Musk in the Trump 2.0 Era with Kate Conger

Why Is This Happening? The Chris Hayes Podcast

NBCNews

News, Nbcnews, Why Is This Happening?, The Chris Hayes Podcast, Chris Hayes, Politics, Government, Society & Culture, Msnbc, Withpod

4.6 • 8.9K Ratings

🗓️ 21 January 2025

⏱️ 52 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

We’ve never had a situation where the world’s richest man has essentially joined the White House as a co-president of sorts. What might this mean, especially when we consider Elon Musk’s history of unchecked power? Kate Conger is a New York Times reporter based in San Francisco, covering X and other technology companies. She’s also a co-author, along with Ryan Mac, of “Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter” Conger joins WITHpod to discuss what has happened to X under Musk’s stewardship, Musk’s growing political influence, the SEC suing him, why his role is so peculiar and more. We should note that Conger and Mac requested to interview Musk for their book, but mentioned that no response was received.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, everyone, it's Chris Hayes. Before we start the show today, I just wanted to give you a heads up about the book tour. My book, The Sirens Call, how attention became the world's most endangered resource, is out on Tuesday, January 28th next week. You can pre-order it now. If you go to MSNBC.com slash the dash sirens-call, that's the landing page where you can pre-order the book.
0:22.3	And crucially, you can get tickets for my events.
0:25.2	And I wanted to give you a heads up because the WithPod listeners tend to be some of the
0:29.1	diest, hardest, diehards.
0:32.8	And I would love to see you at these events.
0:34.4	And there's not that many tickets left.
0:35.6	So Wednesday, January 29th, I will be in Washington, D.C., 7 p.m. at 6th and I.
0:41.0	Friday, that same week, January 31st, I will be in Boston, 7 p.m. at Harvard Bookstore at First Parish.
0:47.9	And then Saturday, February 1st, I will be in New York, 7.30 p.m. at Temple Emmanuel L. Stryker Center. The next week, I go to California that Monday, February 3rd. I'm going to be in Palo Alto at 12 p.m. at the Commonwealth Club and San Francisco that night, 7 p.m. at Book Passage at Calvety Presbyterian. So there's a bunch of events after that. I'll just give you those because they're filling up very quickly.
1:12.2	If you want to check on events, I would love to see you there.
1:14.8	I really do love meeting people in person.
1:16.8	I love doing live events.
1:18.6	I'm a theater kid at heart.
1:20.0	So if you go to MSNBC.com slash the dash sirens dash call, you can get all that information.
1:27.2	See you there.
1:33.9	I hate to use the word because it's so cliche, but it's really unprecedented. And I think a lot of
1:38.1	other tech leadership is looking now at what Musk has been able to accomplish by aligning
1:43.1	himself so closely with Trump and
1:44.9	wanting to follow suit. And it is this very kind of transparent favor trading that's going on
1:50.8	throughout the industry right now where people are feeling like, okay, I can cozy up to the
1:54.6	president and that's going to have a beneficial impact for my business, which it's just happening
1:59.4	right out in the open. It's no longer something that
	...

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