beaten up at school once
and so bloody, he had to go to the hospital.
The scars were actually worse when he came home
and his father made him stand in front of him
and berated him for more than an hour, calling him stupid,
saying it was his fault.
- Stories like this make me sick to my stomach
and you realize that the trauma
and scars from this kind of abuse, both physical
and emotional, they don't go away easily.
Speaking of his dad, there's a lot of rumors
that Elon came from a rich dad
who owned Emerald mines in South Africa
and that he was set up to be successful
because of family wealth.
This isn't factually accurate.
Elon's dad did import emeralds,
but there wasn't a lot of money in this family.
- He never owned a emerald mine. This is total bull shit.
- If you want more detail on that,
you can go check out our sources where we put the fact check
for every of the assertions in this video.
Anyway, what Elon did have at a young age was a skill
for computers and programming.
(soft music)
- [Elon] I taught myself how to program computers,
but mostly 'cause I wanted to program games.
- At the age of 12, he invented a video game.
- Mom, do you remember when I was 12
and I created my own video game.
- [Johnny] That he sold to a magazine for,
- $500.
- It was his first business move in tech,
his first interest in space.
- Around 12 or 13, I had kind of an existential crisis
trying to figure out the meaning of life.
- From an early age.
Musk found meaning in the idea of the potential
of humanity, what humans can do as a collective,
how we as a species have somehow been able to work together
to explore the meaning of the universe.
- My motivation was that if we can expand the scope
and scale of consciousness,
maybe we can find out the meaning of life.
- I mean, you hear this and it kind of sounds overly grand,
kind of delusional, overly idealistic,
but honestly,
this is what motivates Musk from a very young age
and he doesn't bend on what he wants
and what he's willing to do to achieve it.
So he leaves South Africa when he is 18 and moves to Canada
and eventually ends up in Pennsylvania where he goes
to college and gets a degree in economics and physics.
At the age of 24, he moves out to California
to pursue a PhD at Stanford,
but he never starts the program.
Instead he starts his first business.
(soft music)
Okay, so I'm not gonna go into the details of every one
of Elon's companies because there are a lot.
If you want to deep dive, read this very thick book,
this was a foundational part of our reporting
and it details the play by play on all of these companies.
For now, let me give you a quick summary
of the businesses this guy built to become one
of the richest men on the planet.
His first company was called Zip2.
He started it in 1995 with his brother, who seems
to have an affinity for cowboy hats.
(whip snapping) - Yee-haw.
- His company provided maps
and business directories for online newspapers.
I know those words sound very strange to us now,
but like back in 1995, it was a huge deal.
It almost was like the precursor to
what Google Maps is today, and it was very successful.
- We helped bring online several hundred newspapers
that previously were only in print.
- It was acquired a few years later for $307 million,
22 million of those dollars going right into Elon's pocket.
Suddenly Elon is rich.
- Receiving cash is cash.
I mean, those are just a large number of Ben Franklins.
- He uses the money to start another company called X.com.
No, no, no, not that X.com, the first X.com,
which you now know today as PayPal.
- So this is an ATM.
All we're gonna do is
transform the traditional banking industry.
- It was basically an online bank
and it was revolutionary at the time.
So much so that in 2002, eBay bought it
for $1.5 billion. (cash register ringing)
Elon got 180 million of those dollars,
and now he's officially super rich.
- There it is gentlemen, the fastest car in the world.
- So what to do with all of this money?
The answer for Elon Musk was
to try out the craziest ideas he could think of.
- Oh, I have like about 180 million from PayPal.
I thought, you know, I'll allocate half of that to SpaceX
and Tesla and Solar City.
That should be fine. I'll have 90 million. Like that's lots.
I thought our probability of success was less than 10%.
It would be foolish to think anything else other than that.
(soft music)
- Ever since he was a kid making video games about space,
Elon has been motivated by this idea
of humans expanding outside of earth, humans becoming a,
- Multi planet species.
We would like to help make life multi-planetary.
The extension of life to multiple planets.
- In early two thousands, Tesla already existed.
They were making electric cars,
but there were kind of high-end niche sports cars.
Elon was really interested in this.
So he came in as an investor
and eventually became the CEO with the vision
of turning electric cars mainstream
and ushering a whole new era of transportation.
But these ideas were more expensive than he anticipated.
- Things cost more and took longer than I thought.
So I had a choice of either put the rest of the money in
or the companies are gonna die.
- His rockets kept blowing up.
His electric cars were devilishly complicated
to manufacture, but Elon developed this addiction to risk
and intensity that kept him pushing forward
despite these challenges.
Tesla reinvented how cars were made.
Thanks to innovative technology
and manufacturing, really clever engineering
and a waterfall of government subsidies.
He was able to skyrocket Tesla into one
of the most valuable companies in the world,
overtaking every other car company
by a long shot in just a few years.
And this company was weird.
It wasn't obeying all the rules,
like there was almost no official marketing campaign.
And Elon decided to make all of his technology open source.
The patents were not copyrighted.
Anyone could see them
and use them with the hope that the market
for electric vehicles would take off,
and that the world would more quickly move away from the use
of fossil fuels, which would ultimately benefit Tesla.
- So if somebody comes and makes a better electric car
than Tesla, and it's so much better than ours
that we can't sell our cars
and we go bankrupt,
I still think that's a good thing for the world.
- These were bold, crazy moves,
but they were totally working.
Meanwhile, Elon's Space Company was about
to go out of business
(soft music)
- For SpaceX, the first three launches failed.
Just barely able to scrape together enough parts
and money to do the the fourth launch.
- And then, after six years and six months of stress
and intensity, Elon's dreams of going
to space started to come true.
(upbeat music)
(cheering)
I'm gonna explain a little bit more about how he did all
of this, but the big deal about SpaceX is
that they created a reusable rocket.
Every other rocket is disposable.
You can only use it once and it's very expensive.
But Elon proved that you could use a rocket
and safely land it back down onto the surface
of earth and then use it again.
Soon, SpaceX would be carrying NASA astronauts
and supplies to the International Space Station,
launching military satellites into space for the Pentagon,
launching dozens of satellites up into space
for commercial use,
and even launching the first ever private space flight
for tourism.
Space travel was officially reinvented.
- I think we're at the dawn of a new era
and it's a reason for people to be excited
and inspired to be human.
- Okay? But what's crazy is that during all of this,
Elon is also launching a bunch
of other companies like The Boring Company,
which is trying to revolutionize traffic
and transportation by building smarter tunnels.
Oh my God, it just hit me that it's boring,
like boring into the side of a mountain.
Oh my God, that just hit me, right now?
This company also turned into like a blank canvas
for Elon Musk to play out all of his childish,
silly ideas like selling a flamethrower
or this perfume that smells like singed human hair.
And yes, Musk uses his businesses as kind of a way
to troll humanity while also trying to save humanity.
It's this behavior that a lot of people find refreshing
and ends up getting a lot of attention
and becoming a marketing tool for all of his companies.
He starts building Neuralink, which is designing a way
for humans to control computers with their brains,
which is already having some initial successes.
And now that Elon's company can easily go to space,
he starts sending up these small satellites, 6,000 of them
that are orbiting the earth,
and he starts providing internet to remote places,
arguably changing the course of the war in Ukraine
by providing Ukrainian soldiers with internet
during the initial invasion from Russia.
Though that's gotten more complicated in recent months
as Russian soldiers have started to use Starlink
and it's a whole other rabbit hole.
Okay, but we're not done yet with Elon's companies.
He also co-founded OpenAI way back in 2015
who went on to make ChatGPT.
He later left the company over disagreements
and then has recently started his own AI company called,
you Guessed it, xAI.
Yes, the guy loves the letter X.
It's literally the name of several of his companies
and one of his children.
Each one of these ventures points back
to Elon's childish idealism.
This grand vision of testing the limits of
what humans can do by pushing our understanding of physics
and working together to do crazy amazing things.
But then after building all of these companies
that are focused on pushing the physical limits
of human potential,
Elon in recent years has set his sights
on reshaping another industry.
(soft music)
- [Announcer] Tonight, the richest man
in the world is hunting for more.
- [Reporter] Put in an offer of almost $44 billion
to buy Twitter.
- [Reporter] All of Twitter.
Is this all a troll or is this very real?
- Elon Musk has been portrayed as both a reckless,
unethical billionaire as well as a visionary
who is changing the world for the better.
And what you think about him probably comes from
what you read about him.
And what you read about him was probably served to you
by an algorithm.
This is how our media landscape works these days
and it's getting us deeper and deeper into trouble,
which is a major theme in this video,
but it's also in line with the sponsor of today's video,
which is Ground News.
Ground News is a platform that I've been using
to navigate this problem, to find a balanced view
where I can see both sides of a news story.
Ground News aggregates, tens of thousands
of news articles from around the world into one place,
and then allows you to critically examine
how that news is being covered.
Here's a recent story
that on the left you can see from the Los Angeles Times
that engineers sue Elon Musk
and SpaceX saying
that the company mirrored his juvenile, crude X posts.
While on the right you've got the New York Post saying
that Elon Musk was sued
by fired engineers alleging Elon Musk
allowed pervasive sexist culture.
These headlines have subtle bias in them.
Like the left-leaning headline suggests
that Musk's personal behavior was directly responsible
while the right-leaning headline emphasizes
that they were fired employees
and that there was an alleged sexist culture
softening any kind of blame towards Musk and his company.
This is really subtle stuff that's hard to pay attention to
if you're just scrolling your algorithm.
Ground News emphasizes and highlights these biases
and allows you to be more critical as a news consumer.
Not only do they show this bias distribution,
but they also have a tool that rates
how factual an article is,
and my favorite, they have this blind spot detector
that pays attention to the articles that you tend to read
and presents you with stuff that might be outside
of your comfort zone,
but that you probably need to see
to be a balanced news consumer.
This is a really cool tool. I'm very glad they exist.
I'm really glad they're sponsoring today's video.
If you wanna try this out for yourself,
go to groundnews.com/johnnyharris
where you'll get 40% off the vantage plan,
which is unlimited access to all of these features.
I use Ground News, I think it's really important
in today's media landscape.
I'm grateful that they sponsored today's video.
With that, let's dive back into the story of Elon Musk.
- [Announcer] Tonight, the richest man
in the world is hunting for more.
- Okay, so we're getting into this.
Why did Elon buy Twitter?
What can we learn from it?
Before we do that, I want to tell you a little bit
about what I learned about Elon Musk as a leader
after talking to people who have worked with him,
people who have worked under him.
There's a few key lessons that I've taken away from all
of these conversations we've had with these people
and doing research on him.
I will not be quoting them directly
because most of them asked to remain anonymous.
(soft music)
The first thing I heard over
and over again is how obsessed Elon Musk is with the details
of what his companies are building.
- [Elon] I think people think like I'm a business guy
or something like that,
engineering looks like 80% or more of my time.
- [Johnny] One source I talked to
who worked closely with Musk,
estimates that he spends 90% of his time
in technical details
with a whiteboard out, looking at code with engineers
and programmers, solving very specific details in meetings
that sometimes go into the middle of the night.
And this gets to our second takeaway, which is
that Elon questions everything and I mean everything.
You can see this really clearly.
When he was building SpaceX,
- It was tough going there in the beginning
'cause I'd never built anything physical.
I mean, I'd built like little model rockets as a kid
and that kind of thing, but I'd never had a company
that built anything physical.
- Elon's original idea for SpaceX was to buy Russian rockets
that had been decommissioned
and to rebuild them more efficiently.
- I can tell you it was very weird going
to the Russian rocket forces
and saying, I'd like to buy two of your biggest rockets.
They thought I was crazy, but I did have money.
- He went to Russia
and quickly discovered that the price that governments pay
for rockets is astronomical.
It felt absurd.
On the flight home, Elon makes this list
of every component he can think of needed to build a rocket,
and then he put in the estimated price
for just the materials and the components.
What he found is that the prices that they were quoting him
for these rocket parts were highly inflated.
He interrogated every single cost associated with rockets
and started to make plans on
how his team could find a much cheaper way to build them.
He did this over and over and over until soon
his team was manufacturing 70% of all
of the rocket components for SpaceX
and saving millions of dollars.
I heard story after story like this, Elon showing up,
talking to some low level engineer,
working on some very specific problem
and interrogating it
until he found the most efficient answer.
Oh, and this wasn't about him being collaborative
or inclusive of his employees.
This is about him stress testing every single assumption,
pushing every single thing to the limit so
that he can find the most efficient way to build something.
This also makes working for Elon incredibly stressful.
He'll show up, he'll question everything,
and then he'll tell people that a six month timeline needs
to be condensed down into 90 days.
Everyone's jaw drops.
They say it's impossible, and he says it has to be possible
and then everyone makes it happen.
Which gets me to number four, the people around him.
Musk's ruthless idealism
and vision for the future has attracted a lot really
talented people who bring these dreams to life.
These people have rallied around his mission
to reinvent transportation or take humans to Mars.
They're the ones who make it happen
with unprecedented speed and efficiency.
These four things are really his superpowers.
They're the ingredients that have allowed him
to reinvent entire industries,
but this isn't the full picture.
Everyone I talk to includes the fact
that Elon can be a total asshole
and is a lot of the time.
- Hate me, like me or indifferent.
Do you want the best car or do you not want the best car?
(laughing)
- [Johnny] He is abrupt, he is blunt,
and he puts basically no effort into making you like him.
- No, I am not the evil. I just misunderstood.
(whistling)
- One irony I kept hearing is that Musk cares so much
about humanity, but he doesn't really care about humans.
Okay, so I'm the father of an 11-year-old who is autistic,
and I myself identify as being on some part of the spectrum.
And so listening to hours of Musk, I see moments that
to most people might look like him being mean hearted
and arrogant, and extreme, and even cruel,
but to me feel more like him being unaware
or perhaps unwilling to play by the rules of social norms.
Okay, but, and because my son is probably watching this,
I need to make one thing crystal clear
that there is a line here.
Musk's behavior, especially recently,
can quickly cross into malicious, temperamental,
mean hearted and harmful behavior that goes well
beyond anything that can be justified
or explained by neurodivergence, into something
that looks a lot more like aggressive bullying, coercion,
unethical business practices.
- There's almost a demon mode of Elon Musk
where he turns really dark
and that can be very problematic, especially
when it came to acquiring Twitter.
- My point is that there's some empathy
that is warranted here.
It can be a blurry line,
but Musk very clearly crosses that line.
Something we'll talk about more in a little bit.
But for now, let's get back to our list, these five things
that are the big takeaways on how Musk operates
and how he's built his empire.
And let's look at where this got him by the early 2020s.
His four big companies had grown rapidly
to become worth billions.
Tesla reaching a trillion dollar valuation,
one of the most valuable companies on earth,
revolutionizing the car industry.
And by January, 2021, these successes has skyrocketed Musk
to become the world's richest man
according to Forbes Billionaire Tracker.
But don't be fooled.
For Musk, this actually isn't an ideal situation.
Musk's biographer, Walter Isaacson, wrote this amazing book
that details all of this private communication
that really gives us an inside look into the psychology
of Musk during this time.
And he documents this conversation between Shivan Zilis,
the director of operations at one of his companies,
and the mother of a set of Elon's twins,
and Elon in a text that read, "You don't have
to be in a state of war all the time,
or is that where you find greater comfort,
when you're in periods of war?"
And he replies that it's a part of his default setting.
Zilis then tells Isaacson
that "It was like he was winning the simulation
and now he felt at a loss at what to do.
Extended periods of calm were unnerving for him."
The guy is addicted to conflict and crisis,
and tension, and drama.
And being the world's richest man
with all these successes was uncomfortable.
He needed a new storm to throw himself into,
and so he chose the storm of all storms.
(deep music)
At the end of 2022, he buys Twitter for $44 billion.
In his offer letter, he tells us why he's doing it.
He believes that Twitter has the potential
to be the platform for free speech around the globe,
and that free speech is a societal imperative
for a functioning democracy.
And right away, Musk applies his playbook to the company,
sending out a midnight email telling the thousands
of employees that there's gonna be a new Twitter culture
that is quote, "Extremely hardcore, long hours,
high intensity."
And tells anyone who wants to stay
to fill out this form or be fired.
- Thousands of Twitter employees are being laid off,
locked out of their work email accounts.
- Twitter has fired half of its seven
and a half thousand staff.
- We called it the Twitter Hunger Games.
- I thought a lot about how to talk about Musk's foray
into Twitter because it is in the news right now.
It is shaping the way that we receive
and talk about information,
and there's a lot of hot takes out there.
What I decided to do here is to try
to give the most earnest understanding as to Musk's motives.
Why did he do this?
What does he want from it,
and what is he doing to reshape Twitter around this vision?
- [Joe] What was it ultimately that led you
to make the decision to do it?
- [Elon] It's somewhat melodramatic,
but I was worried about that it was
having a corrosive effect on civilization.
- So first and foremost,
free speech is like the thing he says over and over.
- Free speech. Free speech. Free speech.
- Free speech is the only way that humans are gonna thrive.
And because Musk's main mission is the advancement
of human civilization, he must buy Twitter
and make it the free speech platform.
The platform where we have perhaps the most important
conversations in the world.
He says this over and over like in this tweet where he says,
"This is a battle for the future of civilization.
If free speech is lost, even in America,
tyranny is all that lies ahead."
So that's number one on what he says his motives are.
- [Elon] I think part of it is that,
it's where it was located,
which is, you know, downtown San Francisco.
- [Johnny] The next pillar of Musk's reasoning has to do
with the city of San Francisco.
- [Elon] Is there a place that's more far left
than San Francisco, Berkeley?
- [Johnny] Twitter's headquarters is located right here
in downtown San Francisco.
And for Musk, that's a big problem.
- [Elon] It was an accidental far left information weapon
that was then harnessed by the far left
who could not themselves create the weapon,
but happened to be co-located where the technologists were.
- Okay, so let me get this straight.
Musk believes that Twitter being in the heart
of a liberal city means that the engineers
and leaders deciding what gets elevated
and suppressed on Twitter are infected with the politics
of the liberal city.
And so they're more likely to elevate their ideology,
a megaphone, an information weapon.
That's his argument.
I have a couple issues with the argument
and its logical underpinning,
but again, this is about what Elon Musk says
and his motivations for buying Twitter.
And number three, the government is censoring Twitter
and Twitter is letting them.
- [Elon] Twitter was simply an arm of the government.
You know, a state publication is the way
to think of old Twitter.
It's a state publication.
- Alright, this is our list.
We're gonna get to each of these
and like try to understand them all.
But like is anyone else wondering what happened here?
It feels like the story went from quirky visionary engineer
uses his brilliant unorthodox,
socially immature tactics and obsessions
to accomplish unprecedented engineering feats.
To said quirky engineers suddenly
dedicates his brilliant mind away from physics
and towards social media
because he believes that there's a deep state conspiracy
between San Francisco technologists infected
with liberal bias and their censoring government overlords,
and he is going to fix it.
(soft music)
What happened?
I actually never got to the bottom of that
and I don't think anyone has.
That's actually been a central question
that was never answered for me during this reporting.
We do know this pivot happened sometime in 2020.
Why did Musk shift to obsessing over this?
The answer to that probably lies somewhere
in Elon Musk's brain, and it is not ethical
or useful for me to try to opine on his mental health
or what is going on in his brain.
So let's stick to the facts.
Here is the logical framework
that Elon Musk used to buy Twitter.
This is what he wants to do with it is fix this.
Let's see what happens next.
So after firing most of the employees
and changing the name to his favorite letter,
he gets to work on free speech.
He lets big accounts
that were previously banned back onto the platform,
including former President Donald Trump,
comedian Kathy Griffin, lawmaker Marjorie Taylor Greene,
Jordan Peterson.
Within a few months he posts this tweet
around the Super Bowl and he notices
that this tweet gets less engagement than the tweet
by President Joe Biden.
Elon does not like this.
He calls an urgent meeting
and tasks 80 engineers to quickly rebuild a version
of the algorithm that will allow his tweets
to be artificially boosted by a factor of a thousand.
I was kind of skeptical on how sensational was reported,
but through my conversations, confirmed
that this actually went down.
Like the old Twitter was not built
to artificially boost one account.
And Elon, the free speech guy was like,
I need you to boost my account
because it's not getting as much attention as the president
and the 80 engineers did.
So a few months after buying the company,
Elon now has super algorithmic power
and he uses it to start to amplify certain people.
So I know what you're thinking, Johnny,
you just disagree with these people
and so you think that it's bad that Elon let them on,
but really free speech is about letting everyone talk.
Yes, absolutely. That is true.
And yet Elon uses an artificially amplified voice
to prop up a very specific type of voice on Twitter
to amplify ideas, extreme ideas,
harmful ideas, not just to liberals in San Francisco,
but ideas that we as humanity recognize are bad ideas.
And now someone with a massive megaphone has control
on how big those ideas can get.
Even Bill Maher, the Elon fanboy.
- There's a very few people who actually make change happen.
You are one of those people.
- Even he could not understand why Elon was doing this.
- I understand why he wanted
to like have a platform where you have free speech,
but like why then embrace the worst people on it.
- And then Elon isn't totally consistent about this.
Like in the case of Alex Jones
who spreads horrendous conspiracies
and misinformation to a lot of people.
When asked why Elon didn't let him go back onto Twitter,
he said no.
Saying that he had no mercy for anyone
who would use the death of children for gain,
politics or fame.
He did eventually reinstate Alex Jones after running a poll.
But you start to see that he'll reinstate anyone
unless he personally takes issue
with their views or what they said.
What's puzzling to me is
that this isn't free speech absolutism.
It's not say anything you want.
Musk's new Twitter then starts banning
and suppressing Substack links,
Substack the place where independent journalists write.
Musk made the change where you can't comment
or like on anything that has a Substack article
and you can't embed tweets in your Substack article.
That doesn't feel like free speech to me.
Musk then decides
that the word cisgender is a slur on Twitter
and threatens to ban people who use it too much.
Is that free speech?
He then starts banning journalists
who criticize him, though he did reinstate a few of them
after a vote.
And then start suing media watchdog organizations
like the Center for Countering Digital Hate,
trying to silence them
for criticizing the new Twitter.
Musk, of course, lost with the verdict coming out saying
that this lawsuit was basically
about trying to silence criticism
and deter others from criticizing his company.
- He's someone who is willing to use his enormous wealth
and power to silence people.
- Like this is such clear anti-free speech behavior.
When Twitter users organized a protest against making users
pay for a blue check mark, he banned that account.
And this is what's so mind bending.
Like I swear he's trolling us here.
He says that he's obsessed with free speech,
but then immediately after taking over Twitter,
he demonstrates an extreme hypocrisy for that very point.
And I secretly think he's doing that
so that we are talking about it right now.
I don't think it was ever about free speech.
I also think that when he posts political propaganda ads
like this conspiracy video that says
that Democrats are letting immigrants in
to turn America into single party rule
and has almost a hundred million views.
I think he's doing that not
because he agrees with this factless piece of propaganda,
but because he loves to rile people up.
Though maybe he does agree with it, I don't know.
Either way, he has built a platform
that gives him the biggest megaphone
and suppresses people that criticize him.
That is not free speech.
Okay, but let's move on
because free speech was just one of his three major motives.
What about this argument that Twitter is infected
with liberal ideology because it is based in San Francisco?
Luckily we have data.
This was a great study, very thorough,
algorithmic amplification of politics on Twitter.
It's a study from before Elon took over.
They conducted a long running, massive scale,
randomized experiment where they looked at a huge number
of tweets from seven countries
and they found that in six out of the seven countries,
including the United States,
that quote, "The mainstream political right
enjoys a higher algorithmic amplification
than the mainstream political left."
They saw this over and over.
Oh, and also a really interesting side note here is
that they found that Twitter actually
doesn't amplify far left or far right political groups,
more than moderate ones,
which is a myth that I believed until I read this study.
But the whole point is
that old Twitter did not have a liberal bias.
If anything, it had a conservative bias.
This study is very robust proof of that
despite Elon's theory that Twitter being in San Francisco
infected it with a liberal bias.
Go to the sources and read the study
for yourself if you wanna poke into it.
If there's anything wrong with it that I'm missing,
please tell me.
But it seems like pretty solid proof to me.
Okay, but what about the last critique?
And this is a big one.
Musk believed that Twitter was being censored by governments
and Twitter was letting them do this.
And guess what? That is actually true.
Upon taking over Twitter, Musk cracked into all
of the internal communications
and found a bunch of emails that showed
how Twitter had banned
and suppressed information that it deemed harmful
and dangerous, but that they did so sometimes
with a political bias.
You can see things like Biden's team asking Twitter
to review these tweets that they didn't like.
Yes, governments around the world can ask Twitter
to take things down in their country
that they think are breaking the law
or that are harmful to national security.
And this happened on both sides.
The Trump White House asked Twitter to take things down
as well, but this reporting did reveal
what looked like a lot of left-leaning bias
in censoring certain highly sensitive content
that would be damaging to the left.
The the big example of this was this New York Post article
about Hunter Biden's laptop.
Twitter severely censored this,
not even letting people DM the link to each other
and making up a thin justification for it later.
Now, content moderation, deciding what is harmful
and what should be censored and what shouldn't,
is a really difficult task.
But for a lot of people, including myself,
this crossed a line.
This was not okay.
Though I have to say
that Hunter Biden New York Post article
was the most sort of egregious one.
A lot of the other stuff in the Twitter files was not nearly
as black and white.
Much more nuanced, much more complicated.
The point is there should be transparency here,
and I agree with Musk on that.
Okay, but this is once again
where we find some strange paradox
that doesn't make any sense, which is
that since Musk took over,
government censorship on Twitter has gone up.
Twitter suspended multiple journalists
from prominent outlets included the Washington Post,
the New York Times, and CNN.
- Tonight, a number
of high profile journalists have been silenced.
- Here are the number of take down requests that governments
around the world made to Twitter in the six months
before Musk took over.
And these are the ones that Twitter complied with.
Twitter would fully comply
with the government's censorship request
about half of the time.
The other half of the time they'd say no.
In the six months after Musk, the number
of requests went up, probably because Musk got rid
of a lot of the automatic moderation.
But look, Musk's Twitter now says yes
to government censorship over 80% of the time,
way more than the old Twitter.
Wait, what?
And look, the kind of stuff that Musk is allowing
to be censored on the platform is really sensitive stuff
for free speech.
Like take Turkey for example.
There was a Turkish election last year.
The president of Turkey, himself, a massive user
of state censorship, pressured Twitter
to block the accounts of a few people he didn't like,
a Kurdish businessman, an investigative journalist,
both of them vocal critics of the president.
Like this is like clear black
and white political censorship in an election year.
Like make the guy
who is criticizing me go away.
And guess what?
Musk's Twitter did it. They said yes.
They banned the accounts
and then said we didn't have a choice.
They were gonna shut down all of Twitter
so we had to do it.
And then they patted themselves on the back
about how they were still trying to fight it,
and they're doing so much for battling government censorship
and transparency on the platform.
But guess what? They did have a choice.
This same kind of thing happened before Musk ever came in
and Twitter fought back.
In a previous Turkish election,
the government tried to do the same thing,
censor posts about corruption within the Turkish government.
They asked Twitter to take these down
and Twitter said, no.
They fired back that political speech is
among the most important speech,
especially when it concerns matters of possible corruption.
So Turkey shut down Twitter, it was down for a couple
of weeks while they battled it out in court
and the Turkish government lost.
Indeed, they lost
because they were trying to censor political speech
and Twitter fought back.
There's even more recent examples like Wikipedia
or Wokipedia as Elon calls it, refusing to comply
with the Turkish government censorship requests,
getting completely shut down for almost three years only
to have it be overturned in Turkish courts.
A major win for free speech in Turkey,
which is something that's in short supply lately.
So like Wikipedia, Twitter can do this.
They can say no to the Turkish government
if they're actually crusaders for free speech
and they're actually against government censorship,
they would have said no in 2023.
Musk's Twitter did this in India too,
when the Indian government asked Twitter to censor a bunch
of journalists, including an entire BBC bureau
and a documentary that was critical
of the government and the president, and Twitter complied.
Elon, where is your conviction for free speech?
Where is your hate for government censorship
in moments like this where it really, really matters?
But for Elon Musk, he's got a lot
of other things he needs to think about.
He needs to think about the market for Teslas,
who might be buying his satellites or rockets.
He needs to be thinking about
where Tesla factories might be set up,
the market for his electric cars.
This is a conflict of interest that gets in the way
of his idealistic vision for free speech
and his hate for government censorship.
Twitter used to have a page
where they would publish in detail
why they would take down any content they took down
at the request of the government.
And there's this research lab at Harvard
that would aggregate all of this for the public.
When our story producer Alex went to go look
for these government requests from Turkey
and India, she found that they no longer were there.
This page had gone quiet.
So she reached out to the Harvard lab and got this response.
Twitter stopped sharing this data starting in April, 2023.
No more transparency on government censorship.
It looks like it's down to the whims of one super rich dude.
That is not free speech, that is the antithesis of
what this guy said he was going to build.
So no, I don't think Elon Musk is earnest
about these three things that he said were his motive
for buying Twitter.
In fact, after looking into all of this,
I'm having a hard time figuring out
what Elon is earnest about at all, other than his belief
that humans have the potential to do amazing things.
I do believe that in all of this, that is the one thing
that has stayed consistent.
But how he's pursuing that goal
and that vision in recent years is baffling, confusing
and in my mind, quite harmful to our society.
Twitter seems much more like a platform
where he can bully the people he doesn't like.
He can feed his addiction to crisis
and controversy while also showing a childish hypocrisy
in his principles and values.
But unlike his other ventures,
which you can tell when they're successful
because they're physics,
the rocket either goes up into space or it doesn't.
The car drives or it doesn't.
This new venture doesn't have a physical feedback loop
that tells him if it's doing good or working.
Instead, he's playing with the delicate, precarious nature
of information in the internet age,
something that is already in crisis
and now is being chipped away at by one rich dude
who gets off on crisis.
And what blows my mind most is that in the process of all
of this, Musk is undermining his own dream,
his own vision.
This is a sentiment I heard from the employees
and colleagues of Elon Musk.
They felt betrayed, like this man pushed them
to think differently, to do things that seemed impossible,
all in the name of this grand vision of
what humanity could be, what we could do as a civilization.
And yet in recent years, he seems to be sabotaging
that very vision, alienating the people
and customers that he needs to bring this vision to life.
In my mind, Elon has exchanged that vision for controversy
and division that forces all of us to talk about it.
Here we are talking about it, talking about him.
I think a part of him loves that or needs that.
And yet after all of this, defenders of Elon will continue
to argue that only someone like this
could be the one to change the world.
- To anyone I've offended,
I just wanna say I reinvented electric cars
and I'm sending people to Mars on a rocket ship,
did you think I was also gonna be a chill normal dude?
(audience laughing)
- And yeah, I get that the people
who change the world aren't normal and orthodox,
they're not nice.
But I don't accept this way of thinking about Musk today,
maybe a couple years ago.
But in recent years,
Musk has shown it's his addiction to crisis and attention
that is having a corrosive effect on our society, validating
and glorifying ways of acting that rewards the worst parts
of us, and instead of saving civilization,
driving us further apart.
(soft music)
Hey everyone,
thanks for watching this deep dive on Elon Musk.
I wanna tell you about our new channel called Search Party.
It is a deep dive into geopolitics and sports.
It is started by Sam Ellis, my old Vox colleague
who now has a wonderful channel that we collaborate on
and it is awesome.
Go check it out. Thank you everyone over at The Newsroom,
which is on Patreon, the people
who support our deep dive reporting every month.
I really appreciate your support.
Patreon.com/johnnyharris if you wanna go check
out the perks there.
We also still have a few hundred copies of this poster
that I designed a few months ago, maybe last year.
And it is still around, a few hundred copies left
if you want to go buy them.
If they still exist at this point,
they could be sold out.
It is a poster of all the map projections
and it's called All Maps Are Wrong,
and I'm very proud of it.
You can have it on your wall like I have it on mine.
All of our sources are in the description
if you want to go poke into them.
And thank you all for being here.
I'll see you in the next one. Bye-Bye.
(soft music)
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