The day after Grok started spewing antisemitic propaganda, X CEO Linda Yaccarino announced that she's leaving the company. The timing sticks out, although sources says she's been planning an exit for a while. In this emergency episode, Max Chafkin summons Bloomberg's big tech team leader Sarah Frier to chat about Linda's legacy, her possible future plans and the timing of her departure.

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On this week’s episode, David Papadopoulos invites Bloomberg political reporter Nancy Cook and Bloomberg Businessweek’s Max Chafkin to the studio to discuss Elon Musk’s latest idea—the creation of the “America Party.” Third parties have famously been losing propositions in American politics, and Cook questions if the distractible multibillionaire even has the patience to handle the paperwork required to register with the Federal Election Commission.

And then there’s his constant string of controversies. Chafkin wonders if there’s a reliable base out there hungry to support the party of a man who called Social Security a Ponzi scheme, initiated a feud with President Donald Trump (still popular with much of Musk’s theoretical rank and file) and whose “DOGE” initiative on Trump’s behalf is accused by some of worsening the catastrophic consequences of the recent flooding in Texas.

Nevertheless, history shows just how disruptive third parties can be when the margins are slim, as they are now. Cook sees a small slice of the electorate, “tech bros who are like, ‘oh, right, we should cut Social Security, we should shrink the federal government’,” who could possibly be converted by the right wing business mogul.

Later in the show, Papadopoulos and Chafkin are joined by Bloomberg stocks reporter Esha Dey to discuss the latest gyrations of the world’s most prominent meme stock, Tesla. The trio discuss the challenges facing the electric car company and dissect a recent eyebrow-raising note from analyst Dan Ives. The prominent Tesla bull presents a simple answer to Tesla’s woes: give Elon more money.

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The predictable second round of Elon Musk’s feud with Donald Trump began over the weekend as the Tesla CEO took aim at the GOP’s massive tax-and-spend bill. Specifically irking Musk (along with efforts to gut incentives to buy his cars) is the amount of money the bill would add to the $37 trillion national debt ($3.3 trillion over a decade, according to a new estimate from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office). Trump initially kept his replies to the richest man on Earth muted, but as the South Africa-native’s broadsides piled up, the notoriously thin-skinned Republican president could no longer help himself.

Trump blew up and not only threatened to withdraw government subsidies from Musk’s companies but said he would mull whether to try and “denaturalize” Musk and deport him. Meanwhile, Musk suggested he’d support primary challenges to any Republican lawmaker who supported the bill, and returned to the idea of starting a third party—called the America Party (of course).

To make sense of all the chaos, Bloomberg national correspondent Joshua Green joins David Papadopoulos on this week’s episode of Elon, Inc. Green argues that—despite Musk’s hundreds of billions of dollars and hundreds of millions of social media followers (and bots)—there isn’t a huge constituency out there for a third party. Green also outlines the roots of a mini-campaign within Trump’s ultra-right wing base to get Musk deported, discusses Musk’s chances of actually convincing any lawmakers in the House (now that the Senate has passed the bill) to change their vote on Trump’s tax bill and predicts how many more rounds are left between him and his (one-time) biggest campaign donor.

Papadopoulos also calls up Musk reporter Dana Hull to talk about about fresh challenges for Tesla. With several recent high-profile leadership exits, a flawed robotaxi rollout and sagging sales, things aren’t looking rosy for the electric carmaker ahead of tomorrow’s quarterly sales numbers. “They might only sell like a million and a half units this year; that’s like a far cry from the 20 million that they once talked about” Hull notes.

Finally, Trump wasn’t the only subject of a Musk feuds this week. Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum recently threatened legal action against SpaceX due to debris from a rocket explosion sweeping in across the border from Texas. Is Musk’s space technology company ready for a spat with one of the few world leaders who has managed to tame Trump? Bloomberg Executive Editor Crayton Harrison joins for the full story.

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