It's remarkable how much conflict of interest Elon Musk has with the federal government he now so strongly controls. A few examples:
- Musk has been fighting with the FAA for years over regulation of SpaceX, culminating in a couple of large fines levied against SpaceX last year. Musk wanted administrator Michael Whitaker out and said so in no uncertain terms. And guess what? After the election Whitaker announced he would resign years early before Trump could fire him.
- The NHTSA is America's premier highway safety agency. Among other things, this makes it the agency in charge of investigating crashes of driverless cars—like Elon Musk's Tesla. But unlike Google's Waymo, which cooperates with the NHTSA, Tesla decidedly doesn't:
Musk has accused NHTSA of holding back progress on self-driving technology with its investigations and recalls.... NHTSA has mandated that Tesla and other automakers using self-driving technology report crash data on vehicles, a requirement that Tesla has criticized and that watchdogs fear could be eliminated.
No matter. Musk is in charge of firing workers, so he decided to slash nearly half the jobs at the specialized unit overseeing the safety of autonomous vehicles:
“If the question is, will this affect the federal government’s ability to understand the safety case behind Tesla’s vehicles, then yes, it will,” said one terminated engineer. “The amount of people in the federal government who are able to understand this adequately is very small. Now it’s almost nonexistent.”
It must be nice to complain about over-regulation and then actually do something about it by firing half the regulators.
- Donald Trump has ordered the removal of all 8,000 EV chargers installed at government buildings nationwide. Why? It's one thing not to build any more, but why demolish the ones that are already there?
This might just be part of Trump's baffling animus toward electric cars, which has also manifested itself in his order to "pause" construction of a nationwide network of charging stations being built with infrastructure funding. But it's also worth pondering who else has a profitable network of high-speed chargers that doesn't need any competition. That would be Elon Musk and Tesla. - When he took office, Donald Trump promised to end the federal $7,500 subsidy for electric vehicles. Once again, this may just be part of Trump's jihad against EVs, but it's worth noting that it would likely help Tesla:
“Take away the subsidies. It will only help Tesla,” Musk wrote in a post on X as he campaigned and raised money for Trump in July. Auto industry experts say the move would have a nominal impact on Tesla — by far the largest electric vehicle maker in the U.S. — but have a potentially devastating impact on its competitors in the EV sector since they are still struggling to secure a foothold in the market.
It's all a zero-sum game. Subsidies might benefit Tesla, but they benefit smaller EV companies a lot more. Getting rid of them now would be a big net positive for Tesla.
- When the Ukraine war started Elon Musk immediately activated his Starlink network for use by Ukraine's military. But that turns out to be a two-edged sword:
The US has threatened to cut off Ukraine’s access to Starlink — the global satellite network that has proven essential on the battlefield — if Kyiv does not accept the White House’s deal to exchange its rare earth minerals for continued security guarantees, according to anonymous sources.... “Ukraine runs on Starlink. They consider it their North Star,” the source told Reuters. “Losing Starlink... would be a massive blow.”
This is less an example of Musk benefiting from his control over government than it is the opposite. The government, it turns out, can benefit by knowing Musk will cooperate with them since he doesn't want to lose his access or inadvertently annoy his patron Trump.
- Musk has long promised to make X into a payment app. If he does this he would be regulated by, among others, the CFPB, the consumer protection bureau created in the wake of the financial crisis and long loathed by Republicans. Can you guess what Musk wants to do with the CFPB? Cut staff? Nope. He wants to eliminate it entirely, and he might just be able to do it.
Time to off this piece of minutia.
There's no other reason for Musk to have supported Trumps campaign other than financial benefit. He's getting his monies worth and then some.
Trolling. He's always been two things: an internet troll and super gullible.
He's the guy who shouldn't be on the internet. He doesn't know how to deal with people lying to him.
"Donald Trump promised to end the federal $7,500 subsidy for electric vehicles."
500 quatloos the subsidies get eliminated for every brand of EV... *except* Tesla.
Tesla stock is down ~18% since inauguration day (while, for comparison, the S&P500 is only down 2% over the same time period; way to go, Trump, ending the Biden bull market!), so--one hopes--the market is speaking.
Tesla and SpaceX were also being investigated for employee discrimination and the people investigating that have also been fired.
Not to mention that now, discrimination is mandatory.
True Musk has tons of conflicts. However, is that not likely true for any super rich person, who then gets directly involved in the political system?
Do you not think Nelson Rockefeller, Pete du Pont, Jay Pritzker etc have (or had) significant economic conflicts?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/danalexander/2015/07/01/meet-the-politicians-born-into-americas-richest-families/
Both sides! Everybody does it! Nothing to see here with Musk!
“We can’t stop all the current or future corruption/criming so no point in stopping any of the corruption/criming in the present or past” is an interesting theory, never applied to the non-elite class’s actual or even just perceived corruption/crimes of course.
Austin - my point, was not really about Democrats or Republicans and rather about political structure: significant economic conflicts will always exist, when you have super wealthy people in power.
"significant economic conflicts will always exist, when you have super wealthy people in power."
Ah yes [strokes chin], such wise wisdom expressed in this truism!
The point, dear Middle, is that even beyond the banal observation that there are conflicts of interest when people with interests are in government there is something deeply corosive and destructive and corrupt about the world's richest man firing vast swaths of the public's employees, including those whose job it is to make sure Musk's businesses comply with the law, despite not being a public official of any kind.
Musk isn't a rich man who ran for office; nobody voted for him, nobody appointed him to any established position of authority, no Senate voted to confirm him, nobody can even clearly articulate why he's "empowered" to do these things, aside from Trump occasionally tweeting asyntactic ramblings about how he supports whatever the fuck it is that Elon is doing.
This is russia-level stuff, where the line between government and in-group rich guy stops existing.
+1
aldoushickman
I am a fan of FDR. The WPA was created by executive order and run by Harry Hopkins (a non elected role with tremendous power).
The problem I have with Musk is his action, and not his conflict of interests or that he is unelected. Frankly, if Musk was taking an active, and materially positive, role in the Harris administration would you feel deferent about his conflicts of interests?
"I am a fan of FDR. The WPA was created by executive order and run by Harry Hopkins (a non elected role with tremendous power)"
That's not remotely comparable. The WPA was created after the passage of the Emergency Relief Appropriation Act of 1935, in which Congress granted a specific quantity of funds and set requirements for the use of the funds, including a time limit on the entire thing. FDR's action was specifically authorized by law. Nothing like that is present here.
"Frankly, if Musk was taking an active, and materially positive, role in the Harris administration would you feel deferent about his conflicts of interests?"
I don't understand what you are talking about. If Harris were president, and announced that Musk was the head (maybe? Or maybe not! Who can tell!) of some made-up government office and then Musk went around redirecting Congressionally-appropriated funds towards like free (Starlink) internet and (Tesla-based) transportation electrification and home battery storage, firing whoever got in his way, and when asked about it Harris would just chuckle and say she supported Musk and then get back to playing golf and dicking around with the Kennedy Center, yes, I would absolutely not "feel deferent [sic]" about Musk's obvious anti-democratic conflicts of interest.
My point is simply that some rich dickhead exercising massive state power without being an official democratically elected or appointed steward of said power is an additional and significant Bad on top of the obvious conflicts of interest.
Like, otherwise, what's the best possible spin that can be placed on what's going on? Nobless oblige? In this fucking century, in this fucking country, we do not have aristocrats or kings whereby state power is indistinct from wealth or personality. That's what's wrong with Musk doing whatever the hell it is he's doing with his liveried household goons (in _addition_ to him doing it poorly, destructively, and in a manner out to benefit himself).
Eventually, middleoftheroad will win this argument with the master stroke "but I wasn't actually saying anything at all!"
Don’t feed the troll,
It’s a waste of time and he gets off on it
lame both siderism nonsense
This is why, over the years, we have developed ethical rules for government officials. There is no ‘both-siding’ who is flouting these. Now we have the challenge of putting teeth into them.
https://campaignlegal.org/update/day-one-his-presidency-trump-ignored-yet-another-ethics-norm
We will all be using X, the Everything App, very soon as the UI for the Federal Government. Elon wants to be the government.
So that he can get to Mars, finally to rule alone and as supplies dwindle to nothing, sit upon his throne and become mummified for eternity...
Taxes are way too low and regulations are way too lenient if assholes like Musk and the rest of the multi billionaire class can emerge in capitalist democracies.
L'etat, c'est Musk.
Musk almost certainly won't send anyone to Mars. If he actually sends "colonists" to Mars, he sure as bleep will not be one of them. Like Horace Greely, he'll stay behind and make (more) money selling stuff to the suckers going off into the wilderness.
Ford went big on EVs and endorsed Harris. Must be tense over there.
Ford didn’t endorse Harris.
One can only hope there will be enough people worldwide who are just too nauseated by Henrich Musk to ever step foot inside a Tesla dealership, and that causes a material and permanent decline in his net worth.
I will certainly be one of those people, and will never consider buying a Tesla or providing 1 dime of funding to that Nazi.
It helps a lot that teslas cost a fortune and most developed countries actually tax their citizens enough to prevent many from becoming self destructively rich.
EVs - especially Teslas - are cheaper over time than gas cars, even Toyotas.
In Portugal this fall, lots of BMWs, Mercedes, and Audis around, as was the case last year in Croatia and Slovenia. Based on my completely unscientific and statically irrelevant observations, I would guess that many of those folks could also have afforded a Tesla Model 3.
On the road in Portugal (driving around in my rented Mercedes A class plug in hybrid), we spotted a number a large charging stations off of major highways.
Perhaps Herr Musk expects to sell a pile of $100K Cybertrucks in the rural MAGA heartland and to the "Joe Rogan" watching right wing white young MAGA supporters in the cities.
No. Apparently the Pentagon is buying a bunch of the CyberTrucks.
Trump is getting rid of charging stations on federal property so I guess they'll have to charged off base--maybe via a contract with Tesla?
There's no evidence of a Pentagon contract for Cybertrucks.
There was a contract for armored cars for the State Department but they were the only bid, and it was last August.
🤷♀️
Musk is just self defeating here. But anyone who followed his lucky rise should know this.
The FAA fines are minuscule compared to the actual contracts. Their limits on the launches and slow movements to approval is... well, that's more that they need more funding.
Tesla would've gotten the lion's share of the EV subsidies. What's holding Tesla back is the coat per cell and this made it work! Yeah, they're the only company with a profit without them, but...
The only thing he vaguely has a point on is NHTSA - their process has made approving new technology just baffling. It's not that it shouldn't be slow - Tesla doesn't have a car that can drive itself yet, and they're in some ways way behind Waymo - but NHTSA doesn't have a process. NHTSA promised us a process for video mirrors a decade ago and they're still on the public-inquiry step!
Tesla moved forward with ADAS in their cars and that meant they ended up with the lion's share of reports to NHTSA - because other automakers avoided the reporting requirements. NHTSA allowed most of them to escape reporting because their couldn't update their cars over the air.
So NHTSA is required to announce investigations, but the news doesn't carry when those investigations find nothing. Heck, several of the Tesla recalls are for things they can fix easily - but other automakers don't have to do recalls because they don't update their cars over the air.
The technology has become a double edged sword against Tesla who was ahead on this.
That said, he should be severed from his companies - he's never there, and is now a giant albatross about their necks. He's the reason their sales are dropping. No one wants to share true details about them unless their real technology fans because it"s just too funny to make fun of him.
Elon has created a new swamp. I call it the Cyberswamp.
Might be new to you, but it's not new... Back when Kevin was still Calpundit it was called somethingawful and 4chan.
I thought it was all X now.
don't forget fda and neuralink regulation.
My understating was that the EV subsidy was limited by manufacturer, meaning that you could only get it for the first N vehicles produced by a manufacturer; and I thought that Tesla was running up against that limit.
So ending the subsidy really wouldn't hurt them, it would help by making their competitors more expensive.
Though also IIRC they upped that limit because Tesla was going to hit it, so IDK if Tesla is that close to the phaseout currently.
I think the limit was eliminated entirely for the IRA subsidy. Another commenter says that Tesla is the only company profiting on sales even without a subsidy, so it might prefer to take a bit of a hit for the benefit of knocking out the competition.
Note that Tesla has had many years of subsidies that got it to this point, but Musk doesn't want others to have the same subsidy history.
Yeah, the IRA bill reset and changed it to a time and price instead of number of units ever.
Musk has two cards to play against the U.S. government:
1). Starlink internet deals in Russia itself to link isolated areas
2). Move to China. Musk no longer cares if he sells cars in Europe and U.S. He already has factories and huge Chinese market to sell. He can also give Space X technology to China. I guarantee you the next Democrat who becomes President he will on the first plane to Shanghai.
Tesla had negative sales growth in China last year, too.
"We don't have gas stations in government buildings so we shouldn't have EV chargers either!" strikes me as a perfect example of that plain Common Sense Trump has convinced himself was his campaign slogan.
I guess everyone should bring their own battery powered desk lamps and computers with that 'logic' Trump employed there.
About those EV chargers: A lot of those chargers are used by... Tesla drivers. It's not like they're going to park somewhere else with a Tesla charger and then walk to work. They're SOL just like the rest of the electrified Federal work force.