Elon, Inc.

Tuesday was a big day in the world of Tesla, which reported its second-quarter sales numbers. After a disastrous start to 2024, and despite year-over-year sales being down, the numbers weren’t that bad. David, Dana and Max talk it out with Bloomberg senior editor for autos Craig Trudell. Plus we have a lot of SpaceX and X news.

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Last week, the news broke that Tesla had terminated most of its supercharging team (along with summer interns) as part of a broader mass dismissal. Even with all the frantic efforts to bolster profits, this came as a surprise. Perhaps less of a surprise? White supremacist Nick Fuentes being allowed back on Musk’s X, where he promptly held a Sunday night Spaces broadcast with, as of Tuesday afternoon, 2.1 million viewers. The biggest surprise this week in Elon-world though had to be his new role as social media etiquette adviser, as he attempted to school J.K. Rowling on the best ways to post (remember the positive!).

David, Dana and Max are joined by Bloomberg tech reporter Kurt Wagner to unpack all of this, and then some.

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Were we talking about almost any other executive, the report by the Wall Street Journal over the weekend about Elon Musk’s alleged drug use would have qualified as a bombshell. The article contends the chief executive of SpaceX and Tesla has used a collection of substances. This, according to the Journal’s unidentified sources, has caused consternation within Musk’s companies, with Tesla board members and SpaceX executives privately expressing concerns that the alleged drug use may be making Musk unreliable and erratic.

But it’s not clear that many people, either inside or outside Musk’s companies, are genuinely worried. Musk mostly laughed off the report, offering a jokey response suggesting that any drugs he was taking should be seen as performance enhancers and noting that he’d passed government-mandated drug tests “after that one puff on Rogan”—a reference to a 2018 interview with Joe Rogan during which he smoked marijuana. Investors have been largely unmoved by all of this, partly because during the period that Musk is alleged to have indulged in illicit substances, he also made them a great deal of money. And Musk has mostly gone back to his regular schedule of boosting conspiracy theories proffered by election deniers, white nationalists and other assorted right wing influencers.

On this episode, we are joined by Loren Grush, a Bloomberg aerospace reporter and author of the NASA history, The Six, to discuss why these drug allegations haven’t hurt Musk and why a labor dispute involving SpaceX employees might be a bigger threat in the long run.

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When Elon Musk announced his new AI chatbot “Grok” last month, almost everything about it looked like a publicity stunt or a vanity project or both. The product was seemingly built over a matter of months, it was only available to a small group of X users and its chief selling point was Musk’s promise it wouldn’t be constrained by the “woke mind virus.” He boasted that Grok’s chatbot was “based”—a slang term meaning unapologetically right wing—and posted fratty memes meant to emphasize Grok’s dominance over market-leading competitor ChatGPT.

None of this inspired confidence. But with Grok now available to paying users of Musk’s social media platform, the reviews are coming in. And they’re surprisingly positive. This week we are joined by Bloomberg reporter Shirin Ghaffary, who has been testing out the new chatbot and comparing it ChatGPT and Google’s Bard chatbot.

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Over the holiday break, Elon Musk was busy making news on X, furiously posting his way into a multipronged fight with ultra-right wing MAGA luminaries Laura Loomer and Steve Bannon about immigration visas. But over the past 24 hours, two other stories arguably overshadowed the civil war in Trumpland: a deadly Cybertruck explosion in Las Vegas and some surprisingly bad sales numbers from Tesla. David Papadopoulos is joined by Max Chafkin and Dana Hull to break down the news.

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