Journal columnist Tim Higgins says Musk has a lot to be concerned about with Democrats in control of Congress.

One of the things that's top of mind to a lot of Democrats is just the role that Musk played in those early days of the Trump administration.

Remember, he was the head of Doge, where he spent the early part of 2025 looking for spending to cut.

And he did it in a way that was seen by some critics as pretty brutal.

Another spot that I would anticipate Musk to face a lot of scrutiny is the role he has as the head of SpaceX and its satellite program called Starlink and the position that company plays in geopolitical issues.

In particular, there's the suggestion that Musk has limited Ukraine's ability to use that satellite network in its battles with Russia and a lot of questions about the power that Musk has in these roles.

Tim says that congressional scrutiny of Musk could pose a risk for SpaceX and Tesla, too.

This is a pivotal moment for Musk and his companies.

So what's the what's the option then to move more slowly to play up the benefits? What should the industry have done up to this point?

You know, it's interesting.

If you go back the last generation of Silicon Valley, the tech coming out of the valley in a lot of ways sold itself.

Everybody got very excited for the iPhone.

You could see the benefits of Facebook early on in those companies.

You think about Google, you think about some of the other companies that came out were very sophisticated and not just public relations, but also grassroots lobbying.

They were out in the States.

A lot of people have gotten very, very rich, and I think there's a lot of frustration with the trillions of dollars around technology.

What happened last week after the first one, which people are expecting the stock to suffer, and what were, I think analysts were, and is, is the market's response so far a reliable indication of what's to come?

I, I think the only thing that we can reliably predict for the next few months as these lock-ups occur is going to be volatility, right? I think last week was a pretty good example of that.

The first earnings call, the first earnings report, the market reacted very negatively to those results, I think in large part because there was some concern about the, just the size of spending on investing in AI.

Uh, it gets to this idea of is, it's a space company, but it's now also an AI company, and the big bulk of that money is going to AI, whereas, you know, the space part of the company needs a lot of cash as well.

So right, you've got this overall concern in the marketplace about companies spending huge amounts of money on AI and questions about when the, the kind of the payback will be for that.

So you've got kind of that muddying up the water, and then going into this lock-up period where the, the first time that insiders and folks who were given some of these shares before the IPO, they couldn't sell until this point.

There's other tranches as well to try to keep some of the volatility from happening earlier on.

Right

I feel like I woke up and one day everybody said, "By the way, we're going to space, and that's gonna increase the stock market and everybody's 401[k] and everybody's IRA, and your retirement rests on this idea."

And I would argue that that was probably Elon Musk's original goal.

When he made his first fortune, uh, with PayPal, we're going back roughly 25 years.

He's this newly rich guy in California, and finally he can pursue his bigger dreams.

And he, he's excited about the idea of making humanity multi-planetary, m- having people on Earth and Mars.

And he was very frustrated with the idea that people were not excited about space anymore.

To your point, the 1960s, that was a very exciting time, uh, with the Apollo program and going to the Moon and the space race with the Russians.

You know? What is it that will happen?"

What was he like back then?

Well, he had a lot to prove.

SpaceX was this radical idea.

Tesla was a radical idea.

SolarCity was out there.

He was invested in that.

He had a little bit of a chip on his shoulder, and he wanted to prove that he could change the world.

Turning back to the man in charge of all this, we've talked a bit already about how Musk has changed over the years, but how has the public's perception of Musk morphed over that same period? Tim, can you speak to us a little bit about that, and why does that matter?

IPO price?

Uh, unlike a, a typical IPO, uh, a larger share, uh, of, of stock is gonna be set aside for retail, uh, up to perhaps 30%.

And so Robinhood should have a, an allocation.

Uh, Fidelity, uh, Schwab, and others, uh, depending upon, uh, the way they, they allocate it, you, you should be able to get some.

And not, maybe not everybody, but, uh, the, definitely that's the hope is that retail investors are gonna play a bigger role in this IPO than you normally see.

And that kind of gets at one of the core things that, uh, Musk is really about, uh, is retail investors.

It's helped him so much, uh, at his other company, Tesla, over the years.

Siri really

That's Q-U-I-N-C-E dot com slash N-B-I-D.

I'm Tim Higgins, author of iWar, Fortnite, Elon Musk, Spotify, WeChat, and Laying Siege to Apple's Empire.

I'm also a business columnist for the Wall Street Journal, where I write about the world's most influential business leaders.

Before that, I spent years writing extensively about Apple for the Journal and Bloomberg News, giving me a front-row seat to the iPhone maker's business.

During that time, I became interested in what was really a great corporate drama playing out around the world between Apple and its rivals such as Spotify and Epic Games, who operate in the digital world accessed by the iPhone.

I want to share five insights that you'll find in my new book.

Insight number one, it's easier to win when you make the rules.

Unserious, empty, hallucinatory, and borderline dishonest.

Some of these things are clearly way out there, literally Mars.

And if he is successful in setting up a city on Mars that has a million people, he will be handsomely rewarded.

Musk is already very close to becoming the world's first trillionaire.

And just to kind of put that in perspective, no one is really close to him at all at this point.

It used to be it was like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk and some others were kind of batting back and forth for who was the richest person.

Since the increased valuation of SpaceX in the last year or so, it's really been rocket fuel to his wealth.

A whopping 200 million shares of stock, as long as the colony is permanent, has at least 1 million residents, and SpaceX has hit a market valuation of $7.5 trillion.

Have we seen a reaction from him yet?

I haven't, but I've been on the air here with you.

So I assume something will come.

And, you know, he's not going to hold his tongue.

You know, this is going to be something he's probably going to continue to talk about for time to come.

In a lot of ways, he won on the first day of the trial.

He was able to frame Sam Altman in a way that's not so positive at a time that was still the kind of attention was forming around who Sam Altman is.

Has all of the attention you think been such that it benefits SpaceX, it benefits OpenAI, it benefits everybody in this complex? Or do you think it'll be a negative ultimately?

Maybe this is the bet of the century because $1 trillion, even by Musk standards, is big money.

Absolutely.

And Musk is talking about how this is a new era, a new book for Tesla going forward.

It had been a car company.

Now he wants you to think about it as a giant robotics company.

And that's a giant bet.

That's a huge gamble.

So how long, theoretically, at sort of current rates, Tim, do we know the cars might occur? And then we have no robots delivered, correct? Or is that wrong?

What do you think the market makes of this?

I think the initial take from the market is that that profitability figure is, is concerning as you just look ahead and you look ahead with what the company has to play with in an environment in the US.

Yes, they have brought out a cheaper Model Y, a SUV, a cheaper Model 3 sedan, uh, in recent months, but it's still not...

Uh, and it doesn't really make up for the, the loss of those EV tax credits, uh, tax breaks that customers were getting, um, in the US.

So the idea that essentially you have a price increase on your, your product lineup that is rather old.

Yeah.

... a very, kind of unique-looking vehicle that has failed to excite, uh, a lot of buyers the way they thought that it would, the way that Elon Musk kind of projected that it would.

Um, the cupboard's kind of bare.

Why do opponents of it really just despise it so much?

Yeah.

The opponents of it call it an Apple tax.

Apple would not call it a tax.

They think it is a fair fee, uh, slice of the revenue generated in their app store for digital goods that are consumed in their digital world.

They make the argument that they're providing a huge customer base with security and protection.

But for a company like Spotify, especially early on when you think about what this company as a startup was trying to do, it had some huge costs that were hanging over it, and one of that was the money they pay to get those songs, that's... was a big expense.

It might be tempting for us consumers, us users to dismiss this as bickering between our big tech companies, but is there and will there be an impact on us, on users as a result of how this all plays out?

Mm-hmm.

"You, you kind of owe us a little and, and isn't that fair?" And so you have these kind of cl- this really great clash of, of what is...

How should this play out? And so it just...

It struck me as interesting.

And as I started kind of thinking about it in a bigger way, uh, it really seemed as if it wasn't just Tim Sweeney.

You got the, the Spotify element, you've got the regulators in Europe, you've got other tech companies in the US and around the world really kind of rising up in this kind of interesting moment, which I thought in a lot of ways was surprising, right? If you went back several years ago and talked about monopolies in the US and Microsoft, the old Microsoft, of, of course, was, uh, uh, a- attacked by the DOJ and fought those allegations.

But i- in the more modern era, Google, Amazon, those were the big tech companies that were painted with that monopoly brush fairly or not.

Mm-hmm.

Why didn't that peace agreement last?

There's been tensions between Musk and Apple really since Musk got into the app game with his acquisition of Twitter, which became X.

Yes, there was a seeming detente early on, but ultimately, Apple has a very powerful hand in controlling how businesses operate in the app economy.

Musk isn't the first tech company out there to complain about that power, whether it's the 15 to 30% revenue share that Apple takes for companies that are doing digital services in the app economy, or the rules that they have to follow that Apple says are important to ensuring user safety and kind of the user experience.

Musk has been trying to push back against that power ever since.

What we see now with the emergence of Apple teamed up with OpenAI is an extension of, of that kind of bubbling fight, but it is probably made more intense by the fact that Musk has a huge beef with Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, that spans many, many years.

So many a Silicon Valley bigwigs like Mark Zuckerberg, they argue that AI will render the iPhone irrelevant, but wouldn't that require a new form of AI-driven communications product? And have we seen any such ideas from the bigger names in AI that might inspire the kind of adoption required to make this thesis a reality?

Yeah, you think about the iPhone or the smartphone in general, think of Samsung's phone, which runs on Android, the operating system offered by Google, these devices are your daily users to accessing the digital world.

I guess today, Tim, is a sort of a day you've seen coming for a while.

Yeah, absolutely.

This is a huge, huge deal for Apple.

Set aside the merits of the lawsuit.

This is about optics.

This is about politics.

The real threat for Apple here is that Musk drags its relationship of open AI into the public square and further highlights Apple's kind of control of that digital world.

But why is Apple struggling on the AI front?

To what extent is this a shift in tech companies' and entrepreneurs' focus?

Silicon Valley has really ridden the golden wave, if you will, on software in the past generations.

Uh, Sand Hill Road, where venture capitalists have their offices, these investors have bet on essentially quick turnarounds, companies that have ideas that require relatively little capital, a few people to make huge amounts of money.

I think of Facebook and Instagram.

Hardware was something different.

Early days of Tesla, for example, which is more than 20 years old, it struggled to find traditional Silicon Valley investors because of concerns of all of the money that was going to be required to get them to manufacturing something.

The challenge of manufacturing is if you're doing something new and it doesn't quite work, you gotta spend money to fix it.

So what's the connection there between hard tech developments and artificial intelligence?

So Tim, why do Apple's efforts on privacy confine them in unique ways compared to other companies? And what can other companies offer in terms of AI that Apple can't?

Well first, it's really important to understand just the ethos of Apple, especially under CEO Tim Cook, and that is the idea that the data that's created on your iPhone, a very personal device, is...... private.

Unlike a lot of other tech companies out there, uh, trying to monetize that data, Tim Cook has really made a big effort and a really big brand positioning that Apple protects that data.

It doesn't use data that the user hasn't agreed to allow, that it keeps a lot of data on the phone or in encrypted cloud spaces.

So that is kind of Apple's history, its ethos.

And then as we move into the world of artificial intelligence, the advances that we are seeing are made possible in large part because of all of the data that we have out there.

Think of all of the information that's on the internet that can be taken and fed into these models, uh, to become smarter, and it becomes more useful, more personal, if you will, the more personal data you feed into the AI.

Can you outline in terms of user-facing AI features, what is Apple offering compared to OpenAI and Meta?

But what should we expect now, Tim, in the months to come as this turnover happens and things start to settle down again? Or as he kind of reiterates his vision for the company, what should that look like?

You know, in some ways, it's not surprising to see people leave because I think there are a lot of folks we're expecting once he gets back in the mix.

The sun, if you will, he being the sun, is directly on some of these folks and it becomes very hot.

We kind of anticipating a constant kind of expansion of that driverless taxi service in Austin.

We saw some of that.

Remember, this started off very small.

He has talked about how this is going to grow over time.

Are shareholders in your mind to be thankful for the fact that he's scrutinizing as much and perhaps even micromanaging a little bit more than he was before? Because it does mean he's focused a little bit or a lot more on Tesla itself.

Can you take us through a timeline of their love-hate relationship?

Well, when Musk created xAI, it really was an environment where he was very critical of other tech companies' AI chatbots, saying that they were woke, that they were leaning toward liberal ideals, perhaps more concerned about being politically correct than factually accurate, and he promised that xAI was going to be trying to what he described as maximizing truth-seeking, and that was the foundation of the creation of his AI company.

And Grok was really part of that.

It was his chatbot.

It was a little spicy.

Your interactions with it were probably different than what you might have been experiencing with other chatbots.

That was kind of at the beginning, and then recently, it has come under criticism from those on the right, those who cheered on Grok early on, arguing that it had become woke, and Musk took note, and he felt like the training data was coming from more liberal sources, and he said it needs to be retrained.

So, what are we to make of this reboot and Musk's desire to change Grok because of the answers it was giving?

What's going on here?

It seems like we're seeing the return of pragmatic Elon Musk.

Right.

We saw really, really angry Musk last week.

And now things are cooling off and kind of the realization of, you know, he's got to make things work with the president.

You know, one of the things I think is also very interesting is Trump himself.

seems to have tried to cool things off with Musk.

So that said, is it now a non-issue? Because the worst case scenario, I would think, if you're a Tesla shareholder, is a vindictive president who suddenly turns his administration against your, you know, hopes on the regulatory front vis-a-vis robo-taxis and all the rest of it.

And doesn't this add a lot more uncertainty into the environment for Elon Musk's companies? We're hearing arguments that this is good for Tesla now, but I could see some ways it could be bad.

Yeah, absolutely.

Investors were excited at the idea of getting Elon back involved in the company.

Remember, in the next few days, weeks, we were expecting Tesla and Elon Musk to launch their robo-taxi service in Austin, Texas.

This is a multi-year promise that he says has always been around the corner to finally kind of do it and show that Tesla can have robot cars on the roadways, something that Waymo is doing and San Francisco and Zoox is doing.

And so investors have been betting on that.

So a lot of the reason why Tesla's valuation has been so high, that future that he was promising.

Does this moment change that dynamic?

Where could those cost savings come from and who takes the Doge baton from here? What happens to that now?

The president says that many of the Doge workers will remain, though we know that the engine of that effort, Elon Musk, is taking a step back.

The Journal has reported that Steve Davis, a long-time lieutenant in the Elon Musk world, is also stepping back.

So the question becomes who is the leader, who is the kind of the power behind the scenes? And it's something we just don't really have a, a good grasp on at this point.

But like Buddhism, as Musk likes to say, the Doge effort will continue.

And one of the things that's really of concern is that while Doge is highlighting areas that could see savings, it seems as if Congress will really have to cement that.

The president hinting that that effort will be made there, but so far, we haven't really seen that and the budget bill that is moving away through Congress is projected to increase the US deficit, so kind of going the opposite direction.

Tim, in a recent piece of which the headline was Angry Elon is Back, you write about how he needs to go forward and focus on his companies, but the question is also how does he play that sort of advisory friend role to the government in whatever capacity that might still look like?

What is the battle that you're referring to? Does it have anything to do with sort of what we're talking about? Because these are big kid stakes right now.

Absolutely.

Ten years ago, I think it would have been hard to have Apple in a bigger conversation about the dangers of big tech.

It was, in a lot of ways, able to skip the conversation about antitrust and monopoly.

But what the Epic case really did was highlight some of these practices and bring attention on a global scale and help fuel some of these fights in Brussels, in Europe, the U.K., in Japan, in South Korea.

Just the way that Apple and also Google with its own version of the App Store, how they control that digital ecosystem, that digital empires that they created and ruled with a pretty iron fist, collecting their percentage of sales within the app for digital services, which they argued was fair, that they created the world and that they should benefit from it.

The question has been, were they going too far, right? And the judge in this case originally was seeming to rule in Apple's favor mostly.

So, Tim, is it the board's due diligence here to look for successors once people are protesting Musk, protesting the dealerships? You know, the interest in the brand has fallen precipitously.

And were you and other Musk watchers surprised by that call?

It seemed to be building.

There had been signs that Musk's involvement was going to be perhaps tapering off.

You have to remember that the role that he has at the White House is a special government employee.

Not to get too technical and in the weeds, but essentially it means that he can do that job for 130 days.

And so either the White House was gonna have to do something else, or it provided a nice way for him to off-ramp.

And as we watched Musk in recent weeks, it's clear that he had become at the eye of the storm politically.

And on the other side of the coin, with his other job as the CEO of Tesla, how have his moves affected what's happening at that company?

How big of a deal is this for the auto industry?

Huge deal.

Huge deal.

Earlier this week, a group of the auto industry lobbying groups, including the automakers, suppliers, franchise dealers, all were telling the White House that this sort of thing was needed, warning that there could be a domino effect, a cascading effect, if you will, if these tariffs were to go into effect.

Really increasing the cost of business and concerns broadly about the state of the supplier industry.

As we know from many, many years of watching this industry, that part of the supply chain for the car business is very fragile.

A lot of these suppliers are probably not in a very good spot and not able to kind of weather the increases they'd be seeing, and they're worried about the industry going down.

So just roughly how many come from China and how big of an impact on price could this have?