Elon Musk and America's Tech Oligarchy with Quinn Slobodian

The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart

Comedy Central

Comedy, News Commentary, Politics, News

4.5 • 10.4K Ratings

🗓️ 10 June 2026

⏱️ 96 minutes

🔗️ Recording | Apple Podcasts | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

As Elon Musk stands to become the world's first trillionaire through the SpaceX IPO, Jon is joined by Quinn Slobodian, co-author of the new book "Muskism," to understand how we arrived at this moment of tech oligarchy. Together, they explore how Musk built a trillion-dollar empire on government money and then used that empire to capture the government itself, and discuss how we can renegotiate the balance of power between public interest and private wealth. Plus, Jon answers listener questions about Trump’s amazing and enthusiastic boo-cheers, CNN, and Taco Bell, yet again! This episode is brought to you by: BOMBAS - Head over to https://Bombas.com/WEEKLY and use code WEEKLY for 20% off your first purchase. GROUND NEWS - Go to https://groundnews.com/stewart to see all sides of every story. Subscribe for 40% off the Vantage Subscription only for a limited time through our link https://groundnews.com/stewart. MINT MOBILE - Shop plans at https://MintMobile.com/TWS. SHOPIFY - Sign up for your $1 per month trial and start selling today at https://shopify.com/TWS. Follow The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart on social media for more: > YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@weeklyshowpodcast > Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/weeklyshowpodcast > TikTok: https://tiktok.com/@weeklyshowpodcast > X: https://x.com/weeklyshowpod > BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/theweeklyshowpodcast.com Host/Executive Producer – Jon Stewart Executive Producer – James Dixon Executive Producer – Chris McShane Executive Producer – Caity Gray Producer – Brittany Mehmedovic Producer – Gillian Spear Video Editor & Engineer – Rob Vitolo Audio Editor & Engineer – Nicole Boyce Music by Hansdle Hsu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello everybody. Welcome to the weekly show podcast. My name is John Stewart. And if you hear in my voice a certain weariness, a certain maybe barely, barely contained anger and upset.
0:24.3	The New York Knickerbockers last night.
0:26.0	They didn't win the game.
0:26.7	They didn't play their best game.
0:28.3	But man, oh man, the physicality of that game.
0:30.9	You cannot, can I make this a rule?
0:34.2	You cannot run over Jalen Brunson or throw him to the ground and just have the referees go
0:41.3	that's fine and you just can't do it no i'm not saying it's it's because of jalen bruns because of the
0:47.6	knicks but there there was a point in the game where victor wembenyama just basically threw him
0:53.5	to the ground and i don't care if brunson was hand checking him or grabbing it, doing the thing, whatever. You can't just throw a dude to the ground. And you can't just, I can't remember who the other guy was. Maybe it was Castle. Just ran directly into Brunson, threw an elbow out, plowed him over. And the reference, you know what? I apologize.
1:11.4	You don't want to hear this.
1:12.8	That's not what you're doing here.
1:16.5	You're here to have some interesting conversation with a person that cares about things that are beyond sports, things that might have some effect on the world that you live in, the world that we all live in,
1:27.6	the design, our future, and those things.
1:29.7	And I should just get to that.
1:30.7	I apologize.
1:31.6	I'm still hurting.
1:32.8	I'm hurting people.
1:34.7	That's all I'm saying.
1:36.4	It was a long night.
1:38.6	And damn, and we'll get them back tomorrow night.
1:43.7	That's all I can say but before that we're
	...

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