Know Your Enemy

• Becoming Elon Musk, Part Two

  If there's ever been a Know Your Enemy subject worthy of two episodes, it is Elon Musk—currently the world's richest man, CEO and leader of several pathbreaking companies, ringleader of the Department of Government Efficiency, and (for now) Donald Trump's co-president. In other words, to understand what's happening in the United States during the second Trump administration, it's essential to understand Musk: what shaped him, his enduring preoccupations and personality traits, how he made his vast fortune, and why, in unprecedented ways, he decided to go all in on Trump.In this second of two episodes on Musk, Matt and Sam bring his story up to the present. After offering a few concluding details on Musk's various romantic and familial entanglements, they chart the course of his political derangement, especially focusing on his seeming addiction to Twitter—the social media platform he eventually bought and renamed "X," which also is the name he gave one of his young sons. Musk's purchase of Twitter is treated as a case study in how the billionaire now tends to operate, from his penchant for making wild claims and impulsive decisions, to the way he manages people, tasks, and money. The discussion concludes with a theory of why Trump made such a show of buying a Tesla at the White House, and how to understand what Musk is up to with his erratic, ignorant work at DOGE, with plenty of eyebrow-raising details along the way.As mentioned: Join Matt and Sam and Jamelle Bouie at Dissent magazine’s fundraiser on April 8 in New York!Listen again: "Becoming Elon Musk, Part One"Sources:Kate Conger & Ryan Mac, Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter (2024)Walter Isaacson, Elon Musk (2023)Ashlee Vance, Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future (2015)Ella Yurman, "Vivian Jenna Wilson on Being Elon Musk’s Estranged Daughter, Protecting Trans Youth and Taking on the Right Online," Mar 20, 2025Kylie Cheung, "World’s Richest Man Allegedly Refuses to Pay Appropriate Child Support," Jezebel, Mar 21, 2025Faiz Siddiqui, "Elon Musk is worth $270 billion. He’d buy Twitter with an IOU," WaPo, April 22, 2022Theodore Schleifer  & Maggie Haberman "Elon Musk Seeks to Put $100 Million Into Trump Political Operation," NYTimes, Mar 11, 20225.Eric Lipton, "Musk Is Positioned to Profit Off Billions in New Government Contracts," NYTimes, Mar 23, 2025.Jessie Blaeser, "DOGE shared its receipts — and some of them don’t match," Politico, Feb 22, 2025. Hadas Gold, "Trump says he’ll buy a Tesla to support Elon Musk, whose companies are struggling," CNN, Mar 11, 2025.Sam Adler-Bell, "Capital without Borders," Commonweal, Feb 8, 2017.  ...and don't forget to subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon to access to all of our bonus episodes!

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  2:01:16
• Becoming Elon Musk, Part One

  If there's ever been a Know Your Enemy subject worthy of two episodes, it is Elon Musk—currently the world's richest man, CEO and leader of several pathbreaking companies, ringleader of the Department of Government Efficiency, and (for now) Donald Trump's co-president. In other words, to understand what's happening in the United States during the second Trump administration, it's essential to understand Musk: what shaped him, his enduring preoccupations and personality traits, how he made his vast fortune, and why, in unprecedented ways, he decided to go all in on Trump. To explore the life and times of Musk, Matt and Sam read several biographies, along with the best reporting on him and his activities (especially of late). In this first episode, they offer a close reading of Musk's childhood in South Africa and the people, and traumas, that shaped him; his discovery of science fiction and teenage fixations on computers, video games, and space exploration; his escape to Canada to attend college and eventual arrival in the United States; and his early years in Silicon Valley and the businesses that first made him very rich. As mentioned: Join Matt and Sam and Jamelle Bouie at Dissent magazine’s fundraiser on April 8 in New York!Sources:Kate Conger & Ryan Mac, Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter (2024)Walter Isaacson, Elon Musk (2023)Ashlee Vance, Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future (2015)Joshua Benton, "Musk’s Anti-Semitic, Apartheid-Loving Grandfather," The Atlantic, Sept 30, 2023Henry Farrell, "Silicon Valley’s Reading List Reveals Its Political Ambitions," Bloomberg, Feb 21, 2025Tony Tulathimutte, Rejection (2024)Kase Wickhman, "Elon Musk Has Yet Another Child, According to the Mother of That Baby," Vanity Fair, Feb 18, 2025Favour Adegoke, "Elon Musk's Trans Daughter Rips Dad For Allegedly Using Sex-Selective IVF For Her: 'I Was Going Against The Product'," Yahoo News, March 11, 2024Jesse's podcast: Tech Talk....and don't forget to subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon to access to all of our bonus episodes!

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  1:22:30
• "Exit From Within" (August 2022)

  Here's something a little creepy. In a bonus episode from August 2022, Matt and Sam were discussing Sam's profile of Arizona Senate hopeful and Peter Thiel-protégé Blake Masters when we found ourselves imagining how a future union of MAGA nationalism and Silicon Valley libertarianism might try to run the government. A listener flagged it for us, noting that the description — which we call "exit from within" — sounds remarkably similar to what we are now experiencing with Trump, Musk, DOGE, and the tech right. We had totally forgotten about this, and thought the rest of you might like to hear it. We'll be back to our regular programming, with the Elon Musk episode, next week. The full episode, "Masters of War," is on Patreon. Readings: Sam Adler-Bell, "The Violent Fantasies of Blake Masters," NYTimes, Aug 3, 2022. Albert O. Hirschman, "Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States," (1970) ...and don't forget to subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon to listen to all of our premium episodes!

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  20:42
• How Bad Is It? [TEASER]

  Listen to the rest of this premium episode by subscribing at patreon.com/knowyourenemyJust over a month into Trump's second term, Matt and Sam offer their thoughts on where we're at—and, to be blunt, the assessment is fairly depressing. They take stock of the troubling truth that Pete Hegseth's confirmation reveals about Trump's hold over the Republican Party, new FBI director Kash Patel's conspiratorial children's books, the state of the conservative legal movement, the right's relatively recent embrace of unbounded executive power, what the Democrats can do to fight back, and more.Sources:Pope Francis, "Letter of the Holy Father Francis to the Bishops of the United States of America," Feb 10, 2025Jonathan Swan & Maggie Haberman, "Power, Intimidation and the Resurrection of Trump’s Support for Hegseth," New York Times, Dec 12, 2024Gabriel Sherman, "'They’re Scared Shitless': The Threat of Political Violence Informing Trump’s Grip on Congress," Vanity Fair, Feb 19, 2025Jude Joffe-Block, et al, "How Kash Patel has Used Children's Books and Podcasts to Promote Conspiracy Theories," NPR, Dec 10, 2024Heidi Przybyla, "Leonard Leo Used Federalist Society Contact to Obtain $1.6B Donation," Politico, May 2, 2023James Burnham, Congress and the American Tradition(1959)

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  4:27
• Pay Attention! (w/ Chris Hayes)

  We're all anxious, and none of us can pay attention. We don't read long books anymore; our kids don't read at all. When we watch TV, we scroll at the same time. And we absolutely cannot be alone with ourselves. These are the symptoms of a modern malaise that is everywhere diagnosed but rarely treated with the dire seriousness it deserves: an epochal sickness that is fundamentally changing the way we relate to each other and to our own minds. What would it take to reclaim control? Chris Hayes — journalist, author, and host of MSNBC's All In — joins to discuss his new book The Sirens' Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource. Together, Chris and the boys theorize how attention replaced information as the defining commodity of modern life. Along the way, we discuss our own struggles with social media addiction, prayer as an ancient technology for organizing attention, the evolutionary origins of attention-seeking, Donald Trump as the "public figure par excellence" of the attention age, and how to fight back against the corporate takeover of our minds. Toward the end, Chris explains how he's navigating hosting his cable show amid another bewildering Trump era, which seems designed to divide and fragment our attention.Further Reading: Chris Hayes, The Sirens' Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource, (2025)Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, (1952)Adam Phillips, Attention Seeking, (2022)Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, (1844)Kyle Chayka, FIlterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture, (2024)Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, (2019)Daniel Immerwahr, "What if the Attention Crisis Is All a Distraction?" The New Yorker, Jan 20, 2025....and don't forget to subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon to listen to all of our premium episodes! 

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