How Elon Musk Made Himself the Internet’s Main Character in 2023
Inside the Hive
Vanity Fair
4.2 • 1.5K Ratings
🗓️ 21 December 2023
⏱️ 41 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Host Brian Stelter breaks down Elon Musk’s erratic stewardship of Twitter, now X, with Zoë Schiffer, managing editor of Platformer and author of the forthcoming book, “Extremely Hardcore.” They discuss Musk’s rightward shift and war against the “woke mind virus,” the ramifications of him blowing up Twitter’s verification system, and whether it’s responsible to still post on X as misinformation and toxicity flow.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Hi, it's Radika Jones, editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair. |
| 0:05.0 | If you love digging into the week's political headlines, |
| 0:08.0 | subscribe to Vanity Fair. |
| 0:10.0 | Our reporters take you behind the scenes of some of the biggest stories from the campaign |
| 0:14.9 | trail to the halls of Congress. |
| 0:17.5 | Just for our Inside the Hive listeners, save 15% on a yearly digital subscription to Vanity Fair with promo code |
| 0:24.4 | pod 15 that's vanity fare.com promo code pod 15 for 15% off one year of all you can |
| 0:32.3 | read watch and media. fair to call Elon Musk the person of the year in tech and media and if so is it for all the wrong |
| 0:56.8 | reasons absolutely I think he was the main character of the internet and I think that was arguably his goal in buying Twitter in the |
| 1:05.6 | first place and he made it so at every twist and turn this entire year. |
| 1:10.3 | That is Zoe Schiffer. |
| 1:13.0 | She's the managing editor of Platformer, |
| 1:15.0 | and author of the forthcoming book Extremely Hardcore |
| 1:19.0 | Inside Elon Musk's Twitter. |
| 1:22.0 | And I'm Brian Selder. Welcome to Vanity Fair's Inside the Hive. |
| 1:26.8 | This week on our final episode of the year, we're going inside the disinformation machine. |
| 1:32.4 | And looking at a man who really did shape |
| 1:34.8 | 2023 in many ways and many times for the worse. |
| 1:40.3 | Elon Musk bought Twitter toward the end of 2022 and he spent most of this year chasing staff and users and advertisers away. |
| 1:50.0 | His ownership has changed Twitter now called X in even more ways than I could have imagined. |
| 1:56.0 | But I'm not the expert here. Zoe is. Zoe you've been studying this. You're about to come out with a book on the subject. |
| 2:02.0 | What was Musk's stated reason for taking over |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Vanity Fair, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Vanity Fair and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2025.