Hey everyone, I'm Katherine Rampell, economics editor here at The Bulwark, and welcome to this week's issue of Receipts. I am delighted to be joined by tech journalist, podcaster, TV host, all-around force of nature, Kara Swisher. If you are not familiar with Kara Swisher, I don't know how that is possible.
It's not possible. She hosts or co-hosts a gazillion hit podcasts including On with Kara Swisher and Pivot. She recently announced that she will be hosting a new podcast with Hillary Clinton of all people. She also recently hosted a CNN miniseries earlier this year, Kara Swisher Wants to Live Forever. It was great. It was about the longevity industry and it was not just about the cool tech, the killer apps, but also kind of the socioeconomic implications. So maybe if we have time we'll talk about that and your future or lack thereof with the network that hosted or produced that miniseries.
And I'm pretty sure, although not positive, that Kara was one of the people who told me early on that I should join The Bulwark. So for that I am grateful, and I'm very grateful to have you here today, Kara, because I can think of no better person to talk with about a topic that I'm kind of obsessed with, which is what is the deal with business leaders and Donald Trump? That is, why do they support him? Still, how much of that is fear, how much of that is opportunism? So like, not that they're worried about losing things, but they're excited to possibly gain things through transactionalism. How much of it is actual ideology, like they actually agree with him for what he stands for, and are they getting their money's worth? The other thing that people should know about Kara, the reason why I want to talk with her about all of this is that she is the most plugged-in person I have ever met. She talks to everyone, every CEO, including the ones who ostensibly hate her. Maybe they talk to her because they hate her. I don't know.
Doesn't talk to me anymore. Not all of them.
Well, let's start with that. So why do you think that all of these folks in Silicon Valley and elsewhere are willing to take your calls and take your texts even though you've written critical things?
I mean, some of them, it depends on the person again, like same thing with Donald Trump, it depends on the person what their different motivations are. And with me, I think most people who are adults understand what a journalist does or what a media person does, and you know, if you're smart and know your stuff, they want to talk to you because you know more than they do. That's always been the case. You know, I always make sure, you know, they live in their little worlds and I talk to everybody, and so I'm valuable to them in that regard. Sometimes I'll tell them things, how I think about it. Usually I don't give them advice. I don't, you know, I don't work for them, so it's not... I don't really... I'll say it publicly what my advice is. You know, some, if they're adults, they're fine. If they're children, if they were badly raised and don't have an ability, or deeply insecure, or just in desperate need of mental help, they don't talk to me. So,
I thought you were going to say it's your scintillating personality.
I'm funny. I think I'm funny. I think they're surprised. Like, I've just been talking to... I met the guy who's CEO of Polymarket at a party, at a dinner party, and I thought he was quite smart. I actually hadn't spent time with him, and he will be coming on the podcast to do an on-the-record review. But we had enjoyable texts. He's funny. He's a funny guy. And so I think he enjoys... like, he'll say something, I'm like, 'That's [__] ridiculous.' And I suspect a lot of these people spend their lives getting licked up and down, and I'm not one to do that. And so I'm just about to meet the Klarna CEO, for example, which I don't know. I'm not a regular beat reporter anymore, so I don't spend as much time... you know, it just depends on the person. Many people meet me off the record first, and then we go from there. I ran into John Kennedy, Senator Kennedy, on a plane, and you know, he walked by. I was sitting in first class. He was going to economy, although he used the bathroom in first class, just FYI, which was very funny. But he went by and he looked, and he goes, 'You funny like Foghorn Leghorn.' And I go, 'I am. Will you come on the podcast?' And he said yes. So it was really, you know, it just depends on people.
That's scary. I'm little, too. You're always surprised that I'm little.
Yeah. Yeah. You and me both. I know. We both have Napoleon complexes of some kind.
So I don't know if you still have any connection to Elon Musk these days. Okay, that's what I figured. But I am curious to hear your current interpretation or psychoanalysis of what is going on with him politically. And let me just set this up for our listeners. So, the New York Times recently reported that Elon Musk has quietly funneled more than $276 million into Republican groups.
Yeah, exactly. It's on the front page of the New York Times. Yeah. And his super PAC since the start of July.
And I'm quoting from the story: In an effort to save Republicans' Senate majority, he gave a total of $158 million this summer to the Senate Leadership Fund, the main super PAC backing the party's candidates for the chamber. This is according to his own team. So again, not so quiet. In sum, that is one of the largest political donations in American history and more than the group's Democratic rival raised from all of its donors. So in sum,
It's a lot of money. And the reason I want to get your thoughts on this is that first of all, Elon Musk told us, what was it, last year, that he wasn't going to get involved in politics anymore.
My policy with him these days is, hello, he lied. But go ahead.
Okay. Well, so it's not just that he said he wasn't going to do it, but I do wonder like what he has to gain at this point.
For a number of... Pardon?
Are you kidding? You don't see what he has... what he has to lose is what you should be paying attention to.
Okay. So, say more about that.
Well, you know, I think I was just... I was in this new Musk documentary that Alex Gibney did, and one of the points I had made, and this is an interview I did before the election perhaps, I don't remember when I did it, was like, why is he backing Trump? But I'm like, are you kidding? He's under investigation by the Democrats, and if Trump wins, he's out. He gets a get-out-of-jail-free card. And on top of that, you know, he got DOGE. He got all this access. He got all these contracts. In fact, it was a big payday for him, especially as some of his companies were troubled, whether it was Twitter or... well, he uses that for a different thing that's about influence. And so it's relatively cheap for him to have that loss. But like Tesla and stuff, he needed a boost. And under Kamala Harris, he might be in jail right now, right? He is correct. And that's not because she's some avenging fury, it's because there's a lot of questions around different companies of his. And so in this case he got contracts and attention and whatever hole he's desperately needing to fill personally, you know, obviously a very lonely person from what you could tell, and he got all the benefits here. And in another administration he wouldn't. Well, here we are again. Like, all he has is money, right? He's not a particularly compelling campaigner. He lost in Wisconsin after spending a lot of money because he was repellent to people. His presence was repellent. But here he has money. And so if Donald Trump loses the House and the Senate, I would worry. I'd be worried if I were him. You know, no matter how rich he is, and especially since he's been so sort of heinous in his behavior, he's not going to be able to buy off all the Democrats for sure, and he's got plenty of enemies among the Republicans. And so he's got to keep Donald Trump in some level of power. It's existential for him. And the same thing with the next presidential... he's got to keep J.D. Vance president. If he can use money to do it, he'll do so. So money is cheap for him.
Yeah. But no matter how much money he throws at the House races, let's say Democrats are still going to control the House. I mean, certainly that's what the polling suggests right now. They will still have subpoena power. So why throw all this money at the Senate? And maybe I think, you know, there's some more question there about whether Democrats can take the Senate, but what does he have to gain by keeping one party in power in the Senate? Like, I don't even understand what the mechanism is that they were...
An emboldened Congress is going to start investigating him again, as they were. There were all these agencies, some of which he put a knife in and killed in DOGE, many of whom were investigating him. He stopped like a half a dozen investigations of his various companies. So they're going to start investigating again. You think he's not on the list? Like, he's at the top of that list. Donald Trump obviously is at the top, and his family and his, you know, his grifty family is at the top. But Elon Musk is right up there for that. And so they're going to look at what he's done. And this is not a new thing. You know, in Italy, in this country, this happens when these wealthy people get deeply enmeshed in politics, is they open themselves up to all manner of investigations. And so I think he knows. And then on the personal level, I do think he's a believer. Like, he's largely fueled by, you know, his own self-described drug use, his own radicalization. He just... I think he talked about it today, like his online, you know, his extremely online lifestyle, his insecurity. It's business, it's personal, it's all wrapped up. That he now... this is his team and this is his life, and he's got to defend it at all cost. And he lives in that zero-sum world, if you know him at all, where he is ready player one and the rest of us are NPCs, which are non-player characters. And so he has to win. And what does he have? Does he have likability? No. People... he's a villain now to many, many, many people, many more every single day. Does he have votability? No. He really can't run for much, right? What does he have? He has money, and that's what he's going to put to...
Yeah. I guess my point is he's never going to stop the investigations, at least from the House. So like, what incremental help? They're not going to... they're not going to touch him. These can start to touch him, right?
Ultimately, I think, you know, he knows... he's a very... he's a fatalistic person, I would say. Now, and then the way he behaves, I'm almost like, is he suicidal? Like, I don't mean real suicidal. I mean the way his actions are just really truly bonkers in some cases and not good for him, neither for his personal life or his business life. And you have to... he knows what's coming. Like, he's not stupid. Like, of all the many things you can say about him, is he... he has a very big sense of fate, and I think it's coming for him and real hard, I think, at some point, inevitably and eventually.
And what do you make of the fact that he might be helping Putin at this point and hurting Ukraine? And again, let me just give some background just before you answer so our audience knows. So, Ukraine said that SpaceX imposed new limits on military-grade Starlink terminals without warning, and thereby made it more difficult, basically by throttling the system, made it more difficult for Ukraine to execute drone strikes against Russia or against Russian-held territory. And the limits on Starlink restrict the speed at which some of Ukraine's weapons can travel and connect to the internet. Yep, this stuff matters. Elon's response to this, he posted on Twitter/X: 'Star Shield systems are owned and controlled by the US government. Any limits on speed or usage are decided by the US military and ultimately POTUS, and Starlink is a commercial service, blah blah blah blah blah.' So he basically punted and said it wasn't his decision. I will point out that Musk recently tweeted something basically saying Zelensky has gone too far and has otherwise canoodled with Putin in years past. So, I'm just curious how you interpret all this.
Well, I think he put out that tweet because he was... because, you know, he's been involving himself in this for a while. You know, he met with Putin, who knows what happened there. He styles himself as a world leader, an extrajudicial, extragovernmental leader in some fashion, a ruler. You know, he always put the... you watch the memes he puts out, they're not just for fun. They're a real reflection of his personal... He's always in some sort of outfit where he looks a lot better than he physically does in real life, and often wearing armor and things like that. But I think he, you know, he is very prone to influence by the Russians, right? As are many rich people, including Donald Trump. And so, and the Russians work it. You know, they work it. Now, he was close to Ukrainians, too. I think in his heart of hearts, he's probably more pro-Ukrainian, but this is good for his business to be this way, right? Because Trump is, etc. And so, you know, initially he really was helping them out by giving them free services, etc., etc. And when I was talking to him, I mean, he was quite pro-Ukrainian, I would say. But he was also pro-gay, and then he, you know, unleashed a series of like anti-trans and everything else. But so that changed. He just changed whatever happened to him in his constantly evolving brain. But he's not not talking to Donald Trump here about this. Like, when it suits him, he goes, 'I don't know, not mine.' And when it doesn't suit him, it's 'I am the master of all mankind.' Like, I'm certain he talked to Donald Trump. He knew exactly what the Trump administration was doing. Of course, it was the Trump administration who probably made this decision to throttle it back. But there was no way Musk wasn't either part of it or knew about it in some fashion. And so he's just saying, 'It's not me. Don't blame me.' And probably smartly so because, you know, especially with this DOGE deal, he looked, you know, he looks like a Bond villain at this point. So I think he probably understood that was maybe a step too far, presumably.
Yeah. Yeah. You know, I do wonder about, again, to what extent these kinds of alliances with strongmen are born of opportunism versus ideology. And part of the reason I ask about that, or that I raise it in the case of Elon Musk, is that he has also sided quite openly with AfD, the far-right party in Germany.
That's it. It wasn't like that.
Yeah. So, you know, how much of this, I guess for some of these figures, Elon Musk or others, is really about believing in the project as opposed to lining their own pockets or protecting their wealth?
Yeah, there's two people I think really do have the ideology. He's shifted, like, you know how some of those left-wing people, you know, suddenly become right-wing? That's what's happened, you know, and whatever reason, COVID really radicalized him. That's when I noticed the change in him and when we really parted, like, it was more recently where I haven't been talking to him, but it was during that time the government power was obsessed with him. And one of the things I always used to say, you know, people don't know this, but his grandfather was like a stone-cold anti-Semite, racist, like really, you can read about him, there's many accounts of him, and moved from Canada to South Africa because the Canadians didn't want him essentially, and ran a very right-wing party. And one of the things people would say, 'Oh, Elon's like that.' I'm like, 'You can't really blame him for his grandfather, right?' You know, like my grandfather said some terrible things and that's not me, you know. Part of me is like, 'Wow, he's kind of behaving like his grandfather now.' Like, it's kind of interesting. So, he must have changed. I think there is ideology here in some fashion, especially around what he considers free speech, which no one... it's a version of free speech where he gets to speak but nobody else does essentially, because he can turn on and off people and he does at his will. And the other person who's like this is Peter Thiel. He has always been very conservative, consistently conservative over the many years I had covered him, especially early on, one of the only conservative voices in Silicon Valley way back when. With Elon, I didn't even know his politics until recently, right? He didn't express any except vague liberalism, mostly capitalism, a little bit of P.T. Barnum, like, you know, it just wasn't political. And I think as did many people in Silicon Valley. Then there's this other trench of people, Mark Zuckerberg, you know, wounded flower kind of thing, wounded like, 'Oh, people are mean to me. Oh, Trump isn't. Oh, yay. I'll go with him.' He's very much about whether he can make money. Like, I think that pretty much decides everything. Tim Cook, money. Like, I need tariffs to be gone for me or I need this or I need that. Sergey Brin has shifted drastically, like he's at Google. And so each person has their own journey. Most of them, I think, are opportunistic, and I think they'll switch right back, whichever it takes. And then if they're conservative, they'll gripe by themselves. They'll gripe alone and kiss up to the president. I don't know.
We'll get to that in a second. I do want to hear your prognostications about who the tech industry will support come 2028. But first, you mentioned Peter Thiel. I think Peter Thiel is an interesting example here because he has, as I understand it, basically fled to Argentina.
Yeah. So he has moved to Argentina. Somebody who I think was a true believer, or my impression without knowing him was that he was a real true believer in the MAGA project and now does not maybe like what it has wrought.
Yeah. And so I thought this was kind of an interesting case in part because I spoke earlier this week with Chrystia Freeland. I don't know if you know her, the former...
Yep. Former finance minister, deputy PM of Canada,
who also is now advising Zelensky and started her career as a journalist in Ukraine and in Moscow writing about the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of the oligarchs. And you know, one of the patterns that we saw with the oligarchs in Russia was that they coalesced around a strongman, around Putin. They thought they could manipulate him, and then they found out that in fact once you empower a strongman, that strongman can use his strength against you, and many of them have since fled. Right. And actually I think we have a little clip from Chrystia talking about that. Let's play that.
And ultimately what you're going to see is, you know, if you acquiesce to the creation of a system that is built in to be unfair, that is ultimately patrimonial, it's ultimately about who the boss favors, who the house favors, then do not be surprised if you come out on the losing end. And ultimately in a system like that, the only person who wins is the dictator at the center of it.
Mhm. Yeah. History. I mean, every time.
Well, I guess the question is, has that conclusion occurred to the titans of industry today in the United States?
I think they're going to abandon him in four seconds. I think, you know, maybe... I mean, look, he's still the president. He's still going to, you know, but they're not going to be going to the White House every Tuesday for lunch. Have you noticed? The only people that go to the White House are tech titans. Like, I'm dying for a chemical company executive to have lunch with the president at this point. I'm like, every... they're like, I always get a call from CNN like, 'The tech titans are coming to lunch.' I'm like, they literally came to lunch four days ago, or they had a dinner or whatever, and with their girlfriends, and I don't give a [__] anymore. Like, I mean, this is Trump. It's a... as I've said, and I think I correctly coined the phrase, he's a coin-operated president, right? And so they put money in and they get contracts out and they get whatever they want out, and that's why they're there. I think they'll shift on a dime. I think they will... it depends on what the power structure is and who it is. They will first try to get the Democrats to... one person did say this to me, pretty prominent, said, 'Well, Trump will kill us. The Democrats will forgive us.' Like, and if we give them enough money, they'll forgive us, and they'll try because their proclivity is to try to, you know, work it out. Let's work it out. And, you know, money is money. And so you'll see a little bit more acquiescence on the part of Democrats, which they shouldn't. They should pop them in the nose. That's what they know is being popped in the nose, and then just slowly let them back into, you know, polite society essentially. But they'll probably give in. They always do.
Well, there's a question of both when do they abandon him and when does he abandon them, right? And we saw reporting... Yeah. Well, I mean,
He's pro-data center, pro-AI, like he really hasn't. It's really... I'm sort of like, Donald... like Vivek Ramaswamy cut and ran, JD Vance cut and ran. They're all like anti-data center before they were pro-data center. So, you know, Trump has not...
Well, I mean, he's still inflicting tariffs around the world. He is still...
Doesn't affect them. Doesn't affect them. They're not exporting anything. It just was Apple. It was just Apple, but he gave them some breaks, I'm sure, or something like that. But no, that's not... He's very pro-tech from what I can tell.
So, we had this reporting today from the Washington Post about ballroom donors.
Good for the Washington Post, despite...
Yeah, their news side is doing a great job. Let's give them credit for that.
I agree. But just to read off some of these...
For both of us, doesn't it? But...
