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Hello, I'm Erica Kelly from the podcast Southern Fried True crime, and if you want to go from podcast fan to podcast host, do what I did and check out spreaker from iheart. I was working in accounting and hating it. Then after just 18 months of podcasting with Spreaker, I was able to quit my day job. Follow your podcasting dreams, let's break or handle the hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com. That's spreaker.com. Hey there, it's Ebony Monet, your co-host for the San Diego Zoo's Amazing Wildlife podcast. In this special episode, we're speaking with Doctor Jane Goodall about the fascinating journey that led to her impactful behavioural discoveries on chimpanzees. It wasn't until one of the chimpanzees began to lose his fear of me, but I began to really make discoveries that actually shook the scientific world. Survive on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey y'all, it's Caroline Hobby hosted get real with Caroline Hobby interviewing the most fascinating people in Nashville and beyond. I talked to artists, I talked to the wives of artists. I talked to women entrepreneurs who have created businesses who are moms, who juggle a million hats and do it all. Each episode will leave you inspired, feeling like you can accomplish your own dream and calling. Listen to new episodes of get Real with Caroline Hobby every Monday on the Nashville podcast network. Available on iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcast. Welcome back to behind the ******** the only podcast where the host just got an e-mail from the ATF asking him to sign some documents that I can get a suppressor for my AR15. So that's exciting news. Wow times quite a weird flex. Congratulations, dude. Thank you, thank you. I'm just really excited that I only have to wait another 12 months to get it. I'm excited, too. At some point, get to shoot guns with you when we can be around people again. Sophia, that will be a very fun day, especially if my fans in the ATF pushed that paperwork along. I have a lot of a lot of ATF fans. Oh yeah, that's awesome, because I only talk about wanting the FDA to raid me like I don't have any. I'm not starting to fight with the ATF because I know they'll burn down my whole company. Oh, ****. I made a Waco. Sorry. You, Waco. You fully just Waco right now. This was all so that I could do a Waco that was all for a Waco. That you built that entire thing up just to bring up Waco again. I did. I did. And it's going to take two years now for me to get my ******* suppressor. I'm going to get raided by the ATF for starting a cult in the woods before I get to pick it up and then they'll burn it down along with 70 children. Sorry. I keep going. Keep going. The ATF would think that you Waco thing is hilarious. They would. I bet they laugh a lot about Waco. In the ATF. I mean, it could be longer than two years. We know that. They're terrible at communicating. Yeah, I I've spent like literal, like 10s of hours in the last two weeks going into like Boogaloo, Facebook groups and subreddits and like, stuff like that. And, like, there's so many Waco memes. They love that ******* Waco Netflix show, which was like one of the most irresponsible TV shows I've ever seen. Electric Boogaloo, what did you say? Yeah, like, like the civil, the second civil war. That's like the the right wing meme for like they want to start another civil war. It's the boogaloo. That's what they call it. That's how **** happens on the Internet now. Oh gosh. All right, so there's like thousands of people on Facebook trying to make a civil war happen because they want to get to use all of their fancy guns. And they also really hate the ATF because of Waco. And so they have a ton of Waco memes about, like, shooting ATF agents and it's fine for them, but the ******* Antifa kids who throw oranges at cops get like arrested and tear gassed for vandalism. It's great the, the, the mix of how law enforcement responds to these things. Were you talking selective law enforcement? Were you talking about the Waco? Yeah, serious with Macaulay Culkin's brother. Is that the way you're talking about? Oh, I didn't know he was in it, but I think that miniseries we're in wildly. Which? Culkin, Kieran, Rory? There's a there's, like, didn't realize there was a coke in in there. It's an incredibly irresponsible series because while it does accurately, I think, depict how irresponsible the government was, it makes ******* David Koresh look like a cool dude when he was like, no, he was not. But I don't know, it's it's fun. Fun when you were they, like, show him. And it makes him look like he can actually sing. And he's like a rock star that that scene. Yes. Yeah. Like he's a cool rock star. They even try to make the fact that he had teenage brides. Less ****** **. It's weird they tried to make it. Netflix really went to bat for David Koresh. In a way that's kind of baffling. It's like, that's a weird, it's an interesting enough story. If he and the ATF both suck, like, and they they they they made him hot. He's not he he was, yeah. Picked. No, he the guy they picked, I think, looks exactly like him. I will give them that. They cast it like he looks. Just started his career as a model, I know, but if you look at pictures of David Koresh like they they *******. I think they actually kind of nailed the look. They have nothing to contribute to this. I have not seen it at all. Yeah, I mean, it's not ohh, you're not a Koresh fan. You're not fully caressing on Koresh. Oh man, no, I am not a correction. You're so ******* wrong. OK, I'm looking at a side by side face. One of them is fully ******* hard, and one of them is like, oh, send me, send me when I will tell you right now. When I start my cult and get taken down by Ivy, the FDA or the ATF, it's a ******* roll of the dice. Which one actually burns down our compound and all of our children? But when they take me down and then make a Netflix movie that whitewashes all of my many crimes, make sure Ian McShane plays me. He doesn't look like me or sound like me, but that that is my wish. And it's up to both of you to make sure that happens. No, no, no, no. It can't be him. Who do you think should play? Play him? Like maybe give Jared Leto like. Like some like, Oh no, no, no, no. Who do? But that's nice that you think I'm more muscular than Jared Leto. I do appreciate that. Sophia. Doesn't he have Jared Leto eyes? Oh, now that part hurts. I'm trying to think of. I think that's the only nice thing about Jared Leto as his eyes. Are you kidding me? Robert, I think we should just go full circle. And have you played by Jeremy Renner? Now that. OK. Alright. Yeah. Let's do it. **** it. Yeah, let's have runner in there. I I'm I'm down with that. I'm down with that cast. Yeah alright. We've we've figured out when when my Waco movie happens. This has been a very Waco start to the part two of our Elon Musk podcast. Yeah let's let's get back to talking about Elon. Hey thanks for having me by the way. Thanks. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for coming on. I do want to I do want to start because like I've been thinking about what you said at the end. I really don't want this to be a situation whereby. People are like going after you because, like, they think that I was trying to be fair to him. I was. I I want, I, I, I like. There's a lot of **** we're going to talk about today that he did bad. I honestly think the worst thing he did is his failure to learn from his pitch. Played David Koresh. Sorry, I set her aside Friday night. Are we still come on. So hot. That is such bad casting. Thank you. Look, those. It is the official position of this podcast. That David Koresh was hot. Robert, you're in. Yes, it is. That is not true. Look, we have to, we have to acknowledge David Koresh's sculpted ABS. We have to listen. Look at the holding up right now. She's hearing the side by side. I am seeing where it says one of these things is not like the other. David Koresh is hot, have been and Elon Musk is bad, and I I will that that is the stance that I want. All of the Elon Musk fans hate listening this. To take out of this is that I officially endorse David Koresh's hot. That's important. I officially endorsed you to continue this podcast. Hello listeners, this is Sophie. Robert is out reporting at the current riots happening in Portland right now, but he wanted to make sure that we had this correction in Part 2 of this episode. Uh, he incorrectly labeled author Ashley Vance as if she and he is a he and Robert also wanted me to mention that his book, Elon Musk, Tesla, SpaceX, and the quest for a fantastic future is a wonderful book. You can find a link to that book under the footnotes in part one. Now back to the episode. The thing that I condemn Elon most for is, and the reason I think it's so important to understand, like, how ****** ** this child hit it was, is that when you have an experience like that a good person should have that make them into a better person, a more empathetic person, right? Like, that's what you hope through. Like, you and I both talked Sophia about how, like, we got bullied a bunch and dealt with a bunch of **** like that. And I think it made us both into people who sympathize a lot. With people who are being victimized. Elon Musk did not take that out of it. He did take the thing where like he clearly hates bullies, but he also just basically uses that as an excuse to say that everybody who rightfully criticizes him as a bully. He clearly didn't learn the most important lesson of his childhood, which should have been that a lot of people in the world may be forced to serve in horrific militaries or stay in countries that they can't stand to to live in, and that it is like an act of evil to stop people from trying to find a better life. Instead, he was willing to, like, shut his ******* mouth and work with an administration that was doing his best to cut off other in need kids in a similar situation that he was in himself. He did not let that turn him into a more empathetic person. And that is something that he should be morally condemned for, as well as everything else we're about to talk about. Yeah, I think that's a really good where you could have gone like there by the grace of God, go I instead of **** these kids, I made it out. **** these kids. **** them. Yeah, they weren't lucky. Yeah. You know, it's not even. I would have a little bit more respect for him if he was like a hard line right winger being like, no, I think, like I have very strong opinions on immigration because a racist ***** ** **** no, it's all money related. Yeah, exactly. He wanted to keep his nice government contracts, like, exactly. It's all money related. Yeah, Yep. Ashley Vance spends the bulk of her biography of Elon Musk outlining the entrepreneur's history of business setbacks and successes. And you can find that story in a lot of places. I'm not going to spend huge amount of time discussing his products, the technology behind them, or giving play by plays of every acquisition in his history. She writes a lot about his cool technology, and it is cool. I've driven a Tesla a couple of times and they're neat. He didn't make them. Yeah. Anyway, in 1994, Musk and his brother headed to the US they started their time with a road trip in the summer before Musk had to get started on his degree. He held a couple of internships in Silicon Valley. The tech industry was a natural fit for Elon. He developed a reputation as an obsessive worker who was willing to put an impossible hours, a reputation that has followed him his entire career. When he was interning, he had the idea for his first business. A salesperson for the Yellow Pages walked into one of the offices where he worked and tried to sell his startup on the idea of an online listing. Add on to their normal Yellow Pages listings. The pitch was poorly delivered, and the guy clearly didn't know anything about the Internet. But Elon saw a glimmer of promise in the idea in 1995. He and his brother. Simple formed global Link Information Network which changed its name to ZIP Tube because global Link Information Network is a ship name. The idea behind zip two was to convince businesses to create web presence. Shocking that a guy named Kibble isn't good at naming stuff. I think. I think Musk is the bad namer for reasons that will become clear. He actually has kind of an early history of sucking at naming companies. And now the idea behind zip two was to convince businesses to create web presences on a searchable business directory that also had maps. Component obviously that's a good idea, because it's the way everything works now, and in 1995 was very ahead of the curve. And if you've read any story about a scrappy tech startup in the Bay, you know the story of ZIP 2. Elon and his brother started alone in a dinky office where the toilets backed up, yadda yadda. They had no money, the shoestring budget, all that ********. This is not exactly true. Like all of these stories, the scrappy underdog entrepreneurs had much more funding than they tend to emphasize. In Musk's case, zip two was formed with the help of $28,000 of his dad's money. Umm. Yeah, he doesn't like to talk about that. Sometimes he openly acknowledges it. I think sometimes he lies. I don't know. Yeah, Ashley Vance acknowledges this, but in a way that tries to make it seem like it wasn't a big deal, she writes. Quote they were more or less broke after getting the office space, licensing software, and buying some equipment. For the first three months of Zippy's life, Musk and his brother lived at the office. They had a small closet where they kept their clothes and shower at the YMCA. I'm so sorry. Oh, could they have sold any of their free floating diamonds? I mean, sorry. *******. What was it? Emeralds. I'm sorry, they're emerald. No, they left the emeralds behind with dad and just took 28 grand of his money. That's it. Just a small suggest. A small amount. 20 grand, you know, like 28, you know? It's not like a Trump sized loan, but it is significant, right? Like. Like, I'm sure he's like, he's not lying when he says, you know, we were on a shoestring budget, but the fact that you had a budget is because your dad was rich. Yep. Like, that's the point. The point is not that it was easy to start a business on 28 grand. It's that most of us don't get 28 grand to start a business and do not have an emerald mine to fall back on. Yes. Yes. Don't have dads emerald mine money to fall back on. Yeah. So like most entrepreneurs in a similar position, Elon doesn't like to talk about the privileges that made his success possible. In this case, I suspect some of its pride. But I think some of it's also the fact that he hates his dad and probably doesn't want to admit that his dad helped a lot. I suspect that if you were to get him to be honest about this, he would blurt out something like I earned that money by putting up with his **** my whole childhood, but that's me. Editorializing on Elon's mind a little bit, ZIP 2 grew rapidly, and this is probably due in part to the fact that Elon put in fundamentally lunatic hours to build his company. One of his early employees recalled to Vance quote, almost every day. I'd come in at 7:30 or 8:00 AM and he'd be asleep right there on that bag. He had a bean bag. Maybe he showered on the weekends. I don't know. You get the feeling that Musk didn't shower a lot. That's why Musk, huh? That totally makes sense now. Yeah, that all of these the thing that is emphasized. I I worked as a tech. Analyst for a while. So have little real a lot of biographies about a lot of tech guys and they all smelled terrible and so did their little offices when they started out. They were all ******* nasty. It's not hard to shower once a day. You get your best ideas in the shower? Yes, just ******* get in the shower. Get tech, man. They get their best ideas by forming like a ******* a crown of scrotal sweat around their ******* drawstring pants. I don't know. I used to work at Google. Yeah, and some some the engineer areas would sometimes. Get musty. Yeah. There's a smell that engineers have. We all musky. They would get engineer stank? Yeah. It was Musk's manic level of devotion and obsessive work ethic that endeared him to the venture capitalists whose investments helped zip to grow into a viable business. They saw him as, in the words of 1 employee willing to stake his existence on building this business, he told one investor. My mentality is that of a samurai. I would rather commit seppuku than fail. I would die for Global link incorporated. Yeah, I would die for the Yellow Pages, you dumb *****. Yeah, but zip 2 success was also heavily dependent on the goodwill of friends that Musk and his brother made during their time at Canada. Their buddy Greg Cory was critical, giving them $6000 when they left for California to start their company. He became a cofounder and his past real estate and business experience were crucial. Ashley Vance writes. Quote the Canadian had a knack for calming Musk and ended up being something of a mentor. Really smart people sometimes don't understand that not everyone can keep up with them or go as fast, said Derek Pradian, a venture capitalist who become Zip 2's chief executive officer. Greg is one of the few people that Elon would listen to and had a way of putting things in context for him. Couri also used to referee fist fights between Elon and Kimball in the middle of the office. So. Elon and his brother. That's exactly the kind of **** I expect from Kibbles and bits. Totally. Yeah. And it's the thing that it's the thing that is true also about Facebook, where it's like, yeah, it should be against the law for teenagers to start businesses. It's actually it's bad for a lot of reasons, in part because they never grow out of being teenagers in their heads. Yes, he had office fist fights with his brother, and Kimball's insistent that he was the only person Elon ever fought physically. At least one SpaceX employee has accused. Line of being physically aggressive with him, but that came years later, so we'll talk about that maybe a little bit later. Kimball claims that neither he nor his brother quote, have the ability to reconcile a vision other than our own, which I think is totally accurate. I don't think Kimball's lying at all about that. The fights ended after Elon ripped some of the skin off of his fist, I think because he missed a punch and hit something else, and he had to get a tetanus shot. Cory told them both that they had to stop fighting in the office after that, which you shouldn't have to tell people. But whatever, boys, boys, keep it down in the office of the business you're trying to start of the business, you're courting investments for fewer fist fights on the floor when the investors are in the room. Yeah, by 1996 the company was off the ground and running. Elon, a self-taught coder, was largely replaced by a team of new professional coders who rewrote almost every line of code that Elon had put in. There was a good reason for this. Elon's code was functional, but tended to be idiosyncratic, difficult to update and expand overtime, difficult for other people to work on. Handing over control for this was difficult for him. He had particular trouble with the fact that professional coders wanted to work normal human hours. He tried to get them to go without sleeping for days at a time, but they were unwilling to do this for some reason. You tried to get them to stop breathing and inject. Aren't you guys willing? Willing for some crazy reason? Aren't you guys willing to die for my vision? No, it's the Yellow Pages. But Internet, Elon, like, calm. Calm the **** down. Yes. You're not saving lives, buddy. People are not still the best, yeah? Yeah, that is an important point you make, Sophia. I. One of the things that I think that I have learned reading all this is that, like, Elon makes a big point now about how all of his businesses, his goal is like saving the world, like SpaceX is to save the human race by getting us off the planet. Tesla is to save the human race by, like, putting it into fossil fuel use. And he talks about that enough, and a lot of reviewers act as if he just believes it. And I'm sure he has convinced himself that he believes that. You get the feeling, though, from his ******* Yellow Pages business. He's always needed to be able to claim that his businesses are that important so that he can justify the fact that he is an unreasonable workaholic that ***** over people in them. Like he had to find a business that he could claim was critical to the future of the human race so that he could act like the ******* he's always acted like in business. That's that's I think core to him. Oh totally. You're right on about that. And it also reminds me of like a lot of comedians who are like, no where artists. I mean like as a comedian whenever people are like. Yep. Hey, you know what? We're Ernest, OK? And like, sometimes we have to, like, do stuff to, like, for our art and, like, it's it's fine if we're *****. Like, it's gonna make for great jokes and stories later. It's like, you can't do that. Other people's expense, man. I have endangered myself and the people around me for my career. I ****** ** and been very unreasonable and unfair and relationships for the the sake of my career. There's a lot of men, and particularly men, who wind up succeeding under capitalism. You have that aspect to their personality and it's not a good thing. It's bad. It's bad that I do it. It's bad that Elon does it. It's a bad thing to do. It's not just men. A lot of women have it too, but I guess men get away with it, I think more because it's expected. I don't know. And I think it's sometimes is admired. They're like, well, that's what you have to do if you want to become a Steve Jobs. You have to ******* be * ****. Like that's what it is. Yeah. Yeah. And you get a lot of positive reinforcement as a man, for being an unreasonable workaholic, like for years. Before it started to be a problem and like my romantic life and my personal life, I got praised a ton for like what a hard worker I was and it was like I wasn't actually being praised for working hard, I was being praised for working unreasonably. But. It my husband is the same way. Yeah. It's rewarded. You can make a lot of money doing that. Yeah, people are. It's not. There's the greatest movie ever, even though you leave for seven years. ******* figure it out. Yes, you know, and don't see your face. Yes. ****. You know, Sophia, you don't talk about your husband, James Cameron often, but yes. They're so mad at him, *** **** it. And he's he's right in the background as we talk, working on another ******* submarine. Like enough with the submarines, James. *** **** it. Uh, thank God I have the heart. Yeah, thank God. So yeah, the business did well, zip 2 did really well, and success made Elon into a more confident person, giving him a sense of control that he'd lacked in his early life. He slowly learned to tone some of the less productive aspects of his personality down his wife Justine later claimed quote. Elon is not someone who would say I feel you. I see your point of view because he doesn't have that. I feel you dimension where things that seemed obvious to other people that weren't that obvious to him. He had to learn that a 20 something year old really shouldn't shoot down the plans of older senior people and point out everything wrong with them. He learned to modify his behavior in certain ways, and this is true objectively because he got good at dealing with money people, but he only learned how to communicate more carefully with people. He needed things from Doris Downs. Zip 2's former creative director later recalled, I remember being in a meeting once brainstorming about a new product, a new car site. Someone complained about a technical change that we wanted being impossible. Elon turned and said I don't really give a damn what you think and walked out of the meeting. For Elon. The word no does not exist, and he expects that attitude from everyone around him. This is, again in Vance's book too, always spun as a positive thing. And the thing that Vance will point out is that like and and that employees who both like and hate Elon will point out is that his trigger is being told. Something can't be done. You always have to present him with an alternate option of what can be done instead and. Again, that's often seen as like, no, this is like a good management practice. That's part of his success that, like, he makes his people always present him with another option, but it really is rooted in the fact that he can't hear. No, he can't be told. No, he's not learned that. Which is good. Sophia. Yeah. I mean, that's how far is ******* first wife down. So. Yep, clearly, Yep. Just a great learning of lessons for him. Yeah. Ever. And it's interesting that he did learn how to modify kind of the. Noxious aspects of his behaviour around people he needed money from. That is really telling, and he doesn't want to with his employees, so he feels fine taking like, acting that way around them anyway. That's good behavior. Zip 2 continued to grow and it it did consistently lose money, but obviously in Silicon Valley that doesn't matter, and the VC money kept trickling in enough to keep it alive until the company was purchased. Purchased by Compaq in February of 1999 for $307 million in cash. Elon walked away with about 22 million bucks himself. Yeah. He got about 22 million out of that, and he left the company immediately because he didn't actually really care about this project, he just wanted to get rich off of it. And yeah, when he talks about this in the present day, his chief lingering frustrations with his time seemed to be #1 that the coders he worked with weren't as good as him. He always talks about, like, how he had to correct their ******* and like everyone else, always talks about the fact that his code wouldn't have worked in a real product and like, needed to be fixed by people who knew how to actually code in a productive. Anyway, yeah. And he also is really angry that he never got to be CEO because everybody agreed that he was bad at dealing with people and wouldn't let him be CEO. So that's what he was angry with, walking out of his first business. So he spent $1,000,000 immediately on a on a McLaren, which is some sort of fancy rich person car that there's. There's not many of them. So rich guys love it because there's only like 60. Oh, I'm just like you. I'm a rare precious, precious, you know, muscle. That's me. Yeah, yeah. But a car that's just like me, really precious and rare and special and expensive and just like really unique. And he needed to be unique even more cause like not only did he need to get the car that's like the fancy car that almost no one gets to have, but he also couldn't be like a normal rich guy and like have it be like his fancy special car that he drives when he wants to be fancy. Like he was famous for treating it like **** and like letting it get dirty and like ******* it up, hitting curbs, curbs. And he bragged about it. It's important to people that people that he knew that he had. This unique car and that he treated it like **** like he needed other folks to know that about him. I would literally throw this money in a garbage disposal bra. I don't care, OK? I just ******* grow it. I don't care disposal. I'm cool. When he had the car delivered, he had CNN show up at his house to film the delivery. The interview caught Elon and an interesting point in his life when he was clearly elated by his newfound wealth. Wildly cocky and far too young to know how off putting all of this is, Ashley Vance writes quote. The whole time he looked like a caricature of an engineer. Even made it big. Musk's hair had started thinning, and he had a closely cropped cut that accentuated his boyish face. He wore an all too big brown Sport coat and checked his cell phone from his lavish car sitting next to his gorgeous girlfriend Justine. Justine moved to California, by the way, and he seems spellbind bound by his life. Must rolled out one laughable rich guideline after another, talking 1st about the ZIP 2 deal. Receiving cash is cash. I mean, those are just a large number of Ben Franklins, and next about the awesomeness of his life. There it is, gentlemen, the fastest car in the world, and then about his prodigious. In addition, I could go and buy one of the islands in the Bahamas and turn it into my personal fiefdom, but I am much more interested in trying to build and create a new company. So he's just like a real ******* about this and patting himself on the back during it. He's like, I could have done another rich guy thing, but I'm doing this rich guy thing that I think is better. Yeah. That's what happens when you give a rich kid in his early 20s twenty $2,000,000 of his own. I'm not like other rich guys. I yeah, I'm making a space company or whatever, I'm gonna make it. Well not yet. First he wants to make an Internet based bank so he rolls most of his money that he got from gets from the sale intox.com which is this his idea for an Internet best based bank. And what's unusual about this is that most tech millionaires like who started new businesses. For their first hit, got other people to put in the money and this is something that Musk is rare about. Musk is that he he put most of his own fortune into ex.com and this this was really uncommon. And the reason why is because he wanted control. He wanted to be CEO this time around and so putting in the majority of the funding gave him control and meant other people could have less of a say over his vision and couldn't say no to him now. From the beginning there were conflictsat-x.com based on Elon's behavior. One of his cofounders was a guy named Fricker, who'd moved from Canada to help start the business and was frustrated by Evan's attitude. Fricker wanted to create a straightforward. I'm so sorry, it's really boring here. Not during this podcast. Just in my life. That was so funny. So Fricker wanted to create a straightforward online bank. Like, he didn't see why it needed to be a big deal. He was like, yeah, people, the internet's the thing. Now people are gonna need a bank. This seems like a thing we should do and make money. Whereas Elon was like, no, we're going to completely change the banking system. And the way that banking is done will never be the same. And it it had to be like this big ******* deal for him. Whereas this guy was like, yeah, we could just make like a a a bank app thing online, and that'll be a thing people want. Elon it it had to be a bigger deal for Elon and Fricker, accused Musk of Overhyping their product, and eventually attempted a coup against Musk. So five months after x.com was founded, Fricker and most of the best engineers in the company all left to form their own business. It says a lot about Musk's personality that very few of the people at the company cited with him in this personal dispute. You get the feeling they all found him very frustrating, but Musk kept going and he was able to hide X dot coms internal problems from Mike Moritz of Sequoia Capital, who put in a major. Investment that allowed Elon to hire more engineers to continue his vision, one former employee later recalled. You look back and it was total insanity. We had what amounted to a Hollywood movie set of a website. It barely got past the venture capitalists. Thex.com office was tiny and cramped and by all accounts, disgusting, one employee recalled. It was this massive adolescent men that worked so hard, it stunk so badly in there. I can still smell it, leftover pizza, body odor and sweat. He's so lucky that he isn't Jewish. If he had, like, just come out and been like, I'm gonna change the banking industry, people would have just said all kinds of anti-Semitic **** for him to him for the rest of his ******* life, it would have followed him around. Yes, this was the one time anti-Semitism might have helped us all out, but alas. If only. Ohh man. Yeah, in a company filled with broken, sold men who worked way too hard on a damn banking app must worked the way too hardest. Putting in 23 hours a day to everyone else's 20. That's a bit of an exaggeration, but it's how he describes it and probably not super far off from the truth just based on what we know of him. By Thanksgiving of 1999, x.com was live and it worked. It was not the only game in online banking town, however. Max Levchin and Peter Thiel were working on a competing product at exactly the same time. They called it confinity, which is a ****. Same, but teal and company also picked an objectively good name for the service. They called it PayPal, which is a way better name than confinity or than x.com. Which sounds like a **** site. Well, it's actually what I heard. What I heard is that x.com got bought out by exhibit and became X to the z.com. Oh, I don't get the joke. I I understand there's a joke. I just don't get it. It's fine. You need to know who exhibit. Yeah, I know. Enough for for the both of us. That was so fun. Thank you. So, yeah, in March. So they they competed for a while, and we're basically, like, running both companies out of business by fighting with money. And so in March of 2000, they decided to merge. Personality crop conflicts cropped up almost immediately. And it like, I hate Peter Teal is honestly more deserving of behind the ******** than Elon Musk. Get one at some point, because he is a real monster, but he comes off as the more reasonable person in the fight between them. So the big issue is that Peter Thiel and everyone else at the company thought PayPal was a better name for their service, and Elon Musk was in love with x.com because he'd come up with it and he was not willing to compromise, and he was objectively wrong. But it's also such a little kid named to like, he's like x.com. And if that's taken, what about 4:20 69.com? And if that's yeah, cheating. Yeah, it's it's silly. There's a lot that's been written about the PayPal mafia, which is what all these guys came to be known as in this. And I'm I'm just not going to talk much about it because I'm interesting and **** it. But yeah, I should just let you know that that's a term you hear a lot, and I don't care about it. I'm not going to go into much detail about. PayPal because it's boring. What's most important is that there was a split between Musk and teal, and Teal actually resigned from the company two months after the merger. Peter Thiel is a huge ***** ** **** but it really seems like Musk was more of a problem here, given this was the second time in less than a year that a cofounder of the company that he worked at had quit after an argument with Elon. Yeah, so that's interesting. X.com had other issues. The company picked up new users at a huge rate, but it's infrastructure was not able to handle the load, so the site collapsed regularly. Fraud was rampant in the business. Lost tons of money as a result of stupid **** and I'm going to quote from Ashley Vance's book now. Asx.com became popular and its transaction volume exploded. All of its problems worsened. There was more fraud. There were more fees from banks and credit card companies. There was more competition from startupsx.com lacked a cohesive business model to offset the losses and turn a profit from the money it managed. Roelof Botha, the startups chief Financial officer and now a prominent venture capitalist at Sequoia, did not think Musk provided the board with a true picture. Ofx.com's issues a growing number of other people at the company question Musk's decision making in the face of all the crises. What followed was one of the nastiest coups in Silicon Valley's long. Illustrious history of Nasty Coos. A small group of XCOM employees gathered one night at Fannie and Alexander, a now defunct bar in Palo Alto, and brainstormed about how to push out Musk. They decided to sell the board on the idea of Teal returning his CEO. Instead of confronting Musk directly with the plan, the conspirators decided to take action behind Musk's back. So the coup plotters acted right as Elon Musk left for his honeymoon with Justine. They'd actually married months earlier, but hadn't been able to celebrate it because Elon Musk is a workaholic. So. He finds out that they are ousting him as CEO right after they land in Sydney, Australia and he immediately leaves the honeymoon to go try to win his company back because that is where is my man. Yeah, that what she said when that happened. She was so excited. Yeah. He loves me. Yeah, so Elon and Justine land in like, Australia. Yeah, and he just like books a trip back right away. He didn't get his way, though. Teal took over. X.com was rebranded as PayPal, and according to the folks who worked there, Elon did take this eventually. Well, he didn't blow the company up or anything, although he probably could have tried with new, better management and a much better name. PayPal took off. In July of 2002, eBay offered $1.5 billion for the company. The board accepted the deal, and Musk got 250 million. This Shuck out to about $180 million after taxes question. So Justine stay. Yeah, and enjoy Australia by herself and have a good old time. Was that mentioned? Because that's what I'm wondering. I think so. I think so. She seems like a neat lady. Everything? Yeah, I hope so. She writes fantasy novels which Elon wasn't initially very supportive of and then made fun of her for around his friends. Because that's the kind of guy he is. ******. That's a ****. Yeah. If my husband may be part of my career behind my back, yeah, he would be dead. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Don't don't **** talk your spouses career unless your spouse is Elon Musk. Then absolutely do **** talk your spouse's career. Grimes. Grimes. Cheese. Yeah. Start a ******* book club just so people can come over and rag on your husband with. Yeah. So, like, hey, Elon, you've seen any space lately? I don't know how to. That I don't have a good joke yet. Give me a minute. Yeah. Thank you. So you're not really see. Eat it. And while you take that minute, what's that'll teach him? It's time for something else, Robert, while you take that minute. 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Option it's convenient, accessible, affordable, and it is entirely online. You can get matched with a therapist after filling out a brief survey, and if the therapist that you get matched with doesn't wind up working out, you can switch therapists at any time. When you want to be a better problem solver, therapy can get you there. Visit betterhelp.com behind today to get 10% off your first month. That's better helpp.com/behind betterhelp.com/behind. My name is Erica Kelly and I am the host and creator of Southern Freight true crime. There are so many people that just have no idea about some injustices in the world and if you can give a voice to them, you can create change. To be able to do it within podcasting is just such a gift. I believe it was 18 months after I got on with speaker that I was making enough that I could quit my day job. It was incredible. I always felt like an ambassador for speaker, but that's because I'm passionate about podcasting. It's really easy to use. I always tell people I am so not tech. Took me 5 minutes to get comfortable with spreaker, and when I find a new friend that has an incredible show, I want them to make money. I want them to be able to do what I did. Follow your podcasting dreams. Let's break your handle the hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com. That's spreaker.com. Get paid to talk about the things you love with spreaker from iheart. We're back. We're back from those incredibly ***** products, talking about the equally probably ***** Elon Musk, but ***** for business, ***** to save the world. That's Elon Musk in this. So, as everyone I'm sure knows, Elon takes all his money he makes from eBay and he throws it into Tesla, SpaceX, and his brother's business, solar city. Ashley Vance's book gives a good blow by blow account of how this all went down. If you're interested, solar city next door to Circuit City. Yes. Yes, yes, party city on the corner from party city. Yes, around the corner from both. It's in the city block of Lincoln City. I don't know. **** it. Tesla started out as some other dudes electric car company. So Elon Musk didn't start Tesla, which is should be obvious because it has a good name. And as we've learned, Elon Musk cannot name a business well. But Musk liked the idea behind Tesla, and he pumped in a bunch of funding to become part of the business. He also introduced the founders to a Genius battery building engineer whose research must could help to fund. So he does get some credit. At around the same time, Musk also started SpaceX. The company grew out of conversations and research that must had started to fund between a bunch of space nerds. In essence, Elon had money, and he used a bunch of it to gather a group of smart Astro nerds together and get them talking. The rough goal at first was to try and send mice to Mars and then send them back to Earth alive, which is a cool idea. The scientist he was talking to thought that they could do this for like 20 million bucks. The plan gradually evolved into the idea of building a robot greenhouse and launching it via rocket to Mars. The greenhouse would mix Martian soil with earth soil and squared out tiny bits of bits of oxygen. And the Martian atmosphere would send video feedback to Earth so people could, you know, see plants growing on Mars, which is a cool idea. That would be a neat thing to see plants grow on Mars. To watch that. That's the most I've ever been interested so far in. Yes, what he's been inventing. I mean PayPal. It's a fine, I guess. No, **** it. It's a cool *** idea about this ******* space garden that sounds do. Yeah, hell **** yeah. Bring me a space tomato from Mars. I won't guess based tomato from Mars. You could, honestly. Yes, I would Kickstarter that. Yeah, and when you tell stories like that, you can see why space nerds fell in love with Elon Musk at this. That's a ******* cool thing to want to do. And it's a cool thing if you have 10s of millions of dollars to put money into. Since Elon had a lot of money to spare, like obviously he could actually make this happen. He flew to Russia with a rocket scientist he knew to see if the Russian government would sell him a rocket, and they were totally down to sell him a rocket, but they wanted way too much. Funny. Umm, so yeah, he decided to start SpaceX in order to make space travel cheaper and get mankind to Mars. And gradually the goal switched from Space Garden to make it cheaper to get satellites into the air and provide **** to the ISS. Which is like, not a not cool thing to do, but is not as cool as space garden. I think we can all agree on that. No, and I can't eat that. That's no space tomato. You got that? OK, I mean, they do grow things in the ISS, so you can say he's contributing to Space Tomatoes, but he's not contributing to Mars tomatoes right now. Yeah, for real, where the **** is my Mars basil? That's why I'm, I'm that's what I'm waiting for. Yeah, ****. Where's our Mars, basil? Elon? You ******* *******. Oh my God. Do you think they could make way bigger vegetables on Mars because of the weight thing? If they could make? Probably, from what I understand, yes. As big as my whole body. Holy **** you can make like, giant. You could make a watermelon that reaches from Mars to the earth, and then we could eat our way to Mars inside of a watermelon that protects us from space. Dude, finally don't factory. Like, get behind. Yes, giants. Face watermelon space giant giant space elevator made out of a watermelon. Hell yeah. So Musk has been pretty adamant from the beginning that his goal with SpaceX was to make space travel cheaper and get mankind to Mars. That's always like the dream, like everything. Like he always emphasizes. Like the goal is to get human beings to Mars so that we can become like an interplanetary society and, you know, not get wiped out by a ******* rock or whatever. And that's like the, that's like the the the pitch that he's gotten very good at giving. And both of Elon's big. Two companies that he founded with his eBay money have dreams like this from the beginning, even before Elon Tesla's. Goal was to make sweet luxury electric cars and use that money and the lessons from it to drive down the cost of building an electric car that could dominate the US auto market. Now there is a big debate to be had as to whether or not either SpaceX or Tesla have ever had a chance of contributing to the grand goal set for them. They certainly have not achieved them, and we'll discuss that a little later. But the fact that both of the companies were started with species life and death at as the stakes had some benefits for Elon. For one thing, they allowed him to inspire and motivate his workplace with things. On the money, so you can have your workers work themselves into an early grave if they think they're saving the world, whereas it's hard to do that if they think they're making the Yellow Pages, right? That's one benefit to a guy like Elon. The other benefit is that, like, he didn't really want to make either of these companies public, especially not early, because that means you lose control. If you have a public company, you have less control than a private company, and Elon is a big control guy. So again, focusing on saving the human race is the goal. For both companies allowed him to justify keeping control, which meant less money for his workers, meant they didn't get to cash out their stock options, but also meant that he had the control he needed to see these dreams through, and it makes it easier to sell people on that. From the beginning, both companies were based entirely off of the work and genius inventions of other people. Tesla's founder, a guy named Eberhard, was a brilliant and is he still alive. A brilliant engineer, SpaceX relied on a huge crop of genius rocket engineers. Musk did make his contributions, and he is a talented. Engineer and on the engineering side, he did some meaningful things, but they were also a mixed bag. For example, he insisted the Tesla Roadster have a carbon fiber body, which necessitated a specific sort of paint. The paint happens to be very toxic, which has led to Tesla being fined 10s of thousands of dollars by the state of California for polluting the air and land with toxic waste. So that's good. Carbon fiber is cool. Can't make an omelet without ruining all of the chickens abilities to make eggs. That is a very true statement, Sophia. Musk is a hands on Boss and it's clearly important to him that he be seen as one of, if not the leading minds behind both of his big businesses, signature products. In 2005, Tesla got its first New York Times coverage. It was very positive about company founder Eberhard and the other genius engineers, but it completely ignored Elon, one of Tesla's early employees later said. We tried to emphasize him and told the reporter about him over and over again, but they weren't interested in the board of the company. Elon was furious. He was livid, but nobody puts Elon in the corner. OK, no, but not ever. The early buzz around the Tesla was very positive and there were huge problems with the car behind the scenes though, what you'd expect because it's like a hard thing to do. The product was delayed repeatedly and it had issues that kept cropping up the transmission and the body, and the costs ballooned, yadda yadda. It became very clear eventually that Tesla's early engineers had wildly underestimated what their car would cost to make, and they had sold hundreds of pre-ordered cars at a price way less than what the car would actually cost to make. Think they were selling them for like 90,000 and they found out was gonna cost like 170 grand per vehicle and must have been the guy largely like delivering the big speeches that had sold a lot of these cars and hyping them up. But he hadn't been the guy that was responsible for ******* up the cost calculation. That was Eberhard. And he does seem to have genuinely really ****** ** at estimating what these cars would cost to make. And Musk used this **** ** as an opportunity to push the company founder out as CEO. And so Elon finally got to be CEO. There's certainly a case to be made. That he was uh, this was the right thing to do. Many early Tesla people will say that Eberhart did **** ** badly, and he needed to be ousted at that point. And you could say he needed to be ousted as badly as Elon needed to be ousted in order for PayPal to be a success. But the whole endeavor led to tremendous bad blood between Eberhard and Musk, and the two men would snipe at each other for many years after that point. Now, this is another thing. I've seen folks online come after Musk 4 and I don't. I don't like the fact that he stole the company from this guy. I don't know. It's debatable as to whether or not he did the right thing. He probably did the right thing for making Tesla into a profitable company. What's not debatable is how ****** ** it is that Elon Musk gets credit for building all of these wonderful devices that he did not build. A January 2020 Fortune article got the title how Elon Musk built a Tesla factory in China in less than a year. Obviously he didn't. He's never built. Factory is life. In September of 2019, Quartz published an article titled Elon Musk is designing his rocket as fast as he can or undesigned. He was making a point about how he thinks, but like it still gives the credit to him for like making this rocket. Musk gets a lot of credit in general for the wonders that his companies have produced. In a 2017 Rolling Stone article, Neil Strauss opened by noting that Musk has not yet achieved either of the incredibly lofty goals he set for Tesla or SpaceX. But quote, what he has done is something that very few living people can claim. Painstakingly bulldozed with no experience whatsoever, into two fields with ridiculously high barriers to entry, car manufacturing and rocketry, and created the best products in those industries and measured by just about any meaningful metric you can think of. And the process he's managed to sell the world, and his ability to achieve objectives so lofty that from the mouth of anyone else they'd be called fantasies. And that's frustrating to me because he did jump in without any experience to do very difficult, interesting industries, but he didn't create those ******* products and I yeah. It's frustrating. It's frustrating that the writers of Star Trek Discovery saw fit to give Elon Musk credit as a brilliant inventor. They listed him next to the inventor of the warp, Dr Zefram Cochrane, as a genius scientific mind. Which is Bosa? **** Zephram Cochrane lived through World War three and made a ******* I mean, he's a fake guy, but whatever. It's ******** to put Elon Musk at that level because he's not a genius ******* inventor. It is fair, I think, based on what I've read, to say that he's probably contributes more to the development of his products than most CEO's do, but. He is also not just sitting there making them as a general rule. Ashley Vance's book goes into the into tremendous detail about the incredible sacrifices that SpaceX rocket engineers made to build the company's first successful rocket. They did it in like this this island off of the coast of Hawaii and like lived on this primitive humid like base for years that like didn't have. Like things that people normally need to have to be comfortable. They didn't see their family for like months or even years at a time. They sacrificed their health. The social lives, because these, like they believed in the dream of human spaceflight, we're back. Listeners will hear this as seamless, but we just had an interruption for a mystery. And you none of you will ever know. And it's an it's it's an you won't. We're not going to tell. Sorry, suckers. You *******. ******* liking my work, said suckers. But you really went hard. I turned it into five. Learned. Yeah, the key to keeping an audience is to be like a little bit abusive to them. You know, like negging you neg the audience. I think they like the one you do that because they feel like, ohh, he knows we can take it, we're tough, and then they send you more knives. It's weird. You guys have a beautiful love they do. I abuse them and they send me knives and that is the healthiest relationship in my life. Hey, if anybody wants to send Robert a knife for me, I would take it. Just FYI. Yeah. Just gonna send Sophia. Not well. Wait, I was not considered in this factor, but OK. Sophie, do you want a knife? No, no, no, that I'm not. I've given you so many knives relationships that I was in a part of that and most functional. Through all your podcasts. Yeah, I know, I know. See, that's because I habitually torpedo my relationships, but not how it works. We're great. You know, the the problem, the real problem with this line of jokes, Sophia, is that if you start getting mailed a bunch of knives, you're not going to know if it's because Elon Musk fans want you dead or because they really enjoyed your performance. ****. OK, OK, let me amend my request. You can send a knife for Robert for me if it includes. Ohh. I see. That's ******. I'd love that. Just so I know it's not aggressive. You can, like, draw a happy face on it if you want. Or just include a little. No, no, with a happy face. So I know it's like. And non threatening, yeah, gift. Send her knives and smiley faces, which is the totally nonthreatening gift is knives and pictures of smiling faces, everyone. No one's creeped out by that at all. Let's move on. Hey, I know what I like, OK, Robert? Yeah. So the thing I want to emphasize is, like, again, Musk gets all this credit for like, well, you made like, he's a rocket in engineer. He, like, made these incredible space things. And it's like, I think, like, there's a lot that actually is objectively incredible about Spacex's rockets, including the fact that they, like, are capable of, of kind of piloting themselves back to the ground. A lot of cool stuff has been done by engineers at SpaceX who are brilliant rocket designers and who sacrificed an enormous amount. Again, these guys had to live for years, unlike an island base. With like very little in the way of comforts, like ignoring their families because there were people who believed in this dream of getting to Mars and like sacrificed huge chunks of their youth to make these rockets work. It was a an incredibly laborious, nightmarish process in some ways. And they did it. And Musk was sitting in California watching test launches on closed circuit video and hyping up the company. Which is not to say that, like, as a CEO, he's not thinking, probably make the case that he's one of the more valuable CEO's out there, which I also think he's still. They overvalued. But anyway, it's frustrating to me that he gets so much credit and all these ******* engineers, the guys actually doing the cool work, but whatever, yeah, muskets. The thing that's frustrating to me most is that Musk gets the credit for the successes of his workers while being able to blame them for his or for the failures of the company. One example of this came in March 24th, 2006. SpaceX had an important launch of its Falcon One rocket. The rocket wound up like ******* up and blowing up and **** so it didn't work out. And this was it made them push like the date. Because they had, like contracts and stuff to put stuff into space and they couldn't get their rocket to actually work is a big problem because Elon Musk used to build that, those rockets when he was a kid with explosives and was like, I'm lucky I kept my fingers, yeah, you're gonna put that guy in charge of your rocket? Yeah. He wasn't really like, it was engineers and stuff who were like, it's it's hard to do. It's hard to do. It's literally rocket science, Robert. I am aware. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, well, and like, you would think a good boss would be like, no, it's ******* hard. Like, it's nobody's fault. This is going to take some time to get right. And, like, it didn't work this time, but we're going to get it right. And that's kind of what Elon Musk, like, put out to the world. But he also needed a scapegoat to blame for the investors. And so he picked one of his hard working engineers who had been sacrificing his youth out on an island in a very unfair way. And I'm going to quote from Ashley Vance now. Musk and other SpaceX executives blamed the crash on an onion. Name technician they said this technician had done some work on the rocket one day before the launch and failed to properly tighten the fitting on a fuel pipe, which caused the fitting to crack. The fitting in question was something basic and aluminum B nut that's often used to connect a pair of tubes. The technician was Holman, who was like one of the guys living out there. In the aftermath of the rocket crash, Holman flew to Los Angeles to confront Musk directly. He'd spent years working day and night on the Falcon one and felt enraged that Musk had called out him and his team in public. Holman knew that he'd fastened the B nut correctly and that observers from NASA. Have been looking over his shoulder to check the work when home and charged into Spacex's headquarters with a head full of fury. Mary Beth Brown, Musk secretary, tried to calm him and stop him from seeing Musk. Hollman kept going anyway and the two of them proceeded to have a shouting match at Musk's cubicle. Now later investigation proved that Holman had done nothing wrong. The culprit was the aluminum body of the rocket. Another board member later admitted that Holman quote Kind of got blamed so that they could get out an answer to the investors as to why the launch had not worked. And that's ******* ****** and that's what. One thing that ****** me off about Elon Musk because he gets a lot of credit when the Rockets work and he finds a hard working person to blame when they don't, that's ********. It's like, yeah, literally the opposite of good leadership. When you're a leader, you take credit for both. You know? It's the it's the responsibility of of being the head of something. You take credit for the good and the bad, and you shield your people who work for you. I would go so far as to say that a great leader takes credit for the bad and gives credit to. His subordinates. For the good stuff. That's a really good leader that doesn't exist in the tech world. So yeah, it was not even trying to go that. Yeah, I I was like, just be a good and decent boss and be like, yeah, yeah, **** ** is also on me if you're gonna take credit for the good ****. And when you are really a great leader, your subordinates will make sure that you get a lot of credit for the good stuff that happens. You don't do that yourself because that's being * ****. But anyway, whatever. **** it. So Mary Beth Brown, let's talk about Mary Beth Brown. But he's not gonna stop being * **** *****? Cause his social skills are just not very good as we've known like the whole time. Speaking of that, let's talk about his relationship with Mary Beth Brown. So Mary Beth Brown was Musk's assistant at both SpaceX and Tesla from the beginning of both companies. And basically everybody who spent any time around either company in this. Will agree that she was absolutely critical to both success. Ashley Vance describes her as Musk's pepper pots because there's a lot of ******* Iron Man. Tony Stark comparisons that made the Musk and for years she was the gateway to Elon Musk and his mediator because again, like you were just bringing up, he has no social skills. So she would keep people away from him when he was in a bad mood and unable to productively engage. And she would like tell people when it was a good line to talk to him because she was under, she was like the Musk whisperer. She brought him his meal, she scheduled his time with his children, she picked out his clothes. She was his ******* mom. That was her job, right? That is so sad. I always felt so sad for pepper and those ******* movies. Yeah, it's a bummer, and it's a bummer, yeah. I mean, at least he didn't have a weird relationship with her, I guess, but it's weird anyway that that's a thing. But also, he was like a ******* manchild, as all of these tech guys are. So Vance credits Mary Beth Brown for helping to set up Spacex's early culture and asking as a balm whenever Musk would ruffle feathers and hurt anyone in any like a key. A key employees feelings. She worked 20 hour days when Elon worked 20 hour days. She traveled with him when he was because he would. He spends like two days a week in LA, two days a week. San Francisco and his other company, like he traveled around all the time, so she this was like a ******* nightmare job that she must have been obviously dead. She bought into the beliefs of the company and it seems to be widely agreed that she was a very important part of both companies, especially as they started off. She played a huge role in in the fact that both were a success and Elon Musk fired her in 2014. The story goes that she finally worked up the courage to ask Musk to be paid a salary in line with what the top executives at SpaceX were. Eight, since she was one of the longest serving employees and a key part of the operation and was forced to like live Elon's unreasonable schedule, she thought this was fair. Musk told her to go take a vacation and he would do her job himself and decide if he really needed her. When she came back, he told her that she was unnecessary and fired her without ceremony. So that's cool. I remember reading about that and being like that is the most insulting way to fire someone that's given so much of their time and life. Huge amount to just make sure that they know that you think they're worthless before you let them go. That is yeah so ****** for no reason. Yeah. To not just say like well I'm not going to do this and I don't need you anymore but like but first I'm going to devalue the decade that you sacrifice. That's what I'm saying. That's so wild. Yeah that's like just the true example of someone being, yeah of someone being so self absorbed that it it is truly abusive to other people because they do not consider the other persons like feelings. Their their livelihood or anything? Yup. Cool. To be a billionaire makes you superhuman. It does. Very human. OK, so lex Luther, more morals. Yeah. I mean, you know what? At least Lex Luther has an understandable life goal. He wants to murder Superman and don't we all? Yeah, he kind of sucks. I mean, for me, Superman is the FDA, but I get it. Like, yeah, we all have an emphasis, Robert. It's the FDA for everyone. Now, uh, yeah, sorry. What he did with Mary Beth Brown follows a pattern for Elon Musk. He hates being told no. He's being told anything he doesn't want to hear. And every former employee you can find is very consistent about the fact that telling him you can't do something is the worst career if you can make. Musk is famous for reacting to this by telling people, OK, then I'll do your job and I'll be the CEO of two companies. And then he fires them and does their job. And in the stories that get told, he always does the job well. And, you know, the person goes away. And it is true that Musk is very smart. He might even, you might even say he's brilliant at some things. It's also true that he's contributed to both of his companies. He said a particular impact on the development of Tesla's vehicles, from what I can tell, he seems to have the same kind of gift that Steve Jobs has or had. And the gift is like the thing that jobs did that made him special and that made him actually kind of worth the money he got paid as a CEO, or more of it than most CEO's are, is that he he was really good at saying no to like he knew to his employees when they would say, like, we think we've got this phone, right? He knew, like he had kind of an instinctive knowledge of what people wanted to hold in their hands. And that's why the iPhone worked and other phones that were made around the same time, smartphones. Early smartphones, didn't work as jobs understood. He, like, refused to let the product out until he knew that it was like going to feel good in people's hands and delight people. And Musk did kind of the same thing with the Tesla, which is why people ******* love their teslas, because it is a a. Well, it's a car designed to delight people in certain ways. Like one of Musk's big contributions was insisting that the door handles do that thing where they like pop out and like it's silly and unnecessary. But also having driven one like it's ******* cool as hell and it makes people happy and loyal to the product because it delights. Husband has a Tesla and he ******* loves it. The amount of joy it's from driving it, I'm like, this is stupid, but it is cool. Yeah, it's cool, it's cool and and must get some credit for a number of the really cool things about that car he has. He does have, I think the the CEO to compare him most to is Steve Jobs who was a monster but who was also had a skill and Musk has that same skill. He's not a rocket engineer. He is someone though who understands. He understood something important that people wanted and and he was the first person to understand that thing. And as a result, he put out a product that delights people, and that's that's a that's a talent. You can say it's not worth nearly as much as he's been paid, and I would agree with that, but it is a talent. So at SpaceX, however, Musk's main achievement seems to be pushing a policy whereby the company makes the vast majority of their spacecraft components in house. This is a really weird thing to do that no one else in the rocket industry does, and it caused them to take years to get off the ground because they had to, like, invent everything from the ground up, but it also allowed them to bypass. A lot of the bloat that the heavily regulated space industry has and has LED them to do stuff like the radios that SpaceX put in rockets cost a fraction of the radios that, like, were put in rockets before because they didn't like, get into this Lockheed Martin ******** where everything's like stupidly overbuilt and expensive like, and that it was a good idea to do it this way. It seems like a policy that was successful in reducing the cost of shooting **** into space. So whether or not you think that's good, it it worked. My issue with Musk isn't that. I think he's useless. It's that I think he gets way too much ******* credit and that he uses the world saving goals of his company as an excuse to treat loyal and critical employees who do more of the work in a lot of cases than he does like **** whenever he feels like they're getting in the way of what he wants to do at the moment. And I'm gonna quote again from Ashley Vance's biography. This is near the end of the biography. The rank and file employees tend to describe Musk and more mixed ways. They Revere his drive and respect how demanding he can be. They also think he can be hard to the point of mean and come off as capricious. The employees want to be close to Musk, but they also fear that he'll suddenly change his mind about something and that every interaction with him is an opportunity to be fired. Elon's worst trait by far, in my opinion, is a complete lack of loyalty to your human connection, said one former employee. Many of us worked tirelessly for him for years and were tossed to the curb. Like a piece of litter without a second thought. Maybe it was calculated to keep the rest of the workplace on their toes and scared. Maybe he was just able to detach from human connection to a remarkable degree. What was clear is that people who worked for him were like ammunition used for a specific purpose until exhausted and discarded. What a goal. Wow. Yeah, that's some Voldemort **** right? Just ******* sucking the all the I don't know. Yeah, I would say it's a bad thing to do, deatheater. They, like, suck out all your life force right out of your out of your body, and then just leave you all your warm memories and you just ******* die. That's how I feel it is. And someone stabs you up your talent. Sorry. Thank you. Dementor. I needed help. Thank you. You're the only person I would let make a Harry Potter comparison here. Thanks. I've earned it. With my service, with my, with my dead baby killer service. You have graduated to not being on those episodes, and I've never been less disturbed. In my life, Speaking of babies alive babies. Let's talk about Elon's wife thought that was an ad position. I was like, where? What? How? No. But Sophie, you know who won't kill babies? Well, Raytheon kills a lot of babies. Yeah. Here's the thing about Raytheon. What do we all hate weddings? Nobody likes having to go to a wedding. And the dream of Raytheon is to make weddings a thing of the past, not just for people in Afghanistan, but for everyone all over the world. Yes, with Raytheon, we can all live in a world where no wedding gets to happen without a drone strike. And isn't that the world we all want to live in? No, I like weddings. Weddings are dope. There's an open bar, usually, and I get free. What do you talking about, Robert? I mean, I don't want to be Raytheon. He don't want to be in a wedding. That's a lot of work. But like, what are you? This makes no sense. 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You can get matched with a therapist after filling out a brief survey, and if the therapist that you get matched with doesn't wind up working out, you can switch therapists at any time. When you want to be a better problem solver, therapy can get you there. Visit betterhelp.com/behind today to get 10% off your first month. That's better helpp.com. Slash behind betterhelp.com/behind my name is Erica Kelly and I am the host and creator of Southern Fried true crime. There are so many people that just have no idea about some injustices in the world and if you can give a voice to them, you can create change. To be able to do it within podcasting is just such a gift. I believe it was 18 months after I got on with Spreaker that I was making enough that I could quit my day job. It was incredible. I always feel like an ambassador for speaker, but that's because I'm passionate about podcasting. It's really easy to use. I always tell people I am so not tech. Took me 5 minutes to get comfortable with spreaker, and when I find a new friend that has an incredible show, I want them to make money. I want them to be able to do what I did. Follow your podcasting dreams. Let's break your handle the hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com. That's SPREAK. Er.com get paid to talk about the things you love with spreaker from iheart. We're back, and we're talking about Elon Musk's first wife, Justine. She famously wrote a viral article in 2010 after their divorce. For Marie Claire. Its title is I was a starter wife. That is one of the best article. That is where a lot of my information comes from. It's pretty it's a pretty good breakup article. By information, I mean hate. Yeah, that's all. It followed on the heels of Justine's blog, which she had kept for, like, the entirety of their marriage and had regularly, like, written some unflattering things about Elon. About that, like, then made it out like, all sorts of, like, gossip rags and stuff would talk about it. He did not. He was not happy with that. And also, I kind of think it was her way of, like, striking back at him for, like, talking some **** about her career as a writer. She's like, OK then, well, I'm going to write about what * **** you are in my blog and then the writing. Oh, I bet you're going to hate it a lot ******* more when it's about you. And what a ******* ****. Very funny. It was very funny. Cole isn't funny, but that's funny. Uh, so, yeah, it's full of fun details and I'm going to read one of them now as we dance at our wedding. At reception, Elon told me I am the alpha in this relationship. I shrugged it off. You shouldn't do that, just as I was, as I would later shrug off signing the POSTNUPTIAL agreement. But as time went on, I learned that he was serious. He had grown up in the male dominated culture of South Africa and the will to compete and dominate that made him so successful in business did not magically shut off when he came home. This, in the vast economic imbalance between us, meant that in the months following our wedding, a certain dynamic. Began to take hold. Elon's judgment overruled mine, and he was constantly mark, remarking on the ways he found me lacking. I am your wife, I told him repeatedly. Not your employee. His response to that was that if you were my employee, I'd fire you. He absolutely would. Yeah. Yeah. I'll **** me. I'll **** me so good. I'll **** me. I'll have my own babies. I'll raise them. That'll show you you're nothing. Yeah. Oh, that's amazing. So, yeah, that's great. Justine notes that after the first time, she flew to Silicon Valley to meet Musk while he was building zip. Two. He asked her how many kids she wanted. She said one or two, unless she could afford nannies. Then she wanted four. He responded with a laugh. And the reply that's the difference between you and me. I just assumed that there will be nannies. A good person says that's the thing about me and you. I I expect servants. That's the difference. I know I'll have servants. Slaves, servants, slaves. Servants. Servants, definitely. What my dad has, which was it that my dad has? Yeah, not that, yeah, but essentially that, yes. Justine also claims that Musk had her meet with his lawyer two months before the wedding to sign a financial agreement that he assured her was not a prenup, but is essentially was. And it had her sign away most of her rights. Which does kind of suggest that Musk was planning on the marriage not lasting, which is kind of the point of the title of her article. She also notes that during the marriage quote, no one, no matter how many highlights I got, Elon pushed me to be blonder. Go platinum, he kept saying, and I kept refusing. That's cool, but whatever. Yeah, it's hot when someone you love just tries to change you all the time. I love it. I that's what I am completely. He'd been told that all women love to be changed by men, and just like all men like to be improved by women. People want to not be loved for being themselves. Yeah, everybody does. Yeah. People just want to be told that their garbage and that they need to change. Yeah. That's what people want and need is to be told they're garbage. Which is why I tell my audience that they're garbage. So that they'll be better to try and impress me. Send you a knife because they were like that. Felt good. Hurt me again, Daddy. Yeah. Yeah. Hurt. Hurt me again, Daddy. Podcast, daddy. That's exactly what it is. That's the slogan of behind the ********. Hurt me again and again. Podcast daddy. So sorry, must see. Yeah. It is worth noting that this this post snap didn't really seem to matter Justine. What got what seems like a pretty fair settlement to me. She's rich as ****. She gets like 80 something $1000 a month in addition to getting like a couple million up front and out. Like she's she's doing fine now. It's it's it's she seems to be OK, but Musk did not treat her well and was a giant **** and almost as soon as they broke things off he flew to England and met Talulah Riley, an actress who happened to be 14 years younger than him. He hit on her by showing pictures of his rockets and that seems to have. The two hung out for a night or two in England, and then she flew out to visit him. A few weeks later, when she'd been out in California for five days, he asked her to marry him. She was 22. Uh, that's so gross and just like, cliche. I'm like, dude, come on. Come on dude. Like 5 days or me. It was a little more than that, but not much. But you pathetic dude, so she said yes, they got married. They got divorced soon after that, and Musk tried to be on his own for like 10 months. And then he got remarried to Tallulah. And then they got divorced again. When Ashley Vance published her book in 2015, Musk was in the process of fixing things before ******* them up again with Riley. So her book doesn't really get into detail about what happened later, but that 2017 Rolling Stone article certainly does, and it is a ******* doozy. I love that article also. Yeah, it opens right after he broke up with I wrote. Some famous lady, but it's Amber Heard. It's OK to call her some famous lady, right? What does she do? What's her thing? She's an actress and stuff. Yeah, and I'm gonna quote from that Rolling Stones article right now. He heaves a sigh and ends his effort at composure. I just broke up with my girlfriend, he says hesitantly. I was really in love and it hurt bad. He pauses and corrects himself while she broke up with me more than I broke up with her. I think this happened right before Musk had to launch the Model 3, and he claims it made his job must harder. Much harder. I've been in severe emotional pain for the last few weeks, Musk elaborates, severe. It took every ounce of will. To be able to do the Model 3 event and not look like the most depressed guy around. For most of that day, I was morbid. And then I had to psych myself up, drink a couple of Red Bulls, hang out with positive people, and then, like, tell myself I have all these people depending on me, all right? Do it. So he talks about how he did it, and then he gets back on the subject of his breakup. In the middle of this, he straight up asks Neil Strauss, is there anybody you think I should date? It's so hard for me to even meet people, which. It's both so entitled and so pathetic at the same time. It's just like quite a mixture. Yeah, I don't know how to. I don't know how it would handle that as an interviewer. It's actually, to Neil Strauss's credit that he managed to like not explode in awkwardness at this moment. That's like a nightmare. I would think of someone I hate and then I would hit hook, hook them up with Elon. Yeah, yeah, I would. I would get him to date. I don't know Ivanka Trump, honestly. So yeah, it seems like that actually might happen. OK, I'm going to continue reading from the Rolling Stone article. He swallows and clarifies, stammering softly. I'm looking for a long term relationship. I'm not looking for a one night. Band. I'm looking for a serious companion or soulmate, that kind of thing. And yeah, it's just like, it's so bad. This is, like the worst thing I can imagine happening as an interviewer. It's just unbelievably awkward. I'm going to quote from Strauss again. I did eventually tell him. I eventually tell him that it may not be a good idea to jump right into another relationship. He may want to take some time to himself and figure out why his previous relationships haven't worked in the long run, which is like, pretty good advice. Voice of reason here. That's amazing. Neil Strauss is the guy. Giving him legitimately good advice was like, maybe figure out what about yourself makes you incapable of staying in relationships? Elon? Like he needed Rolling Stone to tell him to take it easy. Yeah. And figure out who he is. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's weird that Rolling Stone would tell him to take it easy. Normally, that's the Eagles. Oh, God. Wow. You are more of a dad than you've ever been. I know, that's the dad. Best ******* joke I've ever made, you know who's barely a dad? Elon Musk. Finally, get on my level, Robert. Yes, he's a terrible ******* father. Feel like Jack O'Brien just took over your body. Thank you. So yeah, Musk shakes his head and grimaces if I'm not in love. If I'm not with a long term companion, I cannot be happy. And this is Strauss again. I explained that needing someone so badly that you feel like nothing without them, nothing without them, is textbook codependence. Which, again, Neil Strauss, author of the game, is the guy. Explaining that very reasonably yeah, but your code of printer bro. It's incredible. Have you looked inside yourself and realized you were the problem and maybe that needing people the way that you do isn't? Yeah. Psychologically sound. Neil Strauss? Yeah. I wrote the book that made negging into a household term, and I want to tell you, I think you might not be healthily approaching your relationships. Dude, that's like Michael Jordan being like, look, you have a problem with gambling. I'm gonna need to talk to you about that. You gambled too much. Yeah, it's like OJ Simpson telling you you have problems with not murdering people. I don't know. Probably shouldn't go into that. It's like the ATF telling you you're not treating compounds with sequelae. Going a third time is going to be the the thing that got you out of this triple. Wait, my if I have. Motto. Sophia. It's a BMW. Always be Waco. And that's the that's the ******* way I run. He wasn't hot, Robert. You're gonna have to get over it. I know, I know I will. So yeah, so Neil Strauss very reasonably tells Elon Musk that he's codependent to ****. And here's what comes next. Musk disagrees strongly. It's not true, he replies petulantly. I will never be happy without having someone going to sleep alone. Kills me. He hesitates, shakes his head. Falters. Continues. It's not like I don't know what that feels like. Being in a big empty house. In the footsteps echoing through the hallway. Go in there and no one on the pillow next to you. ****. How do you make yourself happy in a situation like that? You spread the **** out on the bed and you sleep eagle style. That's what I do. What the **** are you talking about? You enjoy the **** out of your ******* single last self, *****. You find a sex worker or a group of sex workers whose personalities you enjoy, and you pay them very well because money means nothing to you. And this way you're not emotionally damaging somebody. You can just pay someone to cuddle with you at night because you're a billionaire and you don't have to consistently be like marrying these people and leading them in these very stressful. Relationships? That's an option for you, Elon. It would be fine. Wait, what question? What year was this, though? Robert this is 2017, yes, think about how much needs to be solved in you and like how unhappy you are with yourself that you cannot stand to be alone. Do we think, yeah, theory that he just heard the song hate sleeping alone by Drake won too many times and got it stuck in his head and decided that's how he was going to live his life? No, but that's why I was the only bet that his emotions, the most he's probably ever identified with anyone has been like when he just listens to Drake, he's like, oh, that's what emotions are like. He's like Howard. Hate sleeping alone. Got it, got it, got it. I hate that. That's me. Drake says it so I believe it so this interview keeps going on. Quote When I was a child, there's one thing I said must continues. His demeanor is stiff, yet in the Sheen of his eyes and the trembling of his lips, a high tide of emotion is visible. Pushing against the retaining walls. I never want to be alone. That's what I would say. His voice drops to a whisper. I don't want to be alone. So yeah, that says a lot. Ah, but you know what says even more so, Sophia, is it goods and services? No, it's a line in the article where Elon Musk kind of let slip that he might believe in race science. Ohh, I'd forgot about that. How could I have forgotten? Oh my God. Of course, according to Musk's best guess, our personalities might be 80% nature and 20% nurture. And by the way, there's a number of lines where he makes similar kind of points in the biography that, like, on their own, you might not notice. But when you put them together, it's like, I think some of that a lot of that apartheid **** rubbed off on Elon. Oh, totally. Yeah. And again, I want to be fair in pointing out like he tried to get away from it, but like some of that **** is plugged deep into his head. And this is part of the problem with being a kind of person who can't take any criticism is that you both wind up codependent and wind up pushing some weird race science **** because you're not able to take criticism about yourself anyway. That's good. But he's nice to his servants. So. Yeah, that's great. That's good stuff. Yeah. Now, so much has been written about Musk that it's very hard for me to draw a line on how much to include, or what is reasonable to critique him on, or what is even true about the guy, because there's a lot of disagreements and stuff. I included some statements by his dad, and Elon claims his dad is a liar and untrustworthy, and that's definitely true. One thing I'm sure that longtime Musk fans will Ding me on is not touching enough on the subject. On the period when Musk nearly lost everything betting on Tesla and SpaceX, this is the most mythically significant part of Elon's. Here, and the basic story is that at one point both Tesla and SpaceX had yet to prove themselves. With their key products. Both companies hemorrhaged money. Musk had to throw in almost every dollar he was worth to keep them afloat, and he executed an intricate series of moods that just barely managed to bring in enough VC dollars to keep both companies solvent until their products prove themselves. It is true that must risk much more of his personal wealth than most tech entrepreneurs do. It's also true that he was never in danger of being poor and he always had a few $1,000,000 in reserves. And it seems to me that most people who write about. I'm focused on the fact that he gambled 95% of his wealth. It ignored the fact that the remaining 5% was still enough money for him to live on comfortably for the rest of his life without working another day anyway, or as other people who are poor call it, not gambling. Really glad you still have enough money for the rest of your life. That's not gambling. Yeah, yeah. I would prefer instead to report on the elements of Musk Musk's success that don't get covered often. For one example, reporting in 2015 by the LA Times revealed that Musk's three big companies had benefited from an estimated $4.9 billion in government support. This money came in a variety of forms, including tax credits and rebates for the buyers of solar panels and electric cars. It is interesting to me that Musk's bravery in investing so much of his own money is always mentioned in stories about his success. But the fortunes and government money that made it possible almost never are. A lot of this money came in the form of money from states who desperately tried to convince Tesla or SpaceX to set up facilities in their backyard. Nevada gave Tesla $1.3 billion in incentives to build a battery factory near Reno. SpaceX also got $20 million in development subsidies to build a launch facility in Texas. And that Sophia. And my dear friends on the Internet brings us to what will be the closing anecdote of this episode? How Elon Musk destroyed the small town of Boca Chica. You heard this story, Sophia. I think I was reading a whole thread about it, actually, yesterday for the first time, but yeah. It ******* rules. Boca Chica does not matter in the big picture sense of the world. It's a tiny, tiny, tiny retirement community in the village on the Texas coast, and it it has almost no I think it only had like 2 permanent residents. Like it's a what you'd call a Snowbird community where old people have their retirement homes and come to at the end of, like, during the winter, basically, because it's it's got a nice beach. And I read a really good Esquire article about the destruction of this small town by Elon Musk. And it opens with a Texas Parks and Wildlife magazine quote from 1992 quote the schemes and dreams of developers to build on this beautiful and desolate area. Die hard, but die they always have. And this is more or less sums up why the property values here have stayed low, and why old people who aren't rich have been able to afford to have homes here. It's never been taken over by hipsters or developers. Due to its isolation and its proximity to Texas's poorest city and difficult geography, Boca Chica is a perfect place for old people to spend their golden years. Without having millions of dollars, it's no wonder that Elon Musk picked the area for his rocket test range, stating in 2018. We've got a lot of land and nobody around, so if it blows up, it's cool. Which that's good, is not true. Because there's all these old people. Columbus was like, well, there's no one here in America, so we're gonna just take it. When they were Yep, definitely Yep, people here. Musk started working to get the land in 2013, claiming he was gonna make the commercial version of Cape Canaveral. He pushed for two bills in the Texas State House, one to reduce a private company's liability over nuisance complaints, and run from the city of Brownsville, which is the city nearby. That would allow city officials to deny public access to beaches when Space Flight activities were on the calendar. Incidentally, Sophia the beach around Boca, Chico, was known as the Poor Peoples Beach. For being one of the only chunks of nice coastline in Texas that was free to use for poor people. Not only read about that and also from what I understand, it was a key wildlife. Correct, yes. It is also a lot lot of turtles. Lot of turtles. Musk claimed that SpaceX would make 12 launches a year for its commercial operations, and that one day a man would leave Brownsville and go to Mars, which is how he got the local government on board. This was a lie. The plan quickly changed. Basically, he was like, this is where we're going to, like, send a man to Mars from. And then what he actually did is like, this is what we're going to, this is what we're going to test all of our rockets that will **** ** and break. So that's what it became, blow up near ******* old people's houses. Yep and uh. SpaceX started running almost daily tests when they said they would be doing like once a month on experimental rockets that were very loud, often dangerous, and led to the beach being closed much of the time. The roads were increasingly blocked, life blocked. Life was made almost unlivable for many residents due to the constant construction and experiments. Musk started buying up Boca Chica piece by piece. He offered extant residents 3 times their property value, which stands generous until you realize that property values were extremely low, which means these old people who worked their whole lives to be able to. Live on this beach, we're only getting enough money to buy like a tiny like a tiny ****** place in like an A city. Like not a place like they had. Which was a nice place where they got to be out in the middle of nowhere near a beach and live comfortably. Like they couldn't buy anything that was like what they were losing even though he was making this quote UN quote generous offer because the property values here were low, which is why he was able to anyway. It's ******* frustrating and it's also always extremely low when people **** with children or old people. It's like, yeah, dude. Yep. Yep. As I type this, the community is rapidly dying and being turned into an industrial test site for experimental space rockets. And I'm sure if you were to have an honest conversation with him, Elon would say that this was a necessary sacrifice for humanity's future. After all, what a few old people's retirement houses really matter when measured against the quest to help mankind escape the surly bonds of Earth. This is the line of logic that kind of follows through all of Elon's bad deeds. Yes, it sucks for them, but look at what he's trying to do. It's what people think when Tesla. Pays out $86,000 in fines for polluting the environment with their toxic paint. It's what people think when they read that he told this to a worker who missed a crucial event to witness the birth of his child. Quote, that is no excuse. I'm extremely disappointed. You need to figure out where your priorities are. We're changing the world and changing history, and you either commit or you don't. Elon denies saying this. Yeah, it's what people think when they read articles like this September 2019 Bloomberg piece about how Tesla repeatedly violated the National Labor Relations Act by repeatedly threatening and. Evaluating against employees for attempting to organize a union? Yeah, that's the **** that really ******* ****** me off too. He had so much union busting, tons of union busting. This dude that tries to claim he's a socialist to me makes me laugh so hard. I'm like, bro, do you know what socialism is? It would mean your workers own the means of production and also have the ability to say no to you about some things we don't like. Elon. Think about that. That is not what you're ******* doing at all, you weird dictator. Yep. It's also what people think when they read articles like the one published in April of 2018 in the Intelligencer. This revealed the fact that, quote, company officials labeled toxic exposures, muscle strains, and repetitive stress injuries as personal medical issues are minor accidents requiring only first aid. Lowering the official injury count at the factory, which is again one of the most dangerous factories in the country. But hey, it's OK because he's trying to save the world. What's a few? 100,000, however many people? In pursuit of 1 man's probably with a tiny ***** dreams if I know one thing that's never gone badly in history Sophia. It's a man having a dream about how to save the world that he's willing to sacrifice other people for. That always works. Yeah, it works great. But you know what? I'm gonna retract my statement about people with small *****. You know, doesn't mean they're worse than anybody. That's you know what? In fact, I don't care about your Elon Musk has a **** **** and he's an *******. He's definitely is a **** **** and I don't care, and it doesn't matter. And I don't know why I brought *** **** into it. I'm now disgusted just picturing it. I know we've all become worse because of our exposure to Elon. I'm blaming him for that. Sophia, great. I'll join you. Thank you. Yeah. Some of those injuries and medical issues at the Tesla factory were caused by the fact that Elon hates the color yellow. The intelligence reports on claims made in a reveals news article quote. Among the more baffling the tales in the report are several sections about how Elon Musk's personal tastes appear to have affected the factory safety for the worst. His preferences were well known and led to cutting back on those standard safety signals. Musk apparently really hates the color yellow. So instead of using the aforementioned Hue lane lines in the factory floor are. Printed in shades of Gray, Tesla denies this and sent reveal photos of rails and posts painted yellow in the factory. He also is not into having too many signs or the beeping sound forklifts make in reverse, all things that would seem important to keeping staff safe. It's just a matter of time before someone gets killed. A former safety lead set of the conditions in the factory. One employee attempted to call attention to these problems before eventually resigning. I could and probably should go on, but this article is too long already. We haven't even talked about the time Elon accused that heroic cave diver of being a pedophile. Nor have we discussed the fact that yes, yeah, I know, he's so ******. We haven't also discussed the fact that once he got in trouble for slandering a hero, he hired a convicted felon to stalk that heroic cave diver and try to find dirt on him. That's another thing that happens. But this article has to end at some ******* point. And the real question here, the thing that we have to ask, is whether or not anything Musk has made himself a part of or started is nearly as revolutionary or important as he claims it is. If this guy is really saving the world. And bringing humanity into the future. Then you could say or other some people would argue that a lot of his bad behavior is justified. At least that's the argument that could be made. If he's not, then he's just a rich ******* who got richer by pretending to save the world so he could get jacked off by Worshipful fanboys by while participating in the plunder of our planets, diminishing resources. I cannot answer this question definitively, but derivative fool that I am, I can quote one of the more self reflective chunks of Ashley Vance's book about Musk and I'm going to do that now to close this out the Economist Tyler. Cohen, who has earned some measure of fame in recent years for his insightful writings about the state of the technology industry and ideas on where it may go, falls into that first camp and the great stagnation. Cohen bemoaned the lack of big technological advances and argued that the American economy has slowed and wages have been depressed as a result. In a figurative sense, the American economy has enjoyed lots of low hanging fruit since at least the 17th century, whether it be free land, lots of immigrant labor, or powerful new technologies, he wrote. Yet during the last 40 years that low hanging fruit started disappearing and we started pretending it was still there. We have failed to recognize that we are at a technological plateau and the trees are more bare than we would like to think. That's it. That's what has gone wrong. In his next book averages over, Cohen predicted an unromantic future in which a great divide had occurred between the haves and the have nots, and Cohen's future huge gains in artificial intelligence will lead to the elimination of many of today's high employment lines of work. The people who thrive in this environment will be very bright and able to complement the machines and team effectively with them. As for the unemployed masses, well, many of them will find jobs going to work for the Habs who will employ. Teams of nannies, housekeepers, and gardeners, if anything Musk is doing, might alter the course of mankind toward a rosier future, Cohen can't find it. Coming up with true breakthrough ideas is much harder today than in the past, according to Cohen, because we've already mined the bulk of the big discoveries. During a luncheon, Virginia Cohen described Musk as not a genius inventor, but as an attention seeker, and not a terribly good one at that. I don't think a lot of people care about getting to Mars, he said. And it seems like a very expensive way to drive whatever breakthroughs you might get from it. And then you hear about the Hyperloop. I don't think it has any intention of doing it. You have to wonder if it's not meant to just be publicity for his companies. And As for Tesla, it might work, but you're still just pushing the problems back somewhere else. You still have to generate power. It could be that he is challenging convention less than people think. That's where I want to end. Where are you excited for all the people who are going to get ****** *** at us? Yeah. I mean, I can't wait for people to tell me that I should probably die and that I'm a ****. I can't really wait. That is needed for people to tell me that they're so it's gonna be unhappy that I'm confident in that. I don't just giggle in the background anymore. I am excited for people to be briefly angry at me and then lose interest in being angry at me. Because that's what happens when people get angry at men on the Internet and instead focus their rage on Sophia. Because misogyny is very deeply boiled into our culture, and that's lame. And **** all of you for that. Sorry, Sophia. Yeah, I'm the one who wrote 14,000 words about how I don't like Elon Musk, so please do come after me. I will not respond to you because I don't care what weird Elon Musk and nerds say on Twitter. Truth. But do mail US knives, either as threats or as a gift. Either way, we get knives. That's a win. I won a knife as a gift. Again, include a happy face, so I know it's it's chill. Yeah. I'll take knives as gifts or threats. All kinds of attention are equal to me. Alright, Sophia, you wanna go out with a plug? Sure. I am releasing my first stand up album, Father's Day on Father's Day. I don't have a father so it's going to be really fun and you guys should listen. And you should also listen to my podcast, 420 day fiance with Miles Gray and private parts unknown with Courtney Kosack shout out and yeah, follow me. Twitter Instagram associate SFY listen to Sophia's album so that you can understand what it's like not to have a father and understand what it's like to be Elon Musk's kids. Exactly. It feels the same. That's the last dig we're ending on. Beautiful. Hello, I'm Erica Kelly from the podcast Southern Fried True crime, and if you want to go from podcast fan to podcast host, do what I did and check out spreaker from iheart. I was working in accounting and hating it. Then after just 18 months of podcasting with Spreaker, I was able to quit my day job. Follow your podcasting dreams, let's break your handle the hosting. Creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com. That's spreaker.com. Hey there, it's Ebony Monet, your co-host for the San Diego Zoo's Amazing Wildlife podcast. In this special episode, we're speaking with Doctor Jane Goodall about the fascinating journey that led to her impactful behavioural discoveries on chimpanzees. It wasn't until one of the chimpanzees began to lose his fear of me, but I began to really make discoveries that actually shook the scientific world. Survive on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, it's Chuck Wicks from loved country. Talk to Chuck where we bring you what's really happening in the country music family. We also if you love country, here's the deal. You love country music. You can be on the podcast. So if you're a fan country music or you can call in anytime. Like I want to talk about this. Hulk Hogan called in. He's like Chuck the hulkster. I love your podcast. Jason Aldean, Jimmy Allen, Carly Pierce, Lauren Elena. Listen to new episodes of love Country. Talk to Chuck every Monday and Thursday on the Nashville. 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