SPECIAL | As Elon Musk remakes Washington, we ask: Who is this guy anyway?
The Excerpt
USA TODAY
4.4 • 1.2K Ratings
🗓️ 19 March 2025
⏱️ 13 minutes
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Summary
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.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to The Excerpt. |
| 0:05.8 | I'm Taylor Wilson. |
| 0:07.0 | Today is Wednesday, March 19th, 2025, and this is a special episode of The Excerpt. |
| 0:18.2 | If you paid attention to Washington politics since the start to the new Trump administration, |
| 0:22.6 | one name is impossible to ignore Elon Musk. After his ventures with electric vehicles, |
| 0:27.8 | spacecraft, and social media, Musk's focus now appears to be the Department of Government |
| 0:32.1 | Efficiency and his unorthodox role as part of President Donald Trump's orbit. But who is Elon really? |
| 0:39.0 | And what are his motivations in this moment? |
| 0:41.2 | To help us unpack at all, I'm now joined by Kara Swisher. |
| 0:44.2 | Kara hosts the podcast Pivot and On with Kara Swisher. |
| 0:47.9 | Kara, thank you so much for joining me today on the excerpt. |
| 0:50.2 | No problem, no problem. |
| 0:51.5 | Can you just tell us a bit about Elon's background in early life? I think |
| 0:54.9 | folks know kind of the 30,000 foot view here, but when did you first meet him and how has he evolved |
| 0:59.8 | since then? 30 years ago, he had a company that put the yellow pages on the internet. It was very typical |
| 1:05.2 | of the day. It was called a zip two, and it was just moving the yellow pages digitally. That's all it was. It wasn't very |
| 1:10.9 | complex. He got sort of thrown out of that company. It got sold, and then he went on to |
| 1:15.5 | found a payments company called X.com, and that was merged. They were very big rivals with PayPal, |
| 1:22.3 | and it got merged, and you got thrown out of that company. But he made money from it when it |
| 1:26.5 | sold to eBay. Stoke of |
| 1:27.8 | luck, eBay paid an enormous amount of money, which started this PayPal Mafia group people. Now, |
| 1:33.3 | they all went on to do various and said every things, but he then focused in on two things, cars |
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