Hello and welcome to the Bullwark podcast. I'm your host Tim Miller. Unfortunately, we have to bring back an expert on autocracy because that is our world right now. She's a staff writer at the Atlantic. Her books include Artocracy, Inc. The dictators who want to run the world, Twilight of Democracy, and the Pulitzer Prize winning Gulaga history. It's Ann Applebaum. How you

doing, Ann? I'm okay. I mean, personally, I'm fine. Yeah. Yeah, that's how I'm answering it, too.

Things are doing great inside this home. Once we get outside the home, it's a little, it gets

diceier and diceier.

Your most recent piece for the Atlantic is called Europe's Elon Musk problem. If you'd

indulge by Yankee myopia, I'd like to begin by discussing America's Elon Musk problem and

then we can back into the Europe side of things because there's a New York Times story out

this morning inside Musk's aggressive

incursion into the federal government. They write, there's no precedent for a government

official to have Mr. Musk's scale of conflicts of interest, which includes domestic holdings and

foreign connections. And there's no precedent for someone who is not a full-time employee to have

such ability to reshape the federal workforce. One agency official said before Congress and the courts can

respond, Elon Musk will have rolled up the whole government. I'm curious your thoughts on that

and parallels to what we've seen elsewhere. So I am not sure there is an exact parallel that we've seen anywhere else. What Musk has just done,

as you've said, is he's a private citizen. They've given him some kind of quasi-government status.

He's a government advisor, but he doesn't have a confirmed position. He's not part of any

congressionally confirmed office or department.

He himself is obviously not confirmed by anybody. And what he seems to have done is taken a group

of some apparently even very young engineers into government offices and started demanding

and downloading data. Let's put it this way. If, you know, the Chinese government were to be

doing this by hacking, this would be considered a major cyber warfare attack. There is no precedent

for giving that kind of information or that kind of access to a private citizen, even if the president

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