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Silicon Valley’s original disruptors didn’t just change technology - they rewired politics. Panorama investigates the 'PayPal Mafia' - Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and David Sacks - and their influence on Donald Trump’s rise to the White House.
From Starbase in Texas, Elon Musk’s futuristic city, to the corridors of Washington, Panorama reveals how ideology, algorithms and vast fortunes are rewriting the rules of power.
And as artificial intelligence accelerates seemingly beyond regulation, will the tech titans become the ultimate power brokers, not just in politics but in shaping the future of humanity itself?
From Starbase in Texas, Elon Musk’s futuristic city, to the corridors of Washington, Panorama reveals how ideology, algorithms and vast fortunes are rewriting the rules of power.
And as artificial intelligence accelerates seemingly beyond regulation, will the tech titans become the ultimate power brokers, not just in politics but in shaping the future of humanity itself?
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00:00We have quite a show for you tonight. I think you're going to like it.
00:17The power and money of big tech is getting stronger every day.
00:24I mean, they're powerful. They're very powerful.
00:26We're not just talking about incredibly wealthy people.
00:30We're talking about people who are wealthier than anyone has ever been in the history of humankind.
00:39Elon Musk could officially become the first trillionaire.
00:43Do you know how much you're worth?
00:45Probably more than $10 billion, less than $20 billion.
00:48Today, the vast wealth and influence of a few tech billionaires is changing politics like never before.
00:57Take over, Elon Musk.
01:01Good evening. I'm Peter Thiel. Stand up and vote for Donald Trump.
01:07Trump and big tech have formed a kind of diabolical union.
01:17I want to thank you. You have a very special back.
01:20You guys are totally and completely phony.
01:22You don't have a problem with oligarchs.
01:24You have a problem with oligarchs that don't back you.
01:27We have a billionaire president.
01:30We have a vice president who comes from the top ranks of Silicon Valley.
01:36Crypto finally has a champion and an ally in the White House.
01:41Big tech is really driving a golden age for technology, for AI, for robotics.
01:47But big tech stands accused of capturing government.
01:53We're being taken over and exploited by the richest man in the world.
02:00Whoa! Whoa!
02:02I think even power trivializes what they feel.
02:07I can transform the world.
02:09I have the answers.
02:11I am the answer.
02:13Yes!
02:16As Silicon Valley drives the world towards a new age of AI,
02:22who's really in control?
02:24Abraham Lincoln talked about a government of the people, by the people, for the people.
02:32I think it is absolutely fair to say that in America,
02:33that you have a government of the billionaires, by the billionaires, for the billionaires.
02:37My fellow Americans, I want to warn the country of some things that give me great concern.
03:05Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power, and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy.
03:15I'm here to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.
03:31The Constitution of the United States.
03:34So help me God.
03:35So help me God.
03:36Congratulations, Mr. Carter.
03:37I didn't mean to be in the front row, and I'd be getting pushed into the front row for various reasons.
03:44So I was, you know, as close to Trump, almost as I am to you.
03:46What you saw right behind Trump weren't really big tech guys, and behind them were another 13 billionaires.
04:02We have never lived in a moment in modern American history where so few people, multi-billionaires, have so much wealth and so much economic and political power.
04:18The roots of Silicon Valley's power today reach back more than 25 years to the dawn of the Internet age.
04:28What you've got going on with the Internet is, it's basically like an earthquake where the epicenter is Silicon Valley, and it's shaking up the whole world.
04:51It's 7 o'clock in the morning, and Elon Musk anxiously waits for his golden payoff, his prize for paying his dues in the valley.
05:08I expect to receive a car that I've just bought, which is called the McLaren F1.
05:13Wow, I can't believe it's actually here.
05:15It's pretty wild, man.
05:17There it is, gentlemen, in the fastest car in the world.
05:19I had like, I don't know, 10 grand in the bank, and then this check arrives in the mail, of all places, in the mail.
05:27And then my bank balance went from 10,000 to 20 million and 10,000.
05:38There was this incredible Internet boom going on in Silicon Valley in the late 90s.
05:43It felt there was sort of this open frontier, open gold rush.
05:49There were tons of people in tech in the late 90s who were basically trying to do the exact same thing, who saw the Internet and saw money and thought, you know, naturally, there's going to be a way to move money on the Internet.
06:02We eventually stumbled on this idea of linking money with email.
06:09I was very interested in the cryptocurrency.
06:13Could there be new forms of money?
06:15What we're going to do is transform the traditional banking industry.
06:18Elon Musk and a young hedge fund manager, Peter Thiel, were running similar startup companies.
06:27They wanted to find a way for people to transfer money without using banks.
06:32A dream that would come to fruition a decade later as cryptocurrency.
06:37Instead of competing, they merged and formed PayPal.
06:44Peter Thiel recruited an old friend, David Sachs, to help him run it.
06:50I got a call from Peter in 1999, and he told me about this company he was creating.
06:57And, you know, that company went on to become PayPal, and he recruited me to be the COO.
07:01David Sachs, Elon Musk, and Peter Thiel would go on to become three of the most important figures in the tech industry.
07:11They had really big plans.
07:14We had this user counter that would track the user growth.
07:18We called it the World Domination Index.
07:21So on a certain level, we kind of, you know, thought it was taking over the world.
07:26We started with 24 people in our office.
07:28Those were the first 24 customers, and they sent money to friends and to other people, and it just grew exponentially.
07:36Thiel, like many in Silicon Valley, is a libertarian.
07:43He's someone who believes that essentially businesses should be left alone, that regulations are a bad thing.
07:50We had all these ideas about, you know, getting rid of central banks.
07:52We were going to use technology to change the whole world and basically overturn the monetary system of the world.
08:00Thiel, very early on, was talking about the very extreme libertarian implications of this company.
08:10The idea that if you have a digital bank account and you can send digital currency to another person, you have essentially the equivalent of an untraceable financial system, a system that's outside of the controls that governments impose on capital.
08:29He said, we're going to give people a Swiss bank account in every pocket.
08:31PayPal quickly became popular with criminals and money launderers.
08:40The regulators were worried, but it didn't stand in the way of PayPal going viral.
08:46By 2001, it had nearly 13 million users.
08:50The politicians didn't like us, but if we got the PayPal network to be big enough, it would sort of overwhelm the regulators.
09:00The way I often thought of it at the time was that we were in a race between technology and politics.
09:05Teal's a big chess player that Stanford, he started this chess team and they would go to tournaments.
09:28The spring of 1988, they're driving south from Palo Alto, it's a really windy road, and Teal is at the wheel driving like a maniac, pedal to the metal, in a way that, you know, starts to scare his classmates, the passengers.
09:47Unsurprisingly, plates come on, he gets pulled over by a police officer, a cop comes over, Teal unrolls the window, and he starts to explain how essentially, you know, speeding tickets are unconstitutional, and that he does not recognize this as like a legal process, and eventually gets let off the hook with a warning.
10:17He said the thing that was surprising was not the getting off.
10:21What was surprising was the fact that he just started speeding again, right, that he just didn't care.
10:30It actually gets to like the core of his ideology, that the rules set by governments not only can be avoided, but should be avoided.
10:47Peter Teal has said this story is exaggerated.
11:00Stanford University has played a central role in Silicon Valley's history, and also in the history specifically of Peter Teal.
11:10When I was an undergraduate at Stanford in the late 1980s, Stanford was sort of a very liberal, politically correct place.
11:19At Stanford, Peter Teal's libertarian politics clashed with left-wing campus activism.
11:25One of the key issues was the anti-apartheid movement.
11:32Teal spent time as a young person in South Africa, and I think he may have taken some of this activism personally.
11:40Peter Teal's attacks on what he saw as liberal causes and political correctness launched him into the spotlight as a rising star in the conservative movement.
11:53The problems of racism, sexism, other forms of oppression have been vastly exaggerated, and as a result, people get unjustly accused.
12:03A culture of complaint leads to a culture of blame, and that is ultimately the real problem with it.
12:08David Sachs came to Stanford after Peter Teal and really started to follow in Peter Teal's footsteps.
12:21I was lucky enough to meet Peter Teal when I was there, and we collaborated together on a student newspaper that Peter founded.
12:29As a college student, I started, you know, this conservative libertarian newspaper, the Stanford Review.
12:38The Stanford Review really traded in a kind of shock politics based around anti-political correctness.
12:47You know, reaction against feminism, against multiculturalism, against affirmative action, and against government intervention and regulation.
12:57A lot of the ideas that Peter Teal and David Sachs expressed back in the 1980s and 90s have actually found great purchase in Washington, D.C. in the years since.
13:11By gaining power in Silicon Valley, they have been able to influence politics directly.
13:27Please welcome the co-founder of PayPal, entrepreneur, Peter Teal.
13:33Good evening. I'm Peter Teal.
13:37I'm not a politician, but neither is Donald Trump.
13:42He is a builder, and it's time to rebuild America.
13:49Our country is going to start building and making things again.
13:57Donald Trump's 2016 campaign ended up emphasizing a lot of issues that were very in line with Peter Teal's worldview.
14:09We cannot afford to be so politically correct anymore.
14:15Peter Teal donated more than a million dollars to Donald Trump's 2016 campaign, at a time when most of Silicon Valley's tech titans supported the Democrats.
14:28Peter had been the only guy with the courage to step up at the Republican convention and talk about innovation and talk about, hey, that what Trump's talking about in Make America Great Again can fall very much into the original spirit of Silicon Valley.
14:47Stand up and vote for Donald Trump.
14:49After Donald Trump's long-shot win, Peter Teal's investment paid out.
14:59Silicon Valley comes to Trump Tower today.
15:02President-elect Donald Trump hosting a tech summit, bringing together leaders from some of America's top companies.
15:08I want to thank, I want to stop by thanking Peter.
15:14He's been so terrific and so outstanding, and he's ahead of the curve.
15:19And I want to thank him.
15:20He has been a very special guy.
15:22You had this room full of people, many of whom had either kind of quietly opposed or even publicly opposed.
15:30Donald Trump, and they were all there in Trump Tower, essentially paying homage to the Trump administration.
15:39And at the center of it all is Teal, as the guy who had, like, convened this.
15:43And I think that moment was really, like, the precursor to a lot of what we saw during the 2024 campaign.
15:51They have co-opted him, and he has co-opted them.
15:53And I think that really started at that meeting in Trump Tower in 2016.
15:57These big tech companies, they saw themselves as neutral platforms, and they didn't see themselves as partisans engaged in a political battle.
16:09If I had to sort of pinpoint when it changed, it would have been around 2016, you know, when Trump got elected.
16:21I was right across from the president.
16:24You had Teal to his one side, and Elon was right next to him.
16:28And Elon clearly had a lot to say and had kind of a dominant personality.
16:33At that meeting, it was Peter sat right next to President Trump.
16:36But the person that came out as the alpha male and really the energy was Elon Musk.
16:43You sold PayPal to eBay for what?
16:58It was about $1.5 billion.
17:02So that was a good outcome.
17:05A good outcome?
17:07Yes.
17:08And he betted on rocket ships and fast cars.
17:16After PayPal, I was like, well, I was kind of curious as to why we had not sent anyone to Mars.
17:22So that's where I decided to start SpaceX.
17:25Elon Musk, E-L-O-N, M-U-S-K, Chief Executive Officer of Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX.
17:33With his share of the PayPal millions, Peter Thiel also sensed a new business opportunity.
17:41After September 11th, the US government was criticized for missing crucial clues that could have prevented the attacks.
18:03Peter Thiel's new company, Palantir, said it could help.
18:08Something like Palantir is the key to stopping major terrorist attacks.
18:13I don't think we're going to do it by projecting military force throughout the world.
18:16I think we will do it by sort of very cleverly uncovering these conspiracies before they come together.
18:25Palantir software could find patterns and connections in huge data sets.
18:33The technology had started at PayPal, where it was used to identify fraud.
18:41Engineers at PayPal had been developing ways to connect disparate types of information about people and their transactions to locate crimes and fraud in the network.
18:52And this technology, after 9-11, became really valuable to be able to map social networks and individuals and their lives and their patterns in order to target them in counter-terrorism operations.
19:08In 2005, during the Bush administration, the CIA became one of Palantir's first outside investors.
19:15Paving the way for more than $3 billion in US government contracts over the next two decades.
19:22But even as these partnerships fueled Peter Thiel's fortune, he was blaming government for holding back technological progress.
19:33We have to be very sensitive to the degree to which politics has been constraining technology.
19:40Even if we have to, in small measure, engage in politics, we should never forget how evil and distasteful and bad it really is.
19:49As Peter Thiel's profile as a public intellectual grew, he took to the university lecture circuit, preaching the philosophy of Thielism.
19:59Starting a company, if you're the founder, entrepreneur, starting a company, you always want to aim for monopoly.
20:06In 2011, Peter Thiel gave a talk that was attended by a young man named J.D. Vance.
20:14I first met him at Yale Law School and he was, I don't know, just a very thoughtful person.
20:22I'm probably always a sucker for smart, thoughtful people.
20:26Thiel is constantly collecting people who are, like, ambitious, young intellectuals.
20:33And Thiel, like, finds these people and he, like, finds things to do with them.
20:39And J.D. Vance essentially gets in with the PayPal Mafia.
20:43The PayPal Mafia is the name that Thiel and his cohort had given to their network.
21:00Fortune did a story.
21:02They all dressed up like cast members on The Godfather.
21:06Thiel is Don Corleone.
21:10The PayPal Mafia is a broader network of people who were all involved in PayPal and who went on to found other venture capital companies, startups, and other Silicon Valley firms.
21:26After leaving school, J.D. Vance became directly a part of Peter Thiel's orbit.
21:31You are out in San Francisco now, right?
21:33That's right.
21:34Working for Peter Thiel?
21:35Yeah, I work at one of the venture capital funds that he co-founded.
21:39For Thiel, Vance is a generational bet.
21:42Thiel made him an investor.
21:44Thiel introduced him to his network.
21:46Thiel introduced him to the people who will fund his political campaigns.
21:50He doesn't have a political career without that.
21:52In 2022, Peter Thiel backed J.D. Vance's run for the Ohio Senate.
22:02He was a long-shot candidate with no political experience.
22:07But $15 million of Thiel's money helped Vance get elected.
22:13Here, CBS News projects that in the state of Ohio, J.D. Vance will be the next Republican senator.
22:22A victory for Republicans.
22:25A victory for Peter Thiel, who spent millions backing J.D. Vance.
22:30We've been given an opportunity to do something, and that's to govern.
22:34If you look at the relationship between Trump and the tech right during the 2024 election, you can look at it as a bargain on both sides.
23:02And for Trump, clearly the bargain was about campaign cash and campaign donations, an influential constituency led by Elon Musk.
23:11I want to thank you very much.
23:12You're most welcome.
23:13It's an honor to be here.
23:14And thanks for the help in North Carolina, Georgia, and every other state you've been helping in.
23:19Nobody's done what he's done.
23:20Thank you very much.
23:21It was an honor.
23:22And then for the Silicon Valley right, they really saw an opportunity to shape public policy in their vision and in their interest.
23:32At one point on the campaign, when he was out raising money from individual donors, he said, why do we have to do this?
23:41I can get all the money I want from the crypto guys.
23:46Cryptocurrency, digital money that can be used to make payments without banks, captured Donald Trump's attention as the election unfolded.
23:59June 6th, 2024, David Sachs and around 100 crypto people invested in the industry meet with Donald Trump.
24:10And tickets cost half a million dollars.
24:14So he basically did, you know, a speech at our house.
24:21A third of the people at that dinner were folks in the Bitcoin or crypto community.
24:27His attraction to the tech mafia just became the possibility of more money.
24:36And it was easy money.
24:38Hi, everybody.
24:39Thanks so much for sitting down with us, Mr. President.
24:42We had a great time at the fundraiser that we did a couple weeks ago.
24:45I think it turned out great.
24:48And I heard the Winklevoss brothers are actually announcing that they're donating a million dollars each in Bitcoin to you tomorrow.
24:56So I think that's a great result to come out of it as well.
25:00Got to meet them for the first time at your house and terrific, terrific.
25:06President Biden had taken a tougher stance on crypto, supporting regulations to protect consumers and the wider economy.
25:15The crypto guys wanted change.
25:19People in the crypto world wanted their industry have more political and economic legitimacy.
25:25Secondly, they wanted to have their man on the ticket, J.D. Vance.
25:31In real life, J.D. Vance thinks Donald Trump is a charlatan.
25:40He has said as much.
25:42Trump is a really bad candidate and, frankly, I think a really bad person.
25:47I'm a never-Trump guy. I never liked him.
25:50But his ambitions are unlimited.
25:54You called Donald Trump unfit for the nation's highest office and you said he could be America's Hitler.
26:02I've also been extremely open about the fact that I was wrong about Donald Trump.
26:06And Vance did have the support of this key group who had become increasingly important to Donald Trump.
26:18And J.D. Vance came actually to represent those people.
26:22And in the end, that's what the decision about who would be his vice president came down to.
26:34I officially accept your nomination to be vice president of the United States of America.
26:39I have a different vision for America.
26:49And that is, we have got to end this corrupt campaign finance system.
27:02A lot of people around the world, and even in the United States, don't fully understand the level of corruption.
27:20So what does it mean?
27:22Based on a horrific Supreme Court decision of, like, 16 years ago, it means that if you're a billionaire,
27:28you can put in unlimited amounts of money into political campaigns.
27:33Democratic billionaires spent a lot of money on Kamala Harris' campaign.
27:38Musk spent $270 million to get Trump elected.
27:52I'm running around the country telling people that we're moving toward an oligarchy.
27:56And what you are seeing is big tech is a vanguard in that movement toward oligarchy.
28:03Their religion is greed, greed, and more greed.
28:14Abraham Lincoln talked about a government of the people, by the people, for the people.
28:19I think it is absolutely fair to say that in America that you have a government of the billionaires, by the billionaires, for the billionaires.
28:24And that, you ask me what we're trying to do, that's what we're trying to address.
28:27Here's what the Democratic Party did. Nothing. Here's they had every ability to tax them in 21.
28:36You know what they did? Nothing.
28:37So I don't want to hear Bernie Sanders whining about the tech oligarchs.
28:42The progressive left loves the oligarchs.
28:46When they had power and control, they created the oligarchy back in Obama's situation, and they nurtured it under Biden.
28:53The bayonaires run the Democratic Party more than they run the Republican Party.
28:58The Democrats are the party of the elite, and nowhere is that more obvious than in this last election,
29:04because you saw so many of the business elite, the Wall Street elite, the Silicon Valley elite,
29:10coming out in support of the Democrat Party.
29:14A few of them came to the Republican side, and the reason you know it's only a few is because you know their names.
29:20His name is Elon Musk. Come on up here, Elon.
29:23Fight, fight, fight. Vote, vote, vote.
29:27And President-elect Trump continues to fill out his next administration.
29:35Some of his latest appointments are giving a boost to the cryptocurrency industry.
29:40One of the president-elect's latest appointments, Silicon Valley venture capitalist David Sachs,
29:47as the country's first ever White House AI and crypto czar.
29:51Thank you, Mr. President. We're all here today...
29:54Shortly after winning the election, President Trump brought former PayPal executive David Sachs into his inner circle.
30:01...who works every day to get so much done on behalf of the American people.
30:04David Sachs was very instrumental in getting Trump elected in terms of pulling money together.
30:14And he is now in charge of the crypto effort in the Trump administration.
30:26My name is Richard Painter.
30:29I was formerly the chief White House ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush.
30:34Very quickly, after taking office in January 2025, President Trump issued executive orders that were designed to allow the United States to take the lead in developing new cryptocurrencies and cryptocurrency trading platforms.
30:52The problem is that now, for the first time ever, we have a president of the United States who himself has a substantial interest invested in the cryptocurrency industry.
31:05Donald Trump, just a few years ago in 2021, said that Bitcoin was a scam. Cryptocurrency was a scam.
31:13You don't like Bitcoin? You wouldn't invest in Bitcoin?
31:18Bitcoin just seems like a scam. I don't like it because it's another currency competing against the dollar.
31:24He's apparently changed his mind.
31:26The United States will be the crypto capital of the planet and the Bitcoin superpower of the world.
31:38He thinks with his wallet. And if he changes his mind, the prices go up and what he has in his crypto wallet is far more valuable.
31:49The support so far for crypto now sending its most widely known currency, Bitcoin, to near record highs.
31:56And now, after using his Trump brand to sell everything from steaks and vodka to sneakers and Bibles, the president promoting his company's newly launched Trump meme coin.
32:07Meme coins are a type of cryptocurrency based on internet memes or jokes.
32:13Their value is often driven by social media hype.
32:18Do you intend to continue selling products that benefit yourself personally while you're president?
32:24Well, I don't know if it benefited. I don't know where it is. I don't know much about it other than I launched it.
32:29I heard it was very successful. I haven't checked it. Where is it today?
32:33You made a lot of money, sir.
32:35How much?
32:38Several billion dollars, it seems like, in the last several days.
32:41Several billion? That's peanuts for these guys.
32:46This is embarrassing. What's going on in this town?
32:49Some estimates of his holdings in cryptocurrency run into the billions of dollars.
32:56That's an enormous amount of money.
32:59This is just unacceptable to have a president who is in charge of the regulatory apparatus for any industry, including crypto, while he has such a vast interest in crypto.
33:11Trump is using public office for private gain.
33:18I don't think there's been an administration in American history that has been so corrupted.
33:29And I think the word has got to be used as corruption.
33:34The fact that some of your guests on this program have been able to criticize those investments is a testament to how transparent this president really is.
33:47President Trump wants to make the United States the crypto capital of the world, for the same reason he wants to make the United States the AI capital of the world.
33:56Because he knows that when Americans innovate, when they develop the next generation of technologies, we don't just benefit.
34:04What the entire world benefits when we are leading that charge.
34:09The White House didn't respond to Panorama's questions about President Trump's cryptocurrency investments.
34:15But as previously said, there are no conflicts of interest.
34:21What the oligarchs see in crypto is a way of getting out from under the eye of the government, creating a currency that is essentially invisible.
34:35The kind of dream of libertarians.
34:38Peter Thiel and David Sachs, this kind of this notion that you really don't want and don't need government.
34:45You want instead this kind of society that can be ruled and run by a technological elite.
34:54All stations verify ready for launch.
34:56FTS.
34:57FTS down.
34:58Props.
34:59ABI.
35:00TNC.
35:0210, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.
35:15Texas is adding a new city, and this one is out of this world, kind of.
35:22Starbase, the headquarters for Elon Musk's SpaceX, is now officially being recognized as a city.
35:31This is the first new city made in America in, I think, quite a few decades.
35:36The company executives say city status will help SpaceX keep pace with its rapidly growing workforce there.
35:46We're one of the poorest communities in the country, and we're being taken over and exploited by the richest man in the world.
36:11We're one of the poorest people in the world.
36:12Over here on the left side is the so-called city of Starbase, Elon Musk's company town.
36:24And then, further along the road, you'll see the two launch pads, where they're testing the largest rocket in human history.
36:34SpaceX says it's contributed more than $800 million to the local economy, and created more than 20,000 jobs.
36:45Starbase is run by a mayor and two commissioners who work for SpaceX.
36:49City status gives Starbase the authority to levy taxes, close roads, and restrict access to the local beach.
37:00Like other cities, it also has the power to rezone land, changing what it can be used for.
37:06My name is Homer L. Pompa, and I have been on the beach since 1970.
37:19And I understand that you fought in Vietnam.
37:23Well, I was a squad leader, 1st Marine Division.
37:29When I came back, I wasn't the same person.
37:32I hid out here, I isolated, I didn't want to see crowds, because every time there was crowds in Vietnam, everybody get boomed away.
37:43This is my solitude.
37:47This is my heaven.
37:50Starbase wants to buy Homer's property.
37:54But he doesn't want to sell.
37:58In May, Starbase wrote to Homer and other local residents, warning that their land could be rezoned,
38:06and they may lose the right to continue using their properties.
38:09Historically, rezoning has been used as a tool to bully and push people out.
38:16We see these letters as another bullying tactic to try to push people, long-time Rio Grande Valley residents, out of the region.
38:27I come back to America, you know, we're all messed up, and now they want to take everything away from us.
38:32This is America.
38:35That's what I fought for, and I'll continue to fight.
38:39I'm 75.
38:42Let me be.
38:44Let me die here.
38:46You know, I fought for this.
38:47The creation of Starbase has been helped by the backing of politicians in nearby Brownsville.
39:03Over the last decade, Elon Musk has donated more than $5.5 million to local political campaigns.
39:10Elon Musk used his money to buy power and influence from the elected officials here.
39:22In 2022, when graffiti criticizing SpaceX appeared on a mural paid for by the Musk Foundation,
39:29suspicion fell on environmental campaigner, Beka Hinojosa.
39:37PM?
39:39We're here. We're from the police department. We need to talk to you.
39:43The city of Brownsville sent police to arrest me for allegedly spray-painting anti-SpaceX graffiti.
39:52Okay, turn on.
39:54Committee. Cooperate.
40:01And then they interrogated me for 26 hours.
40:05The detectives are going to come and talk to you.
40:07And when I was finally released, the mayor at the time posted my information on his official Facebook page,
40:20something he's never done to anyone else.
40:25It's been over three years and I'm still waiting for a court trial.
40:29The city did this to try to silence opposition to SpaceX.
40:40SpaceX is an environmental disaster.
40:47They've scorched the beach.
40:49They were caught illegally dumping on our beach.
41:07In 2024, SpaceX faced penalties from state and federal regulators for releasing pollutants into the water there, violating environmental regulations.
41:15What's happening here is a warning to the rest of the country.
41:27The city of Brownsville and its police department declined to respond to the allegations in this program.
41:35SpaceX didn't reply to Panorama.
41:46I have two illustrious guests here with me.
41:49One is Philip Lowe, who is the inventor of the iBrain and founder and CEO of the company NeuroVigil.
41:55Our other guest is Elon Musk, who really needs no introduction, but he's also at the helm of the private space company SpaceX.
42:02So thank you so much for joining me, guys.
42:04Glad to be here.
42:06I have interacted with him at a very deep level for a very long time.
42:11He was much closer to me than my own brother.
42:14His innocence.
42:15I thought you were just watching.
42:17I don't enjoy seeing what happened to my dear friend.
42:23He developed when he was a little boy who had a father who didn't seem to validate him.
42:29This notion that he was going to rule a planet, namely Mars.
42:35In fact, the name Elon, you know, comes from a novel where a character named Elon has control over Mars.
42:45And the way that translated over time, I think, is this absolute lust for power.
42:51This is what victory feels like.
43:04Yeah.
43:06And this was no ordinary victory.
43:08This was a fork in the road of human civilization.
43:12And I just want to say thank you for making it happen.
43:21My heart goes out to you.
43:25Dr. Lowe fell out with his friend after Elon Musk made what looked like a Nazi salute at President Trump's inauguration rally.
43:34As the child of a Holocaust survivor, I was extremely disappointed because we had a deep friendship going back 14 years.
43:43Elon Musk has responded to the outrage caused by that gesture.
43:48Musk posted on X, frankly, they need better dirty tricks.
43:52The everyone is Hitler attack is so tired.
43:55I see in his behavior a very strong pattern of, you know, doing everything possible to acquire and consolidate power.
44:04We've seen this with Twitter.
44:08You buy Twitter, you buy the world's biggest megaphone.
44:14In 2022, Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion.
44:19He changed the name to X and reinstated Donald Trump's account, which had been suspended after the January 6th attack on the Capitol.
44:32X's new owner became a cheerleader for the presidential hopeful.
44:36If Trump doesn't win, this will be the last real election in America.
44:42Every election going forward will be a guaranteed Democrat win.
44:47If the Dems win this election, they will legalize enough illegals to turn the swing states.
44:53There will be no escape.
44:54Elon Musk promoted the idea Democrats were behind mass immigration, claiming they wanted to replace white voters and create a permanent Democratic majority.
45:07I think they really are doing it because they want to sign these people up to vote.
45:11I really do. You know, I never would have believed it.
45:14They can't speak a word of English for the most part, but they're signing them up.
45:18They'll be signing them up trying to get them in to vote.
45:20Elon Musk was trying to motivate his followers to boost turnout for Trump.
45:25In August last year, the two men held a two-hour discussion broadcast live on X.
45:33Yeah, well, I think it's obvious that you're a believer and an advocate of free speech.
45:37The good thing is that you and I, we can get the word out.
45:41The shift of Elon Musk, when he took over that platform, is a fundamental...
45:45I mean, this is why so many of my buddies and so many friends and colleagues have been after me, like, hey, this guy was a godsend.
45:52X is not a free speech platform. These are propaganda weapons.
45:57We are in the information age, and weapons that are being used are information weapons, or in this case, disinformation weapons.
46:05In terms of not only political power, these guys control how we speak to each other, how we share ideas. Very dangerous.
46:14X told Panorama that it is dedicated to fostering an open, unbiased public conversation.
46:27And if they win, there's no border. We'll have a hundred million people come in from the rest of the world.
46:33Donald Trump's campaign rhetoric quickly turned into policy.
46:40Look at the top, that's where they stop. With bites and...
46:42Look!
46:48And Peter Thiel's company, Palantir, would help him execute it.
46:54Since April this year, Palantir has received around $60 million from the US government to assist in Donald Trump's deportations program.
47:07It's one of, honestly, the scariest kind of contracts I've seen given to a tech company.
47:11It aims to handle the full life cycle of deportation of individuals from the surveillance and targeting and tracking all the way to their incarceration.
47:28It's basically using big data to accomplish the full spectrum of a mass migration operation.
47:34In early May, Juan Pinto and 12 other former Palantir employees published an open letter opposing the company's close ties with the Trump administration.
47:51Big tech, including Palantir, is increasingly complicit, normalizing authoritarianism under the guise of a revolution led by oligarchs.
48:00We must resist this trend.
48:01All of big tech, from meta to Palantir, is bending the knee over to the Trump administration, is willing to cave in to their ideological demands.
48:13Mr. Thiel, do you have any comments about Palantir's surveillance of the American people, sir?
48:22Our streets! Our streets! Our streets! Our streets!
48:26There's no reason for any of you to be here angry.
48:29You're one of us!
48:30Following unrest in the wake of immigration raids in Los Angeles in early June, President Trump sent federal troops to support Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE.
48:43He's also recently ordered the deployment of the National Guard to Chicago and Portland.
48:49What really scares me about the use of federal troops in American cities is this.
48:59When I worked at Palantir, I illustrated the technologies developed by the government with Palantir,
49:05of integrating battlefield signals, satellites, ground vehicles, warfighters, and drones into a connected web of information and data that is used to kill individuals in the battlefield.
49:21And when I see MQ-9 drones flying around Los Angeles, what I was basically seeing as an insider who saw how these things worked, is those exact same chains of information.
49:33That, in my opinion, should only belong in a foreign battlefield.
49:36Special thanks to our sponsor, Palantir.
49:46Palantir has been the top-performing stock on the entire U.S. stock market in 2025.
50:07And a big part of that is they've been raking in government contracts under the Trump administration, particularly this targeting system, which is called Maven Smart System.
50:20It can identify tanks and all other sorts of objects.
50:23And then it makes a suggestion, a targeting suggestion, to the operator.
50:28So they're also getting this $10 billion contract over the next decade to basically place Palantir in all aspects of the U.S. military.
50:40It's an enormous, enormous benefit to one single company.
50:45Stand by.
50:46The day that that contract was announced, their stock price just, whew, went through the roof.
50:52Peter Thiel's Palantir has grown under both Democrat and Republican administrations.
51:02During President Trump's second term, it's become one of the biggest companies in the world, worth more than $400 billion.
51:11Palantir told Panorama it provides its software to help democratically elected governments of the West implement policies that align with applicable law and the political will of their electorates, independent of the political stripes in question.
51:27It says its ice work began in 2011 under the Obama administration, and it believes its software can help ice achieve its goals and duties more effectively and accurately.
51:38Palantir also says it respects the right of its employees to express their views.
51:45The White House told Panorama,
51:47President Trump has exercised his lawful authority to protect federal officers and assets from violent riots and lawlessness that local leaders have refused to quell.
51:57And that the president's executive actions to address left-wing violence will employ a whole-of-government approach.
52:04The genius of Peter Thiel has been to have all this influence, to have his ideology, like, almost perfectly transmitted into the White House.
52:19Peter Thiel's former employee, J.D. Vance, may even be in line for President Trump's job.
52:25Now, do you agree that the heir apparent to MAGA is J.D. Vance?
52:32Well, I think most likely, in all fairness, certainly he's doing a great job and he would be probably favored at this point.
52:40You can better believe how much they're putting into 2028 already.
52:44Vance has a whole operation, such a well-funded operation, that is ready for his 2028 campaign. Like, they're starting now.
52:52Senator J.D. Vance!
52:58We're at an inflection point right now.
53:01If J.D. Vance were to become president, you would have the oligarchy fundamentally in charge.
53:09I mean, there would be no constraint on them. They would run everything.
53:13Teal, I would argue, is really the architect of this moment that we are living in today, which is that, you know, a handful of very well-connected technologists are basically at the arm of some of the most powerful people in the world.
53:31What's up, dude? How are you? Good to see you, man. How you been? Great.
53:37I have tried to encourage them to bring on board as many of the good people I know as possible.
53:43There's so many more people in this administration that I think are really first-rate.
53:47Panorama invited Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and David Sachs to take part in this program. They declined.
54:01David, you know, you've done a wonderful job. Would you like to say a few words?
54:06There's a boom happening right now in AI because of what President Trump has done in terms of stimulating an investment. It's going to benefit all Americans, so it's really a thrill to be part of.
54:18Trump and Big Tech have formed a kind of diabolical union.
54:26Thanks for hosting this, and this is quite a group to get together.
54:29So thank you for incredible leadership.
54:31Big Tech gets out of it a great deal of power, political power. It wants hands-off in terms of regulating artificial intelligence or any direction that Big Tech wants to go in.
54:49Political support and light-touch regulation are vital to Big Tech companies and their profits.
54:55Their payout could be enormous. AI is forecast to add more than $15 trillion to the global economy over the next four years.
55:09Following a public rift with the President earlier this year, Elon Musk and Donald Trump have mended ties.
55:16And in September, Musk's firm, ex-AI, secured a deal to supply its technology to federal agencies.
55:27AI will so profoundly change the future, it's difficult to fathom how much.
55:34AI is like the Internet in 1999. It's clearly going to be important, big, transformative, have all kinds of interesting social, political effects, maybe even effects about how humans think about themselves.
55:47Elon Musk's latest venture uses robots to bring AI into the physical world.
55:57The optimist robots will walk among you.
56:00It can be a teacher, babysit your kids, get the groceries, just be your friend, serve drinks, whatever you can think of, it will do.
56:10It will do.
56:14Big Tech is really driving a golden age for technology, for AI, for robotics.
56:20That's going to be hundreds of thousands of jobs over the coming decades that are going to go to American workers and their families.
56:28There are posters out there that would say, don't hire humans.
56:34We have not begun to even understand the impact of AI and robotics.
56:41And what we are just beginning to see are sweeping changes in the economy.
56:47I expect that most of the jobs that people have now will not be here or they'll be very, very different in 10 years.
56:59So the challenge that we face is a very profound issue.
57:03This race for super intelligence is a direction where you can't put the horse back in the barn.
57:12Elon Musk says there's 20% probability that humanity could be destroyed by this.
57:18The four horsemen in Silicon Valley virtually have no guardrails, no controls whatsoever.
57:25We're going to a dystopian place unless we stop it.
57:29According to the world's richest human, the AI future that could change everything is racing towards us fast.
57:40I think we're quite close to digital super intelligence.
57:43It may happen this year.
57:47And if it doesn't happen this year, next year for sure.
57:50So now it's, you know, pedal to the metal on humanoid robots and digital super intelligence.
57:59Watch this chip off faster.
58:01And we bleed down.
58:02And we're like, yeah.
58:03And theeled man is flying in for a together period of 2050.
58:04We can say this chip is кυ no.
58:05And we're learning about it.
58:06And that is why.
58:07And I hope it's going to be more efficient.
58:08And when we see that, I hope we just need to enjoy it.
58:10And we'll leave it and for sure.
58:11And we realize that this chip is going to pay five pessoas every day.
58:13Please do not take care of yourself.
58:15своего students on top of the world for a while.
58:17And I hope to have access this else's highest force than this.
58:20It only doesn't take care of yourself with economics I'm wearing a cat inside,
58:22my snudge anytime.
58:23I hope we can decrease it sooner than mine as well as I speak.
58:24I hope to show you about it.
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