Elon Musk is steamrolling Wall Street to become a trillionaire

Hogging seats on a crowded train, not saying excuse me, watching videos on your phone with no headphones in. Sometimes it feels like we don't know how to act anymore. What we have been seeing, increasingly, is people breaking rules. Why should I play by the rules if nobody else is going to do that for me? This week on Explain It to Me, how to mind your manners.

New episodes Sundays wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Neil Ipotel, editor-in-chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. My guest today is Ryan Mack, technology reporter at the New York Times and co-author of the excellent book Character Limit, how Elon Musk destroyed Twitter. The book came out in 2024.

I could not recommend it more. I wanted to have Ryan on today because we're on the cusp of the SpaceX IPO, which promises to be one of the most consequential public offerings in history for a variety of reasons. Its biggest ever size, of course. at nearly $2 trillion, but also because all kinds of rules that keep our markets fair are being bent, if not outright broken along the way. And also because somewhere buried deep inside SpaceX is X, the social platform formerly known as Twitter, which Musk purchased in 2022.

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