Elon, Inc.Before last week’s Tesla earnings, Elon Musk was scheduled to go to India—but didn’t. This weekend, though, news broke that he had in fact gone to China, to try to negotiate regulatory acceptance for his FSD (full self-driving) system. (It’s not actually full self-driving.) The Elon, Inc. panel—reporters Dana Hull and Max Chafkin—ponder that trip, and then delve into the second anniversary of Elon’s joke-y offer to buy Twitter, now X. Plus: A long simmering feud begins to boil over.
Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio news.
Well, Elon Musk is now the richest person on the planet.
More than half the satellites in space are owned and controlled by one man.
Well, he's a legitimate super genius. I mean legitimate.
He says he's always voted for Democrats, but this year it will be different.
He'll vote Republican.
There is a reason the US government is so reliant on him.
Elon Musk is a scam artist and he's done nothing.
Anything he does, he's fascinating the people. Welcome to Elaning Bloomberg Weekly podcast about Elon Musk. It's Tuesday, April thirtieth. I'm your host, David Papadopolis. This week we're talking about China and X. Elon took his jet to Beijing Sunday, where he cut a deal that will allow Tesla to sell what it calls full self driving technology. So far the market approves. Tesla stock soared the most in three years on Monday, extending a rebound that began after last week's earnings call. Then we're going to go down memory lane as we celebrate the two year anniversary of the Twitter board accepting Musk's offer to buy the company. Oh, Elon's tried a lot of things these past two years, and let's just say not all of them have quite worked out dating service anyone. But before all that, a quick programming note. We're hitting the road again. We'll be in San Francisco next week to record a live episode at the Bloomberg Tech Summit. Come join us. We're going to start off with Tesla and for this, as always, we have Dana Hull, Bloomberg's Elon Reporter extraordinaire Ala Dana. Hey, Hey, And we have Max Chepkin, Bloomberg BusinessWeek's senior writer editor and ava fanatic of the New York Metropolitans. Hey, David, Hello, Max, Okay, Dana. So we wake up Sunday to find Elon is in Beijing. I'm not sure we knew that was going to happen. He shows up out of the blue there to do what exactly and does he achieve what he's trying to do?
Well? I mean, if you follow his jet, which obviously those of us who follow Elon, no, I mean you knew that he was heading to China, but it wasn't an announced visit, if that's what you mean. But I think what's interesting is, you know, to back up for a minute, Elon was supposed to go to India. He cancels the trip to India, says he's got pressing matters at Tesla. He has an earnings call where he basically says the future of the company is all about autonomy. And then he pops up in Beijing, which is not where Tesla has its factory, but he meets with like the number two guy in China, and then basically they're trying to get permission to unroll what they call FSD in China, which is a huge undertaking because the mapping in China is very different than the road system in the United States that it's like a whole different regulatory regime. It's an enormous country. But this is like a big deal for Elon, and I think it just kind of shows that, like, you know, love him or hate him, whatever you think about the guy, he is just like operating on a level that is very different from the way most other CEOs operate. And you know, so he's in China and the stock goes up to its highest, you know, has its highest gain in over three years. The market is betting on this whole idea that the future of the company is not really about selling cars, it's about selling software.
You know, Max, It's funny. For the longest time I've been telling myself that, boy, we really need to talk about China on this podcast. We have failed to Max until now. China is pretty darn important for Tesla, is it not.
Yeah, So, Tesla is a factory in China. As Dana hinted, China is also the biggest market for electric vehicle. It's widely thought of as sort of the market with the most potential for electric vehicle sales. And you know that's because it's a huge country, of course, big economy, but also because the government, the Chinese government has invested and promoted this industry in a huge way, and it actually has made Elon Musk kind of a centerpiece of that. The thing is, what's happened in the past couple of years is we've seen this new wave of Chinese car companies. We've talked on this podcast before about byd Jaomi, you know, better known as smartphone maker, is making cars. Lots of Chinese companies are having lots of success making cars, which was kind of the plan all along. I mean The reason that China gave Elon Musk a bunch of sort of favorable policies and so on was because they wanted this. They wanted him to kind of be at the center of their EV industry, and that's kind of what happened. And and Elon Musk is kind of still enjoying the fruits of that relationship, right.
So they did court him back in the day to help jump start their EV industry they needed in Then I get the sense that China doesn't quite need him as much now. He kind of needs China more than China needs him.
No, China doesn't need him.
We were talking about India a couple of weeks ago, and I mentioned that, you know, it's a little risky to go to India and potentially announce a big investment because China is not going to like that. And I don't think it's a coincidence that we had this cancelation of the India trip and this trip to China. And when you look at the way that the Chinese media is playing it, you know they're mentioning, prominently mentioning the cancelation of the India trip.
Now, Dana, this deal that he has apparently inked for full self driving, which we have described at length in previous episodes. You can you can just find those discussions there in the archive. But is this deal, Dana Hall, is it final or is it they still need to work out some other particular No, I don't.
Think it's final. I think it's like directionally positive that they got you know, he you know, so he was in Beijing meeting with the Number two talking about FSD. He's got a relationship with Beadu to sort of underwrite or underpin a lot of the mapping that's needed. He got some permission from not the military directly, but like some kind of military apparatus that will allow Tesla to operate more easily in China. I mean a lot of things still have to happen, but it's all directionally very positive. And Tesla hasn't announced anything. I mean, there's been no announcement or filing from Tesla whatsoever saying that they're now rolling out FSD in China. But that's certainly what the market is excited about.
I mean, there's no deal.
They're on a list of like qualified car companies to conceivably along with like dozens of others. I think I think some seventy or eighty other car models are on this list that give them the right to conceivably launch this, and they're all of these issues. So China, of course is very concerned learned about AI. You know this, this is not a liberal democracy as a country that regulates its technology very closely that you know, wants certain access to data and that's very important with you know, any kind of software and especially with a data collection scheme like a quote unquote Robotaxi. And the other thing is China has been very adamant about ensuring that local partners are playing a role, so that's why they had this this. The other part of this is this announcement of a deal with Baidu, which Tesla already had you know, a relationship with before. But it's it's essentially like little breadcrumbs that point in a somewhat promising direction. And that coupled with Elon Musk saying last week that he thought, you know, full self driving quote unquote could happen in China, that the people are taking that as a positive sign.
Yeah, and we're going to go back to that earnings call. Actually now, you know, Dana whether the market reaction this week when the stock short fifteen percent on Monday, is an overreaction or not. It comes on the heels of a big rebound in the stock last week as well. The stock, of course, had been tanking all year, and now it's it's bounced back over thirty percent, even though I think it's it opened up down a bit today. I suppose to a certain degree, you kind of got to give it to Musk. He sort of pulled a rabbit out of his hat here, turning around a stock that had been essentially in free fall.
Yeah.
I mean he changed the narrative, and he's very good at that. I mean, this is a guy who's been the CEO since two thousand and eight. He has been through cycles before and and he kind of he understands Wall Street psychology, which is like what is the long term future of the company. And you know, so the whole year has been crappy, the stock has been down. He seemed distracted. He seemed to be focusing on all of his other companies and not on Tesla, which is the key to his wealth. You had the layoffs, you had sagging sales, like all this like negative negative, negative, negative, so he comes into the earnings call and like he knows that he's got to turn it around, so he like plants a flag.
Yeah, what exactly did he say on that call? Because just shortly before he gets on that call, the earnings came out, the first quarter earnings, and they were about a disappointing or maybe even more disappointing than everybody had thought they'd be. He opens his mouth though on the call, and then the stock just starts going up and up and up. What was it in particular that that investors latched onto.
Well, he basically planted a very strong flag and talked about autonomy. And I think we have tape on that.
Yes we do. You're right, let's listen to it.
Really, we should be thought of as an AI robotics company. If you value tells it as just like an order company, you would just have to fundamentally just the wrong framework then will come to be. If you ask the wrong question, then the right answer is impossible. I mean, if somebody doesn't believe tell is going to solve autonomy, I think they should not be an investor in the company.
If you just value Tessel's an auto company. Max Chafkin you're a loser. But listen, Dana. But here's the thing. Is it actually the autonomous part that drove the stock up so much or was it more about him talking about, Hey, no, we have actually haven't given up on this affordable tessel model idea.
I mean, I think it was both. They basically said it was sort of like they split the you know, split the baby in half, or however you want to call it. It was like, Oh, don't worry, we still are going to make affordable cars. Ish, they're gonna be this kind of like Frankenstein hybrid model where we're going to take some of the new car and marry it with some of the next generation unboxed assembly process, and we're going to have a cheaper model maybe by the end of this year.
Then actually, let's let's let's listen to the tape on that as well. Hold on.
We've updated our future vehicle lineup to accelerate the launch of new models. Head previously mentioned start production in the second half of twenty twenty five, so we expect it to be more like the early twenty twenty five, if.
Not late this year.
These new vehicles, including more affordable models, will use aspects of the next generation platform as well as aspects of our current platforms, and we'll be able to produce on the same manufacturing lenes as like currentfig.
Lineup, all of which means what mister chaff.
It means nothing.
I mean, it's kind of amazing that we went into this saying is he going to what is he going to say about the model to this cheaper car? And that clip that you played that was it, I mean during that because it raises all these questions, like so he said that the car would be made on the more affordable car will be made on the same production lines. Kind of raises a question, so are we talking about a new model or we talking about a cheaper version of a current model, which an analyst asked and Elon Musk said, ooh, no comment. We've said all we will on this back to the Robotaxi, and this happened several times during the call. An analyst would ask kind of like a reasonable question about these new models and or supposed new models, and Elon Musk would say, never mind, robotaxi. And so it's pretty clear to me anyway that there are two things going on. One is they're going to launch this Robotaxi, and by launch I mean have a car that looks Robotaxi ish and lift a sheet off of it in August. And they are trying very aggressively to lower the prices of the Model three and the Model Why Elon Musk hasn't specifically said that there isn't going to be a Model too, but it really when you look at what he's saying, how he's saying it, it seems pretty clear. You have two things. You have the Robotaxi, and you have an effort to keep get the prices on the current lineup as low as possible and maybe do whatever you can to refresh that lineup. And that is that is a huge departure from everything, not everything, but for many of the things that Elon Musk has been signaling and saying and so on over the last year or so.
Okay, so Dan Max is from what I glean here feels like the market perhaps is irrationally exuberant about mister Musk's comments. Nonetheless, the stock is way back up for the moment and things are at least looking slightly less hour there. But the layoffs continue, do they not?
Just to be super clear, the news from this morning is that two more key executives are gone fired or dismissed or however it actually went down, and their entire divisions are also closing. So and that's the new Car division and as Dana is saying, that the Supercharger division. So it's not like you have to like be a close reader of the things that Elon Musk says during his earnings call to figure out what's going on with the new models.
He just dismissed the entire new model team.
Yeah, I mean, so's Ed Ludlow and I reported Musk wanted to cut twenty percent, and then when they announced the layoffs, the email from him said more than ten percent. So like, what is that? Is that nineteen percent? Is that eighteen percent? Like we've never gotten like a very clear number. But the layoffs have been happening in waves, and just overnight a lot of people on the Supercharging team were impacted, and you're starting to see people post on LinkedIn and Twitter and elsewhere about how, yeah, my team and I were wiped out. And this comes at like a really pivotal time for the company because you know, the big news of twenty twenty three was that Tesla was finally opening at supercharger network to other automakers, So if you own like a Ford or a GM electric vehicle, you can now go to superchargers. And the whole integration of supercharging with other automakers is a big theme of like the summer of twenty twenty four. Now all of the people that were in charge of kind of you know, inking those deals and leading those partnerships are gone and all of this is happening in the broader context of Elon wants his pay package, so he's very much leaning into this like I'm back in the saddle, I'm in charge, I'm making tough decisions, I'm laying people off, I'm going to China. Like he's doing all this stuff to kind of prove to his shareholders that he is still very much the CEO and he deserves that big pay.
You know.
The other thing is it seems that he has closed the policy division, which again is kind of a curious choice when you're trying to laun a heavily regulated likely to be controversial, you know, I think regulators are gonna have something to say about releasing car without a steering wheel, And it seems like at least, the current policy team is going to be replaced with some new arrangement that hopefully won't just be like an emoji like the NITSA regulator send an email to to Elon Musk and they get a poop back or something.
Yeah, no, that well, it's distinctly possible. We've we've had a lot of poop emojis sent our way over these last couple of years. But Dan, so, just to finish up for a second on the earnings call, because of course before the earnings call, we put out in front of the world again our Tesla Bingo card, our earnings Bingo card, and did we get bingo or not?
Once again? You know, Max and I worked really hard to kind of try to create a create a Bingo Bingo card. That's that was going to do it for us. We were one short because even though he said a lot of things that were on our card, he never said the word interest rates, and then we would have gotten it. We would have gotten it if he'd said interest rates.
Yeah, Row one going across Robotax, Saxey regulatory approval, next gen and Horse.
Actually he said horse twice.
Okay, very good. Well, we'll be back with another new and improved Bingos Bingo card. Come come second quarter earnings. Okay, So now we're gonna talk about the two year anniversary of Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter now X and to do that we have joining us Kurt Wagner, Bloomberg technology reporter and author of the book Battle for the Bird.
Welcome, Kurt, hey, Thank you for having me appreciate it.
It's been a while since we've talked about how things are going at X and the current state of finances there. How is it going well.
We don't have many updates from the last time we all chatted. We know that things were not going well at the end of the lastlast year, not only because there was the lingering effects of the advertising you know, issues that the company had had, but as you all remember very well, Elon then went on stage at the deal Book conference and I believe it was early December and told advertisers to go f themselves, right. So he sort of ended twenty twenty three, came into twenty twenty four on a very sour note, and as we've talked about historically, like his behavior on X. In my opinion and from the conversations i've had with a lot of marketers is the biggest turnoff and the biggest hurdle to their entire business, and we've seen that that's continued to this day. You know, he tweets things that are incredibly inappropriate regardless of who you are, but especially as the CEO and face of this company. And so we don't have numbers because they're not publicly traded, they don't have to report earnings, but we just I don't think anything has really improved since we talked about this a couple of months ago, when things were really in a downward spiral.
Yeah, Now, Kurt on his behavior on X, he's actually been trying to remove what is essentially something of a gag order on him on X, not as it's related to the company X, but as related to Tesla. This is the fame Twitter sitter. Explain what's transpired.
Yeah, so quick backstory, But basically, after he promised to or pledge to take Tesla private at four hundred and twenty dollars per share, which he ultimately did not you know, have the money to do, the sec came to a settlement agreement with Elon where his posts on Twitter or now X that are related to Tesla need to be approved or at least vetted by a company lawyer, and so he has been trying to get rid of this Twitter sitter as it's called, and you know, saying that this is an infringement on his free speech. He was hoping that the Supreme Court would actually take up this case and determine whether this was violation of his free speech. But the Supreme Court said, no, we're not. You know, we have other things going on that we should probably be putting more attention to, so they sort of chose not to take that case. But I mean, honestly, honestly, I cannot believe that there is a lawyer who already reviews his Tesla tweets and approves of them, because it seems crazy that any of this stuff is vetted. Certainly, everything that's unrelated to Tesla is clearly not vetted. And even the Tesla stuff, as you guys can probably attest to, sometimes seems quite borderline to me. So I'm not sure how much this really matters.
So to back up for a minute, I mean, there really was a Twitter sitter. We knew their name at one point. It was in like a filing in between like the sec and MUSC and his lawyers. But then there's been so much turnover in Tesla's legal department that I actually don't know who has the job right now. But it's like the Designated Securities Council, like it has like a name, And a lot of people were like, you're just making this up. There is no Twitter sitter, and I was like, no, no, there really is.
I guess I'm curious, Dana. You followed Elon as close as anybody. Do you really think he's composing a tweet, taking the time to email it over to some lawyer, waiting for approval before posting it. I just have no impossible time imagining.
How dare you suggest that when Elon Musk tweets a picture of one dog placing its testicles on another dog, that he is not vetting that with Tesla's compliance department.
Well, you don't know what was what was you know what the original Yeah, that's true.
You're right. The compliance department might have been like, we got to dial this one back.
I put a little disclaimer at the bottom and back on the right side of the line. Absolutely, you know, bringing the conversation back to the actual company X for a second. You know, Kurt, when he purchased the company, he at the time was sort of fairly obsessed with we Chat and the idea of an everything app. This is actually what he said back then in an interview.
I mean, we don't even have a that that's as good as we Chat in China, and like, in China, you like live on we Chat. Basically everyone's like, like, you live on we Chat, you do payments, you do everything.
It's like yep, it's great chats, kick ass. And we don't have anything like we Chat outside of China. So I was like, my idea would be, like, how about if we just copy we Chat?
Hey, So Kurt his efforts to quote unquote copy weed Chat, how's that going?
Well, this is the idea of the everything app that Elon talks about a lot, and we haven't really seen a lot of those ideas materialize. We've heard him talk about the idea of banking, certainly, video and entertainment, this idea of you know, using X to do shopping perhaps or basically to run your life. They were teasing this idea of video conferencing within X as well the other day, so you know, maybe replaced zoom I think the biggest issue is number one. As I mentioned, a lot of these products are just sort of talked about, right, They're just they're out in the ether, but they don't actually exist at the moment. But I think the bigger issue is, uh, you know, when you are focused on everything, as Elon says he wants to do, you don't really do any one thing particularly well, right, And I'm not sure that anyone is at this stage looking for a single app to do all of these things in their life. And that's part of the reason that the everything app idea has not taken off outside of China. Right, He's like, Hey, we build this and succeeds in China, why don't we just build this elsewhere. Well, they've tried to build this. Mark Zuckerberg tried to do this at Facebook for several years with Messenger and WhatsApp and found basically that in the US in particular, people are used to having different apps that specialize in different skills, and they want to go to Uber to get their Uber ride, and they want to use their banking app to get their bank.
I'm going to rapid fire hit you with a bunch of the things that they've tried over these last two years, and you're gonna just you know, give us your reaction curt in terms of how they've gone. So I got Twitter Blue Premium.
I think that's been a huge flop for the most part. We don't know how many subscribers they have, but estimates are I believe less than a million people are willing to pay the eight dollars per month for this service. I'd say this is where they've done the most change to Twitter, Like, if you pay the eight dollars, you'd probably get the biggest differentiated experience than you did from Twitter one point zero. But I just don't think enough people are paying for this for that to be considered a huge success right now.
Not good, Not good, says Max Job search Board Kurt Wagner Job Searches.
This is one thing that I think a lot of people don't even realize exists on Twitter, which is that if you are a business and you pay for like a premium business account, you can then post your jobs on there. I funny enough, even though I don't know if a lot of people not exist. The company claims this is doing incredibly well. Hundreds of thousands of job postings and it sort of makes sense, right. I think a lot of people do use Twitter in some type of professional capacity, So maybe you would you come across a job posting on Twitter versus say, you know, Instagram or TikTok or something like that. But I don't think it's necessarily something that like the average consumer of Twitter or X. Now, excuse me, is really you know, clamoring.
For Kurt premium video premium video?
You may recall after cees in January, I think I came on here. We talked about Don Lemon and Tulsa Gabbard and Jim Rome and WWE and how you know, X was going to be the new place to go basically watch like exclusive premium content that has not materialized yet. We obviously know what happened with Don Lemon. That deal fell apart before it ever got going. As far as I know, Tulsa Gabbard and Jim Rome have not actually posted any original videos to X. I actually reached out to them last week just to make sure, and I was told they would get back to me, and then I never heard. But I haven't seen anything on their feeds. So these deals that they've really promoted in January, I don't know if anything exists. There are certainly nothing real mainstream.
To me, what I just keep noticing is that it just seems like Musk is doing anything possible to boost engagement and he's failing so spectacularly. Like yesterday, Taylor Swift tweeted something out and then like Musk responded to Taylor and then she ignored him, And it's like, oh, man, like, are you just really trying to like goose those numbers? And even some of his more like ridiculous kind of you know, juvenile memes and stuff. It's like, I don't know, I just feel I just would love to know what the true engagement of numbers are.
All this is so bad, but I do feel like we need to acknowledge some good things, one of which is Kurt didn't mention Tucker Carlson.
And you know, there was a point when not to.
Just looking for the silver lining here, the Tucker shaped lining to this cloud. But there was a point when Elon took over Twitter and clearly started shifting to the right where it wasn't clear that there even was a market for a right wing social network.
And I think you have to say he's made one.
This is a more successful version of the company that Donald Trump wanted to start with Truth Social that you know, the rumble guys are trying to run. This is truly a place where you know, in fluential conservative thought leaders are hanging out.
It's a market. Maybe it's a viable market. Is it a monetizable market in a meaningful way?
It is monetizable, yes, Is it in a meaningful way? I'd probably say they've proven thus far that it's been really hard. I don't think that the stuff that Elon is tweeting about is necessarily the very friendly family friendly certainly not ground that a lot of marketers want to put their name attached to. And I think that's really the biggest issue all.
Right now, Max, can I go back to my list here please for a second. So also I got for Kurt dating, the dating service app. What's going on?
Yeah, So there's a handful of products I mentioned with this everything app idea that we've heard him kind of hint at talk about but that have not materialized. Dating falls into that category. Wouldn't it be great to find your next date on X Stay tuned, Perhaps you will someday. As of right now, that does.
Not exist it's a horrifying prospect.
Okay, it's worth Kurt bank service and payments. I mean, you want me to take my money out of Vanguard and move it over to X.
What if I told you you could get a very high yield on those savings that X's hole and that was a pledge. Yeah, that's the pledge that Elon has made a few times. Again, similar to dating, haven't seen the product yet. This one is they have applied for payments transfer licenses. Essentially, they have to go through all fifty states to get permission to allow users to transfer money through the app. They are in the process of applying for these. I believe there's something like more than a dozen states that have already been approved, but it doesn't exist yet. His whole idea was, why don't you simply keep your money with us. We'll give you a great yield, you know, savings yield on that money, and then you can use it to not only buy things through ads you see on X, but.
To pay people. So, Danahll, are you ready to move all your money onto X?
Absolutely not. I mean, I'm not giving Elon Musk any access to my personal financial information, but I do want to mention that like, if you think about Elon and the early history of Elon, like this all comes back to his PayPal days, which is like the sort of Elon era that we all kind of forget about. But when people are like, who is Elon Musk? Oh, yeah, like he's the founder of Tesla, it's like, no, no, he's not the founder of Tesla. But also like he became a millionaire because of PayPal and PayPal being sold to eBay, and like he's always been interested in payments, Like that's like the original sin of like how this guy became who he is. And so I do think it is interesting that he's like kind of coming full circle in terms of his original vision for what PayPal could have been.
Yeah.
Yeah, but to be fair, he got fired from that job for doing this exact thing.
I mean, he he was.
As it was, he was pushed up. But it was a it was a power struggle, right, I mean.
Yeah, yeah.
He he wanted to do an everything app called X and the investors and Peter Teel, the co founder, disagreed, wanted to focus on payments, and Elon Musk lost that power struggle. Of course, here, although there are these debt holders and so on. There are external shareholders of X. You know, there's no you know, no one's challenging him on any of this stuff.
So I guess, like, yeah, two years into X, it looks like we're just getting confirmation that tel was right back then.
I do think if you were a you know, X dot com truther X dot com as the nineteen nineties version, it's been a tough couple of years for you. It really does look like, as you said, David, focusing on a single product is probably better than kind of scattershot launching dating sites and banks and highyield savings accounts.
I mean, are we going to talk about the one thing that is going well at.
X, the high yield X savings account? Okay, so you want to talk about GROC, tell us about.
Gro So Rock.
Last week there were news reports, including it at Bloomberg that it's raising money at evaluation of eighteen billion dollars. Again, you know, we don't know for sure, but I think there's a pretty good chance that Groc is worth more right now than X, and Grock, of course, is kind of piggybacked, I should say X AI although it's not technically part of X. It's very much piggybacking on X. X is the main distribution platform. These two entities don't really exist without the other. And when Kurt's excellent book came out, you know, he was on this podcast and we talked about you know what, you know, where the value was, and Kurt suggested that maybe this is just an AI play, And I think that looks pretty good right now.
I'm never going to be told that I'm that I'm right and disagree with you, Max, So that's great. I do think like this idea of XAI being the true value is totally valid. There's so much potential with these chatbots, and we see companies like Meta investing billions and billions of dollars into training these large language models to power chatbots and things like that. So if you can take X the social network and somehow tie it to x AI and you know, groc or whatever else comes from that, I think that is probably the best way for X the social network to have a positive outcome financially here. And it feels like that's what's happening there. They're clearly, as Max pointed out, Grok is like X the social network is the distribution ground. For Grock. It's the training data for GROX. So I think what we're seeing here is these two companies being tied together. Not sure exactly what happens at the end of that, but you know, it feels like that's where it's headed.
Enough about X and it's woes. It's time for another feud of the week? Are you just making these feuds up? Max? So these feuds are these figments of your imagination? Are they're real?
No?
These are these are very real. This is as real as the earth, the sky, the sun.
Ok, what do you got for us this week?
Dustin Moskovitz he is kind of a Silicon Valley powerbroker, co founder of Facebook, kind of a more of like a lesser co founder Facebook, very close friend of Mark Zuckerberg. He runs a company called Asana, which is a sort of productivity you know type.
Thing for businesses.
He is also a major donor to the Democratic Party and a bit of a left wing activist, and he over the last few months has every now and then posted something critical about Elon on threads. Of course on threads, and recently though he went way further. He called Tesla basically Enron. He said, let's wake up to this.
This is Enron. They're a fraud essentially, That's what he said.
Yes, the grounds. You know, I spent some time reading this very lengthy thread. He's a very verbose guy, a little bit hard to unpack. But the basic contention is that Tesla is improperly recognizing it's autopilot revenue. I think, stepping back from that, Moskovitz is jumping on to a common critique about Tesla, which is that autopilot is essentially vapor where it doesn't actually drive the car for you. It's you know, Elon Musk is overstating its capabilities. Elon Musk responded in an extremely generous and fashion by posting a meme in which Dustin Moskowitz was labeled on one dog and another dog I think labeled Elon was performing a lewd act on that dog.
Okay, okay, wow, Like I'm saying, I assume a Tesla compliance officer looked at that and said, okay, this is legit.
This is legit. Again. You don't know what the initial post looked like, right, I mean, I have no idea, right, So the Twitter sitter said, yeah, this didn't Now now that you've edited down scale, the back. This is this is fine and legit, to which Dustin responded and said.
What continuing to he's continuing to criticize Elon Musk.
I mean the feud continues, So this is.
Okay, So this is this truly isn't a figment of your imagination? Just sounds like a decent fud.
Look, I think that this, you know, it's it's very tempting when somebody, especially on Threads, which you know, despite Mark Zuckerberg's best efforts, does not have the kind of like cultural capital even that X does. When somebody's just like shooting, you know, random verbal assaults at Elon Musk, it's's kind of tempting to ignore it. But Moskovitz is a important guy. He is a major Democratic donor. He's somebody with real juice in political circles. I mean, there are also reasons to doubt some things that he said. He was a big you know, he's a big effective altuois. People have tied him to Sam bankman Fried. Of course he has said, you know, his brand of that is totally different. But either way, like this is somebody that like has access to the highest levels of the Democratic Party and he is going around criticizing Elon Musk very loudly.
This is not a good situation for Elon Musk.
On the other hand, you don't want to overstate it because like he's buddies with Mark Zuckerberg.
Is it this kind of like an extension of the Zuckerberg feud?
Yeah, you know, it's kind of like a tag team situation where you have a Yeah, you have Zuckerberg and and Moscow's in one quarter Linda and Elon and the other they're tagging it.
No.
No, that's a very good question if you do go tag team and so it's Moscowtz and Zuckerberg tagging, and I once who is who is Elon's tag team partner?
I feel like Danna needs to answer that question.
Oh wow, who's the guy said he was going to jump on a grenade that.
Was it's his brother.
But it's why we should have came up.
You know who it should be though, it should be Walter. That would be a colorful fight.
So Max, what I want you to work on this next week before the next episode is like you know what then, like, what are the costumes they wear in the red You've got to work on for each time. Kurt Wagner. Thank you for joining us.
Thank you, thank you, thank you.
Danna Mac pleasure to be here always. This episode was produced by Stacey Wang. Naomi Shaven and Rayhan Harmantier are senior editors. The idea for this very show also came from Rayhawk. Blake Maples handles engineering, and we get special editing assistants from Jeff Grocott. Our supervising producers Magnus Henrickson. The Elon Inc. Theme is written and performed by Taka Yasuzawa and Alex Sugiira. Brendan Francis Newnham is our executive producer, and Sage Bauman is the head of Bloomberg Podcasts. I'm David Papadoppolis. If you have a minute, rate and review our show, it'll help other listeners find us. See you next week.
