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.[1][2][3] 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.[2][3] Kiriakou now calls Musk arguably the most powerful man in the world, citing NASA needing his help to rescue stranded astronauts.[4] 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.”[5] 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.[6]
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.[7] As of roughly two weeks before that interview, the journalists had gone through only about 10% of the documents in the database.[8]
DOGE
Kiriakou has predicted Musk will “have to be reined in” over DOGE’s publishing of alleged wasteful government spending.[9]