Raging Moderates with Scott Galloway and Jessica Tarlov
Elon Musk’s Federal Government Takeover
Tue, 11 Feb 2025
Scott Galloway and Jessica Tarlov break down Elon Musk’s growing influence in the government and the legal battles piling up against him and DOGE. They dive into Trump’s latest federal worker buyout plan, his controversial comments on Gaza, and the Democrats’ strategy to push back. Follow Jessica Tarlov, @JessicaTarlov. Follow Prof G, @profgalloway. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What is Elon Musk's influence on the federal government?
So, look, before I'm not going to I don't want to get into a back and forth here. What I would say is that the comments made were made by me, not by Kara. And I find it sort of telling that he puts Kara's name first and goes after Kara instead of just going after the person who he has or should have a grievance with. And that's that's me. And anyways, I'll let you go first.
Any thoughts on what's going on with Elon, Jess?
Well, I have a lot of thoughts on what's going on with Elon. I assumed that Kara came first in that because she has long covered him. And last week she had a big interview with Ezra Klein, which I thought was very impressive, talking about her years of covering him and being close to him. So that was my assumption as to why that happened. But yes, I have a lot of thoughts. I don't want to steal.
If you have things to say about the tweet stuff, maybe save it for Pivot when you two can... We can talk about it more in depth, but I don't want to cut you off if you've got more on that because mine is not about the tweets necessarily.
You know, I don't have a lot. At first, I started, this is what happens whenever Elon tweets at me or gets angry at me, and that is my phone starts blowing up with, are you okay? Is everything okay? And I'm like, I'm not on Twitter, so I'm shielded from most of the toxicity. And someone sent me a screenshot saying, of the tweet and that it had 11,000 comments.
And I'm like, well, I bet those comments aren't fun to read. But I mean, essentially, I start to get worried and I start to get panicked and I start to, you know, I start to get anxious. And then I realized, okay, whatever you say about Kara and me is we live with our children. We don't sleep with a loaded gun next to us. We're not severely addicted to a disassociative substance.
We're not making Nazi gestures. And he's acting like these engineers are in Guantanamo Bay when the reality is that probably the most serious thing they're doing, other than denying children and veterans their payments, trying to figure out if the meme for Doge should be wearing sunglasses.
And just this notion of these billionaire tears where he can't decide if it's his struggling engineers or just proper grammar. Like, pick a struggle, boss. It's like, well, you don't have autocorrect? I start to read this thing. I start to get upset. I start to think about responding. And then I think, I don't want to create a sideshow.
I want to focus on what I think is important, and that is highlighting. that we have somebody who was not cleared or approved by government or Congress, who is basically hacking into our federal systems. If China did this, it would be an act of war without the permission of Congress and shutting off funds to veterans and children and the neediest.
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Chapter 2: How is public opinion shifting on Elon Musk?
And I didn't mean to paint with such a broad brush, but I do think that There's the widest group of young men that you were talking about who are lacking in opportunity and lacking in mobility and the chance to make meaningful relationships and to live a full and loving and beautiful life that we all want.
But then there is also a large contingent of these bro types who feel, even though they have been afforded tons of opportunities... have had the best education and probably aren't facing any student debt at the end of this, getting internships at places like Palantir at 19 years old, who still feel aggrieved.
And a lot of that is rooted in the fact that they don't see a ramp to the level of success that their boomer parents or late Gen X boomer parents had by their age.
I mean, thinking back to how enormous it felt if a parent could earn a million dollars in a year, and then how stifled people who see themselves as upwardly mobile and are living in these big cities and maybe are at a big law firm or in banking, when you say, oh, earn a million dollars a year, I'm not going to have anywhere close to the life my parents had.
My kids are not going to go to private school, which is now, you know, $55,000 to $65,000 a year versus the $25,000 when I was growing up as an elder millennial. So I wanted to add that. But something I've been thinking a lot about, and this is shifting gears a little bit, but still about what's going on with Musk and Co. is how much this moment feels to me like it did when Trump and
the array of lawyers that were fanned out across the country after the 2020 election were getting to work to essentially poison pill as big of a swath of the population as they possibly could to not believe that Joe Biden had won a free and fair election. They did it with vaccine skepticism. Their power is strongest when their supporters are separated from the rest of society.
And I feel like we're seeing that moment again. And J.D. Vance said, tweeted over the weekend after the judge ruled about the Treasury payments. Not that Scott Besson couldn't access the Treasury payment system, but that you couldn't have individuals that weren't fully vetted having access. And we'll see what happens. I think today there'll be an addendum to that.
But he's tweeting saying that they're trying to control the executive's quote unquote legitimate power. And a lot of that is a reference back to the Supreme Court case where they basically gave Trump immunity from anything or future presidents. But it was really about Trump. And then you had, I don't know if you saw, Kristi Noem, the Homeland Security Secretary, was on with Dana Bash this weekend.
People don't trust the government.
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Chapter 3: What are the implications of Musk's legal challenges?
That was the best line of the way.
And then she spews drivel for... you know, 58 seconds after that and shows she doesn't really know what she's talking about. But she actually did say the important part out loud, which is they are creating an environment and have fostered for years now an environment in which people don't feel that they can trust the government.
And one of the first things Trump said when he started running for president was, I alone can fix it. And now it's I alone plus Elon and JD and whoever is on board for all of this. And I'm scared to see society,
perhaps even further breaking apart along these new lines of who thinks that the government does anything good for me and who thinks that there is absolutely nothing of positive note that the government delivers. And that's hugely dangerous.
And I don't know, that's been the most disturbing part for me that I feel like I'm back in November and December of 2020 and I worry we're not going to get these people back.
Well, this is a serious issue, and I want to apologize for my Nazi references because they're not funny, although it is clear that Musk and Trump have made a hard Reich turn. And also, I don't know if you've driven the new Model SS from Tesla.
Are you coming up with these on the fly, or do you have a list of Musk Nazi jokes that you like to make?
Well, you know, he's changed his pronouns to he and Himmler. But anyways, there's a lot in there. And I think that essentially you have, unfortunately, everything reverse engineers to one key statistic in my view. And if we don't fix it, we're going to have some form of revolution, famine, or war. And that happens in every society. And it's the following.
The ultimate social compact is that my kids will do better than me. If I work hard, I play by the rules, my kids will do better than me. The definition, I used to think the definition of love was caring more about someone than you care about yourself. And I've broadened that to, you know, you give witness and notice to people's lives. But the people who you irrationally love are your children.
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Chapter 4: How does Trump's buyout plan affect federal workers?
There's also, because we've had what I would argue is the best functioning organization. I think the most impressive organization in history is a wing of the U.S. government, and that's our military. And I think in the top five is the U.S. government. And Mel Robbins, who I think is going to probably displace Joe Rogan if Stephen Bartlett doesn't, has this new book out called Let Them.
And I'm sort of at the point right now where the people who are under the illusion that Trump represents them, the genius of the Republican Party is they represent the top 1% in corporations, and they've convinced the bottom 99 that you should endorse us because once you get into the top 1%, you're going to love it here, and you have more of a chance with us. And when Democrats keep...
spewing out this elitist dribble and we continue to move towards a 30-year-old not doing as well as his or her parents, then the parents and the people under the age of 30 just want chaos. And what I say around some of this stuff, I'm at the point now where it's like, let them. The states that went for Trump are the states that are the biggest takers of federal assistance. And
So just see what happens when Veterans Affairs benefits, when we disrupt and shut down those people you can't trust. OK, let's see what happens to you and dad and your neighbors and what happens in these rural, dark red communities. when there is no head start. See what happens when you shut down DEI and there is no job opportunity for veterans. I'm at the point where it's like, you know what?
You broke it, you own it. You're gonna get to find out. just how quote unquote incompetent government is, you're going to find out that government is a lot more competent than you had originally thought. And you're going to get a very ugly awakening in my view. And I'm sort of at the point of, all right, it's time. You really want to see what life is like.
In these red states, the people who are most rabidly for Trump, who tend to be in rural areas, tend to be, quite frankly, have a larger body mass index, are more dependent upon Medicare, are more dependent on government services. The biggest takers from a state perspective are the ones that went hardest towards Trump.
which means when these payments and these programs get shut down, this isn't going to hurt us, Jess. I mean, we're upset about this because I'd like to think we have some fidelity to America and the Constitution and want to pay back based on the prosperity we've recognized because of this incredible system and rule of law and democracy. But quite frankly, this isn't going to really hurt you or me.
Our kids aren't in SNAP. We're not getting Veterans Affair payments. We're not getting Social Security payments, right? We're not. Yeah. We're not dying of malaria in Malawi or wherever, right? This won't affect us. It's just fascinating, though, that the people who I think are about to get the biggest dose of like, wow, be careful what you ask for, are the ones that are most rabidly pro-Trump.
So my sense is at this point, you know, as Mel Robbins would say, let them have at it. You asked for it. You got it. Toyota.
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Chapter 5: What strategies are Democrats using to respond to Musk?
I don't want to be someone that wishes a bad economic outcome on anyone. I would love a world in which everyone can succeed to the utmost level. But it does seem like there has already been a bit of this escalation. I don't want to go as far as saying buyer's remorse, but you're seeing these videos coming up on TikTok. I don't know.
There's a farmer who relies on this cost sharing program that gets funded through the Inflation Reduction Act that has been frozen and gone away. And he's talking about potentially losing his farm. He was someone who voted for Trump.
Katie Britt, the senator from Alabama, is out there talking about how we can't have the NIH go away, the new policy of getting indirect costs down to 15%, which will basically mean that we have to shutter labs that are saving us from every disease under the sun and are a huge economic boon for the country. I was astounded to see that for every dollar that we put
into society from the NIH that we get $2.46 back, and it generates nearly $93 billion in economic activity in the U.S. And also is what keeps us the leader of the pack, our competitiveness. It's so funny to hear Republicans bemoaning how far we're falling behind all the time. And then they're like, you know what we'll do? We'll get rid of, we'll slash NIH funding.
That'll be the way that we'll really show the rest of the world. But in a more personal level, I talked. about two or three months ago to a college student from the Midwest. He reached out, he watches The Five, is thinking about a career in politics, really interested in political communication. We got on the phone and he emailed me last week and he said, and he said that I could share this.
I've really appreciated hearing what you have had to say the past week on The Five and your podcast with Scott. So yeah, Scott, you've really opened my mind on certain things that are currently going on as someone who voted for Trump. And you have been communicating a lot of frustrations I've been feeling alongside some family and friends who didn't expect all the chaos.
And then he puts in parentheses, not to mention the tariffs, as our family owns a small business where all our products are made in China. So this is a 20-year-old bro, right, from the middle of the country. Comes from a conservative family. They love Trump. And it only took—I got this a week ago. So it only took two weeks of this level of chaos—
for him to feel strongly enough that he would write that down, right? That's not a casual comment. And he told me that I could talk about it, that I could put that out on air. So it's obviously something that's very emblematic of not only what's going on in his life, but what's going on in his orbit.
Elon Musk's popularity has gone from in 2016, it was plus 29 when he was the SpaceX guy, down to negative 11. So something is happening. There is pushback out there and the realization that, yeah, maybe there are cuts we should be making, but this wholesale approach to just move fast and break things is not something that works for the public sector.
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Chapter 6: How do societal divides affect opinions on government?
Even this week will be an interesting incubator for that. But I think that they are so far emboldened, even from where they were in 2020 when they were getting bad rulings, that we could see something completely unprecedented.
Bill O'Reilly recently said that he doesn't believe Musk has as much power as we think. And then Time magazine in the same week puts him on the cover behind the president's desk. Do you think we're overestimating Musk's influence or underestimating it?
I'm not sure. Listen, Time magazine wants a good cover. It was a good cover. It definitely pissed Trump off, even though he said like, oh, are they still in business? You know, who reads that anymore? But he definitely, when he got Time Person of the Year just a month ago, was super psyched about Time magazine. I'm sure the answer is somewhere in the middle.
I think you don't want to be the person that went out there and took a big swing. Like, Elon Musk actually doesn't have that much power. You can even see from the level of disruption that we've had that he has that power. And also... that he swayed the election like this.
You know, $290 million, whatever algorithmic changes to social media that we'll probably never understand the true impact of that or the gravity of that impact when, I mean, you're not on Twitter anymore. I still am. I need to be there for work. It's A, a cesspool, but B... I can barely find content that I need to be able to do my job.
Reporters that I follow are not showing up even in the, you know, the for you column. It pales in comparison to what it used to be, which was, I thought, the best news gathering site. You could always find what you needed right away when you logged on to Twitter. And it's not like that anymore at all. So I'm in the middle on it. What do you think? Are you a Bill O'Reilly or a Time magazine?
You know, I don't know. I know that the staff in the White House is more worried about trying to calm Trump down when he's angry because he doesn't drink or do drugs. Whereas with Musk, you just give him a ketamine infused juice box. There goes the bigger man. That bigger man part of the show is over. He's back. That's right. Anyways, with that, let's take a quick break. Stay with us.
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Chapter 7: What role do young men play in the current political landscape?
Well, the thing that it does in the immediate term, even if he says it's not something that he was completely serious about, and you saw that Caroline Leavitt, the press secretary, had to walk back his openness to boots on the ground the next day in the briefing because that was something that freaked even the biggest warmongers out there. Yeah.
They were like, no, actually, we are not putting boots on the ground in the Middle East. But this helps Bibi in the immediate term in shoring up his right flank, which he definitely needs if he's going to be able to stay in power. And Trump always just has that side door available to him where he says, you know, Well, it was a negotiating tactic, right?
You know, we just needed to see what Egypt and Jordan were really made of. The former deputy prime minister of Jordan said that this was a declaration of war on the Arab people. That doesn't sound good. Even if that is the place that you are starting at, that you— can even think of a world in which you're going to move 2 million people out of the place that they live.
And this is not about defending Hamas, staying in charge or anything of that sort. But just Egypt and Jordan have been very clear about this. Saudi got involved and said, we're not doing this either. The Arab world has not been open to taking Palestinians for a very long time. which is one of the endemic problems with this conflict. And I don't know what the solution is.
We all wish that there was going to be able to be a two-state solution with a neat bow, and we can't get there. There are people who have dedicated their lives to it, like Tony Blair, for instance, and we have not been able to get there. But
I think that it's a little too easy to just say that it's a distraction or it's a sideshow because it is forcing people to have to deal with it, first of all, which makes a big difference. Like Marco Rubio is going to have to say something about it, right? And people like Tom Cotton are going to have to say something about it. The administration is going to have Pete Hegseth over at defense.
People are going to have to prepare themselves for the fact that his mercurial or herky-jerky approach to foreign policy might not go your way all the time. And we did talk about it as maybe it's one of the advantages that our enemies have no idea what he's actually going to do. But there are real implications for this. And his words matter as much as we'd like to pretend that they don't.
And he says a lot of shit and he throws stuff against the wall and sees whether it sticks or not. You cannot, with a serious face, say at this point that Trump is not interested in being a modern-day imperialist, at least to some degree.
The amount of times that he's talked about Greenland, he's talking about the Panama Canal, now he's talking about whatever he wants to do in the Middle East, which is Jared Kushner's vision. Jared Kushner said there's a lot of waterfront property that'd be available.
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Chapter 8: Are we overestimating or underestimating Musk's power?
to get in the way of blocking the extension on our debt ceiling such that the next Treasury auction fails. Because at the end of the day, the reason why the tariffs were rolled back is the leverage in the people that Trump listens to are corporations and shareholders. And they called him around these ridiculous Canadian and Mexican tariffs and said, do not do this.
This will have an immediate impact on the stock market. The adult in the room is the stock market and the 10-year bond. And he basically got these illusory symbolic concessions and then walked them back. And I think if the Democrats say, OK, you want to play Russian roulette, we're going to load the chamber around the upcoming Treasury auction.
And if you want to call all your buddies and tell them that interest rates are about to spike, which will take the stock market down. And I'm still trying to figure out if that hurts the 1 percent. Well, 1 percent of America's population owns 90 percent of the stocks.
So, I think that the real leverage here is around money and is around, you know, you want to shut down the economy, you don't believe in a democratic process, fine. We're going to shut down the economy and you're not going to be able to make the interest, the upcoming interest payments, and you're going to be the president for the first time.
was so offensive, was so non-democratic that we felt we had no choice but to get in the way that you're about to be the first president where a treasury auction where America did not pay its debts. And let's see what happens, boss. But I'm trying to think of where we have leverage
And those are the only places I can think of because per what Hakeem Jeffries said, us just screaming outrage and waving our cane in front of a federal building, that's not working, right? We need to go after the money and we need to say, you're going to be the president that takes this stock market down, you know, eight or 10% on the opening bell next Wednesday after a failed treasury auction.
Your thoughts?
I love that idea. And I'm sure they're considering that alongside the negotiations that are going to come up in March because the Republicans had these high hopes for one massive bill, which seems like a really stupid way to be funding the government anyway. But if you put those two things together, that'd be very difficult for Trump to weather.
And he will be the person in charge if we fail at auction or if the government shuts down in general. Though it seems like he does want to furlough employees anyway. But I have an idea that maybe could be used as a complement to this. And I'm hoping that Democrats I'm loosely calling this the Democratic disruption plan because everyone loves this term disruption. It's become very chic. Right.
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