Elon, Inc.In some ways, Elon Musk had a quiet week—if making news on a daily instead of hourly basis counts as quiet. This week on Elon, Inc., the panel— Max Chafkin, Dana Hull and Bloomberg Businessweek columnist Amanda Mull—discusses Mull’s latest story about the wrong turns Musk has taken with the Tesla brand.
And while Tesla dealerships and Supercharger stations are increasingly the focus of anti-Musk ire, the panel ponders the future of SpaceX and Starlink, especially as the latter is seeing growth among its competitors.
Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio news. Let me tell you we have a new star.
A star is born Elon up On mars Juson Kennemy.
He is the Thomas Edison plus plus plus of our age.
Probably his whole life is from a position of insecurity.
I feel for the guy.
I would say ninety eight percent really appreciate what he does.
But those two percent that are nasty, they are I'll pay in four post.
We were meant for great things in the United States of America, and Elon reminds.
Us of that we don't have a fourth branch of governments called Elon Musk.
Welcome to Elon Ang, Bloomberg's weekly podcast about Elon Musk. It's Tuesday, March eighteenth. I'm your host, David Papadopolis. Now this week has mercifully given us a bit of a break from the non stop barrage of Elon Indoze news. But that doesn't mean things are quiet in the Musk Empire. There's been all sorts of news on the SpaceX front, and we'll start off there, and then Amanda Mall will join us to talk about a terrific piece you just pen for BusinessWeek about the epic brand destruction. Elon has unleased at Tesla to talk about everything SpaceX. We have our two regulars, Max Chafkin and Dana Hall. Maxilo to you, Hello, David, Dana, how are you hello?
Hello?
Now, I know that I often say on this show, I know nothing about what we're about to talk about, but I truly and when it comes to SpaceX, I truly know nothing about this. So you guys are going to help me like you're going to help our listeners. Dana, the stranded astronauts up there at the space station are coming home courtesy of Elon. Musk tell us about it.
Well, First of all, the phrase stranded is something that NASA has kind of pushed back on.
They're stranded, they're stranded and miserable.
I mean, I know that journalists love to say that they're stranded and they're stuck, but the truth is that they're doing research and they're there because they want to be there. And yes, they were supposed to come home on a Boeing Starliner craft. NASA made the decision not to send them home on the Boeing craft, So now they are coming home on a SpaceX Dragon capsule. And this is a big win for Elon because it kind of plays into this narrative that quote unquote SpaceX is rescuing the astronauts, and yeah, I mean they are. They are bringing them home, and that's a huge win for Elon. And SpaceX has a brand as like the most reliable way to get to and from the space station.
NASA has, as Dana is saying, a reliable way to get astronauts to and from the International Space Station it is SpaceX. It is also and separately attempting to find a second way. Now that is very annoying to Elon Musk since he essentially has a monopoly on this business. So as they've been developing this, Musk has been at pains to spin this as some kind of huge failure, and it is. It is definitely a setback for Boeing. But NASA could have sent these astronauts home much sooner if it had wanted to. It chose not to, And as Dan is saying, they chose to be there.
Okay, fine, so you guys insist that they're not stranded, but they are. We can agree that they are coming home. They're not.
They're they're traveling now, They're they're hurtling through.
As we speak through the void of the sound over there that I hear, is that the sound of them hurtling through space.
By the time listeners hear this podcast, they may splash ocean.
Yeah, so the astronauts are on their way home. I mean, they are in the capsule and they are expected to splash down, like Tuesday evening. They will splash down Tuesday.
Around the time this podcast splashes down as you're listening. A splashdown is is a term that everybody loves to use with these things. Right, there's no other way to come back from the space station if you're not you know, beyond splashing again.
Okay, David, you know you realize it's because they are landing in the ocean. Like it's cost.
I'm aware of that, but is in every case it's separate news. Starlink, a key division of SpaceX, is getting a competitor or Max Competitive Tours. Tell us about it, all.
Right, Yeah, so there's a bunch of stuff happening around Starlink, and in particular around Starlink. Competitors is a new spinoff from Alphabet, the parent company of Google, which is called.
T A A RX.
I guess a titara is how you say, I don't know how to say it. It is a high speed internet company. It does not use satellites. It uses I'm not etting this up. It uses lasers that are mounted on towers. Apparently they can send high speed data, very long rate a laser, essentially like fiber optic cables, but in the sky. And this is being spun as a potential Starlink competitor. This is the thing that other technology company have talked about. It is not a direct competitor starting What it is is another potential way to deliver high speed internet to people in rural areas, which is like the main use case for Starlink. Now, I want to say two things. One is this is like very very speculative. The company, according to the report in the Verge, which is the one that we all saw, has like two dozen employees. Google has been trying to find ways to provide broadband internet to rural areas for a very long time, with.
Very little success.
This actually had its roots in their balloon Internet program, which you may or may not remember.
I don't.
That did not end well.
This is not how like you know you're going to log on to Facebook and you need to.
Said that the Balloon Internet program.
Did not want Now I want to say this though this is again very speculative, not worth banking on at the moment.
That said, but a window into something.
Well, it shows you number one, that there are multiple ways for companies to go after Starlink. We often talk about Elon Musk kind of having a monopoly, right because he has a lot of satellites, but he doesn't have a monopoly on Internet access because there are other ways to deliver the Internet. You can get your Internet via fiber rocket cable, You can get your Internet via cell phone tower. You could even conceivably get your Internet via some crazy laser.
Things that you know. I don't know, David, make sure I don't totally understand.
Now.
The other thing is there are other Starlink competitors. There are a couple of companies that are sort of legacy satellite providers that use older technology but also provide satellite Internet service. There is also an EU company. Yeah you tellt Yeah, I think it's like Eutel Sat maybe really probably the most literal name.
For a for a company in history.
It is a EU based satellite provider and this company is getting a lot of buzz.
Stock has been soaring.
Yeah, it's it's been up like five times over the last month. Over the past month. There is there is thought that Europeans may, especially European governments, may prefer to do business with a European space company at a time when, of course Donald Trump is you know, taking this nationalistic pose and Elon Musk is so closely.
Allied with him.
So there are these other options, and I think seeing these other options materialize kind of hints at the ways that this bet that Elon Musk has made on Donald Trump could go bad. His businesses, while very strong, have vulnerabilities.
So, Dana, we've obviously seen it again and again and again in enormous numbers when it comes to Tesla, that old customer base walking away from the company, and we're going to talk about that at length again in the back half of the show. Maybe some signs that a little bit of that now happening potentially in the starlink space. The Guardian, I should point out, had a piece that came out yesterday or today citing some people who said I've given up my Starlink. I would have just myself slapped the bumper sticker on my Starlink and kept and kept using it. But maybe some signs emerging there.
Sure, I mean, you know, I think what's funny is that for so long, I mean in the early days, like Tesla was the scrappy upstart taking on legacy Atto, and you know, Starlink was the scrappy telecom company taking on the big incumbents. And now that Elon is who he is, doing what he's doing with the Trump administration, the only way that consumers feel like they have political agency to kind of fight back is to you know, slap a bumper sticker or give up their product. I mean that said, most people buy products because they like the products, Like, yeah, you know, equally, there are a lot of people that are probably upset with Jeff Bezos. I'm not seeing people like vandalizing Whole Foods or canceling Amazon in the big numbers that they're you know, virtue signaling about their Tesla's.
I just don't think right the rejection is quite is quite a strong, but that is a good The virtue signaling term max is important because Guardian article like actually came out I misspoke, it came out on Sunday.
The lead image is like a Scottish folks. It's not exactly like he's barefoot on the beach. There must be like three or four other people like.
This is not necessarily a huge court.
I do want to say, though, there are other customers that are rethinking Starlink.
You know, we're seeing reports out of Italy.
Remember we talked some weeks ago about the deal that Starlink was in talks with Georgia Maloney and the Italian government to provide. So there's now increasing opposition in Italy over this deal. It is not a done deal and so and we're seeing you know, the opposition parties in Italy saying, hey, we should do this with a European player, not with space A. You tell set, well, yeah, assumably it isn't just virtue signaling, right like there are strategic reasons why countries might not want to know it has it can't.
It certainly can't be virtue signaling in the same way it is with the Tesla, because who the hell knows what your internet is?
Is?
You know how you're and so it's truly you must really when you get rid of it, you must truly be concerned about your association with the company. If you're Italy or as a customer, you'd be like you must be just like I can't signal to my neighbors and my friends and he you know, I can't send them a message. But man, for me as a consumer, I just really don't want to give him any money. That's what it has to be. And we'll just see ultimately how beyond that, Scotsman, how big that universe is. And then over the weekend, Dana, we had an ex from Elon claiming that the first SpaceX mission to Mars is going to happen next year.
What say you, Well, he's been saying that for a long time, so that's not really new. What was new was that that Optimists would be on board, right, So the idea is that the Optimist is going to Mars before the humans.
You don't need a life support system, right, true.
So it just sort of shows once again how like all of his products and all everything that he's doing, it's all in the service of Mars, right Like the boring company tunnels are all about Mars. Optimist is gonna work on Mars, and he's excited about it because you know, he's now got this relationship with Trump, Trump wants to go to Mars by the end of his first term. I mean, this is the whole enchilada. It's all about Mars.
I think there's a second reason why he's talking about I mean, I take Danna's point that, you know, freelon Mars is the whole enchilada. But also, and we'll get to this in the next segment, Tesla stock is collapsing right now. Optimist is a Tesla product. He has used SpaceX in the past to provide marketing Tesla. That's what that's in part what this is. Right Saying he's gonna send Optimists to Mars is a way to potentially remind Tesla investors like I've got this really awesome robot called Optimists, and you know it's gonna be worth thirty trillion dollars or whatever. The other thing I want to say, there is no Mars program. Not only does does starship does it not appear to be technically ready or anywhere near ready to do the things that Elon is saying.
NASA hasn't agreed to that. The thing that starts.
But being under Trump, if Musk really wants to go to Mars asap is NASA. I'm not going to say yes.
I think we assume that Donald Trump will be in favor of that. I don't think we know how the politics of that are going to work. There are other constituents here, there are other defense contractors, there are voters in the states where those defense contractors operate, on many which are red states. There's going to be a lot of political opposition to like taking money away from one NASA program and putting in another. And there would also be a lot of opposition to just like taking money away from what like Social Security employees or something. I mean, I'm not saying cut, I'm gonna say from not saying recipients. I'm saying they are cutting a huge, huge numbers of staff from the Social Security Administration and many other administrations. And one of the things that Elon Musk has said he thinks that we should do with that money is put into a MARS program. So, like, I don't know why that's far fetched. That is that is kind of like.
What he said he in that case, and that is a political a tough sell politically.
I'll say.
Now, the other thing is they would need to make this starship do a lot more things than it has already done. I mean, when Elon Musk went on the Rogan podcast, there was a lengthy discussion about the heat shield on the Starship spacecraft, and it is not working yet. It is a novel design that they have not figured out. And that is among several problems that are sort of novel, including attempting to refuel this thing in space. There's a lot of questions about how many launches it'll take.
Will there will be some sort of refueling vessel waiting for it up in space something.
That is the plan. So so he's going to launch the just to get to the Moon.
The plan is he's going to launch Starship, and then there are going to be a succession of many fuel launch.
Like water stations in a marathon, like.
Water stations in America.
You know how tricky that can be. Grab the water to watch.
Sometimes it gets dropped on you. But and in space sometimes the fuel just gets boiled off and disappears. So there are lots of issues. Again, it's not not to say that these issues are going to be impossible. It's just like acting like this is a done deal either technically or politically, is you know, bordering on delusional.
Okay, let's move on to Tesla. Okay. We're now joined by Amanda mal a writer for Business Week. Amanda, thanks for joining us, Thanks for having me, Amanda. You just published today a terrific piece about Tesla and the brand destruction that Elon has wrought there, and there was a line that really jumped out at me and I wanted to ask you about it. You wrote that it's nearly impossible to think of a comparable example of a company detonating its own brand. Tell us about that. We've debated this a little bit on the show before, and we were wondering what kind of historical comparisons there were, and you found none.
Yeah, Like, I've written about consumerism and branding and marketing for a long time, and what Tesla is doing with its customer base and its market positioning and it's branding right now is something that you know, I sort of stumped me for an analog in the history of consumption, because you know, brands pivot all the time. They seek to change their markets, they seek to expand their markets, they seek to find new kinds of customers. They do that in all sorts of ways, but very, very rarely is that done through telling almost their entire existing customer base that like not own yes to essentially go, you know, f themselves. And that is quite literally what Elon has done with the current Tesla customer base, which is overwhelmingly left of center people not necessarily libs or progressives, but like people who are concerned about the environment and willing to change their habits and make a very large purchase to sort of like put their money where their mouth.
And was he fully aware do you believe at just how much he was going to turn them away when he made this pivot, or was is he surprised at all?
I think Elon currently seems concerned about this pivot and what it's doing to Tesla sales, what it's doing to Tesla's share price. I think you can see that in the sort of car show that they put on at the White House last week. I don't know what he expected, Like, it's very hard for me to put myself in his sort of mindset going into this, because I think any anybody who works in branding or marketing would tell you that this is like what would happen when you changed the identity of the company from something that sort of flatters the sensibilities of progressives and people who are interested in the environment and in staving off climate change to something that is, you know, supportive of climate change, supportive of antagonizing that customer base.
On that antagonizing point, there was a moment on the Stephen Colbert Show last week that kind have captured this a bit. Let us understand that in general, the Colbert Live audience is a progressive, wealthy, uh East Coast crowd, give or take. I'm sure there's some tourists in all tourists, but are they not.
It's probably left of center, given that Colbert's left of center, But my guess is it's like more centrist than than like the regular cross section of New York.
All right, well, let's let's listen to that clip. Well, there was a silver lining on the implosion of the world economy. It's bad for Elon Musk too. Yesterday, Well.
That is not great for sales.
Wow wow, Now, Max, What struck me having watched it last week was uh, just how raw it sort of felt from the crowd and how much Colbert and and the with him, we're sort of shocked by the extent of the reaction. And yeah, it's it's a thing.
Yeah, I mean, I think they're two misunderstandings, and Amanda has kind of hinted at both of them. One is the sort of misunderstanding of his own customer base and like what they were excited about, what their politics look like, and how they felt about Donald trumpor would feel about Donald Trump. And the second, frankly, is a misunderstanding of Donald Trump's voters and how enthusiastic they are to buy electric vehicles or to you know, participate in the fandom of somebody that does what looks like to most saying people a Nazi salute, right Like, most people, including most Republicans, do not like that stuff. They don't like the like trolling version of Elon Musk. And you see that in the poll numbers. Musk's poll numbers are worse than Donald Trump's pull numbers, which is pretty amazing, honestly, considering that Musk was a very popular figure just a couple of years ago, beloved essentially and admired by people of both parties, and he has managed to just like blow past even one of the most divisive people, you know, public figures, you know, in the world.
Yeah, am I talking with some of my friends who are members of MAGA, and I've raised with them and I've said, what do you think about this, you know, buying a Tesla, And I think that the sentiment has been no chance in hell has essentially been what I've heard back now, Amanda on that White House lawn sales pitch that we saw last week Musk and Trump and there's this whole fleet of Tesla's, of all colors and shapes and sizes. You wrote in the piece that to you it reeks of desperation. Is that what this is here and that it is not going to be an elixir of sorts for the brand.
Yes, I think that when you see a stunt like that, My reading of it was that Elon understands that, like his his traditional consumer is not interested in associating with what he's now associated the brand with and what these protests have very effectively further associated the brand with, and he understands it seems that he needs to find some sort of other like Polish for this situation, and so he went to Donald Trump, which who was divisive but extremely popular among a large swamp of the population, and it was essentially trying to more explicitly hook Tesla up to not just his own cult of personality, but to Donald Trump's. And I think that it probably worked for like some small number of people who were really, really in tune to, you know, signals coming from Trump himself. But like most of Trump's voter are not fully bought in ideologues to the weirdest parts of internet right wing thought. They are regular people who, like Max SAIDs don't necessarily want to be associated with a lot of the things that Elon Musk explicitly associates himself with. Like people who want to own the Libs through their car purchases have like a wealth of options. They have all kinds of trucks and SUVs.
And buying a Model three is not that is not how you achieve it.
I remember that ad that which we talked about. I showed this demanda before we started taping. But Dan, I'll remember, well America Pack ran these ads that were like, the Libs don't want you to buys to like take zin or eat red meat or buy a truck.
And you see a picture of a truck, it's not a cyber truck. It's a gag.
Well, we Man and I were trying to figure out what it was, but we couldn't figure out. It may have been a rock generated truck, but in any case, it was definitively not a cyber truck like you can buy as a man of center piece.
You can buy like a V eight, you know, or whatever.
You can buy a F two fifty and on the libs that way fifty big you can if you really want to commit. But but in any case, like there's just you know, it's it's just not clear that like the pitch of Sustainable Transport has found purchase with that.
He's in a really he's in a really crowded market for symbols of owning the libs via you know, vehicular manner.
Okay, but but he does he is quite good at owning the libs, though in general perhaps not via via vehicle uh sales. Now, Dan, I want to raise this with you though, because there was a Washington Post story that came out in the last couple of days that says that Google search increases or Internet search increases in Red America for quote by a Tesla are way up. And then they cite a bunch of politicians and sorts no buyers to be They don't cite a single buyer, but they have a bunch of politicians sort of really pushing in the wake of the White House lawn ship the Tesla brand. We are from where you sit your dubious this is going to go anywhere. I mean, there are showrooms, by the way, I looked up in red America. There are showrooms in Meridian, Idaho, and Council Bluffs, Iowa, and Strongsville, Ohio, and Chattanooga, Tennessee. They're not rushing to those dealerships to buy musks.
Shift to the right and the effort to kind of pitch Tesla as a car to middle America began quite a while ago when the company moved its headquarters from California to Texas. And you know, if you look at Tesla, like the mission of the company is about accelerating clean energy, but they really market the car as just being like a cool tech car. Right. So they've been aware that there has always been a ceiling to the number of liberal clostal consumers who were going to buy a Tesla. They knew that they had to kind of reach out to red state America a long time ago, which is part of why they moved to Texas, which is part of why they came out with the cyber truck. But that said, the infrastructure for EVS in Middle America is still not as strong, and like the state incentives are not as strong as they are in places like California and Colorado. That said, like Texas is a big state for EVS, and there are a lot of people who drive Tesla's in Texas. It's all Texas and Florida. So like, I think people have the wrong impression that you know, EV penetration is you know, blue state only. It's actually the penetration is warm state. Texas and Florida are huge EV states. So this shift has been going on for quite some time and predates Trump selection.
You know that that made for TV infomercial thing and talking about the white on the White House lawn. You know, I think if you watched it, it wasn't a great ad for Tesla. It was a great piece of content for Donald Trump because well it was. It was really entertaining and really fun. It had this moment where Trump got in the model atque computer Everything's computer. Yeah, it's all computer.
This is a different panel that I've had.
Everything's computer, that's.
Beautiful and and like that was a viral moment, and and it just really had the contours of like of a reality show, like an episode of The Apprentice that' said, the actual like sales pitch was kind of buried in a middle like a press conference, a bunch of Trump's antics. And then the whole point of this thing was that Trump was gonna buy a car, which he barely did in the thing. You watch the thing right that Trump gets in the car, he takes a bunch of questions. Half an hour goes by, then he starts saying his goodbyes. He says, oh, thank you, Elon, thank you. Every Then the reporters are like, mister President, what car are you gonna buy? And he just like flips around and kind of casually goes like, oh, that one. And it doesn't look like a considered purchase, doesn't look like something he's truly excited about. And I think this gets to a more profound problem with Elon Musk, which is that he is now in a sort of relationship, a business relationship with Donald Trump, who is not somebody who is really all about kind of win win partner ships. And I think it's pretty clear that Donald Trump is doing very well in this partnership.
You know.
After this event, the New York Times reported that Elon Musk had agreed to give another one hundred million dollars to donate another one hundred million dollars to Donald Trump's Superpack. Not his own superpack, because Muscle is putting money into that for the Wisconsin State Supreme Court, but an additional one hundred million bucks for Trump to spend as he pleases. Trump is doing really well here. And again I don't know that Elon Musk got his hundred million dollars worth in that event.
Well, the other thing that was significant about that event was that Trump agreed that people who are vandalizing teslas should be treated as domestic terrorists. And that is like a huge escalation and something that everyone really needs to pay attention to. So you're now going to see, you know, as people get arrested for vandalizing stores, or keying cars or setting superchargers on fire, like much more aggressive prosecution.
I thought, owners of t still, we're going to be protected by hate crime laws. It's it's terrorism that we're going.
What what what?
What made me laugh a little bit was the quote from the Attorney General Pam Bondi the other day where she said, if you're going to touch a Tesla, go to a dealership, do anything, you better watch out. And I'm thinking, like that's the problem. No one's going and touching Tesla's and going to dealerships. You need people to go there. So it's like, of all the worries we have, that shouldn't be one.
I mean, obviously there are, like you, questions about norms and kind of like potential executive overreach here, but like this just calls more attention to the protests than otherwise than I think there like you're just saying yeah. I mean, like, I don't think this really helps e on Musk in any way. It just it just calls attention to fact that like if you shoul drive a Tesla, people are are going to just be boiling mad all around you.
I mean, well, Dan, I want to point out that stock opened up. Tesla did down again this morning, testing once again those lows that had hit last week. I think it's been down around fifty percent or so from the peak, the immediate post election peak, and it's down in part because of this big BYD news overnight out of China. BYD's now got this whole new car and this new battery that you can recharge almost as quickly as you would put fuel in a combustion car, just five minutes. And it just strikes me. And I think it's striking investors out there that BYD is just bringing it and innovating day in and day out, while Tesla sort of snoozes.
Yeah, and you're also finally seeing like the sell side analysts wake up and cut their estimates, so that's also impacting the stock. But yeah, no, I mean, like Tesla has real competition in China, which is where it gets like forty percent of its sales, and BYD and you know, like for so long the supercharging network has been Tesla's big value add but now like the next sleep is like even faster, and there is this sense that like the valuation is coming back to earth. The backlash against the brand is real. As Amanda wrote so beautifully in her piece, analysts are waking up. Q one is going to be a mess. You know, everyone's cutting their price targets and their estimates, and you know, I think the proxy will be worth reading too.
Okay, Now, Amanda, as Dana just summarized so well, it is a pretty gloomy outlook out there, and for him and for Musk in this moment, and for Tesla. You wrote in the piece as well that Musk appears to have completely misapprehended the symbolic value of Tesla's brand, or at the very least, he seems to have misunderstood his own capacity to change the nature of that value without also diminishing it. So I ask you this the same question I asked Dana last week. If Musk had to do it all over again and he could know then what he knows now, is he still a yes to this whole thing?
I think he probably is, because I think he is like a true believer in a diologue, in the stuff that he is doing politically right.
The government needs to be rained in and government spending needs to be reined in.
Yes, I think that his larger project is this.
Doge stuff drive Tesla is zero.
Yes, absolutely. I think that I think that he feel he is sure enough in himself that he can find some sort of financial upside, maybe not for Tesla, but maybe but elsewhere that he will be fine.
So his break he essentially from the Tesla's stock price, there is no breaking point in the Tesla stock price for him. Maxis, do you have a Tesla stock price where Musk capitulates and breaks?
And I think so.
I think that Elon Musk, I think he and Donald Trump will last through the midterm. But I think the only thing that could stop that, but the thing that could lead Musk to leave, or could lead that relationship to break up, is not about Donald Trump getting sick of kind of like Elon Musk hang around or whatever other kind of hilarity ensues over in the executive branch. It is the stock price of Tesla. It's like, if it fell, it's falling about fifty percent. If it fell another fifty fifty percent from where it is today, which totally could happen. You look at the share price of Bid. You're talking about how great Bid is doing. It is worth a lot less than Tesla.
I looked.
I think it's you know, between one hundred and two hundred billion. Tesla right now worth seven hundred billion. So if that stock price were to fall further, if it were to fall too closer to the valuation of SpaceX, for instance, you know, round, that would make my exactlytion below for one hundred billion. I could see Musk opting to spend more time with his company, Like he could basically maintain his alliance with Trump and go back to Tesla and like solve potentially two problems at the same time. Like at some point there are going to be diminishing returns. Those are going to start to face diminishing returns where like it gets harder to cut costs the political backlash growth, and also like there's no reason he couldn't say, thank you, mister president, You're doing a great job, but I need to focus on my company. And he could still write Trump hundreds of billions of dollars worth of checks.
Absolutely, And aren't you, by the way, already starting to get diminishing returns from dos? I mean, certainly, as we said at the very top of the show, they're in the news a lot less than they used to be. Now. Maybe that's just because Wow, they're just doing their business now and the shock and all of the initial days is pasted. Don't read too much into that or read a lot into it. They're just not getting a whole lot done at this point.
I don't think we really know like in terms of their you know, cut attempts to cut government spending, whether they've hit diminishing returns. I think politically they are hitting diminishing returns. You know, the reports out recently about getting rid of phone support for social Security, Like, you're starting to cut into things that are.
Going to be popular with voters.
People people who need to access social Security benefits do not you know, they happen to be most of them happen to be very old, and they're not necessarily the kind of person who's like super enthusiastic about talking to a chatbot. I am not enthusiastic about talking to a chatbot. And you know, and I'm forty two, so like I can only imagine somebody who has less experienced how they feel about it.
Yeah, and this goes back to what you were talking about earlier. I think about the sort of Trump is not like a win winess business partnership guy. So he Trump has effectively gotten Elon Musk to be the face of a lot of the things that are going to.
Be unpopular.
That he if he were the guy with the cudgel in his hand, he Trump, he would be taking all that heat instead. No, Elon, you got this, dude, go for it.
Yeah.
I think that Trump has effectively structured this whole endeavor so that Elon Musk is the face of the stuff that is less likely to be.
Popular as a results of eventually the fall guy, and not only yeah, absolutely yeah, Trump can eventually ran him and say oh no, no, no, no, we don't want to go that far.
Yeah, never mind, you know, we were, We're looking at it very strongly.
What did Amanda? Thank you very much for joining us. That was a terrific piece you had out today. Tesla's gamble on Maga customers won't work. And when you have a news story out on mister Mosk or Tesla or any of his other companies, you shall come back and tell us all about it.
Thank you so much, all.
Right, Max, Dana thanks as always, Thank you for having us.
David, thank you.
This episode was produced by Stacy wang Anna Masa rakus Is our editor, and Rayhan Harmanci our senior editor, Blake Maple's handles engineering, and Dave Purcell fact checks. Our supervising producer is Magnus Hendrickson. The Elining theme is written and performed by Taka Yasuzawa and Alex Sugiira. Reddon Francis Newnham is our executive producer, and Sage Bowman is the head of Bloomberg Podcasts. A thanks as always to our supporters Joel Weber and Brad Stone. I'm David Papadopoulos. If you have a minute, rate and review our show, it'll help other listeners find us. See you next week.
