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    Elon Musk’s Doge put sensitive social security data at risk, whistleblower says

    Elon Musk’s so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) copied and uploaded sensitive Social Security Administration (SSA) data to a vulnerable cloud server, potentially risking the safety of hundreds of millions of Americans and violating federal privacy laws, according to a whistleblower complaint filed on Tuesday.The complaint from Charles Borges, the chief data officer at the SSA, alleges that Doge staffers effectively created a live copy of the entire country’s social security data from its numerical identification system database. The information is a goldmine for bad actors, the complaint alleges, and was placed on a server without independent oversight that only Doge officials could access.“These actions constitute violations of laws, rules, and regulations, abuse of authority, gross mismanagement, and creation of a substantial and specific threat to public health and safety,” the complaint states.The whistleblower complaint, first reported by the New York Times, is one of the most high-profile insider accounts of how Doge staffers have allegedly taken confidential government information and used it for their own ends, at great risk to the public. The database that Doge officials allegedly uploaded to the cloud contains highly personal information about hundreds of millions of US citizens and residents. It includes details such as names, place and date of birth, race and ethnicity, names of family members, phone numbers, addresses and social security numbers.The Social Security Administration denied that the sensitive data had been compromised and stated that it takes all whistleblower complaints seriously.“SSA stores all personal data in secure environments that have robust safeguards in place to protect vital information. The data referenced in the complaint is stored in a longstanding environment used by SSA and walled off from the internet,” an SSA spokesperson said. “We are not aware of any compromise to this environment and remain dedicated to protecting sensitive personal data.”The non-profit Government Accountability Project whistleblower organization is providing Borges legal counsel in the case and filed his complaint with the US Office of Special Counsel, as well as members of Congress. The complaint calls on lawmakers to swiftly take action to safeguard public data and provide more oversight.“Placing a live copy of Americans’ social security data in a cloud environment without independent oversight puts everyone with a social security number and their families at real risk of identity theft, interrupted benefits, and tax or medical fraud that can follow them for years,” said Andrea Meza, director of advocacy and strategy at the Government Accountability Project and the legal counsel on the case.Borges is a career civil servant and navy veteran who joined the SSA in late January, and was previously chief data officer for naval air systems command. His complaint alleges that he repeatedly raised concerns with his superiors about Doge officials improperly accessing data but that no action was taken.“Mr Borges spent weeks pressing for fixes inside SSA; when nothing changed, he used the protected channels federal whistleblower law provides,” Maza said. “We’re calling for immediate oversight and an independent audit to investigate these violations, prevent future problems, and restore required safeguards.”Lawmakers and ethics watchdog groups, as well as former and current federal employees, have long accused Doge of accessing government data with a wanton disregard for security protocols and transparency. A separate whistleblower disclosure in April raised concerns that Doge employees had potentially exposed sensitive National Labor Relations Board information, and alleged it appeared that Doge employees attempted to cover up documentation of what data they accessed.As Doge rapidly embedded its staffers across federal agencies earlier this year, it gained access to troves of information from a wide swath of government databases. Although reports have detailed how the agency is using some of that data to further the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, there has not been a full accounting of why Doge has accessed the public’s data. More

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    Trump threatens to ‘federalize’ DC after attack on Doge staffer

    Donald Trump is threatening to strip Washington DC of its local governance and place the US capital under direct federal control, citing what he described as rampant youth crime following an alleged assault on a federal employee who worked for the so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge).In a post on his Truth Social platform, the president said he would “federalize” the city if local authorities failed to address crime, specifically calling for minors as young as 14 to be prosecuted as adults.“Crime in Washington, D.C., is totally out of control,” Trump wrote. “If D.C. doesn’t get its act together, and quickly, we will have no choice but to take Federal control of the City, and run this City how it should be run.”The threat received backing from Elon Musk, after the billionaire described an incident in which a member of the Doge team was allegedly “severely beaten to the point of concussion” while defending a woman from assault in the capital.“A few days ago, a gang of about a dozen young men tried to assault a woman in her car at night in DC,” Musk posted on X. “A @Doge team member saw what was happening, ran to defend her and was severely beaten to the point of concussion, but he saved her. It is time to federalize DC.”The victim was identified by friends and the police as Edward Coristine, a 19-year-old known as “Big Balls”, one of Doge’s most recognizable staffers who joined Doge in January. He reportedly left in June, and is currently employed at the Social Security Administration. According to a police report obtained by Politico, Coristine was assaulted at approximately 3am on Sunday by about 10 juveniles near Dupont Circle.Police arrested two 15-year-olds from Maryland, a boy and a girl, as they attempted to flee the scene, and charged them with attempted carjacking. A black iPhone 16 valued at $1,000 was reported stolen during the incident.Trump’s post, which included images of a bloodied and shirtless Coristine, concluded: “If this continues, I am going to exert my powers, and FEDERALIZE this City. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”Washington DC currently operates under “home rule”, established in 1973, which grants the city an elected mayor and council while maintaining ultimate congressional oversight. No president has attempted to revoke this arrangement since its creation.Trump’s threat could theoretically take several forms. The constitution grants Congress broad authority over the federal district, though completely suspending local governance would probably require congressional legislation. Trump could also deploy federal law enforcement officers or national guard troops under executive authority, as he did during 2020 protests when federal forces cleared Lafayette Square outside the White House over local officials’ objections.But fully stripping the city’s home rule would probably face fierce Democratic opposition in Congress. Any such move would require congressional legislation that Democrats could block or attempt to challenge in federal courts.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe president targeted DC’s juvenile justice system specifically. “The Law in D.C. must be changed to prosecute these ‘minors’ as adults, and lock them up for a long time, starting at age 14,” he wrote, referring to alleged attackers he described as “local thugs” and putting the word “youths” in quotation marks.Washington DC, with a population of about 700,000, has seen violent crime decline in the first half of 2025 compared with the previous year, and 2024 marked a 30-year low, according to a pre-Trump January report by the Department of Justice. The Democratic-controlled city has frequently clashed with Trump over federal interventions and has long sought statehood, which would grant it full self-governance and congressional representation – which Republican lawmakers have opposed.The office of the DC mayor, Muriel Bowser, declined a request for comment. More

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    Elon Musk claims his America party will change US politics. Experts disagree

    “You want a new political party and you shall have it!” Elon Musk declared in early July.The world’s richest man is never one to shy away from grandiose statements, and he continued: “When it comes to bankrupting our country with waste & graft, we live in a one-party system, not a democracy. Today, the America Party is formed to give you back your freedom.”The America party, Musk hopes, will be a viable alternative to the Democratic and Republican parties: a political organization that can influence the future of US politics. He has mooted running candidates for two to three Senate seats and up to 10 House districts. Given the tight divide between Republicans and Democrats in Congress, Musk believes capturing the small number of seats “would be enough to serve as the deciding vote on contentious laws”.Given there is consistently strong support for an alternative to the Big Two parties, it should be a good idea, right?Wrong, said Bernard Tamas, professor of political science at Valdosta State University and author of The Demise and Rebirth of American Third Parties.“At this moment in American politics, I see no evidence that you’re going to get another party winning seats in Congress and actually being able to have an impact in the government,” Tamas said.“It’s not just the money that Democrats and Republicans have. They have all the resources. They have the money. They have 150 years of structure. They have all the professional politicians, and they have all the consultants, and they have all the Madison Avenue ad companies working for them.”The whole concept of the America party seemingly came together in a matter of weeks, following the famous row between Musk and Donald Trump. And as with many ideas born out of spite and fury, certain elements appear to have not been fully thought through. Americaparty.com, for example, is already registered to someone else, who now appears to be trying to sell the domain name for $6.9m. On X, which Musk owns, @AmericaParty was already taken, so the new venture had to opt for @AmericaPartyX.It’s not yet clear what the party will stand for, beyond opposition to Republicans’ ballooning of the national debt. Musk has yet to elaborate on the “contentious laws” his politicians would challenge, and there is no party platform or manifesto.In any case, third parties have rarely, if ever, been successful in the way Musk envisages. But where they can make a difference is in highlighting issues and pressuring the main two parties to act.“In terms of the parties that really had a big impact, they didn’t win seats,” Tamas said. “The job of third parties is disruption. It’s to sting like a bee. It’s to cause pain.”Tamas pointed to the Progressive party in Wisconsin and the Minnesota Farmer-Labor party, which managed to win key victories over relief for unemployed constituents and banking reform in the state, as examples of political groups that have managed to inflict such a bee sting. That doesn’t appear to be what Musk is going for, however, despite there being an opportunity for a stinging insect.“Here you have the Republican party moving farther and farther to the right, and farther and farther in this kind of Maga direction, with nobody in the Republican party in Congress willing to stand up at all to Trump or this movement,” Tamas said.“It’s a perfect opening for a third party. This is what it looks like historically. But you’re not going to replace them. What you do is you attack them for this. You’re trying to pull them back towards the center.“This is how the third parties have always succeeded. The idea is you cause them pain, and what they do, if it works, is they shift back towards something that reflects more what the public wants, or deals with the issues that the third party is bringing up.”Parties that have pursued the getting-people-elected approach have fared less well than the pain-inflictors. Forward party was founded by Andrew Yang, who had previously run for the Democratic presidential nomination, in 2022, with the slightly call-to-arms style slogan of “Not left. Not right. Forward.” These days the party barely features on the national political landscape, although it does continue to bleat out social media content – a recent 4 July post on Instagram attracted almost 40 likes.At its inception, Forward party figures claimed both the Republican and Democratic parties had become too radical, and said their new venture “can’t be pegged to the traditional left-right spectrum because we aren’t built like the existing parties”.Somehow, a promise to not really have a firm ideological stance on anything isn’t a very sexy pitch to voters. Among the “elected affiliates” named on Forward’s website are the former mayor of Newberry, Florida, a town of 7,300 people, and a man who “is responsible for sanitation and utilities” in the Connecticut borough of Stonington – population 976 people.There is widespread support for a third party. Polls have repeatedly shown that people want a third party. But what that looks like remains to be seen. In Musk’s own survey on social media asking if people wanted him to start a new party, only 65% said yes, and 34% said no, although a poll in early July showed that 14% of voters said they would be very likely to support the party, with 26% somewhat likely.There are already issues with the America party becoming a viable third choice. Musk is approaching eccentric political advisers, including Curtis Yarvin, a rightwing tech blogger who has argued American democracy has run its course and the country should instead be run by a dictator-esque CEO.A more fundamental problem with the America party is unique to Musk: people really don’t like him. A poll last week found that 60% of Americans have an unfavorable view of Musk, compared with 32% in favor.America shall have a third party, Musk declared at the start of his new venture. But does America want this kind of third party, with these kind of aims, run by this kind of man? More

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    Doge wants to replace our institutions with a tech utopia. It won’t work | Mike Pepi

    Elon Musk has stepped away from Doge with very little “efficiency” to show for it. While it may have been more of a showpiece than real policy, this brutal and short experiment in Silicon Valley governance reveals a long-simmering battle between digital utopians and the institutional infrastructures critical to functioning democracies.Doge’s website dubiously claims $190bn in savings. The receipts show that they are less about efficiency than they are aimed at effective dissolution, a fate met by USAID, the federal agency responsible for distributing foreign assistance.Don’t be fooled. These brash new reductions are not just your garden-variety small-government crusades or culture-war skirmishes. This administration’s war on institutions derives from the newfound power of Silicon Valley ideology – a techno-determinism that views each institution’s function as potential raw material for capture by private digital platforms.All the while, Elon Musk sold the White House on an “AI-first strategy” for the US government. The recent executive order Removing Barriers to American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence mandates that barely tested Silicon Valley AI be jammed into the government’s work. It directs agencies to use AI to “lessen the burden of bureaucratic restrictions”. This is a thinly veiled attempt not just to reduce institutional activities; it’s also a degradation play.Doge makes plain an often misunderstood tension: Silicon Valley’s final dream is a world without institutions. Since the rise of the internet, startups have long encouraged, and profited from, institutional decline. This anti-institutionalism goes back to the roots of computing. Charles Babbage’s difference engine, central to modern computing, was built on technologies meant to control labor. It was a reflection of Babbage’s belief that the highest intention of the factory manager was to reduce the skill and cognitive complexity of laborers’ tasks. If the machine could manage production, humans – now smoothed-out automatons – would hardly need accompanying social protections, or even any governance at all.In 1948, Norbert Wiener founded the discipline of cybernetics, “the science of control and communications in the animal and machine”. This automated governance was eventually brought into direct competition with public institutions. The revolt against the state took many forms in the history of computing thereafter, from the libertarian California ideology (“information wants to be free”) to the very idea that a new “cyberspace” would be liberated from governments. Here the individual is an entrepreneur of the mind, able to instantly improve their lot without the mediating hand of the institutional form.To get to the real heart of Doge’s ideology, read The Cathedral and the Bazaar, Eric Raymond’s manifesto on building open-source software. For Raymond, cathedrals are “carefully crafted by individual wizards or small bands of mages working in splendid isolation”. This slow, deliberate work is no match for the networked and digitally enabled bazaar, where many software developers move fast by releasing early and often, delegate everything they can, and are open to the point of promiscuity. Something like scripture for computer engineers, Raymond’s ideas soon jumped out of the network and into governance of the physical world, where all human organizations were scrutinized as the maligned “cathedral”.Entrepreneurs loved this idea, too. The management method known as the “lean startup” is a lightweight program of data-driven optimizations designed to quickly scale businesses. Instead of human labor and judgment, lean startups use data and algorithms to experiment their way toward governance.But there’s a catch: a public institution is not supposed to be run like a digital startup. Silicon Valley may have carved out a niche in which its organizational philosophies mastered food delivery apps, AI girlfriends and money-laundering shitcoins, but the moment they take these methods to institutions entrusted with public welfare, they’ve lost the plot. Governments don’t have customers – they care for citizens. If classical liberalism had the state and its many sovereign institutions, and neoliberalism had the divine hand of the free market, today’s platform class elevates computation as the ultimate arbiter of truth. When presented with an institutional force, the platform class first asks: how could this be delivered by way of a digital platform?Digital technology doesn’t have to be this way. Good software can augment institutions, not be the rationale for their deletion. Building this future requires undoing Silicon Valley’s pernicious opposition to the institutional form. By giving into the digital utopian’s anti-institutionalism, we allowed them to reshape government according to their growth-at-all-costs logic.If the newly empowered digital utopianism goes unchecked, we face a platform-archy where black-box AI makes decisions once adjudicated through democratic institutions. This isn’t just a Silicon Valley efficiency fantasy; it’s on the roadmap of every authoritarian who ever sniffed power.Thankfully, the anti-Doge backlash was swift. The abrupt layoffs backfired, leading many Americans to fully understand just how much research and resources for advancing science, medicine and culture are tied to federal support.In the private sector, since capital is no longer free after the federal government hiked interest rates in 2022, the growth of the big Silicon Valley platforms have almost completely stalled. In search of an answer, Silicon Valley is making a big bet on AI, overwhelming users with automated answers that hallucinate and mislead at every turn. It’s becoming harder and harder for the average person to buy what the digital utopians are selling.The response to this assault on our institutions might be a kind of Digital New Deal – a public plan for institutions in the AI era. This 21st-century economics must go well beyond solving for mass unemployment. Reconstructing the institutional foundations of public goods such as journalism, libraries and higher education requires more than just restoring the public funds stripped by Doge. It will require forceful assertions about their regulatory value in the face of a fully automated slop state. Governments come and go, but free and open institutions are critical to the functioning of democracy. If we make the mistake of misrecognizing digital platforms for public institutions, we will not easily reverse Doge’s mistakes.

    Mike Pepi is a technologist and author who has written widely about the intersection between culture and the Internet. His book, Against Platforms: Surviving Digital Utopia, was published by Melville House in 2025 More

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    US supreme court clears way for Trump officials to resume mass government firings

    The US supreme court has cleared the way for Donald Trump’s administration to resume plans for mass firings of federal workers that critics warn could threaten critical government services.Extending a winning streak for the US president, the justices on Tuesday lifted a lower court order that had frozen sweeping federal layoffs known as “reductions in force” while litigation in the case proceeds.The decision could result in hundreds of thousands of job losses at the departments of agriculture, commerce, health and human services, state, treasury, veterans affairs and other agencies.Democrats condemned the ruling. Antjuan Seawright, a party strategist, said: “I’m disappointed but I’m not shocked or surprised. This rightwing activist court has proven ruling after ruling, time after time, that they are going to sing the songs and dance to the tune of Trumpism. A lot of this is just implementation of what we saw previewed in Project 2025.”Project 2025, a plan drawn up by the conservative Heritage Foundation thinktank, set out a blueprint for downsizing government. Trump has claimed that voters gave him a mandate for the effort and he tapped billionaire ally Elon Musk to lead the charge through the “department of government efficiency”, or Doge, though Musk has since departed.In February, Trump announced “a critical transformation of the federal bureaucracy” in an executive order directing agencies to prepare for a government overhaul aimed at significantly reducing the workforce and gutting offices.In its brief unsigned order on Tuesday, the supreme court said Trump’s administration was “likely to succeed on its argument that the executive order” and a memorandum implementing his order were lawful. The court said it was not assessing the legality of any specific plans for layoffs at federal agencies.Liberal justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was the sole member of the nine-person court to publicly dissent from the decision, which overturns San Francisco-based district judge Susan Illston’s 22 May ruling.Jackson wrote that Illston’s “temporary, practical, harm-reducing preservation of the status quo was no match for this court’s demonstrated enthusiasm for greenlighting this president’s legally dubious actions in an emergency posture”.She also described her colleagues as making the “wrong decision at the wrong moment, especially given what little this Court knows about what is actually happening on the ground”.Illston had argued in her ruling that Trump had exceeded his authority in ordering the downsizing, siding with a group of unions, non-profits and local governments that challenged the administration. “As history demonstrates, the president may broadly restructure federal agencies only when authorized by Congress,” she wrote.The judge blocked the agencies from carrying out mass layoffs and limited their ability to cut or overhaul federal programmes. Illston also ordered the reinstatement of workers who had lost their jobs, though she delayed implementing this portion of her ruling while the appeals process plays out.Illston’s ruling was the broadest of its kind against the government overhaul pursued by Trump and Doge. Tens of thousands of federal workers have been fired, have left their jobs via deferred resignation programmes or have been placed on leave.The administration had previously challenged Illston’s order at the San Francisco-based ninth US circuit court of appeals but lost in a 2-1 ruling on 30 May. That prompted the justice department to make an emergency request to the supreme court, contending that controlling the personnel of federal agencies “lies at the heartland” of the president’s executive branch authority.The plaintiffs had urged the supreme court to deny the justice department’s request. Allowing the Trump administration to move forward with its “breakneck reorganization”, they wrote, would mean that “programs, offices and functions across the federal government will be abolished, agencies will be radically downsized from what Congress authorized, critical government services will be lost and hundreds of thousands of federal employees will lose their jobs”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe supreme court’s rejection of that argument on Tuesday was welcomed by Trump allies. Pam Bondi, the attorney general, posted on the X social media platform: “Today, the Supreme Court stopped lawless lower courts from restricting President Trump’s authority over federal personnel – another Supreme Court victory thanks to @thejusticedept attorneys. Now, federal agencies can become more efficient than ever before.The state department wrote on X: “Today’s near unanimous decision from the Supreme Court further confirms that the law was on our side throughout this entire process. We will continue to move forward with our historic reorganization plan at the State Department, as announced earlier this year. This is yet another testament to President Trump’s dedication to following through on an America First agenda.”In recent months the supreme court has sided with Trump in some major cases that were acted upon on an emergency basis since he returned to office in January.It cleared the way for Trump’s administration to resume deporting migrants to countries other than their own without offering them a chance to show the harms they could face. In two cases, it let the administration end temporary legal status previously granted on humanitarian grounds to hundreds of thousands of migrants.It also allowed Trump to implement his ban on transgender people in the US military, blocked a judge’s order for the administration to rehire thousands of fired employees and twice sided with Doge. In addition, the court curbed the power of federal judges to impose nationwide rulings impeding presidential policies.On Tuesday the Democracy Forward coalition condemned the supreme court for intervening in what it called Trump’s unlawful reorganisation of the federal government. It said in a statement: “Today’s decision has dealt a serious blow to our democracy and puts services that the American people rely on in grave jeopardy.“This decision does not change the simple and clear fact that reorganizing government functions and laying off federal workers en masse haphazardly without any congressional approval is not allowed by our Constitution.” More

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    Donald Trump calls Elon Musk’s new political party ‘ridiculous’ and says Tesla owner is ‘off the rails’ – US politics live

    Welcome to our live coverage of US politics and the second Trump administration.Donald Trump has hit out at Elon Musk’s decision to start and bankroll a new US political party that the tech billionaire believes can offer a viable alternative to the Democrats and Republicans.Speaking to reporters before boarding Air Force One yesterday, the US president said:
    I think it’s ridiculous to start a third party. It’s always been a two-party system and I think starting a third party just adds to the confusion.
    Shortly after speaking about his former ally, Trump posted further comments on his Truth Social platform, writing:
    I am saddened to watch Elon Musk go completely ‘off the rails,’ essentially becoming a TRAIN WRECK over the past five weeks.
    Trump and Musk were formerly close allies, with the Tesla boss and X owner appointed to slash federal spending through the unofficial Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) from January through May.Musk fell out with the Republican president over his sprawling tax and spending plan, signed into law on Friday, which is expected to add at least $3 trillion (£2.2 trillion) to the US’s already huge $37tn (£27tn) debt pile. Musk has argued that the bill, which he has described as “utterly insane and destructive”, would irresponsibly add to the US national debt.Musk, the world’s richest person, posted on X over the weekend that he had set up the America Party to challenge the Republican and Democratic “Uniparty”. The details of the structure of the new venture or a timeline for its creation are still unclear.But some of his social media posts suggests the new political party would focus on two or three Senate seats, and eight to 10 House districts.We will have more on this and other US politics stories throughout the day so stick with us.Donald Trump has said his administration plans to start sending letters on Monday to US trade partners dictating new tariffs, amid confusion over when the new rates will come into effect.“It could be 12, maybe 15 [letters],” the president told reporters, “and we’ve made deals also, so we’re going to have a combination of letters and some deals have been made.”With his previously announced 90-day pause on tariffs set to end on 9 July, the president was asked if the new rates would come into effect this week or on 1 August, as some officials had suggested.“No, there are going to be tariffs, the tariffs, the tariffs are going to be, the tariffs,” the president began uncertainly. “I think we’ll have most countries done by July 9, yeah. Either a letter or a deal.”Sensing the confusion, his commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, jumped in to add: “But they go into effect on August 1. Tariffs go into effect August 1, but the president is setting the rates and the deals right now.”You can read the full story, by my colleagues Robert Mackey, Lauren Almeida and Lisa O’Carroll, here:The US is extremely mindful of BRICS’ economic might and its growing influence on the diplomatic stage. The group, often described as the developing world’s alternative to the G7 group of nations, has undergone a recent rapid expansion.BRICS was founded by Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, but the group last year expanded to include Indonesia, Iran, Egypt, Ethiopia and the UAE.Some of its members have denounced US tariff policies and have suggested reforms to how major currencies are valued.The group pushes for greater representation for emerging economies and thinks western countries have a disproportionate influence on global organisations like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.In other news, Donald Trump has widened his trade war after saying the US will impose an additional 10% tariff on any countries aligning themselves with the “anti-American policies” of the BRICS group of developing nations that include China and Russia.Trump wrote on social media:
    Any country aligning themselves with the Anti-American policies of BRICS, will be charged an ADDITIONAL 10% tariff. There will be no exceptions to this policy.
    His comments came after a joint Sunday statement from the opening of the BRICS summit in Rio de Janeiro in which the group warned the rise in tariffs threatened global trade, continuing its veiled criticism of Trump’s erratic tariff policies.Since his return to the White House, Trump has announced a series of steep import taxes on foreign goods, arguing they will protect American jobs and the US manufacturing industry.In April, in line with this protectionist view, Trump announced a 10% base tariff rate on most countries and additional duties ranging up to 50%, although he later delayed the effective date for all but 10% duties until 9 July.The negotiating window until 9 July has led to announced deals only with the UK and Vietnam. You can read more on Trump’s tariff threat in our business live blog.My colleagues Richard Luscombe and Robert Mackey have a little more detail about how the feud between the world’s richest man and the world’s most powerful man has recently escalated. Here is an extract from their story:
    When the pair fell out earlier in the summer, Musk lashed out during an astonishing social media duel in which he stated Trump’s name was in the files relating to associates of the late pedophile and sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.
    Musk later deleted the post and apologized to the president as they embarked on an uneasy truce. On Sunday, however, Musk returned to the subject, reposting a photo of the jailed Epstein facilitator Ghislaine Maxwell that questioned why she was the only person in prison while men who engaged in sex with underage girls – a crime colloquially known in the US as statutory rape – were not.
    In other posts he said it would be “not hard” to break the two-party stranglehold in US politics enjoyed by Democrats and Republicans…
    Trump has made clear his feelings about his former friend in recent days after criticism of the bill. In response to Musk’s posts calling the bill “insane”, Trump said he might “look into” deporting the South African-born, naturalized US citizen billionaire.
    Welcome to our live coverage of US politics and the second Trump administration.Donald Trump has hit out at Elon Musk’s decision to start and bankroll a new US political party that the tech billionaire believes can offer a viable alternative to the Democrats and Republicans.Speaking to reporters before boarding Air Force One yesterday, the US president said:
    I think it’s ridiculous to start a third party. It’s always been a two-party system and I think starting a third party just adds to the confusion.
    Shortly after speaking about his former ally, Trump posted further comments on his Truth Social platform, writing:
    I am saddened to watch Elon Musk go completely ‘off the rails,’ essentially becoming a TRAIN WRECK over the past five weeks.
    Trump and Musk were formerly close allies, with the Tesla boss and X owner appointed to slash federal spending through the unofficial Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) from January through May.Musk fell out with the Republican president over his sprawling tax and spending plan, signed into law on Friday, which is expected to add at least $3 trillion (£2.2 trillion) to the US’s already huge $37tn (£27tn) debt pile. Musk has argued that the bill, which he has described as “utterly insane and destructive”, would irresponsibly add to the US national debt.Musk, the world’s richest person, posted on X over the weekend that he had set up the America Party to challenge the Republican and Democratic “Uniparty”. The details of the structure of the new venture or a timeline for its creation are still unclear.But some of his social media posts suggests the new political party would focus on two or three Senate seats, and eight to 10 House districts.We will have more on this and other US politics stories throughout the day so stick with us. More

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    Tesla shares dive as investors fear new Elon Musk political party will damage brand

    Shares in Tesla are heading for a sharp fall in the US as investors fear Elon Musk’s launch of a new political party will present further problems for the electric carmaker.Tesla stock was down more than 7% in pre-market trading on Monday, threatening to wipe approximately $70bn (£51bn) off the company’s value when Wall Street opens.If the shares fell by that much, the value of Musk’s stock would fall by more than $9bn to about $120bn. The Tesla and Space X boss remains comfortably the world’s richest person, with a wealth of about $400bn, according to Forbes.Tesla is valued at just under $1tn but its shares have come under pressure owing to the Tesla CEO’s relationship with Donald Trump.First, Musk’s strong support for the US president created a consumer backlash and now the antagonistic turn in his relationship with Trump has investors worried Musk will be distracted from his day job, or that the White House will punish his businesses.Dan Ives, analyst at Wedbush Securities, said Musk’s announcement that he is bankrolling a US political party will alarm investors.“Very simply, Musk diving deeper into politics and now trying to take on the Beltway establishment is exactly the opposite direction that Tesla investors/shareholders want him to take during this crucial period for the Tesla story,” Ives said, adding that there was a “broader sense of exhaustion” among Tesla investors that Musk – the company’s largest shareholder – will not stay out of politics.Trump on Sunday called Musk’s plans to form the America party “ridiculous”, launching new barbs at the world’s richest person.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn a post on the Truth Social tech platform, Trump wrote: “I am saddened to watch Elon Musk go completely ‘off the rails,’ essentially becoming a TRAIN WRECK over the past five weeks.”Musk announced the creation of the America party on his X platform at the weekend. He wrote: “When it comes to bankrupting our country with waste & graft, we live in a one-party system, not a democracy. Today, the America party is formed to give you back your freedom.” More