SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Elon Musk was the world's first trillionaire. The power of that kind of money may be hard to understand in technology, finance, politics, everyday life. Since July, Elon Musk has spent at least $276 million on campaign donations to Republicans, but that is just a fraction of his overall wealth - around 0.03%. He has business ventures in space, AI, electric vehicles and even - as he showed off this week - flying cars.
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ELON MUSK: You know, I'm not sure it's necessarily legal in all jurisdictions. So it's going to be pretty wild that you can have a rocket car.
SIMON: Joined now by Ronan Farrow, an investigative reporter and contributing writer to The New Yorker, who has written about Elon Musk and his influence and helped produce a documentary called "Musk." Mr. Farrow, thanks so much for being with us.
RONAN FARROW: Thanks for having me.
SIMON: This week, Elon Musk's Starshield military communications service was briefly restricted in Ukraine. He says any decision would've come from the Pentagon, not his company. But does this remind us how dominant SpaceX is in the field, and should that be a concern?
FARROW: Absolutely. A few years ago, I reported in The New Yorker on U.S. officials who were expressing alarm that the U.S. government had let one man become infrastructure - Starlink for Ukraine's army, SpaceX for NASA and the Pentagon - and that they increasingly had no way to compel him to comply with their policy directives. And one of the cases that I dug into to illustrate this was an incident in the fall of 2022 when Ukrainian forces were advancing on Russian-held territory, and Starlink was dropping. And the Ukrainians were signaling, well, we're in peril because of this. So U.S. officials were calling Elon Musk to plead with him, please restore contact.
Now, in the latest incident, we have Zelenskyy in Ukraine saying people are dying as a result of us losing connectivity and Musk saying, well, it's not me, it's the administration. And the administration, for some days, equivocating, and now saying very narrowly, well, it wasn't the president. The truth is, we don't know who flipped the switch in this case. But this goes to the larger theme, that this is a moment where so often the infrastructure is controlled by private interests with as much by way of life-or-death stakes as turning off communication capacities in a theater of war.
SIMON: How would you assess the current relationship between Elon Musk and President Trump? They were close, then seemed to have a falling out.
FARROW: They were close and seemed to have a falling out. But in recent days, we have seen Musk get appointed to yet another government role, co-leading an initiative called Project Meridian, assessing the future of warfare. By the way, at a time when his companies have immense business with the U.S. government. So there are real questions being raised about the conflicts of interests here, to put it mildly.
SIMON: We, of course, mentioned Elon Musk's record campaign contributions.
FARROW: Yes.
SIMON: How do you see his spending in politics?
FARROW: Well, he said that he was done after the last cycle with spending big to support Republican politics. But as you noted, that has not happened. The biggest of his recent checks - 158 million to the Senate Leadership Fund - is one of the largest political gifts ever made by a person in this country.
And this is part of a wider trend line. We are living through a moment in American history when wealth imbalances are immense and deepening and an oligarchy - and particularly a tech oligarchy - is increasingly entwined with politics. The infrastructure the government runs on is now being provided by many of the same men that are bankrolling disproportionately one side of the aisle, and Elon Musk is a particularly acute example of that.
SIMON: But, I mean, we have to point out there are certainly big-name contributors - and I'll cite just George Soros - who are contributing millions to Democrats, aren't there?
FARROW: Of course. But Elon Musk embodies a very particular and rising strain of politics in Silicon Valley that is empowering their companies to operate with less and less regulation. Absolutely, money and politics, more broadly, is a bipartisan issue, but this is a specific rising tide that we're seeing right now.
SIMON: Are there ways that Elon Musk influences our everyday lives that - of which we might not be aware?
FARROW: I think one thing to highlight is the information economy that we all live in. This past April, I reported on a rival of Musk's, Sam Altman, in The New Yorker. And it's striking to look at how differently information related to my reporting that was tough on Musk flowed through the internet versus information that was tough on arrival of his. In the case of my reporting on Musk, a key post on X about it that I made got something like 8 million views. The OpenAI Sam Altman reporting by comparison, the key post I had made about that on his platform - it wound up getting something like 40 million views.
You know, when I reported on Musk, he called me against the people and a puppet of the establishment. And then, you know, when I was reporting on someone he didn't like, he was posting that content nonstop and amplifying it in not always transparent ways. So we just all need to be aware that we are living in information systems that are frequently being manipulated to suit the whims and business objectives of very powerful individuals that don't have a lot of accountability around them.
SIMON: Ronan Farrow, reporter for The New Yorker, one of the producers of the new documentary "Musk." Thank you so much for being with us.
FARROW: Thank you.
SIMON: And we reached out to Elon Musk for comment through his lawyer and companies but did not hear back. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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