As Elon Musk remakes Washington, we ask: Who is this guy anyway? | The Excerpt
On a special episode (first released on March 19, 2025) of The Excerpt podcast: If you’ve paid attention to Washington politics since the start of the new Trump administration, one name is impossible to ignore – Elon Musk. After his ventures with electric vehicles, spacecraft, and social media, Musk’s focus now appears to be the Department of Government Efficiency, and his unorthodox role as part of President Donald Trump’s orbit. But who is Musk, really? And what are his motivations in this moment? Journalist Kara Swisher, who also hosts the podcasts "Pivot" and "On with Kara Swisher" and has been covering Musk for decades, joins The Excerpt to dig into it with us. Let us know what you think of this episode by sending an email to podcasts@usatoday.com.
Hit play on the player below to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript beneath it. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.
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Taylor Wilson:
Hello and welcome to the Excerpt, I'm Taylor Wilson. If you've paid attention to Washington politics since the start to the new Trump administration, one name is impossible to ignore: Elon Musk. After his ventures with electric vehicles, spacecraft and social media, Musk's focus now appears to be the Department of Government Efficiency and his unorthodox role as part of President Donald Trump's orbit. But who is Elon really? And what are his motivations in this moment? To help us unpack it all, I'm now joined by Kara Swisher. Kara hosts the podcast Pivot and On with Kara Swisher. Kara, thank you so much for joining me today on the Excerpt.
Kara Swisher:
No problem.
Taylor Wilson:
Can you just tell us a bit about Elon's background and early life? I think folks know kind of the 30,000-foot view here, but when did you first meet him and how has he evolved since then?
Kara Swisher:
30 years ago, he had a company that put the yellow pages on the internet, it was very typical of the day. It was called Zip2, and it was just moving the yellow pages digitally, that's all it was, it wasn't very complex. He got sort of thrown out of that company, it got sold, and then he went on to found a payments company called x.com, and that was merged... They were very big rivals with PayPal, and it got merged and he got thrown out of that company, but he made money from it when it sold to eBay, the stroke of luck, eBay paid an enormous amount of money, which started this PayPal Mafia group of people. Now, they all went on to do various and other things, but he then focused in on two things, cars and rockets essentially.
I was quite intrigued by that because a lot of people would do, I don't know, a digital dry cleaning service or something inane, and he actually was doing something of difficulty and substance. Now, he did not found Tesla, for people to understand, he did not, there were other people that did. He invested, but he was a very good operations person, a bit of a chaos monkey again. But at the same time, he was dealing with really difficult areas, and so he created both those companies and used the force of his personality to get them going, very much like Henry Ford in lots of ways, by the way, and not so nice ways too. And he pushed them through and grew them at a time when people were not focused on those or had had failures around the electric car industry, for example. And he was trying to innovate in rocketry, always a long interest of his. He's not an expert on it, but he's brought in a lot of great people and then he moved into Starlink and everything else.
So he was doing a lot of really difficult and interesting businesses, and he became very wealthy because of it. Some of it because the stock became kind of a meme stock that represented him, in other cases because he was really innovating in a very difficult area.
Taylor Wilson:
All right, so you shift from kind of that era of Musk to this moment now, Kara, I mean, how did we get to this point? When did Musk start cozying up to Trump and others in that world? And how did he end up with such a powerful and influential role in this administration?
Kara Swisher:
Well, Donald Trump likes money and he's the world's richest man. I think that's pretty much all you need to know about that. And he's useful to Trump as a heat shield and a money provider. I think Donald Trump, anyone who's powerful, who is obsequious to him, which Elon is, is attractive; it's an attractive trait for him. He also provides him enormous amounts of ability to threaten legislators with primaries and things like that by using Musk's money. So he's useful in lots of reasons for Donald Trump, it makes perfect sense to me why he's linking with him. Initially, they were hostile to each other a little bit, they traded a lot of barbs. And when I was talking to Musk, he was quite... He thought Donald Trump was a moron, he really did. Much like JD Vance, same thing, Vance was more anti-Trump than Musk, Musk wanted to try to work with him, but he was quite interested in climate change and even LGBTQ rights, now he's sort of an enemy of that.
He was hoping to make change because I think he does feel like a lot of people that the deficit is too high, the government's run inefficiently. These are not controversial things to say, and it's not like the penny dropped out of the sky when he suddenly realized this. This has always been an ongoing issue in Washington, is the growth of the federal government and the inefficiencies, but government's not there to be efficient by the way, necessarily, it's there to serve the people. And so it's a little different than running a startup.
And he got more and more over COVID, he became more radicalized, I would say. He got very interested in conspiracy theories, like a lot of people during that time. The Journal's written about his journey with drugs, Ketamine particularly. The Journal wrote a great piece about it that from what I know is completely accurate. And then he had some issues in his own family with his daughter who is trans that seemed to have radicalized him in some strange and terrible way. Heinous is the word I would use for it. And he sort of changed over that period, I would say from COVID on, there had been signs of this, there had been issues in the factories around safety, around racial issues, et cetera. But really, he really radicalized during the COVID period of time about the government particularly.
Taylor Wilson:
Well, as you say, business and politics, I mean, these are two different things and they often get conflated now in this era. But can we look to this business career, this part of Musk's life, and how he's run his companies, Kara, for clues on how he's now approaching DOGE in this moment?
Kara Swisher:
Yeah, I think, his companies have had a series of issues, right? But what he does is he's very risk tolerant, he'll blow up 90 rockets to get to the one that works. Now, not everybody can do that; NASA can't do that. NASA can't blow up one rocket, at all, or else they're in big trouble. And so he has a real risk tolerance, that's one thing. So he doesn't mind just shutting things down. He also doesn't mind rushing through rules, at all. He breaks them all the time and then lets everybody sort it out, whether he gets lawsuits or anything else, like with Twitter, he just fired everyone and not paying them severance by law and just is like, come and get me. He had stupid things, he had a sign up on top of... A giant glowing X on top of a San Francisco building, very dangerous to people below, he just did it. And then he took it down, but he didn't care if they fined him, that's the kind of personality. So he sort of barrels through things.
He counts on the fact that it's very difficult to stop someone who's willing to blow stop signs, right? But in this case, it's closing down government institutions. He also has a real... again, risk tolerance is enormous for him and a lack of empathy towards anybody, that's another thing that's very well known about him. Also, extreme sensitivity to criticism, you see him reacting to anybody even like SNL, which of course they're going to make fun of him and his ridiculous chainsaw behavior. That's just, come on, give me a break, and he's angry about it. He got very mad at the Biden administration for not inviting him to an EV summit. I thought that was an error on the Biden administration's part, but I heard about it for months. And recently someone said, he's still talking about that EV summit. He's still angry that he wasn't invited to it. And so he's very much into revenge, I guess, I don't know, or grudges, the grudge. He's a grudgey kind of person.
And so all kinds of things. And then he gets ideas from people that aren't factual and he sort of incorporates them, and then if he makes a mistake, he goes, oh, I made a mistake, even if it's critical mistake. That's what he does; it's very typical. But what he's aiming at is destroying parts of the government. I would say eliminating them completely.
Taylor Wilson:
What I'm hearing, Kara, and correct me if I'm wrong, it seems like Musk seems to move from one thing to the next pretty quickly.
Kara Swisher:
He does.
Taylor Wilson:
We've seen that throughout his career. Does that mean he'll simply get bored of DOGE at some point?
Kara Swisher:
No.
Taylor Wilson:
And what would that mean for the American people?
Kara Swisher:
No, I don't think so, but he has this sort of life where he jumps from one thing to the next and is constantly bored and constantly in need of excitement in some way or however that may manifest itself.
And so he finds this to be a great challenge, and that's why Tesla is suffering very badly, sales are down by a lot. They haven't innovated... And this is a very fair thing to say, they haven't innovated their lineup in a long time. That's why everybody else is catching up. Not just because people don't want to buy his cars because they don't like him. The car experience has not improved, and that product is critically important, really good product. And so he's bored with Tesla, so that's why that hasn't happened. And the people there aren't empowered enough to do their own thing, obviously. And so he moves from thing to thing to thing, and this is the biggest challenge of all. So I think he's going to be here for a while, I think everyone's thinking that there's going to be some blowup. There might be, but I'm not so sure you should count on that.
Taylor Wilson:
I'm curious who in Musk's world matters to him? And do his personal relationships tell us anything?
Kara Swisher:
I've talked to various people close to him, and most people are terrified of him, of retaliation if they speak out in any way. It seems like he has a relationship with this woman named Shivon Zilis, who was on the board of OpenAI. They've had their fourth child, I think. She seems to be, if he has a partner, it seems that's who it is, and I don't know her, I've met her once. Most of Musk's relationships end and people leave. It's littered with people who have worked for him and have left in exasperation and abuse really, they just can't take it. The manicness, the yelling. One person told me at Neuralink, which is his brain chip company, that he comes in, he kicks over some trash cans and he leaves and everyone gets back to work. It was funny, it made me laugh when I heard that.
So he likes to do that. Like, I'm here to go, you're all terrible. Just what he's doing in the government and with no interest in knowing exactly what anybody does specifically, let's just break it and then pick up the pieces later. He's done that in a lot of federal agencies. No idea what anybody does, nor does he care.
Taylor Wilson:
Who are the people in his circle or his biggest influences when it comes to, as you put it, being adjacent to some of this far right hate?
Kara Swisher:
Well, he likes to make trouble. He's always been a troublemaker. And I appreciate that or that's one part I did appreciate is that he was always questioning things. But now it's moved into a tremendously heinous direction in terms of just constantly never wanting to fix things, just break them. And I think it's a really dangerous thing to insult people. Insult people way beneath... The issue I started to have with him, he was insulting California regulators about closing his company at the time of COVID. It's okay to be cautious when you don't know what's happening, because God forbid if it would have been like an Ebola thing. We don't know. And perhaps caution might be... Oh, it's a government trying to... It wasn't. It was, nobody knew what was happening and people make mistakes and things like that.
And so instead of looking at it that way, it became this ridiculous conspiracy theory around the deep state. I mean, I wish our government were that competent, but they're not. They're just not. Government in general is not as competent as we hope it would be, but it's because it's a difficult thing to run government, it really is. It actually is. And the fact that he insults all these amazing government workers, the way he does without any knowledge of what they do or whether they're competent or not, is really, it's grotesque. It's actually grotesque.
Can I just tell you? It's sad because this is someone who was doing some really interesting things, who could have been a force for good, could have been a real force for bringing people together and doing great things. I believe in going to Mars. I believe in the space travel thing; I believe we should be a multi-planetary species. He's right; we're in great risk. But where has he been on climate change now that he's thrown in with this gang? Did he really mean it, or not? So that's the kind of thing. So that's what's really sad here, is someone with enormous potential instead wants to divide us and make us pay attention to him all the time, to indulge his personal problems is really sad.
Taylor Wilson:
Kara Swisher, I really appreciate picking your brain on this.
Kara Swisher:
Thank you.
Taylor Wilson:
It's obviously a topic you're passionate about, and I appreciate you coming on. And you can find Kara's podcast everywhere you get your pods. Her podcast, Pivot is now also on YouTube, as is the Excerpt. And thank you so much for joining me, Kara, appreciate you.
Kara Swisher:
Thank you.