Buckeye broadband supports cspan as a Public Service along with tse other Television Providers giving you a front row seat to democracy. Joining us from new york this morning is james to kobe, the pbs frontline director of a new documentary, elon musk, twitter take over. Why did you decide to do a documentary about elon musk and the twitter take over . Guest i wanted to make a film to report about elon musk for a long time. Kind of his purchase of twitter seems to be the right time to do it. The fact that he has been evolving politically over the past couple of years basically during the pandemic and onward and it seems this interesting new chapter in his career and life, his politics. It also gave us the chance to some serious reporting and tell the story of the people who have been working at twitter which had been changing in the postpandemic time. It was an opportunity to delve into an interesting strain of politics in america and also the latest chapter in his expanding power. He was involved in rockets and tesla and Satellite Technology. Here is a move into social media and to mediate itself which is an odd move in a different move and much more about affecting the political conversation and the media and promoting his own voice to some extent and his own views on things, specifically freespeech speech in america and abroad. It just seemed like a Good Opportunity to delve into his story and till the story of whats been happening with twitter. Host what you learn about elon musk . Guest a lot, he is an extraordinary innovator. He also was one of the most popular figures, political figures in america now. I have a lot of respect and reverence for what hes been able to accomplish with tesla and spacex and star link and a lot of other things. I think what happened that was interesting was that he had always been active on twitter. He has always said he loves twitter and he joined it in 20102011 and he has tweeted thousands of times about his observations on the world and about everything from books to technology to series of things but he steered clear of politics for a long time. Then you see when the pandemic hit and tesla factories were closed during the lockdown and he got politically activated during the pandemic. As a lot of people did in this country. Learning about his political evolution and his feelings on free speech in america and abroad was what was fascinating. We can get into it but there was a lot learned here. Host i want to show one clip from your documentary. This is where you look at elon musk and how he views this platform twitter before he purchased the company. [video clip] space x, go for lunch for launch. It had all the elements of a perfect day for elon musk. The test launch of his latest reusable rocket, the most powerful in the world, capable of deep space exploration. It was a crucial step toward his ultimate goal, the conquest of mars. Elon musk gets his most pleasure out of rocket ships. At moments when the rockets go off, thats when the childish pleasure comes out. Can you hear me over the cheering . He doesnt usually like having pleasure. He doesnt savor the moment but he does when its a rocket launch. Camera views from inside the payload very. Throughout the day, musk provided running commentary at his favorite place to express himself, social media site twitter. Upper stage restart nominal. Hes a performer. He likes it. He likes playing elon musk. He thinks he is ironman. Right on cue, the rocket discharges own cherry red tesla complete with a mannequin in the driver seat. Elon musk has outdone himself this time. A new rocket launched. Its still tripping me about. Im tripping balls here. The electric car and the reusable rocket were part of a vast business empire. Technology to Artificial Intelligence to web and satellites circling the earth that is made elon musk one of the richest and most powerful men in the world. Space x launch control, apparently there was a car in orbit around earth. The app he was using to lightweight the launch would be his as well a few years let her. In an offer to buy twitter, elon musk. Elon musk and twitter announced a 44 billion deal. He says he wants to transform the company. Host james jacoby come you also mention in this documentary more openly about elon musk using twitter for marketing before he purchased the company for tesla, for spacex. Talk about that a little bit. Guest yeah, its fascinating. Tesla does not do really any marketing. In fact, in some of their silence to the sec and elsewhere, they have mentioned elsewhere that it in part because elon musk is such a public personality and his condo is twitter that they dont really need to do any major advertising. We wanted to tell the story in part as his love affair with twitter to some extent. He has used twitter to express himself makes the joke that people use their hair to express themselves. I dont, clearly but some people may. He uses twitter to express himself. Walter isaacson spent the last couple of years with elon musk as his biographer and refers to twitter as his global pride playground. He line musk was bullied as a kid growing up in south africa had a tough time. And in some ways, twitter which is a rough and tumble free speech opinionated environment that musk was good at and gained a lot of followers on it and he was good at twitter. He gained a huge following and had more than one million followers. He has used it to make jokes, hes used it to go after some critics of his, but in the years before his takeover, it was a major Marketing Tool for him. It was a major way for him to create this cult of personality and engender an audience that liked the fact that he was unfiltered and honest about his opinions and said some controversial things, made some funny jokes, some offcolor jokes and i think people really appreciated that. It appealed to clearly hundreds of millions of people and was also in some ways fascinating to see how he used twitter and how former President Trump used twitter who obviously used twitter before he was president in the way to promote himself and his brand. He was very savvy at how to do things sick simply and cleverly on the medium and elon musk, whether he was using that trump playbook or vice versa, they both really master the art of twitter. We really try to tell a little bit of that evolution at the beginning of the film. Host now that he is bought the company, is at the same effective tool for him . Guest yeah, if not more so. He is experimenting at various points with how amplified he may be on the platform. We get into a strange chapter in that story in the film but i think this is certainly an effective tool now that he owns the platform to promote himself and his views and people he sees as likeminded. I think he also wants to bring people were not likeminded onto the platform but they generally appear to be more interested in promoting himself with similar viewpoints to him. Host we are speaking with james jacoby, the documentarian and correspondent for cbs for pbs frontline. He will take your questions and your comments about this documentary this morning. Republicans dial in at 202 7488001 democrats 202 7488000 and independents 202 7488002. Text us and include your first name, city and state to 202 7488003. You can also post onx cspan wj. Talk about renaming the company x. Guest that happened earlier this year. He always had a vision for many years, maybe 20 years to create an overall Umbrella Company called x. Gets his favorite letter and he loves it for Different Reasons he has a child he calls x. Heas always seen it as an umbrella idea for what he thinks of as a super app in the same way aswe chat in china. We have many different apps on our phones for many things and elon musk wanted to consolidate things under one app. X would be a social media site, place for content creators to create content whether its nonfiction or fiction. It would be a payment platform. He was one of the founders of paypal. He wants to make payments more easy so that combines then my with social media app. X was this rebrand which was a gutsy move considering twitter was immediately recognizable to eradicate twitter and createx was interesting and bold. It had its own verb. Now people are rather confused as to what to say when you tweet. I dont even know what to say when it comes to x now. I think there is some growing pains when it comes to this rebrand and some confusion around. Yeah, he is a longterm thinker and i think he believes we will, at one point, decide that all these apps we have, its too much, its useless and futile at a certain point to keep creating them so you might as well bring them under a larger umbrella. That remains to be seen whether he can pull that off or not. Host did you talk to elon musk for this documentary . Guest he would not talk to us, unfortunately. We tried many different avenues to speak to him. He is rather particular about who he speaks to. Its hard to figure out the rhyme or reason there but clearly, frontline asks tough questions and im not sure he wanted to undergo the scrutiny that we bring to it. Thats just conjecture, i dont know why he didnt want to purchase vaped why he didnt want to participate. We reached out to the executive running x and a number of other people from Silicon Valley are his brain trust. For whatever reason, we didnt have much luck there. Host the frontline documentary on elon musk, twitter takeover premiere tonight at 9 p. M. Eastern time on pbs and will be available to stream on frontlines website and youtube and the pbs video at. Thats 9 p. M. Tonight is premiering and i want to show our viewers another clip. You did speak with a current employee but what happened up about what happened when he took over the company. Elon musk had taken over more than 12 billion in debt and needed to make cuts quickly. He had brought a team of friends, relatives and loyalist from his other companies to help them do just that. Suddenly, an army of people materialized in the office that didnt have twitter nametags or computers and who started telling twitter staff what to do. The assumption was that they had some kind of authority because elon had brought them over. They knew had to build cars, they knew how to launch rockets, they knew how to dig tunnels but they didnt necessarily know about how to run a social media company. Teams were asked to print out code, 50 pages of code and have it reviewed by a tesla engineer. People were standing at the printer printing at their code and standing in line like a bunch of students being reprimanded by him dean and the whole exercise is not valuable. Engineers who build cars to not understand the code behind social media systems. They are totally different things. That was a performance of loyalty. Host james jacoby, is x being run the same way today or has elon musk made changes . Guest its deftly different. A few people in that clip are no longer at the company who held important positions. The last speaker rented department that was focused on whats called ethical ai. And Machine Learning were basically they had an entire group of people inside twitter that was study whether the to her twitter algorithms were in some ways biased toward conservatives were biased toward liberals. They were studying whether there algorithms were promoting hateful content more than nonhateful content. There was a reckoning over the past five or six years with the dangers of social media, the danger of misinformation of disinformation campaigns by foreign actors like the russians. The russians during the 2016 election, the fact of their harmful effects on youth and children, there is a radicalization of young men and women in this country thats happening on social media. Chawdry is no longer there studying these issues of algorithmic bias. The other employee you heard from is the head of integrity and safety at twitter and hes no longer there. One of the big effects has been that we have this election coming up in 2024 and there is concerns about disinformation. And how prepared are the social Media Companies to deal with that in 2024 . What we know is that there are fewer people at twitter, for instance, that are dealing with that issue than there were. Elon musk might say he is creating Engineering Solutions to some of these problems of disinformation and misinformation and weve heard people who do this for a living that says that doesnt necessarily do much for you, you need a lot of human moderation happening to read code and figure out whether things are misinformation or disinformation but i think part of elon musks plan is to step back and not let social Media Companies like twitter have their hands on the scales when it comes to deciding was true or false. That was part of the major critique of how twitter had been run previously. Its part of the reason why elon musk wanted to buy it because he felt there was an over moderation. His belief was also that it was biased. I dont think its true that it was biased and we challenge a number of people in the film about that. I think one of the most substantive changes that happen since elon musk took over his his trust and Safety Division and other things trying to promote Healthy Community or healthy conversation on twitter seems to a been cut back. Host washington, d. C. , independent caller, you are up first. Caller thank you i have listened to this must promoting hatred and hes doing this or that. A bunch of fbi agent seven documentary and how the federal government was dictating what could and could not be said. You are talking about hate speech, you couldnt talk about the fact that the virus was engineered in wuhan come you couldnt talk about hunter biden and the whole family was taking bribes and soliciting funds. Your hate speech is basically a form of censorship and you had a bunch of leftwing liberals in their making incredible amounts of money to make sure only the leftwing view was ever documented. Host james jacoby, your thoughts . Guest unfortunately, the facts are not on your side here. The fact is that yes, we get into this deeply into the documentary about the pressure that was put on the company by the federal government and by federal agencies from the fbi and the department of Homeland Security to cdc to combat what they saw as misinformation whether it was about the election in 2020 or misinformation about the vaccines and other things. There is a lot of pressure placed on all of these social Media Companies as there are in traditional Media Companies by all sorts of actors to make certain editorial decisions. Twitter its documented pushback on a lot of these requests. I think there is a legitimate conversation to be had as to whats appropriate for certain Government Agencies to make certain requests and ask for certain content to be taken down or to limit its reach. Its not true that twitter it was facebook, not twitter that suppressed the sort of discussion about lasting theory. They admitted it was a mistake. When it comes to the hunter biden laptop, the big mistake twitter made was that it was a New York Post story three weeks before the 2020 election. That was about the hunter biden laptop and twitter suppressed that story and blocked the New York Post for a couple of weeks. Also a big mistake and they admitted that mistake. They assumed wrongfully that was part of a russian hack meant to disrupt the election. We are talking a complicated issues here. I think the idea that there is some sort of leftwing conspiracy to conspire with the government to suppress certain views and viewpoints, its just not borne out by the facts. I think we need to have an enlightening conversation about whats going on here and its not easy, its thorny. Its a terminus amount of power for these private companies to have to be able to moderate these big conversations in these in these defective public squares in which they are in. I think we have to stick to the facts on this. There are a lot of wild theories out there that really are not borne out by the facts. Host is elon musk a conservative . Guest is he a conservative . He has set in the past that he is not a conservative and that he really doesnt want to be pinned down to any particular political viewpoint. Im not going to describe him as a conservative but he is a selfdescribed independent and if thats how he describes himself, if you look at that tacky has taken the past two years when it comes to the limitation of what people can and cant say, the conservative viewpoint is being suppressed on social media platforms i think elon musk sympathizes with that. When it comes to the fact of the matter, the counterfactual to the idea that conservatives have been suppressed on twitter is the fact that some of the biggest users we have are conservatives on twitter. Some of the people with the biggest followings in the furtherance reach and the further most reach. There are a lot of countervailing facts to that idea but in terms of elon musks political evil leash and devolution, it has become more conservative. Host democratic callers next. Caller hello, good morning. Im going to make ralph in a little more upset. James, when we pay taxes to give to president zelenskyy to arm him and elon musk blocks the drones that go into russia and other targeted areas to defend themselves, is that a traitor or is he not american . I dont really know. Guest i want to say that the focus of my reporting is not been on star link and what happens there in ukraine or the fact that elon musk in some ways now, some of his most powerful technology he controls is the Satellite Technology and remote Internet Technology that the Ukrainian Government and military have used to counter the russians in the war. What i will say is some of the issues that have been raised by a fellow journalist about what kind of power this gives elon musk in terms of the u. S. Military establishment, those are the bigger questions. I dont think its a question of whether hes a traitor, i think its a question of how do we find ourselves in a place where our government, the Ukrainian Government and military are so dependent on one company, one man for Remote Communications . That is a failing of a system. Its not necessarily on elon musk. Its a private company that can make