Elon's Spies · Tortoise Media

A star is born

May 13, 2025·30 min·2 clips

On election night, as Trump awaits results at Mar-a-Lago, everyone wonders where billionaire Elon Musk is.

Tuesday night starts as a tracking exercise. Trump is at Mar-a-Lago waiting on the presidential result, surrounded by an inner circle likely to shape American government. Musk is not there yet. Ryan Mack, a New York Times tech reporter, follows Musk's Gulfstream as it leaves Texas for West Palm Beach. The absence is the clue. The host uses that election-night scene to ask how Musk moved so sharply toward Trump and the Republican Party. The answer is messier than one snub. Lynette Lopez argues that one important break came when Biden gathered car executives to discuss electric vehicles in August 2021. Musk was left out. The episode says Tesla's anti-union stance helped explain the decision, but the omission still landed as a personal insult to someone the episode treats as central to electrification. Fair enough, maybe. Still, the episode is careful about it. One invitation does not explain everything. What it does show is how grievance and political usefulness started feeding each other. Musk likes disruption. The closing thought pairs him with Trump as two men who see themselves as mavericks riding in to rescue broken systems. That alliance has a fuse on it. A former Trump staffer predicts that if Musk's advice backfires, Trump will blame him, and the fallout would get ugly. Power attracts power. The question left hanging is how long these two stars can travel together before the pull gets too strong.

As heard by us

A sharp political profile of Musk's turn toward Trump, anchored by election-night suspense and the EV snub.

The episode opens on election-night tension at Mar-a-Lago and keeps moving by using Musk's delayed arrival as a simple, effective hook. It treats him as a central figure in Trump's MAGA orbit, then circles back to the Biden White House snub over electric vehicles and the…

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Why you'd press play

You want the election-night mystery of where Musk was, then the longer story of how a 2021 White House snub helped push him toward Trump.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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