Thanks for downloading Making a Killing. I'm Bethany McClain. We've had some amazingly fun conversations so far in this series, but other shows that are really fun is when my interview collides with a topic I've written about for Vanity Fair, and this upcoming episode will feature Lynette Lopez talking about Tesla. In modern English, the term cult has usually been used in reference to a social group that is defined by its unusual, religious, spiritual, or philosophical beliefs, or by its common interest in a particular personality, object or goal. So that's how Wikipedia answers the question what is a cult? I was thinking about that because, well, because I'm thinking about Elon Musk, who isn't a Tesla and the rest of Elon's empire. I recently finished a piece for Vanity Fair about Solar City, which was a mostly forgotten piece of the puzzle until recently. Back to them anyway. The headline of the piece was He's full of s blank blank blank, How Elon Musk fooled investors, built taxpayers, and gambled Tesla to save Solar City. I guess my point of view is pretty clear. Criticizing Musk is an interesting exercise, because Musk, who is going to save the planet with solar energy, self driving electric vehicles, artificial intelligence, and if all else fails, a way to get to Mars, is in many ways the leader of a cult. Let's call it the Muscuans. Musk is their leader, their icon, or, as one put it on Twitter, the most genius man alive. During the course of my reporting, I learned about another group, a group called Tesla Q Tesla stock symbol followed by the queue that stocks pickup when they are delisted due to bankruptcy. Obviously, these are not Muscians, these are skeptics, and the battleground between the believers, the Muscians and the skeptics is Twitter. Of course, as is the case with any cult. To the believers, it's Tesla C that is the real enemy. And so the dark side of fintwit, which is what people call financial Twitter, is that cult members target people, particularly female journalists, who dare to write or say anything negative about their leader. As listeners of this podcast know, one of the questions I'm obsessed with is what is the line between a visionary and a fraud. I don't have a view on the rest of Elon's empire beyond Solar City. The one thing I do know is that if any piece of it works, Elon Musk will go down in the history books as a visionary. But will the problems he has created and Tesla's desperate need for cash catch up with him? And is the way his critics are treated, whether with his explicit or implicit consent, a clue to how all of this might turn out. My guest today is Lynette Lopez, who has been covering Musk fearlessly and skeptically for Business Insider for several years. A year ago, after she wrote a particularly skeptical story, the Muskins came after her, so she's also experienced the dark side of fintwit. I'm curious as to her views on his empire, but also her experience with the cult and what, in her view it all means. Selenette, your pin tweet is pretty astonishing. It's from about a year or so ago, and it's I'd just like to point out that right now, right at this very moment, at Elon Musk is going through my Facebook history and screen tell us about that. So Elon Musk doesn't engage on Twitter like most CEOs or adults. He targets people who don't have nearly the following that he has. He relies on information that he gets from his Twitter followers, who are as you might call them, members of his cult. And his very rapid response to that tweet was, I'm not grabbing from your Facebook profile. Someone is sending me pictures and that's what I'm seeing. That is not the response of a normal adult, let alone a normal CEO, let alone a normal CEO. So, regardless of what you think about Elon Musk, let's establish right now that he is not normal. And that's a really good starting point. Not normal, and no interaction that you will have with him or his company will be normal. The entire thing runs as an appendage to his body and brain and heart because he's a very emotional man. So you have to think about every single person who interacts with you from Tesla as an agent of Musk. So they're all just appendages, appendages, and that they are that way because they're afraid. They're afraid of losing their jobs, they're afraid of incurring his wrath, as members of the cult are afraid of their fearless leader, right exactly exactly, So what was it that led to this. What was it that caused Elon Musk? If causes the right word, as if there's some linearity about this? What caused Elon Musk's followers to start going through your Facebook? Well it's a little bit complicated and has resulted in a lawsuit against a man named Martin Tripp, who is a former Tesla employee. Ye, a whistle blower, right, yes, he is a whistle blower. He approached me in May of twenty eighteen with documents that proved that Tesla was just generating an unbelievable amount of scrap in order to build the Model three. And what does it mean that they were generating a lot of scrap, that they were wasting a lot. Yes, roughly, it meant that for every two cars Tesla was making, it would throw away a third of a car. Oh, that's stunning, stun stuff. And is there a sense what's normal in the Is some scrap normal? In the an automobile manufacturing, some scrap is normal. But that was it blew the Detroit guys away. Okay, that level blew anybody who had any experience in automotive away. But one thing I will note that is that a lot of Tesla employees do not have a lot of experience in automotive, but those that did would speak to me in kind of hush tones. I remember I spoke to one guy. He was the manager of the line in Fremont that manufactured the doors on the Model three, and I asked him, you know, so what's your fail rate? And he kind of just mumbled percent and I was like what, Like I thought he was going to say like point three percent or something like that. It was fifteen percent. Wow. Yeah, and again is standard something approaching five percent zero percent? It's something between I would say one in three. Okay, So this is a huge number. This is a huge and one that makes it really hard for test let make money, which is already the problem, right because I would assume that the more you're wasting, the harder it is to actually turn a profit. Right. Yes, And you have to also remember that it Tesla, nothing is final. Everything is always in flux and also subject to the whim of Elon Musk. So if a car look ridiculous or become too complicated with butterfly doors, doesn't matter. If Elon wants the butterfly doors, you're getting. Butterfly doors come hell or high water. So Martin Tripp came to you and with the stunning number about the waste. Okay, yes, stunning number, he started leaking all sorts of information about what was going on inside of Tesla because he was very concerned. He joined Tesla because he wanted to save the earth. He was a huge Musk fan when he joined up, and it took several months for the company to kind of wear him down to the point that he was overworked, depressed, and felt like he really wasn't get the whole story about what Tesla was about. So he wanted to be a Muscan, but he was then refold very much wanted to be a Muscan. And after having spoken with dozens of Tesla employees, former, current, etc. It's a familiar story. They go in, they have a high opinion of Elon Musk, and they come out of there just stunned at how just massive the chaos is inside of the company. So the trip was eventually found. Musk hired a third party service to hunt him down and they used a detail in one of my stories and corroborated with his searches inside the company's database, and they found him. They sued him and they thought that would probably shut me up, but no. So that was in June of last year, and around July, after having collected other sources around the company, I published a story that said, in order to factory gait, which is a Tesla term, so get five thousand cars finished at the end of the factory lines. It's what they had a goal of factory getting five thousand cars. To get to that number, they stopped doing this test called the brake and roll test, which is a test that tests the car at different rotations per minute the wheels. You connect the car to a computer, the wheel starts spinning, and the computer tells you how the alignment's going, what the car's doing, how it's reacting to difference. And it's a standard test and an important test standard tests. Nobody I talk to anywhere in the world of automaking could tell me why anyone would stop doing I mean, the idea of it not being done was just like, I mean, there's no rule, but you know a little bit like putting a pharmaceutical product out without quality control exactly, there's no cool But who would do that was kind of the reaction. So I published the story and I don't know, the stock fell might have been just light trading Day was around the July fourth holiday that tends to get Elon's attention, though, and a few days later he was tweeting at me basically suggesting that I was being paid by short sellers to write negative articles about Tesla, which is always the favorite response to any immature CEO who is targeted, right who has anything skeptical said about him, which is that it must be the short sellers paying the journalist, rather than maybe there's some legitimate criticism here. Maybe journalism is a job that we do and we get paid for, and maybe it's something different than being a syncophan for the company. Right. I have student loans. I got to pay my bills. Unfortunately, these short sellers aren't out here paying like that. But they're not. They're just not. They don't do it. I've never experienced any short seller in my life to establish that. Actually, I've been doing this for twenty five years. I've never had someone offered to pay me. No, never, they don't do that. So Elon went on and on and on for what felt like two days, just like tweeting out screenshots from my Facebook profile. As you pointed, out and speculating, and then of course his twenty two million followers start speculating, and everyone's speculating. So now I have this really angry mob following me everywhere I go on Twitter, making fake accounts that purport to be me. Yeah, and you can complain to Twitter about this, but then they say that you are a public figure. So if people are making dummy accounts, like, what are you going to do? I have twenty two thousand followers. I am heartily a public figure, right, but you know, Okay, So just in case you're wondering, if you're ever bullied on Twitter, don't expect any help. That's a whole other Staddy Jack and and so that's that. I mean, that's been my relationship with Tesla ever since. Unless I have a really really good scoop, they don't respond to my questions, they don't engage with me. And I guess that's fine because that establishes the nature of our relationship. I don't have to pretend to be nice. I'm not nice, very adult response just to ignore the journalists who just ignore me question. So since we're not going to play nice, that's fine. I know how to do that. I know how to play me. You have a line after your pin tweet which is great, which says you go on to say, if you're investing or Tesla or in a Tesla, you need to sit with that. Why do you think it's relevant how Musk treats you and treats other people. How the Muskians, not just Musk, treat people who ask questions they don't like. It just reminds me of Cicero. He said, to be, not to seem yep, and Elon is really focused on seeming and less focused on being, and you really need to consider why that is. That's why you need to know your philosophers. That's got to know you fast. Because let's back up and go back to I think the first piece you wrote about Tesla may not be for Business Insider. It was Sam z Allen Teaboon Pickens criticizing Tesla, and Sam's all was critical because of the government subsidies that Tesla was getting. But you also noticed both of them said he might be the smartest man in the world, the best dealmaker, and the best salesman. This was hardly a full on critical piece, right. What was your mindset at that point? At that point, I mean I was that had to be twenty fifteen, twenty sixteen. I think I was just at a conference watching these two guys talk about Tesla. Look, Sam's Allen Teboon, Pickens Rip Teaboon. They were both very, very, very successful men. But they are Rip Teaboon, Yes, very nice man of metals several occasions. But Old, oh my god, Old, and you know is not known for his kindness or charming personality. I know, he's known for being a battle axe. So as a young person, it's always fun to watch the boomers freak out about new things. Yeah, and I had no feeling about whether Tesla should or should not succeed at that point. It was just interesting to listen to them those statements from the two of them. He might be the smartest man in the world, the best dealmaker, the best salesman. At that time, there was pretty much unqualified adulation surrounding Musk. Right, Is that a fair summary? That's a fair summary. I think I don't think people everybody really understood the Solar City deal at that point, right. I think people were just seeing that he had created the first American car company in a hundred years. It seemed to have some success, and he had his hair plugs by then he was looking like a billionaire player. There's something in CEOs needing to redo their hair right. That has happened more than once, and it has not been a good sign. Yeah, no, no, okay. I get that he had created the first new American car company and over a century. It is astounding. But why do you think he is such a cult figure. Why does he have his army of muscans? Is there more to it than that? I think he makes He makes a certain kind of person feel powerful. He makes a certain kind of man, especially, feel like they can innovate, they can have power over the world that they see around them, and they can use their minds to affect change because they're riding on his coattails. They're riding on his coattails and they can learn from him. So whenever somebody gets this like kind of hero complex, it's always useful to dig deeper. That's it's such a good point that you make. I remember I did a skeptical piece about Valiant. You remember, of course, Valiant, the high flying drug company, And I remember one skeptical investor saying to me, whenever people start to refer to the CEO by his first name, because everybody called him Mike, not Mike Pearson, but Mike. But when people start to refer to the CEO by his first name, watch out. That's not an investment, it's a cult. And so per your point, exactly right. Is there another layer to it too in this that makes the Muscians sort of more extreme, which is this layer of self righteousness surrounding it, that somehow if you're against him, you're you're a climate change denier. If you're against him, you want to see the Earth go down in flames. Does that add to it as well? Of course the self righteousness is a huge part of it. And somebody brought to my attention that inside of the Tesla Facebook group, but Tesla Owners Facebook group, they were speculating. They're like, well, isn't she a climate change denier? Why is she against Tesla? How is she for the climate and against Tesla? Can't be these two things? Cannot understand And I can explain it for you, but I can't understand it for you. Tesla Owners Club. Yeah, that's all I have to say about it. I thought this also. I don't think this was you. It was another female critic, One of the Muscians wrote, how about you shut the hell up and stop bothering Elon. Every minute that you cause trouble is a minute that fully autonomous vehicle sick is late to market. You're literally killing people as if somehow any criticism of Elon Musk is delaying the advent of autonomous vehicles. And I can't quite trace the logic of that, can you? No? I can't. And it's almost as if they think that Elon himself is in the trenches figuring out autonomous vehicles. No, he has a team that does that, a team that is breaking apart, and you know, probably has what I like to think of as the eye of Mordor, which is his full intention on them, and that why they're breaking apart. Whenever Elon focuses on a specific part of the business, it does tend to fracture. It is. It's a lot of really, it really is. I know, my Lord of the rings, good good that prepared you for this job. And so I will admit I'm not well sourced in the autonomous on the autonomous team, but I do follow the reporting and the exits. Yep. I also thought it was fascinating the whole idea that criticism about this is even the notion that criticism about this is distracting Musk from his task means that Musk is paying attention to the criticism right, which is back to our point originally that not many CEOs invest this amount of their very limited time in attacking their critics for a reason. They've got a job to do. It's almost like he thinks he's the president of the United States or something. There's another piece he wrote in the sumber of twenty eighteen where you spoke with I think forty two Tesla employees and they talked actually explicitly about the cult of Elon Musk And what did you hear from them? Well, first of all, do not fire nine percent of your workforce while you're in the middle of a massive project, because they will talk so And was it because he'd hired the wrong people to begin with, or just because he has a temper and just fires people on a whim. Trim the fat running out of money. This was during the Model three ramp, so I imagine that they were burning through a lot of cash and they needed to trim the fat as an organization. Before we come back to that just pause and explain to listeners why the Model three and the Model three ramp were so important. What was this supposed to do? So? Elon Musk has said that Tesla has had a master plan for years now, and the plan was to start with luxury vehicles, the Roadster being first, then the S and the X, and then move on to a mass market vehicle that would become like the Toyota Camera of electric cars. Everyone could afford it, they would mass produce it, and it would completely change the game of automotive. Of course, the challenge there would be making margins thick enough to sustain the manufacturing of this car and mass and so in order to do that, Elon Musk had to keep the price down, can't keep the price of the car affordable, and try not to blow as much money as he had in the past on past models. He failed to do that, and last summer we watched that happen, and the margins on the Model three are not where they should be. I don't I don't think they're above twenty percent. Yet he has not sold as many cars as projected, and right now, you know, it looks like there's no real plan to get out of a financial the financial hole that the company is in now because the Model three was not a success. This goes back to the question of why Musk is such a cult, or at least it's linked to it. But why, at least to this point, arguably to this point, has this not mattered. Why have the capital markets still been willing to give Musk billions of dollars two point seven billion dollars only last spring, despite the fact that it was easy to see that promises like this weren't coming together. Girl, they were about to sell us we work at fifty billion. I guess that says it all right, said no, we work, We don't work billion. It don't work right. I think that as long as bankers recognize that there is an appetite for the story, they will sell you whatever. And Musk has had the story. He Musk is a great story. He's still a great story. I think people are starting to understand him better and that is hurting him. But He's been a story you could sell for years now, and Wall Street loves that. People don't understand that Wall Street is making its percent and it doesn't mean because they're selling stock and bonds for companies that they believe in those companies. Quite the contrary, right, it can be the ultimate exercise in cynicism. No, and the terms of Tesla's last capital raise weren't that. In fact, Wall Street made out like a bandit and congratulations, guys, you did it again. Back to the Model three. How big a deal is the failure of the Model three? I think it could sink the company if they don't figure out what story they're selling next. It is not hard for Elon Musk to blow through two billion dollars. He does that. He does that pretty routinely, right, like every year, every quarter, every year. It's two billion, two and a half billion, three billion dollars. So the last capital raise wild did provide some kind of cushion, is not enough to sustain the company for any significant amount of time if there is not some kind of profit made. And the losses that Tesla has generated throughout its existence have completely canceled out any profits that it has made over the three or four quarters that has actually been profitable. I mean, they basically might as well not have even happened. And Tesla's in a lot of debt, so it needs cash on hand. And this is a very very very expensive business that it's in. And that's another promise Musk has blown. Right, was the promise earlier this year, at the end of last ye that Tesla was now going to be profitable going forward. Right, Not so much. Yeah, he did, he did say that. But it doesn't actually matter. If you remind people what Elon Musk said wants is if perhaps part of the old version of tell a really big line and you can get away with it, it's small eyes that will kill you, and perhaps that this is a version of it, and that if you lie constantly all the time, always, then it no longer matters because people just stop keeping track of it. And yeah, they stop keeping track, they stop taking you certain things you say seriously. They're like, oh, it's Elon, And then you start thinking, well, what should the markets take seriously about what this person says? Right? And when does that dispensation he has that special dispensation to say anything without consequences, When does that go away? Good question. I have no idea if yet to see it. But the SEC has had issues with him saying things that were not true or handing out material non public information at the wrong time. He is very good at marshaling his own media, which there are gro electric car blogs. They're huge fanboys of his. There's one guy at Electric he said one semi critical thing on Twitter once and the Tesla people just destroyed him, as if he had not been sweet to Elon for years. He says one semi critical thing, and it was like watching a puppy get kicked in the face. It was so brutal. I was like, but he loves you. But that's why cults work, right, must Ardent believers are never supposed to step out of line. So on this note of the special dispensation that Musk has, why does he seem to have it on the regulatory front, both with the very minor slap on the risk from the Securities Exchange Commission over the funding secured tweet, which was outright stock manipulation, wasn't it Today where you can argue his company is making claims, carefully worded claims it about autonomous driving technology that is that could actually be quite dangerous, and yet no one in the regulatory apparatus seems to be willing to do much about this. Why why does that special dispensation extend to our regulators? So I don't necessarily know, but I will tell a story. I don't know if you were at CNBC's Delivering Alpha last week when the SEC Commissioner was speaking, and one thing that he talked about was how we really need to get mom and pop invested in these opaque private companies before they get to market, because you know, we're not letting them share it. Not the well that he did not see, Oh yes he did. So that's who we're dealing with. Imagine mom and pop getting into we work before this situation had happened, before the IPO collapse, and everything at the fifty billion dollar valuation than whatever valuations were believable to me. And this is who we're dealing with running the SEC. So I don't know why Elon Musk gets a special dispensation, but actually maybe it's not that special. Maybe it's not that special anymore. You're right, there's there's a hands off attitude, and you can argue the regulatory pendulum swings too far at certain points to each end, and it's probably too far at the certain end. It is right. That is actually stunning. Yeah, So backing up again, as I'm sure you know, tesla Q members talk about this moment a lot of them have had where they've believed in Musk or not really been paying much attention to the story, but they thought, wow, well Elon Musk is a genius, and then he strayed into their field and said something about something they know intimately. And Tesla Charts the guy, a guy who goes on Twitter by the handle Tesla Charts, who has a PhD and knows a fair amount about solar roofs has a story about thinking Yon Musk was a genius and then listening to Musk do his solar roof pitch in the fall of twenty fifteen and saying this is made up. It doesn't it doesn't work this way. Then then people often discover, through the community of Tesla skeptics on Twitter that somebody else who knows something about another corner of the empire also thinks it is it is full of bs. Do you have these moments, big moments for you where you said, oh, wow, this is really scary or is it? How is it more for you? Ben just sort of a compendium of small things. So the Solar City deal, that company was obviously dog do do Yeah. Great headline on the Solar City deal wait, I have it. Let me see if I can find it. You when the deal was announced, the title of your piece was Elon Musk just kicked his shareholders in the teeth. Yeah. I don't know anything about solar roofs. I don't know anything about cars. I actually haven't driven since the Bush administration. That's awesome. I'm so jealous. I hate driving with you. I hate driving too, so in a lot of ways, I think that's helped me because I'm not impressed by the feeling of a Tesla or the look of a Tesla. To me, it looks like a camera. It looks like any other car. I don't care. That's actually a really interesting point that has something to do. I don't think cars are sexy. I don't care. But for me, I do know what a deal should look like. I do know what a crappy company on the vertiage of bankruptcy looks like. And that was Solar City. And I do know what saddling a somewhat healthy company growth stock with millions and millions and millions and millions of dollars debt. I know what that looks like. And it looks like crap. And that's what that deal was after that I started paying attention a little more, and all these people were talking about Elon and engaging with his ideas and engaging with his vision of the future as if they were somehow part of it. He's great at making you feel that way. But every other thing that I was hearing about Tesla in the spring of twenty eighteen, even before I spoke to Martin Tripp, was a very clear sign, frankly, that Elon Musk doesn't care about you. It was at that time that Reveal was doing its investigative work on the working conditions inside of Tesla, which are not great. It was at that time that Elon had just flipped out on some investment banker who was asking normal, rational questions about the company, and he was like, I don't want any boring, bone headed questions, and he went to I mean, it was just issue after issue where I was wishing that was perfectly analogous to Jeff Skilling, the former CEO of ven Ron, once calling an investor an asshole. Ye. Yes, back to that issue after issue, the issue after issue in which it was very clear, I mean, there were Tesla fires. It was just very clear that Ian pause on Tesla fires. You mean cars just spontaneously, spontaneously combusting with little to no explanation. And by little to no, I mean no no explanation. You cannot pretend like you give a crap about the future if you are not willing to answer questions, you are not willing to clarify the issues that you have with your technology, and you are not willing to treat your workers like human beings. Elon Musk doesn't care about you. He doesn't care about stockholders. You don't want volatility. He doesn't care about his customers and whether or not they're getting into cars that have defects or safety issues. He doesn't care. And that has been made clear to me as I've been watching these cars roll off the lot and into the hands of customers. Some people are very happy, but there's always this you know, my car is great, butt X, or my car is amazing the right butt X and the butt X is kind of swept under the rug because they love the mission and they love what they think that Elon Musk is doing for the world. And Elon Musk, I'm sorry to say, is not doing this for the world. He's doing this for Elon Musk. So that was your moment of cognitive dissonance when you said, oh wait, this thing back to your sister. A quote is not about what it is. It's about what it's trying to seem to be. It is what Elon Musk wants you to think about Elon Musk. It is not about what Elon Musk is. Before we come back to other things, pause on this issue of the fires. You would think, in a rational world, at least I would think that would be a pretty simple one way story. Right, things are bursting into flame. This isn't good. But the Muskians say that the press is making too much of this, that this stuff just happens, and that this is yet another example I guess of the cabal against Musk that we even dare to ask questions about car spontaneously exploding? Right? Is that a good summary? That is accurate? It is insane, but it's accurate. You know. I wrote a story about this kind of calculating really how many combustible engine cars should spontaneously combust if they were too equal the percentage of Tesla's that's spontaneously combust and the numbers do not look good for Tesla. There are a lot of reasons why the cars could be spontaneously combusting, and they have to do with battery technology. Tesla's batteries are actually a bunch of laptop batteries strung together, and if one of the little cells explodes, whether it's thermal runaway or there's some kind of defect inside of the battery, one in a billion spontaneously combusting, as one of my sources told me, which is quite possible in this kind of battery technology. The rest of the cells could also explode in what is called sympathetic detonation, and that can cause a fire. So I've read fire reports from people who I had a flat tire and I want to change my tire, and as I was driving home, my battery started smoking, possibly because of the impact of the tire change, who knows, But Tesla really doesn't give people explanations for that. You know, the battery is at a certain point ruined, So how do you investigate the root causes of that? And is that a contrast with how the Big three would handle things? When I think about not that they've been perfect by any means, but when I think about GM's recalls, that seems to be a little bit more of a concern for consumer safety. Perhaps maybe I'm giving the Big Three too much credit. I don't know, because I don't cover cars. I cover the craziness of Tesla. I cut my teeth covering things that I think are a little bit scammy. Yes, so I don't. It's a good background to have, actually, because once you've realized what scammy is, and you realize it exists, and you realize the belief system that goes along with it, it actually gives you a new lens to look at the world. Right. Yes, and how easy scams are to perpetuate. Yes, you don't get surprised anymore by how long anybody can pull something off or how big it got. That doesn't surprise me. Ever, it becomes almost a defense in some ways because people think, well, it's gone on so long, it can't possibly be a scam, or if it were a scam, it would have blown up by now, And all you have to do is have a little understanding of history to say no, not at all. So back to Solar City. One of the theories that I heard the reason for the acquisition, and I was laughing when you use the phrase sympathetic detonation, was that that's what letting Solar City would go. Having let it go bankrupt back then would have caused a sympathetic detonation and the rest of Musk's empire because it would have cast out on the mythology of Elon Musk, and so he needed at all costs to prevent that from happening. But by acquiring it, he's now perhaps the irony is the catch twenty two is that he's now perhaps caused himself a bigger problem. Were you surprised by any of the revelations and the unsealed complaint that came out just recently. I was surprised at how involved Musk was in the deal, very hands on, very hands on, and I thought maybe it was something that bankers handled, maybe it was something that his cousin who were running Solar City handled, and he was just like, show me where to sign on the dotted line. I didn't realize that he himself was the one calling the shots. He was the maestro, calling investors, trying to persuade the ones that weren't on board to do this, calling the bankers right, trying to raise cash for Solar City. I found the most shocking part of it, and we had known this, but just the way in which he and his cousins had lent money to Solar City before the acquisition via these solar bonds, and the way in which they were so quickly repaid after the acquisition. It was hundreds of millions of dollars. I mean, the self dealing, and that the idea. I don't think there's another CEO. There certainly aren't many CEOs who could get away with that. No, and that's the board, that's shareholders. They don't care apparently, I mean, that's the sec they don't care. No one cares. So I guess we're just going to be wringing our hands. I'm going to continue to watch fake Lynette Twitter accounts. That's just the way the world is. Now. Let's let's talk about that for a little bit. Felix Samon, his credit gets laid, among other things, wrote about the stalking of you. He wrote, this is worse than just stalking. Musk is setting his army a fanboys loose on Lopez. He's retweeting stuff they find, and he's encouraging them every step of the way. Musk's harassment of Lopez is obsessive and deranged. Why do you think that is? Why do you think he has had a problem with you and with female journalists in particular. First of all, I don't think these guys really like it when women to try to tell them what to do. I've read about Elon's marriages and his relationships with women. I am not a therapist, but it seems like he is very insistent on being the alpha. Yeah. I think it threatens his ego, it threatens his manhood that a woman is coming after him, and I think he knows that a lot of his followers have. You know, there are a lot of them who are very, very very anti anti woman. I've gotten some really really nasty emails and nasty, nasty messages. I don't keep my dms open. I'm no longer on Facebook, but I'm flattered by it. And that's also why I tweeted out Mariah Carries, why are you so obsessed with me? During this time? I was done by some of this as I dug into it. Though. Another journalist named Aaron Bieba, who criticized Musk, one of the tweets that her was you criticized a man with a cult following of twenty one million plus followers. You should have seen it coming. You brought it on yourself again, this sort of warped logic in which because Musk is so famous and has so many followers, he somehow should be beyond any kind of criticism. It's adorable. It's adorable. That was not the word I thought was going to come out of your mouth, because it's so pathetic, it's sad. Yeah, he's not your dad. He doesn't need you to defend him. He doesn't need you to defend him. He doesn't care that you're defending him. He's taking his private jet from one side of LA to the other. Honey, he doesn't care about you, Okay. Isn't that amazing saying how some people have that ability to convince other people though that somehow they do care or there's something in it for them too. That that quality that people have is just endlessly fascinating to me, because visionaries have it and fraudsters have it, right, and they both have it in spades, and it makes it very difficult in the moment to tell the difference between the two. Yes, it does. There is a attention as a journalist in covering someone like Musk, because you're supposed to be unbiased. When you cover anything, you're supposed to approach it with an open mind and just getting the facts. And at a certain point, though, you start to understand what you're covering. And once you start to understand it and you make a judgment about what you're seeing in front of you, that's when people can say, oh, you have a bias. Now you've injected your bias. But is it bias or have you simply done your job? I would argue the latter. I would argue that it's by if a you start with a predetermined point of view and you're trying to prove that and that's why you come to have your point of view. It's bias if you refuse to hear things that are counter to your argument because you don't want you because you don't want to hear them. And it's bias if you have something at steak other than getting it right. But the only thing we at journalists, as journalists have at steak is being right. We don't want our stories to look ridiculous a year from now, two years from now, five years from now, ten years from now. We want to look right. And if we have nothing more at stake, then getting it right. Then, I actually think it is a lack of courage not to take the information you've learned and use it to make a point, particularly if that point is running counter to the established narrative, because then you're making people think. And if you can make people think, isn't that one of the great points of life. I've had a lot of delicious meals in my life, but nothing is delicious as being right. Yet never eaten anything better than that exactly right. And there's nothing more distasteful than being wrong or shameful than being wrong. Right. Yeah, So I mean in twenty thirteen, twenty fourteen, I was like Elon Musk, Tesla, Megan Green Cars, everybody loves it great. It really wasn't until I started understanding the company that I was like, there is a dark side to this. And I have not yet encountered anything, not from Tesla PR, not from people inside of the company, even from people who love the company, that has been able to show me that I've gotten this all wrong. And and in fact, my engagements with Tesla PR only make me more suspicious of what the hell is going on in there? What do you think do you worry about being wrong? Unlike these guys on Wall Street. I don't have any money behind this, so being right is all I've got. Right. Is there anything you could hear that would change your mind? Is there anything anybody could say or something you could learn that would make you say that would make you know how that happens? Sometimes where your perspective suddenly then you see the same series of events through a different light. Tesla would have to become profitable, yep. And the numbers would have to work, right, number tesky little numbers, test little numbers would have to work. And I would have to start hearing from employees that they're being treated well, yeah, and that the company cares about them. Oh, and from customers that the cars are working properly. I start working. To me, the compelling pieces of evidence that all is not well at Tesla is the string of executive departures. Absolutely. What do you hear about that? Working for Elon is hard and you don't want the eye mortar, and after a while you burn out, or you collect so many secrets that you're just in So you either by the cult, yeah, and you collect the secrets and you move up fast, or you see what's going on, or Elon burns you out and you leave. There are a lot of people who love the challenge of working at a small organization, like relatively small compared to the traditional at something that's trying to change the world, something change the world, unique engineering challenge, you know, very do it yourself sink or swim culture. But ultimately it is nerve racking. I've had sources whose entire families have turned on Musk because Daddy has to go to the factory at six a hundred morning, and he has to come home at night for dinner, but then go back to the factory for maybe like a skip level meeting or something at ten pm, and then it starts a day all over again. Tesla is a lifestyle, it's not just a job, so that lifestyle can be toxic to some people. It's actually really interesting because there's a great story from C. S. Lewis called The Inner Circle the Inner Ring, and it's about how compelling it is for most people once they get on the inside, because we've all experienced what it is to be on the outside, and once you're on the inside, it's so compelling that you will basically do anything to stay there because the allure is so so overwhelming. And so when you see a company like Tesla where people are being admitted to the inner circle and then leaving you, there's something pretty astounding about that, right, most astounding was his lawyer quitting. And yes, January was it. Yeah, after he sent another tweet, his lawyer quit pretty much forty eight maybe twenty four hours. It was so fast. And changing horses in the middle of a lawsuit. Always having different attorneys, that's always a red flag as well. And Elon has a lot of different attorneys, Yes, that is for sure. There are a lot of lawyers making fees. Oh yeah, you know. I was thinking about this issue of retaliation against critics, and I thought, to be fair, we should point out it actually isn't only against women, right. That's been the mob on Twitter. The Muscians on Twitter seem to have directed a fair amount of their ire toward women. But Elon has also fired this lawsuit against ran Deep Hothy, the Tesla cue member who did a lot of research into Musk. There's the Cave Diver episode and the lawsuit against that, which is probably pretty well known. Is crazy. I don't like bullies, and I think that it is very suspect when someone with the power and the money and the resources of Elon Musk goes after a grad student like ran Deep, or a random diver or a little journalist. I cannot imagine Elon ever suing David Einhorn or Jim Chenos people with you're right. He picks on people you're right. He picks on people who he thinks doesn't don't have the means to fight back. He would never sue. It's a really good point. He would never see the Times, He's never gonna see the journal He's never gonna see any of these publications. He will only sue people who he thinks cannot beat him. And that upsets me. That's such a good point it's worth pointing out for listeners. What happened to this young man named Randy Pathi who was sued by Tesla reportedly for endangering employees. But when he got funded to actually have a lawyer and said, well, Tesla, you need to turn over the documents that show me doing this, in effect, Tesla dropped the lawsuit. They just expected to be able to destroy him because he wouldn't have the means to fight back. And you're right, that's a very different picture than going after people who can fight back, and I can't fight back on the internet. I can't fight back on Twitter, but he can't sue me. What would you say if I were a big investor sitting here making a decision whether or not, or I were somebody who had the power to give Elon Musk half a billion dollars? I don't. By the way, let's be clear if just to say, let's pretend, why would you say this matters about Musk's habit of bullying? Why is this an issue? Because it means he's hiding something. It means that he cannot handle any scrutiny at all. It means that he is not willing to tolerate dissent or criticism of any kind. And it means that he has time to swat at flies? And how does he possibly have time to swat flies? So a last question for you, how and when do you think this plays out from where we sit today? Oh, my lord, Jesus, be a biscuit and just stop me up. I don't know, I don't know. I never heard that phrase before. That's awesome. I don't know how this ends. We don't have an sec we don't have regulators. We've got compliant capital markets at least at least for maybe not anymore. Maybe we work as a turning point. Maybe maybe we work as a turning point. Maybe if we don't have a million robotaxis on the ground by next spring, as Elon promise last spring, or if they aren't a thousand solar roofs being installed each week by the end of this year, as Musk just said would be happening, maybe that will be an issue for the markets. I don't know. I don't consider the markets completely and totally efficient, especially not now. I consider the markets a collective understanding of how we feel in the present about the future, not necessarily a smart understanding, isn't it Canes who said the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solved. Absolutely so, I don't know where he's going to pull out another moneymaker, though he doesn't seem to have the cash to the revamp the smmecs, which are the two models that actually make margin. I don't think that China is going to be a huge success because we're seeing the automarket there crater and electric vehicle manufacturers in China are not doing well. So I don't know, but that said, one lesson you've learned at least which will be true until it's not. As don't count Elon Musk out right. Oh no way, no way. I mean, if there's anything I can say about Elon that is positive is that he just won't go away. Yep. The guy's got incredible will, He's got an incredible way will ye yeah, Iron, And it's going to be really interesting to see how this plays out. So thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me. We'll stay in no doubt. So that was fun. I expected Lynette to have strong opinions. She's covered Musk from much longer and in much more detail than I have, but I think she summed up something we both realized. There is nothing about this that's normal. My view is that maybe Musk will change the world, maybe he'll get us to Mars, save the planet, rewire our brains, but he'll do it despite his quirks, not because of them, because there is nothing about his misrepresentations, his failed promises, his treatment of him employees, and most of all, his bullying that is good in any way make you a killing