(soft music) - I mean, my mind is a storm. I don't think most
people would wanna be me. They may think they would wanna be me, but they don't, they don't know. - [Interviewer] Is your
storm a happy storm? - No. - I've grown tired of
hearing the name Elon Musk and not really understanding
what's going on. Who is this guy? Where is he from? How has he built a huge
business empire to become one of the richest people in the world? And what can we learn about
his purchase of Twitter? So I've been going on a deep dive, finding everything I can about this guy, his upbringing, businesses he's started, talking to people who
have worked with him, who have worked for him. Many of these people
wanna remain anonymous for reasons you will soon understand. I've talked to people who
love him, people who hate him, people who used to love
him and now hate him. - If I were an employee
at Twitter right now, I'd probably just do your job, don't let him know your name. - So after a few months
of reporting on this, I feel like I finally have
a handle on who this guy is. I understand how he built his empire, how he treats the people around him, and the real reason I
believe he bought Twitter. - Elon Musk put in an offer. - An unsolicited bid to buy
the social media platform. - [Reporter] $44 billion. - So let me show you the
rise and rule of Elon Musk. - You're a super villain. That's what a super villain does. - [Elon] Yeah. - [Announcer] He's addicted to
drama, he's addicted to risk, and whenever things seem
to be going smoothly, he almost has a compulsion
to stir things up. (soft music) - [Johnny] Elon Musk was
born in the summer of 1971 in South Africa. From a young age, he was
bullied pretty relentlessly by kids at school for
being scrawny and nerdy. - You know, bullied quite a lot. I got punched in the face many times. - [Johnny] Musk would later say that he's on the autism spectrum, though he was never diagnosed. It got really bad for young Elon. Like one time. - When he got beaten up at school once and so bloody, he had
to go to the hospital. The scars were actually
worse when he came home and his father made him
stand in front of him and berated him for more than
an hour, calling him stupid, saying it was his fault. - Stories like this make
me sick to my stomach and you realize that the trauma and scars from this kind
of abuse, both physical and emotional, they don't go away easily. Speaking of his dad,
there's a lot of rumors that Elon came from a rich dad who owned Emerald mines in South Africa and that he was set up to be successful because of family wealth. This isn't factually accurate. Elon's dad did import emeralds, but there wasn't a lot
of money in this family. - He never owned a emerald
mine. This is total bull shit. - If you want more detail on that, you can go check out our sources
where we put the fact check for every of the assertions in this video. Anyway, what Elon did have
at a young age was a skill for computers and programming. (soft music) - [Elon] I taught myself
how to program computers, but mostly 'cause I
wanted to program games. - At the age of 12, he
invented a video game. - Mom, do you remember when I was 12 and I created my own video game. - [Johnny] That he sold to a magazine for, - $500. - It was his first business move in tech, his first interest in space. - Around 12 or 13, I had
kind of an existential crisis trying to figure out the meaning of life. - From an early age. Musk found meaning in
the idea of the potential of humanity, what humans
can do as a collective, how we as a species have somehow
been able to work together to explore the meaning of the universe. - My motivation was that
if we can expand the scope and scale of consciousness, maybe we can find out the meaning of life. - I mean, you hear this and it
kind of sounds overly grand, kind of delusional, overly idealistic, but honestly, this is what motivates
Musk from a very young age and he doesn't bend on what he wants and what he's willing to do to achieve it. So he leaves South Africa when
he is 18 and moves to Canada and eventually ends up in
Pennsylvania where he goes to college and gets a degree
in economics and physics. At the age of 24, he
moves out to California to pursue a PhD at Stanford, but he never starts the program. Instead he starts his first business. (soft music) Okay, so I'm not gonna go
into the details of every one of Elon's companies
because there are a lot. If you want to deep dive,
read this very thick book, this was a foundational
part of our reporting and it details the play by
play on all of these companies. For now, let me give you a quick summary of the businesses this
guy built to become one of the richest men on the planet. His first company was called Zip2. He started it in 1995 with
his brother, who seems to have an affinity for cowboy hats. (whip snapping)
- Yee-haw. - His company provided maps and business directories
for online newspapers. I know those words sound
very strange to us now, but like back in 1995, it was a huge deal. It almost was like the precursor to what Google Maps is today,
and it was very successful. - We helped bring online
several hundred newspapers that previously were only in print. - It was acquired a few
years later for $307 million, 22 million of those dollars
going right into Elon's pocket. Suddenly Elon is rich. - Receiving cash is cash. I mean, those are just a
large number of Ben Franklins. - He uses the money to start
another company called X.com. No, no, no, not that
X.com, the first X.com, which you now know today as PayPal. - So this is an ATM. All we're gonna do is transform the traditional
banking industry. - It was basically an online bank and it was revolutionary at the time. So much so that in 2002, eBay bought it for $1.5 billion.
(cash register ringing) Elon got 180 million of those dollars, and now he's officially super rich. - There it is gentlemen, the
fastest car in the world. - So what to do with all of this money? The answer for Elon Musk was to try out the craziest
ideas he could think of. - Oh, I have like about
180 million from PayPal. I thought, you know, I'll
allocate half of that to SpaceX and Tesla and Solar City. That should be fine. I'll have
90 million. Like that's lots. I thought our probability of
success was less than 10%. It would be foolish to think
anything else other than that. (soft music) - Ever since he was a kid
making video games about space, Elon has been motivated by this idea of humans expanding outside
of earth, humans becoming a, - Multi planet species. We would like to help
make life multi-planetary. The extension of life to multiple planets. - In early two thousands,
Tesla already existed. They were making electric cars, but there were kind of
high-end niche sports cars. Elon was really interested in this. So he came in as an investor and eventually became
the CEO with the vision of turning electric cars mainstream and ushering a whole new
era of transportation. But these ideas were more
expensive than he anticipated. - Things cost more and
took longer than I thought. So I had a choice of either
put the rest of the money in or the companies are gonna die. - His rockets kept blowing up. His electric cars were
devilishly complicated to manufacture, but Elon
developed this addiction to risk and intensity that kept
him pushing forward despite these challenges. Tesla reinvented how cars were made. Thanks to innovative technology and manufacturing,
really clever engineering and a waterfall of government subsidies. He was able to skyrocket Tesla into one of the most valuable
companies in the world, overtaking every other car company by a long shot in just a few years. And this company was weird. It wasn't obeying all the rules, like there was almost no
official marketing campaign. And Elon decided to make all
of his technology open source. The patents were not copyrighted. Anyone could see them and use them with the hope that the market for electric vehicles would take off, and that the world would more
quickly move away from the use of fossil fuels, which would
ultimately benefit Tesla. - So if somebody comes and
makes a better electric car than Tesla, and it's so
much better than ours that we can't sell our cars and we go bankrupt, I still think that's a
good thing for the world. - These were bold, crazy moves, but they were totally working. Meanwhile, Elon's Space Company was about to go out of business (soft music) - For SpaceX, the first
three launches failed. Just barely able to scrape
together enough parts and money to do the the fourth launch. - And then, after six years
and six months of stress and intensity, Elon's dreams of going to space started to come true. (upbeat music) (cheering) I'm gonna explain a little
bit more about how he did all of this, but the big deal about SpaceX is that they created a reusable rocket. Every other rocket is disposable. You can only use it once
and it's very expensive. But Elon proved that
you could use a rocket and safely land it back
down onto the surface of earth and then use it again. Soon, SpaceX would be
carrying NASA astronauts and supplies to the
International Space Station, launching military satellites
into space for the Pentagon, launching dozens of
satellites up into space for commercial use, and even launching the first
ever private space flight for tourism. Space travel was officially reinvented. - I think we're at the dawn of a new era and it's a reason for people to be excited and inspired to be human. - Okay? But what's crazy
is that during all of this, Elon is also launching a bunch of other companies like
The Boring Company, which is trying to revolutionize traffic and transportation by
building smarter tunnels. Oh my God, it just hit
me that it's boring, like boring into the side of a mountain. Oh my God, that just hit me, right now? This company also turned
into like a blank canvas for Elon Musk to play
out all of his childish, silly ideas like selling a flamethrower or this perfume that smells
like singed human hair. And yes, Musk uses his
businesses as kind of a way to troll humanity while also
trying to save humanity. It's this behavior that a
lot of people find refreshing and ends up getting a lot of attention and becoming a marketing tool
for all of his companies. He starts building Neuralink,
which is designing a way for humans to control
computers with their brains, which is already having
some initial successes. And now that Elon's company
can easily go to space, he starts sending up these
small satellites, 6,000 of them that are orbiting the earth, and he starts providing
internet to remote places, arguably changing the
course of the war in Ukraine by providing Ukrainian
soldiers with internet during the initial invasion from Russia. Though that's gotten more
complicated in recent months as Russian soldiers have
started to use Starlink and it's a whole other rabbit hole. Okay, but we're not done
yet with Elon's companies. He also co-founded OpenAI way back in 2015 who went on to make ChatGPT. He later left the company
over disagreements and then has recently started
his own AI company called, you Guessed it, xAI. Yes, the guy loves the letter X. It's literally the name of
several of his companies and one of his children. Each one of these ventures points back to Elon's childish idealism. This grand vision of testing the limits of what humans can do by pushing
our understanding of physics and working together to
do crazy amazing things. But then after building
all of these companies that are focused on
pushing the physical limits of human potential, Elon in recent years has set his sights on reshaping another industry. (soft music) - [Announcer] Tonight, the richest man in the world is hunting for more. - [Reporter] Put in an
offer of almost $44 billion to buy Twitter. - [Reporter] All of Twitter. Is this all a troll or is this very real? - Elon Musk has been
portrayed as both a reckless, unethical billionaire
as well as a visionary who is changing the world for the better. And what you think about
him probably comes from what you read about him. And what you read about him
was probably served to you by an algorithm. This is how our media
landscape works these days and it's getting us deeper
and deeper into trouble, which is a major theme in this video, but it's also in line with
the sponsor of today's video, which is Ground News. Ground News is a platform
that I've been using to navigate this problem,
to find a balanced view where I can see both
sides of a news story. Ground News aggregates, tens of thousands of news articles from around
the world into one place, and then allows you to critically examine how that news is being covered. Here's a recent story that on the left you can see
from the Los Angeles Times that engineers sue Elon Musk and SpaceX saying that the company mirrored
his juvenile, crude X posts. While on the right you've
got the New York Post saying that Elon Musk was sued by fired engineers alleging Elon Musk allowed pervasive sexist culture. These headlines have subtle bias in them. Like the left-leaning headline suggests that Musk's personal behavior
was directly responsible while the right-leaning
headline emphasizes that they were fired employees and that there was an
alleged sexist culture softening any kind of blame
towards Musk and his company. This is really subtle stuff
that's hard to pay attention to if you're just scrolling your algorithm. Ground News emphasizes and
highlights these biases and allows you to be more
critical as a news consumer. Not only do they show
this bias distribution, but they also have a tool that rates how factual an article is, and my favorite, they have
this blind spot detector that pays attention to the
articles that you tend to read and presents you with
stuff that might be outside of your comfort zone, but that you probably need to see to be a balanced news consumer. This is a really cool tool.
I'm very glad they exist. I'm really glad they're
sponsoring today's video. If you wanna try this out for yourself, go to groundnews.com/johnnyharris where you'll get 40% off the vantage plan, which is unlimited access
to all of these features. I use Ground News, I think
it's really important in today's media landscape. I'm grateful that they
sponsored today's video. With that, let's dive back
into the story of Elon Musk. - [Announcer] Tonight, the richest man in the world is hunting for more. - Okay, so we're getting into this. Why did Elon buy Twitter? What can we learn from it? Before we do that, I want
to tell you a little bit about what I learned about
Elon Musk as a leader after talking to people
who have worked with him, people who have worked under him. There's a few key lessons
that I've taken away from all of these conversations
we've had with these people and doing research on him. I will not be quoting them directly because most of them
asked to remain anonymous. (soft music) The first thing I heard over and over again is how obsessed
Elon Musk is with the details of what his companies are building. - [Elon] I think people
think like I'm a business guy or something like that, engineering looks like
80% or more of my time. - [Johnny] One source I talked to who worked closely with Musk, estimates that he spends 90% of his time in technical details with a whiteboard out,
looking at code with engineers and programmers, solving very
specific details in meetings that sometimes go into
the middle of the night. And this gets to our
second takeaway, which is that Elon questions everything
and I mean everything. You can see this really clearly. When he was building SpaceX, - It was tough going
there in the beginning 'cause I'd never built anything physical. I mean, I'd built like
little model rockets as a kid and that kind of thing,
but I'd never had a company that built anything physical. - Elon's original idea for
SpaceX was to buy Russian rockets that had been decommissioned and to rebuild them more efficiently. - I can tell you it was very weird going to the Russian rocket forces and saying, I'd like to buy
two of your biggest rockets. They thought I was crazy,
but I did have money. - He went to Russia and quickly discovered that
the price that governments pay for rockets is astronomical. It felt absurd. On the flight home, Elon makes this list of every component he can think
of needed to build a rocket, and then he put in the estimated price for just the materials and the components. What he found is that the prices
that they were quoting him for these rocket parts
were highly inflated. He interrogated every single
cost associated with rockets and started to make plans on how his team could find a much
cheaper way to build them. He did this over and
over and over until soon his team was manufacturing 70% of all of the rocket components for SpaceX and saving millions of dollars. I heard story after story
like this, Elon showing up, talking to some low level engineer, working on some very specific problem and interrogating it until he found the most efficient answer. Oh, and this wasn't about
him being collaborative or inclusive of his employees. This is about him stress
testing every single assumption, pushing every single thing to the limit so that he can find the most
efficient way to build something. This also makes working for
Elon incredibly stressful. He'll show up, he'll question everything, and then he'll tell people
that a six month timeline needs to be condensed down into 90 days. Everyone's jaw drops. They say it's impossible, and
he says it has to be possible and then everyone makes it happen. Which gets me to number
four, the people around him. Musk's ruthless idealism and vision for the future
has attracted a lot really talented people who bring
these dreams to life. These people have rallied
around his mission to reinvent transportation
or take humans to Mars. They're the ones who make it happen with unprecedented speed and efficiency. These four things are
really his superpowers. They're the ingredients
that have allowed him to reinvent entire industries, but this isn't the full picture. Everyone I talk to includes the fact that Elon can be a total asshole and is a lot of the time. - Hate me, like me or indifferent. Do you want the best car or
do you not want the best car? (laughing) - [Johnny] He is abrupt, he is blunt, and he puts basically no effort
into making you like him. - No, I am not the evil.
I just misunderstood. (whistling) - One irony I kept hearing
is that Musk cares so much about humanity, but he doesn't
really care about humans. Okay, so I'm the father of an
11-year-old who is autistic, and I myself identify as being
on some part of the spectrum. And so listening to hours
of Musk, I see moments that to most people might look
like him being mean hearted and arrogant, and extreme, and even cruel, but to me feel more like him being unaware or perhaps unwilling to play
by the rules of social norms. Okay, but, and because my son
is probably watching this, I need to make one thing crystal clear that there is a line here. Musk's behavior, especially recently, can quickly cross into
malicious, temperamental, mean hearted and harmful
behavior that goes well beyond anything that can be justified or explained by
neurodivergence, into something that looks a lot more like
aggressive bullying, coercion, unethical business practices. - There's almost a demon mode of Elon Musk where he turns really dark and that can be very
problematic, especially when it came to acquiring Twitter. - My point is that there's some empathy that is warranted here. It can be a blurry line, but Musk very clearly crosses that line. Something we'll talk about
more in a little bit. But for now, let's get back
to our list, these five things that are the big takeaways
on how Musk operates and how he's built his empire. And let's look at where this
got him by the early 2020s. His four big companies had grown rapidly to become worth billions. Tesla reaching a trillion
dollar valuation, one of the most valuable
companies on earth, revolutionizing the car industry. And by January, 2021, these
successes has skyrocketed Musk to become the world's richest man according to Forbes Billionaire Tracker. But don't be fooled. For Musk, this actually
isn't an ideal situation. Musk's biographer, Walter
Isaacson, wrote this amazing book that details all of this
private communication that really gives us an inside
look into the psychology of Musk during this time. And he documents this
conversation between Shivan Zilis, the director of operations
at one of his companies, and the mother of a set of Elon's twins, and Elon in a text that
read, "You don't have to be in a state of war all the time, or is that where you find greater comfort, when you're in periods of war?" And he replies that it's a
part of his default setting. Zilis then tells Isaacson that "It was like he was
winning the simulation and now he felt at a loss at what to do. Extended periods of calm
were unnerving for him." The guy is addicted to
conflict and crisis, and tension, and drama. And being the world's richest man with all these successes
was uncomfortable. He needed a new storm
to throw himself into, and so he chose the storm of all storms. (deep music) At the end of 2022, he buys
Twitter for $44 billion. In his offer letter, he
tells us why he's doing it. He believes that Twitter has the potential to be the platform for free
speech around the globe, and that free speech is
a societal imperative for a functioning democracy. And right away, Musk applies
his playbook to the company, sending out a midnight
email telling the thousands of employees that there's
gonna be a new Twitter culture that is quote, "Extremely
hardcore, long hours, high intensity." And tells anyone who wants to stay to fill out this form or be fired. - Thousands of Twitter
employees are being laid off, locked out of their work email accounts. - Twitter has fired half of its seven and a half thousand staff. - We called it the Twitter Hunger Games. - I thought a lot about how
to talk about Musk's foray into Twitter because it
is in the news right now. It is shaping the way that we receive and talk about information, and there's a lot of hot takes out there. What I decided to do here is to try to give the most earnest
understanding as to Musk's motives. Why did he do this? What does he want from it, and what is he doing to reshape
Twitter around this vision? - [Joe] What was it
ultimately that led you to make the decision to do it? - [Elon] It's somewhat melodramatic, but I was worried about that it was having a corrosive effect on civilization. - So first and foremost, free speech is like the
thing he says over and over. - Free speech. Free speech. Free speech. - Free speech is the only way
that humans are gonna thrive. And because Musk's main
mission is the advancement of human civilization, he must buy Twitter and make it the free speech platform. The platform where we have
perhaps the most important conversations in the world. He says this over and over like
in this tweet where he says, "This is a battle for the
future of civilization. If free speech is lost, even in America, tyranny is all that lies ahead." So that's number one on what
he says his motives are. - [Elon] I think part of it is that, it's where it was located, which is, you know,
downtown San Francisco. - [Johnny] The next pillar
of Musk's reasoning has to do with the city of San Francisco. - [Elon] Is there a place
that's more far left than San Francisco, Berkeley? - [Johnny] Twitter's headquarters
is located right here in downtown San Francisco. And for Musk, that's a big problem. - [Elon] It was an accidental
far left information weapon that was then harnessed by the far left who could not themselves
create the weapon, but happened to be co-located
where the technologists were. - Okay, so let me get this straight. Musk believes that
Twitter being in the heart of a liberal city means that the engineers and leaders deciding what gets elevated and suppressed on Twitter are
infected with the politics of the liberal city. And so they're more likely
to elevate their ideology, a megaphone, an information weapon. That's his argument. I have a couple issues with the argument and its logical underpinning, but again, this is about
what Elon Musk says and his motivations for buying Twitter. And number three, the
government is censoring Twitter and Twitter is letting them. - [Elon] Twitter was simply
an arm of the government. You know, a state publication is the way to think of old Twitter. It's a state publication. - Alright, this is our list. We're gonna get to each of these and like try to understand them all. But like is anyone else
wondering what happened here? It feels like the story went
from quirky visionary engineer uses his brilliant unorthodox, socially immature tactics and obsessions to accomplish unprecedented
engineering feats. To said quirky engineers suddenly dedicates his brilliant
mind away from physics and towards social media because he believes that
there's a deep state conspiracy between San Francisco
technologists infected with liberal bias and their
censoring government overlords, and he is going to fix it. (soft music) What happened? I actually never got to the bottom of that and I don't think anyone has. That's actually been a central question that was never answered for
me during this reporting. We do know this pivot
happened sometime in 2020. Why did Musk shift to obsessing over this? The answer to that probably lies somewhere in Elon Musk's brain,
and it is not ethical or useful for me to try to
opine on his mental health or what is going on in his brain. So let's stick to the facts. Here is the logical framework that Elon Musk used to buy Twitter. This is what he wants to
do with it is fix this. Let's see what happens next. So after firing most of the employees and changing the name
to his favorite letter, he gets to work on free speech. He lets big accounts that were previously banned
back onto the platform, including former President Donald Trump, comedian Kathy Griffin,
lawmaker Marjorie Taylor Greene, Jordan Peterson. Within a few months he posts this tweet around the Super Bowl and he notices that this tweet gets less
engagement than the tweet by President Joe Biden. Elon does not like this. He calls an urgent meeting and tasks 80 engineers to
quickly rebuild a version of the algorithm that
will allow his tweets to be artificially boosted
by a factor of a thousand. I was kind of skeptical on
how sensational was reported, but through my conversations, confirmed that this actually went down. Like the old Twitter was not built to artificially boost one account. And Elon, the free speech guy was like, I need you to boost my account because it's not getting as
much attention as the president and the 80 engineers did. So a few months after buying the company, Elon now has super algorithmic power and he uses it to start
to amplify certain people. So I know what you're thinking, Johnny, you just disagree with these people and so you think that it's
bad that Elon let them on, but really free speech is
about letting everyone talk. Yes, absolutely. That is true. And yet Elon uses an
artificially amplified voice to prop up a very specific
type of voice on Twitter to amplify ideas, extreme ideas, harmful ideas, not just to
liberals in San Francisco, but ideas that we as humanity
recognize are bad ideas. And now someone with a
massive megaphone has control on how big those ideas can get. Even Bill Maher, the Elon fanboy. - There's a very few people who
actually make change happen. You are one of those people. - Even he could not understand
why Elon was doing this. - I understand why he wanted to like have a platform
where you have free speech, but like why then embrace
the worst people on it. - And then Elon isn't totally
consistent about this. Like in the case of Alex Jones who spreads horrendous conspiracies and misinformation to a lot of people. When asked why Elon didn't
let him go back onto Twitter, he said no. Saying that he had no mercy for anyone who would use the death
of children for gain, politics or fame. He did eventually reinstate
Alex Jones after running a poll. But you start to see that
he'll reinstate anyone unless he personally takes issue with their views or what they said. What's puzzling to me is that this isn't free speech absolutism. It's not say anything you want. Musk's new Twitter then starts banning and suppressing Substack links, Substack the place where
independent journalists write. Musk made the change
where you can't comment or like on anything that
has a Substack article and you can't embed tweets
in your Substack article. That doesn't feel like free speech to me. Musk then decides that the word cisgender
is a slur on Twitter and threatens to ban
people who use it too much. Is that free speech? He then starts banning journalists who criticize him, though he
did reinstate a few of them after a vote. And then start suing media
watchdog organizations like the Center for
Countering Digital Hate, trying to silence them for criticizing the new Twitter. Musk, of course, lost with
the verdict coming out saying that this lawsuit was basically about trying to silence criticism and deter others from
criticizing his company. - He's someone who is willing
to use his enormous wealth and power to silence people. - Like this is such clear
anti-free speech behavior. When Twitter users organized
a protest against making users pay for a blue check mark,
he banned that account. And this is what's so mind bending. Like I swear he's trolling us here. He says that he's
obsessed with free speech, but then immediately
after taking over Twitter, he demonstrates an extreme
hypocrisy for that very point. And I secretly think he's doing that so that we are talking about it right now. I don't think it was
ever about free speech. I also think that when he
posts political propaganda ads like this conspiracy video that says that Democrats are letting immigrants in to turn America into single party rule and has almost a hundred million views. I think he's doing that not because he agrees with this
factless piece of propaganda, but because he loves to rile people up. Though maybe he does agree
with it, I don't know. Either way, he has built a platform that gives him the biggest megaphone and suppresses people that criticize him. That is not free speech. Okay, but let's move on because free speech was just
one of his three major motives. What about this argument
that Twitter is infected with liberal ideology because
it is based in San Francisco? Luckily we have data. This was a great study, very thorough, algorithmic amplification
of politics on Twitter. It's a study from before Elon took over. They conducted a long
running, massive scale, randomized experiment where
they looked at a huge number of tweets from seven countries and they found that in six
out of the seven countries, including the United States, that quote, "The
mainstream political right enjoys a higher algorithmic amplification than the mainstream political left." They saw this over and over. Oh, and also a really
interesting side note here is that they found that Twitter actually doesn't amplify far left or
far right political groups, more than moderate ones, which is a myth that I believed
until I read this study. But the whole point is that old Twitter did
not have a liberal bias. If anything, it had a conservative bias. This study is very robust proof of that despite Elon's theory that
Twitter being in San Francisco infected it with a liberal bias. Go to the sources and read the study for yourself if you wanna poke into it. If there's anything wrong
with it that I'm missing, please tell me. But it seems like pretty
solid proof to me. Okay, but what about the last critique? And this is a big one. Musk believed that Twitter was
being censored by governments and Twitter was letting them do this. And guess what? That is actually true. Upon taking over Twitter,
Musk cracked into all of the internal communications and found a bunch of emails that showed how Twitter had banned and suppressed information
that it deemed harmful and dangerous, but that
they did so sometimes with a political bias. You can see things like
Biden's team asking Twitter to review these tweets
that they didn't like. Yes, governments around
the world can ask Twitter to take things down in their country that they think are breaking the law or that are harmful to national security. And this happened on both sides. The Trump White House asked
Twitter to take things down as well, but this reporting did reveal what looked like a lot
of left-leaning bias in censoring certain
highly sensitive content that would be damaging to the left. The the big example of this
was this New York Post article about Hunter Biden's laptop. Twitter severely censored this, not even letting people
DM the link to each other and making up a thin
justification for it later. Now, content moderation,
deciding what is harmful and what should be censored
and what shouldn't, is a really difficult task. But for a lot of people, including myself, this crossed a line. This was not okay. Though I have to say that Hunter Biden New York Post article was the most sort of egregious one. A lot of the other stuff in the
Twitter files was not nearly as black and white. Much more nuanced, much more complicated. The point is there should
be transparency here, and I agree with Musk on that. Okay, but this is once again where we find some strange paradox that doesn't make any sense, which is that since Musk took over, government censorship
on Twitter has gone up. Twitter suspended multiple journalists from prominent outlets
included the Washington Post, the New York Times, and CNN. - Tonight, a number of high profile journalists
have been silenced. - Here are the number of take
down requests that governments around the world made to
Twitter in the six months before Musk took over. And these are the ones
that Twitter complied with. Twitter would fully comply with the government's censorship request about half of the time. The other half of the time they'd say no. In the six months after Musk, the number of requests went up,
probably because Musk got rid of a lot of the automatic moderation. But look, Musk's Twitter now says yes to government censorship
over 80% of the time, way more than the old Twitter. Wait, what? And look, the kind of
stuff that Musk is allowing to be censored on the platform
is really sensitive stuff for free speech. Like take Turkey for example. There was a Turkish election last year. The president of Turkey,
himself, a massive user of state censorship, pressured Twitter to block the accounts of a
few people he didn't like, a Kurdish businessman, an
investigative journalist, both of them vocal
critics of the president. Like this is like clear black and white political censorship
in an election year. Like make the guy who is criticizing me go away. And guess what? Musk's Twitter did it. They said yes. They banned the accounts and then said we didn't have a choice. They were gonna shut down all of Twitter so we had to do it. And then they patted
themselves on the back about how they were
still trying to fight it, and they're doing so much for
battling government censorship and transparency on the platform. But guess what? They did have a choice. This same kind of thing happened
before Musk ever came in and Twitter fought back. In a previous Turkish election, the government tried to do the same thing, censor posts about corruption
within the Turkish government. They asked Twitter to take these down and Twitter said, no. They fired back that political speech is among the most important speech, especially when it concerns
matters of possible corruption. So Turkey shut down Twitter,
it was down for a couple of weeks while they
battled it out in court and the Turkish government lost. Indeed, they lost because they were trying
to censor political speech and Twitter fought back. There's even more recent
examples like Wikipedia or Wokipedia as Elon calls
it, refusing to comply with the Turkish government
censorship requests, getting completely shut down
for almost three years only to have it be overturned
in Turkish courts. A major win for free speech in Turkey, which is something that's
in short supply lately. So like Wikipedia, Twitter can do this. They can say no to the Turkish government if they're actually
crusaders for free speech and they're actually against
government censorship, they would have said no in 2023. Musk's Twitter did this in India too, when the Indian government
asked Twitter to censor a bunch of journalists, including
an entire BBC bureau and a documentary that was critical of the government and the
president, and Twitter complied. Elon, where is your
conviction for free speech? Where is your hate for
government censorship in moments like this where
it really, really matters? But for Elon Musk, he's got a lot of other things he needs to think about. He needs to think about
the market for Teslas, who might be buying his
satellites or rockets. He needs to be thinking about where Tesla factories might be set up, the market for his electric cars. This is a conflict of
interest that gets in the way of his idealistic vision for free speech and his hate for government censorship. Twitter used to have a page where they would publish in detail why they would take down
any content they took down at the request of the government. And there's this research lab at Harvard that would aggregate all
of this for the public. When our story producer
Alex went to go look for these government requests from Turkey and India, she found that
they no longer were there. This page had gone quiet. So she reached out to the Harvard
lab and got this response. Twitter stopped sharing this
data starting in April, 2023. No more transparency on
government censorship. It looks like it's down to the
whims of one super rich dude. That is not free speech,
that is the antithesis of what this guy said he was going to build. So no, I don't think Elon Musk is earnest about these three things
that he said were his motive for buying Twitter. In fact, after looking into all of this, I'm having a hard time figuring out what Elon is earnest about
at all, other than his belief that humans have the potential
to do amazing things. I do believe that in all of
this, that is the one thing that has stayed consistent. But how he's pursuing that goal and that vision in recent
years is baffling, confusing and in my mind, quite
harmful to our society. Twitter seems much more like a platform where he can bully the
people he doesn't like. He can feed his addiction to crisis and controversy while also
showing a childish hypocrisy in his principles and values. But unlike his other ventures, which you can tell when they're successful because they're physics, the rocket either goes up
into space or it doesn't. The car drives or it doesn't. This new venture doesn't
have a physical feedback loop that tells him if it's
doing good or working. Instead, he's playing with the
delicate, precarious nature of information in the internet age, something that is already in crisis and now is being chipped
away at by one rich dude who gets off on crisis. And what blows my mind most
is that in the process of all of this, Musk is
undermining his own dream, his own vision. This is a sentiment I
heard from the employees and colleagues of Elon Musk. They felt betrayed, like
this man pushed them to think differently, to do
things that seemed impossible, all in the name of this grand vision of what humanity could be, what
we could do as a civilization. And yet in recent years,
he seems to be sabotaging that very vision, alienating the people and customers that he needs
to bring this vision to life. In my mind, Elon has exchanged
that vision for controversy and division that forces
all of us to talk about it. Here we are talking about
it, talking about him. I think a part of him
loves that or needs that. And yet after all of this,
defenders of Elon will continue to argue that only someone like this could be the one to change the world. - To anyone I've offended, I just wanna say I
reinvented electric cars and I'm sending people
to Mars on a rocket ship, did you think I was also
gonna be a chill normal dude? (audience laughing) - And yeah, I get that the people who change the world
aren't normal and orthodox, they're not nice. But I don't accept this way
of thinking about Musk today, maybe a couple years ago. But in recent years, Musk has shown it's his
addiction to crisis and attention that is having a corrosive
effect on our society, validating and glorifying ways of acting
that rewards the worst parts of us, and instead of saving civilization, driving us further apart. (soft music) Hey everyone, thanks for watching this
deep dive on Elon Musk. I wanna tell you about our new
channel called Search Party. It is a deep dive into
geopolitics and sports. It is started by Sam
Ellis, my old Vox colleague who now has a wonderful
channel that we collaborate on and it is awesome. Go check it out. Thank you
everyone over at The Newsroom, which is on Patreon, the people who support our deep dive
reporting every month. I really appreciate your support. Patreon.com/johnnyharris
if you wanna go check out the perks there. We also still have a few
hundred copies of this poster that I designed a few
months ago, maybe last year. And it is still around,
a few hundred copies left if you want to go buy them. If they still exist at this point, they could be sold out. It is a poster of all the map projections and it's called All Maps Are Wrong, and I'm very proud of it. You can have it on your
wall like I have it on mine. All of our sources are in the description if you want to go poke into them. And thank you all for being here. I'll see you in the next one. Bye-Bye. (soft music)
