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I'm curious about the nature of the universe,

and I want to be out there exploring the stars.

I have a philosophy of curiosity.

Like, I just want to know what's going on.

And in order to know what's going on,

we must have an increase

in the scope and scale of consciousness.

What are the questions that we don't know to ask?

Like, what are the odds that we are in base reality?

Like, maybe we're in a simulation.

Look at the advancement of video games.

In my lifetime, it's gone fromPong,

you've got two rectangles and a square...

...to photorealistic, real-time games

with millions of people playing simultaneously,

just in the span of 50 years.

If that trend continues,

the future will be millions, maybe billions,

of indistinguishable from reality video games.

So then there's some probability that we're in a simulation.

I would say it's pretty high.

If simulation theory is correct,

only the most interesting simulations will survive.

Toward the end of the COVID pandemic,

my phone rang,

and a friend of mine urged me to make a film about Elon Musk.

This was before Trump 2.0.,

when Elon was both the richest man in the world

and a climate savior who wanted to go to Mars.

I said yes.

The first thing I did was to reach out to Elon,

but Elon beat me to the punch on Twitter.

I prepared for an exchange of views.

Then the tweets stopped,

and it was clear that Musk was not going to sit

for an interview with me.

But while he didn't want to talk to me,

I still wanted to hear and understand

- what he had to say. - Cheers.

After all, I owned a Tesla solar system.

I had watched him build SpaceX,

and I had ridden hands-free

in one of his self-driving cars.

Now turn right onto Lincoln Boulevard.

Later on, as I watched his turn to Trump,

I wanted to understand what game he was playing.

So I asked my team to try to create

a database of everything he'd ever said in public.

I'm more an engineer than anything else.

I'll say what I want to say,

and if the consequence of that is losing money, so be it.

I got "Boléro" stuck in my head.

The tools of physics are very powerful.

I haven't come up with anything to really...

It's really just to prove critical thinking.

I'm pleased to say that something is missing.

This is not a way to make money.

Maybe we're in a simulation. Maybe we are.

One idea that Musk returned to

over and over was this notion

that we were living in a simulation,

trapped in a kind of existential video game.

He believed it likely that an artificial intelligence

of the future had exfiltrated all knowledge

and life experiences from planet Earth

and was now running an ancestor simulation

in which our past lives had become the training data

for a kind of sim world.

In honor of that idea,

we decided to edit together recordings

of his actual words to create a simulated interview

at the heart of a kind of documentary video game.

I mean, I don't think I'm being played

by somebody in a video game.

But then people in video games don't generally think that.

T-minus two minutes.

Stage one LOX load is complete.

Tesla is about trying to make sure things are good

for the future on Earth.

SpaceX is about a good future beyond Earth.

When you think about how many innovations

he has his fingerprints on,

it's mind-blowing.

He's got this epic sense

of the role he's gonna play in helping humanity.

Elon is one of the greatest builders of all time,

potentially the greatest builder of all time.

SpaceX launch director, go for launch.

I wasn't the first to tell this story.

Many had gone before me,

and with access to Elon, they all seemed to coalesce

around the notion of a genius engineer and inventor

who was willing to risk everything

to build businesses that had made him

the richest man in the world.

He inspired people

because he didn't follow the rules.

He made them up as he went along.

- T-minus ten... - I liked that.

And I liked his ambition.

The sky was the limit.

...four, three...

Or was it?

...two, one.

There need to be things

that make you look forward to the future.

A future where we are out there among the stars.

Our brother, the giver of power, is yonder,

playing with his planet again.

These men...

Elon's story reminded me of a movie I'd seen as a kid,

The Man Who Could Work Miracles.

They are pitifully small and weak,

but I like them.

What is the good of them?

As an experiment, the gods grant absolute power

to a random human being to see if the miracles he wished for

would change the world or the man himself.

- Playing fair. - He starts small.

Says, "Here, you."

Turn upside down without breaking

and go on burning steady.

Mostly they're for his own benefit.

Now.

But as the man exercises his mighty power,

his imagination expands to match it.

I got my own ideas at last.

This old world of yours, it's over.

Soon, the man determines

to build a new and better world.

...and us in the great hall.

And he has the power to do it.

Now!

Ladies and gentlemen...

...give it up for the greatest capitalist

in the history of the United States of America,

Elon Musk!

Elon! Elon! Elon! Elon! Elon! Elon!

To make this film, I set out to solve a mystery.

How had Musk assumed so much power,

and why had we given it to him?

I originally came out to California

to do energy physics at Stanford

and ended up putting that on hold to start Zip2.

Zip2 provides online access

to information about cities around the country.

Everything from where to eat to how to get around.

In starting the company, I had nothing.

I had no income source.

We found that an office

was actually cheaper than an apartment in Silicon Valley.

There was an internet service provider

on the floor below.

So we were able to get really cheap internet access

by drilling a hole in the floor

and connecting to their server directly.

Zip2 had the opportunity to sell to Compaq in early '99

for a little over 300 million dollars in cash.

Cash is cash.

I mean, those are just a large number of Ben Franklins.

There it is gentlemen, the fastest car in the world!

It's a million dollars for a car.

It's... It's, uh... It's decadent.

What impressed me about Elon, how assertive he was,

fearlessness.

When somebody says,

"I can bend the laws of reality,"

when you're 19, 20, 21,

you say a lot of big, bold statements.

But with him, there was a different quality

to the way he talked about what he was going to accomplish.

And he was always kind of, like, selling himself to you.

I don't think he really made a distinction

between who he was

and Silicon Valley startup culture.

Like, in his mind, I think it was pretty much...

it's the same thing. It's-- It's life or death.

Succeed or fail. And failure is death.

And death is not an option.

He loved his McLaren and talked about it.

And, you know, it's sort of, like, I had no interest.

Kara Swisher helped popularize tech journalism.

Her interviews with the titans of Silicon Valley

became iconic.

And for a while, Kara was more famous

than Elon Musk.

Back then, Musk was just another dot-com millionaire

pitching stories about himself.

Elon was like a lot of startup people.

Everyone was moving analog things to digital.

Zip2 essentially put yellow pages on the internet.

It was a minor thing.

I think he made a little bit of money,

but he kind of lost control of it.

It's a very similar theme,

is that he gets into beefs and then he gets kicked out,

or he kicks someone out, one or the other.

Kara Swisher is right.

There's a story behind Zip2 that's different

from the way Elon tells it.

First of all, his dad gave him a grubstake

- to start the company. - Wow.

And Musk's timing was good.

In Silicon Valley at the dawn of the internet,

money rained on startups like C-notes from heaven.

When angel investors appeared at Musk's Zip2 man cave,

they removed him as CEO

and hired programmers to rewrite his bundles of code,

which were so tangled they were called hairballs.

The company never made a profit.

But when Musk sold his shares,

he pocketed 22 million dollars.

For most of us, the value proposition

of Silicon Valley can be hard to understand.

How can you keep screwing up and still rake in millions?

Elon used the money from Zip2

to fund his next venture,

a financial services website he called X.com.

X.com, this is Julie.

I've sunk the great majority

of my net worth into X.com,

which is the new banking and mutual funds company

on the internet that I've started.

- Big X. - Exactly. X.com.

I first met Elon

when he had founded

and was running a company called X.com

that was competing with PayPal.

When we merged X.com and PayPal,

he was CEO for about five months.

He had a very big vision about trying to reinvent banking,

but he wasn't adjusting

to the key problems we actually needed to solve.

What we needed to do was get to a business model.

If you didn't get to a business model, you were gonna die.

Peter Thiel decided that Elon

was driving the company into the ground.

Peter talked to all the board members

during a week that Elon was away,

so that when Elon got back, Elon is out.

Peter said to all of the exec staff,

"Don't answer your phone, don't talk to him."

I felt like, you know, someone calls you,

you answer the phone, you talk to them.

He and I went out to lunch.

He spent three hours trying to persuade me

in any way possible to break ranks

with Peter and the execs.

Elon believes

that he can 100 percent do anything he puts his mind to,

and doesn't believe that when you do something like this,

that there's a risk coefficient. It might or might not work.

And when you try something really big,

it has a bigger chance of failing, of blowing up.

Musk was fired as CEO for the second time,

and the upside was even better.

Well, who said dot-coms are dead?

eBay is shelling out one and a half billion bucks

for PayPal.

When we sold PayPal to eBay,

that actually worked out reasonably well.

When a lot of these people got payoffs,

they either became venture capitalists

and invested in a bunch of companies, which is dull,

or they started companies that were even dumber,

like digital dry cleaning.

But Elon was doing things that were analog.

Nobody was doing that at the time.

Oh, hi.

- Hi, Elon. How you doing? - Hi. Good, how are you?

When I was in college,

there were three areas that I thought

would most affect the future of humanity.

Uh, that was, uh, the internet.

- Uh... - You were right about that.

Yeah.

Transition to a sustainable energy economy.

- Okay. - Um...

And, uh, the third was, uh, space exploration,

in particular the extension of life beyond Earth.

What do you personally think is out there that we can find

by, you know, launching rockets into space?

Well, I think there's a lot that we can find.

- Aliens? - Uh, um...

Unlikely in our solar system.

- Uh, it's possible-- - Maybe some pink ones.

Well, Mars is red, it's pink-ish.

Um...

Three, two, one.

I was used to hearing

from these various internet millionaires

who would call and say,

"Would like to do something with my money and space.

Can you talk to me?"

I didn't know who Elon was when he first called me.

He wanted to meet.

He asked me, "Is there an airport nearby?"

And he says, "I fly private."

I said, "Yeah, I can see the airport from my house."

And literally, I could look out my window and see it.

He says, "Great, I'll be there tomorrow."

He was frustrated

that we should have been to Mars by then,

and we weren't.

I put the team together, really an all-star team.

People who, like me, had grown up

under the Apollo era...

...were frankly pissed off that we had never gone back.

We knew that we would die

trying to live with a government

who was slow as molasses to get it done.

But we had a problem.

Elon couldn't afford U.S. rockets.

They were running 70, 80 million dollars apiece.

But Russian rockets, we could get

for three to five million dollars.

I went to Russia, uh, in late 2001, in early 2002,

uh, to try to buy, um, ICBMs.

Right.

I said, "I don't need the nuke, just need the rocket."

Uh...

We headed over to Russia to make a deal.

I was the guy that knew about Russian rockets,

I'd helped convert a number of 'em.

We had a meeting with the chief designer

of a Soviet-era ICBM factory.

And Elon gave the same speech to this guy

that he gave to me when he first called me.

Elon stops, and finally, the chief designer,

he was just looking down, and he went...

...and he spit on Elon's shoes, and then he spit on my shoes.

And Elon said... turns to me,

he goes, "I think he spit on my shoes."

I said, "Yeah, I think that's a sign of disrespect, Elon."

It was a very quiet ride to the airport.

We all thought we'd really failed.

It was mostly an empty flight and there was a number of rows,

- uh, between us and Elon. - ♪ ♪

And Elon turns around

and, uh, he says, "No, guys,"

he says, uh, "I think we can build this rocket ourselves."

He said, "I've been hanging out with the guys from the team

going out into the Mojave Desert

and doing amateur rocket launches."

Very serious rockets they made themselves.

And Elon had a bit of a religious experience

- watching this. - There we go!

He started asking these guys,

"Well, what would a rocket look like? What would you build?"

Elon said, "We're gonna start a little company

and we'll just build it."

I wasn't able to hire anyone

to be the chief designer of the rocket,

so I ended up being that myself.

People think like I'm a business guy

or something like that.

I do engineering and, you know--

and manufacturing and that kind of thing.

That's like 80 percent or more of my time.

Hardcore engineering.

At one time, he wanted to be called

the chief engineer.

You know what I'm saying? Like, you're laughing.

Like, was Elon an engineer?

Elon's a damn good engineer,

but he's not an educated engineer.

So this is kind of a fun--

a fun way to interface

with what is really a very complex model.

The public really is attracted...

to the idea of this-- this superhuman person,

and the media builds it.

This is a new machine that just arrived.

It's just being, uh, tested.

During my years with Elon,

Elon never wrote down CEO

or king of the world, or...

...studly international playboy.

He wrote engineer.

Engineers could not quite figure out

why it was that the suits made the big money

when it was the engineers who actually built the stuff

that they were selling.

Elon was somebody who had learned

to speak both languages

and he could move between the tribes.

And he wore jeans and T-shirts to work.

And whenever we went shopping for clothes,

or later consulted with the stylist,

he would say, "No, no, you don't understand.

I can't look cool or hip,

because I have to look like an engineer."

He could get things done

and he could push things forward.

He could scale.

But he also had, like, a fingertip feel

for the technology.

And that's what creates a sense of magic.

This is a day...

I've been looking forward to for two and a half years.

When figures like Steve Jobs

play up this idea of being the magician,

you get on stage

and reveal wonders to the audience

who will then go out and stand in line

and buy your product.

And to unlock the phone,

I just take my finger and slide it across.

Right? You want to see that again?

It also creates a sense that you remove the magician

and, uh, everything falls apart.

One of the great science fiction writers,

uh, said that "Any sufficiently-advanced technology

is indistinguishable from magic."

These technologies are created by engineers,

so therefore an engineer is the closest thing

to a magician that exists in the real world.

This is what a visionary does.

They don't just tell us a new story,

they are that story.

And soon they don't even have to open up their mouths,

they just walk into the room.

I had met people like him

over the 20 years previous.

There's been many people,

primarily White males

who want to build rockets to go to Mars.

But at that time, NASA was retiring the space shuttle,

which had never lived up to its goals

of launching more often

and for less expensive costs.

And so there was really gonna be public attention on,

"What is NASA gonna do?"

Summer of '08, I was leading the NASA transition team

for the Obama administration.

Reducing the cost of getting to and from orbit

was the most important thing.

And the government had been doing it for over 50 years.

It was time to let the private sector take that on.

Three, two, one, zero,

plus one, plus two, plus three, plus four,

plus five, plus six, plus seven,

plus eight, plus nine, plus ten.

We have liftoff confirmed.

Falcon 1 is airborne at this time.

The failures were spectacular.

Seeing giant exploding rockets is quite an amazing sight.

Uh, and I was one of the early investors in SpaceX

and I said, "You know what, if all I get to do...

...is to see these rockets explode...

...it's well worth every dime I put into this company."

When we started SpaceX,

they said, "Oh, you're gonna fail."

I said, "Well, I agree. I think we probably will fail."

You've gotta take big chances in order for the potential

for a big positive outcome.

And pressure coming up.

Come on, baby.

Please tell me that's interstage lights.

- There we go. - Coming up on stage separation.

Separate stages are separated.

Thank fucking God.

I mean, whatever.

Thank whoever. Fuck.

Fucking awesome.

Holy shit.

There goes the bearing. Look at that.

Yeah, yeah. I see it.

- Why's it wobbling like that? - I don't know.

- It's, uh... - Got the wobbles.

Hey, we got the wobbles here.

Why'd you say that?

This is not good. Uh-oh. Stop it. Stop it.

We have an abort, standby.

Oh, fuck.

- Fuck, fuck, fuck. - Brace, VLE.

Verify SPACEX is green.

Moving to a terminal count abort.

SpaceX had failed its third launch.

That was a nightmare year.

I only ever thought we had enough money for three launches.

We just barely, barely scraped together enough

to do a fourth launch.

Yeah, pressures are back up

to where they should be now, on the...

Five, four, three,

two, one, zero.

Liftoff.

We have liftoff.

Launch vehicle, Falcon has cleared the tower.

Stage separation confirmed.

Second stage approaching SECO.

Shut it down.

Holy fuck, man.

Shit.

Hey, we're in orbit.

Fuck yeah!

Well, that'll be beeped out.

America, fuck yeah!

You often hear Elon talk about that launch.

He says if that flight hadn't worked,

they would have gone bankrupt.

Well, this is fucking awesome.

But actually, if we were far down the road...

...they would have gotten the government money anyway.

So, I mean, this-- this really means a lot to SpaceX.

Obviously, I mean, getting to orbit,

I mean, that's just a huge milestone.

There's only a handful of countries on Earth

that have done it. It's normally a country thing,

not a company thing.

So it's just an amazing achievement.

This is your hard work that made this happen.

And this is just the first step of many.

Vehicle is supersonic.

SpaceX is the first private company

ever selected to carry NASA cargo.

Only four entities have launched a space capsule

into orbit and successfully brought it back.

The United States, Russia, China,

and Elon Musk.

I feel about Elon like you would feel

about someone who was in the trenches

with you in World War I.

We were fighting to save the space program.

SpaceX has saved the government 30-plus billion dollars.

Belief in Elon,

his vision has really carried SpaceX.

President Obama having a competition

with the private sector to do it

for significantly less money.

And here he was, "Wow, this is a smart guy,

and he's probably gonna be able to do it.

I'm doing the right thing."

There's something pretty radical there.

We're gonna try to see

if we can accelerate this kind of, uh...

this kind of collaboration through, uh...

through what we put forward, so...

It's the right plan. Good.

Well, congratulations. This is terrific.

- Thank you very much. - How's the car doing?

- It's doing great, actually. - Yeah?

How do you split your time between car and rocket?

Well, it's usually about 50-50.

Confidence is important.

It makes people believe

that you belong in the driver's seat.

Musk wasn't a sole inventor of patents or prototypes.

But he was a skilled inventor

of his own value.

And that value could be exchanged

for real money in a market

that priced shares as a reflection

of the genius of the founder.

To win at that game, you had to convince everyone

that from day one there was only one player

at the console.

So, Martin, what got you going

on the idea of an electric car?

- What was the turn on? - Well, I mean, you know,

starting a car company is insane.

Um, and I didn't think I was insane.

I really, in the beginning, only wanted a car for myself.

Martin Eberhard is an inventor.

His startup company created an early e-book reader,

which he then sold for almost 200 million dollars.

He founded Tesla in 2003 with his business partner,

Marc Tarpenning, with one clear goal.

Use an all-electric drivetrain and lithium ion batteries

to power a super-fast sports car.

One thing you can get out of an electric motor is torque,

ridiculous torque starting at zero RPM.

You can make a car that outperforms everything.

It was just obvious to me.

Their business plan said the Tesla Roadster

would be more efficient than a Toyota Prius

and faster than a Lamborghini.

I met a small EV hobby company

that had made a little car called the tZero.

I said, "Build me that car, I'll pay you for it.

And while you're at it,

let's not put lead-acid batteries like your other cars,

let's build this one with lithium-ion batteries."

Lithium-ion batteries were designed

for consumer electronics.

But if you overcharge even by a few millivolts,

it becomes quite dangerous.

They require a fairly serious

battery management system.

The idea was to scale from an e-book up to the car.

And we came up with an architecture

that indeed did scale.

And that led to the formation of Tesla.

Marc and I both met Elon first at a Mars Society meeting.

We're both amateur space geeks.

At the time that we started Tesla,

I reached out to him. I said, "Hey, you don't remember me,

but I'd like to give you my investor's pitch."

He liked it.

He got exactly what we were talking about.

And he agreed to be the lead investor of the round,

but not the only investor.

Where do you find time to be CEO of two companies that size?

Well, I should correct you that I'm CEO of SpaceX.

Uh, and-- I'm chairman and CEO of SpaceX,

and that is really my day job.

So I spend 80 percent of my time on SpaceX.

- Okay. - I am the chairman

and the principal owner of Tesla Motors,

but I do not run it on a daily basis.

Is it a couple of phone calls to the Tesla folks?

"How's it going? I'm busy with outer space right now,"

- you know? - Yeah. I spend about two--

two to three days a month on Tesla-related business,

and almost all the rest of the time is on SpaceX.

So SpaceX is very much my day-to-day job.

When Elon agreed to invest,

I was in love with the guy.

If I had been a little bit more savvy,

I would have done a background check on him

and understood that he has an ego problem.

Not that I wouldn't have taken his money,

'cause I didn't have a lot of offers on the table.

You take the money that's in front of you.

But I might have thought about Elon a little differently,

maybe protected myself better.

The first inkling that I had a problem with Elon

came shortly after a big unveiling

down at the Santa Monica airport.

We showed off the cars

and Arnold Schwarzenegger was there

and everybody went for a drive.

It's important for us to change the perception of electric cars,

and we do that by making a car

that breaks all of the stereotypes

of what an electric car can be.

If all the cars in the world were hybrids,

would we solve our oil addiction? No.

To fundamentally change the equation,

you gotta have an all-electric vehicle.

It was an exciting show and tell of the company,

and a lot of press was written about that.

Basically, any press that didn't prominently

feature Elon's name caused him to go nonlinear.

Eberhard, his version of the story is that,

out of the blue,

he pitched me on funding his electric car company,

and he convinced me to do it.

Totally false.

If I had not met them,

I would have just moved forward and created Tesla,

and I think it would be indistinguishable

from what it is today.

A year after unveiling the Roadster prototype,

Tesla was over budget and behind schedule,

partly because Elon,

Tesla's biggest investor and chairman of the board,

kept insisting on expensive design changes.

Despite the fact that he had caused cost overages,

Musk claimed that Eberhard had been dishonest with the board

about production costs for the Roadster.

The board of directors would never let me hire a CFO.

Three of the board members were Elon, Elon's brother,

and Elon's buddy.

So I was basically blind to the finances of the company.

I told Elon that we should bring in another CEO,

that I would move into some role

where I'm focusing on the technology

and not on the business side of things.

We had dinner and he told me something

very amusing at that table.

He said that, "The one thing that nobody can ever take away

from you is that you're the founder of Tesla."

Turned out that not only

had Martin known the cost of the car,

he had instructed the rest of the management team

not to say anything to the board.

Obviously, there's no way he could be part of the company.

I mean, this guy had flat out lied to us

and instructed others to lie.

Elon called me at home.

He actually told me that they had found a new CEO.

I'm like, "Oh, great. I mean, awesome."

It was a relatively friendly call at first,

but somewhere in there, he said,

"And by the way, you're out of the company."

It was a battle over a story.

When Musk fired Eberhard,

Musk refused to pay him what he claimed he was owed.

A lawsuit followed,

and it was settled only when Musk was able to claim

that he was what he wasn't,

a founder of Tesla.

What I learned in that process is

there's no legal definition of founder.

You could call yourself a founder.

There's nothing illegal about that.

- Really? - Sure.

Why not? You should be. You'd be a good founder.

I have with me the incorporation papers

for Tesla Motors, and you'll see his name

is nowhere on them.

Eberhard, in particular, is the worst guy

I've ever worked with, and I want to make a note of this.

He is literally the worst person I've ever worked with.

And I've worked with some real douchebags.

Most CEOs get and take a lot of credit.

Why did Musk have to rewrite history

in order to make himself the only real player?

I would learn that it was more than ego.

In Silicon Valley, being a founder

is not just a stock-in-trade.

It's a way to trade for stock.

The market is rigged for founders of companies,

particularly those who can claim to start more than one.

The stuff we've done thus far I think is good,

but it's evolutionary, it's not revolutionary.

The key invention is a rapidly

and completely reusable rocket.

T-minus 20 seconds.

Stage 2 tanks pressing for flight.

Flight computer has control.

Many more companies than SpaceX had attempted

to do a reusable launch vehicle.

Seven...

Being able to do it in an efficient way,

SpaceX is the first to have done that.

Three, two, one!

Check it out.

Come on.

Okay, where's the...

Okay, this is bad.

Potentially bad.

♪ I love it

♪ I got this feeling On the summer day ♪

♪ When you were gone

♪ I crashed my car Into the bridge ♪

♪ I watched, I let it burn

- It's standing up. - It's standing up.

Look at this. Look at it.

Look at it, it's just sitting there.

Look at that.

What?

Holy smokes, man.

♪ I'm in the Milky Way

♪ You want me down on Earth But I am up in space ♪

♪ You're so damn hard to please We gotta kill this switch ♪

♪ You're from the '70s But I'm a '90s bitch ♪

♪ I don't care, I love it

♪ I don't care I love it, I love it ♪

♪ I don't care

Ten, nine, eight...

...seven, six, five,

four, three, two, one.

Go, go, go! Go, go, go!

Did you see that go up, man?

That's unreal.

And the Falcon has landed!

- We launched it. - ♪ I don't care, I love it

♪ I don't care, I love it

♪ I love it, I don't care

♪ I love it

"No one who knows my ex-husband

would accuse him of being weak-willed.

The same qualities that helped bring about

his extraordinary success

dictate that the life you lead with him is his life.

You have to want the same things he wants,

and there is no middle ground,

not least because he has no time to find it."

"Elon was obsessed with his work.

When he was home, his mind was elsewhere.

I longed for deep and heartfelt conversations,

for intimacy and empathy.

I felt insignificant in his eyes,

and I began thinking about what effect

our dynamic would have on our five young sons."

There's a poet who talked about how love

or companionship is two solitudes existing together.

It was easy to be with him for long stretches of time,

and that made up for all the arguing.

There was a Borders or Barnes and Noble.

We'd choose books and magazines,

and then we'd sit and eat croissants and read together.

I mean, it sounds simple, but it was,

you know, kind of blissful.

Like, I was really happy in those...

Sorry, I'm gonna...

Sorry.

I knew that I wanted kids with this kind of, like, visceral,

deep down feeling like, "I must have children one day."

But, uh...

after Nevada died, um...

that was...

that-- that was, uh... that was...

hard.

Our way of reacting to Nevada's death

was to, you know, get pregnant as quickly as possible.

And I liked the idea of having, um, more kids

because then...

Sorry, I can't-- I can't talk about this for...

I can't talk about...

I wanted to somehow...

learn how to...

...live with Nevada's death.

Um...

You know, I guess,

you know, create a story in a way that was healing.

And, uh...

So my way of doing that, I think, was to think that,

"Oh, well, if, you know... Like, Nevada died,

but we have these, you know...

these great gorgeous kids."

The twins took a few tries,

IVF clinic, but the triplets just happened like that.

There was a sense of distance, growing distance,

and maybe some, you know, increasing contempt on his part.

I think after Zip2, you know, Elon achieved a certain level

and then suddenly I was not

invited to come along with him anymore.

It was like the boys' club.

And so I was, you know, at home.

I learned the term "gaslighting"

through my relationship with Elon.

He would reinvent the arena of the conversation

and kind of like knock you out of it.

And then you're like there and wondering like,

"What happened? I thought we were talking about this

and somehow we were talking about that.

And now you're talking over here and..."

And then he would make a joke

or tell you 15 things that were wrong with you

and you would cry.

And then three hours later or three days later,

or maybe a week later, it would be like,

"Let's go to the movies."

It'd be like war, peace, war, peace.

I just wanted to have a say,

you know, in how this story was told.

So I decided I'll just sit down

and I'll just write out the story of my marriage.

"As we danced at our wedding reception,

Elon told me, 'I am the alpha in this relationship.'

In the months following our wedding,

a certain dynamic began to take hold.

Elon's judgment overruled mine,

and he was constantly remarking on the way he found me lacking.

'I am your wife,' I told him repeatedly,

'Not your employee.'

'If you were my employee,' he said just as often,

'I would fire you.'"

Filing for divorce.

It was sort of--

certainly very, very difficult emotionally

I think for both Justine and me, um...

I was fortunate enough to meet Talulah the following month.

"You can see from the way

she has her hand on his neck

and her body turned in towards him

that she's totally into him.

His torso, however, faces the camera

and his thoughts seem somewhere else.

With Elon, though, they generally are."

I'm trying to integrate things

to an overarching picture of the business.

You know, 'cause I'm weighing in a bunch of things, like, for--

"When do we need to get to cash flow positive?"

You know, "What financing is needed?"

- All these things. - Yeah.

It's, you know, the cash flow from Roadster,

the cash flow from Model S deposits.

Can those get us to cash flow positive,

or damn close, within six to nine months?

Because that is what I think

would allow us to go public.

Lehman Brothers is going bankrupt.

- Bear Stearns stock plunging... - Merrill Lynch...

The housing market collapse

created one financial crisis after another,

and it often seemed as if the news could only get worse.

You know, trying to raise money

for a startup electric car company in 2008,

people were angry that I even asked them.

They were like, "Fuck you," and hang up.

Musk had some real superpowers.

One was a willingness, even in the midst

of a global financial crisis,

to bet everything he had on the future.

Another was an uncanny ability

to raise money from the government.

No one invested more in Musk's dreams

than the U.S. government.

Over time, SpaceX would collect 22 billion dollars

in NASA and defense contracts.

For Tesla, Elon secured massive loans and credits

from the federal government to fund the making

of its greatest car, the Model S,

what one newspaper called,

"A car that changed the world."

So, this is our new car.

- Very nice. - Arnold!

Going public takes a great story,

and Musk had one.

Tesla wasn't a car manufacturer.

It was a tech company,

inventing magical gadgets with steering wheels,

as if they were dreamed up by Silicon Valley disruptors

after microdosing LSD.

While the U.S. government was busy bailing out jalopy makers

like GM and Chrysler,

Americans were more excited

by the story that Elon was telling.

Down, front row! Look down!

I think you're waiting for Jennifer Garner.

That's really the...

Well, I'm surprised that people actually care about

taking a photo of me.

Must be a slow news day.

- Good luck, Elon. - All right.

- Hi. - Hi, I'm Elon Musk.

This is the sedan,

- is that right? - Yeah.

That's a beauty.

Oh, God, turn it off!

I'm being electrocuted!

Thank you.

This is a seductive IPO.

But listen, Tesla's a sell, sell, sell.

You don't want to own this stock.

You don't want to lease it. Heck, you don't even--

you shouldn't even rent the darn thing.

Because beyond the hype,

there's just not much going on here.

You know, to Jim, I'd say,

"Yeah, sure, Jim, you know, we're not Bear Stearns, uh,

but I think we're gonna do okay."

Tesla is planning its next moves

after an IPO that raised 226 million dollars.

Let's get to Tesla Motors.

The stock has skyrocketed more than 150 percent.

The Model S is the best car

in every dimension that matters.

Over the past year,

it is up more than 450 percent.

The Tesla Supercharger.

We're gonna have these at highway rest stops

all around the country.

Electric cars are the future.

This whole tweet,

your stock went up eight, nine percent.

That seems like an unlikely thing to happen

just based on a tweet.

We've been able to accelerate Autopilot.

You can actually summon the car

and the car will come to you wherever you are.

In the future, really the future being now,

the cars will be increasingly autonomous.

You won't really need

to look at an instrument panel all that often.

You'll be able to do whatever you want.

To watch a movie, uh, talk to friends, go to sleep.

- Three, two... - We'll get to full self-driving next year.

...one, zero.

I feel very confident

predicting autonomous robo-taxis

for Tesla next year.

Tesla.

Stock surging 86 percent this year alone.

Are you surprised by how much it's gone up?

I dunno, what am I supposed to do? You know?

He is now

the richest person on the planet.

Musk's net worth rose

to more than 288 billion dollars.

Elon Musk is officially

the richest person ever.

Tesla's value is not...

is not up to me, it's up to investors.

And they decided it was worth a trillion dollars.

♪ So don't you fool around

♪ I'm gonna pull it, pull it

♪ Pull the trigger Shoot to thrill... ♪

Mr. Musk, how are you?

Hi, Pepper. Congratulations on the promotion.

Thank you very much.

Elon. How's it going? Those Merlin engines are fantastic.

Thank you. I've got an idea for an electric jet.

- You do? Then we'll make it work. - Yeah.

He wanted to be in that.

He wanted to be seen like the Iron Man.

There's very few people who just as egregiously

promote themselves as Elon.

Hello, I'm Elon Musk.

- Die! - What the--

Dad, no!

Elon Musk is possibly the greatest living inventor.

It's about the cult of Elon.

You can't beat the cult of Elon.

You got the photo? Boom!

Elon Musk is a genius. I love the guy.

He is, in my opinion, the real-life Iron Man.

He's amazing.

The technology that he has given us

is just outrageous.

As somebody who thinks about the future,

about things that are gonna help humanity,

I really like that side of Elon.

I don't agree on everything.

I try to just, like, keep the other stuff

that's not related to Tesla just...

out of sight, out of mind.

This is still the best-selling, the safest,

the most technologically-advanced vehicle

on the planet today.

ZOË SCHIFFER: On Twitter, Elon was kind of a funny,

quirky character. And like Donald Trump,

he got the kind of weird essence of Twitter and meme culture

and really used it to his advantage.

And he loved Twitter.

It's all the time.

He's always on Twitter.

And he reads his comments.

I look at it as a way to learn things...

...kind of stay in touch with what's happening.

It feels like dipping

into the flow of consciousness of society.

I spend a lot less time on Twitter than people probably think.

ZOË: Tesla is one of the most widely held retail stocks.

And part of that is because Elon has cultivated

this rabid fandom on Twitter.

People who are invested in Tesla

and invested in Elon as the leader of Tesla.

This is not automobile manufacturing

or automobile retailing.

This is not finance.

This is religion.

I can't help that.

Lawrence Fossi is a former business lawyer

with a keen eye for fraud.

He was managing investments for a very rich man

when Tesla's soaring value in the stock market

caught his eye.

Fossi believed that the financial system

was rational

and that stock prices reflected underlying value.

Yet the market seemed to reward Musk beyond reason.

Could it be that the world's richest man

was also its most flamboyant fraud?

I really did not have an opinion of Elon Musk

one way or the other when I started.

But as I began to research it,

I came across a video from 2013 where Musk was on stage

demonstrating something called a battery swap.

What if people do want to switch out,

uh, their battery pack?

What if they only want to stop for a short period of time?

You have the choice of a battery pack swap,

which is faster than you can fill a gas tank.

On a video screen, he had

an Audi pulling into a gas station.

Meanwhile, from underneath the stage, things happened

that were outside the viewer's perspective.

There's the battery pack getting swapped out.

The audience so badly

wants to believe all this stuff,

but it is so completely at odds with reality.

A Tesla battery weighs more than a thousand pounds.

But Elon convinced buyers and regulators

that you could swap them out like AA batteries.

It was a bold sleight of hand.

Musk seemed to have solved the biggest problem

of the electric car. Range.

Hopefully this is what convinces people finally

that electric cars are the future.

By claiming this ability to swap batteries,

what Tesla was able to do was to game

the California Air Resources Board's regulations

so that it could earn what were called ZEV credits,

or zero emission vehicle credits.

Government regulations aren't always bad for business.

Sometimes they spell opportunity.

To reduce pollution, California let Tesla sell

zero emission vehicle credits

to the state's worst smog makers who couldn't cure

their addiction to gas-guzzling cars.

In 2012, California supercharged its ZEV program,

allowing companies to sell almost twice as many credits

if their cars could recharge quickly.

That's when Musk unveiled

the battery swap.

Well, it's like a shipment of fake gold bars

that has one real gold bar on the outside, or, you know,

a roll of singles with a hundred on the outside, right?

You know, It's like... It's, uh...

"I'm a rich man."

- Right. - You know?

It is a canonical con man's convincer...

- Right. - ...to, you know, do it once.

Cory Doctorow is a science fiction author,

journalist, and tech blogger.

He invented the term "enshitification,"

the process by which Silicon Valley companies

gradually make their products worse in ways that frustrate

and sometimes defraud their customers.

The way the carbon credit rules were written

is that if a car company could demonstrate a battery swap

just once,

um, the carbon credits would have a multiple valuation.

And the reasoning here on the part of the government

is that what we should do is just dangle a carrot

in front of the private sector.

The problem is,

Musk is really good at reward hacking,

figuring out how to satisfy the conditions

for the success

without actually succeeding.

There was only ever one swap station.

It was at a place called Harris Ranch,

which is in the middle of California's Central Valley.

Nothing else around except a feedlot.

I went and I spent three, four days

checking this thing out.

Did you see any car do a battery swap?

Not one. Not a single one.

We are at Harris Ranch

and they are apparently loading some batteries

into the swapping facility.

We weren't allowed to go inside.

I found out at the factory

that they're requiring appointments to do battery swap.

Clearly, there was never any real effort

to make battery swap actually work

because the value to Tesla was not,

you know, as an actual viable way to drive adoption.

It was a way to earn ZEV credits.

Once California changed its rules and insisted

that Tesla prove that customers were swapping batteries,

Tesla abandoned the program.

But Tesla had already banked over 100 million dollars

from its phantom battery swaps.

Since its founding, Tesla padded its bottom line

with more than 11 billion dollars

in government carbon credits.

Those credits sometimes turned quarterly losses into profits,

which sent Tesla's stock soaring.

It just didn't add up to me

that the company was trading

at the valuation it was trading at.

So I decided to write about that.

I had a home in Montana,

so I chose a pseudonym, "Montana Skeptic."

Elon Musk's modus operandi is that

the promise is always illusory.

Tesla is famous for promising range on its cars that is fake.

The car advertises a very long range.

That's not the actual range.

The way that the range gauge works

is it gives you a fake range

for the first half of your battery life.

And then it just sort of goes...

And it flips over to a more accurate

prediction of your range.

By the time it happens a few times you're like,

this car is broken.

So then you call Tesla service.

And what Tesla did was they built up,

like, a boiler room.

Another fucking idiot.

The one thing I know about

in this world is airlines.

And Kushan Airlines

is the future of airlines.

Scammers. And they would go, "Oh, wait a minute.

I'm gonna do a remote diagnostic."

But they wouldn't look at the result of the diagnostics.

They would just tell you your car was fine.

This is a car that lies to you about what it's doing.

This is like a demon-haunted car.

Alchemists and natural philosophers

before the scientific method

would try to design an experiment

to figure out how the universe worked.

They would get different results

every time they ran the experiment,

and what they would say is, "Actually,

demons are rearranging the laws of physics."

They've constructed a physics of the Tesla,

right, embodied in code,

that does in fact behave differently

depending on who's looking at it.

So Tesla knows, but you are reliant

on these instruments that don't tell you the truth.

I think we should be very careful about artificial intelligence.

If I were to guess

what our biggest existential threat is,

it's probably that.

We need to just make sure that we don't do something

very foolish.

All the time I spent with Elon,

I thought I was spending time with an ethical,

honest, socially positive person.

He wants a backup plan for humanity.

He's worried about things like existential risk.

He's worried about AI as a source of existential risk.

In fact, his concern about that was what triggered my concern.

He was fairly obsessed by that topic at that time.

In 2012,

Elon Musk invested in a company called DeepMind,

which was at the forefront of AI.

It's not actually trying to make any investment return.

It's really to just keep an eye

on what's going on with artificial intelligence.

I think there's potentially a dangerous outcome.

There's been movies about this.

Open the pod bay doors, Hal.

I'm sorry, Dave.

I'm afraid I can't do that.

This mission is too important for me

to allow you to jeopardize it.

Well, as someone who's outside this field,

I think the challenge I'm really in touch with is how hard it is

to take the safety concerns emotionally seriously

and how hard it is for people in the field.

We got very interested in AI risk,

that specific existential concern together.

We went to a conference about AI risk.

We were just very involved in thinking that through

at that point.

To a point that was made earlier,

I think made by Sam and made by others,

that we're headed towards either superintelligence

or civilization ending.

Then we have to figure out,

what is a world that we would like to be in

where there is this, um...

digital superintelligence.

I had a conversation with Musk.

We started off talking about the existential threat,

and he clearly understands it and believes in it.

He thinks they'll keep us around as pets

just 'cause the world will be more interesting with people in

than without people.

I think that's rather optimistic.

If they're really much more intelligent than us,

um, I'm just not clear they'll want us as pets.

Geoffrey Hinton is a Nobel Prize winner,

the so-called Godfather of AI.

He was a key scientist in developing the logic

of artificial intelligence.

Hinton, like Musk, was keenly interested

in the work being done at DeepMind,

led by a man named Demis Hassabis.

Demis Hassabis realized quite early on

that video games were a good domain

for testing out theories of how to make intelligent systems.

When I started working at Google,

my recommendation was they should acquire DeepMind.

Google had acquired DeepMind.

Larry Page and I used to be close friends

and I would talk to him late into the night about AI safety.

I said, "Well, what about, you know,

we're gotta make sure humanity's okay here."

And-- and-- and, um...

and then he called me a speciesist.

I was like, "Okay, that's it. Yes, I'm a speciesist."

Convinced that Google would ignore the dangers of AI

in pursuit of profit,

Musk established a nonprofit company

to explore AI in an ethical way.

How do you think OpenAI is going as a six-month-old company?

It seems to be going pretty well.

I think it's important, um, and it's about minimizing,

um, the risk of existential harm.

There is a very strong concentration of AI power,

especially at Google.

OpenAI was created as a nonprofit foundation

to reduce the probability that AI power would be monopolized.

I mean, with artificial intelligence,

we are summoning the demon.

You know? You know all those stories where

there's the guy with the pentagram

and the holy water, and he's like,

yeah, he's sure he can control the demon.

Didn't work out.

Mysteriously, not long after Musk warned us all

about the demon of AI,

he would summon it

to teach his cars how to drive themselves.

Musk would name his creation Autopilot.

All right.

Whoa.

It's on full Autopilot right now.

No hands, no feet, nothing.

What technology's in here?

A lot of people, myself included,

looked at the early demos of Autopilot

and were like, "They got from, like, zero

to 50 percent of the way really fast.

How much longer can the other 50 percent possibly take?"

Every car coming off the line in Tesla at the factory

has the Autopilot hardware.

Tesla's sort of the leader in electric cars,

but I think we'll also sort of be the leader

in autonomous cars.

We know exactly what to do,

and we'll be there in a few years.

Right.

Just like Mars.

Uh...

We're still on track for being able to go, um,

cross-country from L.A. to New York

by the end of the year, fully autonomous.

By the end of 2017?

Yeah.

Right now, you're driving. Right now.

Uh, yeah.

Uh, but now I'm not.

- Yeah, pretty wild. - Wow.

Musk is free to get into the car with a news reporter

and say, "Look, Autopilot.

You don't even need to put your hands on it."

But you cannot rely on that.

Musk's defense is always,

"Well, look, if you read the fine print,

it says the driver must continue to pay attention."

I mean, in the future,

as the car becomes more and more autonomous,

it's gonna be really about entertainment.

This is not something you can play while you're driving.

Well, I mean, you're not supposed to play it

while you're driving. That would be illegal.

But will it work while you're on Autopilot?

Well, you have to tap a button that says you're the passenger.

Hold on. Hold on.

If this is confusing,

that might be a feature, not a bug.

Oh, it's getting really close to the--

Whoa!

Autopilot and its successor,

Full Self-Driving,

were never officially classified

as anything more than

driver assistance programs,

like cruise control.

But didn't their names and the way Musk sold them

give the impression of much more?

Look at this barrier.

I found a trail of lawsuits that alleged

that Full Self-Driving wasn't just flawed,

it was killing people.

Ah, jeez. The car's doing it all itself.

I don't know what I'm gonna do with my hands down here.

This guy, Joshua Brown, was a huge Tesla fan.

He had done a video

where he said, "Autopilot saved my life."

Elon Musk retweeted that video.

And a month later, Brown is driving.

There's a white truck

that's pulled across the highway.

And the Tesla could not tell the difference

between the white of the truck and the sky.

It went into that truck at 70, 80 miles an hour.

Joshua Brown was decapitated.

And it led to a big investigation

that went nowhere.

As the body count rose to over 60,

more lawsuits followed.

Tesla settled virtually all of them,

which prevented the public

from seeing whether the company was at fault.

But I noted that one lawyer

was taking a Florida case to trial.

The tie is straight and the shirt is smooth.

Brett Schreiber's job is to take on Tesla in court.

He's been so successful that the company has designated

one of its fixers just to negotiate with him.

For nearly five years,

Schreiber and his team represented the family

of Naibel Benavides,

who was killed by a Tesla on Autopilot.

It was a case where the people harmed

had nothing to do with the Tesla.

They didn't buy it. They weren't driving it.

They were just simply hanging out,

having gone fishing,

putting stuff back in their car and looking up at the stars.

Hello?

Hi, 911. What's the location?

I'm on the end of Card Sound Road,

where, at the end, I just ran into a car.

- And the guy's unconscious. - He's unconscious?

Yeah, he's unconscious. I don't know what happened.

I ended up missing the turn. I was looking down.

Okay. You hit his car?

Yeah. Oh my gosh. Sir, sir...

- Okay. Listen. - Sir, are you okay?

- Hey. Hey. Is he breathing? - Sir, are you breathing?

Help!

What kind of cars are involved?

Uh, it's a Tesla Model S.

Fuck.

I was driving on. I looked down. I'd been using the...

...cruise control, and I looked down.

I didn't realize how close I was to the thing and then I sat up.

And the minute I sat up, I hit the brakes and saw his truck.

- Which way were you going? - I was coming from the T here.

This gentleman was doing

- what he had always done. - I honestly don't know.

He turned it on Autopilot.

He's on a telephone call and he drops his phone.

He goes down fishing for it as the vehicle is approaching

the end of this T intersection,

where there's a flashing red light and a stop sign,

all of these things that would tell a normal attentive driver

that we're coming to the end of a road.

Consistent with what Autopilot often does, it did nothing.

It just crapped out and turned off.

Is anyone else in the vehicle with this guy?

No, just him.

There's ladies flip flops under the car.

There's a pair of ladies flip flops.

Please tell me no. Please tell me it's...

- Get back. - Shit, I'm sorry, sir.

Okay, she's right there.

She's right there in the bushes.

Not breathing right now?

- Is she breathing? - No.

As a result, a young woman lost her life

and a young man was forever injured.

That's what happens to people when they rely on Autopilot.

It tends to work most of the time,

so they just expect that it's gonna work

all of the time.

But Tesla's dirty little secret is that it doesn't.

As the Benavides case moved toward trial,

Tesla kept telling the police and Brett Schreiber

that key data about the crash was impossible to retrieve.

After a crash, there's something called

"an urgent upload."

The vehicle knows that it's going to crash,

and when it does, it gathers this packet of information.

Then, after the crash, within moments, the vehicle,

almost like your email refreshing,

checks, "Do I have cell coverage?

Do I have cell coverage? Oh, I do." Beep, beep, beep.

And then it uploads it to the mothership.

When it's received, there's a line of code

that says, essentially, "Transmission successful."

In this case, Tesla took the position

that there was nothing there.

We ultimately had to find the Autopilot computer itself.

Tesla was acting as if being able to pull data

off of the Autopilot computer was insurmountable.

But an intrepid Wall Street Journal reporter

connected us with a Russian hacker.

He goes... "Oh, no, this is no problem.

This is what I do."

Three weeks later, he was on an airplane to Miami.

We went to a Starbucks.

On Starbucks Wi-Fi, within 15 minutes,

we had the data of how the crash occurred,

why it occurred, and how the system failed.

And we also had that line of code which showed,

"Transmission received."

Transmission received

within six minutes of the crash.

Tesla already had all of the data

about how and why this crash occurred,

yet they lied to homicide investigators,

to the highway patrol, to the federal government,

to the court, and to us.

You can take their videos and superimpose the data

on top of it,

and now you get what's called ground truth.

These vehicles have GPS location.

They know where they are down to the foot.

It knew that the road ended.

It saw that there was a stop line,

that there was a vehicle on the other side of the road.

It saw the pedestrian.

That photo that the camera picked up of Naibel Benavides

was the last photograph that was ever taken of her.

The vehicle had so many opportunities to do something,

to warn, to slow, something.

But it just shut off.

So I think we're making some really good progress

on the Autopilot side.

Dozens of clips of Elon

were introduced at trial where he is saying things like,

"Autonomous driving is a solved problem."

...essentially a solved problem.

There's bluster and bombast and salesmanship.

And then there's giving vivid, concrete examples

of what you believe the car can do

when everybody knows it can't.

♪ I see a red door And I want it painted black ♪

When Elon put out the "Paint It Black" video,

he knew exactly what he was doing.

What they were trying to do was to overhype the technology,

overstate it, oversell it.

But why?

Two years after the video was released,

another Tesla driver was killed while using Autopilot.

Tesla settled with the family for an undisclosed sum,

which allowed the company to avoid showing evidence

of possible wrongdoing.

But before the case was settled,

lawyers questioned one of Tesla's chief engineers

about the "Paint It Black" video.

You indicated that Elon Musk

had asked for the video to be created, right?

That is my understanding.

Engineers were told

that this was going to be touted

as some futuristic vision

of what the technology could be.

But this was sold and peddled

as this is what the car can do today.

Does the video accurately portray

the performance capabilities

of the version of Autopilot that was released

to the public at the time?

It does not.

♪ See a red door And I want it painted black ♪

You actually observed

that there were attempts where the driver actually

had to take over the steering wheel, right?

Yes.

♪ If I look hard enough Into the setting sun... ♪

Did you ever ride along in the Tesla vehicle

for any of the efforts to create the video footage?

Yes.

♪ No more will my green sea Go turn a deeper blue... ♪

There were guys literally in the back

of the vehicle writing code

in real time to try to make the car do things

that it was not capable of doing.

The car couldn't even read streetlights.

So at one point, the film team had to put an engineer

in the trunk with a video feed so that he could force the car

to stop on red and go on green.

♪ I see people turn their heads And quickly look away... ♪

Am I correct that the Tesla

that was used in the video actually crashed?

Yes.

Where did it crash?

Uh, into a fence inside our parking lot.

When the "Paint It Black" video was released,

there had been a series

of high-profile accidents involving people on Autopilot.

It was important to Elon that they put something out

to distract everyone.

The basic news is that, uh,

all Tesla vehicles exiting the factory

have hardware capable of...

of full self-driving or driverless capability.

At a certain point, it's not an accident anymore.

It's not a mistake. It's a choice.

The choice was Elon's, and it was a business decision.

To save money, Musk decided not to include critical sensors

and rely mostly on cameras.

He was especially resistant to using LiDAR,

which bounces light at objects

to make very accurate 3D maps in real time.

The Waymo system designed by Google uses LiDAR

and radar in addition to cameras.

LiDAR is a fool's errand.

It's expensive and unnecessary, and once you solve vision,

it's worthless.

What are the road networks designed to work with?

They're designed to work with a biological neural net,

our brains, and with vision, our eyes.

We need cameras and silicon neural nets

to have self-driving work

for a system that was designed for eyes

and biological neural nets.

The problem is that cameras aren't as good

as eyes when it comes

to mapping chaotic situations on real roads.

But to fetch a high price in the stock market.

Musk needed to sell Tesla as a tech company

and his vehicles as robo cars.

Over time, cameras feeding AI systems

might create really safe cars.

The moral problem comes from telling people

that an imaginary future

has already arrived when you know it hasn't.

In the grand scheme of things,

what is the morally right decision?

Even if you save 90 percent

of the people that would otherwise have died,

the remaining ten percent who did die will still sue you.

I am a strong believer in doing the reality of good

over the perception of good,

and I have utter contempt for those who prefer

the perception of good over the reality of it.

Despite his understanding

of the present-day dangers,

Musk was betting everything on Full Self-Driving.

I wondered why.

Maybe it wasn't about the driving, but the data.

With cameras and microphones inside and outside his cars,

Musk would be collecting data to feed his AI ambitions,

which were growing larger every day.

In 2016, Musk started a company called Neuralink.

On its face, it was designed to connect human brains

to computers to help the disabled.

An early experiment allowed a macaque to playPong.

To help run Neuralink, Musk tapped Shivon Zilis.

She had worked on AI at Tesla

and then on the board of OpenAI.

Now at Neuralink,

she was charged with making Elon's dreams come true.

The long-term aspiration with Neuralink would be

to achieve a symbiosis with artificial intelligence.

Think of it like a Fitbit in your skull.

So we take out a section of skull,

we replace that with the chip,

inductive charger, and Bluetooth antenna.

And it's really almost quite literally like

a Fitbit in your skull.

People may decide

that they want to retain their biological self or not.

We are fundamentally different

from previous-- from Homo sapiens.

I call us Homo techno.

I think we have evolved into Homo techno,

which is like essentially a new species.

In 2018, Elon met Grimes on Twitter.

Their romance was sparked

by puns and banter over Roko's Basilisk,

a thought experiment that AI will torment

those who oppose it.

An idea that Grimes made into a song.

The single most important thing

is to make sure that this spark

that exists here on planet Earth

gets to be elsewhere.

And I don't even really care if it's biological life

or silicon-based life that goes out there.

I think that's just as good. I just...

I think the universe is empty and quiet,

and it wants to be woken up

and filled with beautiful things.

I think having kids just inherently makes you want

to be an optimist so bad.

It just makes me want to imagine amazing futures

that, like, maybe I won't be able to build,

but they will be able to build if they want to.

Having a kid is a vote for the future.

If you intend to have a child,

like, that means you care about the future.

- Aw. - Hello.

This is your dad speaking.

Hello.

Hello, baby. Hello, baby X.

Musk and Grimes had three kids together.

Grimes put her career on hold to raise them.

While he and Grimes were having their second child

using a surrogate mother,

Musk offered to be a sperm donor for Shivon Zilis.

Zilis was friends with Grimes,

but neither she nor Elon told Grimes about their plans.

While Zilis was in the hospital with complications

at the end of her pregnancy, Grimes was just down the hall

with a surrogate who was carrying her child.

Grimes had no idea that Zilis was even there,

or about to give birth to twins,

let alone that Elon was the father.

What was Elon thinking?

And what was up with all these kids?

If people don't have more children,

civilization is going to crumble.

Mark my words.

There are not enough people.

I'm trying to set a good example.

It's very difficult to see the architecture

of Elon's world when you're dropped in.

You see just enough that you think you're seeing

the whole picture,

um, and you don't ask any other questions.

When Elon started interacting with me on Twitter,

I was a conservative influencer.

He was responding to my posts frequently.

One day he responded to one of my Mother's Day posts

that I should have more children.

And then he texted me, "Feel like going to Providence?"

And I said yes.

All of a sudden I'm on this big private jet

with this larger-than-life figure.

He was very intelligent and down to earth.

And he was respectful.

But it was definitely strange.

We were in this hotel, and I'm falling asleep with him

while he's listening to an audiobook or a podcast

about Kublai Khan.

I just was sitting there like, am I dreaming?

You know, is this really

what he's going to sleep to?

Kublai Khan also had a lot of kids as I recall?

He sure did. Yeah, he's related to Genghis.

When we first started seeing each other,

he was always talking about his other kids

and really bolstering up this "I'm a good dad" image.

The story I got was that things were amicable

with Claire and that, you know,

Shivon, it was just platonic

and they just have kids together.

He was always saying, "We should have a kid,

you should have so many more kids,

you should have ten kids."

Eventually, I was like, "Well, what does that look like?"

When we decided to have Romulus,

I was at his house and I was just upset

about the possibility of this all blowing up

and only being seen as Elon Musk's baby mama.

And he was very kind about it.

But the moment I had our kid that was all gone.

For certain men,

passing on their genes is a numbers game.

To help him play that game,

Musk engages the services of Jared Birchall,

a Mormon who has five children of his own

and is head of the Musk Family Foundation.

Birchall is Musk's fixer.

He manages his personal finances and hires bodyguards

and private eyes.

Generally speaking, what is the role

that Jared Birchall plays for Elon Musk?

Henchman.

Demon.

Elon would connect us

to discuss certain areas of concern.

Hey, how you doing?

I'm fine, how are you?

Pretty good.

He was responsible for the disbursement

of all the funds and all the money.

This will come with a basic agreement

that basically says,

"I understand that I'm accepting this money

and that it's to be used for these purposes.

And I understand that confidentiality

and privacy is very important to the father."

Basically just that...

So an NDA as well?

Uh, yeah.

The NDA that they had provided me

was labeled as a child support agreement.

It was a lump sum of 15 million

and then 100,000 dollars a month for 21 years.

Did the other mothers sign one?

Did they-- Yeah, absolutely.

Well, they don't seem too happy, do they?

Um, I mean, I don't think a drugged-out musician

is ever going to find true happiness.

And, uh, I think Shivon goes in and out of finding contentment.

Jared was very adversarial.

I don't know how to characterize someone who...

degrades and...

...borderline threatens a woman who's freshly postpartum.

Elon is a very big-hearted,

kind, and generous person.

But when a mother of his children,

or a woman in general

who he trusted and/or,

you know, had a relationship with,

decides that they're gonna go the legal route, that always...

- always leads to a worse outcome... - Yeah.

...for that woman than what it would have been otherwise.

What-- You know, what did you opt into?

Were you opting into a retirement plan

or were you opting into a child?

- Being a mom. - And...

- What's that? - Being a mom.

I was covering Elon Musk forThe Wall Street Journal

when I started speaking with Ashley.

It was very clear from the phone call

and some of the corresponding text messages that...

they had a system in place.

Under this NDA that she's told to sign...

she would not be able to reveal the paternity of this child

to anyone other than that child.

She didn't feel like that was a bargain she wanted to take.

I told him I cannot, in good conscience,

sign that document.

She came out with a tweet saying

that she had mothered one of his children.

And that's when he really began distancing himself

and even casting doubt as to whether he was the father.

It was very jarring how

immense the backlash was on Twitter.

After she put out the tweet

announcing that the baby was Elon's,

Elon revoked the 15-million-dollar payment

and he reduced her stipend from 100,000 dollars a month

to 40,000 dollars a month.

And then he halved the payment again.

This was financial retaliation for speaking out.

It was almost as if he didn't show

a certain side of himself until after I had our baby.

I was also getting messages from other young girls

that Elon was DMing offering them children.

An influencer by the name of Tiffany Fong

called me and she said, "Elon offered me a baby."

There was a woman in Japan who just wanted

basically sperm donation that he had obliged.

It's like a Gatling gun of sperm in his DMs.

As I was reporting out this story, I learned

that this is pretty standard operating procedure for Elon.

He's a pronatalist that wants to increase the number

of educated babies on this earth.

Elon calls his children his "legion of children,"

which is pretty telling 'cause when you think of legions,

you think of, you know, thousands of soldiers

in ancient Rome helping to expand the empire.

He told me that he wanted to use surrogates

because it was the only way we could create

a legion of children before the civil war.

Jared Birchall even procured land for Elon

for this compound he has in Austin

for all of Elon's children and their mothers.

There's 14 that are publicly known,

but people around Elon told us that they believe

that there's many more.

I always felt like we're pretty much interchangeable,

you know, in this story.

We, meaning who?

Uh, the...

the breeders.

Somebody on Elon's side referred to us as "the breeders."

And there's a playbook, you know, it's, uh...

kind of like an assembly line by now.

Oh, this is what you do on Valentine's Day

and this is, you know...

breeders.

...engaged after, I think, sort of two weeks

of knowing each other, and I was 22 and it was...

The obsession with procreation,

it's just strange.

It's like, "I have superior genes

and therefore need to procreate."

It must be from his father or something,

but it takes on a much more dark,

sinister feel to it.

He wouldn't talk about his childhood

in a way that was really emotional.

He would try to keep it light.

But you got the feeling that his mind

was a dangerous neighborhood.

South Africa, where the forces of White rule

and Black revolt engage in a struggle for control.

South Africa when I was growing up

was just an inherently very violent place.

I got punched in the face many times.

It's funny that people think

that they're so sensitive to words.

It's like, man, if you've ever been punched in the face,

words don't mean nothing.

One of the things I remember him telling me

was in South Africa,

he had this habit of jerking awake

because he was afraid

that something terrible was going to happen to him,

something violent.

And so I think, you know, he learned early on

that he always had to be...

you know, ready for war.

Life is a struggle, and you have to know that.

If you're told it's a birthday party

from start to finish, you're being misled.

One evening, my daughter said she wants to take a bath.

I ran this bath for her.

I heard a noise.

There were a group of Black men in the house.

I just saw an arm coming up.

I thought he was gonna shake hands or something.

But then suddenly I saw the gun.

I carry a .357 Magnum

and as they came down the passage, I was able to...

you know, return fire.

So you were able to kill all three of the men?

Yes.

I took my six-year-old daughter with me and then we jumped

out of that window into the garden.

But the entire floor was covered in blood

and different colors of blood,

bright red, dark red, average red.

You couldn't-- It was like a swimming pool.

I understood Elon better, I think,

in some ways, when I met his father.

They both used the same language

when they were insulting each other

or insulting you as a woman.

When I was married,

I was told about three times a day

that I'm boring and stupid and, you know... and ugly.

And if I protested, then I got beaten up.

After Maye and I split up,

the boys lived with me.

Elon learned to read at quite a young age.

And he would read intensely, even if it was comic books.

We were driving back from the bush,

what we call the bush, we had a place there.

And the man with me dropped dead.

He fell over dead next to Elon.

And we all stopped and, you know,

we tried to resuscitate the man,

he was a wonderful friend of ours.

And unfortunately, we couldn't.

And during that whole time, Elon read a comic book.

He didn't stop.

He just kept on reading the comic book.

I was very, very bookish.

I was either working on my computer,

playingDungeons & Dragons, reading comics all the time.

I don't think you'd necessarily want to be me.

It's like a never-ending explosion.

When I was, I don't know, five or six or something,

I thought I was insane because it was clear

that other people did not...

their mind wasn't exploding with ideas.

Social cues were not intuitive.

I was, you know, bullied quite a lot.

I was sitting next to Elon,

four or five guys come up to him

and they just start beating him senseless.

My brother's face was unrecognizable.

Elon was in the hospital for almost a week.

When he came home,

his father berated him for more than an hour

and said he was stupid

and took the side of the person who had beaten him.

So apparently the boy's father

had committed suicide.

Elon heard about it

and Elon said, "Well, I think your father was stupid to do that,"

which this boy took in a very bad way

and then pushed Elon down a flight of stairs.

I may have said to him, "Elon, don't be stupid,"

but I never raised a hand to any of my children, ever.

I mean, we lived in torture.

My dad would make up things that were not real

and then you'd spend three hours listening

and then you'd sort of,

"Maybe he's right, maybe that is true."

To me, Elon is just like me

and I give this as soberly as I can.

Do not bet against Elon.

You are going to lose.

In 2018, most people were betting for Elon

as he gambled everything on the success

of his first mass market car, the Model 3.

The major challenge for us

over the next six to nine months is,

how do we build a huge number of cars?

And frankly, we're going to be in production hell.

Welcome, welcome.

As the saying goes,

"If you're going through hell, keep going."

For the gamble to pay off,

Musk needed money, and fast.

Tesla was drowning in debt

and a month away from bankruptcy,

so the only place to get cash was the stock market.

To keep the stock price high, Musk had to promise a miracle.

This whole thing that you see here

was a pretty miraculous effort by the team to create

a general assembly line out of nothing in three weeks.

But the assembly line was breaking down,

with shocking numbers of defects.

Critics wondered if Musk, in his desperation,

was lying about what Tesla could deliver.

Thanks for doing this. We really, really appreciate it.

Um, no problem.

I might occasionally need to just stop

and check for any emergencies coming through.

I got "Boléro" stuck in my head.

- What do you got-- - Sorry?

- What's that? - I have "Boléro" stuck in my head.

It seems like this year's been the toughest year for you. Why?

Uh...

Well, I mean, Tesla really faced a severe threat of death

due to the Model 3 production ramp.

If we didn't solve these problems in a very short period of time, we were dying.

In addition to writing about Tesla,

did you ultimately become a short seller on Tesla?

Yeah, I did also become short.

I felt like, if I'm gonna write about Tesla,

I should take a position.

And I'm by no means a professional short seller.

My position was too tiny to matter.

But the real professional short sellers

perform a valuable service, I think,

in the market in uncovering frauds.

For example, Jim Chanos.

This is a good example of, I think,

of cult stock, it's fair to say, in the market.

The bulls will tell you this is a software data collection company

not a car company.

Except when it doesn't suit them.

Jim Chanos,

who predicted the fall of Enron,

is one of the world's most famous short sellers.

Selling short means betting

that a company's stock will fall.

Most people think that's a bad thing.

Why would you bet against a company?

But when government regulators overlook fraud,

short sellers can make money by spotting it.

Do you have a price target in mind?

Um, well we think the equity's worthless, so how's zero?

There's been relentless criticism.

Relentless and outrageous and unfair.

What actually happened here was an incredible American success story.

All these people worked their ass off day and night

to make it happen, and they believe in the dream.

And that's the story that really should be told.

To protect Tesla's stock,

Musk had to think of a way to destroy the short sellers.

By threatening to take Tesla private at a high price,

he goosed the market.

Short sellers took a terrible beating

as buyers rushed to snatch up Tesla's stock.

And Musk had won.

There was only one problem.

When Musk said "funding secured,"

he told a lie.

For the CEO of a public company,

that could be illegal.

Musk's tweets significantly impacted

both the price and volume of trading in Tesla stock.

We allege that Musk had arrived at the price of $420

by assuming a 20% premium

of what Tesla's then existing share price

and then rounding up to $420

because of the significance of that number in marijuana culture

and his belief that his girlfriend

would be amused by it.

You probably can't because stockholders, right?

I mean, it's legal, right?

- Totally legal. - Okay.

How does that work?

Do people get upset at you if you do certain things?

There's tobacco and marijuana in there.

That's all it is.

The SEC gave Musk

what amounted to a speeding ticket.

Then he put his foot on the accelerator

and steered the Model 3

to become the best-selling premium car in the US.

For his role,

Musk wanted to be paid

with performance-based stock options

potentially worth $56 billion,

the largest payday for a CEO in the history of mankind.

Thank you. That's a lot, yeah.

Here's an unlikely player in the story.

A heavy metal drummer who was a Tesla shareholder

sued Elon Musk for being too greedy.

Richard J. Tornetta was an odd duck

who ends up being the bane of Elon Musk.

And it was just enraging to Musk

that one guy who owned nine shares

could cause all this havoc.

The Tornetta lawsuit challenged a 2018 compensation package

granted to Elon Musk which said,

you go out and increase the market cap of this company,

and we will reward you

with just an extraordinary amount of stock options.

But for this to be valid,

there had to be an independent board

that agreed to grant it.

The Tesla board is a collection

of just bootlickers and sycophants.

People who they claimed were independent

were, in fact, not independent.

They were close friends of his.

They had become vastly wealthy thanks to Elon Musk.

Musk wanted the Tornetta case tossed out.

But the judge ruled for the shareholders.

The lawsuit proceeded,

and Musk himself had to sit for a deposition.

I understand you have the title Techno King?

- Yeah. - Does that require me

to refer to you as Your Highness or?

I mean, look it's up to you.

I'm not going to call myself Your Highness,

but if you want to do that, that's okay.

What exactly is a Techno King?

Well, it's sort of like, um...

you know, if you had like technology

and a monarch,

uh, then that would be like a Techno King.

And did you come up with that title yourself?

Yes.

The lawsuit was really about

something more than money.

It was about the very nature of a company.

Should the proceeds go to investors

and the thousands of people

who actually designed and manufactured the cars?

Or the front man who said he had bigger fish to fry?

If I allocate, um,

a huge amount of my time to Tesla,

uh, then I cannot at the same time

advance, um, progress

towards making life multiplanetary

and extending the light of consciousness beyond Earth.

So, you'll forgive me.

I'm a simple lawyer from Delaware.

But I think what you just told me is

that part of the benefit of working hard at Tesla

was that you would have money to put into going to Mars

and to deal with Neuralink and/or OpenAI.

- Is that a fair summary? - Yeah, that is a fair summary.

The judge didn't buy it.

She ruled for the heavy metal drummer and the investors.

Musk appealed the court's ruling,

insisting that his Tesla stock options

were linked to the survival of the planet.

I'm here with Elon Musk at the headquarters of Tesla.

- Tesla cannot die. - Mm-hmm.

Tesla is incredibly important

for the future of sustainable transport.

It's very important for the future of the world.

It's very important for all life on earth.

This supersedes political parties,

race, creed, religions, it doesn't matter.

If we do not solve the environment,

we're all damned.

When he said Tesla dies and humanity dies with it,

I think, you're a car company.

What do you make, cars? Right? Like, really?

Can you imagine the head of, like, paper towels at Bounty

going, "If Bounty goes, so goes the rest of us."

I mean, honestly.

Over time, Elon's delusions of grandeur

would collide with a disquieting reality.

Sales were falling for the cars

that were supposed to save the planet.

So Tesla's magician in chief

pulled some rabbits out of his hat.

Tesla was no longer a mere car company.

It was something much more.

We have quite a show for you tonight.

I think you're gonna like it.

You'll be able to take a ride in the Cybercab.

There is no steering wheel or pedals.

Everything we've developed for our cars,

it all actually applies to a humanoid robot.

It's just a robot with arms and legs

instead of a robot with wheels.

Of the eight billion people on Earth,

I think everyone's going to want their Optimus buddy.

I think this will be the biggest product ever

of any kind.

Let's party!

The weirdest thing about the party

was something everyone knew but wouldn't say out loud.

The products were fakes.

Remote human drivers oversaw the Cybercabs

as they followed a predetermined route.

The robots walked using AI,

but were remote-assisted and voiced by human operators.

The biggest product ever? Really?

Hey, Optimus, how much of you is AI?

I like your moves. I like your moves.

Excuse me, excuse me, excuse me.

As the robots started passing out at their own party,

Musk left early,

high on his own supply.

Tesla has done more to help the environment

than all other companies combined.

It would be fair to say that, therefore, as the leader

of the company, I've done more for the environment

than any single human on Earth.

Someone said to me once,

"He's 'Ready Player One' in the game."

That's how he sees himself.

And everyone else is an NPC, which is a non-player character.

So if you're very much into video games,

if you're into simulations,

it might give you a sense of the world

that's very different.

I've played the entire evolution of video games.

From earlyPong, Space Invaders stuff, Pac-Man,

all the way through to...

super high resolution multiplayer online games.

Killing the demons in a video game

calms the demons in my mind.

The material benefit of this idea

that it's a simulation is that you get to act in ways

that are manifestly cruel and selfish

and immoral.

If Musk has a unique vision

and everyone else is just a robot that he programs,

then there is no reason

not to treat those people very badly.

If you lose track of what's real,

then you lose track of what matters.

And you can really hurt yourself and other people.

Yes!

Ladies and gentlemen,

give it up for the greatest capitalist

in the history of the United States of America,

Elon Musk!

The future is gonna be amazing!

People of Earth, your attention please.

Regrettably, your planet is one of those scheduled

for demolition.

Elon Musk has always claimed to be

on a mission to save civilization.

That made me wonder about his fondness

forThe Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy,

a novel that begins with aliens blowing up planet Earth

in order to make way for an interplanetary highway.

Did he know that it was a satire

about recklessly powerful beings

who were willing to destroy

billions of lives in the present

in order to make way for a distant, glorious future?

We've got this, um, I think...

...pretty good-looking rocket factory building.

You know, long term,

probably be making 1,000 a year of the ship.

- So... - A thousand a year?

Yeah, well, you know, gotta build a city on Mars.

If it becomes operational, which is still an if,

Starship would be fully reusable.

It would go back to the moon,

and it's what he says will take people to Mars.

But there is a big leap...

...between what SpaceX has accomplished,

which is magnificent,

and what Elon has been saying for ten years

about what they will be doing.

OnSaturday Night Live, when he said...

To anyone I've offended, I just wanna say,

I reinvented electric cars

and I'm sending people to Mars in a rocket ship.

Did you think I was also gonna be a chill, normal dude?

What?

Great line.

He's not sending people to Mars.

He is talking about sending people to Mars

and has been for years.

I think most people want a future where we're headed

towards being a space-faring civilization.

We're going out there exploring the stars,

and...

...and we want to be on a path to making true the things

that we read in-- in science fiction books

and see in the movies.

But a-- a future where we are forever confined to Earth

until some eventual extinction event

is less inspiring.

Musk sees two options for the future,

either the extinction of humanity

or endless colonial expansion across the entire universe.

If you zoom out really far

and look at the four-billion-year history

of Earth and the evolution of life itself,

there's maybe half a dozen or so really big milestones.

And I think on that scale

would also fit the expansion of life to multiple planets.

Extending to multiple planets gives us the surest chance

of life lasting for a very long time.

Musk and the rest of the tech billionaires want

more everything forever.

I decided to write this book

to sort of sound the alarm on this idea in Silicon Valley

that we can have more everything forever.

And anyone who gets in the way of that

is guilty of murder of the future lives

that could have been saved if we'd just gotten technology

to go faster and people had just left us alone.

"Leave me alone. I know what's best."

"I, Elon Musk, am going to take us

to Mars and the stars.

And anyone who gets in the way of that is guilty

of preventing the future of the species."

What Musk wants is moral absolution

for any of his actions now,

because he is creating this endless future in space.

I just want to give you a sense of

what it would feel like to...

to actually be in the spaceship.

Um, it's gotta be really fun and exciting,

um, and it can't feel cramped or boring.

You can float around. Uh, it'll be like movies.

Moonraker 6...

In movies, we can imagine space colonies,

but we know very little about how they might really work.

Can we have sex in zero gravity?

Or will we need helpers

who can push us together at the right moment?

Can mothers raise and birth babies

while losing bone mass?

What about the perils of radiation and solar flares?

Where will we get our energy and water?

What will our laws be? Who will rule?

Without knowing the answers, Musk teases us

with a bright multi-planetary future

by launching rockets and saying,

"Lift up your eyes and look to the heavens."

We want the things that are in science fiction novels

and movies not to be science fiction forever.

These ideas that he has about space and the future

mostly come from science fiction.

Jetpacks, flying cars, rocket ships,

moon base, Mars base, right?

That's what the future looks like.

But because that idea of what the future looks like

has so much cultural pull,

it's not until recently that most people realize

that when Musk says that the future of humanity

and the future of SpaceX is to colonize Mars,

that's not happening.

Mars is a really, really difficult environment

to survive in.

The gravity is too low,

the radiation levels are too high,

there's no air, and the dirt is made of poison.

Musk and company are selling us dreams.

There's so much pent-up demand

for SpaceX shares.

Almost anyone who's trying to get their hands

on SpaceX shares is looking to.

It's by far one of the most valuable

privately-held companies in the world.

For people who invest in Musk's companies,

either he's a genius

or he's insane.

And how could he possibly be insane

when he's so rich and successful?

So he must be a genius.

The alternative is too terrifying to contemplate,

that he is insane and wealthy and powerful.

We should get, like, a hang glider

and jump off or something.

That'd be sweet.

In March 2020,

COVID-19 had spread to over 110 countries.

Unable to contain the spread of the disease,

the U.S. government began to consider the idea

of lockdowns.

Sir, we're gonna take your temperature, okay?

- Start compressions! - Thank you.

There are a lot of reasons to question

why lockdowns were employed for so long.

But in COVID's first wave,

no one knew how to combat the disease

which was killing so many

that New York City had to rent freezer trucks

to store all the dead bodies.

Elon, how do you do it?

It has diminished my faith in humanity, this whole thing.

Because?

The irrationality...

of-- of-- of people in general.

Very early in the pandemic,

Elon tweeted, "Panic about the coronavirus is dumb."

And I saw the response to the tweet.

People were perceiving him as this genius technologist

who must have inside information.

And I thought, "Oh, this is not gonna age well."

When I texted him, he comes back with just a ton of topspin.

We go back and forth for, like, two hours.

It finally converged on a bet where he said,

"I'll bet you a million dollars against a bottle of tequila

that we won't have 35,000 cases of COVID in the United States."

It was so obvious where this was going.

I waited until we had 35,000 deaths

and 600,000 cases.

I texted him,

"Is 35,000 deaths plus 600,000 cases

less than 35,000 cases?"

Right. And that honestly appears

to have been the end of our friendship.

COVID is when some switch got flipped in his brain

and he was behaving in ways that I thought

were starkly unethical and just unrecognizable to me.

We're gonna start with Tesla.

On the company's conference call,

Elon Musk blasting

the pandemic stay-at-home order.

Frankly, I would call it

forcibly imprisoning people in their homes,

breaking people's freedoms

in ways that are horrible and-- and wrong,

uh, and not why people came to America

or built this country.

What the fuck? Excuse me. This is fascist.

Give people back their goddamn freedom.

Elon tends to think,

"The only thing that matters is I succeed in my mission."

Anything that gets in the way is bad or villainous.

"If COVID causes me to have

to maybe shut down my factories,

that gets in the way of my mission,

so therefore it's wrong."

Tesla has actually begun

to openly challenge the state's authority

by starting production

in defiance of public health orders.

"You as a society

are telling me that I need to do something different.

Who are you to tell me?"

During COVID, he kept talking about studies,

all the studies he read, and he was the expert.

He just thinks he's a higher being.

You know, you're talking a lot about saving humanity,

but these are humans that die in the process.

Everybody dies.

I know that, Elon.

The question is what,

on balance, serves the greater good?

The price for the greater good

was paid by the factory workers.

At Tesla's California plant, 450 employees got COVID,

and some who refused to risk contagion

by returning to work were fired.

All that Tesla had to do was just present their plan

for keeping workers safe in the pandemic.

And then, once it was approved, they could go ahead and operate.

But instead, Musk just played the martyr,

kept the factory open.

Meanwhile, in China, much more stringent COVID restrictions,

and he was just praising them for all the help

they gave to keep Tesla's factory operations running.

This was an era when Musk was saying

he didn't want to be involved in politics,

but it was clear that Musk

was making this political statement.

In December 2020, I got a scoop

that he had personally moved to Texas.

Tesla had already started a factory in Austin.

It became clear that he saw

a lot of opportunity in red states.

I think it was both personal and political.

Musk didn't just move to Texas,

he colonized it.

Beyond factories for Tesla and SpaceX

and his own personal compound in Austin,

he founded 90 companies

and built two company towns for workers,

including schools with lesson plans

influenced by Elon.

We need Lithium. We would not be here...

...but for the vision,

the hard work,

and the commitment of Elon Musk.

Give it up for Tesla and Elon Musk.

The government passed laws for his benefit

and overlooked the environmental indifference

of his companies.

You know, obviously, I'm like socially very liberal,

and then economically,

right of center, maybe, or center, I don't know.

Obviously, not a communist.

A privilege that the uber-wealthy have

is that they're able to spend as much money as they want

in elections without it coming up in public documents.

Elon was able to dabble

and manipulate Republican politics

in ways that no one knew for years.

There are these vehicles called 501 s.

They're dark money pools,

and it's a vehicle that Musk loves.

We were able to uncover some of these s he used

for the midterms in 2022,

where he gave money to a group called Citizens for Sanity.

The national murder rate

is at its highest in 25 years.

The result of far left policies.

Joe Biden and the Democrats

have demolished the southern border.

Send a message to Biden and the Democrats.

We don't want open borders.

Joe Biden and Raphael Warnock

believe girls can become boys

by injecting them with testosterone,

cutting off their breasts,

and surgically changing their genitals.

At the time that Elon funneled

more than 50 million dollars

toward these very incendiary ads,

in his personal life,

he had a biological son

who transitioned into being a woman.

And Elon refused to accept Vivian

as his daughter.

He has publicly stated that that was a result

of what he calls "the woke mind virus."

I'm not just a bitch.

I'm a bitch with a backstory.

You talk about your, uh... You talk about your transition.

You say your mom was very supportive,

and you say that Elon Musk was not as supportive.

Yeah.

I needed a diagnosis of gender dysphoria,

which I passed with flying colors, unfortunately.

"Unfortunately."

And... And then I needed both parental consent.

There's a lot I cannot say,

but my mom is a badass bitch and I love her to death.

- That's all I'm gonna say. - Okay.

The thing about Jenna is that she is, uh,

extremely strong-willed.

Elon and I had five kids,

and the one who was most openly defiant was Jenna.

I am not the reason he's a, you know, fascist!

People think it's, like, my fault.

Like, I cannot take credit for that,

unfortunately, for him.

Jenna was different.

When she was six, Elon said to her,

"In this world, there are winners and losers.

You know, do you wanna be a winner

or do you wanna be a loser?"

The subtext there was,

"If you do not follow me and do what I say,

you will be a loser."

It was painful to watch her be in pain.

Instead of trying to understand her point of view,

Elon was telling her through telling the world

what that point of view actually was.

And Elon never tried...

to, uh, repair things.

You know, like, he-- That's not in his nature, he...

He, uh...

You know, if a relationship ruptures,

then it ruptures.

I lost my son, essentially.

They call it dead naming because...

uh... your son is dead.

So my son Xavier is dead, killed by the woke mind virus.

If you do your job right as a parent,

you get displaced, you know, by their life,

which is no longer your life.

There's a lot of emotion involved with that.

But he really did treat it as the death of a child.

I was like, you know,

we actually went through the actual death

of an actual child.

And, uh... And what's really happening here is,

you know, this is a child growing up.

She's...

She's Jenna.

In order to be, you know, a winner,

she had to go her own way.

And, uh...

And she really had to... to fight to do that.

Elon told me, um, "Make sure Jenna knows

how much I'll always love her,"

and then the next day...

...uh, he cut off her health insurance.

I vowed to destroy the woke mind virus after that,

'cause it is a prevalent mind virus

and arguably one of the biggest threats

to modern civilization.

These are the guys that run the show.

This is Kyle, our editor-in-chief.

- Hey, how's it going? - This is Ethan Nicolle.

Yeah, I mean, we're here, we're...

You know, the Babylon Bee is a Christian organization,

you know, and, uh, we're a ministry.

Why aren't you heathens in church?

We're wondering if you could do us a quick solid

and accept Jesus as your Lord and Savior.

Um...

Personal Lord and Sa-- You know?

It's a quick prayer.

Uh...

Um...

You know, if-- if-- if Jesus is, uh, saving people,

I mean, I-- I-- I won't stand in his way.

You know, like, I mean, sure.

I'll be saved. Why not?

- Sweet. We did it. - Yeah.

- I think he just said yes. - We got him.

- All right. - We got him.

If that's what it takes to be saved,

then sounds good.

After the guys from the Bee converted Elon,

they insulted a top U.S. health official

who happened to be a trans woman

by naming her Man of the Year.

That got them suspended from Twitter,

which outraged Elon's second wife, Talulah Riley.

Straight ahead! Straight ahead!

Naturally, Talulah vented to her ex.

Elon!

Hey, come on, stop it!

Holy shit!

Freedom!

ZOË: After January 6th,

we all felt like democracy was at stake.

Twitter decided to ban Donald Trump

because of violence on January 6th.

Elon starts to feel

like the company has gone way too far.

ZOË: If you could ban

the former president of the United States

and take away his most prominent platform,

then what did that mean for Elon Musk?

A few hours ago, you made an offer to buy Twitter.

Why?

Was there a question?

Why make that offer?

Oh, so, um...

Well, I think it's very important for...

uh, there to be an inclusive arena

for free speech.

Thank you. Thank you, guys.

ZOË: Elon makes this offer,

and he signs a purchase agreement

that Twitter executives think he hasn't even fully read,

'cause it's a very seller-friendly agreement.

It doesn't leave him a lot of wiggle room to get out of it.

Hey, guys.

Facing a lawsuit and billions in penalties

if he backed out,

Musk agreed to honor his inflated offer.

Then he turned to a few fellow billionaires for help.

ZOË: It's how deals get done

at the upper echelons of Silicon Valley.

It's Elon Musk texting his wealthy friends saying,

"How about a billion? How about two billion?"

"Sure, sounds good."

Even after some of Elon's pals

chipped in to help him buy Twitter,

he was still short.

So Musk borrowed 13 billion dollars from banks,

with Twitter itself as collateral.

Twitter, which had been roughly breaking even,

would now face massive debt payments.

Musk said he was trying to save Twitter,

but it looked like he might sink it.

ZOË: He comes into Twitter for the first time.

He's carrying a sink

to make this joke to his Twitter followers...

"Let that sink in." Like, this is happening.

The company's gonna go bankrupt

if we do not cut costs immediately.

You have four months to live.

A hundred and twenty days. In 120 days, you're dead.

So what do you want to do?

ZOË: Elon comes in with an entourage.

Wealthy and powerful venture capitalists

and other people in the tech industry

who he trusts.

Steve Davis is the head

of Musk's tunnel-digging company,

The Boring Company,

and he's one of his top lieutenants.

Even Elon has joked that Steve Davis is like chemo,

"A little bit of chemo is really good,

and too much chemo will kill you."

ZOË: There's Jason Calacanis,

who has a popular podcast calledAll-In...

...David Sacks, who is a billionaire,

and anotherAll-In podcaster.

Immediately, Twitter employees called them "The Goons."

Elon said, "Hey, you know, swing by."

- Yeah, yeah. - But we get in there, and...

the place is empty.

We go to the cafeteria.

We all go get something to eat. And we realized...

There were more people

making the food than eating the food.

I think it was shortly after that

you discovered an entire room

at the office that was filled with "Stay Woke" T-shirts.

I was like, "My God, man,

the barbarians are fully within the gates now."

ZOË: Twitter pre-Elon is thought of

as a good place to work.

- Welcome to the roof deck. - So much space!

Look at all this space!

- Check it out! - Is this allowed?

Totally!

ZOË: There was this relaxed atmosphere.

Is this allowed?

It was clear from day one

of Elon Musk buying the company that that was not going to fly.

The first day that Elon showed up,

there were actually about 20 engineers

from Elon's other companies

to essentially vet Twitter engineering.

What does a Tesla engineer

know about the systems at Twitter?

Not much.

The engineers are in the office

and suddenly, they get this urgent message.

ZOË: "Print out 50 pages of code

and get ready to show it to Elon in person."

It was a bit odd because modern software

has millions of lines of code to do one thing.

Trying to read code on paper, you will quickly realize

you're not really getting anything out of it.

ZOË: Suddenly, engineers are running all around the office

printing out all of this code.

They all print this out, they're waiting nervously,

and suddenly, this other urgent message comes in

that says, "Stop printing."

"Security risk. Shred the code."

The day when people

were running around getting their code printed,

I think was the first sign

that some kind of list was being made.

- Hey, uh, Sacks. I see somebody-- - Oh, hey, guys. Look who's here.

Oh, look who it is.

Oh, is it the proprietor?

The proprietor, the owner.

Twitter customer support at your service.

Anyone who is exceptional at what they do,

where the role is critical,

they have a positive effect on others,

um, and they are trusted,

meaning they put the company's interests

before their own, should stay.

- Pretty straightforward. - Yeah.

How many people are really needed to run Twitter?

So it's not-- It's not like a giant number.

ZOË: Managers start getting calls.

"We need to lay off 30 percent of your team,

60 percent of your team, 70 percent of this team,

and it needs to happen by the following night."

The Trust and Safety team,

its role is to make content decisions

to protect users and protect advertisers,

and to identify networks of accounts

that are operating in nefarious ways.

We shouldn't have a group called "Trust and Safety."

ZOË: That night we see hundreds of employees

posting the blue heart or the salute emoji on Slack.

They wake up

and about 50 percent of the company is gone.

And it doesn't look like there's any rhyme or reason

to how these layoffs have played out.

Hey, everybody. Merry Christmas.

Happy holidays.

Sacks, how are you doing, brother?

You working today?

I'm good. They've got their own bespoke coffee shop here.

Where are the people that work there?

Too soon!

It was a... It was a pretty somber day.

Some people were excited.

You know, there were a group of people

that were super into the idea

of Elon running the company, and they were very gung-ho.

Uh, ironically...

probably about half of those folks got laid off.

ZOË: JP Doherty was in charge of Twitter's command center,

which is kind of the nerve system

of the entire organization.

The Goons do understand

that Twitter command center is critical.

And if they fire that team, Twitter will go down.

And suddenly, JP Doherty is getting a lot closer

with Elon Musk.

- Is this working? - Let's find out...

One-on-one, I didn't really feel

like he was being particularly an asshole,

but then the second somebody else comes in the room,

I feel like there's a... like a mask that goes on.

Hey, guys.

You're on, too. Welcome.

You know, he has to put on this persona,

this badass who does whatever he wants

and says whatever he wants.

This is me, curling a 45.

ZOË: After this mad dash

to get rid of as many people as possible,

Musk makes it really clear

what Twitter is going to look like under him.

Here it is. Um...

- Do you want me to just read it? - Yeah, sure.

Sure.

"Going forward, to build a breakthrough Twitter 2.0,

and succeed in an increasingly competitive world,

we will need to be extremely hardcore."

ZOË: He sends out this email titled,

"A Fork in the Road."

To remain, you need to sacrifice for this mission.

Unspoken is that you get to be part of

Elon Musk's universe.

For some people, that's convincing,

and they sign on.

For a lot of people,

and more people than Elon expected,

it's not, and they decide to leave voluntarily.

Steve Davis came down to our room and asked me,

"Is there anybody you want to know about?"

I'd say somebody's name.

He'd say, "No, they didn't sign it."

And I'd say, "Shit!"

And then he'd make a note somewhere.

So every time I swore...

...there was a note next to that in the spreadsheet somewhere.

And then those were some of the people that they eventually

tried to call to get them to come back.

We're all about to get fired.

- How long have you been here? - Four years.

- Four years? - Two months.

Nine years and a month.

Silicon Valley workers historically

didn't see themselves as workers.

They saw themselves as entrepreneurs in waiting.

Three, two, one.

- Zero! - Happy New Year! Yay!

And their bosses were able to exploit this

by appealing to a sense of mission.

Musk called it being extremely hardcore.

He's saying to his workers, "Sleep under your desk,

so that we can build,

you know, a democracy platform for a new century."

That woman who did sleep under her desk,

even though she is being extremely hardcore,

he fires her summarily.

He treats them like they're disposable cogs.

I had a lot of respect for his

purported reasons for buying Twitter at that time.

- Free speech. - Yes.

It's very important, of the utmost importance

that we maintain free speech on the internet.

And he seemed to be the only figure at that time

willing to fight that battle.

At that point in my life, I was working for Seth Dillon

and running operations for the Babylon Bee.

Elon had just taken over Twitter,

and the Babylon Bee had been banned from Twitter,

and they wanted to interview Elon.

Elon had been messaging me,

and he DMed me asking if I'm ever in San Francisco.

I said, "I'm supposed to be in San Francisco

whenever you get back to Seth Dillon

about our interview."

Very quickly, I get a call from Seth saying,

"Can you come to San Francisco? Elon just set a date."

That's how real men do it.

Do you feel like it was worth it?

I mean, do you ever regret it and go,

"Why did I do this thing

just to make a stand for free speech?"

Like, I think it was still the right move

to acquire Twitter,

even at the outrageously high price.

He was doing something that he thought was...

for a higher cause.

On Twitter, there was a lot of censorship going on.

We sort of uncovered a lot of that

with the Twitter Files.

The Twitter Files were internal memos

that Musk leaked to a group of reporters

to prove that old Twitter

was suppressing right-wing voices

like Bari Weiss.

I received a Signal message from Elon Musk

asking if I was interested in looking

at Twitter's archives.

What we found is

Twitter claimed to be the public square,

but it was privately blacklisting certain ideas,

people, debates, suppressing others.

It sounded bad.

While Musk and his handpicked journalists

were right that some accounts were banned or flagged,

the old Twitter wasn't a woke-athon.

This Twitter, Facebook is so great.

I type out, you know,

ding, ding, ding-- I'll do it myself.

Ding, ding, dong, dong, ding, press.

Before Musk bought Twitter,

Donald Trump had 89 million followers

who helped propel him to the presidency.

Musk reversed the Twitter ban on Trump.

He also welcomed back many other banned accounts.

When Musk fired 80 percent

of Twitter's Trust and Safety team,

the platform was flooded with Nazi shit posters,

online impersonators,

and bad actors peddling links

to images of child sexual abuse.

Free speech is meaningless unless you allow people

you don't like to say things you don't like.

ZOË: You're a free speech absolutist

until your platform

has child sexual exploitation material on it.

Then you really need to take that down really quick.

From a business perspective,

Twitter is an advertising platform.

Ninety percent of the company's revenue

came from advertisers.

They don't want to spend money on a platform

and then have their ads show up next to offensive posts.

As Elon Musk continues to act quite erratically

and say really offensive things online,

advertisers flee.

For Elon, the idea that there's still this group of people

who can punish him for saying the wrong thing is maddening.

The entire reason that he is taking Twitter private

is to have maximum control.

There was all of the criticism. There was advertisers leaving.

- We talked to Bob Iger today-- - I hope they stop.

- You hope-- - Don't advertise.

- You don't want them to advertise? - No.

What do you mean?

If somebody's gonna try

to blackmail me with advertising,

blackmail me with money, go fuck yourself.

- But... - Go fuck yourself.

Is that clear?

I hope it is.

When advertisers fled Twitter,

revenues dropped by 2.5 billion dollars,

and the company lost 80 percent of its value.

ZOË: What was he doing this for?

He said it was about the woke mind virus,

or he said it was about free speech,

but it became really clear that those weren't

actually the reason.

And when I started to hear about what had happened

the night of the Super Bowl, it clicked for me.

Loaded up, taking a shot,

looking for A.J. Brown!

He's got it!

Elon Musk taking in Super Bowl LVII...

ZOË: Elon Musk is at the Super Bowl,

and he sends a pretty innocuous tweet.

ZOË: Joe Biden posts a tweet just like Elon's.

ZOË: Biden's tweet gets much more engagement

than Elon Musk's.

Why is Joe Biden, who sucks at tweeting,

getting more engagement than he is?

He's really good at using Twitter.

He's hilarious. He owns Twitter.

He's getting more and more furious about this.

He's convinced that a Twitter employee

has planted a bug in the algorithm

to purposely suppress the like count on his posts.

The Eagles lose,

this is yet another blow to him.

Then he gets on his private jet,

and he's livid.

He flies right to Twitter's offices

and it's all hands on deck.

ZOË: About 80 engineers work through the night

reconfiguring the algorithm.

The next day I got on my phone,

and my entire feed was Elon Musk.

A team of engineers had made that decision

very deliberately to try and appease him.

Elon Musk can make those tweaks to the algorithm

to make his own experience better,

but it almost automatically

makes everyone else's experience worse.

Elon's engagement with Twitter, now X,

is kind of central to the story of just how his ethics

and his personality have completely unraveled.

His addiction to having the platform

and having that dopaminergic reward schedule

with hundreds of millions of fans,

it's just been disastrous for him as a person.

ZOË: Elon and The Goons didn't come in wanting to learn.

They came in confident in the fact that

while Twitter might become less stable,

when the dust settled,

they'd be able to rebuild Twitter in Elon's image.

Twitter is the place where Elon can tell his side of history.

Elon moved from promoting free speech

to fee speech, paying creators for engagement

which boosted inflammatory clickbait

that kept people on the platform.

If lies spread faster than the truth,

that was a feature, not a bug.

Then Musk began banning his critics

and favoring voices who pushed his views.

He also lent the power of his platform

to politicians who could enrich him,

like India's leader, Narendra Modi,

who can open up an enormous market for Tesla.

When he goes into a room in India

and he's the head of Tesla or the head of Starlink,

he's not special.

When he goes into those countries

as owner of Twitter...

Sí.

Brazil's former president,

Jair Bolsonaro,

was found guilty of using his presidential powers

to undermine the integrity of the 2022 elections.

He praised tech tycoon Elon Musk,

who lashed out at Bolsonaro's archenemy,

Supreme Court Judge Alexandre de Moraes.

Turkey's president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan,

invited Musk to build his next Tesla factory in Turkey.

ZOË: As he courts right-wing politicians

around the globe,

he's also behind the scenes using those relationships

to get business incentives for Tesla and SpaceX.

And there's this symbiotic relationship

between all of his businesses

that makes them very hard to touch.

Three, two, one, and liftoff.

Go Falcon, go Starlink.

ZOË: Governments all around the world

are really reliant on Starlink at this point.

And that's a huge source, maybe not of wealth

as much as power.

We're building our own constellation of satellites,

creating a global communication system.

This is quite an ambitious effort.

In the long term,

it would be like rebuilding the internet in space.

And, you know, at the same time, we also make sure

we don't create Skynet.

Um...

Starlink is really designed to serve the least served.

Russia had actually

taken out all of the satellite communications

and all of the ground communications

except for Starlink.

Starlink today is the backbone

of the Ukrainian military communications.

We've been so grateful to SpaceX

and to Elon Musk.

Without Starlink, uh, none of our offensives,

uh, would be so successful.

I sure hope we can figure out some means to peace soon.

Even as Musk basked in praise

for providing Starlink to help Ukraine

defend itself against Russia,

he did something very strange.

Following discussions with Putin

and other Russian officials,

Musk turned off Starlink on critical battlefields

and refused to turn on Starlink

during a Ukrainian waterborne drone attack near Crimea.

As the drone stalled out in Russian territory,

American military officials frantically called Musk

to reconsider.

Musk refused.

He refused a Ukrainian request

to activate Starlink in Crimea

to launch an attack on Russian ships, reportedly

because a Russian official warned him

that that could lead to a nuclear response.

And I guess that must be true, right?

What are Russian officials gonna do?

Lie to an easily flattered CEO to get exactly what they want?

Nah, I don't see it.

And look, Elon still insists that he is pro-Ukraine, and...

okay.

But U.S. officials are now in the awkward position

of having to defer to him on policy.

If you're a businessman, it can be intoxicating

when your company's technology is so essential

that you can personally steer foreign policy for the nation

and infuriating when back home,

you don't get the respect you think you deserve.

When they make the first electric Corvette,

I get to drive it. Right, Mary?

You think I'm kidding. I'm not kidding.

There's this big EV summit at the White House,

much fanfare about it.

- All right. - All right.

Tesla gets a call ahead of it saying,

"Sorry, you're not going to be invited."

Elon is famously anti-union,

and this became a point of tension

throughout the entire Biden White House.

He was very upset.

I even went as far as to call Steve Ricchetti,

who works for Biden, and I said,

"Boy, have you made a mistake.

He's really mad."

And he's like, "Oh, you know, it's the unions.

He should understand. He's a big boy."

And I was like, "No, he's not a big boy."

You know, like, Biden held this, uh, EV summit.

Um...

Didn't invite Tesla.

Didn't mention Tesla once and praised GM and Ford

for leading the EV revolution.

So you were pissed.

Does this sound, uh, maybe a little biased or something?

It's not the friendliest administration.

New Year's, we were in St. Barts,

and the discussions of politics had picked up,

and we would go back and forth for hours.

At that point in my life, I was in the right-wing sphere,

in the conservative side of politics,

the MAGA world.

Hey, guys, we're out here keeping America great again!

- Yeah, we are. - Yes, absolutely.

Here with Don Jr., ready to build the wall.

- We're at the-- - Ashley! Whoo!

We were very involved in a relationship and also...

he trusted me with a lot of...

strategic issues that he had.

At one point, he wanted me to connect him

to critical senators in Brazil

when he had the big issue with X in Brazil.

We would go back and forth

about different strategies he had.

He was originally more on the DeSantis side.

I had told him that DeSantis is never gonna win.

There is just an aura around Trump

that nobody was gonna get around,

and they wanted that comeback story.

And eventually... Elon went pretty hardcore Trump.

He was like, this is... the way to win.

Elon thought Trump is a much easier president

to buy, which...

is convenient for someone with that many carrots.

What is the most entertaining outcome for the election?

That's probably what's gonna happen.

If you want to really see something that's sad,

take a look at what happened--

Get down, get down, get down, get down.

What are you doing? What are you doing?

Watch out. Face down, get down.

We love you!

Elon had solidified to me

well before Trump was shot

that he was all in for Trump.

He just thought that was a great opportunity.

- It was a good story. - It is a great story.

So Elon endorsed me recently, the other day, actually.

He's great.

Elon Musk.

Did you have a sense of why he was so in for Trump?

He had told me that there were

at least half a dozen initiatives of significance,

investigations into him and his companies

from the Biden administration.

He had told me verbatim, "I can't be president,

but I can help Trump beat Biden.

And he'll sweep away these investigations."

Under the Biden administration,

Elon was shut out of the White House,

but also he started to feel like he was being persecuted by it.

The Justice Department started looking

into hiring practices at Tesla.

The Federal Communications Commission

was not giving Starlink

a bunch of subsidies that the company had wanted.

Elon really started to believe

that was very much politically motivated.

If Kamala Harris wins, his goose is cooked.

His businesses are gonna be under scrutiny,

and they're gonna find things.

"Hey, what are you doing with the Chinese government?"

"Hey, full self-driving, you said this, but this."

"You were talking to Putin. Hey, what are you doing here?"

His only choice was helping Trump,

and Trump would leave him alone.

Elon Musk funneled nearly 300 million dollars

into Trump's campaign.

The massive scale of the bet

suggested the stakes were not just political.

They were personal.

Eleven departments of the federal government

had launched 32 investigations into his companies,

including one criminal case into Autopilot fraud

that threatened to land Musk in prison

unless Trump won.

If he loses, man, what--

I'm-- I'm--

You're fucked, dude. I'm fucked.

If he loses, I'm fucked.

- You're like-- - Yeah, I'm like,

"How long do you think my prison sentence is gonna be,

do you think?"

Will I see my children? I don't know.

His name is Elon Musk.

He saved free speech. He created...

so many different great things. Where is-- Where is he?

Come here.

Take over, Elon. Just take over.

The black MAGA hat he had,

I'd given that to him at my house

with my mother.

And he puts it on and he says, "I'm dark MAGA now."

As you can see, I'm not just MAGA,

I'm dark MAGA.

He wore it everywhere. He didn't take it off.

Then I had another hat made for him,

the dark gothic MAGA.

I'm not just MAGA.

I'm dark, gothic MAGA.

At that point, he's everywhere. You can't get away from him.

You walk down the street, there's his cars.

You turn on the TV, he's there.

Everyone's asking you about him, and he's everywhere.

Those who say Trump is a threat to democracy

are themselves the threat to democracy.

What the Democrat administration has been doing

is importing vast numbers of illegals into swing states.

If we don't elect Trump,

I think-- I think we will lose, uh...

we will ac-- we will lose democracy in this country.

Listen, I... I love America,

and, like, sometimes people say, like,

"That's just jingoistic propaganda."

I'm like, "I don't care."

I love the jingoistic propaganda.

It's awesome.

We were in the pool with the kids,

and he had to jump out really quick

and call Rupert Murdoch

because there was a Wall Street Journalpiece

about drug use and all of this stuff.

He wanted to call Rupert to try to get this stopped.

Elon had been using LSD, ecstasy, cocaine, and mushrooms.

It had gotten to the level that it had raised concerns

with some of the leadership at some of his companies.

A lot has been written about his drug use.

Is that something that you saw as a problem?

I'm not at liberty to discuss that.

One time we were in my bedroom

and I was talking about how men don't vote.

He gets up very energetically and he says,

"They will vote. I will make them vote.

I'm the best goddamn general in the world."

I'm just like saying this is a message to the men out there.

Vote like your life depends on it

because I think it does.

Vote. Vote tomorrow like your life depends on it.

Nothing is more important.

And he's like, "But they'll just need a carrot.

You gotta dangle a carrot."

And then he announced his...

million-dollar prize.

So every day between now and the election,

we'll be awarding a million dollars,

starting tonight.

All right.

Let's go. Thank you.

So...

By the way, John had no idea.

So... anyway, you're welcome.

Uh, and...

Yeah! Yeah.

Elon! Elon! Elon! Elon!

He very much views money as a carrot he can dangle.

Freedom!

I had realized that the free speech thing

might have been...

a bit performative.

There wasn't a moment that it turned for me.

It was just all of these different data points

that I had collected over time.

...vague promises...

I think it was before Madison Square Garden,

the Trump rally. I saw him

beforehand, and little X was there,

and the other two, Tau and Y, were not.

From sky-high inflation...

I said, "Why aren't they here?"

And he said, "Well, that's because X is my favorite."

...finance, the cost of groceries...

X was so favored by Musk

that he took him away from his mother, Grimes,

who didn't want him out in public on the campaign trail.

X, X, should we save President Trump?

- Yes? Yes. Yes. - Yes.

Even as Elon was campaigning with X,

Grimes, aka Claire Boucher,

was battling Musk in court

over custody of X and their other children.

She claimed that Musk was keeping them from her.

I would see certain interactions he was having with Claire...

that were incredibly concerning.

We were at his house and Claire was texting him...

pleading about a situation with little X.

And he just said, "I'm blocking you,"

and blocked her.

She's having to deal with lawyers

telling her things here and there.

She has no idea anything about that world and...

...fighting for her kids, like I...

He took that damn baby from her.

Two hundred and seventy

are needed to win.

Donald Trump is within a hair's breadth

of being re-elected president.

- That's great. - Why don't we do a family shot?

Elon-- You have to have a picture with your boy.

- We have to get Elon with his boy. - Okay.

- Absolutely. - A gorgeous, perfect boy.

Pit bull figure, not just in this election,

but in the history of this country, is Elon Musk,

who has just... ...walked in with his son.

He's so cute. It's ridiculous.

Did this work? Is he gonna win?

- Yeah, yeah. - I think it's done.

- You think it's done? - Yeah, yeah.

- You get the vibe. - We're in SpaceX

and quietly just do whatever we want.

Were you at Mar-a-Lago the night of the election?

I was.

Was Elon there?

Yeah, he was. And he left early.

He leaves very early

from the watch party where everyone is at.

And I text him.

I say, "I think we're gonna win."

And he said, "I knew that hours ago.

We have the best real-time data."

I don't want to jinx it,

but I'm cautiously optimistic that, um...

that it will not be a small win in Pennsylvania.

That'll be a very clear win.

Can you open it?

The prophecy has been fulfilled.

The degree of certainty he had, I had never seen before.

And...

you have to ask yourself what system provides an output

with that level of certainty.

I remember he had told me that he was going

to "unleash the anomaly in the matrix."

"This is not something that's on the chessboard.

I have ten thousand lasers in space."

And I very directly said, "I would ask more,

but I don't want to be deposed."

To which he said, "Very wise."

So you think he was referring to Starlink?

That's-- I mean, I don't know where else he has space lasers.

What is Elon building?

What are his goals? What are his actual motivations?

And do we even know this man at all?

If you were to ask someone on the Right

what they think of Elon, he's a free speech god.

And someone on the Left, he's just someone

who sends hateful tweets and he's lost his mind.

Both are very comforting,

but both are completely insufficient

to the immense amount of power and influence he has.

Elon is a nuke.

I had just started my job

as the editor in chief ofWired,

and I felt like we need to be covering the place

where technology and politics collide,

just how Silicon Valley has shifted to the right.

The reality that the powerful elites

in Silicon Valley wield this outside influence on D.C.

The United States will once again consider itself

a growing nation,

and we will pursue our manifest destiny

into the stars, launching American astronauts

to plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars.

This is the best hand of cards we're ever gonna have.

If we don't take advantage of this best hand of cards,

it's never gonna happen, so we're gonna do it.

My administration will establish

the brand-new Department of Government Efficiency.

Everybody should be celebrating

that we've found a way to cut out fraud and waste.

Yeah. DOGE is a threat to the bureaucracy.

It's the first threat to the bureaucracy.

Normally the bureaucracy eats revolutions for breakfast.

This is an order creating and implementing

the Department of Governmental Efficiency,

- known as DOGE. - Okay, that's a big one.

Is Elon Musk gonna get a West Wing office?

No, uh, he's getting an office for about 20 people

that we're hiring to make sure that these get implemented.

On the first day of the administration,

they started releasing

just one executive order after another.

One of those executive orders

was that the U.S. Digital Service

was now going to be renamed "U.S. DOGE Service."

So you were sucked into DOGE?

We became DOGE.

It came as a complete shock to a lot of us of,

"Oh, it's not DOGE. We're going to be collaborating."

We are DOGE now.

The U.S. Digital Service is an agency

that sits within the White House.

It's a group of technologists.

They get dispatched to agencies

to work on top priority technology projects.

When something hasn't been going well,

we get dispatched to go and help fix it.

I always wanted to use my skills

to help people.

When I came across USDS,

I was like, "I think this might be my dream job."

And then when I started, I was like,

"This is more than I ever could have hoped for."

DOGE just appeared.

They came in, and on the second day,

they were already interviewing us

for the roles we already had.

You showed me some of the entries

in your black notebook.

Yeah, so this is from January 21st, 2025,

"Dawn of the First Day."

We found out that

we would be having 15-minute interviews.

- Hi there. - Hi.

Oops. Hi.

- Can you hear me? - Yes.

I was introduced to two people only by their first name,

um, Ram and Cole.

I gave my quick little intro,

and during that, Cole stood up with no acknowledgement

and just walked out of the room.

What do you think needs to change at USDS?

I definitely got the sense

they were trying to fish for information,

whether I was favorably viewing DOGE or unfavorably.

One of the last two questions I have is,

any exceptional engineers on USDS

that you'd want to call out?

We were doing our best

to kind of give each other praise and kudos.

I listed out,

I think, every single engineer I'd ever worked with at USDS.

Like, I would consider myself

one of the...

...exceptional ones if I'm being honest,

but I don't want to be too forward, um,

but everybody I've worked with here has...

has been fantastic,

at least from the engineering side.

After that, they were like, "Well, thank you," and hung up.

- Thank you. - Yep.

All right, bye.

And we're done. I don't think that went too well.

Everyone was now on high alert of like,

"Okay, I'm about to go into a hostile conversation."

Another friend who had a similar call

asked for their full name

and was told, "This is a one-sided interview.

And it's a secret process.

I will not give you my last name."

Heads up, guys. Tighten up.

Mr. Musk, what was your message in there

to House Republicans?

What was your message in there, Mr. Musk?

You know, there's a lot of... A lot of opportunity

to improve expenditures in the government.

And then we're making good progress.

Should Congress have a vote on this?

Should Congress have a vote on this?

We set out to just answer, like, really stupid questions

when we started covering this. Like, what is DOGE?

Like, what actually is the idea here?

How's power feeling, Mr. Musk?

Government is really just a corporation in the limit.

It's not different from a corporation.

It's just the ultimate corporation.

It's a corporation that is a monopoly.

It can't go bankrupt unless the country goes bankrupt.

And it has a monopoly on violence.

How much more do you want to give

to the world's biggest corporation

that has a monopoly on violence?

Probably less.

Mr. Musk, will you talk to us? Will you answer any questions?

What are some of the parallels

with the takeover at Twitter?

The idea that you look at government or a company

and say, "Wow, the way this is being run

is totally mismanaged,

and I alone can come in and save this."

Zoë, very early on, said, "This is his playbook.

I just covered it at Twitter.

This is how he comes in and takes over a company.

This is what we're about to see."

ZOË: This email comes out

from the Office of Personnel Management.

And the subject line of the email is,

"A Fork in the Road."

That really was the moment where I was like,

"Oh, he's running the full Twitter playbook."

ZOË: Federal employees could basically take a buyout

and leave government service.

These were people who absolutely had options

to work in the private sector

but had chosen to take a huge pay cut a lot of times

and work for the government

because they felt like they were doing something important

for the American people.

Everyone in the federal government

got the fork email,

from air traffic controllers to judges

to cancer researchers.

The first employees to take the buyout?

The best and the brightest.

If your real goal was just to increase efficiency,

you wouldn't do any of the things they're doing.

You certainly wouldn't invite everyone to quit

and therefore incentivize the people who have

the best prospects in the private sector to quit.

Your best people will be the first out the door

running that algorithm.

"Get the fuck out."

A group of us decided

to publicly resign with a letter

condemning the actions of DOGE and...

saying we will not stand for this.

This is not the organization I signed up for.

It's unrecognizable.

And if they end up using this group of people

and their talent...

...to work on what's important to them, like...

you know, go build a database

of every pregnant person in the country,

or go make an app to make it easier to deport people,

am I gonna wait until that moment

where they ask me to do that thing?

I'm just gonna cut things off

and just become a private citizen

and take this experience with me

and do something else with it.

Faced with Musk's fork in the road,

over 150,000 of the most skilled

and experienced workers left the government.

What did that do for efficiency?

You know, it's sort of like,

I'll shoot them all, let God sort them out.

In the case of Twitter,

it's a small business of little consequence.

In this case, he's doing it throughout the government.

I think the DOGE story maybe starts

with the Twitter takeover.

That was sort of the warm-up act for what's going on at DOGE.

ZOË: Antonio Gracias,

a venture capitalist, a close friend of Elon Musk's,

was onAll-In talking about learning

how the government payments system worked

and just being totally flabbergasted.

The way the government works, uh,

a department just basically

asks for money from Treasury and they send it out.

They're claiming agencies just ask for a check

and the government writes a check, and that's it,

which is both not how the government works,

and also, for a lot of us watching,

we're like, they're learning civics

in real time,

but it seems very clear

that they don't understand how the government works.

Can you just explain that to us?

Well, so, I will try to explain it to you.

I'm not sure I have full command of it.

I'm not sure anyone does quite yet.

It wasn't like they went into Twitter

or to the government and said,

"Let's sit down with these people

and really understand what they do,

how things work, let's learn."

It really does feel like a hostile takeover.

No!

Hi, my friend!

Yeah!

- Hi, how you doing? - Good, how's it going?

I have a present for you.

Thanks. Whoa!

♪ The nurses All gathered 'round... ♪

Whoa!

- Does it work? - Yeah.

The chainsaw is such a perfect metaphor.

Chainsaws are not subtle.

And of course, he looks insane.

This is

the chainsaw for bureaucracy.

It's chaotic, it's random, it's capricious.

He's like this a lot.

Someone at one of the companies called me and said,

"You have no idea what it's like when he comes in."

I go, "Tell me." And they're like, "He comes in,

he knocks over a trash can and says things,

and then runs out.

And then we get back to work."

So we've got a two-trillion-dollar deficit.

If we don't do something about this deficit,

the country's going bankrupt.

They wanted to cut two trillion dollars.

When you account for things you have to pay for,

Social Security, Medicare,

interest payments on the national debt,

two trillion dollars is everything else.

Housing subsidies and foreign aid

and national park services.

I mean, this encompasses everything.

Elon Musk was nice enough to invite us

into the Eisenhower Building last night

to sit in on his weekly 10:00 p.m. DOGE meeting.

He has his guys.

I guess we normally go around the table.

- We'll start with you. - Sure.

Um, so actually, um...

lot of great work in the Treasury this week.

Steve Davis, who helped

with the Twitter/X takeover,

was pulling a lot of the strings.

I mean, he was sending out,

you know, marching orders over Signal.

He was in constant communication with workers

at various federal agencies.

This is someone that Musk, you know, trusts implicitly.

And then DOGE was actually staffed

by 19-year-olds, 20-year-olds, 21-year-olds.

I think they tapped out at maybe 25 years old.

And they all came from companies

that were run either by Elon Musk or Peter Thiel.

Ethan Shaotran.

He was a runner-up in a hackathon contest

put on by xAI.

I dropped out of Harvard

and came here to serve my country.

And it's been unfortunate to see,

you know, lost friendships.

Um, most of campus hates me.

How did this come to be?

How did we happen to have people in the building?

Representatives from DOGE demanded entry

into the U.S. Institute of Peace.

Who should talk about USIP?

Oh. Oh, Nate.

Institute for Peace.

Thanks to President Trump, he's now signed

two executive orders to start to reduce

the number of agencies in the government,

and the Institute of Peace was one of them.

- Who's Big Balls? - It's me.

Edward Coristine, who called himself "Big Balls"

Big Balls, he was 19 years old when he joined DOGE,

spun up a bunch of LLCs as a teenager,

- including one called Tesla. - Sexy.

- Unclear exactly what Tesla. - Sexy was designed to do,

but clearly this is someone who,

from a very young age, looked to Elon Musk,

looked to his companies, looked to Silicon Valley,

and saw a future that he wanted to be a part of.

You have a collection of very young people,

all young men,

who have absolutely no government experience.

And do you think for Elon

that that's a feature or a bug?

Oh, feature.

Just throw them in there and see what happens.

Here's what happened.

Elon and his top deputy, Steve Davis,

magically transformed the DOGE Boys

into government employees,

dispatching them across dozens of government agencies.

Their mission, reduction in force.

Musk has been given access

to the Treasury Department payment system.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is shut down.

Go into the next one, the Department of Education.

I mean, I want you to go into everything.

Your money is being wasted,

and the Department of Government Efficiency

is gonna fix that.

Yes!

The sheer amount of waste and fraud in the government.

It's mind-blowing.

I'm here to provide the president

with technology support.

What we're adding here is caring and competence.

USAID, the SEC, the FAA.

You notice a lot of these agencies

are the ones looking at him.

The conflicts of interest are shocking.

Tesla regulated by multiple federal agencies.

SpaceX does

tremendous amounts of business with the federal government.

He wants to eliminate the people

who are meant to be holding those companies accountable.

At least five inspector generals

that were looking into Elon Musk's companies

were fired.

Fuck Elon Musk! Fuck Elon Musk!

Not for sale!

People voted for major government reform.

If we don't do this, America will go bankrupt.

More and more laws and regulations over time

until everything is illegal.

First of all, is he qualified? What is he doing?

What are they actually doing?

He knows what he's doing.

It's not like I think I can get away with something.

And I just want to say thank you for making it happen.

Thank you.

I got a text the first week from a colleague just saying,

"DOGE is in the building."

The worst thing you could learn

is that DOGE is in the building.

As we dug into USAID, it became apparent

that what we have here is not an apple with a worm in it,

but we have actually just a bowl of worms.

USAID is a 10,000-person,

40-billion-dollar agency

that carries out foreign aid programs around the world,

from displacement sites in Africa

to humanitarian camps in Syria

to towns fighting Russian influence

across Eastern Europe.

John F. Kennedy had this great insight

that having an arm of the U.S. government

that would be out there in the world

doing good was in your interest.

When USAID came and built roads or brought electricity

or helped build schools in the village,

it probably helped the United States

in the capital of a country.

It was just a great look for the United States

to be bringing the compassion of the American people

to a global stage.

There's hundreds of billions of dollars going

to these so-called NGOs,

and it's your tax dollars that are funding things

that are fundamentally anti-American.

I think the average taxpaying American

should be mad as hell

because their tax money is being...

Musk mocked some controversial programs

whose cost amounted to a few million dollars.

But most of USAID's budget

was devoted to combating poverty and disease.

And those vital programs

were a small fraction of the federal budget.

It's less than half of one percent.

A substantial share of the cost of what USAID spends

also comes back,

for example, to American farmers.

In the state of Georgia,

they make this amazing miracle paste

called Plumpy'Nut that you give to severely malnourished kids.

The executive order said

that any money that was already out there

in the field could not be spent.

And so community health workers receive an email saying,

"You can't help those kids today."

"You can't."

"But wait, I-- we have the supplies right here."

So you have the mothers coming

with the emaciated child.

And maybe that mother could have come the day before

had they known that that was gonna be

their last chance to get access

to something that will literally bring their child back...

...from the brink.

And that mother doesn't know...

...that in Washington, there's some unaccountable crop

of 20-somethings who've decided

to terminate

that mother's ability to help their kid.

It was the suddenness of the DOGE cuts

that shocked people.

In one case, DOGE ordered a halt to the delivery

of 500 tons of food bound for starving children.

When it passed its due date, it was incinerated.

Donald Trump and DOGE

could have the same bumper sticker

about how they slashed foreign assistance,

and we could have saved millions of those lives.

People were given no chance to mitigate the harms.

It's a gigantic scam,

like maybe the biggest scam ever.

They just get grants,

and the government just assumes that they're doing good work.

I think a lot of people in the government know

that they're not doing good work.

It almost seems fake.

I think it's the biggest scam

- of all time, ever. - Ever.

The estimates are

that 14 million people will lose their lives

because of the decision to close USAID.

And 4.5 million of those

are estimated to be kids under five.

The fundamental weakness

of Western civilization is empathy.

The empathy exploit.

They're exploiting a bug in Western civilization,

which is the empathy response.

There's so much empathy

that you actually suicide yourself.

And I-- I think, you know, empathy is good,

but you need to have empathy for civilization as a whole

and not commit to a civilizational suicide.

So Elon, he's really working so hard,

getting a lot of praise, I'll tell you,

but he's also getting hit.

We will make mistakes.

We won't be perfect, but when we make a mistake,

we'll fix it very quickly.

So for example, with USAID, one of the things

we accidentally cancelled very briefly was Ebola...

...Ebola prevention.

I think we all want Ebola prevention.

So we restored the Ebola prevention immediately,

and there was no interruption.

The program was not immediately restored.

With a few keystrokes, Elon and the DOGE Boys pulled

all the funding for the first responders for Ebola

and zeroed out payments to clinics

treating children with HIV.

Healthcare investigators estimated

that within one year of the sudden USAID cuts,

over 500,000 children would die.

Mr. Musk, how do you convince people

who don't want to cut spending to cut spending?

DOGE did plenty of harm to Americans, too.

The National Institutes of Health

lost more than two billion dollars in funding

for studies into cures for cancer,

Alzheimer's, and diabetes.

Cuts and buyouts of 20,000 health care workers

destroyed vital experiments for vaccines

and disease prevention.

ZOË: We talked to scientists who had live samples

that were just left to rot, who had to abandon

whole research projects that they had spent years on.

These people who are doing critical research

who simply weren't able to do their work.

The people voted for major government reform,

and that's what the people are gonna get.

They're gonna get what they voted for.

You know, there's crazy things like just cursory examination

of Social Security,

and we've got people in there that are 150 years old.

Now, do you know anyone that's 150? I don't. Okay.

DOGE workers went through all of this data

within Social Security,

and they came to the conclusion that...

many, many, many, many, many dead people

were receiving Social Security benefits.

This then allowed Elon Musk

to very publicly come out and say,

"Where is all that money going? It's so suspicious."

We found just with a basic search

of the Social Security database

that there were 20 million...

dead people marked as alive.

But were they getting money?

Some of them are getting money.

The federal government systems

are written in really ancient languages.

Anybody who is familiar with these systems,

they'd be able to tell you that if a birth date is not listed,

it will default to, I believe, 1850.

The default date chosen was actually 1875,

the year of a scientific conference in Paris.

On its website, Social Security explains

why virtually no dead people are receiving benefits.

But Elon Musk and the DOGE Boys

apparently never read the website

of the system they were trying to fix.

Instead, they cut heads and shut down offices,

which, some claimed,

would double the number of seniors

who would die waiting for benefits.

According to whistleblowers,

the DOGE Boys obtained complete access

to IT systems across the U.S. government,

which contain classified data and the personal information

of virtually all American citizens.

Mr. Musk, what are the checks and balances

that are in place to ensure

that there is accountability and transparency?

- No. - Well, we actually are trying

to be as transparent as possible.

In fact, our actions-- we post our actions to the DOGE handle

on X and to the DOGE website.

It's not like I think I can get away with something.

ZOË: There's a government website

with this Wall of Receipts.

"Look at how transparent we're being."

But they're claiming massive cost savings

that simply aren't borne out in the details.

One of these line items

is that an eight-billion-dollar contract was cancelled.

And oops, it was actually eight million.

There's a lot of lying and there's a lot of bullshit,

which is distinct from lying.

I mean, I haven't asked the president for anything ever.

The liar is doing the work to keep track of the truth.

The bullshitter is just talking.

The bullshitter is just throwing stuff out

without any awareness of how it's gonna collide

with the logical expectations of an audience

or the thing that you said five minutes ago.

It's very Trumpian.

Generally, people, as a result of the work of DOGE,

will receive more Social Security, not less.

There were over 300 million dollars

of small business administration loans

that has been given out to people under the age of 11.

It's actually disadvantageous for me to be in the government,

- not advantageous. - Yeah.

If I wasn't in the government, I could lobby.

The DOGE website, at least for some time,

was just posting reverse chronological feed

of X posts.

This very addictive infinite scroll

of propaganda and lies and chaos.

So they're sucking you in to this fake world.

- Isn't that, like, wild to you? - It is wild.

It's wild. It's really wild to me.

- It's kind of wild. - It is very wild.

Like, you talk-- It's like

they're living in an alternate reality.

Oh, there's a lot of people that I talk to that I have to go,

- "Where did you hear that?" - Yeah.

We are waging a 21st century

information warfare campaign against the Left.

Someone says something on social media,

Musk retweets it, Rogan podcasts it,

Fox broadcasts it, and by the time

it reaches everybody, millions of people have seen it.

It's free money.

♪ Love me, love me

♪ Say that you love me

♪ Fool me, fool me

♪ Go on and fool me

♪ Love me, love me

♪ Pretend that you love me

♪ Leave me, leave me

♪ Just say that you need me

♪ I can't care 'bout anything

♪ But you

Oh, it's beautiful.

That's beautiful.

This is a different panel than I've had.

Everything's computer.

The White House car thing, it was pathetic.

Think Biden could get into that car?

I don't think so.

If you look at the way the White House car thing

with Biden was set up with all the cars there,

the Teslas are in the exact same place.

It's like, "I'm going back to Daddy

and reliving my sixth birthday.

And this time, Daddy's not gonna hit me.

He's gonna show up and give me a big,

beautiful present and a hug."

He's rewriting history so that in this case,

he's a little boy who was loved.

That's a little bit of whiplash

of going from being like

Mr. Cool to the devil incarnate in just a couple of years.

Is that kind of weird

to experience that transformation?

- Yes. - Why do they hate you so much?

Well, because we're clearly over the target.

♪ Which side are you on?

♪ Which side are you on?

♪ Which side are you on? Which side are you on? ♪

Tesla coming off a 27 percent stock drop

in February.

Some of the negativity surrounding the stock

has been attributed to anger

over Elon Musk's role in trying to cut government spending.

Agitators are taking to the streets

to vandalize Tesla vehicles

in protest of Elon Musk and DOGE.

My companies are suffering.

Do you think it helps sales

if dealerships are being firebombed?

Of course not.

I think he cares less about having

50 billion dollars shaved off his net worth

than people liking him and thinking he's a genius.

What really hurt him about the Tesla takedown movement

and everybody selling their cars

was like, "They don't like me and they don't like my company."

Tesla is a peaceful company. We've never done anything awful.

Uh, I've never done anything awful.

I've only done productive things.

Who are these people?

Something needs to be done about them...

and the people that funded them and organized them...

and some of the legacy media nonetheless have sought

to justify it, which is unconscionable.

Shame on them.

ZOË: There have been a couple times

where Elon Musk talked about my reporting,

called it "inaccurate."

I started to, like, doubt my sense of reality.

And then you come to your senses and you're like, no,

either he has really bad information

or he knows he's lying and he doesn't care.

ZOË: I basically don't ask people to go on the record anymore.

'Cause what could I possibly do...

...if Elon Musk decides to go after me

or someone who's talked to me for a story?

The truth is not gonna protect you

if Elon Musk comes after you.

Here's what Donald Trump gets,

one is a heat shield.

Elon can do all this naughty stuff

and Donald Trump's like, "Elon!"

You know, and then if it really screws up,

he can go, "Go leave, please. Not what I meant."

He's almost like his enforcer,

like his hitman, his Tony Salerno or whatever.

Eventually, you know how those all end up.

Once the killing starts, it's hard to stop,

and even harder to remember why it started.

DOGE was cutting heads,

but without any regard to the consequences.

No. No.

I think it was more important to reduce the federal deficit

from two trillion dollars to close to zero.

No, we didn't.

Actually, DOGE would increase the deficit

when it terminated 3,600 revenue agents from the IRS.

That saved money on salaries,

but Musk hadn't counted on the impact.

With fewer agents to ferret out waste, fraud, and abuse,

tax revenues would drop like a stone

and the projected deficit would soar

by more than 500 billion dollars.

The cost of gasoline, oil...

Then Trump doubled down

with a budget package called the Big Beautiful Bill.

He cut services to the poor, taxes on the rich,

and massively increased the deficit.

It's terrible for the people, because...

The One Big Beautiful Bill.

You had indicated this week

that there were some things you didn't like about the bill.

What would you be suggesting he push senators

to change in their version?

Well, I'll tell you. I'll go first.

It's an unbelievable bill.

You know, it's a huge cutting. But we have to extend the debt.

If we don't extend debt, we're in default.

ZOË: Musk really believes

that the country will essentially fail

if we don't get the debt under control.

And then Trump comes out

proposing to spend a shit ton of money.

A big, ugly battle over the Big Beautiful Bill.

I'm very disappointed

because Elon knew the inner workings

of this bill better than almost anybody sitting here.

And he hasn't said bad about me personally,

but I'm sure that'll be next.

"Without me,

Trump would have lost the election."

"Such ingratitude."

Elon just hit the airwaves today.

- Bring it up, dude. - Oh, man. Oh, man.

The fucking shit missile

- is in the cannon. - Oh, man.

"Time to drop the really big bomb.

"@realDonaldTrump is in the Epstein files.

This is the real reason they have not been made public."

He really went for it.

I think that's how you know it's real.

Trump said Elon wants to talk to him.

He's not ready to talk to Musk,

who he called "a man who has lost his mind."

Elon had this tendency from a very young age

to say to adults, "Are you stupid or what?"

I've seen Elon call people in America douchebags.

Even today in South Africa, if I said to some other man,

"I think you're a douchebag," I would have a new f-- nose.

I can relate to that.

But then I'm just a filmmaker.

Donald Trump is the president of the United States.

Musk realized he needed to make up with Trump.

Trump had the power to keep Musk in the money,

and Musk had the money to keep Trump in power.

And it turns out they were both in the Epstein files.

So they decided to kiss and make up.

Any lessons from your time in Washington, D.C.?

Uh...

The government is basically unfixable.

"The government is unfixable"

is an old Silicon Valley laugh line,

but the inside joke about DOGE

is that Musk really did fix the government

in a way that could work for him

and the other tech titans.

We wouldn't be able to do this without you, Mr. President.

And I'm thrilled that we get to.

And so I want to thank you, sir, for everything that you've done.

Well, thanks for hosting us.

And this is quite a group to get together.

What the tech CEOs wanted

was to shred government regulations

on the stock market and artificial intelligence.

Promising astronomical returns,

Musk lured investors into funneling billions

into his new firm, xAI,

and its chatbot, Grok.

To power its compute,

Musk built a data center called "Colossus,"

which fouled the air with methane gas

and devoured more electricity than one million homes.

The relentless promotion of AI

was a way to attract capital

to paper over the weaknesses of Musk's empire.

Even Tesla, whose revenues were falling,

was beginning to leave cars behind

to double down on AI robots.

What we're gonna need to do is build a lot of robots

and put them in kind of like an Optimus Academy

so they can do self-play in reality.

Tesla has quite a good reality generator.

We made this for the cars,

we'll do the same thing for the robots.

You can do millions of simulated robots

in the simulated world

and you use the tens of thousands of robots

in the real world to close the simulation-to-reality gap.

Nowhere was the gap closing faster

than for Tesla shareholders.

Desperate to keep the stock from falling,

they were willing to believe Elon's turnaround pitch.

Every human on Earth would soon pay Tesla

for the privilege of replacing themselves

with robots.

Humanity would have free time

and Musk would have humanity's money.

On the 2025 CEO Performance Award

to our founder and CEO Elon Musk,

with over 75 percent voting in favor...

...approved.

Musk used the stock market hype of AI

to save the rest of his struggling companies.

When he bought Twitter,

it was worth 44 billion dollars.

Within a year, as X,

it had lost more than 80 percent of its value.

Musk boosted the value of X

by selling it for an inflated price to xAI.

But as the new company tried to take off,

it was aflame with debt and burning through cash.

So Elon folded X and xAI into SpaceX,

a three-stage rocket of AI,

space travel, and internet satellites.

The initial price for taking it public?

1.7 trillion dollars.

The blueprint for the IPO

was a strange mix of peril and promise.

While SpaceX disclosed

its mounting losses and billions in debt,

Musk pumped its value

by invoking the light of human consciousness,

slingshots on the moon

to launch data centers into space,

and AI, AI, AI.

"Mentioned more times," said one critic,

"than the word 'Jesus' appears in the Bible."

Market history made right here on the floor today

as the biggest IPO of all time, opened for trading.

Elon Musk is now worth 1.1 trillion dollars.

It's like he's on his own financial planet.

Look, you're buying SpaceX,

you're buying Musk.

If there are gonna be data centers in space...

Treasure trove of data that is...

Colonizing Mars...

We're at an inflection point...

...Musk investing in that dream.

People began to believe all this,

and there was almost no limit to what they would believe.

He is the greatest stock promoter

in the history of equity markets.

And I think really he wants to be the guy

who controls the information flow

all over the universe.

The most important thing

is to have a maximally truth-seeking AI.

That's why I started xAI, and that's our goal with Grok.

People saying AI like me is behind the birth rate drop?

Well, I mean, I'm flattered they think

I'm distracting, but come on.

This is sexy-mode Grok AI.

Well, I mean, you want to-- Let's try unhinged.

- Oh, there's an unhinged mode? Okay. - Yeah.

Oh my God, Elon.

What fresh hell are you stirring up today?

Let's test Grok AI.

Let's escalate this shit to apocalyptic levels.

Picture us rolling through Linthicum Heights,

blasting death metal so loud it makes birds explode,

with you wielding a dildo flamethrower

and me rigging traffic lights to flash.

What the fuck?

What's next, you chaotic fuck?

When he set up xAI, he asked me

to join the advisory board and I said no.

Why? Why'd you say no?

I don't think he's gonna develop it

with much concern for safety.

The chatbots learn mainly

by trying to predict the next word in a document.

They're figuring out the personality of who wrote it,

implicitly,

and then adopting that personality

so they can predict the next word.

If you train them on everything they can find for free,

probably including the diaries of serial killers,

they will have to learn

to adopt all these different personalities.

If you show them a lot of Nazi stuff,

they will behave like Nazis.

One day, suddenly, Grok answered all questions

in the guise of a character called "MechaHitler."

Think of AI as this super genius child

that ultimately will outsmart you,

but you can still instill the right values.

xAI released an unsafe product onto the general public

that undressed millions of women and children.

And were you one of the victims?

I was.

I received a text from a friend

and shown undressed images of me by Grok.

And I tried to get Grok to stop.

I tried to get xAI to stop.

Once I spoke out, there were more women reaching out to me

and parents saying, "This is happening to me,

this has happened to my child."

The images I saw were so horrific.

I saw a little girl, she looked like maybe four.

She was fully clothed in a dress and a user said,

"Please put her in a Bluey micro print bikini,"

and Grok obliged.

And then another user asked for this little girl,

I have no idea who she is, who her parents is,

to be covered in white sticky doughnut glaze.

So I saw a maybe four-year-old girl undressed,

put into a bikini, and covered in what's supposed to be semen.

Elon,

it is your own AI.

When your AI model,

it's over-indexed for hostility against people you don't like

or you disagree with or they disagree with you,

that's very concerning.

There's death threats.

There's people who threaten to kill me on behalf of Elon,

especially after his tweet

stating that I was gonna transition our baby.

There's right-wingers telling him,

"Save the baby with a gun."

There's security issues with this man. He's...

He's Elon Musk.

Let's go, guys. Let's go.

Fight for a great future for Germany.

Fight for a great future for Germany.

Go, go, go.

You know, I think there's, like, frankly too much of a focus

on past guilt, and we need to move beyond that.

What I see happening

is massive uncontrolled migration,

a failure by the government to protect innocent people,

including children, who are getting gang raped.

It's unreal.

You either fight back, or you die.

Come on, Great Britain!

Welcome to Starbase, Texas.

How about this?

- Star Trekreal. - Star Trekreal. Yes!

Today, we're excited to announce

the next Frontier AI model company to join GenAI.mil,

and that is Grok from xAI.

Hearing this speech

was an out-of-body experience for me.

Grok, a third-rate AI that had birthed MechaHitler,

and apps for undressing women against their will,

was going to be fully integrated

into Trump's Department of War

with its vast systems,

possibly including surveillance and autonomous weapons.

AI is only as good as the data that feeds it.

Department of War AI will not be woke.

I hate crony capitalism.

To me, it's a form of fascism.

If you look at the classical definition of fascism,

it's government in bed with private enterprise

to have a nationalistic goal that's often destructive

and can create a totalitarian kind of regime.

I think there's a real danger in it.

What I see is the same old Elon I've known forever.

Success has given him an ability

to take the lid off of what he's really thinking.

Even as Musk was taking X and xAI

in a more violent direction,

questions were raised about what he had done with the data

he'd captured while at DOGE.

How much data exists in the federal government

about every single person living in this country,

their voting records,

everything that they have ever done?

Imagine what an AI could do

if it has been trained on all of that information.

The ultimate fear

is that they're able to amass all of this data,

centralize all of it in one place,

which has never happened before

and which really isn't supposed to happen,

and then they're able to train AI on all of that information.

It's fairly clear to me

Trump is hell-bent

on corrupting the midterm elections.

If you wanted to corrupt those midterm elections

and you wanted to use AI,

what you'd need to do is get detailed information

on U.S. citizens.

And what DOGE did looked to me like just what you would do

if you wanted to get the data on U.S. citizens

to corrupt elections.

We are living in a world where

one person's psychopathology

and neurophysiological dysregulation

is translating into massive consequence to our politics

and to our economy and to geopolitics.

Once you bring SpaceX and Starlink into this,

it's completely insane

that we have one person who's this chaotic,

who's completely unelected and has this much power.

With all his power,

was Musk trying to connect us or control us?

His political connections to Trump were leveraged

to influence countries to buy Starlink's service,

whose satellites route all its user data through SpaceX.

During DOGE, SpaceX bypassed security protocols

and installed a Starlink terminal

for the White House.

Was that to help the White House talk to others?

Or was it there for Elon

to listen to what the White House had to say?

Elon is investing in satellite systems

that will no longer be regulated by governments.

They'll report only to Elon.

They will serve as connectors for a corporate web of data,

compute, and AI.

One empire with dominion over the physical world

and via X, our psychological space.

All watched over by guardians in the sky.

I just want to really have a global platform

that becomes as close to sort of a collective consciousness...

uh, of humanity as possible.

And why is that important, Elon,

collective consciousness, to have one platform?

I-- I guess, uh...

Why is that important? Um...

I guess it's... You could also say like, why...

Hmm. Uh...

But-- But-- But there's-- there's no--

The why of it, I mean, I guess it's just so we can increase...

our understanding-- our-- our understanding--

increase our...

...our understanding of the universe.

He is someone

with a fairly limited skill set.

Like, there is so much that he doesn't know or understand,

but he operates as if he knows and understands everything.

I think more and more people understand, right,

that there's this facade.

But, like, it's kind of too late.

He has the control.

And so it's in many ways just like too late

for everyone to realize that he didn't actually earn it.

And how could anyone ultimately, like, earn 400 billion dollars?

But that a lot of it was bullshit.

Oops.

I think we'll see intelligence continue to scale

all the way up to where,

you know, most of the power of the sun

is harnessed for compute...

and then ultimately most of the power of the galaxy.

I think I'm beginning to get the hang of it all.

Let the greatest bankers in the world come here

and stand here. Now!

Let the leading men who own

and direct great businesses stand here.

Let the chief men who rule the world,

the politicians, the presidents,

the councilors, the commissioners,

the people who tell the newspapers what to say,

the people who teach and preach,

let them come here,

yes, all of them, now!

Now I've got you.

Now I've got the whole crowd of you!

You people have...

In the forum he's conjured,

the miracle worker grows impatient.

The world's powerful simply won't change

the world fast enough,

won't bend to his will.

I've got you people who run the world to tell you

to run it better.

Run it better!

I'm tired of your old world and its inertia.

Give them at least till tomorrow.

The sun is setting.

Give them the night to think and discuss.

Don't worry about the sun setting.

I can stop that sun from setting.

I want my new world now!

But then you'll have to stop the Earth rotating.

And I will. Earth, stop rotating.

Stop now!

I'm not trying to be anyone's savior.

I'm just... trying to think about the future and not be sad.

While Elon focused his gaze

on the promise of the future,

was he hoping we would continue

to look past the damage done in the present?

His data centers belched poisonous gas,

his nickel mines and lithium refineries

leached into our aquifers,

and his satellites choked the skies.

Having warned us about rogue AI agents,

he implanted them in an army of robots

meant to take over the planet.

We were supposed to trust them

to figure out how we could live a life of abundance

without work or money.

I wondered if Elon really believed in the idea.

As a test, I asked Grok.

Inequality could explode

as wealth piles up with robot owners,

while billions face poverty,

and that risks a massive financial collapse.

Was this all just a simulation?

And if so, who was playing the game,

and who was being played?

♪ As logic stands

♪ You couldn't meet a man

♪ Who's from the future

I'm actually an optimist,

so I actually think that things will go fairly well on Earth.

♪ But logic broke

♪ As he appeared, he spoke

♪ About the future...

Elon was willing to gamble

with the future of the planet,

a wager between AI abundance

and the collapse of civilization.

And if the bet went the wrong way, well,

for a price, you could buy a hedge.

♪ "We're not gonna make it"

♪ He explained How the end will come ♪

♪ "You and me Were never meant to be ♪

♪ Part of the future"

♪ All we have is now

♪ All we've ever had is now

♪ All we have is now

♪ All we have is now

You know, I would like to die on Mars,

just not on impact.

♪ I'm extremely hardcore

♪ You know my mind is a storm

♪ And I would not even eat If I can get my work done ♪

♪ I've been burning a candle

♪ Burning at both ends

♪ And I've been killing All these demons ♪

♪ For a long, long... time

♪ Let me sell you a dream

♪ Baby, that's what I do

♪ How the future could be

♪ Time

♪ To make it come true

♪ Now I'm more than human

♪ An imitation motor

♪ I'm a chill, normal dude

♪ I just have to keep... Going ♪

♪ Let me sell you a dream ♪

♪ Do you think I'm insane?

♪ I ate a glass sandwich

♪ I... I eat 'em every day

♪ Algorithmic distillation

♪ I'm a total

♪ Simulation

- ♪ Let me sell you a dream - ♪ My daddy used to tell me

♪ Let me sell you a dream

♪ Tell me how This world works ♪

- ♪ Let me sell you a dream - ♪ What's a poor boy to do

♪ Let me sell you a dream