It's the Brian Lairn Show on WNYC.

Good morning again, everyone.

I'm Bridget Bergen in for Brian today.

Now we'll take some time to talk about a businessman who in the past years became a big hero for some Americans and a villain for others.

The wealthiest man in the world, Elon Musk, will be leading Trump's new Department of Government Efficiency with former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramoswamy.

But how did Musk go from the CEO of a startup to having a seat

next to the president-elect, Donald Trump? Joining us now is Max Schofkin, who has been reporting on

Elon Musk for almost 20 years. He's a features editor and a tech reporter at Bloomberg Businessweek,

author of the book The Contrarian,

Peter Thiel and the Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power and host of Bloomberg's new podcast,

Citizen Elon. Max, welcome to WNYC. Hey. So, you know, just taking a step back,

why do you think it's important for the public to understand Elon Musk?

I mean, obviously, there's a great business story there, but his proximity to the president-elect makes it a lot more than that, right?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think you could make a case that Elon Musk is the most powerful person in the world today.

You probably could even try to make a case that he might be the most powerful person in the history of the world.

He is the richest person on earth by some margin, you know, worth more than $300 billion.

It operates several very large and influential companies.

Tesla, you know, large automaker,

the most valuable automaker in the world, and a very large space company, SpaceX, which, you know,

is a major supplier to the U.S. government in terms of rocket launches. And then you layer on top of

that this direct influence he has with President-elect Trump.

I mean, he is, as far as we can tell, you know, one of a handful of key advisors.

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