Elon Musk: Money, memes and Mars

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26:38So he's a billionaire. Fine. He's also pretty popular. The public have noticed him by now. I remember watching the Iron Man movie from the Marvel superhero comic book universe. And you might know that Robert Downey Jr.'s portrayal of Tony Stark is meant to be based on Elon Musk. But Elon Musk is actually in the film himself. He's one of the billionaires that Tony Stark is hobnobbing with. He's more than a business person now. He's a cultural pinup as well. I mean, Time magazine, among others, calls him a true visionary. And he's shaking up two enormous industries here, you know, cars. There's something symbolic, especially in the US, about the car industry.

27:15It means in the old days they say what's good for General Motors is good for America. It gets right to the heart of the industrial nature of a country. And he's a hero to environmentalists as well because they think if he can decarbonize the car industry, then he's doing the planet a great favor as well. So he's being lauded in many, many circles. Yeah. So, you know, Hollywood, he's got environmentalists and the eco left on his side. You couldn't ask for a better PR profile. And, you know, he's not your typical business person. He's a bit odd. You know, he's idiosyncratic. He's idiosyncratic. He talks in a way that business people don't usually talk.

27:51He talks in a much more interesting way about the future, about whatever. You know, he's riding high in 2012. But not all is well behind the scenes at Tesla because the company was seriously struggling. to keep up with demand. Elon, however, is good at making wild promises and somehow pulling them off and in what will become a signature move he takes to Twitter. Now, over the past few years, by 2012, Twitter had become, you know, a very hot social media platform. It had 200 million users by 2012. President Obama took to Twitter to publicly declare victory in the US president election that year.

28:26and so now Elon takes to Twitter telling the public Tesla will be profitable in Q1 2013. That means by the first three months of 2013. And he promises to deliver almost 5 ,000 cars. In reality, in the second quarter of the year before, they delivered just 12 cars. So going from 12 ,000 to 5 ,000 in a year is quite the promise. Incredibly specific, very rare in the business world to sort of make yourself a hostage to fortune like that. I mean, you must be wondering what his team were thinking of. They must have been tearing their hair out behind the scenes. But the thing is, Elon expects his employees to work just as hard as he does.

29:02And he makes something of an example of himself. His desk is in the middle of the Tesla factory floor, so he can make sure his team are working hard enough. He's even known for sleeping under his desk during these particularly brutal production pushes. Remember, at this point, he's a billionaire. He doesn't need to be doing this if he doesn't want to. He once told Bloomberg, I wanted my circumstances to be worse than anyone else at the company. whenever they felt pain I wanted mine to be worse. It is amazing I would imagine what a pain reliever having billions of dollars actually is. Kind of takes you know a very very powerful pain relief.

29:37Yeah if you can afford the private chauffeur to take you home after those all-nighters I assume it feels a lot better than having to drive yourself home to your wife and children. But this kind of pressure applied centrally from Elon came at a cost. A 2017 report found that Tesla factory workers were seriously injured more than twice as often as the industry average. Tesla didn't even dispute those numbers. Their response was, we're learning how to be a car company. What matters is the future. But Elon makes good on his tweet because by the end of Q1 in 2013, Tesla delivered the promised 5 ,000 cars and it turned an$11 million profit.

30:13So for the first time in Tesla's 10-year history, they're profitable. Tesla's stock shoots up by four and a half times and that boosts Elon's wealth to no end. However, Elon's reputation as a boss goes beyond the grueling all-nighters. It's worth taking a minute to look at some of the more serious allegations, and there are a few. In 2022, Business Insider revealed a sexual misconduct claim made against Elon in 2018 by a SpaceX flight attendant. She accused him of exposing himself and offering to buy her a horse in exchange for sex acts. SpaceX ultimately paid her$250 ,000 to set up the claim, and it was reported she had to sign a non-disclosure agreement.

30:51The BBC was unable to independently verify the report at the time and Elon denied these allegations. He said, if I was inclined to engage in sexual harassment, this is unlikely the first time in my entire 30-year career that it comes to light. But that wasn't all. The Wall Street Journal published a report detailing multiple allegations of Elon's inappropriate behaviour at SpaceX dating back as far as 2013. They claim he had sex with an employee and a former intern and asked a woman at his company to have his babies. Elon didn't respond, but SpaceX's president and chief operating officer dismissed the report, calling the allegations untruths, mischaracterizations and revisionist history.

31:29She added that SpaceX takes harassment complaints seriously. A group of SpaceX employees wrote an open letter calling Elon a distraction and an embarrassment. In some places, you might want to reach out to those employees and listen to their grievances. The employees who wrote that letter were fired. So the US National Labour Relations Board accused the company of unlawful terminations. SpaceX denies this and Elon sued the National Labour Relations Board in return. So far, he's won a temporary block on that case. The group of former employees sued SpaceX and Elon, claiming that there was a toxic work culture where, in their words, he runs the company in the Dark Ages, treating women as sexual objects to be evaluated on their bra size and bombarding the workplace with lewd sexual banter.

32:15SpaceX and Elon have denied wrongdoing and the case is ongoing. But let's get back to Tesla. In 2018, they once again have production problems. This time, they're missing even more delivery deadlines. Tesla's credit rating is downgraded to negative due to a significant shortfall in production. I think at this point, we probably have to explain what a credit rating is. Well, it's just like individuals have a credit rating. Have you missed a payment on a couple of credit cards? Did you miss your mortgage payment? You become seen as a riskier borrower. It's going to get harder to get a loan next time.

32:46And companies get this as well. And companies have exactly the same thing. So basically, Tesla's not delivering. Things aren't going that well. So Tesla's credit rating is downgraded, making it just that little bit more difficult, more expensive when you want to raise money in the future. And by August that year, Tesla reported its biggest ever loss. Just a week after Tesla's worst financial report, Elon sends a tweet. I am considering taking Tesla private at$420, funding secured. What does that mean? You can either be publicly listed, your shares on the stock exchange, or you can be privately owned.

33:22Sometimes companies like to be private because you don't have to hit quarterly targets. There's less transparency. So I think he's saying I'm getting beaten up because I keep missing production targets. I'm just getting a lot of aggravation by being a public company. But what he said was, considering taking Tesla private at 420, that was higher than the share price was at the time. The really controversial bit here is he said funding secured. And if you say something like that, it's a tantamount to saying, I am going to pay everyone$420 for their shares, which are worth less than that at the moment.

33:59And to do that on a tweet is going to impact the share price. And there are very strict rules about things that can influence the share price. It can be considered market manipulation. So Tesla shares went up 11%. The regulators, the financial police, the people called the Securities and Exchange Commission, get involved. And they allege that the funding was not, in fact, secured. So Elon's saying, I'm taking it private at 420. I've got the money to do this. And the big debate was like, do you really have the money to do this? And that's what the Securities and Exchange Commission were looking into, saying you're actually telling something which isn't true.

34:38And Elon neither admitted nor denied those allegations. Can I also add that 420 is a bit of a joke number in the sense that 420 is the viral meme joke hashtag signifier for just weed, as in 420 day. Is it? So I think that the time that this tweet was made, there were people saying, is he just making a really silly joke about being stoned? I did not know any of this. Well, I think this is the thing, as we'll discover later on, with Elon's Twitter persona. There's always a sense of, is he being for real here? Is he actually being serious? Well, either way, it landed him into hot water. Well, yeah.

35:14I mean, if he isn't being serious and just doing some kind of, you know, meme joke, that'll make the financial police even more angry because you can't mess around with stuff as serious as the financial market. Yeah. I mean, the case was settled with Elon in the end. So Elon and Tesla each had to pay$20 million in fines. And he was allowed to remain as Tesla CEO, but he has to step down as chairman for three years. So we are now officially entering Elon Musk's most infamous era in which he regularly make the headlines and not just in the business news and not just because he's being an eco warrior who's going to revolutionize the car industry.

35:50Do you remember when 12 boys and their football coach were trapped underground in a Thai cave? I really do. No. Elon sends a submarine to rescue them, but a caving expert involved in the rescue dismisses this as a PR stunt, as the submarine was impractical. You don't usually send submarines into caves, I think. And he adds that Elon could, in his words, stick his submarine where it hurts. Well, once again, Elon takes to Twitter, calling him with absolutely no evidence at all, a pedo guy. He later deletes the tweet, apologises and ends up winning the defamation case that the caving expert files against him.

36:25But again, the court of public opinion, serious damage has been done there. He also goes, for example, onto the Joe Rogan podcast, one of our rivals, of course, and casually smokes a joint. Hours later, two senior executives quit and Tesla's market value dropped 6%. And because he also runs a rocket company, the federal government has to review his security clearance. And the fallout involves the introduction of random drug tests for him and SpaceX employees. It also marks, I think, what you might describe as a shift in how freely Elon tweets out his thoughts and opinions. I think you could call him a Twitter addict or at least an ex-addict, as it's now called.

37:07He literally cannot let a day pass without wading in to give his opinion, whether it's posting something he thinks or retweeting someone else's thoughts. But I remember around this time, people were talking about Tesla and they said, oh, what's Tesla's share price? It all depends on what happens in the next five minutes on his Twitter. It does make you wonder if the Tesla shareholders rue the day Elon ever installed Twitter on his smartphone. And in 2018, the Securities and Exchange Commission forced Tesla to appoint a so-called Twitter sitter, an in-house lawyer who's basically supposed to supervise and vet tweets from Musk.

37:39Well, you can decide for yourself how successful that Twitter sitter has been. His personal life is also no less controversial because by this point, Tallulah and him have divorced for a second time. And in the early 2020s, he's in this on-again, off-again relationship with Grimes. I don't know if you know who Grimes is. I've heard of Grimes. Tell me more. So she's a Canadian electronic musician. She was basically a critical darling of a lot of the indie music establishment of platforms like Pitchfork. I myself loved Grimes when she first came out. Interestingly, she's also very into science fiction and tech.

38:13And this is how she and Elon first bonded. However, it's not all smooth sailing for Grimes and Elon Musk because news then breaks that Elon has secretly fired the twins through IVF with an executive at one of his companies, except he'd also forgotten to mention this to Grimes, who says that she only found out about the twins when everyone else did. Well, his response to the headlines was, predictably maybe, a tweet. Doing my best to help the underpopulation crisis. A collapsing birth rate is the biggest danger civilization faces by far. and this is interesting this pronatalism stance is quite a big feature of elon musk to date he's fathered at least 14 children with four women you could also do an entire podcast i think on how pronatalism has kind of spread around silicon valley because elon musk i don't think it's the only tech bro who's interested in pronatal policies like this well i think and it is true that basically the birth rate in most developed countries has fallen quite precipitously and in many countries is below what they call the replacement rate, how many kids you need to have to keep the population where it is at the moment.

39:16And he thinks this is a bad idea. Remember, this is a person who is intent on saving civilisation and making it a multi-planetary species. If you're going to populate all these planets, you need plenty of people. Although I think most people would agree you shouldn't personally be responsible for populating those planets with your children. He's estranged from one of his children. Last year, he posted, the woke mind virus killed my son, referring to his estranged but very much alive trans daughter Vivian, who later spoke to NBC News. She's described her father as cold. He's very quick to anger.

39:49He's uncaring and narcissistic. Ouch. But all this controversy and making headlines is not hurting Elon Musk's bank balance. In January 2021, he officially became the richest person in the world, surpassing Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. Tesla had sorted out a lot of its production issues and was doing really well. And the world was really ready for electric vehicles at this time. Stock prices skyrocketed. And this increased Elon's net worth to over$185 billion. Jeff Bezos was 184 at that time. So he's top of the heap.

40:25And what does he do now? Elon decides he doesn't just want to use Twitter like the rest of us. Nope, he wants to own it. And this move will become absolutely fundamental to everything that has happened to his life since. Yeah. And I suppose owning a social media website gives you a massive platform, a massive megaphone on the world stage? Well, it's kind of like all those Gilded Age tycoons and barons, right? They all wanted to own a newspaper. Like William Randolph Hearst, for example, Rupert Murdoch, of course. Although I think at the time Twitter wasn't even a particularly... I mean, Twitter was falling behind its rivals, right, at the time.

41:01It was never really on the same level as Facebook or Instagram, for instance. So this was kind of seen as a sort of a bad bet for Elon. And also one he probably regretted. It was a very chaotic, very public battle. He went from offering to buy the platform for$44 billion. And a lot of people thought this was just a rush of blood to the head. So he actually tries to back out of it. And then eventually, through lawyers and what have you, he was forced into doing the deal. because otherwise he could get one of those other things where basically I offered this and no, I don't mean it. You're making the share price go up and down like a yo-yo.

41:37So they say you have to go through with what you originally offered. So he goes through with it and then he walks into Twitter's headquarters with that thing that we were talking about at the beginning of the episode. And once he takes over at Twitter, this is when the real drama begins. So he lays off 50 % of the workforce and then he tells the remaining staff they need to commit to an extremely hardcore, in his words, work schedule or take a severance package. And in a move that many marketing experts would probably advise against, he changed a globally recognised name from Twitter to X. And under Elon, the platform has changed significantly, right?

42:13Completely. I mean, for example, under Elon, one of the first things they did was scrap its COVID misinformation policy. It disbanded its Trust and Safety Council, which was to advise on content moderation, for example. And also don't forget, he reinstated accounts also linked to neo-Nazis. Anti-Semitic tweets doubled from June 2022 to February 2023, according to research from the Institute of Strategic Dialogue. An EU Commission report in 2023 found that X had the highest levels of Russian disinformation among all major social platforms, and understandably many advertisers fled. Fewer people were using it as their social platform of choice.

42:50And I remember this because by 2024, X had lost 71 % of its value So for a man known as Building Billion Dollar Empires X, looks like or looked like at that time one of his biggest business flops. But of course, there are other advantages, as we discussed, to owning a social media platform. Yes, of course. One of Elon's first moves at Twitter was to reinstate Donald Trump's account. Elon then donated what's reported to be hundreds of millions of dollars to Trump's re-election campaign. And during a speech celebrating his inauguration, Elon caused controversy when he made a one-armed gesture twice that many interpreted as a Nazi salute.

43:28And in context, this is also following Elon's public support of some far-right parties and figures in places like Germany. Elon had quite an interesting response to all of this. Yeah, he said, frankly, they need better dirty tricks. The everyone is Hitler attack is so tired. So up until now, we've been discussing Elon, the tech guy, Elon, the businessman, Elon, the social media owner. But now we're about to see Elon make a very interesting move into politics. So he and Trump have a close relationship at this point. Elon's actually personally taken credit for having helped get Trump elected as president.

44:02And if you look at how much money he spent on Twitter, and it's given him this kind of avenue of political power, many people say, oh, it's worth it. Yeah, maybe. I mean, you know, if you're being close to the President of the United States, maybe that's money well spent. Because once Trump is president, he makes Elon a special government employee, heading up a new body tasked with reducing US government spending and cutting jobs. It's called the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. And that acronym is a nod to cryptocurrency called Dogecoin, which Elon was particularly fond of. And during this time, Trump publicly endorses Tesla.

44:39He actually sits in one with Elon on the lawn outside the White House. And Elon Musk even joins Trump's cause with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. I remember that bit where they basically have all the Teslas parked outside on the White House lawn. Quite the image at the time. Quite the image. Anyway, it was quite short-lived. After 130 days, Elon stepped down from Doge. In that time, Doge shuttered government agencies, defunded programs like DEI, that's Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, and made mass layoffs. What he did received both huge praise and huge criticism. So, yeah, I mean, it was a pretty crazy time that he was in the White House.

45:15I mean, he was there with his famous chainsaw. You remember that picture? Yes. Brandishing a chainsaw. Inspired by Argentina President Javier Millet. Yeah. And also there have been executives in the past who are called Chainsaw Al, whatever. It's synonymous with those people who make massive cuts, basically. But and this is the interesting thing, because many claim that despite all of this, he simply did not get the job done. He failed to reach savings anywhere near his stated goals. So he originally pledged to cut at least two trillion dollars, but subsequently halved this target. And there are still huge questions over the claims of the savings made.

45:48And a lot of people said with two characters like Musk and Trump, it's only a matter of time before sparks begin to fly and this bromance hits the rocks. And so it turned out. In June of this year, Elon posted on X about Trump's tax cut and spending bill, the budget often referred by Trump to one big, beautiful bill. He called it, doesn't put his punches here, a disgusting abomination. and Elon believed that the bill would undermine all the efficiencies he'd made and it also threatened Tesla's profits in a very interesting way. Over the next few hours, the pair threw insults and threats at each other publicly.

46:29Everyone is, including myself, was absolutely compelled by this. Glued to the screen. Probably the highest levels of engagement Exit had in quite a while. Trump threatened to revoke billions of dollars in government contracts for Elon's companies. Elon threatened to decommission the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft that NASA used. Trump called Elon crazy, all caps. It continued to escalate, but eventually Elon backtracked. Six days later, he posted on X, I regret some of my posts about President Trump last week. They went too far. And actually, this spat with the president started affecting his bank balance in one day, particularly after that bit when Trump threatened to revoke billions of dollars in government contracts for Elon's companies.

47:11Tesla shares plummeted 14%, which knocked nearly$10 billion off Musk's total net worth. I remember doing the 10 o 'clock news about this on this day. I figured out that since Trump had taken office, Elon Musk's net worth had at one point declined by$100 billion. Wow. So he had lost more money for his political machinations than almost anyone has ever made in history. Because there's only a few who are centibillionaires, right, that we've covered. Then some world economies even. Yeah. But in the long run, Elon's wealth is still skyrocketing. As we speak here right now, he's worth nearly$500 billion,$485 billion.

47:56And that's up from 195 last year, according to Forbes. Now, I think at this point, most listeners will be going, but oh, my God, Elon is the guy who walks around with a chainsaw, who tweets all this stuff. How is he worth this much more money? OK, so we'll explain it to you. SpaceX is now worth$400 billion, but that's not the only thing that makes up his wealth. He's still got a massive chunk in Tesla, whose fortunes have revived because they're now pivoting into robotics like humanoid type robots, which everyone's very excited about. and he's getting into what is the biggest gold rush possibly in history, which is artificial intelligence.

48:35And this is where XAI comes in. Elon had founded this AI company, XAI, in 2023. XAI then bought social media company X, which threatens to make him even richer. Yeah, it really has. And this is to do with Trump and Elon appearing to kiss and make up. They reconnected at Charlie Kirk's funeral in September. Kirk was the right-wing activist who was shot and killed during a campus speaking tour. And a few days after that, the Trump administration signed a deal with XAI that would allow it to be used widely across government. This year alone, XAI has raised$20 billion, with one key investor saying, I think this is really important, harks back to something I said earlier, almost everything that Elon's part of, you really want to be part of as well.

49:20People don't want to miss out on Elon's next brainwave and next fortune-making idea. And as I say, he's got this reputation of being the greatest fundraiser, almost like a sort of profit of the next big thing. And people will follow him and are very, very loyal to him. Yeah, so where he goes, people with deep pockets will follow. So now we get to that section of the podcast where we score our billionaires on a number of categories, things like wealth, controversy, philanthropy, power and legacy. We mark them for fun from one to ten. And then we're going to ask you whether you think they're good, bad or just another billionaire.

49:55And if you're new to the podcast, this is always just us having a little bit of fun. I'm not actually sure how good we are with this marking business. Yeah, this is definitely a reason why neither of us became teachers. But let us start with wealth. I mean, this is easy. Do we have to even go through? OK, currently The Witch's Person,$485 billion. and in fact Elon's wealth temporarily crossed the half trillion, 500 billion mark, before dropping back again. In November of this year the Tesla board voted that Elon should receive$1 trillion if and when he meets certain targets. He's got to raise Tesla's market value to$8.5 trillion from$1.4 trillion at the time of recording.

50:34He's got to deliver tons of robots and millions of cars and then he'll be rewarded with over 400 million new shares which could be worth nearly$1 trillion. And that would make him the first ever trillionaire in human history. For people, we need a new category. We need a new podcast. Now, this is really interesting because I think it's also important to note that Elon describes himself as cash poor. In 2020, he tweeted, I am selling almost all physical possessions. We'll own no house. I think that's changed. It's funny, though. I think in Silicon Valley, there's a fetishisation of being cash poor in the sense that I don't need worldly possessions.

51:12I just need my big, beautiful brain and I'll make billions more. It's kind of like the aesthetics of monkness. It's just like all I need. Monasticism. Monasticism in pursuit of ideas that are going to change the world. And if I get rich a long way, well, I don't really notice that. That's not what it's all about. I put that to a tech bro who I know personally as a friend. And he said, oh, don't believe that rubbish. It's all about the money. well if it is all about the money i think i'm gonna have to score him a 10 out of 10 can we give him an 11 can we do a spinal tap 11 on this yeah he'll be he'll be the first billionaire to get 11 out of 10 on wealth uh controversy well there's no shortage of this either is there no i mean even just putting aside the number of people he's fallen out with the co-founders of tesla the number of boardroom coups he's been involved with those romantic entanglements the enormous number of children he said to have fathered.

52:06Obviously the Nazis salute accusations. Yeah, which he denies, of course. And, you know, the claims of sexual misconduct, again, which he denied. He's right at the centre of the free speech debate across the entire world, you know, in terms of platforming some people that some people don't think should be platformed. It's 10 from me. Yeah, I think it's a 10 from me. And while we're on the subject, let's have a word from him. He's defended his controversial use of social media, and he says this, look, I know sometimes I say or post strange things, but that's just how my brain works. To anyone who's been offended, I just want to say I reinvented electric cars and I'm sending people to Mars in a rocket ship.

52:41Did you think I was also going to be a chill, normal dude? I couldn't have put it better myself. Elon Musk, not a chill, normal dude. Giving back, you know, philanthropy, putting some money back into the community. We always have to be conscious that there may be charitable giving that isn't in the public domain. So we can only really give a mark based on what's public and what's been reported. He signed the giving pledge, which has come up before in our podcasts, which promises to give away more than 50 % of your wealth in your lifetime. Each year, Forbes assigns what they call a philanthropy score based on certain billionaires known charitable giving.

53:14But as of 2024, Forbes found he'd given away less than 1%. So he's got some catching up to do on that front. That truly is quite a puny amount. And just for context, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos have both given away more than him. And they are also tech billionaires. So I don't know what's keeping Elon Musk. Yeah, I think Jeff Bezos scored pretty low on this front as well. So I think based on that work by Forbes and what's in the public domain, it's a one from me. OK, I'll give him a zero for giving back. Power and legacy. Gosh. So if attention equals power in the attention economy, then, gosh, he's got to score highly in this one as well.

53:53it's funny because we have profiled some billionaires who would rather die than be in the public spotlight at all okay but i think elon likes it he likes the power it gives him we sometimes run a quick test thought experiment don't we like you know if this person called the white house with the person pick up the phone he lived in the white house for months pretty much he was there he brought his son to the white house he brought his son to the white house he couldn't have been more powerful both in political terms in social media clout owning his own platform. He claims to have got Trump elected and with some justification, he certainly had an influence.

54:29He gave him a couple of hundred million dollars and plastered Trump all over to his ex-followers saying it's got to be Trump. He said that a lot in the run up to the election. Yeah, I know some tech sceptics who have said, you know, Elon is a great publicity person for himself. But when you look at what he's actually done, you know, he didn't invent the lithium iron battery, but he gives a very good impression of being the guy who did. His great skill, as we've talked about before, is raising the kind of sums of money necessary to go for these crazy moonshot type or Mars shot type experiments.

55:02And that's why he is unparalleled, I think, in business history. I mean, even if he didn't invent the electric car, I still feel like he's got a claim to being one of the most powerful men in business and politics. Completely revolutionized the car industry. Basically, the internal combustion engine had ruled the roost since the early 20th century. And there's no doubt without him, when you walk out that door, you would not see the number of electric cars on the road that you do today because he kicked up the backside the likes of Volkswagen, the likes of Porsche, the likes of, you know, you name a mass volume car manufacturing, they wouldn't be doing what they were doing to the same extent were it not for him.

55:41So that's enormous power and legacy. And, you know, that's before we even talk about if he will get people to Mars because if he manages to do that, my God, Yeah. I wonder whether he'll lay claim to own it. Back to his science fiction, he will own Mars. Power and legacy, what would you give him then? Ten. Yeah, I think it's got to be a ten. And, you know, if Elon's listening, if you ever get a rocket ship to Mars and the first person to step out on the surface of Mars doesn't combust of radiation poisoning, we'll give you an eleven. Yeah. And the very fact we've now given a few eleven out of tens on the podcast and most likely will go even higher than one day, who knows, probably underlines that our marking isn't the most scientific of processes.

56:20I think it's just a fun way of summarising different themes in this episode like we always do. So, I mean, where do we even end with Elon? Because I feel like his story still has mouths more to go. To create one massive revolutionary company like Tesla is amazing. But remember, he also, PayPal was a revolutionary company. SpaceX is a revolutionary company. He's got a company putting chips into people's brains called Neuralink. He's got a transport company called the Boring Company, which has got some hyperloop, which is going to revolutionise urban transport. These are extraordinary ideas and he's making most of them work and pay off.

56:56I mean, whether you love or hate him, he's got some claim to be the most remarkable business person of all time and one of the most remarkable individuals of the 21st century. He is one of those people that you would only see in science fiction. It's almost like he created himself to be the star of his own science fiction novel. That's a brilliant way of putting it. I think that's exactly right. So is he good, bad, or is he just another billionaire? If you're listening to this, please tell us what you think. We'd be fascinated to know because, you know, from my perspective, I first heard of Elon as the boyfriend of Grimes who appeared at the Met Gala.

57:32Is that how you approach it? Yes, exactly. Wow. And I'm saying, who the heck is Grimes? You're saying, who the heck is Elon Musk? Well, this is why the podcast works so well. I would love to know what people think. How did you first hear of Elon Musk? What did you think of him then? What do you think of him now? I think it's pretty hard not to have an opinion about Elon Musk. I'd be surprised if he'll say, you know, neutral, don't really pay much attention. If you want to share your thoughts on Elon or any other billionaires, please email goodbadbillionaire, that's all one word, goodbadbillionaire at bbc.com or drop us a text or WhatsApp to 001 917 686 1176.

58:11We've had an email from a listener, John. Hi, Zing and Simon. My dog, Matilda, who is a fan, love that your dog listens to podcasts, has asked me to suggest that you check which billionaires are dog lovers. She's pretty adamant this may very well guarantee that they are good people. My wife certainly believes in that. Anyone who loves dogs can't be all bad. I don't think pets have figured heavily in any of our billionaire stories. We need to go back and check. So we're actually going to take a break for a few weeks for the holidays. But we will be back in the new year with even more billionaires.

58:45In the meantime, we have more than 70 episodes in the archive. If you haven't already, then what are you waiting for? They are all well worth a listen. And especially if you want to get some time away from your family this holidays. Good Bad Billionaire is a BBC World Service podcast produced by Hannah Hufford with additional production by Louise Morris The editor is Paul Smith and it's a BBC Studios production For the BBC World Service the commissioning editor is John Manel

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