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      Elon Musk Could Make Mars His Next Business Venture

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      Even as Musk’s work at the Department of Government Efficiency appeared to consume him, his top adviser created a set of companies named Red Planet I, II and III.Elon Musk is leaving his full-time Washington assignment next month to try to save Tesla (which has seen its stock battered), to keep up with SpaceX (which is positioned to do big business with the Trump administration) and to chart a new course for xAI, which he just combined with X itself.He’s a busy guy. So what’s another company — or three?Two months ago, even as Musk appeared consumed by his work at yet another job, at the Department of Government Efficiency, his top adviser, Jared Birchall, quietly created an intriguing-sounding set of limited-liability companies in Texas, whose existence has not been previously reported.Their names: Red Planet I, II and III.For the world’s richest man, who is pursuing an elaborate, decades-long plan to colonize Mars, this seemed no idle corporate filing.When Musk bought Twitter, after all, he formed three holding companies (X Holdings I, II and III) to execute the transaction.So, is he planning to buy Mars?Birchall hasn’t returned my requests for comment since I learned of the LLCs a few weeks ago. But he doesn’t typically take actions like this without his boss’s direction. He registered them on Feb. 25, listing himself as the manager of each and using an Austin address that other Musk entities have used.Still, it is surprising to see Musk take this step now, when he has so much on his plate and is already facing pressure to do less, not more. On a Tesla earnings call last week, he said he would substantially reduce the amount of time he spent on DOGE to spend more time on the car company, whose quarterly revenue is way down from a year ago.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Canadians Confront News Void on Facebook and Instagram as Election Nears

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      After Meta blocked news from its platforms in Canada, hyperpartisan and misleading content from popular right-wing Facebook pages such as Canada Proud has filled the gap.Mark Carney was just days away from announcing his bid to lead Canada’s Liberal Party in January when his face popped up on a viral right-wing Facebook page.Two photographs showed Mr. Carney, who became prime minister last month, at a garden party beside Ghislaine Maxwell, a convicted sex trafficker and former confidante of the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein. There was no evidence that Mr. Carney and Ms. Maxwell were close friends, and his team dismissed the pictures as a fleeting social interaction from more than a decade ago.But they were perfect fodder for Canada Proud, a right-wing Facebook page with more than 620,000 followers. For days, Canada Proud posted about the images, including in paid ads that repeatedly said Mr. Carney had been “hanging out with sex traffickers.” More

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      Elon Musk and Social Security’s Effort to Curb Illegal Immigration

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      As Elon Musk continues to argue that Social Security drives illegal immigration, a new effort at the agency aims to curb it.One hallmark of Elon Musk’s 12 weeks in government has been his focus on Social Security.He has sent one of his closest advisers to work at the Social Security Administration. He has falsely insisted that the program is rife with fraud. And he has depicted the entitlement as a tool — a “giant magnet,” to be specific — that he says entices illegal immigrants to come to the United States.That last part has turned Social Security into a major focal point of Musk’s unfounded belief that Democrats have allowed immigrants into the United States as part of a scheme to tilt the electorate in their favor.A team of my colleagues has reported that Musk is now driving big changes at the Social Security Administration that have braided aspects of his rhetoric about the agency directly into policy. The agency is placing certain immigrants — people who are very much alive — on the agency’s list of dead people, cutting them off from crucial financial services in an effort to push them to leave the country.I called my colleague Alexandra Berzon to talk about this reporting, and she explained that, according to the White House’s own accounting, the targeted migrants did not receive much in the way of government benefits — and none of them received Social Security.The new effort, she explained, is less about cost-cutting than it is about getting the Social Security Administration into the business of immigration enforcement, a push that has deeply alarmed current and former employees of the agency.Explain to me what you and our colleagues discovered when reporting this story. How is the Trump administration using Social Security as a tool for immigration policy?We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Coalition Deal in Germany Clears Way for Friedrich Merz to Become Chancellor

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      The agreement was concluded relatively quickly but still took about six and half weeks, during which the country had been virtually rudderless at a critical moment for Europe.Germany’s centrist parties announced on Wednesday that they had formally reached a coalition agreement to allow Friedrich Merz, a conservative, to take the reins as chancellor at a tumultuous moment when Europe’s economic and security order is being upended.Since Mr. Merz’s Christian Democrats came out on top in elections in February, he has been under tremendous pressure to get a government moving as the Trump administration batters Europe with tariffs, threatens the NATO alliance and cozies up to an aggressive and expansionist Russia.Sensing the urgency, Mr. Merz took the exceptional step of using the interim period to push measures through Parliament to raise debt limits so that Germany could throw billions more at infrastructure and military spending. The coalition agreement announced on Wednesday was the fastest since 2009, when Angela Merkel won her second term.Nonetheless, Germany, Europe’s largest economy, has been left virtually leaderless during the multiple overlapping global crises.“We don’t yet know which direction the international situation will take, but that is why our message today is all the clearer: In this global change we want to — and we will — help shape Germany,” Mr. Merz told reporters as the coalition plan was presented.Responding to a question from a reporter, Mr. Merz took a moment to address President Trump directly, in English. “The key message to Donald Trump is Germany is back on track,” he said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Ken Paxton Says He Will Challenge Senator John Cornyn in 2026

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      Ken Paxton, the attorney general of Texas, officially announced on Tuesday that he was challenging Senator John Cornyn in the Republican primary next year, setting up what is likely to be the most contentious and expensive intraparty contest of 2026.Mr. Paxton, a firebrand conservative litigant who has sought to strongly align himself with President Trump, had been teasing a run against Mr. Cornyn for weeks. He all but announced his intentions in an interview with The New York Times last week.On Tuesday, Mr. Paxton unveiled a website for his nascent campaign, prominently featuring a photo of him posing with Mr. Trump, and he officially announced his run in an interview on Fox News.“It’s definitely time for a change in Texas,” Mr. Paxton said in the interview with Laura Ingraham. In a post on social media, he promised to “fight for President Trump’s agenda and take a sledgehammer to the D.C. establishment.”Mr. Paxton has tried to position himself as the preferred candidate of the Republican primary base in Texas, a conservative electorate that has appeared receptive to his campaign in recent polling.Mr. Cornyn, realizing the looming challenge, announced his own campaign last month in a video that heavily featured his own connections to Mr. Trump. In recent days he rolled out an endorsement from the union for U.S. Border Patrol agents, an important show of support for conservative voters who list border security among their top issues.In response to Mr. Paxton’s announcement, the Cornyn campaign pointed to the senator’s voting record, which it said aligned with President Trump more than nearly every other senator. The campaign referred to Mr. Paxton as “a fraud.”“This will be a spirited campaign and we assure Texans they will have a real choice when this race is over,” the campaign said in a statement on Tuesday.Republican voters in Texas are well familiar with both Mr. Cornyn, who has been in state politics for four decades, and Mr. Paxton, a former state representative and state senator now in his third term as attorney general.Mr. Paxton survived an impeachment trial in 2023, initiated by Texas House Republicans, over allegations of corruption and abuse of office that were lodged against him by some of his former top aides.Those aides also filed a whistle-blower suit against him over their firings. Late last week a judge sided with them, saying that Mr. Paxton had admitted to the allegations and that the state should pay $6.6 million to settle the claims. Mr. Paxton has vowed to appeal. More

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      What’s at Stake in Wisconsin

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      Elon Musk sees the state’s Supreme Court race as a way of preserving Republicans’ power in Washington.About nine minutes into his time onstage in Green Bay last night, Elon Musk neatly explained why he — a billionaire technologist who is already distracted by a little project in Washington — had poured $20 million and hours of his time into a Wisconsin Supreme Court election.“What’s happening on Tuesday is a vote for which party controls the U.S. House of Representatives,” he said.The party that controls the chamber, he added, “controls the country, which then steers the course of Western civilization.”Anybody not currently serving in the House might consider that last part to be hyperbole. But Musk’s words revealed his stated motivation behind his involvement on behalf of the conservative candidate, Judge Brad Schimel: He sees it as a way of preserving Republicans’ power well beyond Wisconsin.He has a point. Democrats don’t talk about it in quite such existential terms, but they are widely expected to challenge the narrowly divided state’s congressional maps, which currently favor Republicans, if voters maintain a liberal majority on the Supreme Court.With Republicans holding a thin majority in the House now, any changes that make it easier for Democrats to win seats could have major consequences in midterm elections next year.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Marine Le Pen Could Be Banned From France Election if She’s Found Guilty of Embezzlement

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      A verdict Monday in an embezzlement trial is seen as a test of the country’s democracy — and the rule of law.Marine Le Pen, the French far-right leader, has tried and failed three times to become president. Now, even as her popularity rises, she may be barred from taking part in an election to lead France if she is found guilty of embezzlement on Monday.Such a verdict, far from certain, has been equated by Ms. Le Pen with a “political death” sentence and a “very violent attack on the will of the people.” It would ignite a major political storm at a time when the French Fifth Republic has appeared increasingly dysfunctional.On the one hand stands the principle, as Nicolas Barret, one of the prosecutors, put it in closing arguments last year, that “We are not here in a political arena but a legal one, and the law applies to all.”On the other hand lies the fear, expressed by some leading politicians, that a ban would undermine French democracy by feeding a suspicion that it is skewed against the growing forces of the hard right.“Madame Le Pen must be fought at the ballot box, not elsewhere,” Gérald Darmanin, a former center-right interior minister, wrote on X in November. He is now the justice minister.Ms. Le Pen. 56, has in recent years steered her anti-immigrant party from its antisemitic roots toward the political mainstream. The party, whose name she changed from the National Front to the National Rally, is now the largest single party in the National Assembly with 123 seats.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A Musk Lawsuit in Wisconsin Is the Backdrop to the State’s Supreme Court Race

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      A legal battle over Tesla sales in Wisconsin is the quiet backdrop to a big State Supreme Court race.I was driving from Eau Claire, Wis., to Minneapolis last week when I saw the sign.A Tesla sign.Soon after I crossed the St. Croix River, which divides Wisconsin and Minnesota, a brick-and-steel tower visible from Interstate 94 advertised the Tesla store and service center in Lake Elmo, Minn.The dealership’s proximity to the state line is probably no accident: Wisconsin law prohibits vehicle manufacturers from selling cars directly to customers there, the way Tesla usually does. Instead, companies need to work through local franchisees — think Hank’s Ford or Jimmy’s Subaru, that sort of thing.This means that, in Wisconsin, you can’t actually stroll into a dealership and leave with a Tesla. You can look at one — the company has showrooms in Madison and Milwaukee — but if you want one, you’ll generally have to buy it online and pick it up somewhere like Lake Elmo or Northern Illinois, or have it delivered.Tesla sued Wisconsin over this law in January. Now, Tesla’s owner, Elon Musk, is spending big money on the state’s Supreme Court race.The lawsuit has become a major focus for Democrats, who are accusing Musk of trying to buy a justice and swing the very court that might at some point consider his lawsuit. My colleagues Reid Epstein, who writes about national politics, and Neal Boudette, who covers the auto industry, teamed up to explore the relationship between the lawsuit and Musk’s $20 million investment — so far — in the judicial election, which will be held on April 1.The politics of Tesla’s fight with Wisconsin are, like so much involving Musk, kind of topsy-turvy. It pits car dealers, who tend to be Republican, against Musk supporters, who these days also tend to be Republican.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More