This is an edited transcript of an episode of “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the conversation by following or subscribing to the show on the NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.
At the beginning, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency seemed to have a fairly narrow mandate. The Trump executive order creating it says that the purpose of D.O.G.E. is “modernizing federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity.”
But in the last couple of weeks, it has become clear that Musk’s role is a whole lot larger than that. He has gained access to information technology systems, dismantled the U.S. Agency for International Development and unleashed a fire hose of attacks on his platform, X, accusing the bureaucracy of various conspiratorial crimes.
And so far, at least, Musk’s patron, Donald Trump, seems to be on board.
Archived clip of Donald Trump: I think he’s doing a great job. He’s a smart guy, very smart, and he’s very much into cutting the budget of our federal government.
As I’ve watched all this unfold, I’ve been wondering how Elon Musk has evolved: How did he go from a conventional Obama-era liberal who worried about climate change and wanted to go to Mars to a right-wing conspiratorial meme lord, working to elect the far-right in Germany and shred the federal government in the United States?
What led to this evolution for Elon Musk? And what actual strategies is he bringing to the government that he now seems to have quite a lot of control over?
To talk about all this, I wanted to invite Kara Swisher on the show. Kara is one of the great tech reporters of this age. She’s been covering Musk for many years, along with many of the other tech chief executives who have become such key political figures now. She’s, of course, a host of the great podcasts “On With Kara Swisher” and “Pivot,” which she co-hosts with Scott Galloway, as well as the author of “Burn Book: A Tech Love Story.”
Ezra Klein: Kara Swisher, welcome back to the show.
Kara Swisher: Thank you. I’ve never been here but —
You’ve been on my show before.
I have not.
Yes, you have. I’m going to go back and show you receipts.
Oh, that’s because I suggested you do podcasts. You’ve done rather well.
A master class in interviewing from Kara Swisher, it was called.
Wow. I must have forgotten it. [Laughs.]
[Laughs.] It was such a seminal moment. Well, it’s good to see you.
Good to see you.
How would you describe the role Elon Musk has been playing in the federal government in the first weeks of Donald Trump’s second term?
Well, a little more strongly than The New York Times did. They’re sort of treating it like: Isn’t this an interesting person walking through? I think he’s a one-man show. Wrecking ball, really. And he’s being used by Trump for that purpose.
He’s — there are lots of ways you could use metaphors. You could say junkyard dog. He’s the one sort of taking all the flack, going in and breaking things. But you could be funny and call him Wreck-It Ralph. I don’t think it’s particularly funny or the right way to do it or constitutionally sound.
He’s going in there like he does with his companies and doing the exact same thing. He’s got a series of moves that he makes every single time. And he’s doing them writ large on the federal government.
Walk me through the moves. What is his playbook?
It has morphed over the years. But there’s always a massive amount of drama centered on him. That tends to be the thing he does. He can be very dramatic in a very poignant way.
There was a period where he was very worried about the fate of Tesla, and he was sleeping on the floor there. And he gave an interview to The New York Times where he seemed to cry. He seemed very emotional. And at one point when we were talking — this was, I think, off-camera — he said: If Tesla doesn’t survive, the human race is doomed.
Which I felt was a little dramatic. And I thought: Wow, this is a man in his 40s who thinks that he’s the center of the universe. So it always has that element of drama.
I think he’s greatly informed by video games. Someone described him to me as Ready Player One, and everybody else is an N.P.C. — a nonplayer character. He always has to be the hero or the person who matters the most. Sometimes he does, and sometimes he has engineered it — getting the founder role when he’s not actually the founder or rewriting history or using public relations to make himself the founder.
He understands the hero’s journey kind of thing rather well. Also the stakes have to be very high, and if it doesn’t work, we’re doomed. He tends to overstate problems. Most companies have problems, but: Everything is a disaster here, and I’m here to fix it. Or: Everything sucks, and everybody previously is criminal or evil or “pedophiles.” A word he likes to use a lot.
In one tweet, he called Yoel Roth, who was head of trust and safety at Twitter, “evil.” And said that I was “filled with seething hate” — which is really dramatic and ridiculous. I’m not seething with hate.
Very Trumpian.
Yes, that kind of thing. I think he means it, though. Trump sometimes is just doing it for show — a reality show kind of thing.
One thing we’re seeing right now with Musk in the federal government is an identification of choke points of information and money: the Treasury payment system, the Office of Personnel Management, which is a place where Musk has installed trusted aides. And they’re using that as a way to fan out across the federal work force.
Beneath the grand narrative Musk tells, when he takes things over, what does he actually have the people under him do? What is the theory of action?
He has people around him who are just enablers. All these Silicon Valley people do. All his minions. And they are minions — they’re all lesser than he is in some fashion, and they all look up to him. They’re typically younger. They laugh at his jokes. Sometimes when he apologizes for a joke, which is not very often, he’ll say that the people around him thought it was funny.
When he was being interviewed at Code Conference once, he had a couple of them there. He told a really bad joke, and they all went like: Ha-ha-ha-ha. And I was like: That’s not funny — I’m sorry, did I miss the joke? And they looked at me like I had three heads.
What they do is — it’s not that hard to figure out choke points. They go into it in this way that is violating of typical rules. And I don’t mean necessarily laws — although I suspect many laws may have been broken here. But not caring about breaking laws.
So they go in full force and question: Let me see your code. Why can’t we get in? We’re getting in. We have the law. We have federal marshals. Let’s see what they’ll do.
That is a really big quality that Musk has: Let’s say things and wait for them to sue us or wait for them to stop us. They won’t stop us.
Again, very much like Trump: The people don’t stop you.
We just operate on a set of polite rules in society, and they just barrel right through them.
I want to zoom in on that breaking of rules. I think something Musk understands — and that Trump has understood in different ways — is that at high levels of society, the recourse for breaking a law or a rule is legal. You don’t get frog-marched out, typically. What happens instead is that somebody sues you.
But they need to have standing, and it works its way through the courts. It all moves slowly.
So a lot of law following and rule following is just a norm at that level. You follow the laws, and you follow the rules. If you don’t, you can move much faster than the courts are likely to move.
They can fire all these people — many of them potentially illegally, given civil service protections. And then what? They’re going to sue over the course of six to nine months or four years — and maybe get some back pay. Corporations do this against people organizing unions all the time.
But a lot of what has constrained other executive branches is not actually a constraint. Because by the time the legal system catches up, you’ve already achieved what you want to achieve. It’s a pretty profound insight.
Yes, it is. And if he gets caught, he’s willing to pay. He’s willing to go toe-to-toe legally. And I think where a lot of people are is: I don’t want to fight this guy. He has unlimited money.
Journalists have to think twice. It’s very similar to these media companies settling: CBS has done nothing wrong in this Kamala Harris situation, and yet they’re going to pay. It’s pretty clear that Meta did nothing wrong with Trump, and yet they’re going to pay. You do it to make it go away, or you don’t do it at all because of the exhaustion. And he understands that he can wear them down.
So it is true. If you blow lights, you mostly get away with it, right? You don’t always get caught. Or if you don’t pay bills. Or in his business life: Let’s blow up 90 rockets, because the 91st will work. And that’s his attitude toward pretty much everything, as far as I can tell.
Although to be fair to him, it has led to some amazing rockets.
It did. But who else gets to? Then he insults NASA. NASA can’t blow up rockets, because if they blow up one rocket, that’s the end of it. So it’s a real advantage to be able to blow up rockets and then keep going.
There’s a famous Thomas Edison quote that they all repeat back to me: I have not failed, I’ve found 10,000 ways that don’t work.
Whatever. It’s part of the ethos of tech that there’s no such thing as failure. There’s only: It didn’t work that time, and I’ll get the right one next.
But this gets to, I think, the deeper question here. There are all these tactics and strategies. But toward what?
When he was blowing up rockets, he was trying to make rockets that work in a certain way. And eventually he did, and I think the world, frankly, is better off for him doing it.
Tesla had many failures but really did make better electric cars than anybody else and helped the electric vehicle transition happen.
What does he want now, though? What, in your view, is the vision he’s trying to effectuate with all this power that he now wields in the government?
It’s not money. I hate to say this, but it’s not that important to many of them. Some of them really like money, that’s for sure. But it’s the power that money brings, and it’s the power to decide.
I think it started off with: I have some good ideas, and I’d like to put them into place. And now it’s: I have all the ideas on every topic, and therefore what I say goes.
It’s a very kinglike attitude toward things: Screw Congress, screw the courts. We should have a king, essentially — a chief executive who has unlimited power.
He also does have a really weird sense of mortality, in a way. He wants to be legendary. Again, go back to video games. I think he wants the glory of it. He has those images in his head. And that’s not by way of excuse. It’s by way of explanation — that this is how he looks at himself, as on a grand journey of the hero.
He’s not a hero, by the way — let me be clear.
I agree that he wants power for his ideas, but it has always been a little bit mysterious to me what led to this striking radicalization in him. Because the ideas that Musk seems committed to have changed.
Peter Thiel, who cofounded PayPal with him, has always been pretty far right. You can go back to things he was writing at Stanford.
But Musk was a kind of standard Obama-era liberal. He has a series of companies that are solving problems that are important to Obama-era liberals. Those companies survive off Obama-era policies — from government contracts to electric vehicle subsidies, loan guarantees.
Tesla was saved by an Obama loan guarantee. And even in 2017, Musk joins an advisory board with Trump and then he gets back off it when Trump pulls out of the Paris climate accords.
So you have someone who is running public-private partnerships, working endlessly with the government, working on things like climate change. And within a compressed matter of years, he moves very far to the right.
You’re right. During the Obama years, he was supportive. When he joined that Trump thing — we texted a lot during that period, and he was like: They’re trying to do an anti-gay thing. I’m going to get in there and stop them. He was very much like: I need to be here to change Trump’s mind. Only I can change it.
He wasn’t anti-Trump, but he certainly wasn’t pro-Trump, I can tell you that. He was very much in the con-man school of thought with Trump.
Around Covid, I saw a lot of changes. I talked to him quite a lot, and people give me a hard time for having done that. I get it. But he wasn’t that off-the-beaten track before. I mean, he was megalomaniacal. He was typical of a tech person but doing more interesting things. There was a real shift during Covid. I noticed it. He got overly upset and overly dramatic.
Look, I mean, if you think your company is critical for the future of the human race and then California closes it down because of Covid, you get in that mode. He got very unreasonable. And in one interview I did with him, he started saying only a few thousand people — or whatever, I don’t remember precisely — were going to die from Covid, and he had read all the studies, and he knew, and I didn’t.
He’s never liked unions or the government or regulation. That goes way back for all these people. And so it became more profound during Covid, this idea.
I think the issues around his trans daughter seemed to have affected him quite profoundly. I’ve noticed that in a number of tech people who have trans children. They suddenly become — like, losing their mind, essentially.
The second thing I think The Wall Street Journal has correctly reported on is his use of ketamine and other drugs. So I think that was another thing that seemed to have changed him. Although they all use drugs —
I know a lot of people who use ketamine. They don’t tend to turn that far politically right.
It was also staying up late at night. He has this weird proclivity to be up at 3:00 in the morning. He’s got an obsessive personality. We all have that element to us, but he’s got it in spades.
I keep saying this to people — and I said it at the time when Biden did not invite him to that E.V. summit and invited Mary Barra instead and treated him shabbily. He was very upset. Like, very.
I talked to him a lot about it — or he texted me. And other people noticed it, too. This was a summit that Biden had, and he couldn’t invite him because of the union issues. Musk was very virulently anti-union, so they didn’t invite him. And he was very upset — personally upset. Wounded, almost.
I even went as far as to call Steve Ricchetti, who worked for Biden. And I said: Boy, have you made a mistake. You should bear-hug this guy. He’s really mad.
And Steve Ricchetti was 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.
The Biden people are all very relational. For them to have missed what a relational snub like this could do to somebody with his ego — it’s a mistake at the kind of politics they were supposed to be so good at.
Steve is a lovely guy. I actually ran into him at a movie premiere for “Wicked,” and he goes: Guess you were right. And I’m like: Guess so.
The way Musk takes slights is really strange. I had seen it in action — sort of petty anger and slight slights. And that one really stuck hard. And the Biden people kept tweaking him.
You could be like: So what? But I’m like: Why would you do that? He actually does deserve the accolades around Tesla. So why not just give him that? And I never understood why they wouldn’t, despite the union stuff.
There’s a factor you haven’t mentioned here, which is Twitter. The Wall Street Journal has a piece from years ago where it’s tracking his number of tweets, year by year. From 2012 to 2014, you begin to see it really explode. And by 2018, he’s really off to the races.
There’s a lot going on in his use of Twitter. And obviously, he eventually buys Twitter. But he clearly becomes very influenced by some quite radically right subcultures on Twitter.
I don’t know what the chicken and the egg is here, but he doesn’t become a normal Republican. He doesn’t even become, in some ways, a normal MAGA Republican. He’s not like Steve Bannon or something. He falls into a world of Twitter anons and —
Well, let’s start off with joking stuff. He loves dank memes.
You know him so much better than I do. But the couple of times I have been around him — and this was years ago, before he was who he is now — I would tell people: He was the smartest 15-year-old boy in the world.
That’s a very good way to put it. Yes.
So he got really into the memes. And this was always a real door into a dark right wing on that particular platform.
It always is. I have experiences with my own son. He loves dank memes. He always sends me dank memes or whatever. And you can fall down it very quickly.
And I think that’s what attracted him to Twitter, for sure. And then it took off into a much darker place. He’s an addictive personality, clearly. Whether it’s to work or — “hard-core” is one of his favorite words, which I find to be hustle porn.
He’s attracted to addiction. So his Twitter use is — you can see it. It’s manic. And he’s a manic person. Again, not an excuse, but an explanation. He has a manic personality — and violative.
But all the time he would send dank memes. He retweeted them. He loved that world. And he really was affected when the Babylon Bee people — this was a right-leaning Christian humor site, and they were shut down by Twitter over a trans thing. They gave one of the Biden officials who was trans a man-of-the-year award. It really got him upset.
And it was stupid and rude — but why take it down? I agreed with him. Why take the stupid thing down? But they did. And that really got him going, for sure.
There’s also a reality that, in a way that is unusual among people of his class, he’s really good at social media. In the way young people are — not in the way Barack Obama is.
I don’t think he’s good. My kids are always like: Cringe.
Fair enough. But there is an official voice of social media — the voice Mark Zuckerberg used to have before he became an Elon Musk imitator online. Or the voice that you would get from Obama or Bill Gates.
And Musk isn’t in that voice. He’s constantly responding to small follower accounts. And he really does build up an attentional power that he didn’t have before. He loves attention. But he also uses it to drive meme coins higher. I think he begins to understand what you can turn attention into — in a way other people don’t, because he’s experimenting with it.
What set him apart from the other people who superficially looked like him that made him temperamentally suited to doing that?
His manic nature, right? It’s got a manic-addictive quality to it. And he does have a sense of humor. It’s not my sense of humor, and people will hate me for saying this, but it can be rather charming. When he was on “Saturday Night Live” —
Archived clip of Elon Musk: Look, I know I sometimes say or post strange things, but that’s just how my brain works. To anyone I’ve offended, I just want to say I reinvented electric cars, and I’m sending people to Mars in a rocket ship. Did you think I was also going to be a chill, normal dude?
He was so awkward that it was charming. And other people are going to say: Kara loves him. Well, I don’t care. Go watch it —
Do you really have all these people in your life who are surprised when, as a reporter in tech —
Oh, yes: You made him.
Oh, my God — they’re so exhausting. I have to tell you, sometimes the left is so ridiculously censorious. I don’t want to use “censorious.” They’re just scoldish. They’re not censoring in any way. They can say whatever they want.
But yes, I get a lot of like: You made him — like you didn’t know it —
Well, I didn’t know how he was treating his kid. I’m sorry — I didn’t know that. And had I known I would have —
You also didn’t make him. The car company was successful because the cars were good.
I was covering him as a car manufacturer.
Look, I’m not going to make an excuse. Silicon Valley has a million people like him. He was very typical — except he was doing more interesting things than other people.
So getting back to how he’s good at it: I once wrote a column in The Times — when I was writing for The Times — about the two people I thought were very good — which were Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Trump. Kim Kardashian is another person who’s like this. You don’t have to like any of these people, but boy, are they good at channeling themselves as an image online. And it feels genuine. It feels like them doing it, and it is them doing it. It feels like it’s their voice.
People love when someone that famous reacts to them and then it creates a sensation around them. So then you get a lot of acolytes: Oh, my god, Elon Musk responded to me.
And he feeds off that, too. And again, he initially combined humor with that or insights to interesting things. And then it has very quickly twisted into stuff he doesn’t know anything about. He just pontificates, and that’s his favorite thing — to say all manner of nonsense and inaccuracies about things he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
I remember being at Code years ago, and you all had Musk onstage. You talked through how he believed in the simulation hypothesis, which is a hypothesis that you should expect that any sufficiently advanced civilization will begin running simulations of the world.
There will be more simulations than there will be base realities. So by a simple matter of arithmetic, we are more likely to be living in a simulated world than in the real world. And Musk said he bought this and thought there was a pretty low chance we were in base reality.
He said there’s a non-zero chance. And it fascinated him —
Well, that’s what I was going to get at. Not the simulation hypothesis. I think people can make too much of whether or not that idea matters. But I think he has always had a mind that is attracted to unusual ideas.
The things that most people believe are probably wrong — what you can and can’t do, what is and isn’t true. And he has been proven right a number of times in very big, profound ways.
Now he’s the richest man in the world. He has the most attention in the world. That’s going to change your psychology.
One thing that then seems true, though, is that he doesn’t just get attracted to unusual ideas, but he gets more conspiratorial as I watch him on Twitter. And I’m curious how you understand that dimension of him.
Kevin Roose, The New York Times journalist, did a great thing about that. You go down this rabbit hole, and it can really be: Well, did you know this? Everybody is subject to it with the way social media works.
And that’s the mind of technology people. They’re like: This could happen. We could go to the moon. You have to have that element to you if you’re going to do very difficult things. You have to start with that personality. And therefore every single thing is open to question: Why do we do it this way?
It’s a personality trait I like. But what happens is, when they start to get to Ukraine or vaccines or whatever, they have to question everything and posit themselves.
I always joke about it with my wife: Oh, yet another bold truth teller. I’m so tired of them. I’m here to boldly tell you the truth without any actual information or reporting.
So he’s attracted to ideas like the simulation. Like: Why can’t we live on Mars?
Not everybody does that. And I think it starts off from a good place. But often, in the social media world — as Kevin correctly put out in that podcast he did — it goes down into the conspiracy theory avenue really quickly.
But it’s a very specific kind of conspiracy theory he gets into. He responds to someone who tweets that Jews “have been pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them.” And Musk replies: “You have said the actual truth.”
And in July 2024, just before he came out in support of Trump, he accused Democrats of trying to “import as many illegal voters as possible.”
And in this way, I think what is going on with him is a little bit distinct from a lot of the people who superficially have similar politics. Because I think he’s really bought into a lot of great replacement theory.
Yes. So have a lot of people in Silicon Valley. Let me say: He’s not alone. This Curtis Yarvin stuff. They’ve all sort of been taken by these — it’s almost religious, if you think about it.
One of the things that I think it goes back to — and I hate to say this — is: sad little boy who wasn’t loved enough as a child is searching for meaning, is searching for love. And again, not an excuse, because I think he’s become a terrible person, and he should get therapy.
But when there are easy answers like that — Oh, this is why you’re so unhappy. Oh, this is why the world is the way it is — these right-wing conspiracies do scratch an itch for these people.
It’s a religion. It’s their answer to the world.
It’s also a politics. Musk is South African. Peter Thiel spent much of his childhood in South Africa. David Sacks is South African.
I’ve never quite known how much weight to put on this interpretation, but it seems relevant and interesting that Thiel, Musk and Sacks, who are three of the most significant figures in Silicon Valley’s embrace of Trump, have this very distinctive political experience of watching South Africa’s white minority move from being in control of the country to a frightened minority in the country.
There is that element to a lot of these people. And the same thing with Silicon Valley people.
Again, when you merge that with the ideas around Silicon Valley — which is highly male, highly we have all the answers — it’s like: Why are these silly people in our way?
And with the South African thing — I don’t know. I don’t know what happened there that created this group of people. But you could say that about people who come from Russia or China. Or there’s an element of a whole bunch of people who immigrated from India. They bring with them whatever culture happened there.
And it’s South Africa. You can go one of two ways: The Athol Fugard way or this way of longing for pastimes in some fashion.
Musk eventually buys Twitter. It’s a sort of unusual acquisition, and he tries to get out of it while it’s happening. But he does buy it. And he comes in and immediately slashes right through it. People talk about this as head-count reduction. They talk about it as cutting waste or cutting bone.
But when you look back on it now, what it was — both in reality and culturally in Silicon Valley — was a C.E.O.’s reassertion of control over an overly empowered liberal employee base. Talk a little bit about the cultural effect of what he did on his cohort.
I think what was really interesting is a lot of these guys — can I use this in The New York Times? — have tiny-dick energy. I don’t know what else to say.
They want to be big swinging dicks, and they won’t do it. They won’t go there, because they’re worried about what people will say. Everyone is sort of watching each other. And this guy goes in and just does it.
In Silicon Valley, the employees run the show. They really do. They like to get their lunches. They like to get their cars or dry cleaning. They like to speak up. And by the way, they started it. Google started it, with having the employees talk back every Friday. What do you think was going to happen? Right?
Facebook having a Friday meeting where Mark Zuckerberg answers employee questions. And they all create internal chat software, like Slack and Teams, that allow employees to be speaking in a way that they can organize that speech, even without unions.
They gave power to their employees. I had a discussion — I don’t think it was Mark — where it was like: Now they’re talking back. I’m like: What did you think they were going to do?
You indulge children for long enough and give them sugar all day long — they’re going to become terrible people. You know what I mean? The fact that they were surprised that this is what happened when they created these cultures, I’m always surprised by.
So they have all these employees that annoy them. They let them say whatever they wanted. And then they said whatever they wanted. And then they were annoyed by their saying whatever they wanted.
And they found it very hard to push back, because talent is at a premium in Silicon Valley. So you have to let everybody be themselves. And it got annoying for a lot of these C.E.O.s.
But with Musk, when he did it, you could see everybody in Silicon, they already had this: Oh, he gets to do that. I don’t get to do that. I have to listen to my diversity, equity, inclusion people. Like: Oh, I hate those people. But he doesn’t have to. He can do whatever he wants.
And when Musk did that and cut people, they wanted to do that, too.
This feels to me like part of the Covid-era radicalization that happened to the Silicon Valley C.E.O. class between 2020 and 2024. Something happening during Covid, during the rise of various reckonings — #MeToo and Black Lives Matter.
And I really think it has a lot to do with the rise of Slack and Teams and things like that. I think it’s a very underrated dimension of what changed the relationship between bosses and their employees.
You really see this in Mark Zuckerberg’s personal transformation. And Musk becomes the avatar of what to do about it in the end. It feels to me like a lot of the C.E.O.s just hated their employees. And what radicalized them was that they had lost control of their companies, and they wanted that control back.
And that, as much as anything, feels to me like the theory Musk is importing now to the government. He’s talked about cutting spending, cutting waste. But what he’s trying to get for Trump, or for himself, is control.
Right. It’s sort of the rid me of this annoying priest kind of thing. Rid me of these people.
Again, it’s a king thing. The way they set up their companies is a kingship. Mark Zuckerberg has complete control. He can’t be fired. He’s there for life.
So they like that. But in practice, it doesn’t work that way. Because he’s got reporters annoying him. He’s got his staff. He’s got to at least give a nod to diversity or else he gets shamed. He doesn’t have the fortitude that Musk has in that regard.
So they are trying to assert themselves in what they consider a man. This is the definition of what a man is. A lot of them were not considered manly when they were in high school. Revenge of the nerds.
With Mark, it’s the stupid chain and the T-shirt, which — good luck. It’s fine. I think it looks ridiculous, but fine. He likes it. Or the mixed martial arts. Or I’m going to hydrofoil. Or I’m going to work out. I’m going to show off my muscles there. That’s what Jeff Bezos is doing. Like: Here’s my muscles. Here’s my pretty fiancée. They’re trying to cosplay a version of a man.
It seems pathetic to me. But I think it gives them great comfort.
One of the Rosetta stones, to me, of the intellectual shift happening among this class was when Musk and Zuckerberg were talking about having a fight in a cage.
This has its own funny subthemes, where Zuckerberg is taking it all incredibly earnestly, and Musk is clearly mocking him the whole time. So there’s a whole dynamic where they don’t have the cage match — which Zuckerberg would win, but Musk wins because what he was doing was making fun of Mark Zuckerberg.
They didn’t like each other. Just to be clear: They didn’t like each other.
And then there’s an Allen & Company conference, one of these big C.E.O. tech conferences. Marc Andreessen is asked about this exchange. And he ends up sending out his answer on his Substack. And he basically says: I think it’s great if they fight. Because we’ve lost all the masculine virtues of the Greeks. And if it was good enough for the Greeks, it’s good enough for us.
And one of the things happening in the right-wing intellectual subculture that these guys are increasingly part of is a sense that the world has feminized and that the masculine virtues — of aggression, of combat, of conflict, of daring, of risk, of just making decisions and to hell with it — have been diminished.
And what’s needed is some kind of correction. Modernity is going off the rails because we’re becoming womanly and soft. And I guess this class of venture capitalists and tech founders is going to show us our way back to it.
Well, they don’t like women to start with. Come on. So this shouldn’t be a surprise they don’t like the ladies.
Well, the intellectualization of it is what becomes interesting.
It’s absolutely true — they don’t have women in their midst. I wrote a piece once called “The Men and (No) Women Facebook of Facebook Management,” and Mark got hurt by it. And I was like: What? I’m just putting up pictures of your management. I don’t know what to tell you. You hired them.
They’re very fixated on what a man is, and how to behave.
And what’s really interesting — especially Marc Andreessen: If he could jog 10 feet, I’d be surprised. Talking about the manly virtues — give me a break.
When Zuckerberg said that, I was like: I could beat him up in five seconds. I don’t even understand where this comes from. Now he’s going to try to challenge me to a fight. Whatever.
It’s a concept of what a man is that is not what a man is, but they’ve decided it is.
Of all these people, Elon didn’t cosplay a lot like that. Except now he’s starting to wear cowboy hats and that whole nonsense that he’s doing. But he actually didn’t as much as they did. And now they take all their cues from his aggression, which is interesting.
When I think back on that fight they were going to have, Zuckerberg for a minute seemed to be positing himself as the Elon foil. He challenged him to a fight. He had Threads, and Elon had X. And now you see Zuckerberg copying him. The way he engages on Threads is the way Elon engages on Twitter.
Yeah, Zuckerberg is such a beta. [Laughs.] He’s such a beta. I love saying that.
There is this deep way in which Musk seems to have reset the culture, or at least been the signal that allowed a lot of the people who weren’t quite ready to come out and say how they’ve been feeling themselves to move. He led a lot of the flood toward Trump of tech leaders and now is showing how you can actually turn this into political power.
Peter Thiel, for better or worse, supported Trump early. But he didn’t try to wield the power himself. Thiel makes bets and watches them pay off or not. But Musk is going in and showing: Oh, it could just be you. You could not only have all this power as a technology C.E.O., but you could be one of the most important celebrities in the world — and you could be functionally shadow president.
Yes, Zuckerberg hid from the attention. Zuckerberg liked the acclaim, but he never liked the shit that went with it. That’s why he didn’t push all the way through. And that was interesting.
And Musk does have the guts to do that. Like: I’m going to do it no matter what. I eat my attackers for breakfast. Come and get me.
This is Trump’s personality, too. They seem to be temperamentally similar. It takes a very unusual personality to be shameless at that level.
If you want to really wield power, you have to be willing to be hated. And one of the things most of us are not willing to do is to be truly hated. And most C.E.O.s are not willing to be truly hated. There’s a decision they both made. And that disinhibition is, to me, central to their alliance.
Well, they do care, though, underneath. Trump wants nothing more than have The New York Times love him. You can feel it — the sense of victimhood —
I don’t buy it anymore. Maybe he did once. But I don’t buy it anymore.
I do. I think they both care quite a bit of what people think. I think they care almost too much what people think. And it fuels their rage in a lot of ways.
There is a little piece of them that is never not going to care about what people think of them, and they become more and more emboldened by that. It’s the center of their rocket fuel.
It may be true that it’s rocket fuel for them. But I just think that at a certain point, you lose the belief that these people are even friends you still want to have. And that’s what real radicalization is. Radicalization often takes the normal pluralistic, we’re-all-in-this-together give-and-take off the table. It becomes an all-out war.
And I do think Trump and — in a different, more intellectualized way — Musk now sees this as an all-out war where you have to gain control. He was on Rogan’s show saying that there would be no more elections if Trump didn’t win this time.
Musk has really gotten into the civilizational battle. He clearly believes in some level of great replacement theory. He’s now trying to get the far-right Alternative for Germany party elected in Germany. He’s trying to get the Labour Party out of power in the United Kingdom.
For a very long time, the line of Musk was that everything is backward from his belief that eventually humanity needs to be an interplanetary species.
Well, look at all his children. He manifests himself by having so many children and seemingly not spending time with them, except for one. He wants to have children but not necessarily be a parent, which I think is an interesting thing to plumb at some point.
So what is the goal that now motivates him? Do you really believe it’s still the interplanetary thing? Or is it a view that these countries are losing their cultures, and if you lose those cultures, everything is lost?
I do think it does manifest from the need to get off this planet. That is the one consistent thing since I’ve met him — this idea that civilization is doomed, and therefore we need to get off this planet.
I think at their heart, they do believe the version of themselves is the greatest version of man. Which would be a white-guy, supreme kind of thing. I think they actually believe that at their heart.
So you’re going to see that manifested in these statements that he makes all the time. I forget what he said, but essentially: We need more South Africans here in this country — or something like that. And he’s always sort of pulling in that direction.
I have never heard him express any kind of what I would consider — I’ve heard different C.E.O.s express racism. His is a different kind. It’s more around social engineering and the idea that the best people are being replaced. I think that’s really where he lives. Which is also racist, of course.
So to you, the synthesis of these positions is that Musk is still motivated by the desire to become interplanetary. But he just believes that we are corroding the civilizational virtues and genius that you would need to do that with diversity, equity and inclusion and the woke-mind virus and —
Everything is in the way of our getting somewhere else because the lesser people are in charge. He does talk about this a lot.
At one point he was tweeting about cesarean sections, where he said something like: If you have a cesarean, you have a better brain because your brain comes out bigger. Because you’re not going through the vaginal canal.
And I’ve had a cesarean, so I sort of was like: Sit down, sir. You don’t know what you’re talking about.
It passed people by, but I was like: Oh, he thinks you have to preserve the birth — it’s sort of eugenics almost. You know what I mean? It was such a thing for him to go down that avenue.
But he has these theories about human brains and development. Obviously, he’s involved with Neuralink. So he has always been interested in the idea of machines and people merging together. The Neuralink stuff is certainly an area that hasn’t been plumbed enough.
To bring it back to the government — if I pull out what you’re saying here — what you have is someone who thinks that, for humanity to achieve its long-term goals, you need people like Elon Musk in control of the federal government. And you need a polity that isn’t infected by these modern progressive ideas of equity and consensus and committed to all these things that are slow, burdensome, regulatory and soft and don’t allow for the risk of blowing up 90 rockets.
He’s trying to functionally make the federal government something that can be effectively controlled by people like him in order to achieve these goals. Do you see it that way?
Yes, I think he thinks they’re in the way. Everyone’s like: Oh, they want to reform it. I go: No, no, no, they want to burn it down and start again.
This goes back to Peter Thiel. If you spend time reading Peter Thiel, that is what he’s saying: Democracy doesn’t work. We’re going to start with something else.
And that is sort of the ethos of “move fast and break things” — which is a software term. They don’t want to build. They want to break. And they can’t build until you break. And that’s a disruption. Think of all the words they use. It’s all about destruction. And it’s not creative destruction. It’s: Let’s wipe the slate clean, and then we will build the civilization we want. And let us show you how we can get back to glory.
It’s that theory — but they burnish it with this techno-utopianism that is really techno-authoritarianism — that they know best, and if we just listen to them, the world would be a better place for everybody.
To try to be generous to it as a theory of governmental reform, which —
I know you like to do that.
I try —
I think democracies work pretty [expletive] well, but go ahead.
Musk has said regulations basically should be default gone. Not default there — default gone. And if it turns out that we missed the mark on a regulation, we can always add it back in.
So given that we have a longtime stable government with a lot of bureaucracy, the theory here — which I guess is also a theory from Twitter — is: Yes, you turn things off, you cut hugely. And if there’s a problem, you fix it later. But better to cut deeper and rebuild in a cleaner way than to cut not deep enough.
Politics, normally, does not go that far in reform. It’s very hard to reform institutions. And there are real problems from that. San Francisco works quite poorly. Much of the federal government leaves something to be desired.
So is there a case to be made here for Muskism — that he is doing what normal political reformers won’t do and taking risk in order to do it? That this is actually the only way to create a federal bureaucracy that is not quite so sclerotic?
No, I think it’s not. Not at all. I’m a reform person. Obviously, everything is not going to happen at once. There is an ease to tearing it all down, isn’t there? And there has to be a willingness to sacrifice people. They don’t care about that.
A lot of people will ask: How can they do this? How can they do this? And I’m like: They don’t care for you. They don’t think about you. You’re nothing.
Musk was the earliest person to talk to me about artificial intelligence. A.I. has been around forever, but he was really concerned about the impact of A.I. on humanity. That was another thing. He was the first person to raise those alarms, to me at least, when he started OpenAI with Sam Altman and the rest of them.
First he was like: A.I. is going to kill us. The Terminator idea, right? It’s going to become self-aware, and then it’s going to turn around and bomb us and kill us and start again. And we’ve got to stop that. That was his theory.
Next time I saw him, he came up with a much more sophisticated idea of it, which was: They’re not going to kill us. They’re going to treat us like house cats. They’re fine with us here, and they’re going to build everything around us. But we’re not in danger. As long as they like house cats, we’re fine. They don’t think of us as anything more.
Then the next time I saw him, he had evolved into this idea that A.I. was more like building highways — the way we build highways across the country. Humanity is a bunch of anthills. And we go across anthills without thinking when we’re building roads. We don’t know that the anthills are there. We just do it.
And I thought he was expressing how he operates: These things are anthills. I don’t have to think about them, because we never think about them. To me, that was a really interesting progression: The first one cares about what happens to humanity, and the last one doesn’t.
I like that progression of metaphors. What you put into the metaphor reveals what you can see and not see out of the metaphor.
I think the dominant comparison for what Musk is doing is Twitter, where he came in and used, in some ways, a very similar playbook to take control of the company. But during that period, Twitter broke down. Its advertising collapsed. It’s still a much jankier platform than it used to be. It has things it didn’t have before, like Grok. But the search doesn’t work.
And when I look at what Trump is outsourcing to Musk right now, I wonder if they have really thought about the risk they’re taking on. I’ve never seen an administration come in and so completely own everything bad that might happen that the federal government does or is supposed to regulate in the coming years.
If you imagine something like the terrible plane crash that happened just recently happening in a year when pushed retirements have come through the Federal Aviation Administration — and Musk already pushed the administrator of the F.A.A. to resign — you would get a lot more blame for that.
But bad things happen all the time. The federal government is supposed to stop financial crises and so on. They’re coming with this ax to the government — pushing indiscriminate resignations, reassigning people, pushing out very talented career staff. Anything that goes wrong they are truly going to own.
Yes, but they won’t do that. They will say: We’re cleaning up from the previous administration.
You think they care about consequences? One of the messages in my memoir was —
I think they care about power.
They don’t care about the consequences of damage. They do not care. They don’t anticipate it.
You’re right about Twitter — it’s a lesser business. The only way he’s getting advertisers is by threatening them. They’re just doing these lawsuits. And of course these advertisers are going to go back, just to acquiesce to him —
Now he has power, right? It’s a way to pay him off —
Tesla is not a better business than what it was, because they haven’t innovated the cars. That stock may be going up, but the sales are going down because the cars aren’t as good. They just aren’t.
So he doesn’t care about the actual thing. These people don’t care about the actual thing. They care about laying waste to it, and then saying they’ll build something better.
But I don’t know what they’re going to build better. If you press them, it’s never about solutions. It’s about how everything sucks and we have to get rid of it. They never tell you what their replacement is for any of it, because they don’t have a theory of building. They have a theory of destruction.
Trump with the water thing: We’ve got to get the water flow.
What a disaster that was, what he just did. In California, he’s wasting water —
Opening reservoirs for no reason to fight fires that are gone.
No reason. And then the whole group of people going: Mm-hmm, sir, well done.
I’m like — who is not standing there among the media going: Are you [expletive] kidding me with this?
That’s why they don’t let me in the White House. I’m like: Are you [expletive] kidding me? That was a disaster, what you just did. You idiot.
I think back to Twitter, on the control question. Because Musk buys Twitter. He breaks a lot of Twitter. He breaks the business of Twitter. Clearly he’s overpaying at $44 billion.
So I would have told you a year ago, 18 months ago: That didn’t work out.
But what ended up happening was that he made Twitter a channel for him personally. And he turned all of its attention and influence into something he could control.
I don’t know if the power he’s getting out of that is worth $44 billion. But I actually think it’s worth more than that. I don’t think it would be possible for Musk to play this role in both domestic and now international politics if he didn’t do that. We don’t know how to value attention enough.
Oh, it’s the best investment he made. Except for investing in Trump — that $280 million.
Let me tell you, when he bought Twitter, we were all sort of like: What in the world? Why is he paying so much? What an idiot.
Right? Everybody was saying that. That was sort of it.
Well, he was, too. He tried to get out of it on the view that it was overvalued.
He tried to get out of it. He thought he was stupid. Because he wasn’t anticipating what he could use it for. He didn’t realize he had a really big gun there. He thought it was a knife.
The only person who called me was Mark Cuban. And he said: Kara, he’s not buying it. Maybe he doesn’t know he’s doing this. When he goes into a room internationally as the head of Tesla or Starlink, I mean, he gets a meeting just like the head of General Motors or Lockheed gets. When he goes in as the owner of Twitter, he has enormous power globally, from an influence point of view.
He goes: This is not a U.S. play. This is a global play.
I think Mark was 100 percent right. Musk bought it, and he’s the Twitter guy. And also Tesla. No one else has that. Maybe, back in the day, Rupert Murdoch. And that’s what he’s done. But bigger, better, stronger, more influential. Rupert Murdoch would never think of sitting with Trump cutting this stuff.
Murdoch didn’t want to be the main character of his own platform.
But he is kind of Rupert Murdoch now. Except a Rupert Murdoch who likes to do [expletive].
I’ve said the same thing. I think that’s the absolutely correct comparison.
But that brings us to the government. He may not know what he wants to build after, but what the Twitter experience probably taught him is: If you break it, you can control it. You can make it a vehicle for you.
I don’t know if even he knows what he wants to do with the government, but he wants everybody to see that it is him doing it. I thought it was so telling that in the email they sent out to federal employees persuading them to resign, he gave it the same subject line as the email I sent out to Twitter employees during that buyout.
He wanted everybody to know it was him. He wants to be the main character of the whole thing — as you said at the beginning.
Thank god, you said that because all the media was like: Look at this interesting thing.
And I’m like: He wants you to know.
It’s a signature.
He totally wanted people to know. Everything he does, he wants you to know. Because again, he is a desperate attention sponge. Why would you stay up at night talking to people named Catturd? Why?
Because you have a desperately empty hole in the center of your life that you can never fill. It’s a bottomless well. And I hate to break it down like that because I’m not a psychologist, but boy, does he have a big old hole right in the center of himself.
So what I think is very telling about both of these people is they do not have solutions.
They only tell us what the problem is, and they don’t have a vision. Even Ronald Reagan had a vision.
What is your vision except get out of my way and let me do what I want to do?
That’s really the vision that I can tell. I haven’t heard what they want to make at all.
There’s this idea of the sin eater in fantasy novels. I forget exactly where it comes from, but it’s the character that consumes sin and then can be purged. It’s a sort of sacrificial character.
It’s Jesus, I think.
In a way. Musk — I wonder a bit about that in terms of the pain of the administrative war that Trump and the people around him wanted to do.
When I think about when this starts to go bad, assuming this starts to go bad, Musk taking so much credit for it all makes him so usefully sacrificial. When the people around Musk who are more careful and quiet — the Susie Wileses, the Russ Voughts, the rest of them who are not against this agenda —
Have you noticed they’re all leaking: We don’t have control of him.
Yes, there’s a lot of leaking already that we can’t control Musk.
So at the moment he becomes more liability than asset, you can get rid of him. Trump can be like: Elon Musk got out of control. That wasn’t us.
I don’t know that it happens. And he has leverage he can bring to a fight like that. But it doesn’t seem impossible that it happens. And you can see people setting up that escape route as we speak.
Utterly. Trump’s life is full of those people. And now he’s got the greatest one ever. Michael Cohen was that. There’s always a fixer in Trump’s life who’s willing to go to the mat for the boss — which he likes to be called, apparently.
So Musk is that writ large. He’s much more protected because he’s so wealthy.
How real do you think the affection between the two of them is?
Donald Trump has three emotions: A, B, C. I don’t think he’s very complex in that regard.
I did think they were going to fight, and I know he’s irritating to Trump. You hear that from a lot of people. And I think it’s absolutely true — Musk probably is irritating. At the same time, Trump loves money. That’s at the heart of him.
I think Donald Trump finds him useful, and he is useful to Donald Trump. He’s a useful junkyard dog. And he has a lot of money. So if Trump has a cudgel against these senators, Musk is going to give him money to take them out. He’s got a bank that never ends, essentially.
He also knows he needs him to hold on to power. Because what does it look like when they fight? You don’t want Elon Musk outside the tent. That’s a really bad place for Elon Musk to be. And angry — because he’s shown he has an ability to fight back.
So ultimately it could go on for a while. And he could do more and more outlandish things and behave in more and more outlandish ways. Trump has an endless capacity for: Oh, did he say a racist thing? I don’t care.
So I think it could go on for a very long time.
I’ve been struck to see Trump already trying to make clear that Elon is under his control. He said: “Elon can’t do and won’t do anything without our approval. And we’ll give him the approval where appropriate, where not appropriate, we won’t.”
And then there’s this endless leaking from inside the administration that nobody is actually in control of him. Trump is not paying attention to what he’s doing.
And I sort of think both things are actually true — that Trump could say no to him, but actually Trump doesn’t care. So the danger for both of them, in a strange way, is that Musk, who is hyper-empowered and has an almost endless appetite for risk, takes a risk that blows up for all of them.
What could that be? Like, detonate a nuclear bomb?
You break the government. And things are going to break.
You have to have a very dim view of government to believe that if you get rid of this many talented people in it that when bad things begin to happen in the world — and they happen constantly — I mean, there was a pandemic in Trump’s first term.
But Trump in his first term had this real interesting capacity to always seem like he was outside of the state that he, in theory, ran. And that always gave him this strange ability to separate himself from how a government that he didn’t like worked. That was the whole political utility of the deep state.
But they’ve torched that. I know they might still try to claim it. But when you do this bulldozer tactic, and it’s this public, and you are absorbing all this risk and pushing these people out, then when things break and people go back and they look and say: Well, a bunch of the people here, they actually took the buyout, they took your fork in the road, Elon.
I could be wrong. It could all work out great for them. But they are taking a lot of risk.
You’re operating on the idea that they care about the pain. They don’t care. They won’t take responsibility for it. Have you heard Mark Zuckerberg take responsibility for any of the problems?
I think Trump cares about pain, though. Look at how quickly he backed off on his tariffs on Canada and Mexico when the markets began to move. You can lose midterm elections really badly. And then all of a sudden the investigations are coming for you.
Right. Which is probably what will happen.
One of the things that he’s got to keep Musk around for is the money — to manipulate things, to really flood the zone with all kinds of money and efforts to win the midterms.
But again: They don’t care. He has done the damage. My guess is that Musk thinks this is the only way to do it — to get rid of everything. They’re hoping you focus so much on the destruction that you’re not going to notice you’re living in a destroyed place.
And I know you think there are bigger implications, but they’ll be so all over the place, it will be hard to figure out what actually has been destroyed. Or to feel a sense of anger. What’s going to happen is people are going to feel a sense of nihilism.
I do think that’s often the emotion that they are attempting to provoke.
I want to ask you a question about the broader Silicon Valley tech culture here. You’ve had this big, almost herdlike, movement toward what you called techno-authoritarianism.
It’s been so fast and so intense among the sort of cultural leaders of Silicon Valley — the people with the biggest social media accounts. And they’re all at the Trump inauguration.
When you think of the cultural currents there, do you see a counterforce? Is it all just moving in this direction? Are the employees moving in this direction?
What is the contrarian bet in terms of this intellectual culture? Which was very different 10 years ago, when everybody was pro-Obama.
They weren’t pro-Biden. I can tell you that.
They were not pro-Biden. But they hated Donald Trump in 2016 — with the exception of Thiel.
So it moves very fast. And it makes me wonder where it’s going to be in four years. I’m curious if you have a sense of who you’re watching as signals of that change.
There are a few people. Reid Hoffman was just on the podcast this week. I sense fear in him. He funded the E. Jean Carroll lawsuit. He’s a very lovely person, and he’s very evenhanded all the time — almost to a fault. I don’t think he’s going to be as aggressive — and he certainly was. But he’s got to be thinking: What do I do? I’m very exposed.
You have Mark Cuban, who I think presents a different alternative. He claims to me he doesn’t want to run for president. I think he has a real opening of like: Oh, come on, this is not the way we are.
I don’t think everyone has moved there. There are these loudmouths, like Musk and David Sacks and that gang. And even Peter is not that loudmouthed these days, which I find interesting.
But I don’t think everyone is on this ticket. You didn’t see Tim Cook in the front row. Somehow he didn’t have to be in that picture.
I have never thought Silicon Valley was liberal. I thought they were utilitarian, I guess. I thought they were tolerant socially but didn’t really care, didn’t think about it much. I think these people just want to do their business.
And I don’t think they support Trump. Whether you’re Bob Iger — or whether you’re anybody — you’ve got to pay the vig. You don’t have a choice right now.
I don’t think there’s a deep well of support for Trump. I think there’s a bunch of loudmouths, and everyone else just shakes their head.
So when that’s the case, there tends to be a countervailing force. These guys are shakedown artists, right? As you say, disaster will come, and this will be a big [expletive] mess.
They will line up in that direction because it’s good for them and for their shareholders. So whatever it takes for shareholders to do better — if Trump tanks the stock market — they’ll be on the opposite side instantly.
Because they have no real values. They just don’t. Elon has more values than most of them, in a weird way, even though they’re warped and twisted. So I think they’ll just go whatever way the financial markets go. That’s my feeling.
I think that’s a good place to end. Always our final question: What are three books you’d recommend to the audience?
There’s a memoir coming out from a very well-known media person that, once it publishes, you should read. I’m reading it right now. And I can’t say who it is because he gave it to me on the sly. But I think it’s wonderful.
I love the book “North Woods” by Daniel Mason, which came out last year. It’s the history of a house and the people who lived in it. And it’s haunting me. I think it’s the most beautiful book, and I love Daniel Mason. I’m reading “The Piano Tuner” right now. I’m reading all his stuff.
But “North Woods” is one of the things that comforts me in this very difficult time. I have four kids. I’m a gay person. It’s nerve-racking right now. I thought this was all over, and here we are again. But it gives me comfort that we’ll all be dead someday. [Laughs.] I know it sounds crazy. But life goes on. So I really like that book.
And then I recently interviewed him, and I think he’s terrific: Timothy Snyder, “On Tyranny.” I think he’s a really important person talking about where tyranny goes.
And I’m going to give one more: Geraldine Brooks, who is a wonderful writer. She won the Pulitzer. She wrote “Memorial Days,” an incredible book about the death of her husband, Tony Horwitz, who was a friend of mine. He wrote “Confederates in the Attic.” Geraldine is a friend of mine, and it’s a beautiful rumination on mortality and history. Just a wonderful book.
Kara Swisher, thank you very much.
You can listen to this conversation by following “The Ezra Klein Show” on NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts. View a list of book recommendations from our guests here.
This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Elias Isquith and Jack McCordick. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Mixing by Isaac Jones, with Efim Shapiro and Aman Sahota. Our supervising editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Rollin Hu and Kristin Lin. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.
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