For better or worse, 2023 was the Year of Elon.
The world’s richest man entered the year humbled: Tesla’s stock had fallen precipitously over the previous 12 months, Musk had been forced by a Delaware judge to buy Twitter (since renamed X) at what looked like an inflated price (one he’d set himself, in what now looks like the world’s most misguided attempt at a weed joke), and he’d been booed by an arena full of Dave Chappelle fans. (Musk claimed, limply, that the crowd was mostly cheering “except during the quiet periods.”)
You can say a lot about what Musk has said and done in the months since then, but no one would argue he’s been marginalized. Surveys suggest that Musk’s reputation has taken a hit amid his amplification of right wing conspiracy theories, his endorsement of antisemitism, and his suggestion that the chief executive of one of the world’s most beloved companies “go f--- yourself.” And yet: Musk has put himself at the center of the news and has managed to stabilize his business empire. To make sense of this turn of events, the Elon Inc. crew invited PJ Vogt, the host of the Search Engine podcast, which earlier this year went deep down the Elon Musk rabbit hole to understand how, exactly, one of the world’s most admired technologists turned into a trolling, right wing memelord.
Well, Elon Musk gives now the richest person on the planet.
More than half the satellites in space are owned and controlled by one man.
Starting his own artificial intelligence company.
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.
Alon Musk is a scam artist and he's done nothing.
Anything he does is fascinating the people.
Welcome to Elon Inc.
The show where we analyze the latest from Elon Musk's business empire. I'm Max Chafkin, sitting in for our normal host, David Popotopolis, who is off for the holidays, probably driving his Chevy Colorado around somewhere upstate.
So in instead we plan something special.
We're gonna look back at the year in Elon Musk and look forward to all that's to come in twenty twenty four. We're talking about the biggest stories, the weirdest stories, the funniest stories, all of it. And full disclosure, we're recording this episode on December thirteenth, so if between now and when it airs, you hear of the name of Elon Musk's university or some other strange thing happens, you'll know why we didn't cover it. Okay, to do this, we've got a special guest, PJ Vote. He's a host of the search Engine podcast, which answers a burning question each week, and earlier this year, search Engine did a great episode trying to understand what had happened to Elon Musk. You should check it out if you haven't listened to it. And we're so happy to have PJ here with us today. PJ, Welcome to Elon, Inc.
Thank you for having me.
We're also joined by Sarah Fryar, Bloomberg's Big Tech editor. Hey, Sarah, always the pleasure, and Rayhan Harmansi, who regular listeners will know as an editor on this show.
Rayhon, thank you for being here.
Thanks.
Okay, So this was clearly a huge year for Elon Musk. We had some ups and downs for Tesla, many many rocket launches, We had brain chips and advertiser boycotts, and a very curious obsession with the letter X that I'm sure we'll talk about. And so we're here to look back on all of that and hopefully take stock of it. And I want to start by asking everyone on our panel to give me a one word verdict on how twenty twenty three was for Elon Musk. Sarah Fryar, give me an adjective.
Oh my goodness, explosive, PJ, hysterical.
Yeah, I was gonna say unstable.
Okay, So Magnus, our producer, asked me like a week ago what I thought, and without really thinking I said great. I'm not sure if that was just like a normal like if someone asks you how you're doing, you say great, even if you're doing very poorly. But I've been thinking about defending that idea, and I think if I were going to defend that Elon had a great year, I would say number one, Tesla stock doubled, Number two, Elon became a lot more famous than he'd been, and number three he got the Walter Isaacson Biographer of Genius treatment. So by those standards, I think it was a really, really good year. But what I want to do today is talk about what each of us thought was the biggest, the most important story of twenty twenty three in Elon Musk's world. And let's start with you, Raehan. What did you think was the biggest story of the year for Elon.
I think the biggest story, and I'm going to be borrowing from our colleague Dana Hall, who is not.
With us today.
I think it's Tesla's price cuts. I mean, starting in January, I think maybe as much as half a dozen times this year, Elon cut the price of Tesla. And you know, it had some moments where it seemed like the stocks were going to be very affected by this, but as of now, Tesla's share prices have rebounded and his market share is still over sixty percent.
Yeah.
Elon talked about these price cuts in detail during an earnings call in early January, and let's like just listen to a little bit of that tape just to get a sense of what was going on.
Basically, price really matters. I think there's the vast number of people that wanted to buy a Tesla car but can't afford it, and so these price changes really make a difference for the average consumer, and sometimes for those people who are well, you know, have a lot of money, they sort of forget about how important affordability is.
Wow, that feels like a long time ago, at least to me. You know where the big issue was like how many teslas are people going to buy? And we hadn't really gotten into all these allegations of bad behavior and craziness on social media. But Sarah just catch us up a little bit and remind us what was going on back then. How did Elon Musk start twenty twenty three.
I mean, I think that Musk was in this position of feeling like he was on top of the world, like he's the new king of the playground, or however Walter Isaacson calls it in his book Owning X being in charge of the discourse as you will, And it's all gotten a lot more complicated.
And it's like super popular too.
I mean, because there's later in that Earnings call someone brought up because even back then, right, Elon Musk has got a little crazier in the last couple of months in terms of his Twitter presence, But even then was he was doing some pretty edgy things and somebody said, hey, Elon, don't you think this might be hurting your reputation?
Of these might hurt demand? And here's what he said.
Let me check my Twitter account. So I've got one hundred and twenty seven million followers, and it continues to grow very rapidly. That suggests that I'm reasonably popular, and I might not be popular by with some people, but for the vast majority of people, the follow account speaks for itself on most interactive accounts social social media account I think maybe in the world, certainly on Twitter, and that's actually predated the Twitter acquisition, So I think Twitter is actually incredibly powerful tool for driving demand for Tesla.
So PJ, that's how popularity works, right.
Yeah, it's a discrete number. There's no other numbers. It's not how people feel about you. It's just that many people are theoretically paying attention to you on the social media website which you have purchased and driven into the ground. I find his worldview it's weird. He's forced himself into our imaginations and into our conversations in such a The only sort of public figure who has done this before is Trump, where every conversation sort of pulls towards him, whether you want it to or not. I still find him psychologically very interesting, and this is one of the facets where he really both doesn't seem to distinguish often between good attention and bad attention, and Also he's someone who you know, we all are aware that social media pulls on our minds in ways that we might not always particularly like this is the most extreme case of it. And the person who is most badly affected by the product, or most publicly badly affected by the product, decided he wants to down and run the product is such a crazy thing.
This is really just an engineer mindset. It's the number went up. Yes, how could I be failing?
Yeah?
You know, one hundred and sixty six million is what it's at now, based on that Elon Musk has had, as Max puts it, a great year.
I can't believe we're now we're settling on this. I thought I might take it be controversial. The thing for me in this is the tone, right, it's like the weird, especially comparing those two clips, like the first one where it's like very the affect is like very sort of laid back. He can barely get a word out, and this is this like extremely like swaggering.
Let me check my Twitter account.
It's so like you said, PJ, just like psychologically kind of wild. And also he's up to like one hundred and sixty six million since then, It keeps going up.
I mean, the number does keep going up. But it's interesting though, because, like you know, I mean, Max, you wrote about this, a lot of people were thinking that because of increasingly strange public postings, Tesla would take a hit. He was too distracted. But their strategy of cutting price, I mean, it cut into their profit margins, but it seems to be working. And so you're left with this feeling of like Elon's publicly doing one thing on one hand, and then on another hand, it's not a total failure, and I think that's what is confusing. Over and over and over again.
Well, people thought that X would die or Twitter would die in his hands, and in some ways it has. It's just not the same platform people were used to, but people are still going there if they're still talking about the happenings of the day, and it's definitely a bit more depressing, but it's not making as much money.
He was like, not the most full throated.
I'm just saying it didn't die. I'm consistently surprised that it is hung on and continued to stay marginally relevant. Maybe we'll see it's death in twenty twenty four. It is surprising how after the Twitter acquisition, all these insiders were telling me, telling our colleagues Kurt and Ed, like, this is gonna all break, Like you can't just lay off or accept the resignation of seventy five percent of the staff and expect Twitter to still operate. It's held together with duct tape and it's going to die. And it hasn't died.
So, PJ, you're a user, right, I assume.
I actually retired from Twitter about a month ago.
Okay, So, but I was.
A very very very very very very enthusiastic user up until that point. And really my feeling was there have probably been things I didn't love about the site that I noticed less pre Elon, and that he just sort of like turned all the knobs all the way to the right, Like you know, it's like a social media website that's built for conflict. It's built for like the collapse of context. You notice that less when it's not being set to fight mode, but desires. It's interesting, Like I do think one of the things that's confounding about Elon is that you kind of never know. And I feel like this happened a few times this year where he will do something that is counter to the conventional wisdom of how a CEO should behave, how a human being should behave, how an Internet user should behave, And maybe eight times out of ten you could say, I know how this is gonna go.
This is terrible, this is obvious.
I not at all. A billionaire could tell you not to do that, and eight times out of ten you'll be right, and then two times out of ten you'll be wrong, And it's very confusing.
One of the things.
I'm not a software engineer, but I remember people saying, if you destroy the headcount of this company, the service itself will break. The service shook. It was rickety.
If you'd made me.
Make a money bet when you cut that many engineers, will the website even load? I wouldn't think the actual like, let alone the user experience. The fact that the website is running at all right now is not what I predict and I was relatively certain.
So why did it survive though?
Is it just because we just don't we overestimate the like how many software engineers are required.
It was definitely an overstaffed company. I think it was a place where a lot of things didn't happen because people were indecisive about how to make them happen. That was partially Jack Dorsey's leadership. The culture that he instilled was a more philosophical leadership, and they just weren't that efficient. At Twitter. It was more about like, how do we remain good stewards of this site that is so powerful that we don't even know what to do with it? And now it's different.
So clearly, Sarah, for you, I'm guessing Twitter X this is maybe the story of the year. I want to drill down on that a little bit and talk about one of my favorite characters of the year, Linda Yakarino. First all, let's listen to at a little Linda. I feel like she's been one of one of the kind of the bright spots.
In the year of Elon.
It's a comic relief.
Well that's one way of looking at it.
I think another way, and maybe the way I was thinking about when I was getting ready for this show was Linda as Elon's most important defender, which I think really comes out in the clip we're about to listen to, which was from the Code conference in September.
And who's kidding who?
I don't care what the structure is at Meta, But who wouldn't want Elon Musk sitting by their side running product?
Rayhon's making a face.
I guess if you want a job, you probably don't want Elon bust sitting by your side running product. I mean Linda has emerged though in a really Trump like way, like I think I was talking to Maxwell this before, like the way that like when sort of respected figures have entered Trump's orbit or his cabinet, there's a moment where you're like, are they going to you know, stand up to him? And then you very quickly realized like, oh no, no, no, no, you didn't go here to stand up to him. You came here to be a supplicant. And then there's often a break after that. And I think we just don't really know what Linda's breaking point is.
Well, I think we assumed right that it was going to be like a mooch kind of situation.
I mean, yeah, like forty days.
I don't know, right, Sarah, I mean, did you think she'd make it this for?
I think I said six weeks when we were talking about it when she joined, and really, you know, that wasn't any indication of how I thought about her character or her skills or anything. It was literally just looking at at the history of Musk and top executives at Twitter, where some of them seem to last like a matter of days, a matter of hours. It was really quite a tumultuous time. And she has also exceeded my expectations in standing by him. And the comic relief part is just honestly, her Twitter feed, it is the most basic and almost like has this like sense of obliviousness over her owner's actions. She talks about you know, yay football and Jay Pumpkins, spice lattes, and just everything that is generically acceptable to say, she says it, and with emoji fanfair.
She's tweeting from an alternate reality, which Twitter is a normal social media company that posts like Ana Dyne sort of ten people in a copywriting room wrote something they thought would appeal to a very bland, millennial copy like like, there's some alternate reality where Twitter is even more normal than it was pre acquisition, and she's in that reality. She just happens to also be in our reality where Twitter's becoming whatever Twitter's becoming.
It's like it's like six red high heeled emojis like fashion week, and then a new kind of Twitter ad which really is giving like Spencer's gifts kind of like it's like.
You didn't see the one.
I don't even know if something that's okay to talk about.
There was one. It's probably not okay. Yeah, okay, let me see if I could.
Do this, like in a family friendly there is a Twitter ad. No machine could have predicted that this is where this ends, which is like not that I'm on Twitter, but let's say that I jump back on every once in a while and you just listen and don't talk. It was seeing this ad for a device that you could use after your sexual partner and fall asleep to extract semen from their contracept device in the trash and impregnate yourself. This was what the ad was saying the device was for. If I had more time and more lives, I would find out what is actually going on with that company, because I don't think that that's a business model, like non consensual pregnancy is not really a business model. Like they are doing a good job of jitting up attention for what reason I don't know, but those are the advertisers they're working for or that they're working with. And meanwhile in it's like.
It's all that's what our tweets are like next to and it's I mean that, and of course lots and lots and lots of other things, but I have to say, and I don't want to be a bummer at all, but like.
I feel like my enjoyment of Linda's tweets took a real dive when Elon went further into like anti Semitic amplification.
Yeah, and it.
Really was made me mad because I had been had been such a consistent source of joy to see the like twenty football emojis, you know, like next to the semen ad. I don't know, but I mean it does seem like at this point like she is in it to win it.
She did, by the way, tweets saying that she wishes that groc the Ai chat bought was around to explain the birds and bees to her kids. She said that, yeah, that is one of her top cringe tweets. That is just so indicative of her company cheerleading combined with let's call it optimism.
All right, PJ, your biggest story of the year, my biggest So the editor of your show was like, hey, you're gonna have to come up with the biggest story.
Please don't pick something recent. And I was trying to challenge myself to not pick something social media based, because I feel like sometimes with Elon, social media as a distraction relative to not that it's.
Not a big deal, but a lot of other things happened.
So he sad in thought, and I was like, I think it's both recent and social media based.
I feel like inviting.
Alex Jones back on Twitter was when all the Elon news from this year burns off of my memory to replace be replaced by thirty other things he does in December.
I think I'm gonna remember that, Sarah, what do you think.
I would forget that? I mean, I feel like it's harsh. Well, I just think it's probably the most predictable thing he's done this year, because he every once in a while he needs to inject a dose of hey everyone, please remember that I am mister free speech. And he brings back all of the people that were banned before. And there's got to be a list of the top names that have ever been banned from social media, and he's just gonna check off all those boxes based on who tells him to act. I was very unsurprised, and you know, it was as disappointing as you would as you would expect it to be.
All Right, Well, I think Pj's kind of onto something because it was last year when Elon Musk was sort of hanging out with Kanye West and seeming to kind of accommodate Kanye's over anti semitism, and he got into exchange with Alex Jones where he said, I'm not going to let Alex Jones back because of what he did to those parents.
You know, I lost a child.
Elon Musk lost a child, a young kid, and he empathized, and I think that was a moment where he really seemed human, and it seemed like a human reaction. It seemed almost not exactly a bright spot for Elon Musk's relationship with X, but at least a human one.
Yeah.
And to Sera's point, it wasn't as if I was like, oh my god, Eli, like this is so out of step with where you've been going. I think it was a combination of that. It had been a line that he'd drawn that hadn't seemed about pleasing whatever strange audience, and he's trying to please at any given moment, and also that when he said he would never let Jones back on the platform, the other thing he said was that he had had a child who died, and that he related to the idea that victimizing parents who had lost children was just like even in his sort of very selective understanding of the free speech he wants to defend and very enthusiastic love of provocation, that there were places he wouldn't go, the idea that eventually, of course, he goes to those places.
I guess you're right.
It does feel. It just felt like, okay, this is really you can fully call it at this point, like we know what website, this is always going to be, we know who is going to be here, we know what kind of conversations are going to happen, and also like whatever the next stage is the problem with being edgy all the time is you have to go further, Like you can't just flirt with anti semitism. People get used to it, So then you have to be baldly anti semitic and like in the urge to just like always keep pushing, you end up in some very dark places very quickly. And I think that's what sucks about Elon and what's so complicated about Elon is both that in some ways he's a person who's invented really important and socially powerful things. He's also a person with some of the worst opinions of anyone who thinks publicly at all. And he's someone who, like you're watching, I don't know, there's this argument about whether he's getting worse or just revealing himself or whatever, But you're watching something seem to happen in public in a way that's just like everyone's had it with like some random uncle or something.
Yeah, but you're watching it.
With someone with tremendous power and who's it is being fed directly into this machine that we're all seck And it's such a strange modern nightmare.
I wonder you guys think, is he trying to drive people off of X? Is there anything vaguely strategic about this? Like it seems like it doesn't benefit him, But on the other hand, he's worked hard to make sure like journalists want like he wants a certain kind of person there.
I think it's strategic in the sense that the folks who are cheering him on are cheering him on quite loudly, and when you are somebody who provides a home for the extreme and they give you that sort of feedback. I mean looking at how he framed bringing Alex Jones back on the platform as the voice of the people, like the people who follow me voted for this. He wants to be a people pleaser. He thinks about his Twitter following in terms of his popularity in his constituency. Really, and I think that that is a potentially damaging echo chamber when you start to believe that the Internet is real life. We've seen that happen to regular people, and now we're seeing it happen to the richest man of the world.
Okay, we're going to try something new. It's a segment we're calling what is Elon Musk talking about? And it's going to work like a contest. I am going to play a clip of Elon must saying something, and the three of you are gonna have to guess what is the subject of these comments, and if you get it right, I will award you one point for doing so.
All right, let's hear the first clip.
You wouldn't find the actual cyber truk, so if they did have a spaceship and it came here thirty thousand years ago.
Oh yeah, yeah, we'd would definitely find it evidence of it. Well not, I mean, if it's one spaceship, maybe not. But if it was a lot of them, sure.
That is the origin myth of the Dogon tribe.
Right, all right, Rayhon, there's a theory that Elon is responding to, and I would like you to guess what that theory is.
I have to confess I'm not up on my like alien you know, kind of like archaeology or something like. I mean, I do appreciate the idea that if it was one, it would be hard to find, but if it's many, certainly we would certainly we would have evidence of it. You know, I can't I don't think I can get a point here, Sarah.
What do you think is your responding to the theory that we are actually from a different planet?
Yeh wait, so we're aliens.
I think the idea is that there was I'm not actually you know what, I'm gonna confess that I don't know the entire specifics of the theory, but the idea. This was on the Joe Rogan podcast, and there was, first of all, I loved this. This might have been my favorite Elon moment of the year, just because there's something just wonderful about forcing a very powerful person to sit through conspiracy, to like have to weigh in on every conspiracy on the Internet and be like, so, you know, richest man in the world, what do you think about the ancient Aliens theory? And so, yes, this is the theory that says that, like the Sphinx and the Great Pyramids are much older than people thought. And what happened is the Aliens came and there was a very advanced civilization that built these megalithic things, and they were wiped out by some kind of calamity and then we all kind of went back to the you know, to Neolithic times.
On a reporting trip last year at an airport, I happened run into Coolio, the deceased rapper, who was a wonderful man to get to speak to, but he was a big proponent of the ancient Aliens theory and was sort of like gently chastising me for not reporting it out.
Which is really funny.
I mean, I haven't watched the Secrets of Is It Skinwalker Ranch. Skywalker's Skywalker Ranch is where they do the special effects.
For Star Wars.
There's like a very popular History Channel show on this, but I and also a lot of YouTube videos that Joe Rogan seems to be very familiar with.
So yeah, open your eyes. The evidence is all around.
I was told to do my research. I honestly think and like more more than we have time for today. But I think that there again, someone with more time than any of us have, maybe it's me should figure out. Like, at some point we had something called the History Channel which showed history, and then at another point they were like ancient Aliens documentaries all the time, and for a certain late night stoner personality, you're like, well, it's on the History Channel. And I think the preponderance of people in America who believe that the Sphinx was built by aliens, and the History Channel realizing that documentaries are expensive to make, I think those things shake hands in a historically cultural way.
So credit where due here. Elon Musk was very skeptical of this theory and repeatedly through cold water on it, And I would say, you know, unlike many of his other kind of very out there things, stayed firmly with the scientific consensus on the question of ancient aliens.
All right, so I guess Sarah gets that point. I win.
Why is Rogan asking him about cyber trucks in the middle of the Ancient Aliens club?
Oh my god, PJ. Excellent question.
Basically, they were having this extended debate over whether the lack of evidence for the ancient aliens, the idea of an advanced civilization prior to the Neolithic Age, was a problem for that theory, and Rogan was sort of positing, like was trying to like drill down on, like, well, how much evidence would there actually be if you left a cyber truck awkward?
And that's that was how we got there.
I see, I see.
Okay, okay, it doesn't make that much sense.
So but I think we should just move on and go to the go to the next clip.
Now again, and you look at the surface of the look at the look at the Pacific, and say what percentage of the Pacific consists of whale? Like He'll give you a big picture and like point out all the whales in this picture. I'm like, I don't see any whales. It's like basically zero percent.
All right, PJ. I don't know if you heard the well.
At first I thought he said cervix, but he said survey. He definitely said survey.
I'll read it just for clarity.
If you look at the surface, look at the Pacific, meaning the Pacific Ocean, and say what percentage of the Pacific consists of whale, whales, the mammal marine mammals. Yeah, and then he says, you know, I could, I could give you a picture point out all the whales.
I'm like, I don't see any whales. It's basically zero percent.
So this comment about Pacific being nearly zero percent whale was in response to a question about what topics.
Okay, okay, I want to get this right. I don't just want to let me try to work this out.
I can give you a hint if you want. Yeah, yeah, okay.
So it's a topic that's very much been in the news in the in the tech world, and it's it's a question that sort of transcends both technology and government.
Who should it's artificial intelligence? You s about artificial intelligence and correct? Yeah, okay, okay.
All right, So PJ gets half a point and the other half of the if you want the full point, you have to guess how we got from AI regulation to the percentage of wales and the Pacific Ocean.
Well, the metaphor seems to be about how there can be a lot of something, even if it's a small percentage of something else. And there could be a lot of something even if you can't see it. But that's as far as my mind can reach to Elon's mind.
Right, if we don't regulate, we are facing in extermination events.
That is not correct, Sarah.
The largest mamble, yeah, is easily hidden almost in the sea, and so the insights of AI are there's going to be so much content that it'll be difficult to find the gems.
I'm going to give you a quarter of a point for that one. His point was that.
SpaceX follows a lot of rules, including the rule about not hitting whales with rocket debris.
Oh, I'm glad they do.
I'm sure he was not in favor of all regulation, but I feel like that's a good rule. No.
Actually, his point was that the rule was unnecessary because.
There's so few whales.
Yeah, if you look at the ocean, very few whales. All right, let's let's hear the last clip.
I've got my pandeted walrust move that's what it is. Well, you know like Walrush doesn't need mash Lush. I forgot this even right because it's really big. You don't want to go wrestling at Wolrus.
PJ buzzed first.
So I mean this is this is Whenam and Zaiber were talking about fighting in the octagon. God, what a dumb What a dumb world we decided to have.
We could have had so many other worlds. Okay, I think that's enough.
So I think if I'm keeping this straight, we had a point and a half for PJ, a point in a quarter for Sarah and Rayhan.
I'm sorry, zero points for you, Robed. Let's move on.
We talked about the biggest stories of the year. We talked about I think we hit most of the the big moments. Let's talk about the stories that maybe didn't get as much attention as as we.
Thought should have.
Sarah, what was your most underrated Elon Musk story of the year.
I think it has to be Starlink, just because what we saw with Musk's power is this is this incredib evolution to the point where because he has this tool to provide Internet connectivity, he is essentially a diplomat to countries that needed countries that are in war. We saw, you know, discussions around whether whether it should be used in Gaza. It's been used in Ukraine, and the starlink connection with musk as like the gatekeeper to that connectivity could could open up a lot of more interesting tensions for him around the world, especially as he's also like weighing in on all these global conflicts via his commentary on X and runs. You know, multiple businesses that require consumers in all of these countries. So I just think starlink is fascinating.
PJ, what's your what story did we not spend enough time talking about in twenty twenty three?
I mean, to be fair, I think if it ends up, mattering will matter much more in twenty twenty four, and the place that reported on this was Bloomberg. But I think neuralink could end up being a really big deal. I think that if Elon, for all of his false contradictions and as strange as we feel about the amount of power he has, if neuralink works and he invents something that in the near term can let paraplegic people walk again, and then in the further term could be a computer that you put into your brain, and if that technology is beneficial and important enough that we have to decide, as actually Vance asked in Bloomberg correctly, and I believe on this podcast, do we trust Elon Musk to put a computer in our brain? I just find that to be a fascinating question and a fascinating problem. And like, you know, the thing about him is he really has been at ground zero of so many transformative technologies, to the degree that now if there's something that he's looking at that feels a little bit sci fi, but there's reporting saying that he's pretty close to break through, I'm inclined to take the technology at least very seriously.
It's funny, you guys are all of your picks are sort of in a way better than mine, which was just the stock price, because I feel like, although we did talk a lot about about it, I feel like the money is the thing that kept all of these antics, all this weirdness, all this stuff going, and like the total like flip from Elon Musk being like down and out to being again, what you know, the richest person in the world, Like it seems like it partly is what enabled you know, all of this.
All right.
So we talked a lot about what happened in twenty twenty three, and I want.
To look ahead a little bit, Sarah, what do you.
Think is going to be the story we're going to be talking the most about in twenty twenty four.
Well, I think the one that I'm going to be keeping an eye on closely is just the finances at X because it seems like something's going to give at some point. They're burning money. They have this tremendous amount of debt, by the way, the debt that Musk took on from the acquisition, the forty four billion dollar acquisition from banks, the thirteen billion that's actually on X's balance sheet. It's not his money to repay. The company has to repay it. And advertising dollars are are cratering. Just reported that the company is projecting maybe optimistic two point five billion in revenue for the year, which is way down. You know, a normal quarter this year was around six hundred million in revenue. Normal quarter last year was more than a billion. So does X have to restructure the debt? Do they go bankrupt? What happens? And I actually explore this with our with our credit team today and It just reminded me that if he does decide to restructure the debt, if he does go bankrupt, he loses all the equity goes away. So all those friends that put in, you know, say, if Larry Elson is still a billion dollar equity investor in X, it just goes poof if they restructure the debt. So that's something that Musk will have to grapple with if it gets that dire.
Okay, so lots of tensions around X. Let's talk about the feud between Elon Musk and Bob Iger or maybe a one sided feud. But Sarah, where do you think that goes next year?
Oh?
Man, I mean Elon and Bob Iiger. If X does fail, it's going to be like he's going to be completely blamed on the advertisers. So Disney will be the entity that took your favorite social network if it is your favorite, away from you and the feud continues or they get back in good graces and billionaires move on.
It's just occurring to me that Ron DeSantis should be what Elon is afraid of becoming. Given like at every stage, like you don't go against Disney, you just don't do it.
You know, Tell it to Earth, Rayhan, tell it to Earth. All right, PJ, you brought this up earlier, or I guess you guessed it correctly. Elon and Mark Zuckerberg Anna, are we gonna see a makeup or a breakup?
Or are we gonna see a cage fight?
I don't think we're gonna see a cage fight.
It's so disappointing. I feel like my.
Read was Mark Zuckerberg figured out that arguing with Elon was not a great look. That like, initially, maybe it was like, oh, isn't it cool that Mark Zuckerberg's physically fit? And then isn't it cool that Mark Zuckerberg is like being a little dramatic, and isn't it cool that he looks like the grown up? And eventually sort of everyone clocks that two middle aged men are talking about an octagon, and like, I think he's figured out to just not do that. So I don't think the fight reignites, because I think Zuckerberg's smart enough to stay away and Elon is so punch drunk on targets. I'll find somebody.
Else that seems right. I think that, like, I think Zuckerberg is just like loving threads right now and like the emergence of a rival short form social media, so I think that in his octagon he's already won.
Well, I've been the long time you know, age fight promoter of this on this podcast, and I have to concur and with with great disappointment because I did, I did want to bet on Elon for that.
I mean, you did bet on Elon?
I did?
Yes?
What was the thinking?
The thinking is size, it's you know, it's we heard it, the wall was out.
You know.
I just think, like, like you know, Elon might want it a little bit more than Mark Zuckerberg. I'm just not sure that as I, as I say it out loud, it doesn't sound that good to be talking myself out of it as we speak. Okay, that seems like a great place to wrap up. Thanks for listening to Elon Inc. And thanks to our panel Sarah, Rayhan and PJ.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks, thank you, and listeners, please check out pj's podcast.
It's called search Engine. It's really great.
This episode was produced by Stacy Wong, Naomi Shavin, and Rayhan Hamansi, our senior editors. The idea for this show also came from Rayhan Blake Maple's handles engineering, and we get special editing assistants from Jeff Grocott. Our supervising producer is Magnus Hendrickson. Thanks a bunch to BusinessWeek editor Joel Weber, and to Soer Sadi and to Angel Rekio. The Elon Inc. Theme is written and performed by Taka Yazuzawa and Alex Sigierra. Sage Bauman is the head of Bloomberg Podcast and our executive producer.
I'm Max Schafkin.
David Popadopoulos is off for a couple of weeks. He'll be back in the new year.
If you want to give us a holiday gift, leave us.
A rating, a review. We really appreciate it. Happy holidays, everybody, See you soon.