Elon Musk has been absolutely instrumental to bringing the Republicans to the brink of a government shutdown just in time for Christmas. And one of his main tools in doing that has been spreading absolute mountains of misinformation to his millions of followers. And I want to run through some of the things that if he actually cared about [00:00:18] what he was saying was true or not, or had the intellectual curiosity to actually check the claims that trolls send him on Twitter, every one of these things can be instantly debunked, but he did not debunk them or prebunking them. He just spread them. And so the misinformation is now out there and millions of people believe it. [00:00:34] So he started with, a statement that the bill would include, this is the plan, a version of the bill from a couple of days ago that that would include a 40% pay increase for Congress. He posted that both to his personal account as well as the Twitter account for [00:00:50] his Department of Government Efficiency. And if it's just going to be him posting misinformation on there, I don't know why he needs to have two accounts for that. It's just what he does on his normal thing. But anyway, he claimed there'd be a 40% pay increase. That was a little bit wrong. It was actually a 3.8% increase. [00:01:08] But it's not like he's supposed to be an engineer or anything. And math is tough, so I understand how he could make that mistake. Anyway, the mistake seems to have been founded in the belief that their pay would be increased to $243,000. That's not actually true. [00:01:24] That was pulled from a report on the effect that the that we would have had if they had been receiving cost of living adjustments to their congressional salary every year since 1992, which obviously has not been the case. Maybe like an easy thing to correct if you actually care to look into the numbers. [00:01:42] But he just spread it. So. Another claim amplified by Trump by Trump. Haha, sorry, I thought I was talking about the president. I'm talking about Musk. People are getting those mistaken these days. Is that the bill would prevent any investigation into the House committee that investigated the January 6th Capitol attack. [00:01:58] However, the bill's text makes no mention at all of the riot. Again, why it would be a problem that the CR would stop you from looking into people who are just investigating a terror attack. I don't know, but for him that was unacceptable. [00:02:14] Also untrue. He also alleged that the stopgap bill would fund bioweapons labs. That's because he saw that libs of TikTok had said it. It, of course, does not do that because that's crazy. It seeks to provide funds for Biocontainment labs, [00:02:29] so lab laboratories that would investigate the spread of disease and ways to counteract it, not by weapons labs. Obviously, he didn't apparently care enough to actually look into that one. He also reposted a suggestion that the bill would pave the way for a new DC football stadium that would be a, quote, taxpayer funded playground [00:02:48] for NFL elites, lobbyists and VIPs. The bill just transfers control of the site, not actual funds for construction of anything on it. Again, like you could go on and on and certainly on Twitter he did. He posted in one span 70 times about it, and much of it riddled with misinformation [00:03:05] that would be fact checked. And he just left it up. He didn't seem to care if it was true or not when he spread it. And that would all be well and good if we were just in the hell of like 2022, where he's a rich guy who buys and ruins a social media site. [00:03:21] But since he now utterly controls the Republican Party, it seems like it's everyone's problem when he tells these lies. - Jake, what do you make of this? - Yeah. So first of all, I'm so curious if he's doing it on purpose or he's just clowning. [00:03:36] And I think both are possible because he could just be purposely spreading misinformation to just get everybody riled up and angry like that 40% pay increase, as opposed to a 3.8% increase is a perfect example. [00:03:51] So a 3.8%, you could still be mad. And you know, these politicians don't look like they need a raise. Why don't you just go do some more insider trading? You'll be plenty fine, apparently, but. But it doesn't work as well as 40% increase. What the hell? You know, etc.. So. And maybe he thinks who cares? [00:04:10] Like the new media ecosystem is you just spread a lie. It'll go all around the world by the time truth puts on its boots, you know? It'll get, you know, a quarter of the way around the world in a couple of weeks. And by that time, I've already gotten what I want. Right? Well, the bill is already dead. [00:04:25] Yeah. And so. And, by the way, could be greatly insulting to the people who follow him because he thinks these knuckleheads aren't going to figure it out. Right? I don't know. Or he himself is a knucklehead. And he's like, who cares about doing your homework? [00:04:40] Who cares about checking? Who cares if it's 4% or 40%? Well, brother, you got to care if it's 4% or 40% and you got to care if it's biocontainment or bioweapons. It's kind of a giant difference, right? So. But either one of those scenarios is not good news. [00:04:59] Either he's purposely spreading misinformation, or he's wildly careless in how he spreads misinformation without even double checking with anyone. Right. I mean, you're the richest man in the world. Presumably you could hire a gazillion people to check for you. [00:05:14] Like, hey, I'm about to tweet this. Give me an answer in five seconds. 15 seconds. Is it right or is it not right? I tweeted it, okay. Hurry up, hurry up, hurry up. You could do anything you want, right? No. Not checking. Just wildly throwing out misinformation. Not off to a strong start, David. [00:05:31] I just want to say, regardless of whether it's 40% or 4%, to me, the math that is the real problem is something that most of us learned in third grade, and that is how to count to 51. And if you I know, know anything about our US Senate, you need 51 votes in order to get something done in the Senate, [00:05:47] 218 to get anything done in the House. That seems to be too much for Elon Musk. Not only is he a cloud, or perhaps an idiot or deliberate, but he has literally doesn't have any idea. No idea how our government works. He may be great about making trillions of dollars, but he doesn't know a damn thing [00:06:05] about how anything gets through the US House or the US Senate. And I have a theory that perhaps Donald Trump is deliberately putting Elon Musk out there, because maybe Donald Trump wants Elon Musk to fail, wants him to fail right now before Donald Trump actually takes office. And Elon Musk is proving that he is torpedoing [00:06:22] what the government is trying to do. This is a very carefully crafted deal between Republicans, between Democrats, the House and Senate. Elon Musk blew it up. Then Donald Trump was late to the party and felt like, well, maybe Donald Trump has to blow it up as well. And now you're essentially marching towards a government shutdown. [00:06:40] This is the first defeat, and Donald Trump's not even in office yet. And this is his partner Elon Musk. And I think I don't know, maybe Donald Trump really wants Elon Musk out there failing badly so that Donald Trump can then get rid of him. I think, we can obviously have different interpretations. [00:06:56] You've laid out a couple of different explanations, I think, and have felt for a long time and have tried to get people to understand for a long time. He's both a liar and a moron. That's what he is. Not in an absolute sense. It's not that he doesn't have some sort of savvy. As Schuster pointed out, he's made a lot of money. He understands some things. [00:07:12] I would also I would go further than Schuster, and I would say he understands some things about how government works. He knows that you can just buy them. You can just buy them. Like he was super smart in buying Trump. And he made, you know, like the greatest return on his investment ever. Following that, Tesla stock shot up having nothing to do with the company [00:07:30] or the cars or anything. It's now worth 70% more than it was before the election, because he understands that the stock market has nothing to do with really anything except hype. And he was he's always been very good at that, in the same way that Donald Trump is. He knows that he can take the money that he got by virtue of birth. [00:07:47] He can see in some cases. And I'll give him credit for this. A company where talented coders and engineers are making good things. And so he buys it and puts his name on it. He's good at that. He's good at hyping things up. He's good at telling blatant lies about his products, things that either will never happen or happen years after he says they will happen, or that [00:08:04] cost twice as much as he says they will. And he knows that generally his fans, they just trust him. They don't care. They're not going to fact check that. And certainly the media, the business media isn't going to check any of this because they all want the hype to work just as much as he does. The stock market moving up is just as good for them as it is for him. [00:08:21] And so he understands all of this. That doesn't make him an intelligent person about everything or even about most things. And that's where I think people make mistakes. And so in this, is he sort of lying? Sure. Because he doesn't care. [00:08:36] He has absolutely no respect for the people who worship him most, no more than Donald Trump does. Also, he's a moron. He doesn't know how to fact check things. He doesn't think that he should. He's not curious fundamentally about the world in that way. And so I think that he's got all of these failings and more. [00:08:53] Yeah. So the second thing I'm curious about is how are the people who voted for Trump going to react? Right. So and there's two different sets of folks I'm thinking about here. I am not thinking about old MAGA, which is Donald Trump. [00:09:08] And whoever we've anointed like Elon Musk are demigods and they are not to be questioned everything. If they say 40% and the facts say 4%, then they are right and the facts are wrong, right? So that's old MAGA in my opinion. So now there's two other folks here. [00:09:25] Remember, a lot of moderates and independents voted for Trump. That's why he won the popular vote. They voted based on simple things like economy, crime, border, inflation. ET cetera. Right. So are they on board for. Yeah. Let's lie about everything. Probably not. Right. [00:09:42] And then you've got what I consider to be new MAGA, which is some right wing populist. I know a lot of people are skeptical about that. Well, that's why I'm curious. Right. So am I right that some of them are going to go? Yeah, but I don't really want to be lied to. That's kind of annoying, right? Or are they like old MAGA and like, yeah, we love lies. [00:10:01] Right. So I don't know. I know everybody on the left says they know they're all. They all love the lies. They're going to buy into it. They're going to say it's 40% from now till the end of time, no matter how wrong it is. And there's good reason for that, because they did do that in the first term under Trump. [00:10:16] Right? So are they. But are some of those guys going to rebel now and go, yeah, I'm now seeing Elon Musk say things that are wrong. I don't know, 12 times or 1200 times. Maybe this giant donor isn't telling me the truth. [00:10:31] Right. So I don't know. And it's going to be super interesting to find out. I also wonder if there's an inherent contradiction between Elon Musk and Donald Trump that maybe even Donald Trump's voters are going to recognize. And it seems like this week, like it's pretty simple. Elon Musk wants to obviously cut the government by whatever it is, $2 trillion. [00:10:50] And Donald Trump doesn't care about about cutting the government. He wants to increase spending. He wants to blow up the deficit. These two things are at odds with each other. And there's Donald Trump creating this Department of Government efficiency, which doesn't really exist. [00:11:06] And oh yeah, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy and Marjorie Taylor Greene, you wanted to be in the cabinet, but no, no, you take care of this agency that doesn't exist. It sort of gives them something to do. But Donald Trump doesn't care about cutting government spending. What blew up the deal was Donald Trump initially said, [00:11:22] okay, yeah, there's too much pork. But then in the second round, Donald Trump wanted to blow up the deficit in the House, said no. So you have these two things that are sort of going against each other. And I do think there's also a problem with Elon Musk getting out a little bit ahead of Donald Trump in this whole process this week. [00:11:38] And that caught Donald Trump by surprise and I think makes Donald Trump look very small. And if there's anything that I think Donald Trump hates, It's that he's looking tiny, that he's undermined, perhaps by somebody that's supposed to be a partner of his. Yeah, well, look. There's there are developments that we're going to give you on the stopgap bill. [00:11:57] I just want to touch on one more thing having to do with Musk and his effect on all of this, and his effect on our country going forward before we move to that. So he had a little bit of an issue with, a little bit of a speech that one of the Democrats on the House floor gave Representative Richard Neal. [00:12:13] Let's roll a little bit of that. Can you imagine what the next two years are going to be like if every time the Congress works its will and then there's a tweet, or from an individual who has no official portfolio, who threatens members [00:12:29] on the Republican side with a primary and they succumb. This institution has a separate responsibility based upon the separation of powers. Members of Congress don't serve under presidents of the United States. [00:12:48] So that performance was responded to on Twitter by Elon Musk, who said, oh, forgot to mention that I'm also going to be funding moderate candidates in heavily Democrat districts so the country can get rid of those who don't represent them, like this jackass. There's a special sort of irony to Elon Musk calling literally anyone else [00:13:05] in the world a jackass. But so that's where I think the future looks super exciting, where he's now been threatening this last week that he is going to fund challenges to every Republican that doesn't do anything that he likes. Obviously, he spent a quarter billion dollars to to buy Donald Trump. [00:13:23] He's now in the process of buying candidates in the UK election as well. So he's going to potentially he says he's going to own the Republican Party. He can fund, I guess, if he wants to, with an amount of money that functions as basically like a round off of, you know, his investments on any given day [00:13:41] as many challenges as he wants. He's also going to be doing it, I guess, in the Democratic Party as well. And so the reason I bring this up is maybe he doesn't end up wanting to do this. Maybe he gets bored with politics and then gets really into Magic The Gathering or something. I don't know. [00:13:56] He has a very hard time staying focused on anything for long. Maybe he gets super into Super Soakers. I don't know. But I wonder if maybe this is an opportunity and I've been talking about this for the past few days, and I saw AOC had tweeted something to the effect of like, [00:14:11] is there anything that provides more of an opportunity, maybe for campaign finance reform than this one billionaire promising to buy both political parties? And so do you think he's going to follow through on this? Because he could, in theory, just he could involve himself in 500 races next time. [00:14:29] Yeah. So first, let me explain the irony here. Richie Neil is one of the most conservative Democrats there is in Congress. He's a total crook. He works for the drug companies. I can show you many different bills where he made sure that corporate America one and the average guy lost. [00:14:45] He's one of the worst corporate Democrats there is. If there's a list of three people I'd like to primary, he would definitely make it. Okay, so but from the left, Ellen, not from the right. So if you think that guy is not enough of a crook for you and you want a primary from the right and get someone who'll just do anything [00:15:05] that a giant billionaire donor wants. My God, brother, what you're missing is you could buy Richard Neal for, like, a quarter. Okay, like, Ellen, you don't have to primary. You just give him 100 bucks and he'll work for you. So he does for the drug companies and all the other companies. Can't stand Richard Neal. [00:15:21] So. And look at this pompous ass giving that speech. The rest of the speech I'm fine with. But he was like. And he has no official portfolio. Like, yeah, this is why we lose. What is that? What what do you just talk like a normal person anyways? So Ellen wants to buy all of the Democrats. [00:15:38] First thing is you say, yeah, that's easy to do actually the AIPAC did it. The crypto bros did it. There's tons of Democrats in the House now that are working for, the crypto industry. Right. Because they spent millions and millions of dollars defeating [00:15:54] their progressive primary opponents. So you think they don't work for the crypto guys? You don't think they didn't work for AIPAC? No. Democrat. 95% of Democrats and Republicans will work for anyone who's a donor. So now the problem with Elon is that if he goes out and does it publicly and he goes, I am now buying this Democratic seat, everybody will vote against him. [00:16:13] Right. Who's a Democrat? But the second problem is you can just do through dark money then you have no idea. It just seems like well, I tell you what. Golly gee, that Democrat race so much money. And you know what? The New York Times and all the rest of the mainstream media was like leading candidate in the race. [00:16:30] There is such an amazing job of raising so much money. They're number one. Right. But you don't know the dark money came from Elon, so can he buy the government? Guys, think about this math. He bought Twitter for $44 billion because he thought that that microphone [00:16:45] and amplifier was that important, even though he wildly overpaid for it. Right. He bought Donald Trump for only a quarter of $1 billion. So how much would it take to buy the rest of Congress? Just ask AIPAC. Not that much. They bought, I mean, or the drug companies. The drug companies bought them for about $400 million. [00:17:02] AIPAC bought them for about 100 million. So 100 million would probably do it for the almost all of Congress. And you know how Netanyahu is a war criminal and he comes to Congress and 95% of Congress goes like as Bravo. Standing ovation. Kilmore. Kilmore. Here's money. Here's money making it rain for Netanyahu. You think Ellen can't do that? [00:17:21] All he has to do is buy them. Bribery is totally open and legal now. It's called campaign contributions. And he could give a standing. He will get a standing ovation from both parties. All he has to do is buy them. That is why this system is insane and super scary. [00:17:37] Okay, but Ironically, he might actually expose that because he's doing it in such a brazen way that at some point, maybe, just maybe, the whole country goes, wait, I see you buying them, and then I see them doing exactly what you wanted. [00:17:56] Right. Well, what's so ironic though also is that I mean yeah I think he's raising some attention to campaign finance reform which is never going to happen. But he doesn't even need to by Congress. They will literally give him the government for free right now. I mean, there's Kentucky Senator Rand Paul and Georgia House Republican Marjorie [00:18:12] Taylor Greene saying they want Elon Musk to be speaker of the House, that you don't have to have an elected member be speaker. Anybody could be speaker. If I'm a Democrat and I am, I'm like, yes, please make Elon Musk the speaker of the House. That would be the best thing politically for Democrats in 2025, because [00:18:30] this clown show would go on and on and on. It would destroy the Republicans. And oh, by the way, the Republican House would have all of their fingerprints over Elon Musk as speaker. So I say, yes, Republicans, please make him the speaker of the House. [00:18:45] That would be awesome. The country, of course, would suffer. We might have more government shutdowns and there might be a lot of misery, but politically, it would be a gold mine for people who do not like the Republicans. One last quick thing. You know, after he buys America, maybe he'll go on a shopping spree [00:19:01] for the world, right? Because he just endorsed a party in Germany. Let's just put it kindly and say it's an anti-immigrant party. Elon, I hate to break the news to you. You're an immigrant. Thanks for watching The Young Turks. Really appreciate it. Another way to show support is through YouTube memberships. [00:19:17] You'll get to interact with us more. There's live chat emojis, badges. You've got emojis of me Anna John Jr. So those are super fun. But you also get playback of our exclusive member only shows and specials right after they air. [00:19:33] So all of that, all you got to do is click that join button right underneath the video. Thank you.