Elon Musk is steamrolling Wall Street to become a trillionaire

Today on Decoder, I’m talking to Ryan Mac, a technology reporter at The New York Times and coauthor of the excellent book Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter, which came out in 2024. I can’t recommend it enough.

Elon Musk is steamrolling Wall Street to become a trillionaire

The New York Times’ Ryan Mac on how the SpaceX IPO is shaping up to be the greatest Musk gambit yet.

I wanted to have Ryan on the show because we’re on the cusp of the SpaceX IPO, which promises to be one of the most consequential public offerings in history for a variety of reasons — its biggest-ever size, of course, at nearly $2 trillion dollars, but also because all kinds of rules that keep our markets fair are being bent, if not outright broken, along the way. I also wanted to talk to Ryan because buried somewhere inside SpaceX is X, the social platform formerly known as Twitter, which Musk purchased in 2022. That’s what Ryan cowrote that book about.

I was very confident that Musk would come to regret buying Twitter back then. I wrote a piece called “Welcome To hell, Elon,” which is probably the single most-read thing I’ve ever written. My thesis was that there would be no way to grow Twitter users and revenue without moderating the platform well and, ultimately, that Elon buying Twitter would destroy his reputation and cause damage to his other companies.

Now, we have the numbers from the SpaceX IPO filing to see how right my prediction was. X is shrinking by every major metric, but it may not matter, as Ryan points out. Take a listen, and let me know what you think.

Ryan and I also got into all those rules being broken to land the SpaceX IPO — rules about shareholder control, inclusion in the major index funds, and all the other levers of market accountability that usually serve to keep companies in check. You’re going to hear us say “corporate governance” a lot in this episode, and while it may sound boring, it won’t be if you take a shot every time it comes up.

Okay, don’t do that. But do consider what it means that Elon has become so rich, so powerful, and so detached from the levers of accountability that he can apparently get away with anything. That’s all without any of the major fund managers or investors calling foul because they don’t want to miss out on what could be the biggest financial windfall in recent memory. There’s a lot to think about in this episode.

Okay: New York Times tech reporter Ryan Mac, on Elon Musk, X, and the SpaceX IPO. Here we go.

*This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. *

Ryan Mac, you’re a technology reporter at the New York Times. Welcome to Decoder.

Thanks for having me.

I am really excited to talk to you. I can’t believe you’ve never been on the show before. I feel like we’ve done a lot of reporting in and around each other. I’m a big fan. Thanks so much for being on.

I know. What the hell, man? You just have avoided me this whole time. But no, I’m kidding. It’s good to be here. I’ve listened to many episodes, so great to be a part of it.

**Well, now we’re going to ask you to answer for your crimes, which is what the Decoder audience really wants me to do, I guess. **

**Speaking of crimes, we’re going to talk about the SpaceX IPO. Elon Musk has obviously filed to take SpaceX public. There’s a lot in that IPO, including the idea that there’s a $28 trillion addressable market for SpaceX services, which is more than the world. Just a lot in there. **

**You’ve reported on a lot of it. So I do want to dive into it, but I actually want to start with X, the everything app, the app formerly known as Twitter. Because the SpaceX S-1 really gives us our first look into what that business is, what it has become, where it’s growing. **

In 2022, I wrote an article — maybe the most viral article I’ve ever written — it was called “Welcome to hell, Elon,” in which I very confidently predicted that buying Twitter would be a disaster for Elon Musk. I’m just going to read you my thesis. It was the first sentence of the piece. And then I want to try to back into what we know about X. I’m very curious if you think this has come true or not.

So my thesis was: “Twitter is a disaster clown car company that is successful despite itself and there is no possible way to grow users and revenue without making a series of enormous compromises that will ultimately destroy Elon Musk’s reputation and possibly cause grievous damage to his other companies.”

There’s one view to say, “Yep, that totally came true.” There’s another view to say that actually Elon is more powerful than ever and on the cusp of an IPO that’s going to make him a trillionaire. So tell me about X. What do we know about X, the company in the years since Elon has bought it and what do we know about its financials as reported in this S-1?

Sure. I think you mentioned the word “growing” in all that and I think the place to start is the fact that X is simply not growing. It’s stagnated in terms of revenue, stagnated in terms of user growth. It’s been buried twice within Elon’s companies — first into xAI and now into SpaceX. So it’s become, in some ways, an afterthought in the Musk empire, despite it still being arguably Musk’s favorite thing. He spends countless hours a day on that thing, like many of us used to, and many of us still do.

But in terms of a business proposition, it’s a non-factor if you compare it to some of the other aspects of this business — something like Starlink, for example. If you look back at 2022, it’s just bizarre. He bought this company on a whim. He pitched this idea to investors that he would have one billion users. He would have integrated payments. It would be somewhere you could potentially book a taxi. He pitched this idea of it being WeChat. You mentioned the everything app. And it’s certainly not the everything app. At one point he was like, “You could watch TV on it.”

None of that has come to fruition. Yet I look at what’s happened in the last four to five years since then, and he’s gotten more powerful than ever. His net worth has increased. I think around the time he bought the company he was around $300 billion. His net worth now fluctuates anywhere from $600 to $800 billion these days. And a SpaceX IPO will take him potentially beyond the trillion dollar mark for the first time ever in human history. So it’s bizarre in that there are a lot of contradictory things about it, but at the end of the day, I’d argue he still comes out on top.

**Is it just as simple as he bought a distribution platform for his own tweets and he controlled it and he fixed the algorithm to favor himself and that worked? And it doesn’t matter that revenue is down $100 million year over year and not even quite 40 percent of Twitter’s pre-acquisition revenue? **

**He’s destroyed the business by every metric we can see in the S-1. Every number is down. And only the revenue from data licensing to AI companies is up. **

His own AI company too. Yes, if you singularly look at X as a business, it’s clearly a failure from the time he took over the company to Fidelity marking the valuation of the company down to $10 billion before he merged it with xAI. But also you have to look at it in the whole landscape of Musk Inc. Since he bought the company, he spun up xAI, raised billions of dollars for that company. He then merged it into xAI, burying it, and then he merged it again with xAI into SpaceX.

I guess he’s up, if you’re doing a plus-minus analysis of valuations of these companies. Again, these are valuations that seemingly have no basis in business fundamentals. We’re playing with Musk math here. He has this whole cadre of investors and friends that are willing to back him to the end of the Earth, but yeah, he’s, I’d say, winning.

There’s a version of this where you could straightforwardly make the argument that however many billions he lost on Twitter is worth it as an investment