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CNN Special Reports
Special Report: Eclipsing Power: Musk, Bezos, and the New Space Race. Aired 2-3a ET
Aired September 13, 2026 - 02:00 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
[02:00:00]
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BILL NYE, CHIEF AMBASSADOR, THE PLANETARY SOCIETY: Greetings, Bill Nye here. Like everyone you've ever met, I am native to the Earth. We'll represent the Earth with this blue circle. Another object you're familiar with, the Sun. Closer to us than the Sun is the Earth's moon. The moon, right here, moon, rays of sunlight, they're streaming through the blackness of space, and once in a while, the moon casts a dark shadow on the Earth. So, if you're in the path of this shadow, you see an eclipse.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: An eclipse is something that has engendered curiosity and person kind throughout history.
NYE: Seeing the sky go dark, the crickets chirping in the middle of the day, it creates a spectacular phenomenon here on the Earth.
JACKIE WATTLES, SPACE & SCIENCE WRITER, CNN: The solar eclipse happening in August 2026 is going to have a path of totality that people will, you know, travel across the world to be able to catch a glimpse of.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The fact is that the moon has a very romantic and seductive quality when it comes to our lore.
CASEY DREIR, CHIEF OF SPACE POLICY, THE PLANETARY SOCIETY: And that's the moon that we get to now go to.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We're going back to the freaking moon.
SARA SIDNER, CNN ANCHOR: The space race heating up once again. China launching its latest mission to the moon.
JARED ISAACMAN, ADMINISTRATOR, NASA: The Chinese will land their taikonauts on the moon. Question is, do we return first?
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: It's the U.S. and its billionaires against China.
NOAH SHACHTMAN, CONTRIBUTING EDITOR, WIRED: For better or for worse, the American chance at getting back to the moon depends on Elon Musk. He's an immensely complicated, immensely accomplished, immensely problematic figure, and Jeff Bezos is trying to muscle in on that territory.
DREIER: With Blue Origin or SpaceX, you've placed the entire lunar return effort on two people. That's a huge risk.
SHACHTMAN: And it's troubling to a lot of people that they might increase their power by leveraging space to get more of what they want on Earth.
DREIER: My first rocket launch was watching the Curiosity Rover launch to Mars, and I was sitting with the entire scientific team, who had worked in some cases for decades, planning, designing, building, and so you had the collective dreams and efforts and blood and sweat and tears of hundreds of people, all depending on that one rocket not blowing up.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Main engine start zero and lift off of the Atlas V with Curiosity.
DREIR: And then, when you see it take off, it is brighter than you can imagine. It is louder than you can imagine. And then the crowd itself reacts, Screaming, watching it going up into space, never to return.
SHACHTMAN: The vision of all of NASA is that rocket launches become routine, right?
DREIER: SpaceX has revolutionized the launch industry.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: And lift-off of the Falcon 9 rocket.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Go SpaceX, go NASA Crew 10.
WATTLES: These days, SpaceX launches at least a couple of times a week.
SHACHTMAN: About 90 percent of the U.S. space program is being carried by SpaceX.
WATTLES: They really have far exceeded anyone's expectations. Elon Musk founded SpaceX in 2002, and it was very much a passion project.
WALTER ISAACSON, AUTHOR, ELON MUSK: He'd been a young kid reading Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and he just dreamed of getting our country back into space and going to Mars.
ELON MUSK, CEO, SPACEX: I've always been interested in space, but I didn't think that there was anything that I could do as a single individual. I thought space was really the arena of the government.
ISAACSON: He's driving back from Long Island with some friends, and they were trying to figure out how is NASA going to get us to Mars.
MUSK: So I sort of started looking into it, and I went to the NASA website to say -- to find out when we're going to Mars. It seems like obviously that is the next thing after the moon, and I couldn't find anything. So I'm like, wow, this seems very strange. ISAACSON: And so he says, "I'm going to start a company." All of his
friend thinks he's nuts, and so they made a highlights reel of rockets blowing up, hoping that would talk him out of it, and he said, "No, man, that just strengthened my resolve."
[02:05:00]
WATTLES: Elon Musk very much saw himself as someone that could invest his own money into kind of reinvigorating these very bold, outlandish ambitions.
KARA SWISHER, TECH JOURNALIST & CNN CONTRIBUTOR: He's very entrepreneurial. He did a yellow pages company, putting the yellow pages online, and then he moved into a payments company called X.com.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Big X.
MUSK: Exactly. X.com.
I think X.com could absolutely be a multi-billion-dollar bonanza.
ISAACSON: It had a big rival, and they end up merging, calling it PayPal.
NYE: You know, when I met Elon Musk years ago, he was introduced as Elon Musk, Founder of PayPal, and as I like to joke, as though it was all one word. Elon Musk, Founder of PayPal. I'd like you to meet Bill. Hi, Elon Musk, Founder of PayPal.
ISAACSON: Now he gets eased out because he's a difficult person to work with, but he takes the buy-out from PayPal. So he does SpaceX, and then Tesla, and then he keeps inventing new things.
MUSK: It wasn't as though I thought of you know what are all the businesses that one could do, and then which is going to be the easiest one to make the most amount of money. It wasn't anything like that. It was really from the standpoint of what are the things -- what are the most important problems in the world that need to get solved, and -- and let me try to help solve those.
SWISHER: I remember him talking about rockets early, and he was compelling. His vision was compelling.
MUSK: The goal of SpaceX is to revolutionize space transportation by dramatically improving the cost and the reliability, and by building rockets that are large enough and capable enough to go to other planets. Well, really Mars in particular.
ISAACMAN: So basically, the rockets we used to send astronauts to the moon, that was a disposable rocket.
WATTLES: The entire concept of SpaceX was develop a rocket that doesn't just fly once, it can fly multiple times.
PHIL METZGER, PLANETARY SCIENTIST, UNIVERSITY OF CENTRAL FLORIDA: They start building hardware right away, making mistakes, blowing things up.
DREIER: It's this interesting transference of Silicon Valley, right? It's called you know you fail fast, and in a way that could only happen because it wasn't a government agency.
CHUCK NICE, CO-HOST, STARTALK: NASA blows up one rocket. It's in the news for a month. Look at the failure of NASA. Elon blows up a rocket, and people are like, "Look at him. He's really pushing the discovery of space exploration."
ISAACSON: You'd watch Musk walk around, and he'd get really angry, even late at night, if there weren't enough people building something or getting the launch pad ready, and you'd say, "Why are you doing this?
MUSK: The real motivation, my -- my real motivation, motivation of people at SpaceX, and the reason they -- they work so -- so hard is because we want to see an exciting future in -- in space exploration. If we're not on a path to get there, we'll never get there.
WATTLES: You know, Musk was forthright back in the early days of SpaceX about how uncertain he was that SpaceX would ever be a profitable or sustainable business at all, but after some trial and error, they did figure it out.
ISAACMAN: SpaceX in 2015 caught a booster for the first time, refurbished it, flew it again.
WATTLES: And this marked the time at which SpaceX really morphed from this underdog into a dominant space power.
ISAACSON: Elon pretty much self-funded SpaceX in the beginning, but along the way he found things that would be very commercially successful. Most notably, putting satellites into low Earth orbit.
SWISHER: When he started talking about that, at the time I thought it was brilliant. I continue to think it's brilliant.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: A giant leap for SpaceX, the company launching a rocket full of 60 satellites overnight.
DREIER: Starlink is SpaceX's biggest money maker. It's a large constellation of satellites that basically reflect and provide internet access across the world to anybody, anywhere.
WATTLES: They've launched over 10,000 satellites. It's more than any other company in the world. It's more than any other country in the world.
SHACHTMAN: Musk controls a great deal of access to space, and so the more rollout we get on space, one future could be the more roll out we are on Musk.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: NASA has chosen SpaceX to return us to the moon.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We are in a great competition with a rival that has the will and the means to challenge American exceptionalism across multiple domains, including in the high ground of space.
SHACHTMAN: The Trump Administration has made it absolutely clear that its top priority in space now is to beat China back to the moon.
WATTLES: China is saying it wants to get to the moon by 2030, so every step has to fall exactly right into place if the United States is going to get there before. SpaceX is using its massive, gargantuan Starship rocket for this purpose.
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DREIER: I mean, Starship is just big. It's really, really big. It's almost like going back to Bugs Bunny cartoons from the 1940s and how they represent spaceships. It's kind of what Starship is like.
WATTLES: SpaceX wants this rocket to work not just to get astronauts to the moon, but also to get to Mars. And so far, they've done test flights with varying degrees of success.
DREIER: It is hard to describe how much of a step, Starship would be if it succeeds, and that's the operative word is if.
SHACHTMAN: Late 2025, there started to be rumblings in NASA that oh my God, if we continue to depend on Musk, we're going to lose this space race.
WATTLES: And it was the ex-Acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy last year, who said that you know if SpaceX doesn't have Starship, it's Lunar Lander ready for our use, then we'll use Blue Origin, and it was a very overt way of kind of saying if SpaceX doesn't focus, we'll go with the competitor and really teeing up this billionaire space race.
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WATTLES: It's kind of underappreciated that Blue Origin was founded a couple of years before SpaceX. Bezos started the company in 2000 when he became a billionaire with Amazon. He had the funds to kind of pour money into starting to make space exploration technology that was cheaper than we had seen it, and the company really operated in stealth mode for a long time, and that was by design.
They famously have a tortoise as a mascot, and they have a Latin motto, "Gradatim Ferociter," which means step by step, ferociously.
DREIER: SpaceX has always been, you know, you fail fast. Blue Origin, which is infinitely well capitalized by Jeff Bezos's Amazon money, has only launched two of its larger rockets into space.
SHACHTMAN: Bezos has said for a long time that the tortoise beats the hare, and that he's going to go slow and steady and careful. But in the end, he's going to win this kind of like battle of the billionaires.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Welcome back to Earth, First Step. Congratulations to all of you. WATTLES: Their first major project was building the new Shepard
rocket, which is very different than the Falcon rockets that SpaceX flies because it's suborbital. The Suborbital rockets require far less power, and they just kind of go up and down.
[02:15:00]
SHACHTMAN: You might remember that he sent up a rocket that brought his then girlfriend Lauren Sanchez and Katy Perry up in a near orbit. I think a lot of people thought it was kind of a cheap publicity stunt.
NICE: Is it a PR stunt? Who cares? It brings attention to space travel.
DREIER: At the end of the day, I think their ambitions are much bigger than tourism.
JEFF BEZOS, FOUNDER, BLUE ORGIN: If we move out into the solar system, for all practical purposes, we have unlimited resources.
ISAACSON: One of the things that Musk and Bezos have in common is his kids; they loved science fiction.
BEZOS: Some town resident had donated his entire science fiction collection to the Cotulla Public Library, just teensy probably half the library was these science fiction books, and I read over several summers, I read through that collection of science fiction, and that added to my interest in space travel and science and the future.
WATTLES: Jeff Bezos loves to talk about how when he was at Princeton, he met Gerard O'Neill, who is a very famous astrophysicist, who conceptualized this idea of O'Neill colonies, which are these giant orbiting laboratories that spin to create gravity.
BEZOS: These are very large structures, miles on end, and they hold a million people or more each. We get to preserve this unique gem of a planet, which is completely irreplaceable. There is no Plan B. We have to save this planet.
SHACHTMAN: He said explicitly, his goal is to save planet Earth by moving industry off the planet into space.
BEZOS: We were given a gift, this nearby body called the Moon. This is Blue Moon. We've been working on this lander for three years.
METZGER: Jeff Bezos has definitely talked about becoming the Amazon of space. How he is building the transportation services so that hundreds of other space companies can start doing economic activity in space.
BEZOS: In 1994, I started Amazon. All of the heavy lifting infrastructure needed for Amazon to exist was already in place. We did not have to build a transportation system to deliver packages. It was there. Infrastructure lets entrepreneurs do amazing things. So, the kids here, and your children, and their grandchildren, you're going to build those O'Neill colonies. This generation's job, my generation's job, is to build the infrastructure so that you'll be able to.
SWISHER: Jeff Bezos is a really great entrepreneur. There's no question. What he did at Amazon was astonishing, and a lot of people didn't think he could pull it off.
NICE: He would not allow the company to make money. He was like, "No, we're not done. Scale is what it's about now. So we're actually going to own the pipes of the internet and be the arbiter of who can sell on the internet. I mean, it's evil, but it's genius.
BEZOS: I'm taking my Amazon lottery winnings and I'm converting them into reusable rocket vehicles, so that we can lower the cost of access to space.
ISAACSON: There's an enthusiasm to him, an enthusiasm that pushes things like crazy. He's a visionary.
BEZOS: This vision sounds very big, and it is. None of this is easy. All of it is hard.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.
METZGER: The space race with U.S. and the Soviet Union in the past was really all about proving that our system of government and our system of economics could be the Soviet model. If we could beat them to the moon, then it was a demonstration that our entire system was better than the Soviet system.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: On October 4, 1957, a world-stirring event took place.
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METZGER: Sputnik was the first spacecraft that orbited the Earth. It was launched by the Soviet Union. Now imagine if we were living back at a time where nothing had ever orbited the Earth before, and suddenly those communists over there in Russia with nuclear bombs that they want to rain down on us, they are flying over our country in space.
NYE: The ultimate high ground. When if you could have weapons in space, man, that would -- you'd really be in charge.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: With two Sputniks orbiting the Earth simultaneously, the whole world began to speak about the triumph of Soviet science.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: The Soviet Union also launched the first human to space, Yuri Gagarin.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The space pilot who the Russians have (inaudible) as the man of century (inaudible) for his first public appearance.
METZGER: And so that created this crash program to catch up to the Soviet Union and to beat them.
ISAACSON: I certainly remember watching Apollo 11.
NYE: So I was on my knees, black and white television. One in every five people was watching this thing.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: That's one small step for man.
ISAACSON: And we see that humans have finally escaped this gravity.
NYE: And it changed my life. I became mechanical engineer. I became an aerospace engineer because of Apollo. Come on, man. Was hugely affected by it, hugely.
ISAACMAN: I think it sent a message to the world what the United States was capable of doing. If you can set out and achieve the near impossible, send astronauts the moon, bring them back home safely. I wonder what else the nation is capable of doing, and maybe, maybe I'll you know think twice as an adversary before I encroach or do something that could be perceived as hostile.
METZGER: In a sense, that was the pinnacle of American power.
DREIER: Every mission subsequently from that started to gain confidence and ambition, but by the time that Apollo 15 launch, the program had functionally ended.
SHACHTMAN: It became clear the Soviet Union was kind of going out of business.
DREIER: There was this feeling that OK, we've had our fun, and we don't have the wherewithal, resources, or money to do this anymore. That was a correct read of public opinion.
WATTLES: It no longer seemed that urgent to keep going back to the moon.
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[02:25:00]
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METZGER: During the 1970s, during the Apollo program, Richard Nixon made the decision to cancel the rest of the program because there was political backlash. People didn't see the value of it.
WATTLES: You also have to look at the cultural background of what was happening in America at this time. The Vietnam War was becoming an increasingly big part of the American psyche. There were protests and demonstrations that made space exploration, by comparison, seem sort of frivolous.
DREIER: Your kind of marginal cost of an Apollo mission was not cheap.
METZGER: And so people wondered why were we spending so much money on this when we've got poverty, we've got riots in the U.S., we've got energy problems with the Middle East. In that environment, they made the political decision to cancel it.
WATTLES: After retiring the Apollo program, NASA understood the cost problem. Every Apollo rocket had to be thrown away. That's why it went into developing a different type of vehicle. If you can reuse it, will start bringing down the cost, and then NASA can go achieve all those exploration and science dreams without needing to pull too much out of public coffers.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: NASA has been extra cautious in making sure the first launch is textbook perfect.
WATTLES: So we moved on into the space shuttle era.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: There's a lot on the line.
DREIER: Nixon himself decided to go with the space shuttle program in order to win votes in Southern California.
WATTLES: Unfortunately, the space shuttle never really became exactly what NASA envisioned.
DREIER: The goal was to launch the space shuttle dozens of times a year, but the most NASA ever achieved was roughly, I think, eight or nine launches in a single year. And then Challenger happened.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Major catastrophe in America's space program. Challenger, only seconds after leaving the launch pad, according to NASA, has exploded in mid-air.
LARRY SPEAKES, WHITE HOUSE SPOKESMAN: We do not have any more information than is being provided to the public at this time.
DREIER: And then a Columbia disaster in 2003. You are looking at what is the final moments of the space shuttle Columbia.
WATTLES: The two shuttle disasters in total killed 14 different astronauts. The tragedies were becoming so politically unpopular, so the shuttle program was starting to wind down. But this was a problem because the shuttle was the only vehicle that the United States had that was capable of taking astronauts to and from the International Space Station.
[02:30:00]
DREIER: When the space shuttle was ending, the Obama White House proposed a dramatic reconfiguration of NASA to rely on commercial providers to send individuals to the space station.
BARACK OBAMA, FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: In order to reach the space station, we will work with a growing array of private companies competing to make getting to space easier and more affordable.
DREIER: This goes back to the original conceptions of space. You think about 2001 of Space Odyssey. It's Pan Am as running the flights up to their space station in that movie, right? Like a commercial aviation company at the time. So the Obama administration put a lot of political capital to championing this commercial capability, which primarily was the SpaceX capability at the time.
MUSK: What I think we're beginning to see is the dawn of a new era of space exploration, but one that is driven by commercial companies as much, if not more, than by -- by government.
WATTLES: NASA awarded SpaceX a contract for I think it was about $1.6 billion.
MUSK: NASA has awarded us the contract to provide the majority of the cargo to space station and to return cargo to Earth. The thing we're really hoping will occur this year is that NASA will ask us to do astronaut transport as well.
DREIER: Back in 2010, Elon Musk was giving President Obama a tour of his facilities and showing him the progress that SpaceX was making at the time.
MUSK: This is the most advanced structure in the world.
DREIER: And this was a demonstration that the Obama administration was putting a lot of political effort to supporting a commercial approach.
NYE: NASA has always relied on commercial companies, always, but what is different is civil servants used to design the rocket. Now that's being designed by civilians working for corporations, not working for the government.
DREIER: The way that NASA works with SpaceX and Blue Origin is that NASA relies on them to basically do most of it, and then if it doesn't happen, you know NASA's not on the hook to pay extra, but at the same time, they don't have the ability to really get down into the weeds and understand what's going on.
MUSK: There is definitely going to be a new industry. It's going to be stronger. It's going to be more powerful, more capable, and it's going to ensure that we take things to a whole new level in terms of space flight.
DREIER: Then, in 2017, Trump signed the Space Policy Directive One.
DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: The directive I'm signing today will refocus America's space program on human exploration and discovery.
ISAACMAN: President Trump created the Artemis program. He made it clear that we are returning to the moon to stay to build a base, and you want to be able to keep astronauts alive potentially six months at a time. So as a result, we need affordability.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: And lift off.
ISAACMAN: Right now, you have two companies, SpaceX and Blue Origin, that are working on vehicles that will be able to bring our astronauts to the surface of the moon.
WATTLES: And thus begins a very long battle between Elon Musk's SpaceX and Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin to be the first company to produce that Lunar lander that NASA is asking for.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: And liftoff of Artemis I.
WATTLES: The Artemis program, right now, kind of envisions a series of test flights.
DREIER: Artemis I was a test flight with no astronauts on it. Artemis II was four crew going around the moon. Artemis III will be a demonstration mission in Earth orbit to show that their crew capsule can dock with one of these commercially provided lunar landers. Artemis IV is scheduled to be the first lunar landing sometime before 2030. Artemis V starts to frankly get a little hazy after that. The goal now is to build out a permanent lunar base.
ANDERSON COOPER, CNN ANCHOR: Why do you want to have people on the moon?
BEZOS: The moon is a great place for resources, and so if you want to build big structures in space, you want to go get materials from the moon.
NYE: What resources would be on the moon? There's a couple things that are fascinating.
NICE: We know with absolute certainty that there's water on the moon. Water on the moon is fuel, like oil on Earth. So now, China, private corporations, the U.S. all trying to get to the moon to get to that water, because if you separate the H2O, now you have hydrogen and oxygen. You can bring them back together. It creates boom out into space. You do that from the moon, you save a lot of money.
[02:35:00]
METZGER: Another one that's talked about is going to be A.I.. Within a few years, data centers are going to start appearing in space.
DREIER: The value of having a data center in space, as opposed to the Earth, is that you have ready access to energy through the sun. People don't like living next to data centers, and so, well, if you put them in the space, all that stuff goes away.
ISAACMAN: This is about establishing an outpost on the moon for scientific operations, and then obviously there -- there is just a lot of inspiration that's going to come out of having human kind's first outpost on another world.
I have no doubt we are going to launch Artemis III in 2027.
WATTLES: So SpaceX and Blue Origin are both racing to bring their lunar landers to fruition, and both are in very different stages.
NYE: Blue Origin had the spectacular failure recently. SWISHER: The moment a Blue Origin rocket exploded overnight.
NYE: and SpaceX, which has had a couple issues, and of course the head of SpaceX is a controversial guy.
DREIER: Now we see space moving from a collective effort into an individualized capability that is represented by a person. NASA is running a risk of not owning the hardware that's required for it to succeed, but also the reputation itself, to a large part, is defined by Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. NASA's saving some money, but it's introducing a host of other risks that they've never had to deal with before.
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METZGER: Right now, most space activity is being conducted by a few very wealthy companies and wealthy individuals, and I think that space industry is going to create more concentration of wealth than anything the world has seen before.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: One of the most highly anticipated IPOs in years, Elon Musk rang the opening bell in celebration of its IPO on Nasdaq.
SHACHTMAN: We've got these billionaires playing larger and larger roles in our lives.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We have never seen a company firing on all 12,000 cylinders like we're seeing Amazon.
SHACHTMAN: They control what we see, what we read.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Jeff Bezos, the founder and CEO of Amazon.com, is buying the Washington Post.
SHACHTMAN: They have ownership over seemingly everything, and -- and it can make us known. But this is next level, like literally in orbit and in space.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Today, Elon Musk broke history, becoming the world's first trillionaire.
ISAACSON: He's not motivated by money, but I think he's motivated by becoming the world's first trillionaire. He almost feels like he's an avatar in his own video game, and he's racking up the point.
MUSK: And let me tell you, if people had told me this was going to happen, I was like, "Man, you must be smoking some really good crack because I think this company's going to fail."
SWISHER: He's powerful in a negative way, I would say. He's imperious.
NICE: I don't know if Elon Musk has become what he's become, or if he was always what he is.
ISAACSON: I think we all have drives. For Elon, his drives are partly shaped by his demons, those dark fears he had as a lonely child. When he was a kid, Elon was incredibly socially awkward. He had no friends, and he got beaten up, bullied. He's been able to harness that, and that leads to these drives where he has to prove himself.
Elon changed over time, but he is a variable person. Sometimes he's in engineering mode. Other times he's dark in what one of his girlfriends calls demon mode, and it meant his face would take on a blank stare, and he would just get angry and start telling people that they were messing things up.
WATTLES: I think Elon Musk's perception of the world has been drastically morphed over the years.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Well, the debate over when business can reopen is heating up between California and Tesla.
ISAACSON: The COVID regulation shut down his plants, and he felt that you know politicians didn't understand the nature of risk taking and building things, and so he goes further and further down what I call a rabbit hole.
MUSK: The extension of the shelter-in-place, or frankly, I would call it forcibly imprisoning people in their homes against all their constitutional rights, in my opinion, and breaking people's freedoms in ways that are horrible and wrong, and not why people came to America or built this country. What the (BEEP), excuse me.
ISAACSON: He has a deep sort of paranoia about politics, and worry that the woke mind virus was destroying civilization, and he felt only by doing things like buying Twitter and blowing up sort of the polite political correctness could he be successful.
JAKE TAPPER, CNN ANCHOR: Elon Musk now owns one of the world's most influential social media platforms.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The world's richest man is going to effectively control one of the most influential platforms.
[02:45:00]
ISAACSON: He said all kinds of crazy things.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Tesla CEO Elon Musk has apologized to a Thai cave rescuer for calling him a pedo or pedophile in an unfounded claim.
ISAACSON: He's made all kinds of crazy accusations that he's later had to walk back.
SWISHER: Now he's sort of this awful creature who espouses white supremacist feelings, or at least promotes them.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: People say that you're a racist. People say that you're -- you know, there's all kinds of things said about you, which I'm sure you would disagree with. But I just don't understand what is the motivation for doing that. Are you fomenting --
MUSK: My partner is, she's half Indian, and my -- my -- and I have four children with her. You know, one of them was named after a famous Indian physicist. So I would say I'm not racist. And also, the -- you know, if you look at the people that are employed at my companies, you know, we have senior executives of all races.
SHACHTMAN: Whether he's doing it to stir the pot or because he actually believes it, who knows? It doesn't even matter.
MUSK: I'm not just MAGA. I'm dark gothic MAGA.
SHACHTMAN: Elon Musk made a late life conversion to a MAGA version of Republicanism became a you know key Trump ally, donated hundreds of millions of dollars to his campaign, and then Trump installed Musk as the head of this Department of Governmental Efficiency.
TRUMP: I have created the brand new Department of Government Efficiency.
NICE: Does anybody remember DOGE? Did DOGE ever save us a dime?
MUSK: The chainsaw for bureaucracy.
SWISHER: Did he have to run around with a chainsaw? Did he have to stand in the Oval Office with his kid? No. To be as effective, no. But he desperately needs attention. So.
MUSK: Yes. There's been unfair because, like, DOGE became the whooping boy for everything. So, if there was some cut, real or imagined, everyone would blame DOGE.
ISAACSON: When the war in Ukraine began, Elon Musk's superhero instincts kicked in. He wanted to put on the cape, and he did help Ukraine enormously. At a certain point, as the war has been going on for a while, Ukraine wanted to do a sneak attack on Crimea, and they wanted to use Starlink to guide that.
Now Musk became rightly worried that OK, this now could lead to a nuclear war, and the question was, was he going to allow it to work in Crimea? And he decided no, which ends up thwarting this secret sneak attack.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: He says he received an emergency request from Ukraine's leaders to activate Starlink all the way to Sevastopol. If I had agreed to their request, then SpaceX would be explicitly complicit in a major act of war and conflict escalation.
SHACHTMAN: One of the dangers of someone grabbing a kind of pseudo monopoly over satellite internet communication is it gives that person a lot of geopolitical power.
DREIER: We forget that by handing over that control to a single individual and granting them, in the sense, kind of godlike powers, you are giving away a lot.
SHACHTMAN: I'm not sure that it's a great idea for a mercurial man with very particular interests to have that power.
ISAACMAN: SpaceX has done amazing things that further enable NASA's mission. Elon is one person within that, but there is no doubt he has the vision and he has the engineering and entrepreneurial chops to take the vision and bring it to reality.
ISAACSON: But I think it's interesting that we try to understand these people, for good and for bad, who are moving us into a new era of technology.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We no longer worship, I would say at the altar of kindness and character, but of billionaire innovators. They're the new -- they're the new protected class.
ISAACSON: I think Musk and Bezos are similar in that they both disrupted big, important industries and done it through force of will and through thinking out of the box. But they've also done it sometimes by running rough shot.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Amazon firing back against a damning account of what it's like to work for the world's largest retailer.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Our CNN Money team sums up Amazon's corporate culture as five big nos.
SWISHER: There was a lot of very good reporting on the way workers were treated.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Jeff. Bezos responded to his more than 100,000 employees, writing, "I don't recognize this Amazon." Adding, "Amazon would not tolerate callous workplace behavior."
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SHACHTMAN: It's striking how much politics can play a part in this.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Jeff Bezos coming under harsh criticism for his management, or you might say mismanagement, of the Washington Post.
SHACHTMAN: When he's trying to compete for these big new rocket contracts, he's really taking the Post in another direction.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Journalists at the Post are questioning his motives, wondering if he's trying to curry favor with President Trump.
SHACHTMAN: These days, there's sort of two groups of people that get to access space, right? There's the billionaire class. In fact, the current administrator of NASA, Jared Isaacman, is somebody who paid hundreds of millions of dollars to do a private space mission.
And then there are the astronauts. You know, the people that are supposed to be representative of a country or above all people, and the dichotomy between these kind of like people that have worked their ass off for you know for decades to get to this point, and then these folks who can kind of buy their way, I think it's really striking. ISAACSON: I know people can be dismissive of people like Bezos and
Musk making space into a billionaire boys' hobby, but we have to remember that if you didn't have SpaceX and you didn't have the other private companies, we'd still be grounded.
ISAACMAN: We live in divided times, and if it's convenient to you know beat up the billionaires, then then so be it. I would just say the reason why NASA's budget is quarter percent of the discretionary budget is because you have some of the -- the wealthiest individuals in the world that are not choosing to put their resources into sports teams, but instead putting it into the capabilities that not only benefit your nation, but honestly all of humankind.
So the question is, would you feel better if you paid a lot more out of your paycheck every week for NASA's capabilities or are you happy that somebody else is chipping in?
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UNIDENTIFIED MALE: OK, I'm ready.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: OK, go ahead.
WATTLES: It's been more than 50 years since anyone walked on the moon.
METZGER: Whenever there's an actual return to the moon, and it's in 4K, not in grainy black and white, I think it's going to be a huge moment for the planet. Huge.
ISAACMAN: From my perspective, we return to the moon first and foremost because we have been gifted a proving ground four days away for eventually going to Mars, which is the next step on the grand journey. It is our destiny in the long term to venture out among the stars, I think for the good of human kind.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Ethan, you're looking good.
WATTLES: Musk always talks about needing to make humans an interplanetary species because if something happens to Earth, it'll guarantee the survival of humans. And Bezos has also talked about taking that next step into people living in the cosmos. So for them, really, the expenditure on space flight is very much tied into their vision of what philanthropy is.
ISAACSON: There may have been two different visions, but in some ways, Musk and Bezos are doing a lot of the same things, creating a new space economy.
NICE: Billionaires are motivated by nothing but money. Listen, I don't like billionaires. I think it's a terrible, awful concept. But you know, I think the by-product of the exploration that these billionaires are conducting will be, we all benefit. SWISHER: Someday we'll all be going to space. We'll all take rides up
there.
METZGER: There's going to be a lot of space tourism. I think there will be hotels in orbit. There will be people playing golf on the moon. There's going to be a lot of adventure and a lot of spectacular vacations in space. I believe we're going to have large space colonies, colonies on Mars. All of these things are going to take tremendous industrial development in space, but we're expecting that to happen over the next several decades.
SHACHTMAN: You know, the original space program brought all kinds of really cool developments.
NICE: Your cell phone, this stupid device that we're all stuck to, the camera inside your cell phone, the cameras that are filming me right now. What's up?
ISAACSON: I mean, navigation around the world from your cars to your airplanes.
NYE: We all rely on space assets, but the really astonishing discoveries are yet to be made on planets beyond the moon.
ISAACSON: We know so little about our solar system, let alone the 2 trillion other galaxies, we have to keep going. We can't slow down.
BEZOS: We, as a species, as far as space is concerned, we're -- we're just still warming up. We have not even begun.
MUSK: We can be out there among the stars, making science fiction no longer fiction.
NYE: Space is inspiring, and I think that the reason it's so inspiring-it gets back to humans looking up at the sky and seeing the eclipses. It's the wonder of that open-ended cosmos.
NICE: I do think everyone should go to space because I think everyone needs a cosmic perspective, and that's the easiest way to get one without any explanation. You see it, and you're like, Damn. Look how small and fragile it is, and that's where we all live. And all the borders and everything disappears, and there is no race, and there is no nothing. It's just one little spaceship hurling through space at an incredible speed.
CHORUS: 4, 3, 2, 1
DREIER: Seeing my first rocket launch, that wasn't a rational experience. That was an experience almost akin to a religious experience. You know the confrontation with the infinite to your own ego, and watching yourself disappear against that. It's a rare thing that something so exciting and scientifically relevant and geopolitically relevant also gets to provide us with kind of a neutral way to access something very profound, we humble ourselves before the cosmos, we are lucky to be able to witness it.
