Maybe it's because of quarantine, or maybe it's just my own tendencies, but I've spent

way too much time on Twitter lately, which in my world means it's been hard to ignore Elon Musk.

In between tweets about his company's Tesla and SpaceX, you get tweets like, cancel, cancel culture, and Minecraft has amazing legs.

Or, more significantly, on May 11th, saying he'd be defying the public health order that had closed one of his factories in California.

He tweeted, Tesla is restarting production today

against Alameda County rules. Sometimes he's just playing with people other times he means it.

You know, he uses it as a performance, I think, is that is what he's doing. That's Kara Swisher,

the dean of tech journalists. She started Recode, hosts the Pivot podcast, and she's covered Elon Musk for a long time.

And Kara does not suffer fools.

Well, yeah, I was going to ask you this past weekend, he tweeted, take the red pill, which is this...

Whatever.

Take the red pill is a line from the Matrix.

It means basically, wake up and see the truth.

Yes, it's a line from a movie, but it's also become popular with the alt-right.

The alt-right has grabbed it, but before that, a lot of techies like that line, too.

But I think he fully knows all the implications.

I think a lot of people

get angry because he knows the implications and he still makes a joke anyway.

The thing about Elon Musk's tweeting now is that it's part joke, part performance art,

and part defiance of public health guidelines.

And it has real stakes for his companies and their workers.

I ask Kara to help me understand what is going on in his brain.

...