We’ve never had a situation where the world’s richest man has essentially joined the White House as a co-president of sorts. What might this mean, especially when we consider Elon Musk’s history of unchecked power? Kate Conger is a New York Times reporter based in San Francisco, covering X and other technology companies. She’s also a co-author, along with Ryan Mac, of “Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter” Conger joins WITHpod to discuss what has happened to X under Musk’s stewardship, Musk’s growing political influence, the SEC suing him, why his role is so peculiar and more. We should note that Conger and Mac requested to interview Musk for their book, but mentioned that no response was received.
Note: This is a rough transcript. Please excuse any typos.
Chris Hayes: Hey everyone, it’s Chris Hayes. Before we start the show today, I just wanted to give you a heads up about the book tour. My book, “The Sirens Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource” is out on Tuesday, January 28th, next week. You can pre-order it now. If you go to msnbc.com/the-sirens-call, that’s the landing page where you can pre-order the book. And crucially, you can get tickets for my events. And I wanted to give you a heads up because the WITHpod listeners tend to be some of the diest, hardest diehards. And I would love to see you at these events and there’s not that many tickets left.
So Wednesday, January 29th, I will be in Washington DC, 7:00 p.m. at Sixth and I. Friday, that same week, January 31st, I will be in Boston, 7:00 p.m. at Harvard Bookstore at First Parish. And then Saturday, February 1st, I will be in New York, 7:30 p.m. at Temple Emanuel L. Stryker Center. The next week I go to California that Monday, February 3rd. I’m going to be in Palo Alto at 12:00 p.m. at the Commonwealth Club and San Francisco that night, 7:00 p.m. at Book Passage at Cavalry Presbyterian. So there’s a bunch of events after that. I’ll just give you those because they’re filling up very quickly.
If you want to check out events, I would love to see you there. I really do love meeting people in person. I love doing live events. I’m a theater kid at heart. So if you go to msnbc.com/the-sirens-call. You can get all that information. See you there.
Kate Conger: I hate to use the word because it’s so cliche, but it is really unprecedented. And I think a lot of other tech leadership is looking now at what Musk has been able to accomplish by aligning himself so closely with Trump and wanting to follow suit, you know, and it is this very kind of transparent favor trading that’s going on throughout the industry right now where people are feeling like, okay, I can cozy up to the president and that’s going to have a beneficial impact for my business, which it’s just happening right out in the open. It’s no longer something that feels like, oh, you have to kind of keep these conflicts stashed behind closed doors.
Chris Hayes: Hello and welcome to “Why Is This Happening?” with me, your host Chris Hayes. Well, I got to say, I got to be upfront that I kind of got something wrong, and not wrong, just incomplete, and it pertains to Elon Musk. I have a book that I’ve been talking about a lot called “The Sirens Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource.” It’s out January 28th. I’m going to be coming to a lot of cities. You can come check it out, sirenscallbook.com. And in that book, I write about Elon Musk a fair amount. And he kind of emerges as someone who is chasing attention so intensely from what to me, I think is, I don’t know the guy, I’ve interviewed him once and I certainly have never like, you know, I’m not a therapist, but seems from the outside like a very broken place, like a very broken place inside, like a howling, howling, howling void, like Donald Trump.
And in pursuit of that attention to attempt to do something to patch that hole, he basically lit a lot of money on fire. It’s one of the sort of arguments I make in the book. But then it turns out things kept going after I wrote the book and finished it. But I covered when the government shutdown happened and Mike Johnson was in the halls of Congress and he said, I called Elon Musk and I called Donald Trump. Like that has never happened. I’ve covered politics for 20 years. That’s never happened. I called the president and maybe I called the Senate majority leader. Maybe I called someone else. I have never ever seen that before in my life.
He’s going to have an office apparently in the White House complex. Never seen that before in my life. We’re in totally the richest man in the world being essentially co-president. We’re in totally unprecedented territory here. And I am chilled, but also just, I guess I’m going to confess something here. I’ve been doing the nightly show, “All In with Chris Hayes” on MSNBC since 2013 and covering Trump since he came down the escalator in 2015. Sometimes it feels like I’m just saying the same thing over and over again, which, you know, that’s the job. Sometimes you have to say things over and over again. But the Musk thing is new. Like it’s not the same thing over and over again. There’s something new happening here.
And so I thought today would be a great time to talk about it with someone who knows Musk well and has covered him. In fact, has a piece up in “The New York Times” today about a big news story that we might even start the conversation with off and has co-written a book about him. Kate Conger is a “New York Times” reporter based in San Francisco, covering X and other technology companies. She’s co-author along with Ryan Mac of “Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter.” I was reading it last night and it’s really, really good. So I suggest you pick it up. Kate, welcome to the program.
Kate Conger: Thanks so much for having me.
Chris Hayes: So since I have a hot shot “New York Times” reporter in front of me, I will start with the big news yesterday, which was really interesting. And also I think puts a fine point on the conflicts at play.
Kate Conger: Yes, it absolutely does.
Chris Hayes: The SEC, Securities Exchange Commission is suing Elon Musk. This news broke the day before recording the podcast. What are they suing him for and why?
Kate Conger: So the lawsuit deals with the purchases of Twitter stock that he made before he made the offer to buy the company. So if we rewind all the way back to January 2022, he starts picking up Twitter stock in secret. The SEC says once you hit 5% of a company’s stock, you need to publicly disclose that so that other investors know. Musk didn’t. He kind of blew past that 5% mark. He was being warned by the people managing those trades for him saying, hey, you need to seek legal advice, like this is a problem. And he just kept going and buying more and more stock and then finally disclosed very belatedly in April of 2022. So the SEC says that that maneuver saved him more than $150 million because once his stake became public, Twitter’s stock rose significantly. And so if he had disclosed at 5% instead of at 9%, that additional set of stock that he bought would have been much more expensive for him. So that’s the dispute.
Chris Hayes: And presumably that’s why the disclosure rule exists, right?
Kate Conger: Yes, yes it does.
Chris Hayes: Because people should know if the company is being acquired. Essentially you want that to be public material information that people can trade on. And so if someone is surreptitiously trying an acquisition, the reason there’s this threshold at 5% to make it public is precisely for that reason.
Kate Conger: Right, exactly. And I think, you know, if you’re a retail investor and you just have a little bit of Twitter stock and someone out there is buying it up, you might want to sell at a higher price. And so there’s a lot of investors who are kind of getting shortchanged in that process when Musk is able to buy large amounts of stock without letting the public know what he’s doing. So that’s the issue there. But they’ve waited and they’ve waited and they’ve waited, and now here we are just days out from the inauguration. You know, obviously the leadership of the SEC is about to change to a Trump appointee. And now they’re suing him, which is very interesting.
Chris Hayes: So that lawsuit, obviously it’s a civil action, so it’s a lawsuit by the government. Will that be passed off to the next SEC? I mean, the SEC has an incarnation in Donald Trump.
Kate Conger: Yes. So, it’s interesting that they’ve waited until now to take any action on this, right —
Chris Hayes: Sure is.
Kate Conger: — because this was very clear back in 2022 when it happened.
Chris Hayes: People were talking about it at the time.
Kate Conger: Yes, because he came out and disclosed a 9% stake.
Chris Hayes: Oh, right. Well, I guess if you disclose a 9% stake, you’re admitting that you went past the 5% stake.
Kate Conger: Correct, yes. So, since it happened, a problem and the SEC has said right away, we’re investigating this, this is an issue, taking this problem of the lawsuit and dumped it on Trump’s doorstep. And then, you know, his SEC can decide whether They want to dismiss it or they want to go ahead with bringing a suit against one of the president’s largest donors.
Chris Hayes: And Donald Trump will, I mean, we’re going to get a little in the weeds here, but this agency stuff is, or this is a commission, it’s not an agency, but these commissions and such, many of which are created during the new deal, right, and create entities that are supposed to be arm’s length from the White House. That’s the actual design of them. The commission is the commission that regulates securities. He will appoint a new commissioner who will run that. That commissioner then will presumably have the power to instruct the people beneath him who are the people writing the filings for the lawsuit to just drop it, right?
Kate Conger: Yeah, I think that’s the assumption, is that this case and the dozens of other federal investigations that Musk is currently facing might start to disappear.
Chris Hayes: So let’s go through some of those dozens of investigations because it really is like someone said the other day on Bluesky, which shout out Bluesky. I really like it. I’m enjoying it. I think it’s a great alternative. Like I’ve never seen a norm go from like a consensus norm to totally ignored faster than conflict of interest. It’s really pretty wild. Like this used to be a big deal. I came up in Chicago reporting, okay.
Kate Conger: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: This was all the stories. It was Alderman, who’s running the landmarks committee, has a law firm that’s doing landmark work. And it was like, well, this is a pretty big conflict. Like, I don’t know. What are we thinking about this? This kind of thing was constant. The mayor’s housing commissioner has a best friend who’s a huge housing developer. Trump annihilated that because he was just so flagrant. But Musk is almost at a much bigger level. I mean, Donald Trump’s businesses, first of all, were nowhere near the scale of Elon Musk’s. And second of all, you know, the various businesses he had were just not implicated in the federal machinery in the same way Musk’s are.
Kate Conger: You know, I hate to use the word because it’s so cliché, but it was really unprecedented. And I think a lot of other tech leadership is looking now at what Musk has been able to accomplish by aligning himself so closely with Trump and wanting to follow suit. And it is this very kind of transparent favor trading that’s going on throughout the industry right now where people are feeling like, okay, I can cozy up to the president and that’s going to have a beneficial impact for my business, which it’s just happening right out in the open. It’s no longer something that feels like, oh, you have to kind of keep these conflicts stashed behind closed doors.
Chris Hayes: And there’s two versions of this, right? There’s enforcement actions and regulation that he’s facing. And then there’s contracts, right?
Kate Conger: Right.
Chris Hayes: So there’s both carrots and sticks, right? There’s money he’s getting from the federal government to provide a service. And again, I don’t want to be too knee-jerk here about those contracts. I don’t know them. Elon Musk’s company is maybe the best contractor for that contract. I truly don’t know. A lot of those contracts, all those contracts, I think many of them predate, they’re not just Trump. They happened under Trump. But now you’ve got a government that he’s got one hand kind of on the steering wheel of. First, let’s talk about these regulatory enforcement actions, and then maybe we can talk about some of the contracts.
Kate Conger: Sure. Yeah. So there’s quite a few. The SEC obviously just filed their lawsuit. There’s also been a really long running investigation into Twitter and now X from the Federal Trade Commission that actually predated Elon Musk. That was a privacy investigation that was going on before he bought the company. And then once he bought it, came in and fired a lot of the employees who were working on data and privacy. That sort of accelerated things with the FTC and they started really looking into how are you going to comply with your responsibilities to protect user data when you have none of the employees who are doing the compliance work. So they really picked up the pace there.
Chris Hayes: Again, I just want to be clear here. Like again, on the SEC filing, it’s like we’re just so used to rich and powerful people just blowing through the rules or laws. I mean, not rules. They’re laws or regulations. But like every other companies do this, like other people who are investors when they hit 5%, disclose. It’s a little like Trump in that there are places that take this stuff seriously that have compliance officers that have a culture of compliance that Musk seems kind of a little more reckless about.
Kate Conger: Yeah. And it’s something that, you know, Ryan and I wrote a lot about in the book is just, where did he come from on this feeling like he was invincible? And I think a lot of it is these sort of, you know, lawsuits that he’s gotten into in the past, regulatory entanglements that he’s decided to fight and he’s been able to come out on top. And it’s really emboldened him to say, I’m not going to follow the rules, I’m going to break them and I’ll see what happens. And if someone does come and sue me, I have the resources to keep fighting that in court, and I’m not going to settle. And I think that that is a little bit of maybe what’s going on with the SEC here and why this has been delayed for as long as it has.
These kinds of cases normally aren’t filed. Normally, if you blow past a disclosure limit like this, you reach a settlement agreement with the SEC, you pay a fine, it never gets to this point.
Chris Hayes: Right. But he won’t do that.
Kate Conger: No, he won’t do that. And he tweeted out a letter in December that his lawyer had sent to the SEC basically saying we’re rejecting your settlement offer and this is harassment, kind of daring them to file a case.
Chris Hayes: Wait, let me just stop there because that actually gives some context on the timing here. It wasn’t like they were just twiddling their thumbs.
Kate Conger: Right.
Chris Hayes: Like the normal way these gets disposed of is negotiations that come to a settlement. There were clearly negotiations around a settlement that broke down and Musk said, go after yourself basically.
Kate Conger: Exactly. Yeah. And I think that like a lot of the response I’ve seen to that story is people kind of thinking what’s wrong with the SEC? Why did they wait this long? And I think they were trying to kind of go by the normal course and reach a settlement, get a fine from him and not have to bring it to this point. And I think they misjudged and miscalculated the fact that he was not going to settle with them again. He was livid about the settlement that he made with the SEC when he had done the Tesla 420 tweet. He had tweeted out that he was going to take Tesla private at 420 a share. He said funding was secured, funding was not in fact secured. And then he ended up paying a huge fine to the SEC and agreeing to what they called a Twitter sitter, someone that was going to monitor his tweets and approve tweets that would move markets. And so he wouldn’t be allowed to tweet things that were going to be market moving.
Chris Hayes: At some level, it’s like, it all seems so dumb. Like he’s constantly making, I have to say, humor is one of those things where people have different tastes. There are some people who just hate me. They hate my voice. They hate the way I sound on television. They hate my humor. They think I’m dumb and smug. I can recite it to you. So like, hey, you know, it’s a crazy world. People like different things. Personally, I think he’s the unfunniest person I’ve ever encountered in my entire life. I mean, truly, like just a desperate try-hard and one aspect of that are like the constant sophomore of high school level weed jokes about 420. Anyway —
Kate Conger: Right. Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — just my own internalizing here. Other people are delighted by it. So other people think they’re so funny.
Kate Conger: Totally.
Chris Hayes: But the jokiness aside, again, this is one of those things you cannot do. This is just basic financial regulation that came out of the New Deal crash and the roaring ‘20s and everything, which is that you can’t make up a lie about materially important things to move markets.
Kate Conger: Right.
Chris Hayes: And just be like, I’ve secured funding and take it private, which has huge implications for the price of the stock.
Kate Conger: Exactly. You know, that was not the case. He had like sort of lightweight, oh, maybe we’ll invest, maybe we won’t, but he didn’t have any money secured for that deal when he tweeted it. And he was really angry about that settlement. He’s talked about how he regretted it and he wished he never signed onto that settlement with the SEC. And so I think they really misjudged his character at this point and thought, you know, he’ll do another settlement. And —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Kate Conger: — I think he’s been very clear that he would never settle with them again.
Chris Hayes: So, the SEC suit that he’s got, an investigation FTC on regulations having to do data privacy. There are NLRB cases, I think, open against him and I’ve even interviewed —
Kate Conger: Right.
Chris Hayes: — people who’ve covered accusations of violations of labor law and union busting at Tesla factories.
Kate Conger: And I believe investigations into racism and his factories as well.
Chris Hayes: Yep.
Kate Conger: There, I believe, is still an NTSB investigation going on with Tesla looking into self-driving and —
Chris Hayes: That’s right.
Kate Conger: — and some of the deaths that have been caused there. I mean —
Chris Hayes: Yes, there is an open NTSB investigation on self-driving.
Kate Conger: Yeah, so he’s got, you know, every arm of the federal government right now poking around in one of his various businesses. And I think all of that might radically change next week.
Chris Hayes: So we’ve got this enormous set of obvious conflicts. I mean, how they’ll be navigated, who’s to know. But the conflicts are just on there. They’re right there on the face.
More of our conversation after this quick break.
(ADVETISEMENT)
Chris Hayes: I want to talk about his trajectory. And I’m not that interested in the guy’s inner life, to be totally honest, but it’s kind of all of our problem now. So like, what happened to this dude? Like, truly, my outside diagnosis because I’ve seen it happen before, is that he got brain worms from the internet. Like —
Kate Conger: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — and I’ve seen it happen to a lot of people. Some of the best minds in my generation, quote Allen Ginsberg.
Kate Conger: Taken down by Twitter. Yeah, and I think that’s really true. I mean, one of the things that we did when we were reporting the book is we went back and read all of his tweets. So we went back to the beginning and it was really surprising to see what kinds of like normie posts he was doing when he first got on Twitter. You know, he was posting stuff about like, oh, I took my kids to the ice rink today or like, I’m giving a tour of the SpaceX factory. And they were just like very normal posts compared to the kinds of things that he’s doing on the internet now. And you see him just over the years really accelerate his rate of posting. He goes from posting like once a month maybe to 200, 300 times a day.
Chris Hayes: All hours of the day or night. I mean really like —
Kate Conger: All hours of the day and night.
Chris Hayes: — he’s not sleeping as I mean —
Kate Conger: No.
Chris Hayes: — just based on the public record of his tweets unless he’s scheduling them for while he’s sleeping he’s not sleeping very much.
Kate Conger: Yeah and you know, we did around the time of the election, I think we did a timeline of his tweets and there were maybe three —
Chris Hayes: Oh, I saw it.
Kate Conger: — or four hour gaps at night where he was maybe sleeping, maybe just putting his phone down for a little bit, who knows. But yeah, I mean, and he talks about it. He says, I get all of my information from X. I don’t read any other sources of information now. I don’t watch the news. So that’s really kind of the —
Chris Hayes: Oh, it shows.
Kate Conger: — broth he’s boiling himself in.
Chris Hayes: There also seems to be a political evolution. I mean, I think he would even have to admit that he’s had a political evolution, even though he’s like, I’m not a conservative. Tesla had a very good relationship with the Obama administration, partly because they benefited to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars in federal programs meant to facilitate the green economy. But he wasn’t particularly outspoken political figure in either direction. How do you understand his political trajectory? It seems to me epiphenomenal to the Twitter brain worms. Like he just got radicalized online and that was what produced the politics, but maybe not.
Kate Conger: Yeah, I think that, you know, that is a huge influence and you see it a lot with Jack Dorsey as well, right? His predecessor at Twitter, kind of, I think gotten the brain worm at this point too. And some of the things that he’s posting on social media are really, you know, fringe conspiracy theories now, which is really interesting to see given he had this long trajectory and track record of talking about pushing back on misinformation online and he’s sort of been consumed by it. I mean, I think that like, you really can’t underestimate the radicalizing impact of COVID for Elon Musk either.
He was very against the shutdowns. You know, here in California, they’re pretty strict. People couldn’t go to work in the Tesla factories here and he was really upset about that and really pushed back on that. At the time —
Chris Hayes: That’s a good point.
Kate Conger: — he was posting things like, COVID’s going to be gone by April 2020. COVID doesn’t affect children, they can’t get it. Things like that. Very early on, he was posting that kind of thing and really pushing back on the lockdown orders in California. And so I think that was a big one. And not just for him, but for a lot of other figures in tech. We just saw Mark Zuckerberg going on Joe Rogan’s show recently and talking about how he felt like there was an overcorrection during COVID where the Biden administration was pushing him to take down too much content around COVID and around vaccines and that he needed to push back on that. So it’s been interesting. I think that the pandemic had a really radicalizing effect on a lot of people in Silicon Valley.
Chris Hayes: Radicalizing in the right-wing direction, just to be clear.
Kate Conger: Yes.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. I think that’s right. I mean, I think there’s a bunch of reasons for that. I mean, one of them is the nature of a pandemic and public health solutions are inherently collective and that collective thinking, which is that we all have to do these things for all of us, is going to come into conflict with the sense of individual freedom, which is like, what are you saying I can’t open my factory?
Kate Conger: Right, exactly.
Chris Hayes: I think that conflict is actually like that is deeper and more elemental to me than I got internet brain worms. There’s actually a genuine material conflict at issue here, which is on one side, we’re taking these steps because we think it will protect our citizens and reduce the death and illness for them. And on the other side is like, I don’t really care at the margin about that. I care about opening my factory and selling my cars. And I think there was a reason that was so radicalizing that’s actually hits kind of ideological and material interest bedrock that’s deeper in some ways than I looked at too many frog means and my brain got cooked.
Kate Conger: Totally. Well, and I think it’s important to remember too, that I think the most prized way of thinking in tech is contrarian thinking.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Kate Conger: All of these people have built their businesses on someone telling them that something was impossible —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Kate Conger: — and then saying, no, the opposite is true.
Chris Hayes: That’s such a good point.
Kate Conger: And particularly for Elon Musk, people told him he couldn’t build a consumer electric vehicle and the opposite was true. People told him he couldn’t privatize the space industry and the opposite was true. And that is sort of the most prized way of thinking for a lot of these businessmen. And so I think, you know, when the pandemic first began and people were seeing all this public health advice, there are a lot of people in the Valley who I think had this knee-jerk response of, the opposite must be true. I’m probably smarter than this. And I think, you know, my oppositional way of thinking is going to lead me to find an alternate solution to these public health lockdowns.
And I think that the way our politics around COVID have gone have really reinforced that, where now a lot of those people are able to sort of retcon and say the virus was never that serious. It was never that big a deal and it was this massive overcorrection by the Biden administration. And so it really reinforces that kind of contrarian thinking that these people prize.
Chris Hayes: I just have to say one thing, which you’re right, you know, they’ve targeted their ire at the Biden administration. Donald Trump was president in 2020 and for some reason everyone has just decided that’s not the case. It’s really crazy. Like it’s genuinely crazy that 2020 has been erased from the public memory largely. People remember like not lying in the lockdowns and the aftermath, but like Donald Trump running the COVID handling is like totally memory hold. And his federal government was promulgating shutdowns as they should have. Joe Biden was not in power when things were shutdown that people were (inaudible) just as a factual matter.
Kate Conger: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: And I think let’s stay on this for a second. I think this is a really interesting and fruitful line because I do think Musk is part of a broader ideological tendency that is the kind of tech reactionary thinking. And it’s now allied itself with MAGA, I think because they have some of the same enemies. But I think there’s two aspects to it. So I’ll sketch out my theory. One is, again, material interests. Like, I said this the other day on Bluesky, like, I actually think it makes sense for billionaires to be right wing. Is that like, well, how do you think billionaire get right wing? It’s like, no, you should be right wing.
There’s a reason that the two parties tend to do what they do around taxes and regulation for rich people and powerful companies. If you’re a super-rich person with a lot of companies and you don’t want to be regulated and you don’t want to be taxed, I think Republican Party is probably a good place. Now I think that that’s not the end of the story because I think you can really screw the pooch if you put someone in charge who’s completely incompetent. And we’ll see how that ends up. The other part of this though is that this kind of thing you see everywhere in the tech, right? And in really in the algorithmic feed and the sort of podcast universe of like, if they say it, it’s not true.
Kate Conger: Right.
Chris Hayes: They say take antibiotics. They say vaccines are safe and effective, you know? Like they say that it’s hate speech, and this kind of contrarian. And it’s a kind of way of thinking that can make fortunes, but can also get you in a whole lot of trouble.
Kate Conger: Yeah, it’s made a lot of money for some of these people in some areas. And so it’s like, this rhetorical device has value to me in this one area. And so perhaps if I apply it everywhere else, it will have value as well. And yeah, it’s just sort of the over application, I think, of this certain way of thinking onto every single issue that comes across our path.
Chris Hayes: One of the interesting things you do in the book that you co-wrote with Ryan Mac called “Character Limit” is sketch the kind of cycles that Twitter has gone through on these questions of speech and harm. And one of the things that’s so funny about this discussion is like, everyone comes to it as if it’s the first time anyone’s thought about it. Like over and over and over again —
Kate Conger: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — and be like, well, you know what I think. It’s like, yeah, people have been thinking about this for so long. Talk to me a little bit about what that trajectory has been like at Twitter about how they’ve thought about what are genuinely competing principles and intention? Free expression and free speech and limiting harm, harassment and disinformation.
Kate Conger: Sure. So, in the very beginning, I think Twitter was perhaps even more permissive than X is today. The company would talk about itself being the free speech wing of the free speech party, allowing any kind of content, any kind of speech. And then they really kind of slowly started to dip a toe into content moderation, mostly around like child safety issues, things that were illegal. You know, those were the kinds of things that they were working on in the early days in terms of moderation. And, you know, I think they were behind where Facebook was and a lot of other social media in terms of doing that kind of more proactive moderating of content.
And that became a big issue for them. You know, Twitter became known as kind of a cage match and a place where you could get harassed, you could get canceled or lose your job or whatever the case may be because you said the wrong thing online. And it started to become a big issue for them where they were finding people weren’t posting. They couldn’t get their user numbers to grow. Like these are all things by which the company is valued and they couldn’t get users —
Chris Hayes: Because it’s so unpleasant.
Kate Conger: Yes, they couldn’t get users to participate because they were too scared of the discourse or they had really popular users being harassed completely off the platform during Gamergate. And so at that point, they really started to try to study how can we get people to be using the platform more regularly so that, from a business perspective, not from like a, oh, this is the right thing to do and we need to police this kind of speech, but how do we get more users on the platform? How do we get people more active on the platform, posting more, not just passively scrolling and reading, but actually engaging and contributing content? And what they discovered was that they needed to do more content moderation so that people felt comfortable to speak.
I think what they learned in their research was that, you know, when you have a free for all platform, the voices that end up participating are voices like Musk’s who are the loudest in the room, who are very aggressive, who are kind of picking fights, and everyone else sits on the sidelines and watches. And what they needed to do was create a universe where more people felt comfortable to speak. And that was actually going to be beneficial to the platform as a whole.
Chris Hayes: Right, the harassment and bullying are their own forms of censorship, essentially.
Kate Conger: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: That they are their own means of enforcing silence and stopping people from speaking. They’re different than taking a post down, but they have the same effect. It’s just in different ways in a more sort of chaotic form, right?
Kate Conger: Right, exactly.
Chris Hayes: And you mentioned Gamergate. Gamergate is a kind of hinge point for everything. Will you give a brief like tweet length characterization —
Kate Conger: Sure.
Chris Hayes: — of Gamergate for those who are like, what are you talking about?
Kate Conger: Yeah, so this was like a harassment campaign that kicked off primarily 2014 to 2015. But basically it was a backlash to women in the gaming industry talking about sexism and harassment in gaming. And it kind of kicked off this whole harassment campaign against women in the games industry, reporters who were writing about the controversy, you know, female celebrities who are appearing in like films that you know, gamers or people who like identified with nerd culture felt were theirs, right? So like, you know, Leslie Jones appearing in “Ghostbusters” was a big problem and they were harassing her because of that.
Chris Hayes: I mean, this was like a wave of enormous amounts of sort of sheer misogynist kind of rage and harassment directed largely by male gamers and people adjacent to them online against a bunch of female targets kicked off by a jilted ex of a female game developer who lied and said that a reporter had slept with someone and gave them favorable coverage, but it wasn’t true?
Kate Conger: Right. Yeah.
Chris Hayes: That’s the beginning of it. Anyway —
Kate Conger: That’s the very —
Chris Hayes: — it spirals into this like wave of just insane harassment online against women, basically.
Kate Conger: Yeah, and so at that point, that was kind of a turning point for the company where they started to engage in more proactive types of moderation. They came out with policies against what’s commonly called revenge porn, doxing, things like that to kind of tamp down on harassment and you sort of see the content moderation apparatus grow from there.
Chris Hayes: We’ll be right back after we take this quick break.
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Chris Hayes: So they’ve already gone through, like they’ve reinvented the wheel once over Twitter, right, and again, just to be very clear, content moderation questions go back to like the 1970s earliest version of the internet when there are boards that are just like academics at research facilities. I mean, this is not a new question for anyone. This is people have had to deal with this as soon as people were starting to post online. Musk comes in with a very clear view of this that gets more and more radical over time. Describe how his way into this.
Kate Conger: Yeah. So, as Twitter continued to grow that content moderation apparatus, obviously we see them start to push back on election denialism, COVID misinformation, these types of content that are much more heavily politicized. And I think that’s where Musk really starts to pay attention and feel like they are censoring conservative ideas, conservative voices. And where he really gets activated is actually around issues relating to transgender people. Twitter had banned accounts for misgendering, and that was one of their policies that he really disliked. It resulted in the ban of the Babylon Bee, which is a right-wing satirical website that he really enjoyed and he still shares a lot on X today. And when they were banned, that was one of the big things that he really felt like shouldn’t happen.
He didn’t feel like a company should be able to force its users to use someone’s pronouns. He didn’t think that was appropriate and he didn’t think it merited banning someone from a platform altogether. And one of the first things that he did when he bought the company was come in and tell the people who were running the content moderation at the time that he wanted to bring back the Babylon Bee. That was one of his first priorities the night that he bought the company.
Chris Hayes: And what has happened to Twitter under Musk’s stewardship? How would you, or X, how would you describe it?
Kate Conger: So, obviously a lot of these policies that Twitter wrote to govern their content moderation have been disposed of. One of the new content moderation policies that Musk has introduced is to say that using the word cisgender is a slur on X. And so your posts will be censored if you use that word. And you know, I think it’s sort of indicative of how he’s governed the platform since he took over. It’s to align with his views, his interests, his opinions on things. Taking down content that he doesn’t like is fine. Taking down content that he enjoys is a crime against free speech. And, you know, I think the platform has kind of gotten more alike to his account. You see people kind of adopt his tone, his style of posting, and his account is the biggest one on the platform now. So the things he posts about end up trending, they kind of dominate the conversation. And it really feels like a social media platform that’s about one particular user, sort of in the way that Truth Social is about Donald Trump.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. And I think I got to say, I’m just speaking my own experience, it’s wild the things you’ll encounter over there. I mean, the level of vitriol, poison, the just Nazi memes, people replying to a Jewish poster, get in the oven. That happens all the time, that kind of thing. It is everywhere. It wasn’t before. That stuff would have been taken down. And one of the things I think is so interesting, it reminds me of the Fox branding of “Fair and Balanced.” If you think about kind of liberal institutions and in the highest sense, like liberal proceduralism, right, about free speech and stuff, is that the idea is you want to create kind of like substantively neutral rules that facilitate speech without harassment, not for some explicit partisan or ideological end, right?
Now, critics of that, like conservatives, or leftists sometimes, will say, actually, there’s a huge amount of substantive ideology being smuggled in here when you ban an account because they misgender someone. You have a bunch of substantive commitments there. This is not sort of politically neutral. And often those critiques are correct. But the alternative to attempting to do something like that neutrally is just to absolutely embody the worst thing that the critics are saying, which is solely using the rules as a cudgel for a specific partisan ideological view. And that is exactly to my mind what has happened at X.
Kate Conger: Right. Yeah. I mean, it is very partisan. I think it’s very just particular to Musk’s own politics and what he thinks should or should not be on the platform, up into complying with government requests for censorship. He has been compliant in some situations where he feels like the orders are legitimate, and then you see him going to war with regulators in Australia or in Brazil, fighting to keep content online that espouses political views he agrees with. And so it’s really just about his own mentality. And I think, you talk about the way the tenor of the conversation on X has shifted and it feels like it’s kind of like the most basic sort of attention hacking kind of posts. I think you talk about this in your book, but like sort of if you’re at a party and a glass breaks, everyone kind of whips their head around and that’s, I think, what the conversation feels like on X today —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Kate Conger: — is just there’s breaking glass all the time and people kind of can’t help but look.
Chris Hayes: Right, or if someone started screaming like slurs at someone and then someone else like started urinating on the floor. Like that’s kind of the vibe there. And it’s true. That will get your attention. If you’re at a party and there’s someone in one corner screaming slurs, you’re all going to look at that person. And then there’s someone in the other corner urinating on the floor, you’re all going to look at that person. Now, is that a pleasant party to be at? No, but is it getting your attention in each moment? Yes. I mean, I think it’s the kind of reductio ad absurdum of selecting for the most potentially salient stuff.
And again, you know, there’s a moment, the opening your book tells an amazing story about this data scientist who quits X when Elon Musk takes it over, but originally wanted to stay there. And he seems like an earnest guy and he writes this long memo and he goes in and basically tells Musk to his face the turning point for him. And for me, a kind of turning point where I was like, oh, we’re in trouble here, was after a disturbed individual broke into the home of Nancy Pelosi with a plot to abduct her, tie her to a chair, possibly torture her, didn’t find her and instead assaulted her 78-year-old husband, smashing his head with a hammer, almost breaking his skull entirely.
After that happened, a truly awful event, Musk tweeting out deranged lies that the 70-year-old victim of this was actually in a secret romantic tryst with the assailant. And this went everywhere. I mean, people were just making jokes about it. It was like, it became in right wing circles, like, oh yeah, wink, wink nudge, nudge. Like, you know, the 78-year-old man who got his brain bashed in by a hammer, like actually he was like getting some on the side. And that to me, when Musk elevated that, I was like, oh, he’s gone.
Kate Conger: Yeah, and I think it really shows the way he steeped himself in X as his sole source of information. And you see it all the time.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Kate Conger: He sees these kinds of posts that are like very obvious conspiracy theories from pseudonymous accounts, kind of no data or information to back up the claims that they’re making, and he’ll repost it and elevate it. And that was one of those things and I think that data scientist in particular that you referenced was someone who studied how misinformation spreads online and was like, this is the kind of thing that a very small fraction of internet users would even be fooled by or tricked by and Musk is falling for this stuff.
Chris Hayes: Basically, he says this is so obviously false and stupid that only basically the dumbest 10% of users would fall for it.
Kate Conger: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: Which —
Kate Conger: Did not go over well with Elon as you can imagine.
Chris Hayes: Yes, according to your reporting, Elon says, F-you. But to me, it’s really striking where he says like, I actually study this for a living and you’re in the worst part of the bell curve.
Kate Conger: Right.
Chris Hayes: Like, it’s not just that you’re like, you’re not particularly sophisticated. What you are doing and what you’re falling for is literally in the worst 10th percentile of gullibility.
Kate Conger: Yeah. And I think it goes back to again, this kind of contrarian space of thinking of like, whatever the real story is about what happened to Nancy Pelosi’s husband can’t be true. And I should, as a smart individual, seek alternative conspiracy theories to explain what’s happened because I need to go against the grain at all times. And so you see in that instance, I think, how this kind of thinking that has made a lot of these businesses so successful is like so damaging when it comes to vetting information online.
Chris Hayes: In fact, there’s a meme that embodies this. When I just said bell curve, it occurred to me this. There’s a really common meme that folks love right now, which is the bell curve meme. And it will show a bell curve, which is meant to be like an IQ curve. And all the way on the left, which is like the dumbest people, there’ll be someone like believing something, like the vaccines are dumb, the vaccines are dangerous. And then at the top, which is like people who are pretty intelligent will be like, the vaccines are great. And then when you go all the way out to the most super intelligent people, It’ll be like the vaccines are dangerous.
And this meme is used all the time to signify us, the geniuses in Silicon Valley, we see through the pretentious sophistication that’s wrong of the educated elite. And we’re actually with the people who have the least informed views, the dumbest people who really see the truth. And this is actually a meme that like embodies the entirety of that worldview.
Kate Conger: Yeah, absolutely.
Chris Hayes: You’ve seen that meme a lot.
Kate Conger: Yeah, that one and the Sicko’s meme are really living on my timeline right now.
Chris Hayes: Yes. One interesting thing about the trajectory of Twitter is that it has been unambiguously a business failure. I mean, I think tens of billions of dollars of value have probably been lit on fire. Is that a fair assessment, you think?
Kate Conger: Yeah, Musk paid about $44 billion for Twitter. And then, I think the valuation went as low as $9 billion or so, and it’s recently crept back up a little bit. But I mean just kind of an inarguable destruction of value. But also what’s interesting is that, when you are dealing with someone like Musk who has the wealth that he has, it actually doesn’t matter —
Chris Hayes: No.
Kate Conger: — and it doesn’t matter to investors. So there’s investors who gave him money for the Twitter deal and have obviously lost a fortune in that, who are then reinvesting in xAI and giving him more money for his AI projects.
Chris Hayes: Okay, that’s the thing though. This was a leverage deal. Like he had investors and he had bank loans. Elon Musk did not liquidate $44 billion in stocks, sit down and write a check, right?
Kate Conger: Right.
Chris Hayes: This was a deal that was put together with investors and loans, right? I don’t understand why they don’t care that he lit all this money on fire. It really is kind of weird to me.
Kate Conger: Well, it is weird. And I think that the thinking is that he is such a success story, it’s worth burning your cash maybe on one failure so that you can be first in line for the next success. And so I think that’s the argument for a lot of the bankers who are involved in this deal. It’s like sure, they got burned on Twitter, but they might be called in to do the IPO for SpaceX, or they might be called in to do some other business with him in the future that’s going to make them money. And so it’s not worth backing away.
And you see this kind of this funny money going on, especially with the xAI deal where, you know, the latest fundraising round for xAI is valuing it, I think over $44 billion. So, you know, whatever value was burnt on X is now just kind of transferred over into this AI project that’s training on X data. And so, you know, the value is being replaced somewhere else perhaps rather than in the Twitter deal itself.
Well, I think when you get rich enough in America, you basically can’t fail. That is essentially, I think, one of the lessons here.
Kate Conger: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: Musk illustrates a really important general rule about people is that they could be brilliant in some domains and complete aides in others. And this is true of all sorts of people, including myself, like all of us.
Kate Conger: Oh yeah, I mean, I’m not launching a rocket.
Chris Hayes: Right. Yeah.
Kate Conger: I would not trust myself to do that.
Chris Hayes: Right, and this is actually an important point that I think we think of intelligence as so generalized, and one example here, I think of a lot is Henry Ford. I mean, Henry Ford was obviously a business genius. He obviously kind of revolutionized industrial production, the consumer relationships, the automobile, the way the assembly line functioned, the price that he paid his workers, the price he charged for the car. I mean, he was a genius about all this stuff. He also thought that Jews were an insidious menace that needed to be driven out and spent a lot of money publishing things like “The International Jew” and “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” and writing admiringly about Hitler. Both of these things are true about him. There’s a question to me with Elon Musk, which is like, can you keep those separate? Like, Can the brain keep being good at running a space business if all the information you get about the world is like X sewage? You see what I mean?
Kate Conger: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: Will there be a business level problem of garbage in, garbage out? Or can you just kind of keep them divided?
Kate Conger: You know, I don’t know. And I think that that is something that is really going to be thrust front and center in the Trump administration where we’re going to find out, you know, like can this man bring whatever business genius that he does possess to the federal government and make any positive change there? When SpaceX becomes even more dominant in our space industry, is there going to be a point of failure where he’s kind of taking the eye off the ball because he’s so invested and enmeshed in right wing politics that he’s not paying attention to the business? And yeah, I mean, I think that’s going to be a big question in the next couple of years.
Chris Hayes: What is the experience of covering Musk like? Like, do you worry about him suing you? Do you have a relationship with him? Does he talk to you?
Kate Conger: I have not spoken to him since I think 2019 was the last time that we were in touch. So well before the Twitter deal or the book or anything like that. You know, he has posted a couple of critical things about the book online, but, you know, hasn’t made any move to sue us. Obviously, we went through a very rigorous fact-checking process on the book, you know —
Chris Hayes: You bet you.
Kate Conger: — with that in mind, thinking, like, we need to make sure that every single thing that we publish is extremely buttoned up. And so we feel really confident about the reporting that we put out. And, I mean, I think that the experience of covering him is really interesting. You know, he’s sort of an endlessly fascinating character. And one of the things I enjoy about covering him is that he kind of puts it all out there. You know, most people of his wealth, his status, are being managed by lawyers, P.R. people.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Kate Conger: They’re bored, you know? There’s this whole apparatus around them that’s like, don’t post your emotions on the internet. And Musk has somehow resisted that. And so he’s almost, he’s sort of a great person to cover when you don’t have access to him because he’s posting his thoughts and feelings all day on the internet. So you almost don’t need that kind of access that you might if you were writing about another figure and you would really need them to sit down for an interview and get their side of the story. He’s putting it all out there all the time.
And so, I think that’s been really beneficial for us in our reporting where we kind of have some reporting around him and we’re like, well, where was he at the time? We can just go look at his X feed and he’s posted about it.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, it’s funny you say that because I do think that a driving ethos of the MAGA world, and I think you see this in Vance. Trump, Vance and Musk are three examples where it’s just like, let it all hang out. Like who’s going to do anything to me? And whereas you see, I think more traditional business folks, and I think this is actually an ideological issue. I think when you compare Republicans and Democrats, they’re more scared, they’re more managed. They have P.R. people being like, don’t make news. And part of the feeling of complete invincibility. that those folks are cloaked in, is like, yeah, I can say whatever I want. I could call anyone anything. I mean, Elon Musk really randomly called a random person that he didn’t know at all, a pedo guy online and was sued over it and won. So it’s like, if you can just call someone who, by the way, was not a pedophile, just to be very clear, he had no basis for it. It was a false accusation. The man sued him. Elon Musk won this lawsuit, successfully defended himself. If you can get away with that, then like what do you care? The stock goes up. He’s worth hundreds of billions of dollars. He can say whatever he wants. And Trump and Vance are that way. Thiel in a way, a little bit that way too. Like, Ramaswamy’s that way. That they all have this ethos of, I’ll say whatever I want.
Kate Conger: Well, and I think, I mean, I’m curious what you think about this because it seems like that, you know, has become the most valuable currency, right, is that they’re able to say whatever they want. They cause a controversy.
Chris Hayes: And get attention. Yeah.
Kate Conger: It gets attention. And then they don’t face a consequence. And I’m curious, you know, what you think the democratic strategy needs to be when people, like you said, are really kind of playing with an old school playbook and trying to P.R. manage all of their moves.
Chris Hayes: I would say that the, and I write about this in the book, that Trump’s big insight is that negative attention is better than no attention. And Democrats will always opt for no attention over negative attention. And that’s it. I mean, because attention is so powerful that getting it by any means necessary proves to be empowering. And Musk is the perfect example. He bought Twitter, he lit $30 billion on fire, but the value of the attention he commanded ended up being worth multiples of the $30 billion. And so he’s a perfect story about it.
Kate Conger: Yeah, and how that sort of destruction of value has been, I think, spun as a positive, where now people are like, we should do to the federal government what he was able to do to Twitter. We should fire all the employees. We should cut the cost.
Chris Hayes: Destroy the value.
Kate Conger: We should destroy the value of it —
Chris Hayes: Yeah, cool.
Kate Conger: — because that’s a success story, yeah.
Chris Hayes: Kate Conger is a reporter of “The New York Times” based in San Francisco. She covers X and other technology companies. She’s co-author along with Ryan Mac of “Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter.” That was a great conversation. Kate, thank you so much.
Kate Conger: Yeah, thank you for having me.
Chris Hayes: Once again, great thanks to Kate Conger, “New York Times” reporter in San Francisco. I want to note that since this recording, a lawsuit against the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, which isn’t a department we don’t think, certainly not yet, has been filed. It was filed within minutes of Trump being inaugurated, and it claims that DOGE violates federal transparency rules, which exists for a reason. In a 30-page complaint, National Security Counselors, which is a public interest law firm, says the non-governmental DOGE panel is breaking a law that goes back to 1972, which requires advisory committees like the one envisioned here to the executive branch to follow certain rules on disclosure, hiring and other practices.
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