He may be the world’s richest person and a personal pal of Donald Trump, but even Elon Musk can have a bad week. Not only has Tesla stock continued to crater as consumers worldwide turn their back on the South Africa-born multibillionaire (some violently) but his right-wing social network X was hit by sporadic outages he blamed on hackers. Even one of his SpaceX rockets blew up, raining debris down on the Earth and endangering passenger airliners.

A big part of Musk’s waning popularity is of course tied to his starring role in gutting the US government on behalf of Trump—and even there he’s not as loved as he once was. On this episode to discuss all of this are Bloomberg Businessweek senior writer Max Chafkin and Elon Musk reporter Dana Hull. Later, Bloomberg stocks reporter Esha Day talks about how the markets have been treating Musk of late.

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While Elon Musk is busy in Washington, his publicly traded company has been suffering. Having skyrocketed in the immediate aftermath of Donald Trump’s election, Tesla is now in free fall and increasingly a target of protesters. Every weekend, more people have shown up at Tesla dealerships across the US with signs and chants, demonstrating against Musk’s effort to gut federal regulators and agencies while firing tens of thousands or workers with Trump’s blessing. Overseas, it might be even worse for the carmaker: Tesla sales have collapsed in Europe. Maybe betting on Trump boosting Musk’s companies wasn’t the smartest move for investors after all?

To debate that and more, David Papadopoulos is joined by Bloomberg editor Craig Trudell as well as Elon Musk reporter Dana Hull and Bloomberg Businessweek Senior Reporter Max Chafkin.

Also, after a lull, the feuds are back, and this time they’re bigger than ever.

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Personnel Management (OPM) sent out an email seemingly to all federal employees instructing them to send back a list of five things they accomplished the previous week. Over on X, Musk posted that failure to do so would be tantamount to resigning.

Confusion reigned as departments scrambled to advise employees on whether to follow the order from Donald Trump’s wealthiest assistant. This week, Bloomberg Businessweek’s Max Chafkin chats with Bloomberg social media reporter Kurt Wagner about this email and more.

Then we hear a segment of the live show last week at On Air Fest, where host David Papadopoulos was joined by Chafkin, Elon Musk reporter Dana Hull and Wired’s Makena Kelly, who has been covering politics and Musk’s new government career for some time now.

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Elon Musk and his assistants have reportedly spent the past week dropping in on federal agencies ranging from the US Department of Education to the Department of Energy, the Social Security Administration and the Internal Revenue Service. The result has been the potentially illegal disclosure of personal financial and health data belonging to tens of millions of Americans. Accompanying these visits has been the summary (and again potentially illegal) termination of thousands of federal workers by President Donald Trump. To walk you through these historic developments, David Papadopoulos unpacks it all with Elon Musk reporter Dana Hull. They also talk about recent protests against the multibillionaire at Tesla showrooms, a potential new round of funding for his artificial intelligence venture and the $400 million government order for armed Cybertrucks—to be paid for by American taxpayers—that disappeared from the State Department procurement website.

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Federal judges continue to declare most of Elon Musk’s activities in Washington to be probably illegal as the question of whether his 78-year-old boss will trigger a constitutional crisis becomes more pressing. At the same time, Musk has been making news in Silicon Valley, with a report Monday that he and others want to buy OpenAI. The proposal may have been a feint, but Sam Altman did take the opportunity to make Musk look small. The OpenAI chief executive said no thanks to the $97.4 billion offer, but added he’d be happy to buy X off of Musk for a pittance by comparison. From Washington, reporter Josh Wingrove joins host David Papadopoulos and panelists Max Chafkin and Dana Hull. Plus, New York magazine tech writer John Herrman comes on to talk about how Musk’s businesses may be benefiting from his role as Donald Trump’s hatchet man.

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Elon Musk has been in Washington a few weeks now, and he and his team of Silicon Valley adjutants show no signs of stopping their efforts to (illegally, many legal experts say) dismantle portions of the federal government in the name of Donald Trump. This weekend, we discussed how the Tesla co-founder and far-right billionaire was given access to a central component of government—the mechanism by which the Treasury distributes trillions of dollars authorized by Congress.

Today, Max Chafkin discusses these historic events with Bloomberg reporters Dana Hull, Ted Mann and Anthony Cormier. Cormier co-reported a story on Musk’s effort to collapse the US Agency for International Development, which distributes humanitarian and development aid all over the world. In addition to the ramifications Musk’s unprecedented actions may have for the 249-year-old republic, we also consider what this all means for his finances.

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In a week of unprecedented action (and chaos) from both Elon Musk and the Trump administration, breaking news this weekend brought the Elon, Inc. team together for an emergency episode. The New York Times broke the news, and the Washington Post followed, that Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency was given access to the Treasury Department’s payment system. This system, which handles a big chunk of the government’s money transfers, including Social Security, is normally administered by a small number of non-political appointees, and it was reported that Musk’s desire to get in the gears drove a career Treasury official out of the department late this week.

This is a big deal. Musk has many apparent conflicts of interest, and beyond the finances, this is where sensitive information about American citizens is stored. To discuss this development, host Max Chafkin is joined by Sarah Frier, Big Tech editor; Kurt Wagner, social media reporter; and Dana Hull, who covers Musk for Bloomberg News.

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It’s that time of year: quarterly earnings for Tesla are tomorrow. Regular Elon, Inc. listeners will know that means a new bingo card is here (and you can play on the Bloomberg Terminal at BNGO). But that’s only one of the many breaking news items about Elon Musk—another is today’s announcement that Visa is partnering with X to deliver banking services to the social media platform. To discuss all of this, host David Papadopoulos is joined by Max Chafkin, Dana Hull and editor Craig Trudell to talk Tesla, and senior banking reporter Sridhar Natarajan to unpack X’s new debt deal.

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