Elon Musk isn't a politician by trade. But the business mogul and tech billionaire has become a growing force in the 2024 US elections, especially after endorsing Republican candidate Donald Trump. In a video podcast, reporters from Politico and Business Insider take a closer look at how he's shaping politics through his enterprises, from Starlink to X.
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00:00For Musk to go so aggressively in favor of one candidate, completely alienating the other
00:06candidate is a huge deal, especially considering the vast amount of government contracts that
00:12his sort of sprawling business empire holds.
00:15So this is a totally unique state of affairs.
00:17He's not just endorsing, he's campaigning.
00:20He's very confident that Trump's going to win, and he's using his social platform to
00:25really push that narrative.
00:26Hi, I'm Derek Robertson.
00:28I am a reporter for Politico and one of the authors of the Digital Future Daily newsletter.
00:32Hi, I'm Amanda Hoover.
00:33I'm a senior correspondent for Business Insider.
00:35Hi, I'm Christine Mui.
00:36I'm a tech policy reporter for Politico, and I also help write Digital Future Daily.
00:40It's now becoming more difficult than ever to separate Musk the political figure from
00:44Musk the businessman.
00:45Derek, let's start with you.
00:48Why is Musk's endorsement of Trump so significant, and specifically his growing affinity toward
00:54MAGA politics?
00:56It is because he sits at the intersection of a couple of different trends in American
01:01life.
01:02One being the increasing importance of tech firms to governance and to public life.
01:08The other is the simple fact that he's the world's richest man.
01:11You tend to have a lot of weight to throw around when you have more money than everybody
01:14else.
01:15Third is that unlike other businessmen, he does not feel the need to hedge or equivocate
01:21in his political support whatsoever.
01:23You wrote about Henry Ford, and you just said that in comparison to even those historical
01:28examples, his wealth and his influence is just so immense, it doesn't match up in terms
01:34of scale.
01:35Yeah, that's right.
01:36You have to go back to the kind of Gilded Age, but truly his wealth is like a Carnegie,
01:43like a Rockefeller, and the scope of his business empire is similar to that.
01:49It beggars modern comparison, even when you think of people as wealthy as Jeff Bezos or
01:53Mark Zuckerberg.
01:54Even before, right, he aligned himself firmly in Trump's camp, Musk has always exerted influence
02:00through Twitter, now Axe.
02:04What are the ways in which he's done that, and how have you seen that change since he's
02:06bought Twitter?
02:08So much has changed about the platform.
02:10He really scaled back a lot of moderation, like let other accounts, including Donald
02:16Trump, come back onto the platform.
02:18We're seeing him posting increasingly his political views, and those views have shifted
02:24and changed.
02:25There's also, you know, some new data from the Washington Post showing that Republicans
02:29are getting followed way more on Axe than Democrats, but it kind of shows like the feelings
02:34that some people get, I think, when they're on there, that it seems like there's a lot
02:37of elevation of pro-MAGA views.
02:41There's obviously like lots of miss and disinformation that Musk himself posts.
02:46He really just is like this huge presence on Axe that people see, even if they don't
02:51follow him, you know, he ends up in the feed.
02:54So it's really become a very powerful way for him to put himself in front of so many
02:59people.
03:00And like looking through his feed, like how much do you see parallels?
03:02I mean, you know, is he just repeating what Trump is saying?
03:05Or are there areas where he, you know, you see kind of key differences or he's diverging
03:10from, you know, Trump's views?
03:13There are places where they meaningfully differ.
03:15Trump is vehemently anti-EV.
03:17Musk is arguably the most, almost inarguably, the most important EV manufacturer ever.
03:23I won't do my Trump impersonation, I will spare everybody that, but he was like, you
03:27know, Elon has softened me a little bit toward electric vehicles.
03:31I like him and he's good to me, so maybe we'll be a little easier on electric vehicles.
03:36So there are these weird asymmetries between their policy platform.
03:39So do you find like Musk's rise in American politics most recently surprising at all?
03:45That's a good question.
03:47I'd be interested to hear your perspective on this as well, Amanda, because as somebody
03:51who's focused on the platform, because when I think about Musk's rise as a political figure,
03:57I think about the centrality of social media platforms to American life.
04:01Elon becoming this political does not surprise me because he is a creature of the open, chaotic
04:07internet that I grew up on with, you know, forums that did not include algorithms and
04:13had no moderation whatsoever.
04:15That environment tends to highlight extreme views.
04:20It's such a unique situation, almost, that he's in because you really, you know, if you
04:24see Mark Zuckerberg post on Facebook, it's very like buttoned up and it's a PR, like
04:30move.
04:31It's official.
04:32Yes, it's official.
04:33Even when he's wearing his Zuck knee heel hoodie.
04:36Yeah.
04:37Yeah.
04:38You don't really see many social media platforms acting the way that a user does, you know,
04:44and because Musk was a user of Twitter when it was that and he loved it, his whole acquisition
04:51of it and his intent with it is just so different than how other owners of these platforms operate.
04:57And obviously of these big platforms, their owners still have tremendous sway.
05:02He's the person that we see interacting, though, and we get to see like his thoughts
05:07and his intentions.
05:08He's, you know, spelling those out more.
05:10This is going to sound like it's a bit of a tangent, but I promise it's not.
05:13I was on a podcast yesterday where somebody asked me to talk about the matrix and the
05:17popularity of like the red pill meme in right wing circles, which is exactly what we're
05:22talking about here when we talk about like audience capture and the filter bubble.
05:26But this interviewer asked me, you know, do you think the matrix is responsible for introducing
05:31this rhetoric into the world and sort of like driving people into their respective
05:35echo chambers?
05:36And I said no, because the conditions for this happening already existed.
05:40Some film or some like meme or some cultural device would have come along and unleashed
05:45that idea, regardless of whether the Wachowskis like sat down and made a movie where people
05:50wear long leather trench coats and like fight each other in the sky.
05:54What do you make of the fact that he uses and operates the platform as if he doesn't
05:58care if it makes money?
06:00Because I think, you know, there's a surface level read.
06:03My initial impulse is like, well, he's the richest man in the world.
06:06He has all these other businesses.
06:07Who cares if it makes money?
06:08But also his ownership of Twitter is based on an incredibly complicated, like high leverage
06:14debt program.
06:15Yeah.
06:16Like the Saudis.
06:17$44 million for this platform that has always struggled financially.
06:25That's just the long history of it.
06:27And then immediately as he changed moderation rules, like the advertisers fled.
06:31It's not really considered a safe place to advertise.
06:34He really does operate it like he does not care if it makes money.
06:39And I think that that is risky.
06:42I think a lot of people are surprised it's still alive because of the way that he's operating
06:46it, even with the amount of people he's laid off.
06:48People thought that it wouldn't even be able to function.
06:49Yeah.
06:50He's a sincere ideologue.
06:51Like, I don't believe he cares whether it makes money because he has a messianic belief
06:56that like free speech and defeating the woke mind virus are necessary to ensure the survival
07:01of humanity.
07:02It sounds like risible probably to like many of the people who will be listening to this
07:06podcast, but it's a completely sincere and deeply held belief.
07:08Well, it might, you know, all pay off for him.
07:11Trump has said that if he wins, you know, he'll appoint Elon Musk to a newly created
07:16role.
07:17He'll lead the Department of Government Efficiency, appropriately nicknamed DOGE.
07:24How many details do we have about exactly what that type of role entails and like in
07:29what ways he could use that role to, you know, curry favor and influence for his businesses?
07:36Very few details.
07:37He's talked a lot about what he wants to do.
07:40Elon Musk is very obsessed with reducing waste in government.
07:43He has kind of an old school libertarian bench.
07:47He wants to, you know, strip away regulations.
07:50He has frequently compared the government to bloatware, which is a very nerdy term from
07:57the world of computer programming, where you have a piece of iterative software, think
08:00about Microsoft Word, and you just redevelop Microsoft Word every year.
08:04There's a new Microsoft Word and the code and it becomes so archived that the 25th iteration
08:09of it is not as nimble and responsive as the second or third iteration.
08:14This is the way he thinks about government.
08:16That's not my analysis.
08:17He's literally said that.
08:18So I think he wants to strip down government, remove regulations, do pretty normal Republican
08:24stuff, frankly.
08:25How much do we know about his like tussles of regulatory agencies?
08:28You mentioned some of them.
08:30And which ones would kind of be immediate targets, maybe as you know, if Trump hands
08:35him kind of the scissors to do that?
08:38That's a good question.
08:39He tends to talk about this kind of thing in generalities and not the policy specifics
08:44that the three of us might tend to traffic in as reporters for our respective publications.
08:49But you know, environment is a major concern for him.
08:52He loves to tell a story about how a California regulator forced him to take a seal out of
08:58a harbor and make it listen to sonic booms on headphones in order to see what the effect
09:04of rocket launching would be on the seal habitation.
09:09He thinks that was a bad idea.
09:11I will refrain from editorializing about whether or not it was because I don't know enough
09:14about this.
09:15So I think you would have an all out war between Musk and his environmental lower level regulators.
09:21And I don't think we should lose sight of the fact in talking about all of this, that
09:25when you head up a department that is devoted to managing regulations around a company that
09:31you financially directly benefit from, that raises a slew of ethics questions that our
09:35fellow reporters at Politico have covered fairly extensively.
09:38So he's wading into an even more interconnected thicket of policy risks than I think he faces
09:44right now.
09:45But, you know, Musk's actions aren't just limited to U.S. politics.
09:49There was a bombshell report by the Wall Street Journal that he and Russian President Vladimir
09:54Putin had apparently been having regular contact for two years, including this past year when
10:00he's gone all in on trying to get Trump reelected.
10:06This is another thing that is unprecedented in recent history.
10:10I don't want to use the U word here necessarily.
10:14It's unique.
10:15I'll use another U word.
10:16The issue is not speaking to Vladimir Putin.
10:19The issue is that we are supposed to have one foreign policy as a country.
10:24This is the sort of unique element of Musk's calls with Putin.
10:29Apparently somebody with direct control over battlefield conditions between a geopolitical
10:36friend and a geopolitical foe of the United States doing unilateral diplomacy with the
10:40foe in that setting is something that has raised a lot of alarm bells in Washington.
10:44Yeah, almost immediately there were calls from, right, the head of NASA, the top Democrat
10:50on the Armed Services Committee, basically saying we should investigate.
10:53They stopped short of saying, you know, we should pull away his security clearance or
10:57anything like that.
10:59But, you know, you looked into in your conversations, you looked into this question of what kind
11:02of repercussions are even possible here.
11:05NASA itself has become increasingly dependent on Musk for, you know, on SpaceX, right, for
11:11access to the International Space Station and also, you know, for launches.
11:16When NASA decided that they were going to start regularly contracting with private companies
11:21to ferry people to and from space, they decided that they needed to have more than one contractor
11:27because in the case that one of the contractors failed, it would be important to have a backup.
11:30They did this and Boeing has essentially failed to produce reliable transportation to and
11:36from space.
11:37So SpaceX, the other contractor, is the only one that is reliably shuttling around astronauts
11:43for NASA.
11:44Now you have this major point of leverage that Musk has over the United States government,
11:52which is that you need me to get you to the moon in the coming years, which is, you know,
11:57a plan of NASA's 3D Artemis project.
11:59And I don't know if there's an easy remedy for that aside from just scrapping the Artemis
12:04project or delaying it massively in order to incorporate another contractor or fix the
12:08woes that Boeing has done.
12:10One detail that was really concerning to former officials was the fact that they had a conversation
12:18where he was asked about not activating Starlink over Taiwan as a favor to Chinese President Xi Jinping.
12:26Just as an example of the kind of conflicts of interest that have happened or that could
12:33come out of this.
12:34Yeah.
12:35Starlink is currently not active in Taiwan.
12:37Musk has repeated he's very dovish on Taiwan, meaning that, you know, I think he literally
12:43once said, like, it is inevitable that Taiwan will be reunited with China.
12:47So this is all insinuation, but it's not easy to see why people in Washington who are
12:55more vested on the Taiwan side of this equation are very concerned about that.
13:00Is Musk an anomaly or is he representative of a bigger role that tech bros and billionaires
13:07like him have to play in our electoral politics going forward?
13:11I would lean toward representative of a new influence.
13:16For example, somebody like Sam Altman, who nobody knew his name roughly two years ago,
13:21and now he's on Capitol Hill constantly strongly influencing AI policy decision making, strongly
13:29influencing energy policy in many ways because of the extreme thirst for electricity that
13:34his products generate.
13:36So you have a federal government that all of us know all too well is, you know, stymied
13:43by congressional gridlock, partisan back and forth, you know, bureaucratic sclerosis, etc.,
13:50combined with a dynamic and extremely wealthy tech sector.
13:54It's just an Occam's razor, simplest possible answer to this is yes, tech will have more
13:59influence going forward and remains to be seen what that will look like.
14:02I kind of doubt it will look like Elon Musk because he is quite the sui generis individual.
14:07Yeah, I think his personality is not something that will be really copied or repeated.
14:14You know, we're seeing in this election cycle just more and more tech leaders and venture
14:19capitalists being in favor of Trump, pushing for that, like less regulation, things that
14:24would benefit them.
14:25Whereas, you know, we traditionally thought of Silicon Valley as more left leaning.
14:30And obviously a lot of the people that work, you know, beneath these leaders are liberals.
14:35So there's definitely a disconnect there.
14:37But more and more, some of these leaders are feeling, you know, emboldened to be in support,
14:42just not to the extent that Musk is.
14:45The pressures we were talking about earlier, you know, that Silicon Valley executives might
14:49face when deciding whether or not to be an outright partisan, they weigh far more heavily
14:53on media executives.
14:55And Musk has, you know, said he's representative of a new wave of media.
15:01Right, right.
15:02You know, X, to the extent that X is a publishing platform, which he explicitly wants it to
15:06be, you know, they, if you pay Elon Musk a certain amount of money every month, you can
15:10post the New Testament on X in a single post or something.
15:13Now we've gone kind of far afield from Musk.
15:16But it is interesting that he sees himself as revolutionizing media as well.
15:21Do you think there are any other platforms that come close to challenging X, you know,
15:25in that mission?
15:26There's definitely, I think, the platforms that have arisen, you know, to try to fix
15:32the problems of, you know, when it was Twitter.
15:35The biggest one probably is Meta's Threads, a very similar platform that, like, totally
15:42just boomed when it first opened because it was so easy to sign up.
15:46You know, if you had an Instagram account, you had a Threads account if you wanted, like,
15:50immediately.
15:51But the activity there, even though there are a lot of users and it's a space that is
15:54more advertiser friendly because of moderation, it's not the same draw, you know, even if
16:00they have a lot of users.
16:01A lot of the other platforms that tried, you know, they were more niche, but they really
16:05made themselves focused on civil dialogue.
16:08Like, that was their selling point.
16:09They were like, we're going to focus on trust and safety.
16:11Several of those really didn't make it and had to shut down.
16:15There are some that are, you know, still slowly building, but they, one is Spill, which is
16:21like a Twitter-like platform that caters more towards Black and LGBTQ plus communities.
16:29It really is about elevating those.
16:30So we see that one is like having some success and having some growth, but they're at like,
16:36I believe the last was half a million downloads.
16:41You know, that's compared to like Twitter's peak.
16:44It's a much smaller place.
16:45I know there are probably lots of features of X that I just have not really looked into
16:49using because I'm actively trying to reduce the amount of time I spend on there.
16:53From outside, you know, intelligence firms, users are dropping.
16:59Yeah.
16:59You know, the recent estimates that I saw were like 150 million active users.
17:07And it was down even from like a month before, you know, he's not adding enough to make it
17:14an appealing place to people that aren't already on there.
17:16It feels like those of us who are on there because we've been on there and we'll, you
17:21know, keep posting until or if it ever shuts down.
17:25What do you guys think is going to happen to Musk?
17:27He said that if Harris wins, he thinks he'll be jailed.
17:34You know, if Trump wins, he obviously has this new position, providing that Trump falls
17:39through with that.
17:40I mean, I think he said as well that even if Trump wins, that there's going to be like
17:43financial hardship for the US for a bit.
17:47I think that's something he said a couple of days ago.
17:49So it's like, I don't feel that this is, you know, whichever way the election goes, it
17:55seems that even Musk thinks that there's going to be a lot of change, a very hard time,
18:05you know, not just for him, but for the country.
18:08So how he plays into that and what he continues to do after, I think it's going to be
18:14interesting. I think he'll always be posting, elevating these views, you know, in this
18:20right-wing conversation on X.
18:23But it will be interesting to see how he really pushes back, if that changes his rhetoric,
18:28if Harris wins, if he takes on a role in the Trump administration.
18:32I don't see how he could possibly have time, given that he has to post on X 100 times a
18:38day and run multiple companies.
18:39But it'll be interesting to see where he goes from here.
18:43He's one of the most economically dynamic and significant Americans on the world stage.
18:49He's not going anywhere.
18:50The way he would orient himself toward a Harris administration is an interesting question
18:56to me.
18:56You know, after he wakes up on November 7th or 6th or 8th or whenever we find out when
19:01the results of the election are, he will realize that he has to do business with this
19:05administration.
19:06So I think he'd probably find himself in that scenario in a situation where he is having
19:12to do the thing that business people do every day, even once you don't jump up and down
19:16on stage about how excited they are about Donald Trump, which is figure out how to balance
19:20the regular tradeoffs that come with working with government.
19:23Now, on the Trump side, if he does enter government, as he's promised to, the thing about Trump
19:28is that he doesn't really like sharing the spotlight.
19:32Yeah, you can see that on the stage.
19:34Yeah, and he doesn't like the perception that he's not in charge than it was, than
19:41it would be with Musk, should he find himself at loggerheads with Trump, which I think is
19:45far more likely than it seems right now, given the major bromance between the two
19:50of them.
19:50So in certain ways, I almost think his life would be more difficult under a second Trump
19:55administration than a Harris administration, given those two hypotheticals that we're
19:59just playing out.