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]
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.”[9] 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.[10][11]
DOGE
Kiriakou has predicted Musk will “have to be reined in” over DOGE’s publishing of alleged wasteful government spending.[12]
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.”[13] 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.[14][15][16] 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.[17]