1
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There's a number on a pay stub.

2
00:00:02,822 --> 00:00:06,002
fifty four thousand and eighty dollars.

3
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That's the reported annual salary of Elon Musk from SpaceX.

4
00:00:12,164 --> 00:00:15,105
Tied to a California minimum wage.

5
00:00:15,125 --> 00:00:21,547
The man who runs the rocket company pays himself like he's flipping hamburgers and
hawthorn.

6
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And here's the thing that's the point.

7
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Because in June of twenty twenty six, SpaceX went public.

8
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Biggest IPO in history, $75 billion.

9
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And the man with the 50 hour, sorry, $54,000 salary became the world's first trillionaire.

10
00:00:45,090 --> 00:00:50,893
Net worth passed a trillion United States American dollars.

11
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Briefly hit 1.4.

12
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So sit with that for a second.

13
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A trillion, a trillion dollars.

14
00:00:57,897 --> 00:01:09,192
If you spent a million dollars a day every day, starting when the pyramids were being
built, you would not have spent a trillion dollars yet.

15
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You'd still be going.

16
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Let's see, a trillion dollars is a million million.

17
00:01:14,885 --> 00:01:19,477
And his official salary is fifty-four thousand and eighty.

18
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That's not a contradiction, that's a strategy.

19
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A strategy gets taxed.

20
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Stocks gains don't until you sell them, right?

21
00:01:30,421 --> 00:01:35,423
So loans against stock don't, not ever really.

22
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So the salary stays at minimum wage and the fortune climbs past a trillion to dollars, and
the tax man.

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And the rest of us who live in this country get pennies.

24
00:01:49,058 --> 00:01:51,919
Bernie Sanders did the math on something else.

25
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Musk, a trillionaire, pays the exact same amount into Social Security as a guy making
$184,500.

26
00:02:04,688 --> 00:02:06,989
Because the payroll tax stops there.

27
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The cap.

28
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Stock gains don't count, loan proceeds don't count.

29
00:02:12,203 --> 00:02:25,637
So a school teacher in Ohio pays Social Security tax on every dollar he or she earns, and
the richest human being who has ever lived pays the same flat amount as a mid level

30
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manager.

31
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fifty four thousand eighty dollars.

32
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That number isn't a salary, it's a magic trick.

33
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And we're about to watch it in slow

34
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motion.

35
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Welcome back, my friends, to The Overlap, the show about systems of power, labor, and
American injustice.

36
00:02:57,839 --> 00:02:59,920
I'm Joshua and I'm glad you're here.

37
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Will is not with us again, um, so we're gonna be continuing on without him for now.

38
00:03:04,483 --> 00:03:07,683
So a trillion dollars.

39
00:03:07,684 --> 00:03:09,545
We don't really have a word for this yet, right?

40
00:03:09,545 --> 00:03:11,186
Like trillionaire.

41
00:03:11,186 --> 00:03:16,789
It sounds made up, like a like a kid's word for like a lot, a bazillionaire, right?

42
00:03:17,049 --> 00:03:19,020
But as of June 12th.

43
00:03:19,020 --> 00:03:21,791
2026, it is a job title.

44
00:03:21,891 --> 00:03:27,552
It belongs to one solitary single person, one man.

45
00:03:27,553 --> 00:03:37,075
And the reason that we're doing this now, the reason I couldn't just let it oh slip by is
that the number itself has become kind of this fog.

46
00:03:37,076 --> 00:03:39,997
It's so big, it just stops like meaning anything.

47
00:03:39,997 --> 00:03:41,497
A trillion.

48
00:03:41,498 --> 00:03:43,079
It rolls off the tongue.

49
00:03:43,079 --> 00:03:44,459
And when a number

50
00:03:44,460 --> 00:03:46,440
Stops meaning anything, right?

51
00:03:46,440 --> 00:03:49,131
Nobody asks the obvious question.

52
00:03:49,451 --> 00:03:51,412
How did that happen?

53
00:03:51,413 --> 00:03:53,013
Not like, is he smart?

54
00:03:53,013 --> 00:03:54,794
Not like, does he work hard?

55
00:03:54,794 --> 00:03:57,174
Those are the questions we're handed.

56
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The wrong questions.

57
00:03:58,255 --> 00:04:08,337
The question is: how does a person accumulate a trillion dollars in a country where a
nurse pays a higher tax rate than he does?

58
00:04:08,338 --> 00:04:10,319
What machine creates that?

59
00:04:10,319 --> 00:04:11,098
Who built it?

60
00:04:11,098 --> 00:04:12,409
Who maintains this thing?

61
00:04:12,409 --> 00:04:13,949
Because here's the thing.

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And I want to be clear about this from the very beginning.

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This is not a story about one guy being greedy.

64
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Greed is boring.

65
00:04:21,522 --> 00:04:23,153
Greed is universal.

66
00:04:23,153 --> 00:04:35,297
This is a story about a system that takes greed and hands it a trillion dollars and a
government contract and a tax exemption and calls the result a self-made man.

67
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The self-made man.

68
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We're going to come back to that phrase because almost

69
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Every piece of it is a lie and the lie is documented and the documents are public and we
just don't look at 'em.

70
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So we're gonna look at We're gonna go back to the beginning.

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We're gonna go to Palo Alto in the nineteen nineties, the first big check, and we're gonna
walk forward year by year through the government loans and the NASA contracts and the tax

72
00:05:01,935 --> 00:05:13,464
records and the union busting tweets all the way to a courtroom in Delaware and an IPO
this June of this year of our Lord twenty twenty six.

73
00:05:13,464 --> 00:05:17,768
And what you're gonna see is that the trillion didn't come from rockets, not really.

74
00:05:17,768 --> 00:05:19,939
It came from us, from the public.

75
00:05:19,939 --> 00:05:30,276
From the treasury, from the worker who got fired for an open letter and the agency that
was supposed to protect him and got declared unconstitutional instead.

76
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A trillion dollars.

77
00:05:32,538 --> 00:05:36,220
And the question nobody wants to answer, let's go answer it.

78
00:05:36,221 --> 00:05:41,274
But to understand the myth, we have to go a little bit further back than Palo Alto.

79
00:05:41,274 --> 00:05:45,036
We have to look at the floor he was standing on before he ever slept in that office.

80
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The story of the self made man.

81
00:05:47,866 --> 00:05:52,500
Relies on the idea that the starting line was at zero.

82
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It wasn't.

83
00:05:53,721 --> 00:05:56,403
Musk didn't emerge from a vacuum.

84
00:05:56,403 --> 00:06:08,483
He grew up in South Africa, in a home of uh significant means, a son of an
electromechanical engineer and property developer whose portfolio included a stake in a

85
00:06:08,483 --> 00:06:10,614
Zambian emerald mine.

86
00:06:10,615 --> 00:06:13,578
That wealth provided more than just creature comforts.

87
00:06:13,578 --> 00:06:15,301
It provided elite schooling.

88
00:06:15,301 --> 00:06:21,753
And a financial cushion that made the starving entrepreneur narrative a choice, not a
necessity.

89
00:06:21,753 --> 00:06:29,994
See, this is the foundation that provided the security to take the risks that eventually
became a trillion dollar fortune.

90
00:06:30,195 --> 00:06:35,056
The seed wasn't just a garage, it was a safety net.

91
00:06:35,216 --> 00:06:39,497
So let's start in Palo Alto, California, 1995.

92
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Musk is 24.

93
00:06:41,659 --> 00:06:43,839
He's got a brother named Kimball.

94
00:06:44,192 --> 00:06:46,453
He's got a partner named Greg Curry.

95
00:06:46,453 --> 00:06:48,973
Now they start a company called Zip2.

96
00:06:49,354 --> 00:06:50,634
What did it do?

97
00:06:50,712 --> 00:07:02,418
It put city guides on newspaper websites, like maps, business listings, like really
genuinely boring stuff, right?

98
00:07:02,418 --> 00:07:09,100
It was the thing newspapers needed in nineteen ninety-five and didn't know how to build it
themselves.

99
00:07:09,101 --> 00:07:11,042
So here's the part of the story that everybody knows.

100
00:07:11,042 --> 00:07:12,522
Musk slept in the office.

101
00:07:12,522 --> 00:07:14,062
He showered at the YMCA.

102
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He coded at night.

103
00:07:15,073 --> 00:07:17,663
The legend, the grind.

104
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And I'm not gonna tell you that he didn't work hard because he did.

105
00:07:20,681 --> 00:07:22,765
That part's probably true.

106
00:07:23,105 --> 00:07:27,446
But work hard is not where the money came from.

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In February of nineteen ninety nine, Compaq, does everybody remember Compaq?

108
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Yeah.

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They bought Zip two for three hundred and seven million dollars in nineteen ninety nine.

110
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And Musk owned 7%.

111
00:07:41,619 --> 00:07:44,781
So he walked away with $32 million.

112
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At 27, right?

113
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From a company that put maps on newspaper websites.

114
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Now, I want you to hold on to that number because everything after it is built on it.

115
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That 22 million is the seed.

116
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Every rocket, every Tesla, every tweet that moved a stock.

117
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All of it grows out of that one payout.

118
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The self-made part of the self-made man's story is what?

119
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Four years of sleeping in an office?

120
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And then a check the size of a small town's annual budget.

121
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Right?

122
00:08:23,496 --> 00:08:24,895
So what does he do with it?

123
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He takes twelve and a half million and starts an online bank.

124
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He calls it X.com.

125
00:08:32,060 --> 00:08:38,025
He loved that letter, I guess, even then, and X.com merges with another company,
Confinity.

126
00:08:38,025 --> 00:08:42,574
Run by two guys named Peter Teal and Max Levchin.

127
00:08:42,575 --> 00:08:47,658
And they merged and they became a company you've heard of, PayPal.

128
00:08:47,659 --> 00:08:57,325
And in October of 2002, eBay eBay buys PayPal for one and a half billion dollars.

129
00:08:57,326 --> 00:08:59,427
And Musk's cut this time.

130
00:08:59,427 --> 00:09:02,489
180 million dollars.

131
00:09:02,529 --> 00:09:05,801
So let's tell let's tally the self-made fortune so far, right?

132
00:09:05,801 --> 00:09:10,654
22 million from Zip2, 180 million from PayPal.

133
00:09:10,995 --> 00:09:15,456
Call it, you know, two hundred million dollars by the time he's thirty one.

134
00:09:15,676 --> 00:09:17,297
And I'll be honest with you.

135
00:09:17,397 --> 00:09:24,259
If the story ended there, it would just be this tech story, you know, a guy makes good
websites, he sells them, he gets rich, fine.

136
00:09:24,259 --> 00:09:26,879
America is full of those kind of people.

137
00:09:26,879 --> 00:09:36,142
Not nice not in the AI era, but at the time, that's the casino working as advertised in
the dot com bubble.

138
00:09:36,143 --> 00:09:37,604
So, but here's where it turns, right?

139
00:09:37,604 --> 00:09:39,985
Here's where the public sort of enters the story.

140
00:09:39,985 --> 00:09:47,641
Because what Musk did next is he takes that 200 million and he points it at two things at
once.

141
00:09:47,941 --> 00:09:50,202
He founds SpaceX.

142
00:09:50,463 --> 00:09:51,884
There's that letter again.

143
00:09:51,884 --> 00:09:56,627
And he pours money into a little electric car company called Tesla.

144
00:09:56,627 --> 00:10:02,250
And both of those companies, listen to me, both of those companies would have died.

145
00:10:02,331 --> 00:10:05,052
Both of them, without the government.

146
00:10:05,053 --> 00:10:07,054
Let me give you SpaceX first.

147
00:10:07,055 --> 00:10:12,739
2006, SpaceX has not really successfully launched a rocket.

148
00:10:12,739 --> 00:10:14,580
Has not, right?

149
00:10:14,580 --> 00:10:17,061
They're blowing up on the launch pad.

150
00:10:17,061 --> 00:10:23,766
They're a startup with a dream and a lot of really boomy, explosion y things, right?

151
00:10:23,766 --> 00:10:33,712
And NASA, the United States government, awarded them a contract worth $287 million before
the first successful launch.

152
00:10:33,713 --> 00:10:34,984
I'm gonna say that again.

153
00:10:34,984 --> 00:10:45,129
The government bet $278 million of public money on a rocket company that had never put a
rocket in orbit.

154
00:10:45,129 --> 00:10:48,831
That's not the free market rewarding a winner.

155
00:10:49,312 --> 00:10:52,874
That's the public funding research and development, right?

156
00:10:52,874 --> 00:10:55,855
That's you and me being the venture capitalist.

157
00:10:55,855 --> 00:11:00,058
And when it works out, the upside doesn't actually come back to us.

158
00:11:00,058 --> 00:11:01,275
It goes

159
00:11:01,275 --> 00:11:02,405
To the 7%.

160
00:11:02,405 --> 00:11:04,116
It goes to the guy.

161
00:11:04,136 --> 00:11:07,677
Now, Tesla, this one's even better, and by better I mean worse.

162
00:11:07,957 --> 00:11:13,438
2010, Tesla is, by all honest accounts, about to tank.

163
00:11:13,439 --> 00:11:23,562
And the Department of Energy, under the Obama administration, gives Tesla a low interest
loan of 465 million dollars.

164
00:11:23,563 --> 00:11:25,223
How did that loan happen?

165
00:11:25,224 --> 00:11:25,986
Musk.

166
00:11:25,986 --> 00:11:28,878
Didn't sit back and wait for the bureaucracy he pushed.

167
00:11:28,878 --> 00:11:30,820
He had daily meetings.

168
00:11:30,820 --> 00:11:44,962
There's a detail in the reporting that I found in my research for this episode about
Christmas, when some critical EPA certification was missing and the loan was at risk of

169
00:11:44,962 --> 00:11:45,562
being lost.

170
00:11:45,562 --> 00:11:54,481
So Musk went straight to the agency administrator personally at Christmas, working the
government like a lobbyist because.

171
00:11:54,481 --> 00:11:55,952
That's what he was being.

172
00:11:55,953 --> 00:12:04,381
And a former Tesla employee said it as plainly as you can say anything else, and I quote
Tesla would not have survived without the loan.

173
00:12:04,381 --> 00:12:07,603
It was a critical loan at a critical time.

174
00:12:07,844 --> 00:12:09,485
Wouldn't it have survived?

175
00:12:09,486 --> 00:12:13,309
So I want to go back to that phrase self made man.

176
00:12:13,310 --> 00:12:14,531
Self made.

177
00:12:14,532 --> 00:12:16,864
The seed was a buyout.

178
00:12:16,865 --> 00:12:21,147
The growth was a NASA contract before he'd actually proven anything.

179
00:12:21,148 --> 00:12:27,510
The survival was a federal loan he personally hustled out of the Department of Energy at
Christmas.

180
00:12:27,511 --> 00:12:33,494
At every single life or death moment in this history, the thing that saves him is public
money.

181
00:12:33,494 --> 00:12:35,974
That's not self made, it's public made.

182
00:12:35,975 --> 00:12:41,657
That's a man made by the Treasury and then handed the deed and told it told him to call it
his.

183
00:12:41,658 --> 00:12:44,981
And I don't say that to take anything away from the engineering, right?

184
00:12:44,981 --> 00:12:46,762
The rockets they now land.

185
00:12:46,762 --> 00:12:48,634
The cars they now drive.

186
00:12:48,634 --> 00:12:50,525
Real things got built.

187
00:12:50,906 --> 00:12:54,388
But the question of the show is never did the thing get built.

188
00:12:54,388 --> 00:12:59,422
The question is who paid for it, who profited from it, and who got left holding the bill.

189
00:12:59,422 --> 00:13:06,038
And the answer over and over and over from nineteen ninety nine forward is public paid.

190
00:13:06,038 --> 00:13:10,401
The man profited, and we're about to see who got left holding the bill.

191
00:13:10,883 --> 00:13:14,905
Because the bill comes due in the next part, and the bill is the worker who got fired.

192
00:13:14,905 --> 00:13:17,588
The bill is the tax that didn't get paid.

193
00:13:17,588 --> 00:13:26,225
The bill is the agency that got declared unconstitutional for trying to protect eight
people who wrote a letter.

194
00:13:26,226 --> 00:13:28,107
Hold that in the back of your brain.

195
00:13:28,548 --> 00:13:29,468
We're going there now.

196
00:13:29,468 --> 00:13:36,313
So in February of twenty twenty five, the Washington Post published an investigation.

197
00:13:36,614 --> 00:13:39,566
And they tried to do something almost nobody had done.

198
00:13:39,690 --> 00:13:41,421
They tried to add it all up.

199
00:13:41,421 --> 00:13:50,927
Every government contract, every loan, every subsidy, every tax credit that had flowed to
Musk's companies for more than 20 years.

200
00:13:50,928 --> 00:13:57,172
And the number that they got was at least 38 billion dollars.

201
00:13:57,173 --> 00:14:02,657
38 billion dollars in public support.

202
00:14:02,657 --> 00:14:06,948
That's welfare, is another word for public support in case you.

203
00:14:06,948 --> 00:14:07,819
Hadn't figured it out.

204
00:14:07,819 --> 00:14:13,253
And here's the the detail that really makes me grind my teeth at night.

205
00:14:13,253 --> 00:14:21,238
Nearly two-thirds of that 38 billion came in just the last five years.

206
00:14:21,238 --> 00:14:22,579
This is not ancient history.

207
00:14:22,579 --> 00:14:24,420
This is accelerating.

208
00:14:24,420 --> 00:14:35,387
In 2024 alone, one year, federal and state governments committed 6.3 billion dollars to
Musk's venture, a record high.

209
00:14:35,428 --> 00:14:36,178
Now

210
00:14:36,522 --> 00:14:38,233
Why does this still happen?

211
00:14:38,313 --> 00:14:41,135
That's the question that I think we all should sit with.

212
00:14:41,135 --> 00:14:46,338
Because by 2024, the man is the richest person on earth.

213
00:14:46,338 --> 00:14:48,099
He doesn't need it.

214
00:14:48,100 --> 00:14:51,482
So why does the public keep writing checks to him?

215
00:14:51,483 --> 00:15:04,551
And the answer in 2025 gets so brazen, gets so ludicrous, gets so loud that it actually
stops being a metaphor because in 2025.

216
00:15:04,562 --> 00:15:11,888
Elon Musk wasn't just receiving government money, he was running part of the government.

217
00:15:11,889 --> 00:15:23,711
Doge The Department of Government Efficiency Trump appoints Musk as the de facto head of
it, in case you've been under a rock for the last three years, a special government

218
00:15:23,711 --> 00:15:29,246
employee, and the job of Doge was to slash federal spending.

219
00:15:29,247 --> 00:15:31,966
To go through the government and cut it all out.

220
00:15:31,966 --> 00:15:33,018
Now stop.

221
00:15:33,019 --> 00:15:35,659
Hold both of these in your head at the same time.

222
00:15:35,660 --> 00:15:51,235
At the moment Musk is put in charge of cutting government spending, his companies are
holding fifty-two active contracts worth a potential eleven point eight billion dollars,

223
00:15:51,235 --> 00:15:57,977
including nine and a half billion in defense department contracts.

224
00:15:57,978 --> 00:16:03,657
So the man cutting the budget is one of the largest single recipients of

225
00:16:03,657 --> 00:16:04,989
The budget.

226
00:16:04,990 --> 00:16:09,762
He's holding the knife and standing at the front of the buffet line.

227
00:16:09,763 --> 00:16:19,853
And when reporters and ethics experts raised these questions, and they did very loudly,
there was a guy named Noah Bookbinder among them, great name by the way.

228
00:16:20,134 --> 00:16:24,638
And they pointed at the obvious, like screaming, Hey, this is a conflict of interest,
right?

229
00:16:24,638 --> 00:16:29,653
Trump's answer was that Musk would identify his own conflicts of interest.

230
00:16:29,654 --> 00:16:32,715
I feel like I should say that again because it's so stupid.

231
00:16:32,715 --> 00:16:34,665
It's almost cute.

232
00:16:34,666 --> 00:16:43,389
The conflict of interest problem would be solved by the conflicted party identifying his
own conflicts.

233
00:16:43,389 --> 00:16:48,550
That's like asking a fox to file an incident report after the hen house.

234
00:16:48,550 --> 00:16:54,071
And there's no evidence Musk ever filed the ethics disclosure forms that he was required
to.

235
00:16:54,071 --> 00:16:55,372
None, right?

236
00:16:55,372 --> 00:16:56,762
That's the machine.

237
00:16:56,956 --> 00:16:58,181
That is how it works.

238
00:16:58,181 --> 00:17:01,530
And it's not not even remotely subtle anymore.

239
00:17:01,531 --> 00:17:03,496
We used to at least pretend

240
00:17:03,497 --> 00:17:07,169
Christmas phone call to the Department of Energy in in 2010, right?

241
00:17:07,169 --> 00:17:09,781
At least there was still a wall there.

242
00:17:09,781 --> 00:17:21,319
I mean, it was a thin one between a man asking the government and the government deciding
to give them the money, but twenty twenty five the the man was asking the government

243
00:17:21,319 --> 00:17:27,843
deciding and the government deciding to give them that money are the same person.

244
00:17:27,844 --> 00:17:32,705
Now let's talk about the other half because the contracts are how the public money comes
in.

245
00:17:32,845 --> 00:17:37,386
The tax code is how it never, ever goes back out.

246
00:17:37,387 --> 00:17:39,008
ProPublica.

247
00:17:39,348 --> 00:17:48,410
The secret IRS files leaked records, and what they found about Musk specifically between
2014 and 2018.

248
00:17:48,870 --> 00:17:56,192
His fortune grew by $13.9 billion, and he paid $450 million.

249
00:17:57,146 --> 00:17:58,636
In federal income tax.

250
00:17:58,636 --> 00:17:59,497
That sounds like a lot.

251
00:17:59,497 --> 00:18:01,537
$455 million.

252
00:18:01,537 --> 00:18:07,659
And unless you've like ever tried to figure out how division works, right?

253
00:18:07,659 --> 00:18:13,740
Because that's a true tax rate of three point two seven percent.

254
00:18:13,741 --> 00:18:20,862
Three point two seven percent income tax rate on thirteen point nine billion in wealth
growth.

255
00:18:20,863 --> 00:18:25,135
And in twenty eighteen, one of those years, he paid nothing.

256
00:18:25,135 --> 00:18:27,907
Zero federal income tax, like zero.

257
00:18:27,908 --> 00:18:28,988
And how?

258
00:18:29,329 --> 00:18:31,971
It has a name, it's a strategy.

259
00:18:32,151 --> 00:18:35,654
It's called buy, borrow, die.

260
00:18:35,655 --> 00:18:43,081
Now, I know all of us want to speed up to the third step, but you essentially buy assets
like stock.

261
00:18:43,081 --> 00:18:44,843
You never sell them, right?

262
00:18:44,843 --> 00:18:50,647
Because selling triggers the capital gains tax, which is like 31 to 37 percent.

263
00:18:50,647 --> 00:18:51,602
Instead

264
00:18:51,602 --> 00:18:55,693
You borrow against the stocks that you own.

265
00:18:55,694 --> 00:19:04,337
Now the banks will lend a guy like Musk money against his Tesla shares at almost a 0%
interest rate.

266
00:19:04,717 --> 00:19:06,978
And loans, they're not income, right?

267
00:19:06,978 --> 00:19:08,209
Loans aren't taxed.

268
00:19:08,209 --> 00:19:10,226
When you go get a student loan, you're not taxed on that.

269
00:19:10,226 --> 00:19:13,451
And if you if you were to get a car loan, you're not taxed on that.

270
00:19:13,451 --> 00:19:19,233
You're taxed on the car purchase, but not the loan money coming to the dealership.

271
00:19:19,234 --> 00:19:27,829
So you live extravagantly, infinitely on borrowed money, secured by stock that you will
never sell and you pay nothing.

272
00:19:27,830 --> 00:19:29,250
And then you die.

273
00:19:29,251 --> 00:19:36,776
When you die, the tax basis resets, and your heirs get all of that stock clean.

274
00:19:36,777 --> 00:19:39,779
Buy, borrow, die.

275
00:19:39,779 --> 00:19:41,340
That's the whole game.

276
00:19:41,341 --> 00:19:44,699
That's the trick from the cold open, right?

277
00:19:44,699 --> 00:19:55,506
The fifty-four thousand dollar salary, the minimum wage paycheck in California, that's the
borrow stage made wide open for you to be able to see.

278
00:19:55,507 --> 00:20:00,160
You don't need a salary if you can borrow against a trillion dollars of stock.

279
00:20:00,161 --> 00:20:01,502
It's not just him.

280
00:20:01,682 --> 00:20:10,808
ProPublica actually found the 25 richest Americans paid a true tax rate of 3.4% over those
years.

281
00:20:11,029 --> 00:20:25,980
The top 400 billionaire families, and the Biden administration ran this number, averaged
8.2% in federal income tax, while the average American worker pays around 13%, not

282
00:20:25,980 --> 00:20:27,531
including incidentals.

283
00:20:27,532 --> 00:20:31,658
So I'll ask the question I keep asking, how does this still happen?

284
00:20:31,659 --> 00:20:36,516
And I think the the answer the obvious honest answer is not

285
00:20:36,517 --> 00:20:38,939
It's not the best looking one, it's it's the ugliest one.

286
00:20:38,939 --> 00:20:51,589
It still happens because the people who'd have to stop it are the people who are directly
benefiting from it, or the people funded by the people benefiting from it.

287
00:20:51,590 --> 00:20:54,372
So I'll say what I normally say: the machine is not broken.

288
00:20:54,372 --> 00:20:57,454
The machine is working exactly like it was designed.

289
00:20:57,454 --> 00:20:58,614
It's it's perfect.

290
00:20:58,614 --> 00:20:59,845
It's humming.

291
00:20:59,846 --> 00:21:06,109
It was built to move public money up and keep private money from coming back down.

292
00:21:06,110 --> 00:21:09,071
And it does that flawlessly.

293
00:21:09,132 --> 00:21:16,417
38 billion up, 3.27 down, a trillion dollars.

294
00:21:16,418 --> 00:21:21,623
And he pays into Social Security like he makes a hundred and eighty four thousand a year.

295
00:21:21,803 --> 00:21:23,965
That's not a glitch, that's the design.

296
00:21:23,966 --> 00:21:28,185
If you're driving while you're listening to this, I want you to just kinda take a breath.

297
00:21:28,588 --> 00:21:32,146
If you're in the shower or in the bathroom or something, get some water.

298
00:21:32,147 --> 00:21:38,639
In June of twenty twenty two, a group of SpaceX employees did something brave.

299
00:21:38,799 --> 00:21:44,500
And in hindsight, kind of, you know, doomed to fail, they wrote an open letter.

300
00:21:44,801 --> 00:21:50,442
In it, they called their boss, Elon Musk, a distraction and an embarrassment.

301
00:21:50,443 --> 00:21:56,565
This was after a run of of sexually suggestive tweets that he had sent out.

302
00:21:56,565 --> 00:21:58,756
They they were embarrassed.

303
00:21:58,756 --> 00:22:00,406
I mean, they they worked.

304
00:22:00,502 --> 00:22:03,804
For a serious company doing serious things.

305
00:22:03,804 --> 00:22:10,469
And the face of it was just tweeting sexually explicit and suggestive things.

306
00:22:10,469 --> 00:22:14,371
So they said so in writing together.

307
00:22:14,372 --> 00:22:16,933
They gathered up and wrote a letter.

308
00:22:16,934 --> 00:22:19,182
Eight of them got fired.

309
00:22:19,183 --> 00:22:20,643
Now here's where it matters.

310
00:22:20,644 --> 00:22:30,589
And here's where it stops being office drama and becomes a story about the law because
under federal law, the National Labor Relations Act, workers have the right to band

311
00:22:30,589 --> 00:22:34,891
together, to advocate collectively for better working conditions.

312
00:22:34,891 --> 00:22:38,693
That's the whole foundation of American labor law since the 1930s.

313
00:22:38,693 --> 00:22:43,255
Like you're allowed to get together with your coworkers and complain.

314
00:22:43,296 --> 00:22:46,285
That's protected, that's a federal right.

315
00:22:46,285 --> 00:22:55,669
So in January of 2024, the NLRB, the National Labor Relations Board, the agency that
enforces that law, filed the complaint.

316
00:22:55,669 --> 00:23:00,030
They said SpaceX illegally fired those eight people.

317
00:23:00,031 --> 00:23:01,772
And what did SpaceX do?

318
00:23:01,773 --> 00:23:03,033
This is the part.

319
00:23:03,494 --> 00:23:11,957
The day after the NLRB filed its complaint, the very next day, SpaceX sued the NLRB in
federal court in Texas.

320
00:23:12,378 --> 00:23:13,927
And the argument wasn't.

321
00:23:13,927 --> 00:23:15,358
We didn't do it.

322
00:23:15,818 --> 00:23:22,604
The argument was that the agency itself, the entire structure of the NLRB, is
unconstitutional.

323
00:23:22,864 --> 00:23:24,346
You see the move here, right?

324
00:23:24,346 --> 00:23:25,787
Don't argue you're innocent.

325
00:23:25,787 --> 00:23:28,388
Argue the referee shouldn't exist.

326
00:23:28,389 --> 00:23:32,412
And in August of 2025, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed.

327
00:23:32,412 --> 00:23:37,996
They ruled the NLRB's structure unconstitutional.

328
00:23:37,997 --> 00:23:40,079
So think about what it means for those eight workers.

329
00:23:40,079 --> 00:23:42,100
They wrote a letter, they got fired.

330
00:23:42,134 --> 00:23:52,550
The agency that's supposed to protect them tried to, and instead of defending the firing,
the company got the agency itself declared unconstitutional in three entire states Texas,

331
00:23:52,550 --> 00:23:54,711
Louisiana, and Mississippi.

332
00:23:55,031 --> 00:23:59,193
Which means now any company in those states can do the exact same thing.

333
00:23:59,193 --> 00:24:00,544
Get sued by the NLRB?

334
00:24:00,544 --> 00:24:04,076
Well, just sue the NLRB back block the whole thing.

335
00:24:04,076 --> 00:24:05,897
Eight people wrote a letter.

336
00:24:05,898 --> 00:24:10,373
And and the cost of that letter was a hole-blown in federal worker protection.

337
00:24:10,373 --> 00:24:13,564
For three states and millions of workers.

338
00:24:13,565 --> 00:24:15,977
That's the bill from earlier coming due.

339
00:24:15,977 --> 00:24:18,988
Remember, I said someone gets left holding the bill, right?

340
00:24:18,988 --> 00:24:19,929
It's them.

341
00:24:19,929 --> 00:24:21,109
It's the eight.

342
00:24:21,110 --> 00:24:23,311
And this isn't like a a one-off.

343
00:24:23,391 --> 00:24:26,152
Go to Fremont, California at the Tesla factory.

344
00:24:26,152 --> 00:24:31,075
There was a United Auto Workers organizing campaign there, workers trying to form a union.

345
00:24:31,075 --> 00:24:37,018
And the an NLRB judge found Tesla broke the law over and over.

346
00:24:37,134 --> 00:24:45,716
Interfered with the leaf letting, banned union materials, threatened employees with being
fired in March of twenty seventeen.

347
00:24:46,058 --> 00:24:49,399
And then this is the one that that ties right back to the cold open, right?

348
00:24:49,399 --> 00:24:55,621
In in May of twenty eighteen, Musk tweeted that employees would lose stock options if they
unionized.

349
00:24:55,862 --> 00:25:00,644
That tweet, the NLRB found the tweet violated federal labor law.

350
00:25:00,644 --> 00:25:04,636
You can't threaten workers comp to stop them from organizing.

351
00:25:04,636 --> 00:25:05,736
It's illegal.

352
00:25:05,814 --> 00:25:09,998
The board ruled against Tesla in March of twenty twenty one.

353
00:25:09,998 --> 00:25:20,287
And then October twenty twenty four, the Fifth Circuit, same court vacated the order, they
threw it out, and in the dissent, a judge pointed out that Tesla had just quietly accepted

354
00:25:20,287 --> 00:25:24,250
seven other labor violations in the very same case.

355
00:25:24,330 --> 00:25:25,331
Seven.

356
00:25:25,332 --> 00:25:30,796
They fought this one and let seven go, because the seven didn't matter.

357
00:25:30,997 --> 00:25:32,688
This was about the principle.

358
00:25:32,689 --> 00:25:35,020
Workers don't get to organize here.

359
00:25:35,021 --> 00:25:37,683
Tesla and SpaceX have no union contracts.

360
00:25:37,683 --> 00:25:38,563
None.

361
00:25:38,724 --> 00:25:44,887
And Tesla pays its workers less than the big three automakers in Detroit who do have
unions.

362
00:25:44,888 --> 00:25:48,990
So look at what's happening in the exact same year, 2018.

363
00:25:49,411 --> 00:25:51,533
The same calendar year, anyway.

364
00:25:51,533 --> 00:25:55,055
Musk tweets the illegal threat about stock options.

365
00:25:55,055 --> 00:26:01,399
Musk pays zero federal income tax, and the Tesla board approves a pay package for him
worth.

366
00:26:01,711 --> 00:26:09,205
fifty five point eight billion dollars, the largest executive compensation award in the
history of public markets.

367
00:26:09,205 --> 00:26:10,335
Same year.

368
00:26:10,435 --> 00:26:17,629
He threatens workers stock, he pays nothing to the public, and he's handed fifty five
billion in stock.

369
00:26:17,630 --> 00:26:21,033
Let those three things sit in one room together, right?

370
00:26:21,033 --> 00:26:26,076
A shareholder named Richard Tornetta sued over that package.

371
00:26:26,377 --> 00:26:37,686
And in January of twenty twenty four, a Delaware court agreed with him, found the process
was quote deeply flawed, found Musk effectively quote controlled Tesla, found the board

372
00:26:37,686 --> 00:26:42,790
hadn't told shareholders the truth, ordered the whole thing rescinded a win.

373
00:26:42,790 --> 00:26:43,891
Briefly.

374
00:26:43,892 --> 00:26:45,113
For the idea that

375
00:26:45,113 --> 00:26:47,094
That maybe there's a limit.

376
00:26:47,095 --> 00:26:56,869
And then December nineteenth, twenty twenty-five, the Delaware Supreme Court reversed it
unanimously, restored the package, which by then, because the stock had climbed, was worth

377
00:26:56,869 --> 00:26:59,220
about a hundred and forty billion dollars.

378
00:26:59,220 --> 00:27:08,924
And the court's reason was that canceling it left Musk uncompensated for his time and
effort over a period of six years.

379
00:27:09,545 --> 00:27:11,305
Uncompensated.

380
00:27:11,306 --> 00:27:15,058
A hundred and forty billion dollars in the court's worry.

381
00:27:15,058 --> 00:27:18,136
Was that the man might end up uncompensated?

382
00:27:18,137 --> 00:27:19,909
The eight who wrote the letter?

383
00:27:19,910 --> 00:27:22,213
They don't understand a word like uncompensated.

384
00:27:22,213 --> 00:27:23,574
They just got fired.

385
00:27:23,575 --> 00:27:31,390
So let me try to pull the thread all the way through from Palo Alto to the IPO because
there's one shape here, and once you see it, you you kind of can't unsee it.

386
00:27:31,390 --> 00:27:33,972
And the shape is the public takes the risk.

387
00:27:33,973 --> 00:27:38,235
And the private man takes the reward every time at every stage.

388
00:27:38,235 --> 00:27:44,028
NASA bets 278 million on rockets that hadn't flown.

389
00:27:44,028 --> 00:27:45,049
Public risk.

390
00:27:45,049 --> 00:27:50,272
The DOE lends $465 million to a company that's about to die.

391
00:27:50,272 --> 00:27:51,272
Public risk.

392
00:27:51,272 --> 00:27:55,615
$38 billion in contracts and subsidies over 20 years.

393
00:27:55,615 --> 00:27:57,696
Two-thirds of it just recently.

394
00:27:57,696 --> 00:27:59,617
Public money, public risk.

395
00:27:59,617 --> 00:28:00,797
The reward?

396
00:28:01,158 --> 00:28:02,818
3.27% tax rate.

397
00:28:04,240 --> 00:28:06,591
Zero in 2018.

398
00:28:06,892 --> 00:28:12,855
A $54,000 salary that exists only so the real money never gets taxed.

399
00:28:12,855 --> 00:28:15,977
Buy, borrow, die.

400
00:28:15,977 --> 00:28:18,918
The reward stays private, untouched uphill.

401
00:28:18,918 --> 00:28:20,319
That's the machine.

402
00:28:20,739 --> 00:28:23,921
Public risk in, private reward out.

403
00:28:24,341 --> 00:28:25,562
And a wall in the middle.

404
00:28:25,562 --> 00:28:32,625
The tax code, the courts, the gutted labor board, built specifically so the reward can
never flow back down.

405
00:28:32,625 --> 00:28:39,099
This whole trickle down economy, they've made sure that there is a one way valve on all of
this.

406
00:28:39,100 --> 00:28:42,064
Certainly not back to the people who actually took the risk, which is the public.

407
00:28:42,064 --> 00:28:47,912
And here's the thing that should piss you off, because it's easy to make this about about
musk, right?

408
00:28:47,912 --> 00:28:53,910
Like being uniquely bad and uniquely greedy and lets the machine off the hook.

409
00:28:53,910 --> 00:28:55,751
The machine made musk.

410
00:28:55,752 --> 00:28:56,642
Period.

411
00:28:56,643 --> 00:29:00,435
The machine would have made someone else if it hadn't been Musk.

412
00:29:00,435 --> 00:29:04,267
The buy, borrow, die strategy is not his invention, right?

413
00:29:04,267 --> 00:29:11,901
It's the standard playbook for the top 25 who all paid the same 3.4%.

414
00:29:11,901 --> 00:29:18,065
The Social Security cap that lets him pay like a mid-level manager.

415
00:29:18,065 --> 00:29:21,206
That cap applies to every billionaire.

416
00:29:21,647 --> 00:29:26,529
The NASA contracts, the DOE loans, that's industrial policy.

417
00:29:26,530 --> 00:29:28,981
That's how it works for everyone at the top.

418
00:29:28,982 --> 00:29:31,624
Musk is just the purest expression of it.

419
00:29:31,624 --> 00:29:33,805
The first to a trillion.

420
00:29:33,806 --> 00:29:39,571
The one who ran the spending agency while collecting the spending.

421
00:29:39,571 --> 00:29:44,404
The one who tweeted the illegal threat and got the referee thrown out.

422
00:29:44,405 --> 00:29:55,342
He's not the disease, he's the symptom that you can finally see with your naked eye
because it got so big that the actual machinery behind it became visible for the first

423
00:29:55,342 --> 00:29:56,202
time.

424
00:29:56,203 --> 00:29:59,024
And that's kind of a gift, right, if we use it.

425
00:29:59,024 --> 00:30:09,701
Because for most of my life, this stuff has been invisible, hidden in tax records that
nobody leaked, and contracts that nobody added up and court rulings that nobody will ever

426
00:30:09,701 --> 00:30:10,481
read.

427
00:30:10,482 --> 00:30:13,144
The fog of big numbers kind of did its job.

428
00:30:13,144 --> 00:30:15,576
A trillion dollars.

429
00:30:15,596 --> 00:30:17,858
So big it means nothing.

430
00:30:17,859 --> 00:30:19,560
So big you just stop asking.

431
00:30:19,560 --> 00:30:25,064
But the question, the question nobody wants to answer is so simple.

432
00:30:25,065 --> 00:30:33,872
How did one human being end up with a trillion dollars in a country where a nurse pays a
higher tax rate?

433
00:30:33,873 --> 00:30:35,904
And now we know it wasn't genius, right?

434
00:30:35,904 --> 00:30:37,834
Genius was in the room, sure.

435
00:30:37,835 --> 00:30:50,499
But the trillion came from public contracts, unpaid taxes, suppressed wages, and a legal
system that calls one hundred and forty billion dollars uncompensated and calls eight

436
00:30:50,499 --> 00:30:53,150
fired workers nothing at all.

437
00:30:53,151 --> 00:30:55,742
The self-made man, I told you we'd come back to it.

438
00:30:55,742 --> 00:30:59,863
There is no self-made man in this story.

439
00:30:59,864 --> 00:31:03,785
There's a public-made fortune wearing a self-made costume.

440
00:31:03,786 --> 00:31:10,088
And the costume is the most expensive thing he owns because as long as we believe it, we
won't ask for any money back.

441
00:31:10,088 --> 00:31:12,289
A trillion dollars.

442
00:31:12,290 --> 00:31:16,413
And the question nobody has been able to answer is why do we keep paying in?

443
00:31:16,414 --> 00:31:18,595
So here's what I want you to watch more closely.

444
00:31:18,595 --> 00:31:20,516
Not the net worth, forget the net worth.

445
00:31:20,516 --> 00:31:21,577
It's the fog.

446
00:31:21,577 --> 00:31:24,839
It's the thing designed to shock and awe you.

447
00:31:24,839 --> 00:31:26,490
Watch the tax rate instead.

448
00:31:26,490 --> 00:31:34,984
Watch the salary, $54,080, because that's the little number that tells you everything that
the big number hides.

449
00:31:35,004 --> 00:31:37,045
The big numbers for headlines.

450
00:31:37,045 --> 00:31:46,040
The small number is the actual machine hiding in plain sight on your dime, your health
care, your child care.

451
00:31:46,041 --> 00:31:55,616
And the most absurd thing of all of this, the thing that reveals the logic of it and how
rotten it is truly to its core is the Social Security fact, right?

452
00:31:55,616 --> 00:31:57,858
Bernie Sanders is actually right about this.

453
00:31:57,858 --> 00:32:11,985
The first trillionaire in human history pays the exact same dollar amount into Social
Security as someone earning $184,500 because the tax stops at the cap, and stocks and

454
00:32:11,985 --> 00:32:13,886
loans don't count at all.

455
00:32:13,887 --> 00:32:16,519
So the school teacher pays on every dollar they make.

456
00:32:16,519 --> 00:32:20,372
The trillionaire pays on 184,000 of his trillion.

457
00:32:20,372 --> 00:32:24,105
That's not a loophole somebody forgot to close.

458
00:32:24,185 --> 00:32:28,849
That's a wall somebody built on purpose and it's standing strong.

459
00:32:28,849 --> 00:32:30,250
That's the lens.

460
00:32:30,251 --> 00:32:32,874
Big numbers the magic show, small numbers the trick.

461
00:32:32,874 --> 00:32:35,686
Now, you didn't come here for, you know, call your senator.

462
00:32:35,686 --> 00:32:36,696
I'm not going to insult you with it.

463
00:32:36,696 --> 00:32:37,817
So here's here's something real.

464
00:32:37,817 --> 00:32:38,318
Two things.

465
00:32:38,318 --> 00:32:39,028
One.

466
00:32:39,029 --> 00:32:44,991
Go read about this buy, borrow, die strategy until you actually understand it, right?

467
00:32:44,991 --> 00:32:47,842
Like not just the vibe of it, the mechanics.

468
00:32:48,262 --> 00:32:57,996
Because once you understand how a man with a trillion dollars lives on borrowed money he
never pays tax on, you will never again look at the phrase billionaire's income the same

469
00:32:57,996 --> 00:32:58,276
way.

470
00:32:58,276 --> 00:32:59,687
They don't have income.

471
00:32:59,687 --> 00:33:01,107
That's the whole point.

472
00:33:01,107 --> 00:33:04,628
Learn the trick and you can't be fooled by the magic show.

473
00:33:04,629 --> 00:33:08,102
Two, the next time someone near you says self-made,

474
00:33:08,102 --> 00:33:11,803
About anyone, ask them the Christmas question.

475
00:33:11,803 --> 00:33:15,745
Ask them who made the phone call to the Department of Energy.

476
00:33:15,745 --> 00:33:19,746
Ask who signed the NASA check before the rocket flew.

477
00:33:19,786 --> 00:33:26,848
Make self-made a claim that has to survive one follow-up question because it almost never
does.

478
00:33:26,849 --> 00:33:28,570
A trillion dollars.

479
00:33:28,570 --> 00:33:32,591
Public risk in, private reward out, and a costume in the middle.

480
00:33:32,592 --> 00:33:34,886
Thanks so much for for sitting with me on this one.

481
00:33:34,886 --> 00:33:37,720
Find us at FOF.foundation.

482
00:33:38,062 --> 00:33:42,368
And I hope Will is out there getting some sun and keeping the lights on.

483
00:33:42,409 --> 00:33:46,976
Please, my friends, do take care of each other, and we will talk to you again next week.

484
00:33:46,977 --> 00:33:48,546
Bye.