[MUSIC]

Brigid Bergin: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. I'm Brigid Bergin in for Brian today. Now, we'll take some time to talk about a businessman who, in the past years, became a big hero for some Americans and a villain for others. The wealthiest man in the world, Elon Musk, will be leading Trump's new Department of Government Efficiency with former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy.

How did Musk go from the CEO of a startup to having a seat next to the President-elect, Donald Trump? Joining us now is Max Chafkin, who has been reporting on Elon Musk for almost 20 years. He's a features editor and a tech reporter at Bloomberg Businessweek, author of the book The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power, and host of Bloomberg's new podcast, Citizen Elon. Max, welcome to WNYC.

Max Chafkin: Hey.

Brigid Bergin: Just taking a step back, why do you think it's important for the public to understand Elon Musk? Obviously, there's a great business story there, but his proximity to the President-elect makes it a lot more than that, right?

Max Chafkin: Yes, absolutely. I think you could make a case that Elon Musk is the most powerful person in the world today. You probably could even try to make a case that he might be the most powerful person in the history of the world. He is the richest person on Earth by some margin, worth more than $300 billion. Operates several very large and influential companies. Tesla, large automaker, the most valuable automaker in the world, and a very large space company, SpaceX, which is a major supplier to the US government in terms of rocket launches.

Then you layer on top of that, this direct influence he has with President-elect Trump. He is, as far as we can tell, one of a handful of key advisors. You brought up this potential role, the Department of Government Efficiency. I feel compelled to say it is not technically a department. It's more an advisory thing. Maybe think of it more like a blue ribbon panel, although they have named it that. Then the last thing about Musk is he is a media mogul. He owns X, the company formerly known as Twitter. Although it's maybe not as influential and mainstream centrist or left-leaning circles as it once was, it is very influential on the right. It's like the most important media outlet on the right at the moment, I would argue.

Brigid Bergin: Wow, so you have this new podcast series, Citizen Elon. Talk about the arc that you're trying to cover in this series.

Max Chafkin: What was so crazy to me and what got me interested in the story, when I first met Elon Musk in 2006, he was basically a green energy guy, right? He was trying to develop these electric cars. He was seemed mostly apolitical. Over the next few years, you remember Obama got elected. Elon, he's politically savvy. He drifted off to the left. For a long time, for a lot of people, he became known as this green capitalist, a center-left figure.

The idea that he would then go all the way to the right, to the far-right, ally with Donald Trump, somebody who he had not been especially friendly with just a couple years earlier, that felt like a mystery that we wanted to unravel. I think it's partly a mystery about money and about a desire for power. Also, there were these psychological wounds, I think, that helped push Elon Musk to Donald Trump as well.

Brigid Bergin: You begin with a particular scene. You could argue it, maybe even the turning point for Elon Musk. Joe Biden wanted to make electric vehicles cheaper. In August of 2021, he signed an executive order that says by 2030, half of all cars sold in America will be electric. Let's listen to a longer clip from your podcast, Citizen Elon.

President Joe Biden: We are the United States of America. There's not a single solitary thing, nothing beyond our capacity to get done. I want to thank the CEOs of the automobile companies and I also want to thank all the autoworkers.

Max Chafkin: At the White House that day are members of Congress, the UAW, United Auto Workers, and a bunch of bigwigs from the Big Three. That's General Motors, Ford, and Stellantis, better known as Chrysler. Right before putting pen to paper, Biden invites his colleagues to come up and stand by his side.

President Joe Biden: Come on. Let's let the CEOs through too.

Max Chafkin: "Let's let the CEOs through too."

President Joe Biden: This is an executive order strengthening America's leadership in clean cars and trucks. Again, let me start off by thanking the CEOs as well as the UAW, you all, and why it's happening. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Brigid Bergin: That, of course, was President Joe Biden thanking the CEOs of these auto companies, including Musk, who you report wasn't even there. Why is this moment so important to understand how he became as influential as he is?

Max Chafkin: It was interesting. Joe Biden ran essentially as a pro-union candidate. That was part of the key to how he saw himself and I think also part of his appeal as well as somebody who was going to help deal with climate change. A big part of that was bringing the Big Three, bringing these old-line industrial companies like Ford and GM into the world of electric vehicles. I think on some level, that's pretty innocuous.

In fact, you could even interpret it as Joe Biden moving towards Elon Musk. Elon Musk, for years, of course, had been selling electric cars, promoting them. I think in the mind of Elon Musk, this was a grievous insult. Now, you got to remember, for a long time, Elon Musk was on his own promoting EVs. The automakers and the autoworkers unions were basically bought into this other technology.

The idea of Biden and GM and Ford and so on claiming the mantle of EVs without giving Elon Musk credit, that was a bridge too far. Essentially, he got really mad. I think there were other things going on at that point that also caused Musk to radicalize. It really was a radicalization, I think a radicalization that happened in a very short amount of time. Basically, starting a little bit before that clip that you just played with the pandemic, Musk got really mad about COVID measures and started drifting right there.

Then he really flipped on Biden basically over the course of a few months to the point where he went from being vaguely supportive, looking forward to working with this new administration, to just calling him names essentially, to tweeting right-wing memes that suggested that Biden couldn't think or was being operated like puppet or any number of things. He really went from being a relatively normal executive to this meme lord, this right-wing meme lord who's very political, leading this army of political actors, buying Twitter out of that sense of grievance, and ultimately donating a huge sum of money to Donald Trump.

Brigid Bergin: He goes from, as you mentioned, this relatively normal guy to the aggrieved, to the radicalized, to the social media mogul. Not only did Musk transform and have this huge platform, but you write that he transformed it into a de facto meteor arm for the Republican Party. You spoke to Joan Donovan, a journalism professor at Boston University. Let's take a listen to that.

Joan Donovan: His attitude was goodbye. Then, of course, he brought back in all of the folks that had been removed previously.

Max Chafkin: The thing is just because Elon's era of Twitter is less successful in business terms doesn't mean it's not still powerful or dangerous.

Joan Donovan: We're not going to code it as a campaign contribution to Trump, but it certainly was. He understood, perhaps more than most, that communication tools are weapons of war. He has now the largest psychological weapon that the world may have ever known. You can really change how an entire society sees itself.

Brigid Bergin: Max, Trump and Republicans have falsely claimed for years that their posts are suppressed by social media outlets. Do we have a sense yet of how much X actually boosted them?

Max Chafkin: No. Defining influence in this way is difficult and it's even hard. There's even a lot of disagreement about just how influential X is. For years, the conventional wisdom on this takeover was that it was a complete failure. Because in business terms, it was a complete failure. Elon Musk paid $44 billion, some of his own money. He borrowed some money and, over the course of basically several months, took Twitter apart, fired something like 80% of the staff. He brought back former President Trump.

He brought back all of these pro-January 6th accounts, all these people who were essentially banned from social media, who all the social media companies agreed, "Hey, it'd be really better for business if these guys posting racist memes and suggesting insurrection were not part of this ecosystem." Elon Musk brings them all back. That's disastrous from a business perspective because social media companies are advertising-focused. Lots of advertisers left. A bunch of advertisers boycotted. Elon Musk responded. You might expect a typical CEO to try to find common ground, maybe apologize or something. He responded by going on stage at a New York Times conference and telling them to F off.

Brigid Bergin: That's a response.

Max Chafkin: That's not exactly the words that he said, but you get the idea. From there, he basically turns it into a really vibrant right-wing community. It isn't like some big, wide reaching social network. It's not like TikTok or something. It's more like this place where that's still very big and influential where ideas, memes, right-wing stuff is percolating up before it finds its way into the larger world, which is the role that Twitter long served in other domains, but probably not so much on the right.

You saw during the campaign, Elon Musk gets really excited about the idea that Haitian immigrants are eating pets, right? He's one of a handful of people, which is false. Within a number of days, or not even days, that night, Donald Trump is on the debate stage saying that line. It's a lot of stuff like that where you're seeing ideas, memes, even some policies moving from the meme world into the mouth of the President-elect.

Brigid Bergin: Listeners, as Elon Musk becomes more and more involved in government and the Trump administration, have your opinions on him shifted? Have his actions impacted the way maybe you relate to some of his products like using X or driving Teslas? Were you once a fan and are now maybe reconsidering that or do you feel ambivalent? We want to know your thoughts. Give us a call now at 212-433-WNYC. That's 212-433-9692.

Max, you just set up this image of the memes from Elon's thumbs to the words coming out of the President-elect's mouth, but you also mentioned in the series that Trump and Musk haven't always been the best of friends, even though some outlets are now calling him the "First Friend." I think Brian even referred to him as a bestie as we were talking about the show. How did this relationship develop?

Max Chafkin: Elon Musk and Donald Trump had a very brief relationship in 2016 actually, played a similar, although less high-profile role. He was advising a handful of these counsels. Musk left the Trump administration fairly early, around the time when Donald Trump started stepping in various controversies. You had the Muslim ban, Charlottesville. There's a bunch of stuff that happened in 2017 that made Trump untouchable for a lot of business guys. One of whom was Elon Musk.

He moved away. Then there was this period where they were almost in competition because Musk buys Twitter and turns it into this "free-speech social network," which is code for, "We're going to let right-wing ideas flourish." Donald Trump, of course, had his own version of that. He had Truth Social. They were competing. Trump is actually going to rallies during the midterm election in 2022 making fun of Elon Musk and saying, "He's a BS'er. Don't take him seriously."

I think what happened basically is that Donald Trump earlier this year desperately needed money. He was behind Biden in fundraising. If there's one thing Elon Musk has, it is a ton of money. You had this very quick coming together. Of course, Musk was primed for this. He had moved to the right. I think early on, he had been supportive of DeSantis. He flirted with Vivek Ramaswamy, who's now his co-chair of this Department of Government Efficiency. He flirted with RFK, Jr.

Basically, when it became clear that Trump was the guy and Trump needed money, that's what it was. It's sort of a trade. Trump gets money from Elon Musk. He gets the credibility of an association with a very successful capitalist. Trump has always valued those legitimate "businesspeople" supporting him as an important part of what's making him seem like he knows what he's doing.

Then on the Musk side, you have this opportunity to get very close to power and an opportunity to direct that power because Trump is flexible. He tends to be transactional and he likes to reward people who support him. Musk, as somebody who has this very vast business empire, I brought up a couple of his companies, but there are others. They all do business in one way or the other or are touched by the federal government.

This is an opportunity to just create a shopping list of asks, defense contracts for his rocket company, or regulations that would allow Tesla, his car company, to thrive. He operates an infrastructure company. It's a tunnel-digging company called The Boring Company. That would very much like some government contracts. Neuralink, this brain implant thing that is going to need government approval. He's got a lot of asks and Trump is the guy to deliver them, at least as far as he sees it.

Brigid Bergin: We have a listener who texted, "Here's an EV owner's take. I just bought a Kia EV6 all-electric car because there is no way I would fund Mr. Musk." Max, you're talking about some of the rationale for what shifted into a very significant investment into the Trump campaign. That is a shift because prior to that, even though he is a billionaire, you write that he was somewhat cheap when it came to financing political campaigns. Is what changed his mind so drastically just a sense of opportunism or the trade-off there?

Max Chafkin: I think it's a combination of a level of personal radicalization where he felt that just so strongly that he genuinely believes this stuff. That's part of it. Then the other part of it is you have this opportunity. I think an opportunity, like I said, to have this really, really significant role. The other thing that's happening, the listener brought up the Kia. I believe it was a Kia. There are now all these competing electric car companies. Elon Musk, for a long time, the average Tesla customer doesn't overlap all that well with the average Trump voter, but the EV market is changing.

You have all these additional companies. Musk, I think, has concluded that doing mass-volume electric cars, growing Tesla's customer base a lot wider is a losing proposition. The car business is not super lucrative. He's trying to move to robotaxis to self-driving cars. I think he concluded essentially that these left-leaning or centrist or environmentalist customers, the suburbanites, you typically think of them as either Democrats or maybe moderate Republicans, that they weren't worth as much to him as they once were.

Brigid Bergin: I want to go to the phones. Sidney in Central Islip, thanks so much for calling.

Sidney: Hi, how are you?

Brigid Bergin: Doing great. How are you?

Sidney: Good, good. I'm actually on their side. I'm a Tesla owner. The reason I actually bought into Tesla was because of pretty much the Green New Deal. This guy really cares about the environment, really cares for prosperity, and like to put America ahead of us on a good way to get away from fossil fuels. Now, he's going with Trump, which is totally against everything that he promotes. Now, it's odd that now, I'm trying to sell my Tesla because of that. Now, I want to stay away from Musk, but I'm trying to sell it. Nobody wants to buy it. That's kind of sad.

Brigid Bergin: Sidney, thank you so much for that call. Max, it does raise the question. I don't know if you've looked into it yet, but I think the Musk-owned businesses are still doing fairly well. Is there a risk-reward calculation for him in taking some of these political positions?

Max Chafkin: Yes, this is something that myself and some of my Bloomberg colleagues have been looking at for actually quite a while because this has been a journey, his becoming a more vocal political opponent and even allied, as a caller says, with a climate change denier. There appears to be some impact. It's very hard to know because Tesla, at the same time that Musk has been doing this stuff, has drastically lowered its prices. They've been able to keep demand fairly high for new Teslas.

As the caller is saying, it's really hurt the used-car market because you have simultaneously, maybe fewer people, especially in bluer regions or cities, interested in buying a used Tesla. The price of the new Teslas has come down quite a bit. Yes, it's definitely hurt people who bought into this idea early. That's been just on a personal level, the most strange part of this. I remember when, if you said anything negative about electric vehicles in front of Elon Musk, he would go absolutely berserk. He would criticize you.

He'd say, "You're a tool of Big Oil." He's always been this combative, somebody who's not afraid to throw an insult. The idea of seeing him at these Trump events where Donald Trump is saying that climate change isn't going to be a problem for 500 years and that we need to "drill, baby, drill" and all this stuff, it is weird. It feels like such a departure from that core promise of the brand that he did a very good job with. He did play a huge role in making electric cars mainstream. You have to give him credit for that even if you look at what he's done over the last couple of years.

Brigid Bergin: I should note a headline from one of our producers, my colleague, Amina from CBS, "Elon Musk is $70 billion richer since Trump's victory due to Tesla stock surge." I want to get one more caller in here. Let's go to Mark in Manhattan. Mark, thanks so much for calling.

Mark: Hello. The reason I'm calling is because I have a similar sensation about what has happened to me. I've worked very hard all my life investing in small property. I'm a small property owner in New York City. What has happened is that I used to be very happy to help people out who couldn't get-- I would give them breaks. What has happened over the years, there's been a shift in the local government particularly, and sometimes in the national perspective of putting the burden on private institutions to help out those who don't have.

To a certain degree, I liked it until I was forced to do certain things and obey a third party. We as a country started in capitalism and have somehow migrated to a very liberal government bordering, if not in actual cities, on socialism. I think that individuals who have achieved something in their lives by creating a foundation, investing similar to Elon Musk, who probably had excellent goals and ideals. When spurned by the government and when put off, he then shifts to opportunistic and capitalistic possibilities to find a group of people who will be in government to support individual investments and laissez-faire.

Brigid Bergin: Mark, thanks so much for that call. A different take on what some of this positioning from Elon Musk is all about. Any reaction?

Max Chafkin: Yes, we're going to see this play out on a significant scale. As I said, this government efficiency panel that Elon Musk is on, it's not clear how much authority they have. It's not clear how much Trump is going to listen to him, but there is definitely buy-in on the right and on the people who are now going to be making policy to make some drastic changes to government. There are all these ideas about drastically cutting costs, laying off government workers, bring this capitalist vision to our government.

Brigid Bergin: Just final question for you, Max. A listener texted in, "Is there ultimately room for both huge egos, Trump and Musk, to coexist? Can we anticipate a split at some point?" Look into your crystal ball for us for a moment.

Max Chafkin: [laughs] I think we're all anticipating a split at some point, but I will say that the conventional wisdom, which the person writing in is reflecting, is that basically these two alpha guys, they can't handle being subservient one to the other. Now, what I would say is we have seen a lot of businesspeople flame out of Trump's orbit. The big joke is the Scaramucci, the 10-day timeline that Anthony Scaramucci, the investor, lasted as press secretary.

Now, the thing is that Elon Musk is way, way more influential, way more powerful, has actual leverage over Trump that some of these other guys didn't have. As you look ahead to the midterm, Trump is going to try to enact his agenda. He's going to try to make all these drastic cuts. You have the potential for Congress, including Republican Congress, to say no.

What Trump now has is Elon Musk essentially in his back pocket offering to fund primary challenges for anyone who doesn't get with the program. That's super valuable. I think as long as Musk is willing to take the backseat to Donald Trump, he will last a while. Over the last few months, we've seen him willing to do that. I am not willing to bet on a quick breakup, although there's definitely going to be some tension. With egos this big, how could there not be?

Brigid Bergin: [chuckles] Well, for many of our listeners, there were lots more questions and calls. People very interested in this character who you've profiled. My guest has been Max Chafkin, features editor and tech reporter at Bloomberg Businessweek. He's also the host of Bloomberg's new podcast series, Citizen Elon. Definitely check it out. Max, thanks so much for coming in.

Max Chafkin: Thanks for having me.

Copyright © 2024 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.