Elon Musk

“I feel like this could be net positive for Mark's reputation.”

“Les, this is so stupid. I'm still looking over this patriarchal blah blah blah bullshit, and like, just let two women figure this out together.”

“I think, more importantly, at this phase, it's a media circus, and I think everyone's playing into it, and I think both of them are playing into it, because it's good for their platforms.”

“I think any thinking person who, especially who's worked on the internet, would take the massive under on that, right, in terms of that being the outcome. Like, I think that's extremely, nearly impossible from the position he's currently in”

“This is a big one, and it does destroy a lot of brand value.”

“Twitter ruined Twitter and then sold it to Elon. And now Elon can do whatever he wants.”

“He did it in a big way and gave everyone else permission to cut burn.”

“The information reported this week that Elon had killed a tool that had been involved, that Exit or Twitter had been using to spot fakes and misinformation, and he killed it because it was hosted on Google Cloud, and in his big cost-cutting efforts, he had wan…”

“I mean, Elon runs an entire cult-based stupid coin.”

“The process was clearly broken and like clearly it was an inside deal. But on the flip side, I think if you ask most shareholders, it's actually been fine for them.”

“It's like he fucking delivered. What do you want?”

“Elon keeps playing with the lines of extremism around around corporate governance, and they're like the last line of legitimate defense.”

“All Sam Altman's doing is trying to one-up Elon Musk in absurdism, right, which is like, oh, like, we're gonna, like, list that we can do self-driving cars a decade before we can, or, like, we, at least, like, or we're gonna be like, we're going to Mars, even …”

“Yes. Unless he does some hissy fit about his compensation package and like.”

“There's something like 35 reports into the CEO, which is typical of how I guess Elon likes running companies.”

“I think he's a Elon style showman. I think he like, we can go on and on my criticism. Very clear about them.”

“Vivek Ramaswani has declared his position in it, and he's gonna do like a mini Elon Trump thing to BuzzFeed, where he like, you know, at the cost of nothing, because the company's worth nothing, ends up doing this.”

“We thought the moment of time would be perfect if Elon really messed up the Twitter to X transition, but I don't think many people left X.”

“And then the Elon thing, I think, is a little bit, it's all that plus a special case, which is like, he needs a thing which isn't an incredibly competitive market to support the type of premium his stock is getting.”

“Musk, in my mind, you know, makes strategic business decisions all day long and then waits for a headline to announce them to make it seem like the assassination attempt got his endorsement or that a new law in California around LGBTQ kids caused him to move a…”

“Well, I just think, you know, who knows at this point in history what's real and what's not, but there's a clear pattern of write a big headline check or let, let a headline sit and then step back from it.”

“Where you had a thing that was kind of a shitty public company, and like had been under executing in manager mode, and then you had Elon come in and founder mode it, Right. In a lot of ways. And I would argue he's kind of broken it.”

“One of the things that defines this idea of founder mode is skipping the organizational structure. And going directly to the people that do the work. And you know, this is famously how Steve Jobs did it with the top 100 at Apple. It's how Elon, I think, seems …”

“You know, I think like Elon is a complicated character, but he just candidly, he just seems angry. Right. In a lot of ways.”

“The Tesla story from my perspective is a story of this doesn't actually work great as a business. So look at this new shiny object, right? It's like, okay, like electric cars not growing as fast as we thought. We're not, we're losing market share, which of cou…”

“Elon mostly just reads science fiction and says the things that are in it.”

“Elon paints a very picture that's very exciting, but like, I mean, it's pretty deceptive, right? You kind of are like doing it for what looks like a great. Clip for X or for Instagram, but it's not real.”

“I think he understood Zerp better than anyone. I think he is a better marketer than anyone in the history of the world, right? Like those are both absolutely true statements.”

“My favorite. Interview tidbit with Elon last week that I saw was that it took them more time to get the approval to do the launch of the rocket that they launched last week than it took them to actually build the rocket. So they built a, whatever, a 20, 25 sto…”

“Elon did a very good job selecting places to build where the cultures were so bad at the competitors that he could kind of be a dick and also push people really hard. And the working environment didn't have to be that great because if you want to work on rocke…”

“It's this weird dynamic that's developed because he's the kind of key person in all these companies where people fund these things or his dalliances, even Twitter, right? For access to the actually good stuff. And so you end up in this weird zone where like, I…”

“Elon has no pull. With the voters that matter in this, right? Because Elon's community, this is the thing about the right creators, is Elon those people are gonna probably vote for Trump anyway, right? The people that he speaks to”

“Elon and Larry were quite close for some time and have had a tremendous falling out.”

“Listeners of the pod should know that our very informed sources Don't think he will do the same to the federal government because the Constitution as well as many other federal statutes are very specific about how the federal budget works.”

“Elon is glued to Trump's hip at Mar-a-Lago sitting in on every single meeting and, you know, has uncle status according to his grandchildren.”

“I'm going to go with less because I think at some point he's going to have to Roughly, you know, screw Elon, and that will create some real tension.”

“I'm gonna take the more on this. I guess all the things you've all have said are quite true. I think he's a pragmatic long-term player. Elon and likely, I think just what you said earlier is probably true as well that, you know, it's hard to find friends when …”

“Elon doesn't like to do things that he's going to lose at. So I think he'll find a way to push through.”

“But like when you then compound, you know, Elon in there, it's like night and day in terms of, you know, one side is going to just reduce the regulation. It's going to be driving, it's going to be a growth oriented, you know, more dynamic, you know, kind of dr…”

“And so I do think like, This will get off the ground by the end of the next year.”

“Tick tock will operate in some form in the U S in a partnership. Either with Larry Ellison or Elon Musk. It's my prediction.”

“Do you throw Trump and Elon a bone? Like it's kind of costless to do so. So why not?”

“He bought forty billion in house ads for himself so he could buy America.”

“The kind of aggressive layoffs post COVID, which by the way, we're also spurred by Elon when Elon fired. 70%, right? Firing 20 or 30 or 10 didn't look so bad.”

“Clearly Meta and Amazon and Apple, to a lesser degree, Google, Definitely Empire Elon are all quite in alignment with Trump, right? And I think, like, have decided to really, like, lean in in every way to this administration from, like, you know, the money the…”

“Elon needs bargaining chips with China. In fact, probably his whole move towards Trump you know, in addition to getting his space regulation and all that kind of stuff, was to get more bargaining chips with China.”

“Behind President Trump's family was not his cabinet members or, you know, people who have served in his administrations in the past, but the CEO of every major large tech company, except Microsoft, which we could circle back to Bezos, Zuckerberg, Pichai, Elon.”

“Today it's a 2.7 billion dollar company. Yes. It's worth half as much, But they're doing 1.25 billion and he grew EBITDA margins from 13% to 46%.”

“Elon has an end game and it appears to be To basically become a patron of the next set of the conservative movement around the world for the next several decades, right? If you zoom out, like his support of Donald Trump, what he's doing in Europe and around th…”

“The FA is actually pretty good. Like, there are certainly things you can improve, but it is actually interesting, because if you look across government agencies, they probably aren't the first people I would go plug into, because it's a pretty good system, act…”

“And maybe Elon, I would actually argue that Elon in a lot of ways, I've said this a long time is the ultimate cult leader. And in some ways, a lot of Elon stocks behave like this on absolute steroids.”

“Elon in his career does not prove to be the always upstanding white knight that you blindly trust.”

“He's a great marketer, but he's not as good as Elon at this tete-a-tete.”

“What we did also break was that the board had decided to reject the offer.”

“Elon doesn't actually want to own the OpenAI nonprofit.”

“I also like kind of am sympathetic to Elon on this one, because I also kind of believe setting aside the letter of the law, which again, I don't know, it's not my place, but like the spirit of the law, I do think there was a bait and switch by open AI in terms…”

“I just did it again on Model Three. What Model Three? The information is a respected technology business news outlet founded by Jessica Lawson. It's known for its in-depth investigative reporting about the tech industry, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's glow…”

“It's a good point that Intuit clearly the investors into it are not pricing in any doge efficiencies because the stock looks fine. So if you were to look at the Intuit stock price, You would say that Elon will do nothing to reform the tax strategy of America.”

“Sam Altman sells AGI to get cheap capital, to build pretty basic AI. Elon sells Mars to get cheap capital. To build space internet and like more power to them, but it is all marketing.”

“He's not gonna sell it, so what does it matter?”

“I would say not 75%, but maybe sixty-forty favorable to Elon out here, and I think it's because of, there's just so many fanboys and a few fangirls of SpaceX and the rockets, and they caught them on toothpicks, and humanoid robots, and autonomous vehicles, and…”

“If we unwind the clock and ask ourselves why Elon Musk decided to endorse and help elect Donald Trump, I actually think the fate of Tesla in China was a not insignificant part of the equation, and what was happening at the time was the Chinese government hadn'…”

“There's just no venture capitalist who wants to be on bad terms with him, either because they want in on the next deal, or they just want preferential terms in the SpaceX secondaries, which he controls literally based on how many people emailed him in what ord…”

“Well, the Tesla sales is definitely related to Elon and Doge, no question.”

“Like, look, I think at the end of the day, it's the best American made car that there is, right? Like it's unequivocal. If you kind of separate the cultural thing going on with Elon and Trump and mega and all of that stuff, and you just look at the Tesla objec…”

“But we have a very good story in it this week about Howard Lutnick telling people that in fact, he hired Elon and he told Elon what to do.”

“Clearly it's really damaged the brand of Tesla.”

“And the truth is that they have been able to run Twitter at much less than they were spending on it with far fewer employees. It's still up and running and it's become You know, the water cooler place again.”

“Well, what he said was that he was planning to leave in two to In two to three months, his work would be done.”

“Putting him in charge of just cutting everything willy nilly, even if there are many places in government, which I think a lot of people would agree need to be cut. And certainly there have been people advocating, you know, getting into the deep bureaucracy. W…”

“If it weren't an Elon company and there wasn't a Messiah return story, like this thing would be getting fucking hammered.”

“Also, some amazing detail about their conversations with Elon Musk and SpaceX over using Starlink, where Apparently must gave them a 72 hour deadline to accept or reject his proposal.”

“You forgot the most important line, which is you're not going to have regulatory approval.”

“And so I'd say that like, I would say that just in the spectrum of like, Tesla only exists as Tesla, because Elon is a great marketer, right? Like, I would say that the same thing is true of OpenAI is like, it was a very explicit marketing heavy strategy.”

“I think that Elon and Sam Altman lie, right? I think they say things they know to not be true, to Get people to do things. Right. And like, go on like with them. I just believe that from what I've seen, like, I think they're both way too smart to believe what …”

“One of the most important things that Elon has been able to do over the last many years across multiple companies, like, his real genius is matching enormous amounts of capital with technology companies, right? Like, that's what he does. That's what the market…”

“There's no one who can raise, who can do it on the scale of Elon and Sam right now, or at least demonstrating it. And so I think that's actually the real point of threat or the reason that there's probably so much animosity is like, look, they're just too simi…”

“The only thing that will prevent Elon from controlling all of planetary communications is the government.”

“He, I've always said this, and I mean it derogatorily and also not, is like, he's not a great technologist. He is the greatest marketer of our generation, right?”

“Since we've now embraced, since all that matters in 2026 is narratives, not reality, and the narrative is he's a trillionaire.”

“Elon Musk is going to be a trillionaire.”

“Things seem pretty shaky over there. They've got infrastructure problems, they've got model problems, and now they're losing people.”

“Like in terrible business, it's like a very nice vision in the Elon style, like cool, like Concord two point out, but like from a practical perspective, it's like no fucking way is this going to work. No way is this going to work.”

“And I think this is like Elon's way of getting data centers in space and everything that we need to power the AI future that we have.”

“He has. Yes, they pivoted to the moon.”

“I think there is a greater than not chance that they settle before then or that they postpone.”

“This upcoming Monday is scheduled to be the start of the Elon Musk vs. OpenAI trial. The central question of which was, did OpenAI have the right to convert from a nonprofit to a for-profit, and what should Elon be compensated as well, having been one of the b…”

“The information reported this week, not only unsurprisingly, is he getting super voting shares in the SpaceX IPO, but he now Elon has a really aggressive comp plan as well that will give him tens of millions of shares if I think the market cap goes to 6.6 tril…”

“This conversion of being like, oh, we're just doing a research project. Don't worry, we're scraping the entire internet, but it's just for good. It's just for a research project. And then flipping that into, oh, no, actually it isn't. I just think it was like …”

“Musk has said he will donate the damages owed to him to basically, it wouldn't technically be a donation, but to the OpenAI Foundation. So he is not asking to be left with, like, a piece of this operating company or, like, cash in this bank account. He's basic…”

“Sam Altman and Greg Brockman attended jury selection. Highly unusual. No one ever attends jury selection.”

“Elon Musk is, his salary and comp package is now tied to the Mars colonization happening.”

“It was revealed that Altman, because it was a nonprofit back then, was paid Greg ten million dollars out of his, like, own family office and kept it from Elon, and so all these sort of alliances were being formed beneath the surface, and it just seemed like a …”

“We have seen perhaps the strangest AI compute deal to date, which is Anthropic Colossus. So SpaceX, Elon Musk. Have given over their first Colossus project. 100%. Not like 40%.”

“Polymarket gives Elon a 41% chance of winning the case.”

“OpenAI also revealed in a filing that Musk had approached them about his, Brockman, about a potential settlement two days before.”

“After Altman's latest testimony, the odds that Elon wins this thing have tanked, according to Polymarket and the prediction market.”

“We should mention, everyone knows, that OpenAI won a decisive victory in their Elon Musk trial. That came down to the jury deciding Elon was too late to file this lawsuit.”

“I think the next cult war will be Dario versus Elon.”

“Elon and key investors are 366 day. So full year lockups.”

“I think the new line might be, love it or hate it, he's the best financier of our generation.”

“He bailed out his XAI people. He bailed out his Twitter people. He bailed everyone out, right? So Elon gets to be the guy who makes everyone money, and if you're a SpaceX shareholder, you're like, whatever, you kind of got robbed on a few things, but number bi…”

“The one-liner was that they have now moved, what, they've moved up one year their one trillion dollar revenue number. That was the kind of funny Elon quote from the earnings call, that things are going so well That they're going to hit one trillion one year ea…”

“Elon confirmed, he like re-shared or confirmed a story we wrote that he's getting into building his own blades for like natural gas turbines.”