Elon Musk: The Recode interview

On the latest episode of Recode Decode, hosted by Kara Swisher, Kara sat down with Elon Musk — the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX — to talk about all of his businesses, his social media habits and when we’ll be able to go to Mars, among many other topics.

You can listen to the entire conversation right now in the audio player below. If you prefer to listen on your phone, Recode Decode is available wherever you listen to podcasts — including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Pocket Casts and Overcast.

I’ll be honest, I have been email haranguing Tesla and SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk for months about talking to me and today on Recode Decode, we have a special interview with one of the most-loved, often-controversial and generally most-talked-about figures in tech.

On Halloween night, we sat down at Tesla HQ in Palo Alto for an 80-minute conversation about how those companies are faring, why he was working 120-hour weeks, his public animosity for the press, Donald Trump’s Space Force, accepting money from Saudi Arabia and more.

Elon Musk makes no bones about it: He’s had the worst year of his career — “insanely painful” — and a lot of it is his own fault.

“This year felt like five years of aging, frankly,” he said in an interview with Kara Swisher on a new episode of the Recode Decode podcast. “In fact, my brother said: ‘Look, if you do a self-inflicted wound, can you at least not twist the knife afterwards?’ You stabbed yourself in the leg. You don’t really need to twist it in your leg. Why do that?”

Count the CEO of SpaceX as among the fans of the Trump administration’s proposed “Space Force.”

Elon Musk sees a new branch of the U.S. Armed Forces as “obvious” as Americans travel far off the planet.

Elon Musk unintentionally avoided a real crisis of happenstance this fall.

Just a few weeks after Musk shelved an ambitious plan to take Tesla private — financed, in his mind, by the government of Saudi Arabia — that government invited the scorn of the business community as it slowly admitted that a Saudi critic, journalist Jamal Khashoggi, had been brutally murdered. Musk got lucky — he would have been at the center of that human-rights drama.