Theodore Schleifer
speaker
55 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard Feb 2025
Theodore Schleifer’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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No. Elon Musk, a couple of years ago, couldn't care less about this stuff. He was like lots of wealthy tech executives who probably voted for Democrats. We know he voted for Obama. He voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016. And over the last couple of years, as Elon Musk moved to Texas and surrounded himself with a more conservative social circle,
And frankly, got kind of radicalized by the stuff that he was seeing on the platform he bought, Twitter, or now X. He started caring about this. But this has all been such a fast burn that your question is a good one because no one really anticipated this happening.
I think the timeline starts during COVID. Elon Musk at this time, let's say pre-COVID in 2019, is somebody who is a center-left Democrat, doesn't really care about politics. But what happens is Musk begins to feel targeted, fairly or not, by legislators in California.
As you may recall, there were work stoppages put into place by California government and Tesla's factories were sort of defying or threatening to defy California about that. Around this time in 2021, like lots of wealthy people in tech, Elon leaves the state, he moves to Texas, he moves to Austin.
And he becomes very, very convinced that COVID and the lockdowns and what he calls the quote unquote, woke mind virus has taken over America. And also around this time, Elon Musk has a child who begins to identify as trans and there's a personal dimension to this that we probably haven't fully appreciated.
And suddenly you wake up four years later and Elon Musk is the chair of the Department of Government Efficiency and is sort of leading this takeover of government. But I think the timeline we're talking about here is really the last four years. It's really the Biden years, which has produced the Elon Musk of the Trump years.
Sure. Elon Musk has a lot of kids. Elon has had a lot of marriages or had kids with women who are not his wife. And one of his children began to identify as trans. And Elon has said publicly that this issue, trans issues, is really what kind of pushed him away from the Democratic Party. And he's talked a little bit about it publicly. He doesn't always want to go into the personal stuff.
I find in some of his public commentary, he's not eager to talk about this. But we know that it played some role in kind of him becoming Right. Right. Right. Crime, immigration, the woke mind virus that is infecting American kids. He is motivated, like all of us are, frankly, by our personal experiences.
And clearly, Elon's family life has played a role as well in sort of getting him to be more conservative.
I think he's basically said as much. Yes.
This is just the culmination of everything that came during the Biden era. When I went to Silicon Valley in 2017, it was impossible to be an outspoken Republican because you would be allying yourself with Trump.
And even if you were a believer that there should be tougher border enforcement or that the government spends too much money or anything that Elon Musk says today, you would also have to defend all of these positions that were absolutely reviled in the tech industry. So most Republicans in tech, frankly, just shut up. They didn't talk about politics at all. They talked about their companies.
They were not eager to get involved. Meanwhile, Silicon Valley liberal billionaires are sort of the war chest of the resistance, and they're leading the effort to push back on Trump. Now, fast forward to 2020. Joe Biden wins. Trump leaves office. Jan 6 happens. Now there is the ability, developing slowly, you know, at the time I'm there, 2021, 2022, to be anti-Biden.
Even if you are not really vocally pro-Trump, you know, you could argue that we should have a different Republican nominee. People like Ron DeSantis were getting a lot of currency among Silicon Valley Republican billionaires. Elon Musk was not that involved right at this point, but plenty of kind of Musk acolytes, someone like David Sachs, who is now the White House AI czar.
At the time, David Sachs helps launch this podcast called All In, which becomes very popular among the tech right now. And you see anecdotally, you know, I'm there talking with, you know, kind of people I think of a center left kind of rich liberals who are beginning to, you know, wonder why is Joe Biden so anti-business?
You know, why didn't he invite Tesla to, you know, an EV summit that he held at the White House? You sort of see this visceral reaction to kind of the Biden positions on tech policy. And, you know, why is he stifling innovation, stifling artificial intelligence? Why is he being so mean to all these crypto industry people? priorities.
That is kind of the climate that Elon Musk begins to emerge from. Elon in 2023 was supporting Ron DeSantis somewhat covertly for president. And it wasn't until, you know, the assassination attempt in mid 2024, that Elon was publicly pro Trump, but a lot in building up between 2021 and 2024. That is now we're only seeing publicly in the Trump White House in 2025. But
This was a long time coming, I guess.
Yeah, I mean, look, Elon is an interesting person on AI, where he has all those beliefs, you know, personally about the world and culture and politics. And he also has beliefs that I think would be contradictory to some of kind of the right word shifts of the artificial intelligence industry, where Elon Musk is actually very concerned about AI. You know, he's signed a lot of public letters,
urging there to be AI safety. And he's concerned about the company OpenAI being too commercialized. And sort of he's concerned about this jump from a nonprofit to a for-profit company. So he does not have conventional beliefs of kind of the right here, which is in general, you know, more pro-technology development and pro, frankly, just profit motive.
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