Elon Musk, Trump and MAGA October 2023-Jan 2025

Written by  //  January 8, 2025  //  Politics, Science & Technology, U.S.  //  Comments Off on Elon Musk, Trump and MAGA October 2023-Jan 2025

Elon Musk

Elon Musk Has Used Illegal Drugs, Worrying Leaders at Tesla and SpaceX
Some executives and board members fear the billionaire’s use of drugs—including LSD, cocaine, ecstasy, mushrooms and ketamine—could harm his companies – WSJ 6 Jan. 2024
16 December
Elon Musk Denied Access to SpaceX’s Biggest Government Secrets Over Drugs and Foreign Contacts
(Daily Beast) SpaceX executives decided their founder and chief executive shouldn’t apply for the highest-level security clearance after lawyers warned his alleged drug use and regular contact with foreign governments could create problems for the company’s defense contracts, The Wall Street Journal reported.

8 January
There is little the US can do to constrain Elon Musk. But here are some ideas
Robert Reich
Musk is not the first person in history to be seduced by the thrill of unconstrained power, although this may be the first time so much power is concentrated in one unelected megalomaniac.
(The Guardian) …politicians everywhere now recognize his capacity to pour money into their parties and political campaigns, as he did by investing a quarter of a billion dollars to get Trump elected.
He also owns X, formerly Twitter, which (as of December 2024) has 619 million monthly active users. He has manipulated X’s algorithm to boost his own posts, which now reach 210 million.
But Musk’s real power these days comes from his proximity to and presumed influence over Donald Trump, soon to be president of the United States.
For the time being, particularly under Trump, there is little that we in the US can do to constrain Musk except by boycotting Tesla and X.
Canada and Britain and other European nations, meanwhile, should, at the very least:
Enact laws and regulations to prohibit non-citizens (like Musk) from financing activities that could affect their elections.
Maintain, if not strengthen, laws and rules against hate speech, and ensure that they are applied to social media companies, such as Musk’s X.
Refuse to contract with Musk’s Space X and its Starlink satellite division, or with Musk’s other corporations (Tesla and the Boring Company).
Disengage from any joint ventures or technology transfers involving Musk, including xAI, his artificial intelligence company.

2024

30 December
The MAGA Honeymoon Is Over
Silicon Valley and the nativist right worked together to elect Trump. Now the infighting has begun.
By Ali Breland
(The Atlantic) Elon Musk spent Christmas Day online, in the thick of a particularly venomous culture war. … Donald Trump had ignited this war by appointing the venture capitalist Sriram Krishnan to be his senior AI-policy adviser. Encouraged by the MAGA acolyte and expert troll Laura Loomer, parts of the far-right internet melted down, arguing that Krishnan’s appointment symbolized a betrayal of the principles of the “America First” movement.
Krishnan is an Indian immigrant and a U.S. citizen who, by virtue of his heritage, became a totem for the MAGA right to argue about H-1B visas, which allow certain skilled immigrants to work in the United States. (Many tech companies rely on this labor.) In response to Krishnan’s appointment, some right-wing posters used racist memes to smear Indians, who have made up nearly-three quarters of H-1B recipients in recent years. Loomer called such workers “third world invaders” and invoked the “Great Replacement” theory, which claims that America’s white population is being purposefully replaced by nonwhite people from other countries.
Although Musk has seemingly embraced white supremacy on the platform he owns, X, he apparently could not stand for an attack on a government program that has helped make him money.

27 December
David Brooks: Why the New Fight Inside MAGA Matters So Much
(NYT) … This is not a discrete one-off dispute. This is the kind of core tension you get in your party when you do as Trump has done: taken a dynamic, free-market capitalist party and infused it with protective, backward-looking, reactionary philosophy. We’re going to see this kind of dispute also when it comes to economic regulation, trade, technology policy, labor policy, housing policy and so on.
It’s normal for people like me to have contempt for the reactionaries. We’re in an epic race with China over the future, over who will master A.I. and other technologies. Of course we need to attract the world’s best talent.
But the reactionaries have a point. One of my favorite sayings from psychology is that all of life is a series of daring explorations from a secure base. The reactionaries are right to point out that the past few decades of go-go change have eviscerated many people’s secure bases — stable families, vibrant hometowns, plausible career paths for those who didn’t want to go to college, the stable values that hold communities together.
A MAGA ‘Civil War’ on X between Musk and the far right over H-1B visas
The online rift over the H-1B skilled-worker visa program signifies a potential wedge between Trump’s core base and his new Silicon Valley supporters.
(WaPo) Far-right activists clashed online with billionaire Elon Musk and other supporters of President-elect Donald Trump over the need for a skilled-worker immigration program that has long been a lifeblood for Silicon Valley — signifying a potential rift between Trump’s core nationalist base and technology executives who have come to support him.
The controversy spread across X after far-right activist Laura Loomer on Monday criticized Trump’s choice to name Sriram Krishnan, a technology entrepreneur and investor who was born in India, as his senior policy adviser on artificial intelligence. She pointed to Krishnan’s previous support for removing some caps on green cards and easing the ability of skilled foreign workers to come to the United States. The policy is “in direct opposition” to Trump’s agenda, Loomer wrote.

23 December
The Men and Women Swirling Around Elon Musk
A look at the people who influence the world’s richest man, and those who stand to gain from their association with him now.
By Theodore Schleifer, Ryan Mac, Lily Boyce and Kirsten Grind
Elon Musk occupies a rare place at the center of American power.
As the “first buddy,” he has won the ear of President-elect Donald J. Trump. Mr. Musk has appeared in family photos at Mar-a-Lago and joined Mr. Trump on calls with world leaders and chief executives.
Mr. Musk has never had more influence over business, global politics and the American democratic system.
These are the people who influence Mr. Musk right now, and those whom he influences in turn. They are longtime friends, investors, staff members or party buddies — and sometimes, those boundaries blur. They shape how Mr. Musk operates and views the world. Many have propped him up, in the good times and the bad, and some now stand to gain from his new position in U.S. politics.
Mr. Musk’s friends come from different areas of his life. Some started as colleagues or investors, but later developed personal relationships with the billionaire — to the point where they’ve attended Burning Man or vacationed together. Mr. Musk has also grown close with a number of figures in the tech scene around Austin, where he has been relocating some of his companies’ operations, away from the San Francisco area. …

18-22 December
Trump rejects taunts that Elon Musk is real power behind US president-elect
Directly addressing those criticisms for the first time, Trump praised Musk, before adding: “And no, he’s not taking the presidency.”
Trump further called the suggestion that he has “ceded the presidency to Elon Musk” another “hoax” pushed by his political opponents.
In a later quip, Trump noted that there is no risk of Musk officially taking over as president because he would be constitutionally barred from doing so.
Robert Reich: The Muskrat’s political ambitions keep growing
His malignant narcissism and grandiosity rival Trump’s, but at least Trump was elected.
Musk is getting carried away with himself, using his limitless fortune and his ownership of X to try to turn American politics to the authoritarian right.
Wealth inequality is rapidly undermining our democracy. Musk is the poster boy for a wealth tax.
Elon Musk’s X Endgame
The world’s richest man has become a new kind of oligarch.
By Ali Breland
(The Atlantic) After spending about $277 million to back Donald Trump’s bid for the presidency, Musk has become something of a shadow vice president. But it’s not just Musk’s political donations that are driving his influence forward. As his successful tirade against the spending bill illustrates, Musk also has outsize power to control how information is disseminated. To quote Shoshana Zuboff, an academic who has written about tech overreach and surveillance, Musk is an “information oligarch.”
Since buying Twitter in 2022 and turning it into X, Musk has reportedly used the platform to inflate the reach of his posts (and thereby his own influence on discourse). Since July, his posts on X have received more than 16 times the number of views as all of the accounts of incoming congressional members combined. He also appears to have transformed the platform to boost conservative posts, in accordance with his own political aims.
Musk’s Political Week Rings Alarms From Washington to Europe
(Bloomberg Balance of Power) … Elon Musk’s intervention is a demonstration of his influence at the highest level of political affairs even before his presumed boss, Donald Trump, returns to the presidency.
It’s a shot across the bows for the world as well as for America. It may even be a warning to Trump.
Musk took to X, the platform he owns, with a blizzard of posts on Wednesday criticizing the deal that House speaker and Trump loyalist Mike Johnson had crafted with Democratic members to allow the government to keep functioning, and avert the possibility of default.
Johnson duly came back with a subsequent bill that had Trump and Musk’s blessing, but it failed to win Democratic support and that also fell. The clock is now ticking on a compromise, if any is possible.
Having sown chaos in Washington, Musk turned to Berlin with a provocative post in the European morning today stating that “Only the AfD can save Germany.”
That’s a reference to the far-right party that’s beyond the pale even for most fellow anti-immigration populists at European level but which is polling in second place ahead of Germany’s February elections.
On Monday, Musk was pictured with the British equivalent, Nigel Farage, and was reported to be weighing a $100 million donation for his Reform UK party that would enable Farage to more seriously challenge the Westminster establishment and shift the political landscape to the nationalist right.
It may all be in a week’s work for Musk. But it’s an ominous new reality for the world. — Alan Crawford

‘Co-president’ Elon Musk? Trump ally tests influence in spending fight
The tech billionaire’s swift accumulation of political power has sparked criticism that the incoming Trump administration will function like an oligarchy, with Musk pushing for policies that will further enrich him and his companies
(WaPo) Elon Musk has never been elected to office. President-elect Donald Trump has not tapped him to serve in any role inside the government. Until the July assassination attempt, he never even publicly supported Trump. … Musk’s outsize role in sending the federal government careening toward a potential shutdown before Christmas has alarmed Democrats, academics and watchdog groups, while some Republicans said his intervention was uninformed.
The GOP Is Treating Musk Like He’s in Charge
This week, the world’s richest person solidified his influence over American politics.
By Charles Sykes
Musk’s place at the center of this process offered us a preview of the political dynamics of the Musk-Trump-GOP era: razor-thin legislative margins, chaos, governing via social-media rant, and a Game of Thrones–style jockeying for power between Musk and Trump
(The Atlantic) Yesterday, a tantrum from the world’s richest person swayed events in Congress. First, Elon Musk launched a blizzard of X posts denouncing a bipartisan spending bill designed to keep the government open. Calling the bill “criminal,” Musk threatened: “Any member of the House or Senate who votes for this outrageous spending bill deserves to be voted out in two years!”
Panic ensued among the notoriously skittish congressional GOP, who quickly bowed to their master’s voice. Musk, of course, is not actually the president-elect. He received approximately zero percent of the votes in last month’s election. But for a few hours this week, Musk didn’t just act as if he, and not Donald Trump, will soon hold the reins of government power; the GOP also responded as if he will.
… Musk’s day of prolific posting was also a reminder of how little he comprehends about the U.S. government. His feverish 100-plus posts were riddled with disinformation and false claims that revealed his lack of understanding of the basics of budgeting. He got details wrong about a congressional pay raise and taxpayer funding of an NFL stadium in Washington, D.C. He pushed misinformation from a January 6 rioter who falsely claimed that the spending bill would block Republican investigation of the January 6 Select Committee. Musk exulted in the prospect of a complete government shutdown, posting that a shutdown “doesn’t actually shut down critical functions.” Although it is true that “essential functions” would continue (and that Social Security checks would still go out), contra Musk, shutdowns are neither painless nor cheap. Large swaths of the government would indeed be forced to shut down, and government employees would see delayed paychecks.
Government shutdown nears after Trump and Musk kill compromise
Congress has dwindling time left to find a new way to extend the current deadline of midnight Saturday.
(WaPo) Musk, sometimes boosting false claims on X, the social media site he owns, trashed the bill in an hours-long tirade, calling it “terrible,” “criminal,” “outrageous,” “horrible,” “unconscionable,” “crazy” and, ultimately, “an insane crime.”
Musk ascends as a political force beyond his wealth by tanking budget deal
(AP) Before the new deal was reached, Congressional Democrats mocked their GOP counterparts, with several suggesting Trump had been relegated to vice president. “Welcome to the Elon Musk presidency,” Democratic Rep. Robert Garcia of California wrote on X.
What was clear, though, is Musk’s ascendance as a political force, a level of influence enabled by his great wealth.
Musk, Ramaswamy campaign to get Republican lawmakers to tank stopgap funding bill
(WaPo) Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, whom President-elect Donald Trump tapped to lead the nongovernmental group called the “Department of Government Efficiency” and identify places to cut government spending and waste, have spent a good chunk of Wednesday posting on social media to urge Republican lawmakers to vote against a bipartisan stopgap funding bill. The legislation, unveiled by congressional leaders Tuesday evening, would push the deadline for a government shutdown from Saturday morning until mid-March.
Under pressure from Elon Musk, House GOP prepares to scrap spending bill
Unless Congress acts, a shutdown deadline looms just past midnight Saturday.

17 December
Elon Musk and SpaceX Face Federal Reviews After Violations of Security Reporting Rules
Federal agencies have opened at least three reviews into whether the company and its leader complied with disclosure protocols intended to protect state secrets, people with knowledge of the matter said.
(NYT) Elon Musk and his rocket company, SpaceX, have repeatedly failed to comply with federal reporting protocols aimed at protecting state secrets, including by not providing some details of his meetings with foreign leaders, according to people with knowledge of the company and internal documents.
Concerns about the reporting practices — and particularly about Mr. Musk, who is SpaceX’s chief executive — have triggered at least three federal reviews.
… The Air Force also recently denied Mr. Musk a high-level security access, citing potential security risks associated with the billionaire. Several allied nations, including Israel, have also expressed concerns that he could share sensitive data with others, according to defense officials.
Elizabeth Warren wants Trump to make sure Elon Musk has some rules in his DOGE gig
The job gives the Tesla CEO the power to scrutinize the same agencies regulating his companies

12 December
What Trump Said About Elon Musk in his TIME Person of the Year Interview
President-elect Donald Trump tells TIME in his Person of the Year interview that he may reject spending bills sent to him from Congress if they do not match the cuts prescribed by a cost-cutting plan being drafted by billionaire advisers Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy. The potential threat may give the pair the juice they need to force lawmakers to take their recommendations seriously, avoiding the irrelevance that met so many of their predecessors.

Trump says Elon Musk will put America before Tesla or SpaceX
The president-elect also denied that Musk faces conflicts of interests in leading his DOGE group
Musk has had unprecedented access to the president-elect as he gears up for his ssecond term in office, according to ethics experts. During the 2024 presidential campaign, he spent more than $260 million supporting Trump’s candidacy through several groups, as detailed by Syracuse University researchers.
He’s become an almost constant presence in Trump’s orbit since the 2024 election, even sleeping at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida, and joining calls with major CEOs and world leaders. Several of his allies, including Jared Isaacman, David Sacks, and the next head of the Federal Communications Commission, have been selected for roles in the new Trump administration.
(Quartz) Trump has given Musk co-leadership of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). It’s not actually a government department, bur rather an outside group that plans to work with congressional officials and the White House to recommend ways to reduce federal spending. DOGE plans to take aim at remote work for federal employees, non-government organizations, and regulations Musk and his allies deem burdensome. All in all, Musk wants to slash some $2 trillion in spending.

22 November
Angela Merkel expresses ‘huge concern’ at Elon Musk’s US government role
Former German chancellor says politics should govern the social balance between powerful and ordinary citizens
(The Guardian) Angela Merkel, who in her new memoir raises fears for the western democratic order with Donald Trump as US president, has also expressed deep concerns about the outsized role to be played in Trump’s administration by Elon Musk.
The former German chancellor, who during Trump’s first term was given by some observers the designation of “leader of the free world” usually reserved for US presidents, said 16 years in power had taught her that business and political interests must be kept in fine balance.
Elon Musk Gets a Crash Course in How Trumpworld Works
The world’s richest person, not known for his humility, is still learning the cutthroat courtier politics of Donald Trump’s inner circle — and his ultimate influence remains an open question.
(NYT) Most of the people who now surround President-elect Donald J. Trump are aides who proved themselves to him in past fights, or personal friends for decades. Elon Musk is neither, but [w]hat he brings instead are his 200 million followers on X and the roughly $200 million he spent to help elect Mr. Trump. Both of those have greatly impressed the president-elect. Mr. Trump, gobsmacked by Mr. Musk’s willingness to lay off 80 percent of the staff at X, has said the tech billionaire will help lead a Department of Government Efficiency alongside Vivek Ramaswamy.
… Mick Mulvaney, who served as Mr. Trump’s second chief of staff … and is a former director of the Office of Management and Budget, has sounded skeptical about Mr. Musk’s ability to deliver on his promised budget cuts.
He recently told clients on a call with about 70 people that Mr. Musk would find out that “going to Mars is easier,” according to a person who was listening and described the call. Mr. Mulvaney, the person added, said that he did not envision a wholesale change of how the federal government did business, and that he doubted Mr. Musk would stick around to actually get it done.

19 November
A Democrat shows how to deal with Musk beyond reflexive criticism
Go ahead, admit it. Elon Musk has done some amazing things. If you hate other stuff he does, say that too.
By Jim Geraghty
(WaPo) No matter what becomes of Elon Musk’s out-of-government “Department of Government Efficiency,” or DOGE, Musk himself isn’t going anywhere for a long while. The 53-year-old world’s richest person (at least as of this writing) has too many fingers in too many pies, the ear of President-elect Donald Trump, and too many ideas, energy and influence to be ignored. He’s too big to be “canceled,” although apparently some will try.
What if, instead of attempting to paint Musk as a Bond villain, the Trump opposition cheered on Musk’s ideas that they like and criticize the ones they don’t? What if Democrats, in particular, gave Musk credit for an accomplishment every now and then? Wouldn’t that make criticism of his other moves all the more credible and compelling?
It’s the Democrats’ choice, but the approach of the “pragmatic progressive” Torres, not the far left’s approach that he described, seems more promising in the long run. The fact that Musk — no conservative, although arguably an idiosyncratic libertarian — is now such an enthusiastic participant with a Republican administration is a vivid message for Democrats in this post-election period: The reflexive demonization of anyone who disagrees with them drives people away and does more harm than good.
He has already fathered many children. Now Musk wants all of the US to embrace extreme breeding
Trump’s billionaire best friend wants young people to ‘fear’ childlessness. He’ll be right at home in an incoming administration set on rolling back reproductive rights

‘Hammer of Justice’: Pre-dawn Elon Musk rant paints Matt Gaetz as Judge Dredd
(Raw Story) President-elect Donald Trump’s billionaire buddy Elon Musk threw whole-hearted support early Tuesday morning behind his choice for attorney general, despite Gaetz’s embroilment in an Ethics probe into accusations he sexually assaulted a minor.
These comments echo Trump’s campaign trail threats to sic the military on political rivals he dubbed “the enemy from within.”

17 November
Is this (finally) the end for X? Delicate Musk-Trump relationship and growing rivals spell trouble for platform
The former Twitter could fade away, or help shape a dark future hosting voices of a new authoritarian world
Siân Boyle
(The Guardian) Was that the week that marked the death of X? The platform formerly regarded as a utopian market square for exchanging information has suffered its largest exodus to date.
Bluesky, emerging as X’s newest rival, has amassed 16 million users, including 1 million in the course of 24 hours last week. Hundreds of thousands of people have quit the former Twitter since Donald Trump’s election victory on 6 November.

16 November
Musk appears to pressure Trump on Cabinet and tariffs, irking advisers
Elon Musk, the Tesla and SpaceX billionaire who has become President-elect Donald Trump’s “first buddy,” appeared to publicly pressure Trump on economic policy and a key Cabinet appointment Saturday.
In a Saturday morning post on X, the social network he owns and runs, Musk praised a foreign leader’s decision to cut tariffs — the same import taxes that Trump wants to raise to the highest level in a century. Several hours later, Musk posted that Howard Lutnick, Trump’s co-transition chair, would be a better choice than hedge fund executive Scott Bessent for treasury secretary.
Robert Reich: Trump’s “First Buddy” is in deep shit
If you’re advising a president-elect, you don’t publicly push him to do what you want. That’s true of any president-elect. It’s even truer of Trump.
The most basic rule of such advice-giving is you never make your advice public.
Doing so puts the president-elect in an impossible position: If he does what you’ve publicly urged him to do — even if he was going to do it anyway — your public advocacy makes it look as if you pushed him into it, so he seems to be your patsy.

14 November
Elon Musk Met With Iran’s U.N. Ambassador, Iranian Officials Say
The tech billionaire, a top adviser to President-elect Donald J. Trump, was reported to have discussed ways to defuse tensions between Iran and the United States.
The Iranians said the meeting between Mr. Musk and Ambassador Amir Saeid Iravani lasted more than an hour and was held at a secret location. The Iranians, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss policy publicly, described the meeting as “positive” and “good news.”
Mr. Musk has emerged as the most powerful private citizen in the Trump transition, and has sat in on nearly every job interview. During a call last week with Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, the president-elect handed the phone to the billionaire. Mr. Musk has played a key role in providing communications capability to Ukraine in the war with Russia.
An early direct meeting between a senior Iranian official and Mr. Musk raises the possibility of a change in tone between Tehran and Washington under the Trump administration, despite a charged history between the president-elect and Iran. One of the Iranian officials said that it was Mr. Musk who had requested the meeting and that the ambassador picked the site.

Guardian will no longer post on Elon Musk’s X from its official accounts
Platform’s coverage of US election crystallised longstanding concerns about its content, says Guardian

12-13 November
Trump names Elon Musk to lead government efficiency drive
By Daniel Trotta and Eric Beech
Musk and Ramaswamy will lead efficiency department
DOGE intended to dismantle bureaucracy, cut regulations, restructure agencies
Musk and Ramaswamy’s work to conclude by July 4, 2026
Will take ‘advice and guidance’ from outside government, work with OMB
Ramaswamy says he is withdrawing from consideration for Ohio Senate seat
(Reuters) – U.S. President-elect Donald Trump on Tuesday named Elon Musk to a role aimed at creating a more efficient government, handing even more influence to the world’s richest man who donated millions of dollars to helping Trump get elected.
Musk and former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy will co-lead a newly created Department of Government Efficiency, an entity Trump indicated will operate outside the confines of government.
Trump said in a statement that Musk and Ramaswamy “will pave the way for my Administration to dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies.”
Trump said the new department will realize long-held Republican dreams and “provide advice and guidance from outside of government,” signaling the Musk and Ramaswamy roles would be informal, without requiring Senate approval and allowing Musk to remain the head of electric car company Tesla (TSLA.O), social media platform X and rocket company SpaceX.
At Mar-a-Lago, ‘Uncle’ Elon Musk Puts His Imprint on the Trump Transition
He’s on the patio. He’s on the golf course. Everywhere Donald Trump looks, there is the world’s richest man.
(NYT) In nearly every meeting that President-elect Donald J. Trump holds at Mar-a-Lago, alongside him is someone who has been elected to nothing, nominated to nothing and, only a few months ago, had no meaningful relationship with him.
Elon Musk.
The world’s richest person has ascended to a position of extraordinary, unofficial influence in Mr. Trump’s transition process, playing a role that makes him indisputably America’s most powerful private citizen. He has sat in on nearly every job interview with the Trump team and bonded with the Trump family, and he is trying to install his Silicon Valley friends in plum positions in the next administration.
Mr. Trump announced on Tuesday that Mr. Musk would help lead what he called the Department of Government Efficiency, a new body to “dismantle government bureaucracy.” But Mr. Musk’s true influence on the Trump transition effort goes well beyond that posting.
Mr. Musk has assumed an almost mythical aura in Mr. Trump’s inner circle. At Mar-a-Lago one recent evening, he walked into the dining room about 30 minutes after the president-elect did and received a similar standing ovation, according to two people who saw him enter.
Trump says Musk, Ramaswamy will form outside group to advise White House on government efficiency.
According to Politico Playbook, “The bigger picture, however, is how Musk is starting to wear out his welcome with some in Trump’s orbit. After initially making a huge splash with his endorsement, some insiders now say he’s become almost a comical distraction, hanging around Mar-a-Lago, sidling into high-level transition meetings and giving unsolicited feedback on Trump’s personnel decisions. “Elon is getting a little big for his britches,” one insider tells Playbook.

31 October
Elon Musk’s ‘election integrity community’ on X is full of baseless claims
Feed is rife with posts of individuals deemed suspicious and calls for doxxing with little evidence provided of fault

30 October
Judge orders Elon Musk to court over $1 million giveaway in US election
Philadelphia district attorney calls giveaway an illegal lottery
Hearing moved up to Thursday morning from Friday
(Reuters) – A judge ordered all parties, including Elon Musk, to attend a court hearing in Philadelphia on Thursday in a lawsuit seeking to stop a political action committee controlled by the billionaire from awarding $1 million to registered U.S. voters in battleground states ahead of the Nov. 5 U.S. election.

This Is What $44 Billion Buys You
Elon Musk has turned X into a political weapon.
By Charlie Warzel
(The Atlantic) It’s easy to forget that Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter was so rash and ill-advised that the centibillionaire actually tried to back out of it. Only after he was sued and forced into legal discovery did Musk go through with the acquisition, which has been a financial disaster. He’s alienated advertisers and turned the app, now called X, into his personal playground, where he’s the perpetual main character. And for what?
Only Musk can know what he thought he was buying two years ago, though it seems clear the purchase was ideological in nature. In any case, the true value of X—the specific, chaotic return on his investment—has become readily apparent in these teeth-gnashing final days leading up to November 5. For Musk, the platform has become a useful political weapon of confusion, a machine retrofitted to poison the information environment by filling it with dangerous, false, and unsubstantiated rumors about election fraud that can reach mass audiences. How much does it cost to successfully (to use Steve Bannon’s preferred phrasing) flood the zone with shit? Thanks to Musk’s acquisition, we can put a figure on it: $44 billion.

29 October
Why Elon Musk thinks he’ll be f*cked if Trump loses
And he may be.
ROBERT REICH
Why would the world’s richest man be “f*cked” if Trump loses?
Because under a Harris administration, Musk may be held accountable for his many abuses of power — for busting unions and mistreating workers, for using SpaceX and Starlink to monopolize America’s satellite and space infrastructure, and for using his social media platform to knowingly spread dangerous lies.
When I say “may be held accountable,” I don’t mean Musk would be punished for supporting Trump, as Trump has promised to punish his opponents. Instead, Musk’s many possible violations of the law, including some that are quite recent, may finally catch up with him under a Harris administration.
Musk’s daily million-dollar sweepstakes giveaways to people who have registered to vote in battleground states appear to be clear violations of campaign finance law, which makes it illegal to pay money to people to register to vote.
Campaign finance law also makes it illegal for superPACs to coordinate with candidates. As the person in charge of one of the largest superPACs supporting Trump, Musk’s frequent conversations with Trump would appear to run afoul of these provisions, as well.
In addition, Pennsylvania — the state where Musk began his million-dollar sweepstakes — prohibits illegal lotteries and deceiving consumers by not providing a complete set of contest rules including odds of winning and details on how winners are selected.
Musk may also be held accountable for conflicts of interest between his being in “regular contact” with Russian president Vladimir Putin, as reported by The Wall Street Journal last Friday, and his status as one of the most important national security contractors to the U.S. government through his SpaceX and Starlink enterprises.
The Journal reports that Musk’s regular discussions with Putin — confirmed by several current and former U.S., European, and Russian officials — have involved business and geopolitical tensions.

28 October
Why Does Elon Musk Still Have a Security Clearance?
The U.S. government seems to think he’s too big to fail.
By Tom Nichols
(The Atlantic) Yesterday, The New York Times reported that people around Donald Trump are trying to figure out how “to quickly install loyalists in major positions without subjecting them to the risk of long-running and intrusive F.B.I. background checks.” Trump’s people, unsurprisingly, are worried about whether they’d pass a background check: As Atlantic contributor Peter Wehner wrote in September, the MAGA-dominated GOP “is a moral freak show, and freak shows attract freaks”—who tend to have a hard time getting security clearances. The first Trump administration was rife with people (including his son-in-law, Jared Kushner) who were walking national-security risks, none worse than Trump himself. A second term, in which Trump would be free of adult supervision, would be even worse.
Trump is surrounded by people who shouldn’t be given a clearance to open a checking account, much less set foot in a highly classified environment. But Musk has held a clearance for years, despite ringing the insider-threat bells louder than a percussion maestro hammering a giant glockenspiel.

MUSK READ: Philadelphia DA Larry Krasner this morning “sued to halt Elon Musk’s $1 million daily giveaway to voters in battleground states including Pennsylvania, calling it an illegal lottery that skirts state requirements and violates consumer protection laws,” the Philly Inquirer’s Jeremy Roebuck and Chris Palmer report. “The suit, filed in Common Pleas Court in Philadelphia, is the first legal action challenging the controversial sweepstakes launched earlier this month by Musk’s America PAC. It comes a week after the U.S. Justice Department warned the tech billionaire that the giveaway violates federal laws banning inducements to voters.”
(CNN) Philadelphia DA sues Elon Musk and his super PAC over $1M sweepstakes

26 October
Elon Musk worked in US illegally in 1995 after quitting school – report
Washington Post contrasts the episode with the South African multibillionaire’s anti-immigration views
(The Guardian) The boss of Tesla and SpaceX, who has in recent weeks supported Donald Trump’s campaign for a second presidency while promoting the Republican White House nominee’s opposition to “open borders” on his X social media site, has previously maintained that his transition from student to entrepreneur was a “legal grey area”.
But the Washington Post reported Saturday that the world’s wealthiest individual was almost certainly working in the US without correct authorization for a period in 1995 after he dropped out of Stanford University to work on his debut company, Zip2, which sold for about $300m four years later.

Heather Cox Richardson October 25, 2024
A bombshell story last night from the Wall Street Journal reported that billionaire Elon Musk, one of the richest men in the world, who is backing the election of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump with a daily million-dollar sweepstakes giveaway and gifts of tens of millions to the campaign, has been in regular contact with Russian president Vladimir Putin since late 2022. Reporters Thomas Grove, Warren P. Strobel, Aruna Viswanatha, Gordon Lubold, and Sam Schechner said that the conversations “touch on personal topics, business and geopolitical tensions.”
Today, NASA administrator Bill Nelson called for an investigation into the story. “If the story is true that there have been multiple conversations between Elon Musk and the president of Russia,” Nelson told Burgess Everett of Semafor, “then I think that would be concerning, particularly for NASA, for the Department of Defense, for some of the intelligence agencies.”
Musk appears to be making a bid for control of the Republican Party for a number of possible reasons, including so he can continue to score federal contracts and because the high tariffs Trump has promised to place on Chinese imports would guarantee that Musk would have leverage in the electrical vehicle market.
Musk has been in secret contact with Putin since 2022, says bombshell new report
The Russian president even asked the billionaire for a Starlink favor.
(Politico Eu) According to the Journal’s intelligence sources, Musk and Putin continued to have talks into this year, even as Musk began to ramp up his criticism of U.S. military support for Ukraine and became actively involved in the election campaign of Republican candidate and former President Donald Trump.
Putin once asked the entrepreneur to avoid activating his Starlink satellite internet service over Taiwan as a favor to Chinese President Xi Jinping, two people briefed on the request said.

24 October
Elon Musk Is a New Kind of Political Donor
His zealous efforts to help Donald Trump get elected could shape the race.
By Lora Kelley
(The Atlantic) Over the past three months, Elon Musk has mobilized his many resources—his exceptional wealth, far-reaching online platform, and time—for a cause that could have profound effects on his personal fortune and American society: electing Donald Trump.
Musk is going all in: In addition to donating $75 million to America PAC, a group he founded that backs Trump, he has also temporarily relocated to the all-important swing state of Pennsylvania to effectively run Trump’s get-out-the-vote strategy from a war room he set up in Pittsburgh. He has stumped on the trail, hosting a Trump town hall in the auditorium of a Pennsylvania high school last week and telling locals to go “hog wild” on voter registration. And, in his latest stunt, he has offered $1 million a day to registered voters in swing states who sign an America PAC petition backing the First and Second Amendments—a move that the Justice Department reportedly said might be breaking election laws. His efforts may prove consequential: As my colleague Franklin Foer wrote this past weekend, “If Trump wins, it will likely be by a narrow margin that can be attributed to turnout. Musk can tout himself as the single variable of success.”
Musk is far from the only major donor in this race. Bill Gates has reportedly given $50 million to Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign, and various billionaires publicly support Harris or Trump. What distinguishes Musk though, beyond his on-the-ground efforts, is his ownership of X. He can spread information (and disinformation) with ease, and stifle views he doesn’t like….

22 October
Ignore Musk’s giant checks — and his effort to sow election doubts
The billionaire’s claims of voter fraud, however unfounded, seem poised to go viral.
(WaPo) Elon Musk’s daily giveaway of million-dollar checks to swing-state voters is generating the buzz he no doubt hoped for. But Mr. Musk’s oversize checks are distracting from a less-visible campaign the world’s richest man is conducting: laying the groundwork to cast doubt on the election results if his favored candidate, former president Donald Trump, loses.
He used in-person rallies across Pennsylvania over the weekend to peddle lies about the integrity of the election. Even though no voting machines in the United States are directly connected to the internet, Mr. Musk repeatedly claimed that they can be easily hacked and that artificial intelligence makes it simpler to do so. “We should not allow voting machines of any kind,” he said in Pittsburgh. “We want paper ballots, in person, with I.D.” In fact, every battleground state in the presidential race already has fully auditable paper trails.

18 October
One big thing Donald Trump and Elon Musk have in common
They both want to crush Tesla’s competition
(The Economist) The bromance between Donald Trump and Elon Musk is, on its face, odd: one man seems terminally stuck in the past, the other is a ceaseless inventor. When it comes to the car industry, Mr Trump has no appreciation for or interest in electrification—the raison d’être of Tesla. Yet on another level their pairing makes sense. By levying huge tariffs on Chinese EVs, Mr Trump would crush Tesla’s biggest competition.

Donald Trump Can’t Stop Talking About Elon Musk
(Bloomberg) Since Musk’s “beautiful endorsement,” Trump’s tone on EVs has become more positive too, underscoring the outsized influence of the Tesla and SpaceX CEO.

17 October
Meet the Candidate: Elon Musk
The billionaire is spending a fortune to support former President Donald J. Trump. But at a town hall event in Pennsylvania, he looked an awful lot like a politician himself.
(NYT) Elon Musk held a town hall on Thursday before an enthusiastic crowd at a suburban high school in Pennsylvania, a state that Mr. Musk has told confidants is the linchpin to former President Donald J. Trump’s re-election hopes.
Is Elon Musk running for president?
Of course not. A South African-born billionaire, Mr. Musk cannot legally run and, anyway, he has invested over $75 million in trying to get Donald J. Trump elected.

16 October
Elon Musk commits $70 million to boost Donald Trump
(AP) — Elon Musk, a tech mogul who is the world’s richest person, plunged more than $70 million into helping Donald Trump and other Republicans win in November’s election, making him one of the biggest donors to GOP causes this campaign season, according to campaign finance disclosures released this week.

7 October
The Phony Populism of Trump and Musk
They are plutocrats masquerading as ordinary Americans.
By Tom Nichols
(The Atlantic) … Trump’s rally on Saturday in Butler, Pennsylvania, was a hall-of-fame entry in political weirdness: Few survivors of an attempted assassination hold a giant lawn party on the spot where they were wounded and someone in the crowd was killed.
… Trump then welcomed the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, to the stage. Things got weirder from there, as Musk—who, it should be noted, is 53 years old—jumped around the stage like a concertgoing teenager who got picked out of the audience to meet the band. Musk then proceeded to explain how democracy is in danger—this, from a man who has turned the platform once known as Twitter into an open zone for foreign propaganda and has amplified various hoaxes. Musk has presented himself on his own platform as a champion of the voiceless and the oppressed, but his behavior reveals him as an enemy of speech that isn’t in his own interest.

6 October
Elon Musk Bends the Knee to Donald Trump
The alliance between the billionaire and the politician is pure strongman politics.
By Helen Lewis
(The Atlantic) … The pact between Musk and Trump gives both men something they want—a megaphone for their ideas, a conduit to their fans, an ability to shape the political conversation. Yesterday was supposed to be a celebration of the former president’s miraculous survival and a tribute to the brave Americans who risked their lives to help others in the shooting. Instead it marked an unpredictable alliance between the world’s richest man and the politician who has successfully bullied and flattered him into bending the knee.
19 September
Elon Musk Has Reached a New Low
Welcome to the darkest timeline.
By Charlie Warzel
Musk has become one of the chief spokespeople of the far right’s political project, and he’s reaching people in real time at a massive scale with his message

Heather Cox Richardson October 4, 2024
MAGA Republicans are now lying about the federal response to Hurricane Helene in much the same way they lied about Haitian migrants bringing chaos and disease to Springfield, Ohio. Both disinformation efforts are flat-out lies, and both are designed to demonize immigrants. Immigration was the issue Trump was so eager to run on that he demanded Republican lawmakers reject the strong border bill a bipartisan group of lawmakers had hammered out.
But on Sunday, September 29, two days after the hurricane hit, the right-wing organization started by anti-immigrant Trump loyalist Stephen Miller posted: “Billions for Ukraine. Billions for illegal aliens. And what for the Americans? Reprogram every single dollar that FEMA has dedicated to support illegal aliens to go towards Americans who are facing unprecedented devastation!”
Yesterday, in Saginaw, Michigan, Trump echoed Miller, claiming that the Biden administration is botching the hurricane response because it has spent all the money appropriated for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) on “illegal immigrants.”
Early this morning, X owner Elon Musk posted to his more than 200 million followers: “Yes, they are literally using YOUR tax dollars to import voters and disenfranchise you! It is happening right in front of your eyes. And FEMA used up its budget ferrying illegals into the country instead of saving American lives. Treason.” On Wednesday, Dana Mattioli, Joe Palazzolo, and Khadeeja Safdar of the Wall Street Journal broke the story that Musk has been financing groups with ties to Miller since 2022.

25 September
Why Do People Like Elon Musk Love Donald Trump? It’s Not Just About Money.
By Chris Hughes, chair of the Economic Security Project and the author of the forthcoming book “Marketcrafters: The 100-Year Struggle to Shape the American Economy.” He is a co-founder of Facebook.
(NYT) It would be easy to write off tech’s rightward drift as nothing more than the rich acting in their economic self-interest, but Silicon Valley has always been driven by profit, and it hasn’t tilted Republican since the 1980s. Even now, it remains largely Democratic, even though even some of Kamala Harris’s strongest Valley supporters worry about how she might approach tech policy.
… More than any other administration in the internet era, President Biden and Ms. Harris have pushed tech companies toward serving the public interest. Key to their approach is the support of start-ups to counterbalance the dominance of tech giants, whose combined market value eclipses the G.D.P. of many countries. Brian Deese, the former director of Mr. Biden’s National Economic Council, has made clear that “big” companies are not inherently bad. But when they wield their market power, they can unfairly increase prices, narrow consumer choice, lower wages and impede the innovation that comes from fruitful competition.
Over the past three years, the Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice have taken on some of the largest tech companies — Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple — arguing that they’ve stifled competition and harmed consumers. They’ve already made progress, including a major antitrust ruling against Google that could create momentum for other cases.

19-20 September
Elon Musk Is Debasing American Society
He’s not just enabling trolls; he’s personally endorsing their posts.
By Thomas Chatterton Williams
(The Atlantic) … When Elon Musk acquired Twitter and changed its name to X, he promptly went about stripping its capacity for content moderation, reinstating extremist accounts, and boosting the reach and visibility of the worst trolls. I have heard many blithe rationalizations of the pragmatic and even salutary benefits of “knowing what people really think.” But the pervasiveness and normalization of what was, until very recently, niche and stigmatized bigotry has been astonishing to witness. Although there was plenty of racism on the internet during Trump’s first and second campaigns, it wasn’t this ubiquitous on mainstream networks such as Twitter. On Musk’s X, the racism has now become so relentless and self-confident that it amounts to a genuine qualitative difference.
“If I had to summarize the intent of X’s algorithm at this point, it would be twofold,” Sam Harris remarked this week on his Making Sense podcast. “The first is to make Elon even more famous than he is. And the second is to make every white user of the platform more racist.

What Happened to Elon Musk
A conversation with Charlie Warzel about how the tech billionaire became a mouthpiece for MAGA
By Lora Kelley
Elon Musk has said some shocking things online in recent days, even by his standards. He amplified conspiracy theories about the presidential debate, promoted false claims about the Democrats, and wrote a now-deleted post suggesting that it was suspicious that “no one is even trying to assassinate Biden/Kamala” (in follow-up posts, Musk claimed that he was just joking). I spoke with my colleague Charlie Warzel, who covers technology, about how Musk, a man once known primarily for his inventions and contributions in Silicon Valley, became a mouthpiece for the MAGA movement.
Lora Kelley: Elon Musk has been crossing into the worlds of conspiracism and disinformation for a while—but he seems to be taking things even further lately. Why might he be going this far? What’s in it for him?
Charlie Warzel: It’s complicated, but it’s also deceptively simple. We can’t be inside this guy’s head, but he does seem to truly feed off of and love attention. Musk has been moving in a right-wing direction for a long time. But his purchase of Twitter and how he mishandled it—with advertisers, and de-verifying users—really alienated people and accelerated his turn. Many people used to think of him as the Thomas Edison of the 21st century. He was branded as this innovator and savvy businessman. When he walked into Twitter and made a mess of it, he lost cachet among this group of people who saw him as a genius. Now he’s trying very hard to appeal to the only people who really care about him anymore—including those who reside in the far right corners of the internet.
Lora: Why is Musk getting so involved in this presidential election, and with Trump (who apparently said he would give Musk a role leading a government-efficiency commission if he wins)? Is he making some kind of play to be a great man of history, or is he after power in a potential Trump administration?
Charlie I think the fact that he has effectively just become the in-house social-media team for Donald Trump speaks to the fact that he’s not just making a political calculation. He’s not playing a game of 3-D chess. It seems to me that he’s truly radicalized.
Here’s a guy who has, like, six jobs and has decided to spend most of his time tweeting propaganda for a political candidate and hosting him on his platform. Does he want another job? It’s entirely possible. But I really think what he wants more than anything else is to be that sort of Rupert Murdoch person for this political group. He seems to be trying to fit himself into the role of power broker.
… I started covering Musk in the 2010s. And there were signs of this stuff—picking the fight with the cave diver, the way he would dismiss claims around Tesla, irresponsibly tweeting in ways that had the power to move stock prices. He was a loose cannon and showed a lot of signs of his disregard for the rule of law and authority. But for most people, that was overshadowed by the image of Elon Musk, the great innovator.
Because of his background and fame in tech, everything that he does that seems outrageous becomes newsworthy. Media organizations don’t cover everything that Alex Jones says, because Alex Jones has been a conspiracy theorist since the beginning. But when Musk muses trollishly about the assassination of Kamala Harris, as he did last weekend on X, it is covered in this way of: What happened to this guy?
Elon Musk Has Reached a New Low
Welcome to the darkest timeline.
By Charlie Warzel
He is no longer teasing at his anti-woke views or just asking questions to provoke a response. To call him a troll or a puckish court jester is to sugarcoat what’s really going on: Musk has become one of the chief spokespeople of the far right’s political project, and he’s reaching people in real time at a massive scale with his message.
Since his endorsement of Donald Trump in July, Musk has become the MAGA movement’s second-most-influential figure after the nominee himself (sorry, J. D. Vance), and the most significant node in the Republican Party’s information system. Musk and his platform are to this election what Rupert Murdoch and Fox News were to past Republican campaigns—cynical manipulators and poisonous propaganda machines, pumping lies and outrage into the American political bloodstream.

18 September
How Elon Musk amplified content from a suspected Russian election interference plot
Musk, apparently unaware of the company’s Russia funding source, engaged with content from Tenet Media and its creators at least 60 times.
(NBC) As Elon Musk increasingly weighed in on politics in the last several years, he used his massive following on his social media app X to repeatedly amplify content from a company that appears to be at the center of an alleged Russian covert operation to manipulate U.S. public opinion ahead of the 2024 election.
Musk, one of the world’s richest people, boosted content from creators and accounts tied to Tenet Media at least 60 times, resharing the operation’s posts and engaging in back-and-forth replies with Tenet’s paid pundits on X.
Musk’s posts, shared with his 198 million followers, put Russia-aligned conservative talking points in front of possibly tens of millions of eyeballs, according to the viewership data published by X, and he did so apparently without knowledge of the alleged Russian money behind the operation.

Elon Musk boosts fake Trump rally bomb threat and false claims about the election
CNN — Elon Musk is using his social media platform to promote misinformation about the presidential candidates in the lead up to the November election, amplifying false claims Wednesday about a Trump rally bomb threat and immigrants eating pets in Ohio.
While Musk’s posting of provocative, incendiary content on X is nothing new, the speed with which he has promoted false claims in recent days is striking given the breadth of Musk’s digital reach, with his posts regularly finding their way atop users’ feeds.

17 September
11 WTF Moments From ‘Character Limit,’ the Book About How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter
The billionaire’s takeover of the platform has been a very public disaster. The action behind the scenes was even crazier
(RollingStone) Elon Musk‘s tumultuous takeover and rebranding of Twitter — now X — played out in very public fashion: the $44 billion offer, an attempt to walk it back, and a lawsuit that forced Musk to complete the deal were followed by massive layoffs, a spike in misinformation and extremism on the platform, botched updates, and the return of notorious bad actors whose accounts had been permanently suspended — as well as an exodus of the advertisers that account for the site’s revenue. …
Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter, a new book out today from New York Times tech reporters Kate Conger and Ryan Mac, takes readers behind the scenes of the unusual acquisition and its messy consequences. …
Blowing a Fortune on a Fake Private Eye
When Musk got in trouble for smearing a British diver involved in the 2018 rescue of a Thai youth soccer team in a flooded cave as a “pedo,” he made efforts to prove the unfounded accusation true. To that end, his wealth manager and CEO of his brain implant company Neuralink, Jared Birchall, paid $52,000 to someone he thought was a private investigator to dig up dirt on the man. In fact, their sleuth was a former convict without credentials who “fed Birchall and Musk false information” about the diver. Musk managed to beat a defamation suit anyway.
Musk’s Drug Habits Almost Led to an Intervention
Musk has been open about his use of drugs like ketamine, to the alarm of leadership at Tesla and SpaceX. As Conger and Mac report, he has also been known to take LSD or ecstasy at parties, and to stay up late tweeting on Ambien, a drug that is meant to be a sleep aid. This chemical cocktail led to such erratic behavior that in early 2022, shortly before Musk would launch his bid for Twitter, close family “began discussing a possible intervention that could make him aware of his issues.” Musk was “unreceptive” to their concerns. …

Gary Marcus How Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and the Silicon Valley elite manipulate the public (paywall)

16 September
Secret Service ‘aware’ of Elon Musk post about Harris, Biden
(BBC) The US Secret Service says it is “aware” of a social media post by Elon Musk in which he said that “no one is even trying” to assassinate President Joe Biden or Vice-President Kamala Harris.
Mr Musk has since deleted the post and said it was intended as a joke.
His post on X, formerly Twitter, came just hours after the suspected attempted assassination of Donald Trump at his golf course in Florida on Sunday.
The tech billionaire is a close ally of Trump, who has vowed to enlist Mr Musk to run a “government efficiency commission” if he wins a second term as US president.
The controversial tech mogul is considered a close ally of Trump and formally endorsed him in the aftermath of a separate assassination attempt against the former president that took place at a rally on 13 July in Butler, Pennsylvania.
In that attempt, the suspect fired multiple rounds, injuring Trump and killing an attendee at the rally.
Since then, Mr Musk has often tweeted or re-posted messages critical of both Biden and Harris and in support of Trump.

6 September
How Elon Musk Is Influencing Donald Trump
(NYT) Their fast-evolving political friendship has become a potential minefield, as Mr. Musk’s sprawling businesses may present conflicts of interest if Mr. Trump is elected in November.

5-6 September
Trump announces horrifying new job for Elon Musk if elected
Trump said Musk has agreed to run an agency focused on government “efficiency,” continuing his transactional relationship with donors ahead of a potential second term.
Trump says Musk could head ‘government efficiency’ force
Donald Trump said he would enlist Elon Musk to run a “government efficiency commission” if he wins a second term as US president.
Speaking to the Economic Club of New York on Thursday, Trump said the X owner had agreed to head a task force to conduct a “complete financial and performance audit of the entire federal government” and make “recommendations for drastic reforms.”
The two men have alluded to the idea for several weeks, but Thursday’s comments were Trump’s most direct indication yet that he might want Mr Musk to play a role in his potential second administration.
“I look forward to serving America if the opportunity arises,” Mr Musk posted on X on Thursday morning. “No pay, no title, no recognition is needed.”

From Forbes: Musk, who says he’s worried about population collapse, has ten children with three women, including triplets and two sets of twins.

24 July
Elon Musk is going all-in on Donald Trump
CNN — At first glance, Elon Musk and Donald Trump wouldn’t seem to be natural allies.
One has made cutting greenhouse emissions a major business selling point. The other questions the need to cut emissions at all, denouncing most forms of clean energy as at best unnecessary and at worst destructive.
One wants to move away from fossil fuels and convert all car sales worldwide to electric vehicles. The other believes EVs will be an economic disaster for America and that the nation should produce and burn more oil.
But as of last Saturday, Musk is now publicly endorsing Trump’s presidential reelection bid. And the Wall Street Journal, citing people familiar with the matter, reported Monday that Musk is now planning on supporting Trump’s presidential campaign by committing $45 million a month to a new super PAC backing the former president.

2023

3 October
‘We need to get to Mars before I die.’
Exclusive excerpt from ‘Elon Musk’ by biographer Walter Isaacson
By Brett Tingley
(Space.com) Walter Isaacson’s sweeping biography of SpaceX CEO Elon Musk reveals what drives the innovative entrepreneur to consistently push the envelope.
The founder and CEO of SpaceX not only leads the most revolutionary and active spaceflight company on the planet, but also heads the electric car company Tesla and social media giant X (formerly known as Twitter), to name just a few of Musk’s many endeavors.
Biographer and journalist Walter Isaacson spent two years with Musk in order to write Elon Musk, a new, best-selling biography that explores what makes the entrepreneur and innovator tick.

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