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AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: We end today’s show with a look at the latest news on the world’s richest man, Elon Musk. This week, French prosecutors have asked Musk to appear for questioning following a police raid on the offices of Musk’s social media network X in Paris. The raid was part of an investigation into the distribution of child sexual abuse images. The French probe comes on the heels of two separate investigations by the U.K. and the European Union into Musk’s AI tool Grok over sexual deepfakes. Last year, the European Union fined X the equivalent of $140 million over hate speech and misinformation. Writing on X after the raid in Paris on Tuesday, Musk said, quote, “This is a political attack.”
AMY GOODMAN: Earlier this week, Elon Musk also announced SpaceX, his rocket and satellite business, has acquired his artificial intelligence startup xAI. The estimated $1.25 trillion merger comes as Musk has said he wants to build a million solar power data centers in space.
Elon Musk also shows up in the newly released Jeffrey Epstein files. In one email, he asked Epstein, quote, “What day/night will be the wildest party on [your] island?” unquote. He wrote that email on Christmas Day.
For more on all of this, we’re joined by a Boston University professor of international history, Quinn Slobodian, author of the forthcoming book, with Ben Tarnoff, Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed.
Let’s start off, Professor Slobodian, with that raid on Musk’s headquarters in Paris. Talk about what happened there. And then we’ll talk about his connections to Jeffrey Epstein.
QUINN SLOBODIAN: Yeah, the raid in Paris is the culmination of a one-year investigation that began in last January over algorithm manipulation and foreign interference, and has since expanded, as you suggested, to now seven charges, ranging from CSAM to sexualized deepfakes to Holocaust denial, and still this question of algorithm manipulation. And it’s a part of a kind of a pushback that we’re seeing now against Musk that’s probably more forceful than anything we’ve seen to date. The Spanish prime minister similarly announced forthcoming plans to ban children on the social media platforms, including Grok and X. And not mentioned, but Malaysia and Indonesia actually blocked Grok in the late of last year and have only recently opened it up again, too.
So, this is all, I think, a real significant backlash to the decision, which was a business decision that Musk made in late December and early January, to encourage users on Grok to use the service to produce artificially generated erotic images of strangers without their consent. And this is something that was done at the rate of, in some cases, at its peak, thousands of times an hour. Over 2 million images of this kind were created. The Center for Countering Digital Hate estimates that about 20,000 of those were of children. So, this is clearly a red line that has been crossed. And especially in the European Union and beyond, there is some significant pushback now against these kind of actions.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, Quinn, do you expect that there will be similar actions taken elsewhere as happened in Paris? And the fact that the problem with X is not just — of course, these were particularly egregious — the distribution of sexual deepfakes, as well as the Holocaust denial content, but there’s a lot of other extremely damaging and injurious false information that circulates on these platforms.
QUINN SLOBODIAN: Well, as you mentioned in the intro, there already has been a major fine levied against Musk in December by the European Commission about the use of the platform to mislead users. So, the use of the BlueCheck verification system, which suggests kind of sources of authority that are not in fact sources of authority, are used to juice the kind of political messages that Musk himself wants to get across, which are now absolutely indistinguishable from the most extreme political demands of the European far right, most notably the demand for the “remigration,” quote-unquote, of nonwhite residents of Europe, is something that, until very recently, was only ever heard on the extreme fringes. Even a party like the Alternative for Germany party wouldn’t have used terms like that. And now it’s frequently propagated and circulated by Musk in ways that, rightly enough now, even parties of the center, the center-right and the center-left across Europe feel like has gone from free speech into the space of disinformation and foreign interference. So, indeed, I do think that the question of liability now for the kind of actions that are produced as an outcome of speech circulated on X has entered into a new zone of regulation for Europe in a way that it hasn’t before.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Quinn, could you also talk about this, earlier this week, SpaceX acquiring xAI? It’s the largest merger in history —
QUINN SLOBODIAN: Yeah.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: — which could potentially make Musk into a trillionaire.
QUINN SLOBODIAN: Yeah, this is really extraordinary. The merger of xAI, which is his AI company, which is the parent company of X.com, into SpaceX produces this $1.5 trillion-valued behemoth, the largest private company by far in the world. And the proportions inside of that company are worth thinking about. So, X is only about 1% to 2% of the total value of the Musk empire, and yet we have a disproportionate sort of amount of attention that goes to it, because, I think, it plays a disproportionately important role. It is the kind of mouthpiece. It’s the platform. It’s the place where Musk is able to deliver his ideology in the most unfiltered way. And it’s the place where he does his best to kind of build consent for, really, what is the extreme far-right position that he’s trying to construct a new social reality on the basis of. So, the X story is a tiny one inside of the grand story of SpaceX.
The grand story of SpaceX is one that, as of last Friday, includes, as alluded to at the top, a request filed with the FCC to launch, quote-unquote, “up to 1 million satellites” into orbit around the Earth. To put that in context, at present, Starlink, the satellite part of SpaceX, has a few — a bit over 9,000 satellites, which is already 60% of the satellites in orbit. To raise that up to 1 million is nothing less than the most audacious land grab in human history — in this case, a land grab for space, with the idea that that will then become a layer, really encasing the Earth, of data centers, which will be able to, he hopes, catapult his, so far, lagging AI company past the competitors and provide universal broadband access for the Earth citizens below. So, the scale of the ambitions is really, really breathtaking, in fact.
AMY GOODMAN: Quinn, before we go, though, I wanted to ask you about the connections between Musk and Epstein, with French prosecutors investing [sic] X —
QUINN SLOBODIAN: Right.
AMY GOODMAN: — investigating X for potential complicity in the possession and distribution of child sexual abuse material, investigating with Europol. You also have this release of millions of pages of documents, with Elon Musk mentioned a number of times. Can you talk about that and maybe make that connection?
QUINN SLOBODIAN: Sure. Especially during the feud with Trump last year, Musk made a great deal of hay on his own distance from Epstein and his own kind of moral condemnation of him, and used it as a way to kind of tar his rivals and his opponents in that moment. What we know now, based on the latest cache of documents, is that, far from keeping arm’s distance, he was actually in semiregular contact with Epstein and made very clear plans to come and visit him on his island to party, as he put it in the emails. So, the distance that was claimed to be there was actually nothing of the sort, and he’s quite clearly as enmeshed in this toxic Epstein network as the very people he was criticizing.
AMY GOODMAN: Quinn Slobodian, we’re going to talk to you much more about your book when it comes out in the next months, Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed. Quinn Slobodian is professor of international history at Boston University. We thank you so much for being with us.
On Monday, February 23rd, Democracy Now! is celebrating our 30th anniversary at Riverside Church in New York. Nermeen and I, as well as Juan González, who’s flying in from Chicago, will be there, with, hopefully, you. Guests will include Angela Davis, Naomi Klein, the Nobel Prize-winning Maria Ressa, the great Michael Stipe and the jazz legend Wynton Marsalis, Mosab Abu Toha, Hurray for the Riff Raff and so many more. You can go to democracynow.org for more information and tickets. That’s democracynow.org. I can’t wait to see you there, Nermeen!
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Me, too!
AMY GOODMAN: And a very happy 15th birthday to one Arthur Alcoff! I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh, for another edition of Democracy Now!
