Dex Hunter-Torricke

know cowering with the idea that this is something that you know they should have any sort of direct view on and so it ended up with one of those messy unsatisfying compromises where like a post was put out and all the sort of sharp bits of language were you know watered down and it didn't mention trump by name it was just the sort of like thing expressed in the ether and it was like why are we playing coy with this stuff like if you really do believe in you know the values which at the time zuckerberg really said he believed in you know things like standing up for dreamers

you know, standing up for the rights of, you know, underrepresented people, for immigrants, you know, for communities, you know, that were, you know, diverse.

All those communities Trump attacked from literally day one when he rode down that escalator in Trump Tower.

And he said that it was his mission to basically, you know, exorcise them from society and roll the clock back to the 50s.

And if you're not going to stand up for your values when, you know, there's something as consequential as a future president of the United States, you know, starting to spew those things, when are you ever going to stand up to them?

Well, this is now well after I've left SpaceX, but now SpaceX is one of the companies that is obviously a prime defense contractor.

And part of the work that is now unfolding is to obviously develop a new generation of weapons and infrastructure to enable the US to win future wars.

There are proposals such as Golden Dome, the absolutely astonishing space-based missile defense system that Trump wants to build, which some estimates say will cost over a trillion dollars.

SpaceX is going to be the primary contractor for all of that.

And these are things now where...

Again, this is the duality of the moment.

You could say, oh, it's a defensive missile shield designed to shoot down incoming nuclear warheads.

Maybe that's okay.

Except if you are part of a nexus of leaders and institutions which are exerting tremendous political authority and economic power, because the technologies you're developing have become so central to economic growth in the United States, you have the ability

to radically shift agendas here.

If you've chosen instead to just make a bunch of money building space-based military infrastructure rather than using your overall influence to in fact shift us to a world where maybe we don't have to fight, why are we preparing for a nuclear war instead of trying to figure out how to not have nuclear wars?

Then I would say that is a historic mismatch of resources.

That is not the right strategy.

And of course, Elon Musk himself

well after I worked for him, has now taken on a role which I think is unforgivable in the tech industry and in the world.