Elon, Inc. – Details, episodes & analysis

Elon Musk announced his support for Donald Trump on July 13, minutes after the attempt on Trump’s life at a rally in Pennsylvania. Since then, the chief executive of Tesla and SpaceX has been engaged in what amounts to one of the all-time largest political spending sprees. That’s not even counting what many have called the biggest in-kind political gift in history: Musk’s social media platform, X. In this second episode of Citizen Elon, we explore what Musk stands to gain, how he's wielding his newfound political power and what is even possible when the world's richest man unites with Trump

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This has been a huge week for Elon Musk: First, the Tesla stock rally, in reaction to a good earnings report, made him billions of dollars richer (at least on paper). Then, Musk continued his full-throated campaign for Donald Trump with a marquee appearance at Madison Square Garden, leading chants of “USA!” to adoring fans amid a rally that featured the most racially inflammatory language yet of the Republican’s campaign.

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Feuds. Can’t beat ‘em, can’t stop ‘em. At Elon, Inc., we’ve long covered Elon Musk’s penchant for a public feud at the end of episodes, but today feuds take center stage. David and Max talk to Bloomberg emerging markets reporter Julia Leite, who is based in Brazil, about Musk’s evolving legal situation there. Then Dana joins to talk about the Cybertruck situation in Chechnya.

We can't help ourselves. There's two extra feuds, both related to land-use disputes. First, the party game Cards Against Humanity is suing SpaceX for allegedly trespassing on a swath of land that the company bought in 2017. Secondly, in the ongoing feud between prominent venture capitalist and Democrat donor Vinod Khosla, there has been a new chapter. In the course of trading insults on X, Musk mocked Khosla for a previous fight Khosla had had about beach access, and Khosla has asked him to apologize.

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As we chronicle every week on Elon, Inc., Elon Musk contains multitudes. He leads six companies, runs his own social-media platform and is now explicitly working to re-elect Donald Trump as president. This week, we talk about two very different kinds of Musk stories. One is about his behavior on X, and the rare tweet he took down. The other is about how his space company, SpaceX, is having a great run of late, with a successful space walk and a new deal with United Airlines. 

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Does Elon Musk consider all of his companies to be one giant company? That’s something that comes up in today’s episode as host David, Dana and Max consider a recent report on Tesla potentially giving up future revenue in exchange for access to Musk’s artificial intelligence startup, xAI access. That brings up corporate governance issues. 

And then, Dana speaks to New York Times reporter Kirsten Grind about a story she wrote on Musk’s plans regarding Mars.

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After months of back and forth, Brazil finally did what it’s been threatening to do: ban X. This comes on the heels of government complaints from Britain and elsewhere about false information thriving on Elon Musk’s embattled social media platform—some of it from Musk himself. In this episode of Elon, Inc., we dig into Brazil’s action and also talk about the Android app launch of X TV, a way to watch video content from the former Twitter on your home TV screen. Our panel—David Papadopoulos, Max Chafkin and Kurt Wagner—have some ideas.

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Tesla is often heralded as Elon Musk’s premiere company, the business at the foundation of all his other businesses. But as Tesla has struggled and lost market share, it’s SpaceX that keeps surging ahead of the competition.

SpaceX is trying to add the first commercial spacewalk to its list of accomplishments, and is set to bail out embattled rival Boeing by retrieving astronauts stranded by its faulty Starliner. This week reporters Loren Grush and Bruce Einhorn sift through the developments and debate if there’s any competition left for SpaceX in this field.

Host David Papadopoulos is also joined by reporter Kurt Wagner and editor Sarah Frier to discuss the latest development over at X. Why is Donald Trump all of a sudden posting again on his richest fan’s troubled platform? Will the arrest of Telegram Chief Executive Officer Pavel Durov have any consequences for Musk and X? And why did Diddy invest in Musk's takeover of X?

As always with Musk, there’s a lot to talk about.

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Reality TV stars are freezing their eggs on camera. Lawmakers in DC are debating federal protection for IVF. Hundreds of millions of dollars are being invested in slick startups that market fertility treatments for all. But this rapid growth has revealed cracks in the system. Misconception, a new series from Bloomberg’s Prognosis, follows reporter Kristen V. Brown on her own intimate journey as she uncovers the business of fertility. Along the way, she finds a fractured industry — a profit-driven field of medicine that thrives on dueling messages of hope and fear as people gamble everything for a chance at a baby.

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Last week, X users might have noticed a new kind of artificial intelligence-generated image proliferating: strange visions of Elon Musk next to Disney characters carrying guns, or Donald Trump in all kinds of, well, weird situations. This was what followed a new release of Musk’s Grok AI tool, which can now make images—unsurprisingly with fewer guardrails than other image-creating machines out there.

On this episode we’ll talk about Grok’s new skillset and also get into the semiotics of the Cybertruck. Initially conceived of as a mass-market truck, it’s slid into another category: marker of a certain kind of right-wing flex, the kind Musk himself has engaged in on his struggling social network. Joining David to discuss is Davey Alba, a Bloomberg technology reporter, along with Max Chafkin and Dana Hull.

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Monday night, Donald Trump sat down for an interview with Elon Musk on Musk’s social media platform, X. An unfiltered conversation between two of the most influential figures of the last decade? It was no surprise that over one million people listened concurrently in as they meandered across topics ranging from electric vehicles and immigration, to a play-by-play of the assassination attempt Trump survived in Pennsylvania last month.

So what’s the significance of this interview, which produced very little news and was marred from the start by technical issues? On the latest episode of Elon, Inc., host David gathers Max and Dana to try and untangle it.

But wait there’s more. In the final installment of our summer conversation series, Papadopoulos speaks with Bethany Allen, head of program for China investigations and analysis at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. Allen unpacks Musk’s business ventures in China and what his involvement with the country means for Tesla and the electric vehicle industry at large.

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