{"id":16073,"date":"2025-02-07T20:27:18","date_gmt":"2025-02-08T04:27:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/?p=16073"},"modified":"2025-02-08T03:30:14","modified_gmt":"2025-02-08T11:30:14","slug":"what-elon-musk-wants-the-new-york-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/?p=16073","title":{"rendered":"&#8220;What Elon Musk Wants&#8221;, The New York Times"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/section\/opinion\"><\/a><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/section\/opinion\">OPINION<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>THE EZRA KLEIN SHOW<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Feb. 7, 2025<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul>\n<li><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>By&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/by\/ezra-klein\">Ezra Klein<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2025\/02\/07\/opinion\/ezra-klein-podcast-kara-swisher.html\">What Elon Musk Wants<\/a><\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p>The journalist Kara Swisher discusses Elon Musk\u2019s goals in government \u2014 and the factors that have led to his radicalization.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>This is an edited transcript of an episode of \u201cThe Ezra Klein Show.\u201d You can listen to the conversation by following or subscribing to the show on the&nbsp;<\/em><a href=\"https:\/\/apps.apple.com\/us\/app\/nyt-audio\/id1549293936\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" target=\"_blank\"><em>NYT Audio App<\/em><\/a><em>,&nbsp;<\/em><a href=\"https:\/\/podcasts.apple.com\/us\/podcast\/the-ezra-klein-show\/id1548604447\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" target=\"_blank\"><em>Apple<\/em><\/a><em>,&nbsp;<\/em><a href=\"https:\/\/open.spotify.com\/show\/3oB5noYIwEB2dMAREj2F7S\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" target=\"_blank\"><em>Spotify<\/em><\/a><em>,&nbsp;<\/em><a href=\"https:\/\/music.amazon.com\/podcasts\/c4a3b1da-5433-49e6-8c14-0e1da53be78c\/the-ezra-klein-show\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" target=\"_blank\"><em>Amazon Music<\/em><\/a><em>,&nbsp;<\/em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/channel\/UCnxuOd8obvLLtf5_-YKFbiQ\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" target=\"_blank\"><em>YouTube<\/em><\/a><em>,&nbsp;<\/em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.iheart.com\/podcast\/326-the-ezra-klein-show-31142409\/\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" target=\"_blank\"><em>iHeartRadio<\/em><\/a><em>&nbsp;or&nbsp;<\/em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2021\/01\/19\/opinion\/how-to-listen-ezra-klein-show-nyt.html?action=click&amp;module=RelatedLinks&amp;pgtype=Article\"><em>wherever you get your podcasts<\/em><\/a><em>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>At the beginning, Elon Musk\u2019s Department of Government Efficiency seemed to have a fairly narrow mandate. The Trump&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.whitehouse.gov\/presidential-actions\/2025\/01\/establishing-and-implementing-the-presidents-department-of-government-efficiency\/\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" target=\"_blank\">executive order<\/a>&nbsp;creating it says that the purpose of D.O.G.E. is \u201cmodernizing federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But in the last couple of weeks, it has become clear that Musk\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And so far, at least, Musk\u2019s patron, Donald Trump, seems to be on board.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\">\n<p><strong><em>Archived clip of Donald Trump:<\/em><\/strong>&nbsp;<em>I think he\u2019s doing a great job. He\u2019s a smart guy, very smart, and he\u2019s very much into cutting the budget of our federal government.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<p>As I\u2019ve watched all this unfold, I\u2019ve 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?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>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?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>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\u2019s been covering Musk for many years, along with many of the other tech chief executives who have become such key political figures now. She\u2019s, of course, a host of the great podcasts \u201cOn With Kara Swisher\u201d and \u201cPivot,\u201d which she co-hosts with Scott Galloway, as well as the author of \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.simonandschuster.com\/books\/Burn-Book\/Kara-Swisher\/9781982163891\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Burn Book: A Tech Love Story.<\/a>\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Ezra Klein: Kara Swisher, welcome back to the show.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Kara Swisher:<\/strong>&nbsp;Thank you. I\u2019ve never been here but \u2014<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>You\u2019ve been on my show before.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I have not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Yes, you have. I\u2019m going to go back and show you receipts.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Oh, that\u2019s because I suggested you do podcasts. You\u2019ve done rather well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>A master class in interviewing from Kara Swisher, it was called.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Wow. I must have forgotten it. [Laughs.]<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>[Laughs.] It was such a seminal moment. Well, it\u2019s good to see you.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Good to see you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>How would you describe the role Elon Musk has been playing in the federal government in the first weeks of Donald Trump\u2019s second term?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Well, a little more strongly than The New York Times did. They\u2019re sort of treating it like: Isn\u2019t this an interesting person walking through? I think he\u2019s a one-man show. Wrecking ball, really. And he\u2019s being used by Trump for that purpose.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>He\u2019s \u2014 there are lots of ways you could use metaphors. You could say junkyard dog. He\u2019s the one sort of taking all the flak, going in and breaking things. But you could be funny and call him Wreck-It Ralph. I don\u2019t think it\u2019s particularly funny or the right way to do it or constitutionally sound.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>He\u2019s going in there like he does with his companies and doing the exact same thing. He\u2019s got a series of moves that he makes every single time. And he\u2019s doing them writ large on the federal government.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Walk me through the moves. What is his playbook?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It has morphed over the years. But there\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>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 \u2014 this was, I think, off-camera \u2014 he said: If Tesla doesn\u2019t survive, the human race is doomed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Which I felt was a little dramatic. And I thought: Wow, this is a man in his 40s who thinks that he\u2019s the center of the universe. So it always has that element of drama.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I think he\u2019s greatly informed by video games. Someone described him to me as Ready Player One, and everybody else is an N.P.C. \u2014 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 \u2014 getting the founder role when he\u2019s not actually the founder or rewriting history or using public relations to make himself the founder.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>He understands the hero\u2019s journey kind of thing rather well. Also the stakes have to be very high, and if it doesn\u2019t work, we\u2019re doomed. He tends to overstate problems. Most companies have problems, but: Everything is a disaster here, and I\u2019m here to fix it. Or: Everything sucks, and everybody previously is criminal or evil or \u201cpedophiles.\u201d A word he likes to use a lot.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/x.com\/elonmusk\/status\/1709025216578335003\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">one tweet<\/a>, he called Yoel Roth, who was head of trust and safety at Twitter, \u201cevil.\u201d And said that I was \u201cfilled with seething hate\u201d \u2014 which is really dramatic and ridiculous. I\u2019m not seething with hate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Very Trumpian.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Yes, that kind of thing. I think he means it, though. Trump sometimes is just doing it for show \u2014 a reality show kind of thing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>One thing we\u2019re 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\u2019re using that as a way to fan out across the federal work force.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>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?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>He has people around him who are just enablers. All these Silicon Valley people do. All his minions. And they are minions \u2014 they\u2019re all lesser than he is in some fashion, and they all look up to him. They\u2019re typically younger. They laugh at his jokes. Sometimes when he apologizes for a joke, which is not very often, he\u2019ll say that the people around him thought it was funny.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>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\u2019s not funny \u2014 I\u2019m sorry, did I miss the joke? And they looked at me like I had three heads.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>What they do is \u2014 it\u2019s not that hard to figure out choke points. They go into it in this way that is violating of typical rules. And I don\u2019t mean necessarily laws \u2014 although I suspect many laws may have been broken here. But not caring about breaking laws.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So they go in full force and question: Let me see your code. Why can\u2019t we get in? We\u2019re getting in. We have the law. We have federal marshals. Let\u2019s see what they\u2019ll do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>That is a really big quality that Musk has: Let\u2019s say things and wait for them to sue us or wait for them to stop us. They won\u2019t stop us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Again, very much like Trump: The people don\u2019t stop you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>We just operate on a set of polite rules in society, and they just barrel right through them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>I want to zoom in on that breaking of rules. I think something Musk understands \u2014 and that Trump has understood in different ways \u2014 is that at high levels of society, the recourse for breaking a law or a rule is legal. You don\u2019t get frog-marched out, typically. What happens instead is that somebody sues you.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>But they need to have standing, and it works its way through the courts. It all moves slowly.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>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\u2019t, you can move much faster than the courts are likely to move.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>They can fire all these people \u2014 many of them potentially illegally, given civil service protections. And then what? They\u2019re going to sue over the course of six to nine months or four years \u2014 and maybe get some back pay. Corporations do this against people organizing unions all the time.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>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\u2019ve already achieved what you want to achieve. It\u2019s a pretty profound insight.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Yes, it is. And if he gets caught, he\u2019s willing to pay. He\u2019s willing to go toe-to-toe legally. And I think where a lot of people are is: I don\u2019t want to fight this guy. He has unlimited money.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Journalists have to think twice. It\u2019s very similar to these media companies settling: CBS has done nothing wrong in this Kamala Harris situation, and yet they\u2019re going to pay. It\u2019s pretty clear that Meta did nothing wrong with Trump, and yet they\u2019re going to pay. You do it to make it go away, or you don\u2019t do it at all because of the exhaustion. And he understands that he can wear them down.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So it is true. If you blow lights, you mostly get away with it, right? You don\u2019t always get caught. Or if you don\u2019t pay bills. Or in his business life: Let\u2019s blow up 90 rockets, because the 91st will work. And that\u2019s his attitude toward pretty much everything, as far as I can tell.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Although to be fair to him, it has led to some amazing rockets.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It did. But who else gets to? Then he insults NASA. NASA can\u2019t blow up rockets, because if they blow up one rocket, that\u2019s the end of it. So it\u2019s a real advantage to be able to blow up rockets and then keep going.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>There\u2019s a famous Thomas Edison quote that they all repeat back to me: I have not failed, I\u2019ve found 10,000 ways that don\u2019t work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Whatever. It\u2019s part of the ethos of tech that there\u2019s no such thing as failure. There\u2019s only: It didn\u2019t work that time, and I\u2019ll get the right one next.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>But this gets to, I think, the deeper question here. There are all these tactics and strategies. But toward what?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>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.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Tesla had many failures but really did make better electric cars than anybody else and helped the electric vehicle transition happen.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>What does he want now, though? What, in your view, is the vision he\u2019s trying to effectuate with all this power that he now wields in the government?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It\u2019s not money. I hate to say this, but it\u2019s not that important to many of them. Some of them really like money, that\u2019s for sure. But it\u2019s the power that money brings, and it\u2019s the power to decide.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I think it started off with: I have some good ideas, and I\u2019d like to put them into place. And now it\u2019s: I have all the ideas on every topic, and therefore what I say goes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It\u2019s a very kinglike attitude toward things: Screw Congress, screw the courts. We should have a king, essentially \u2014 a chief executive who has unlimited power.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>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\u2019s not by way of excuse. It\u2019s by way of explanation \u2014 that this is how he looks at himself, as on a grand journey of the hero.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>He\u2019s not a hero, by the way \u2014 let me be clear.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>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.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Peter Thiel, who cofounded PayPal with him, has always been pretty far right. You can go back to things he was writing at Stanford.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>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 \u2014 from government contracts to electric vehicle subsidies, loan guarantees.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>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.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>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.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>You\u2019re right. During the Obama years, he was supportive. When he joined that Trump thing \u2014 we texted a lot during that period, and he was like: They\u2019re trying to do an anti-gay thing. I\u2019m going to get in there and stop them. He was very much like: I need to be here to change Trump\u2019s mind. Only I can change it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>He wasn\u2019t anti-Trump, but he certainly wasn\u2019t pro-Trump, I can tell you that. He was very much in the con-man school of thought with Trump.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>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 \u2014 or whatever, I don\u2019t remember precisely \u2014 were going to die from Covid, and he had read all the studies, and he knew, and I didn\u2019t.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>He\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I think the issues around his trans daughter seemed to have affected him quite profoundly. I\u2019ve noticed that in a number of tech people who have trans children. They suddenly become \u2014 like, losing their mind, essentially.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>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 \u2014<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>I know a lot of people who use ketamine. They don\u2019t tend to turn that far politically right.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It was also staying up late at night. He has this weird proclivity to be up at 3:00 in the morning. He\u2019s got an obsessive personality. We all have that element to us, but he\u2019s got it in spades.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I keep saying this to people \u2014 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I talked to him a lot about it \u2014 or he texted me. And other people noticed it, too. This was a summit that Biden had, and he couldn\u2019t invite him because of the union issues. Musk was very virulently anti-union, so they didn\u2019t invite him. And he was very upset \u2014 personally upset. Wounded, almost.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>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\u2019s really mad.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And Steve Ricchetti was like: Oh, you know, it\u2019s the unions. He should understand. He\u2019s a big boy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And I was like: No, he\u2019s not a big boy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>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 \u2014 it\u2019s a mistake at the kind of politics they were supposed to be so good at.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Steve is a lovely guy. I actually ran into him at a movie premiere for \u201cWicked,\u201d and he goes: Guess you were right. And I\u2019m like: Guess so.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The way Musk takes slights is really strange. I had seen it in action \u2014 sort of petty anger and slight slights. And that one really stuck hard. And the Biden people kept tweaking him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>You could be like: So what? But I\u2019m 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\u2019t, despite the union stuff.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>There\u2019s a factor you haven\u2019t mentioned here, which is Twitter. The Wall Street Journal has a piece from years ago where it\u2019s tracking his number of tweets, year by year. From 2012 to 2014, you begin to see it really explode. And by 2018, he\u2019s really off to the races.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>There\u2019s 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.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>I don\u2019t know what the chicken and the egg is here, but he doesn\u2019t become a normal Republican. He doesn\u2019t even become, in some ways, a normal MAGA Republican. He\u2019s not like Steve Bannon or something. He falls into a world of Twitter anons and \u2014<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Well, let\u2019s start off with joking stuff. He loves dank memes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>You know him so much better than I do. But the couple of times I have been around him \u2014 and this was years ago, before he was who he is now \u2014 I would tell people: He was the smartest 15-year-old boy in the world.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>That\u2019s a very good way to put it. Yes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>So he got really into the memes. And this was always a real door into a dark right wing on that particular platform.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And I think that\u2019s what attracted him to Twitter, for sure. And then it took off into a much darker place. He\u2019s an addictive personality, clearly. Whether it\u2019s to work or \u2014 \u201chard-core\u201d is one of his favorite words, which I find to be hustle porn.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>He\u2019s attracted to addiction. So his Twitter use is \u2014 you can see it. It\u2019s manic. And he\u2019s a manic person. Again, not an excuse, but an explanation. He has a manic personality \u2014 and violative.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>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 \u2014 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And it was stupid and rude \u2014 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>There\u2019s also a reality that, in a way that is unusual among people of his class, he\u2019s really good at social media. In the way young people are \u2014 not in the way Barack Obama is.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I don\u2019t think he\u2019s good. My kids are always like: Cringe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Fair enough. But there is an official voice of social media \u2014 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.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>And Musk isn\u2019t in that voice. He\u2019s constantly responding to small follower accounts. And he really does build up an attentional power that he didn\u2019t 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 \u2014 in a way other people don\u2019t, because he\u2019s experimenting with it.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>What set him apart from the other people who superficially looked like him that made him temperamentally suited to doing that?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>His manic nature, right? It\u2019s got a manic-addictive quality to it. And he does have a sense of humor. It\u2019s not my sense of humor, and people will hate me for saying this, but it can be rather charming. When he was on \u201cSaturday Night Live\u201d \u2014<\/p>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\">\n<p><strong><em>Archived clip of Elon Musk:<\/em><\/strong><em>&nbsp;Look, I know I sometimes say or post strange things, but that\u2019s just how my brain works. To anyone I\u2019ve offended, I just want to say I reinvented electric cars, and I\u2019m sending people to Mars in a rocket ship. Did you think I was also going to be a chill, normal dude?<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<p>He was so awkward that it was charming. And other people are going to say: Kara loves him. Well, I don\u2019t care. Go watch it \u2014<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Do you really have all these people in your life who are surprised when, as a reporter in tech \u2014<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Oh, yes: You made him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Oh, my God \u2014 they\u2019re so exhausting. I have to tell you, sometimes the left is so ridiculously censorious. I don\u2019t want to use \u201ccensorious.\u201d They\u2019re just scoldish. They\u2019re not censoring in any way. They can say whatever they want.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But yes, I get a lot of like: You made him \u2014 like you didn\u2019t know it \u2014<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Well, I didn\u2019t know how he was treating his kid. I\u2019m sorry \u2014 I didn\u2019t know that. And had I known I would have \u2014<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>You also didn\u2019t make him. The car company was successful because the cars were good.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I was covering him as a car manufacturer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>tLook, I\u2019m not going to make an excuse. Silicon Valley has a million people like him. He was very typical \u2014 except he was doing more interesting things than other people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So getting back to how he\u2019s good at it: I once wrote a column in The Times \u2014 when I was writing for The Times \u2014 about the two people I thought were very good \u2014 which were Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Trump. Kim Kardashian is another person who\u2019s like this. You don\u2019t 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\u2019s their voice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>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\u2019t know anything about. He just pontificates, and that\u2019s his favorite thing \u2014 to say all manner of nonsense and inaccuracies about things he doesn\u2019t know what he\u2019s talking about.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>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.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>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.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>He said there\u2019s a non-zero chance. And it fascinated him \u2014<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Well, that\u2019s 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.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>The things that most people believe are probably wrong \u2014 what you can and can\u2019t do, what is and isn\u2019t true. And he has been proven right a number of times in very big, profound ways<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Now he\u2019s the richest man in the world. He has the most attention in the world. That\u2019s going to change your psychology.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>One thing that then seems true, though, is that he doesn\u2019t just get attracted to unusual ideas, but he gets more conspiratorial as I watch him on Twitter. And I\u2019m curious how you understand that dimension of him.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And that\u2019s the mind of technology people. They\u2019re like: This could happen. We could go to the moon. You have to have that element to you if you\u2019re 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?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I always joke about it with my wife: Oh, yet another bold truth teller. I\u2019m so tired of them. I\u2019m here to boldly tell you the truth without any actual information or reporting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So he\u2019s attracted to ideas like the simulation. Like: Why can\u2019t we live on Mars?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Not everybody does that. And I think it starts off from a good place. But often, in the social media world \u2014 as Kevin correctly put out in that podcast he did \u2014 it goes down into the conspiracy theory avenue really quickly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>But it\u2019s a very specific kind of conspiracy theory he gets into. He&nbsp;<\/strong><strong><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/technology\/2023\/nov\/16\/elon-musk-antisemitic-tweet-adl\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" target=\"_blank\">responds<\/a><\/strong><strong>&nbsp;to someone who tweets that Jews \u201chave been pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them.\u201d And Musk&nbsp;<\/strong><strong><a href=\"https:\/\/x.com\/elonmusk\/status\/1724908287471272299?s=20\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" target=\"_blank\">replies<\/a><\/strong><strong>: \u201cYou have said the actual truth.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>And in July 2024, just before he came out in support of Trump, he accused Democrats of trying to \u201cimport as many illegal voters as possible.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>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\u2019s really bought into a lot of great replacement theory.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Yes. So have a lot of people in Silicon Valley. Let me say: He\u2019s not alone. This Curtis Yarvin stuff. They\u2019ve all sort of been taken by these \u2014 it\u2019s almost religious, if you think about it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>One of the things that I think it goes back to \u2014 and I hate to say this \u2014 is: sad little boy who wasn\u2019t loved enough as a child is searching for meaning, is searching for love. And again, not an excuse, because I think he\u2019s become a terrible person, and he should get therapy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But when there are easy answers like that \u2014 Oh, this is why you\u2019re so unhappy. Oh, this is why the world is the way it is \u2014 these right-wing conspiracies do scratch an itch for these people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It\u2019s a religion. It\u2019s their answer to the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>It\u2019s also a politics. Musk is South African. Peter Thiel spent much of his childhood in South Africa. David Sacks is South African.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>I\u2019ve 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\u2019s embrace of Trump, have this very distinctive political experience of watching South Africa\u2019s white minority move from being in control of the country to a frightened minority in the country.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>There is that element to a lot of these people. And the same thing with Silicon Valley people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Again, when you merge that with the ideas around Silicon Valley \u2014 which is highly male, highly we have all the answers \u2014 it\u2019s like: Why are these silly people in our way?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And with the South African thing \u2014 I don\u2019t know. I don\u2019t 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\u2019s an element of a whole bunch of people who immigrated from India. They bring with them whatever culture happened there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And it\u2019s South Africa. You can go one of two ways: The Athol Fugard way or this way of longing for pastimes in some fashion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Musk eventually buys Twitter. It\u2019s a sort of unusual acquisition, and he tries to get out of it while it\u2019s 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.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>But when you look back on it now, what it was \u2014 both in reality and culturally in Silicon Valley \u2014 was a C.E.O.\u2019s 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.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I think what was really interesting is a lot of these guys \u2014 can I use this in The New York Times? \u2014 have tiny-dick energy. I don\u2019t know what else to say.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>They want to be big swinging dicks, and they won\u2019t do it. They won\u2019t go there, because they\u2019re worried about what people will say. Everyone is sort of watching each other. And this guy goes in and just does it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>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?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>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.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>They gave power to their employees. I had a discussion \u2014 I don\u2019t think it was Mark \u2014 where it was like: Now they\u2019re talking back. I\u2019m like: What did you think they were going to do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>You indulge children for long enough and give them sugar all day long \u2014 they\u2019re 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\u2019m always surprised by.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>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\u2019t get to do that. I have to listen to my diversity, equity, inclusion people. Like: Oh, I hate those people. But he doesn\u2019t have to. He can do whatever he wants.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And when Musk did that and cut people, they wanted to do that, too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>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 \u2014 #MeToo<\/strong>&nbsp;<strong>and Black Lives Matter.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>And I really think it has a lot to do with the rise of Slack and Teams and things like that. I think it\u2019s a very underrated dimension of what changed the relationship between bosses and their employees.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>You really see this in Mark Zuckerberg\u2019s 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.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>And that, as much as anything, feels to me like the theory Musk is importing now to the government. He\u2019s talked about cutting spending, cutting waste. But what he\u2019s trying to get for Trump, or for himself, is control.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Right. It\u2019s sort of the rid me of this annoying priest kind of thing. Rid me of these people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Again, it\u2019s a king thing. The way they set up their companies is a kingship. Mark Zuckerberg has complete control. He can\u2019t be fired. He\u2019s there for life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So they like that. But in practice, it doesn\u2019t work that way. Because he\u2019s got reporters annoying him. He\u2019s got his staff. He\u2019s got to at least give a nod to diversity or else he gets shamed. He doesn\u2019t have the fortitude that Musk has in that regard.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>With Mark, it\u2019s the stupid chain and the T-shirt, which \u2014 good luck. It\u2019s fine. I think it looks ridiculous, but fine. He likes it. Or the mixed martial arts. Or I\u2019m going to hydrofoil. Or I\u2019m going to work out. I\u2019m going to show off my muscles there. That\u2019s what Jeff Bezos is doing. Like: Here\u2019s my muscles. Here\u2019s my pretty fianc\u00e9e. They\u2019re trying to cosplay a version of a man.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It seems pathetic to me. But I think it gives them great comfort.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>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.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>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\u2019s a whole dynamic where they don\u2019t have the cage match \u2014 which Zuckerberg would win, but Musk wins because what he was doing was making fun of Mark Zuckerberg.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>They didn\u2019t like each other. Just to be clear: They didn\u2019t like each other.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>And then there\u2019s an Allen &amp; 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&nbsp;<\/strong><strong><a href=\"https:\/\/pmarca.substack.com\/p\/fighting\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Substack<\/a><\/strong><strong>. And he basically says: I think it\u2019s great if they fight. Because we\u2019ve lost all the masculine virtues of the Greeks. And if it was good enough for the Greeks, it\u2019s good enough for us.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>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 \u2014 of aggression, of combat, of conflict, of daring, of risk, of just making decisions and to hell with it \u2014 have been diminished.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>And what\u2019s needed is some kind of correction. Modernity is going off the rails because we\u2019re 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.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Well, they don\u2019t like women to start with. Come on. So this shouldn\u2019t be a surprise they don\u2019t like the ladies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Well, the intellectualization of it is what becomes interesting.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It\u2019s absolutely true \u2014 they don\u2019t have women in their midst. I&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/allthingsd.com\/20070816\/the-men-and-no-women-facebook-of-facebook-management\/\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" target=\"_blank\">wrote a piece<\/a>&nbsp;once called \u201cThe Men and (No) Women Facebook of Facebook Management,\u201d and Mark got hurt by it. And I was like: What? I\u2019m just putting up pictures of your management. I don\u2019t know what to tell you. You hired them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>They\u2019re very fixated on what a man is, and how to behave.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And what\u2019s really interesting \u2014 especially Marc Andreessen: If he could jog 10 feet, I\u2019d be surprised. Talking about the manly virtues \u2014 give me a break.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>When Zuckerberg said that, I was like: I could beat him up in five seconds. I don\u2019t even understand where this comes from. Now he\u2019s going to try to challenge me to a fight. Whatever.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It\u2019s a concept of what a man is that is not what a man is, but they\u2019ve decided it is.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Of all these people, Elon didn\u2019t cosplay a lot like that. Except now he\u2019s starting to wear cowboy hats and that whole nonsense that he\u2019s doing. But he actually didn\u2019t as much as they did. And now they take all their cues from his aggression, which is interesting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>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.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Yeah, Zuckerberg is such a beta. [Laughs.] He\u2019s such a beta. I love saying that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>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\u2019t quite ready to come out and say how they\u2019ve 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.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Peter Thiel, for better or worse, supported Trump early. But he didn\u2019t 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 \u2014 and you could be functionally shadow president.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Yes, Zuckerberg hid from the attention. Zuckerberg liked the acclaim, but he never liked the shit that went with it. That\u2019s why he didn\u2019t push all the way through. And that was interesting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And Musk does have the guts to do that. Like: I\u2019m going to do it no matter what. I eat my attackers for breakfast. Come and get me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>This is Trump\u2019s personality, too. They seem to be temperamentally similar. It takes a very unusual personality to be shameless at that level.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>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\u2019s a decision they both made. And that disinhibition is, to me, central to their alliance.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Well, they do care, though, underneath. Trump wants nothing more than have The New York Times love him. You can feel it \u2014 the sense of victimhood \u2014<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>I don\u2019t buy it anymore. Maybe he did once. But I don\u2019t buy it anymore.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>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\u2019s the center of their rocket fuel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>It may be true that it\u2019s 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\u2019s what real radicalization is. Radicalization often takes the normal pluralistic, we\u2019re-all-in-this-together give-and-take off the table. It becomes an all-out war.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>And I do think Trump and \u2014 in a different, more intellectualized way \u2014 Musk now sees this as an all-out war where you have to gain control. He was on Rogan\u2019s show saying that there would be no more elections if Trump didn\u2019t win this time.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Musk has really gotten into the civilizational battle. He clearly believes in some level of great replacement theory. He\u2019s now trying to get the far-right&nbsp;<\/strong><strong><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2024\/12\/28\/world\/europe\/musk-support-for-german-far-right-afd.html\">Alternative for Germany party<\/a><\/strong><strong>&nbsp;elected in Germany. He\u2019s trying to get the Labour Party out of power in the United Kingdom.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>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.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>So what is the goal that now motivates him? Do you really believe it\u2019s 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?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I do think it does manifest from the need to get off this planet. That is the one consistent thing since I\u2019ve met him \u2014 this idea that civilization is doomed, and therefore we need to get off this planet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So you\u2019re 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 \u2014 or something like that. And he\u2019s always sort of pulling in that direction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I have never heard him express any kind of what I would consider \u2014 I\u2019ve heard different C.E.O.s express racism. His is a different kind. It\u2019s more around social engineering and the idea that the best people are being replaced. I think that\u2019s really where he lives. Which is also racist, of course.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>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 \u2014<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Everything is in the way of our getting somewhere else because the lesser people are in charge. He does talk about this a lot.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>At one point he was&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/x.com\/elonmusk\/status\/1742409933411299706\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">tweeting<\/a>&nbsp;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\u2019re not going through the vaginal canal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And I\u2019ve had a cesarean, so I sort of was like: Sit down, sir. You don\u2019t know what you\u2019re talking about.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It passed people by, but I was like: Oh, he thinks you have to preserve the birth \u2014 it\u2019s sort of eugenics almost. You know what I mean? It was such a thing for him to go down that avenue.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But he has these theories about human brains and development. Obviously, he\u2019s involved with&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2024\/05\/22\/health\/elon-musk-brain-implant-arbaugh.html\">Neuralink<\/a>. So he has always been interested in the idea of machines and people merging together. The Neuralink stuff is certainly an area that hasn\u2019t been plumbed enough.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>To bring it back to the government \u2014 if I pull out what you\u2019re saying here \u2014 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\u2019t 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\u2019t allow for the risk of blowing up 90 rockets.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>He\u2019s 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?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>ADVERTISEMENT<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2025\/02\/07\/opinion\/ezra-klein-podcast-kara-swisher.html#after-story-ad-34\">SKIP ADVERTISEMENT<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Yes, I think he thinks they\u2019re in the way. Everyone\u2019s like: Oh, they want to reform it. I go: No, no, no, they want to burn it down and start again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This goes back to Peter Thiel. If you spend time reading Peter Thiel, that is what he\u2019s saying: Democracy doesn\u2019t work. We\u2019re going to start with something else.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And that is sort of the ethos of \u201cmove fast and break things\u201d \u2014 which is a software term. They don\u2019t want to build. They want to break. And they can\u2019t build until you break. And that\u2019s a disruption. Think of all the words they use. It\u2019s all about destruction. And it\u2019s not creative destruction. It\u2019s: Let\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It\u2019s that theory \u2014 but they burnish it with this techno-utopianism that is really techno-authoritarianism \u2014 that they know best, and if we just listen to them, the world would be a better place for everybody.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>To try to be generous to it as a theory of governmental reform, which \u2014<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I know you like to do that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>I try \u2014<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I think democracies work pretty [expletive] well, but go ahead.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Musk has said regulations basically should be default gone. Not default there \u2014 default gone. And if it turns out that we missed the mark on a regulation, we can always add it back in.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>So given that we have a longtime stable government with a lot of bureaucracy, the theory here \u2014 which I guess is also a theory from Twitter \u2014 is: Yes, you turn things off, you cut hugely. And if there\u2019s a problem, you fix it later. But better to cut deeper and rebuild in a cleaner way than to cut not deep enough.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Politics, normally, does not go that far in reform. It\u2019s 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.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>So is there a case to be made here for Muskism \u2014 that he is doing what normal political reformers won\u2019t 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?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>No, I think it\u2019s not. Not at all. I\u2019m a reform person. Obviously, everything is not going to happen at once. There is an ease to tearing it all down, isn\u2019t there? And there has to be a willingness to sacrifice people. They don\u2019t care about that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>A lot of people will ask: How can they do this? How can they do this? And I\u2019m like: They don\u2019t care for you. They don\u2019t think about you. You\u2019re nothing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>First he was like: A.I. is going to kill us. The Terminator idea, right? It\u2019s going to become self-aware, and then it\u2019s going to turn around and bomb us and kill us and start again. And we\u2019ve got to stop that. That was his theory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Next time I saw him, he came up with a much more sophisticated idea of it, which was: They\u2019re not going to kill us. They\u2019re going to treat us like house cats. They\u2019re fine with us here, and they\u2019re going to build everything around us. But we\u2019re not in danger. As long as they like house cats, we\u2019re fine. They don\u2019t think of us as anything more.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Then the next time I saw him, he had evolved into this idea that A.I. was more like building highways \u2014 the way we build highways across the country. Humanity is a bunch of anthills. And we go across anthills without thinking when we\u2019re building roads. We don\u2019t know that the anthills are there. We just do it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And I thought he was expressing how he operates: These things are anthills. I don\u2019t 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\u2019t.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>I like that progression of metaphors. What you put into the metaphor reveals what you can see and not see out of the metaphor.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>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\u2019s still a much jankier platform than it used to be. It has things it didn\u2019t have before, like Grok. But the search doesn\u2019t work.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>And when I look at what Trump is outsourcing to Musk right now, I wonder if they have really thought about the risk they\u2019re taking on. I\u2019ve 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.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>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 \u2014 and Musk already&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2025\/01\/31\/us\/politics\/trump-washington-plane-crash.html\">pushed<\/a>&nbsp;the administrator of the F.A.A. to resign \u2014 you would get a lot more blame for that.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>But bad things happen all the time. The federal government is supposed to stop financial crises and so on. They\u2019re coming with this ax to the government \u2014 pushing indiscriminate resignations, reassigning people, pushing out very talented career staff. Anything that goes wrong they are truly going to own.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Yes, but they won\u2019t do that. They will say: We\u2019re cleaning up from the previous administration.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>You think they care about consequences? One of the messages in my memoir was \u2014<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>I think they care about power.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>They don\u2019t care about the consequences of damage. They do not care. They don\u2019t anticipate it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>You\u2019re right about Twitter \u2014 it\u2019s a lesser business. The only way he\u2019s getting advertisers is by threatening them. They\u2019re just doing these lawsuits. And of course these advertisers are going to go back, just to acquiesce to him \u2014<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Now he has power, right? It\u2019s a way to pay him off \u2014<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Tesla is not a better business than what it was, because they haven\u2019t innovated the cars. That stock may be going up, but the sales are going down because the cars aren\u2019t as good. They just aren\u2019t.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So he doesn\u2019t care about the actual thing. These people don\u2019t care about the actual thing. They care about laying waste to it, and then saying they\u2019ll build something better.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But I don\u2019t know what they\u2019re going to build better. If you press them, it\u2019s never about solutions. It\u2019s 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\u2019t have a theory of building. They have a theory of destruction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Trump with the water thing: We\u2019ve got to get the water flow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>What a disaster that was, what he just did. In California, he\u2019s wasting water \u2014<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Opening reservoirs for no reason to fight fires that are gone.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>No reason. And then the whole group of people going: Mm-hmm, sir, well done.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I\u2019m like \u2014 who is not standing there among the media going: Are you [expletive] kidding me with this?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>That\u2019s why they don\u2019t let me in the White House. I\u2019m like: Are you [expletive] kidding me? That was a disaster, what you just did. You idiot.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>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\u2019s overpaying at $44 billion.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>So I would have told you a year ago, 18 months ago: That didn\u2019t work out.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>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.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>I don\u2019t know if the power he\u2019s getting out of that is worth $44 billion. But I actually think it\u2019s worth more than that. I don\u2019t think it would be possible for Musk to play this role in both domestic and now international politics if he didn\u2019t do that. We don\u2019t know how to value attention enough.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Oh, it\u2019s the best investment he made. Except for investing in Trump \u2014 that $280 million.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Right? Everybody was saying that. That was sort of it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Well, he was, too. He tried to get out of it on the view that it was overvalued.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>He tried to get out of it. He thought he was stupid. Because he wasn\u2019t anticipating what he could use it for. He didn\u2019t realize he had a really big gun there. He thought it was a knife.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The only person who called me was Mark Cuban. And he said: Kara, he\u2019s not buying it. Maybe he doesn\u2019t know he\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>He goes: This is not a U.S. play. This is a global play.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I think Mark was 100 percent right. Musk bought it, and he\u2019s the Twitter guy. And also Tesla. No one else has that. Maybe, back in the day, Rupert Murdoch. And that\u2019s what he\u2019s done. But bigger, better, stronger, more influential. Rupert Murdoch would never think of sitting with Trump cutting this stuff.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Murdoch didn\u2019t want to be the main character of his own platform.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But he is kind of Rupert Murdoch now. Except a Rupert Murdoch who likes to do [expletive].<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>I\u2019ve said the same thing. I think that\u2019s the absolutely correct comparison.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>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.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>I don\u2019t 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&nbsp;<\/strong><strong><a href=\"https:\/\/www.opm.gov\/fork\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" target=\"_blank\">the email they sent out<\/a><\/strong><strong>&nbsp;to federal employees persuading them to resign, he gave it the same subject line as the email he sent out to Twitter employees during that buyout.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>He wanted everybody to know it was him. He wants to be the main character of the whole thing \u2014 as you said at the beginning.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Thank god, you said that because all the media was like: Look at this interesting thing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And I\u2019m like: He wants you to know.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>It\u2019s a signature.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>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&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2023\/07\/13\/opinion\/twitter-new-right.html\">Catturd<\/a>? Why?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>ADVERTISEMENT<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2025\/02\/07\/opinion\/ezra-klein-podcast-kara-swisher.html#after-story-ad-43\">SKIP ADVERTISEMENT<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Because you have a desperately empty hole in the center of your life that you can never fill. It\u2019s a bottomless well. And I hate to break it down like that because I\u2019m not a psychologist, but boy, does he have a big old hole right in the center of himself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So what I think is very telling about both of these people is they do not have solutions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>They only tell us what the problem is, and they don\u2019t have a vision. Even Ronald Reagan had a vision.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>What is your vision except get out of my way and let me do what I want to do?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>That\u2019s really the vision that I can tell. I haven\u2019t heard what they want to make at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>There\u2019s this idea of the sin eater in fantasy novels. I forget exactly where it comes from, but it\u2019s the character that consumes sin and then can be purged. It\u2019s a sort of sacrificial character.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It\u2019s Jesus, I think.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>In a way. Musk \u2014 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.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>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 \u2014 the Susie Wileses, the Russ Voughts, the rest of them who are not against this agenda \u2014<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Have you noticed they\u2019re all leaking: We don\u2019t have control of him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Yes, there\u2019s a lot of leaking already that we can\u2019t control Musk.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>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\u2019t us.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>I don\u2019t know that it happens. And he has leverage he can bring to a fight like that. But it doesn\u2019t seem impossible that it happens. And you can see people setting up that escape route as we speak.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Utterly. Trump\u2019s life is full of those people. And now he\u2019s got the greatest one ever. Michael Cohen was that. There\u2019s always a fixer in Trump\u2019s life who\u2019s willing to go to the mat for the boss \u2014 which he likes to be called, apparently.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So Musk is that writ large. He\u2019s much more protected because he\u2019s so wealthy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>How real do you think the affection between the two of them is?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Donald Trump has three emotions: A, B, C. I don\u2019t think he\u2019s very complex in that regard.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I did think they were going to fight, and I know he\u2019s irritating to Trump. You hear that from a lot of people. And I think it\u2019s absolutely true \u2014 Musk probably is irritating. At the same time, Trump loves money. That\u2019s at the heart of him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I think Donald Trump finds him useful, and he is useful to Donald Trump. He\u2019s 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\u2019s got a bank that never ends, essentially.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>He also knows he needs him to hold on to power. Because what does it look like when they fight? You don\u2019t want Elon Musk outside the tent. That\u2019s a really bad place for Elon Musk to be. And angry \u2014 because he\u2019s shown he has an ability to fight back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>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\u2019t care.<span style=\"color: rgb(54, 54, 54); font-family: nyt-imperial, georgia, &quot;times new roman&quot;, times, serif; font-size: 1.25rem; font-style: inherit; font-variant-caps: inherit; caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); white-space: normal;\">So I think it could go on for a very long time.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>I\u2019ve been struck to see Trump already trying to make clear that Elon is under his control. He&nbsp;<\/strong><strong><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2025\/02\/03\/us\/politics\/musk-federal-government.html\">said<\/a><\/strong><strong>: \u201cElon can\u2019t do and won\u2019t do anything without our approval. And we\u2019ll give him the approval where appropriate, where not appropriate, we won\u2019t.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>And then there\u2019s this endless leaking from inside the administration that nobody is actually in control of him. Trump is not paying attention to what he\u2019s doing.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>And I sort of think both things are actually true \u2014 that Trump could say no to him, but actually Trump doesn\u2019t 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.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>What could that be? Like, detonate a nuclear bomb?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>You break the government. And things are going to break.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>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 \u2014 and they happen constantly \u2014 I mean, there was a pandemic in Trump\u2019s first term.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>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\u2019t like worked. That was the whole political utility of the deep state.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>But they\u2019ve torched that. I know they might still try to claim it. But when you do this bulldozer tactic, and it\u2019s 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.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>I could be wrong. It could all work out great for them. But they are taking a lot of risk.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>You\u2019re operating on the idea that they care about the pain. They don\u2019t care. They won\u2019t take responsibility for it. Have you heard Mark Zuckerberg take responsibility for any of the problems?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>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.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Right. Which is probably what will happen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>One of the things that he\u2019s got to keep Musk around for is the money \u2014 to manipulate things, to really flood the zone with all kinds of money and efforts to win the midterms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But again: They don\u2019t care. He has done the damage. My guess is that Musk thinks this is the only way to do it \u2014 to get rid of everything. They\u2019re hoping you focus so much on the destruction that you\u2019re not going to notice you\u2019re living in a destroyed place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And I know you think there are bigger implications, but they\u2019ll 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\u2019s going to happen is people are going to feel a sense of nihilism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>I do think that\u2019s often the emotion that they are attempting to provoke.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>I want to ask you a question about the broader Silicon Valley tech culture here. You\u2019ve had this big, almost herdlike, movement toward what you called techno-authoritarianism.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>It\u2019s been so fast and so intense among the sort of cultural leaders of Silicon Valley \u2014 the people with the biggest social media accounts. And they\u2019re all at the Trump inauguration.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>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?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>What is the contrarian bet in terms of this intellectual culture? Which was very different 10 years ago, when everybody was pro-Obama.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>They weren\u2019t pro-Biden. I can tell you that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>They were not pro-Biden. But they hated Donald Trump in 2016 \u2014 with the exception of Thiel.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>So it moves very fast. And it makes me wonder where it\u2019s going to be in four years. I\u2019m curious if you have a sense of who you\u2019re watching as signals of that change.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>There are a few people. Reid Hoffman was just on the podcast this week. I sense fear in him. He&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2023\/04\/13\/nyregion\/trump-carroll-lawsuit-hoffman-linkedin.html\">funded the E. Jean Carroll lawsuit<\/a>. He\u2019s a very lovely person, and he\u2019s very evenhanded all the time \u2014 almost to a fault. I don\u2019t think he\u2019s going to be as aggressive \u2014 and he certainly was. But he\u2019s got to be thinking: What do I do? I\u2019m very exposed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>You have Mark Cuban, who I think presents a different alternative. He claims to me he doesn\u2019t want to run for president. I think he has a real opening of like: Oh, come on, this is not the way we are.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I don\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But I don\u2019t think everyone is on this ticket. You didn\u2019t see Tim Cook in the front row. Somehow he didn\u2019t have to be in that picture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I have never thought Silicon Valley was liberal. I thought they were utilitarian, I guess. I thought they were tolerant socially but didn\u2019t really care, didn\u2019t think about it much. I think these people just want to do their business.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And I don\u2019t think they support Trump. Whether you\u2019re Bob Iger \u2014 or whether you\u2019re anybody \u2014 you\u2019ve got to pay the vig. You don\u2019t have a choice right now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I don\u2019t think there\u2019s a deep well of support for Trump. I think there\u2019s a bunch of loudmouths, and everyone else just shakes their head.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So when that\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>They will line up in that direction because it\u2019s good for them and for their shareholders. So whatever it takes for shareholders to do better \u2014 if Trump tanks the stock market \u2014 they\u2019ll be on the opposite side instantly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Because they have no real values. They just don\u2019t. Elon has more values than most of them, in a weird way, even though they\u2019re warped and twisted. So I think they\u2019ll just go whatever way the financial markets go. That\u2019s my feeling.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>I think that\u2019s a good place to end. Always our final question: What are three books you\u2019d recommend to the audience?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>There\u2019s a memoir coming out from a very well-known media person that, once it publishes, you should read. I\u2019m reading it right now. And I can\u2019t say who it is because he gave it to me on the sly. But I think it\u2019s wonderful.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I love the book \u201cNorth Woods\u201d by Daniel Mason, which came out last year. It\u2019s the history of a house and the people who lived in it. And it\u2019s haunting me. I think it\u2019s the most beautiful book, and I love Daniel Mason. I\u2019m reading \u201cThe Piano Tuner\u201d right now. I\u2019m reading all his stuff.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But \u201cNorth Woods\u201d is one of the things that comforts me in this very difficult time. I have four kids. I\u2019m a gay person. It\u2019s nerve-racking right now. I thought this was all over, and here we are again. But it gives me comfort that we\u2019ll all be dead someday. [Laughs.] I know it sounds crazy. But life goes on. So I really like that book.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And then I recently interviewed him, and I think he\u2019s terrific: Timothy Snyder, \u201cOn Tyranny.\u201d I think he\u2019s a really important person talking about where tyranny goes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And I\u2019m going to give one more: Geraldine Brooks, who is a wonderful writer. She won the Pulitzer. She wrote \u201cMemorial Days,\u201d an incredible book about the death of her husband, Tony Horwitz, who was a friend of mine. He wrote \u201cConfederates in the Attic.\u201d Geraldine is a friend of mine, and it\u2019s a beautiful rumination on mortality and history. Just a wonderful book.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Kara Swisher, thank you very much.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>You can listen to this conversation by following \u201cThe Ezra Klein Show\u201d on&nbsp;<\/em><a href=\"https:\/\/apps.apple.com\/us\/app\/nyt-audio\/id1549293936\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><em>NYT Audio App<\/em><\/a><em>,&nbsp;<\/em><a href=\"https:\/\/podcasts.apple.com\/us\/podcast\/the-ezra-klein-show\/id1548604447\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><em>Apple<\/em><\/a><em>,&nbsp;<\/em><a href=\"https:\/\/open.spotify.com\/show\/3oB5noYIwEB2dMAREj2F7S\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><em>Spotify<\/em><\/a><em>,&nbsp;<\/em><a href=\"https:\/\/music.amazon.com\/podcasts\/c4a3b1da-5433-49e6-8c14-0e1da53be78c\/the-ezra-klein-show\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><em>Amazon Music<\/em><\/a><em>,&nbsp;<\/em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/playlist?list=PLdMrbgYfVl-szepgVpArP0obwYgbKdfvx\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><em>YouTube<\/em><\/a><em>,&nbsp;<\/em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.iheart.com\/podcast\/326-the-ezra-klein-show-31142409\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><em>iHeartRadio<\/em><\/a><em>&nbsp;or&nbsp;<\/em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2021\/01\/19\/opinion\/how-to-listen-ezra-klein-show-nyt.html?action=click&amp;module=RelatedLinks&amp;pgtype=Article\"><em>wherever you get your podcasts<\/em><\/a><em>. View a list of book recommendations from our guests&nbsp;<\/em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/article\/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.html\"><em>here<\/em><\/a><em>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>More conversations about Donald Trump and the tech right<a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2025\/01\/28\/opinion\/ezra-klein-podcast-james-pogue.html\"><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2025\/01\/28\/opinion\/ezra-klein-podcast-james-pogue.html\">Opinion | Ezra Klein<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2025\/01\/28\/opinion\/ezra-klein-podcast-james-pogue.html\">MAGA\u2019s Big Tech Divide<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2025\/01\/28\/opinion\/ezra-klein-podcast-james-pogue.html\">Jan. 28, 2025<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2025\/01\/17\/opinion\/ezra-klein-podcast-chris-hayes.html\"><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2025\/01\/17\/opinion\/ezra-klein-podcast-chris-hayes.html\">Opinion | Ezra Klein<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2025\/01\/17\/opinion\/ezra-klein-podcast-chris-hayes.html\">Democrats Are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2025\/01\/17\/opinion\/ezra-klein-podcast-chris-hayes.html\">Jan. 17, 2025<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2024\/10\/22\/opinion\/donald-trump-ezra-klein-podcast.html\"><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2024\/10\/22\/opinion\/donald-trump-ezra-klein-podcast.html\">Opinion | Ezra Klein<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2024\/10\/22\/opinion\/donald-trump-ezra-klein-podcast.html\">What\u2019s Wrong With Donald Trump?<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2024\/10\/22\/opinion\/donald-trump-ezra-klein-podcast.html\">Oct. 22, 2024<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This episode of \u201cThe Ezra Klein Show\u201d 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Follow the New York Times Opinion section on&nbsp;<\/em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/nytopinion\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" target=\"_blank\"><em>Facebook<\/em><\/a><em>,&nbsp;<\/em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.instagram.com\/nytopinion\/\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" target=\"_blank\"><em>Instagram<\/em><\/a><em>,&nbsp;<\/em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.tiktok.com\/@nytopinion\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" target=\"_blank\"><em>TikTok<\/em><\/a><em>,&nbsp;<\/em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.whatsapp.com\/channel\/0029VaN8tdZ5vKAGNwXaED0M\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" target=\"_blank\"><em>WhatsApp<\/em><\/a><em>,&nbsp;<\/em><a href=\"http:\/\/twitter.com\/NYTOpinion\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" target=\"_blank\"><em>X<\/em><\/a><em>and&nbsp;<\/em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.threads.net\/@nytopinion\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" target=\"_blank\"><em>Threads<\/em><\/a><em>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Ezra Klein joined Opinion in 2021. Previously, he was the founder, editor in chief and then editor at large of Vox; the host of the podcast \u201cThe Ezra Klein Show\u201d; and the author of \u201cWhy We\u2019re Polarized.\u201d Before that, he was a columnist and editor at The Washington Post, where he founded and led the Wonkblog vertical. He is&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.threads.net\/@ezraklein\">on Threads<\/a>.&nbsp;&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>OPINION THE EZRA KLEIN SHOW Feb. 7, 2025 By&nbsp;Ezra Klein What Elon Musk Wants The journalist Kara Swisher discusses Elon Musk\u2019s goals in government \u2014 and the factors that have led to his radicalization. This is an edited transcript of an episode of \u201cThe Ezra Klein Show.\u201d You can listen to the conversation by following [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1001004,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16073"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1001004"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16073"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16073\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16076,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16073\/revisions\/16076"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16073"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16073"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16073"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}