Elon Musk
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Elon Musk is the entrepreneur whom John Kiriakou recounts meeting by chance in early 2009 at the Hay-Adams Hotel bar in Washington, D.C., after an introduction from a mutual friend, at a time when Musk was worth about $1 billion following the sale of PayPal. Kiriakou's recurring account of the meeting has Musk, not yet famous or recognized by him, talking at length that night about selling PayPal for roughly a billion dollars and using the proceeds to buy Tesla, SpaceX and Starlink, with plans to colonize Mars, all before Kiriakou ever got to pitch his own TV show idea to the mutual friend they were there to meet. Kiriakou now calls Musk arguably the most powerful man in the world, citing NASA needing his help to rescue stranded astronauts. Kiriakou uses the 2009 memory to question how Musk's net worth grew from $1 billion in 2009 to $446 billion by 2024-2025, arguing the gain came "on the backs of the American people." He also cites a Wall Street Journal report that Musk lost $40 billion in wealth after Donald Trump first announced tariffs, with Jeff Bezos separately losing about $20 billion amid the same stock market drop.

The Twitter Files database

Kiriakou says that after buying Twitter, Musk gave three journalists, Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger, and a third, access to a standalone, searchable database containing every internal Twitter email exchanged from the company's founding until his purchase, rather than curated files. As of roughly two weeks before that interview, the journalists had gone through only about 10% of the documents in the database.

The algorithm and the forced follow

Kiriakou's objection to Musk's stewardship of the platform is that its ranking is not neutral. He describes the algorithms as manoeuvred "to only allow a certain segment of people that he likes, and that say the things he wants, to get seen on X", and offers his own account as the illustration: he does not manage the account himself, a friend does, but when he looks at it he is "bombarded with tweets from Elon Musk. I don't follow Elon Musk ... and every time I try to unfollow him, I'm denied." He cites the experience as part of his case for a subscription-funded, open-source alternative, see Panquake, while applying the same free-speech consistency test to both: a platform that means what it says has to host people it dislikes.

DOGE

Kiriakou has predicted Musk will "have to be reined in" over DOGE's publishing of alleged wasteful government spending.

The government efficiency drive, assessed

Interviewed by John Kiriakou in 2026, the economist Richard D. Wolff rejected the premise of the department of government efficiency outright: "I'm a professor of economics. I teach what efficiency is. This has nothing remotely to do with efficiency." His argument was that the federal civilian workforce is the smaller share of American government employment, roughly two and a half million against five million at state level and fifteen million at local level, so anyone genuinely pursuing efficiency would look elsewhere. The federal workforce was chosen, in his account, only because it is the one a president can fire, making the exercise "a political hustle not an efficiency" whose real function is to cut the deficit. Wolff added that the federal civilian workforce is no larger today than it was in the 1960s, when the population was a hundred million smaller, which, he noted, is what economists actually call efficiency.

See also

- Donald Trump
- John Kiriakou
