Elon Musk Crashes Out The Moment Interviewer Pushes Back

**Zanny Minton** (0:00)
Yeah, I guess I'm a popular guy. Quote, civil war in Britain is inevitable. Just a question of a ren.

**John Johnston** (0:05)
On the car trends, yes.

**Zanny Minton** (0:07)
London is a much safer city than any city in the United States. When were you last in the UK?

**Elon Musk** (0:13)
A few years ago.

**Zanny Minton** (0:14)
Exactly.

**John Johnston** (0:14)
So when was the last time that Elon actually walked down a street, living a completely pampered life?

**Zanny Minton** (0:21)
He thinks he has a right to influence our politics. It's why people loathe you. People say that you're a racist. Do you think what you're doing is helpful for Western democracy?

**Elon Musk** (0:31)
Maybe some people will do loathe me.

**John Johnston** (0:32)
He doesn't care about Western democracy. That's so clear. He doesn't want democracy. Hi, everyone. JJ here. Welcome back. Well, I could not let this one go by without commenting on it, because it's pretty rare these days that Elon Musk gets interviewed by somebody who asks some good questions, pushes back. Elon just sits down with sycophants and interviews where he's going to get softball questions like Joe Rogan and Tech Bro podcast, that sort of thing. So about once a year, maybe, he sits down with somebody who asks some good questions and he crashes out. This is exactly what happened in this interview here with Zanny Minton, as you know, the editor and chief of The Economist, and they got into politics, they got into tech and AI.
Now, I just want to focus on this one part of the interview. It's a long interview and I do encourage you to watch it from The Economist, and it really puts into stark relief Elon's fringe thoughts. Having a journalist actually push back on some things is, as I said, a rare sight. So let's see what they say and I'll react to it. Let's get into it.

**Zanny Minton** (1:43)
You support not just the populist right, but the far right. In fact, very fringe parties in some countries.

**Elon Musk** (1:47)
No, I support the normal people.

**John Johnston** (1:49)
Okay.

**Elon Musk** (1:49)
What do you call the far right? Falsely.

**John Johnston** (1:52)
So this is gaslighting straight off the mark, where he's trying to say that his views are normal, and we can see from his tweets, if you follow them, a lot of people don't, but sycophants do on there, and people who criticize, he's got hundreds of millions of followers, I think 250 million, and he thinks everybody follows him because they like him, which is not the case.
That's not what I'm doing it for. But he supports like the AFD in Germany, Marine Le Pen in France, restore Britain. They definitely have far right tendencies.

**Zanny Minton** (2:24)
You think he's the normal person? Okay.

**Elon Musk** (2:26)
Yes.
Literally, you could go back 10 or 15 years, and these policies were completely normal. In fact, one of the tricks that I think is funny, I think is quite funny is to take a speech from Obama and Hillary, and then go to someone who's on the sort of what I call the lunatic left, and say, what do you think of the speech by Trump? Like, oh, wow, he's the worst person ever. Actually, that was a speech by Obama. Or actually, that was a speech by Hillary.

**Zanny Minton** (3:03)
I agree that the center of gravity in this country has shifted, certainly the Democratic Party has shifted to the left, but that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about people like Rupert Lowe.

**Elon Musk** (3:10)
Please, it's actually just normal people. It's just normal people.
And here are the principles. And tell me, which of these sound terrible? That we should have secure borders, that we should have safe cities, that we should have sensible spending.
Which of those three are far-right fringe? And I would like to just admonish you and the media for the absurd characterization of the far-right. It is and misleading and nonsense. Please keep this part in.

**Zanny Minton** (3:44)
We'll keep all of this in.

**John Johnston** (3:47)
She goes, she's about to push back on this because, you know, he's saying it like it's all normal and it's just sort of what he considers to be centrist in a way, centrist right, but it's so not, it's so far to the right and he's just pretending and everybody can see it on his timeline. You know, the kind of stuff that he's spouting these days, then when he's in an interview, he kind of try and pulls it back and makes it sound like it's normal.