Musk Is a Unicorn, Even Among History’s Powerful Men

Is there a precedent for Elon Musk? That question is at the heart of Max Chafkin’s interview with a historian who’s spent decades examining the lives of powerful American men. Plus: Andrew Rea has built a YouTube empire on pop-culture cooking, and why the US is in the middle of a class revolution. If this email was forwarded to you, click here to sign up.

Every day, a new headline about Musk and Donald Trump’s alliance brings fresh questions about money and power, and how much influence a private citizen can (and should) wield on public institutions. To help make sense of it, Chafkin, a Bloomberg Businessweek senior writer, talked to David Nasaw, an emeritus professor of history at the CUNY Graduate Center and the author of best-selling books chronicling the lives of robber baron Andrew Carnegie, media mogul William Randolph Hearst and the progenitor of America’s premier political dynasty, Joseph Kennedy. Some of this interview can be heard in the third episode of our Citizen Elon podcast miniseries, available now for Bloomberg subscribers and everywhere on Friday. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.