Elon Musk on Twitter's bot problem, SpaceX's grand plan, Tesla stories, Giga Texas & more

The segment opens with banter about a "sultry filter" and a good hair day, then introduces the guest, whom the hosts address as Elon, as "your favorite CEO" of Twitter. The tone is light and the exchange has no substantive claims; a host then asks what is new in his world.

Asked what is new, the guest says he is debating the number of bots on Twitter with Parrah (the name as it appears in the ASR transcript). In his telling, he is being told there is no way to know the number, which he mocks as being as unknowable as "the human soul". He jokes that no witchcraft or alchemy should be needed to estimate a percentage.

His own suggestion is deliberately blunt: try calling people and see who answers, rather than "read the tea leaves". He also offers a conceptual test of what matters. An account can look human, or one person can run a thousand of them, but that person can only buy one toaster, so the number that counts is unique real people.

The guest argues that anyone who uses Twitter knows the comment threads are full of spam, scams and fake accounts. He calls it beyond reasonable for Twitter to claim, as he characterizes it, that more than 95% of the unique humans commenting daily are real, and asks whether anyone has that experience.

The other voices react with sarcasm about being sold a bridge, then ask what he thinks the real figure is. He says it is probably at least four or five times the claimed 5%, with a lowest estimate of 20%. He adds that, as he describes it, smart outside firms analyzing daily users reached about the same figure, which he says is a lower bound and not an upper bound. These are his statements, not verified here.

The guest says he holds the most-liked tweet of any living human, at roughly 4.7 million likes, and jokes about it being a post on putting the cocaine back in Coca Cola. Using Twitter's stated figure of 217,000,000 monetizable daily active users, he reasons that even the top tweets cluster near 4 million likes, or under about 2% of daily users, which seems very low to him.

A host offers YouTube as a comparison: with a user base of perhaps one or two billion, its most popular videos draw tens of billions of views. The guest says that ratio makes more sense and concludes that "something doesn't add up". The figures here are from the speakers and were not checked.

The guest says his worry is not whether the bot share is 5%, 7% or 8%, but whether it could be as high as 80% or 90%, or at least ten times larger than reported. He frames this as material because Twitter relies mainly on brand advertising, where awareness is the product and it matters whether real humans see the ads, unlike click-through advertising tied to purchases.

A host asks why the purchase matters to him and how likely the deal is to close. The guest answers the first part: he says a digital town square is needed where people can debate any issue, and for that it must be broadly inclusive, politically balanced and transparent. He says this is why he wants the algorithm placed on GitHub for the public to critique and improve.

He adds that manual interventions such as shadow banning, or raising or lowering a tweet's prominence, should be flagged so users know what happened. In his view, people now cannot tell whether a tweet's performance is the algorithm or a manual choice, or why accounts are banned with no apparent recourse, and he says Twitter currently has a very far-left bias. This is his assessment, not an established finding.

The guest describes himself as a moderate, neither Republican nor Democrat, and says he has historically voted overwhelmingly for Democrats and might never have voted for a Republican. He then says that this election he will, which draws a stunned reaction and jokes from the others, who tell the speaker to keep going.

He insists the aim is not a right-wing takeover but a "moderate wing takeover" so people of all political beliefs feel welcome and can speak without fear of being banned or shadow banned. He also says the platform must be rid of bots, scams, trolls and large bot armies that try to sway public opinion.

The guest says that some of the smartest people in history held free speech to be important for a healthy democracy, and that it matters most when someone you dislike says something you dislike. He admits that is annoying, but calls it a good sign that free speech exists.

As an example, he says the media trashes him all the time and he does not mind. Despite having many resources, he says he cannot stop the media from doing so, and he calls that a good thing.

A host points out that the guest has long been a Democrat, and that the same goes for Joe Rogan, a Bernie Sanders supporter. The host says the Democratic Party has been hostile to Rogan and that Biden cannot even say the word Tesla or invite him to a White House EV summit. The question is how that feels personally, since the party should be celebrating his work.

The guest says it definitely feels wrong. In his view the Democratic Party is overly controlled by unions and trial lawyers, especially class-action lawyers, and he calls unions another form of monopoly. He says that on the Republican side, bad outcomes tend to come from corporate interests and religion, as he put it. He argues Biden is too captured by the unions, unlike Obama, who he says weighed union concerns against bigger issues. These are his opinions.

A host cites a Bloomberg article, as described aloud: Tesla is up 22,000 percent since going public and has had 11 quarters of sequential profitability. Yet analyst price targets range from about 200 to 1600. A few car-pun jokes follow from the others. The host then recalls that the guest tweeted that Tesla is like six companies inside one company and asks him to explain them.