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    Trump says he has ‘no choice’ but to back EVs after Musk endorsement

    Donald Trump has for months denigrated electric vehicles, arguing their supporters should “rot in hell” and that assisting the nascent industry is “lunacy”. He now appears to have somewhat shifted his view thanks to the support of Elon Musk, the world’s richest person.“I’m for electric cars, I have to be because Elon endorsed me very strongly,” Trump, the Republican nominee for US president, told supporters at a rally in Atlanta, Georgia, on Saturday.The transactional nature of this relationship with Musk was made clear by the former president and convicted business fraudster, however. “So I have no choice,” said Trump, who then went on to say that electric vehicles were suitable for a “small slice” of the population and that “you want every type of car imaginable” to be available.Trump also claimed that $9tn would be needed to build a network of electric car chargers, which is not a figure that has been cited by the industry or White House. Joe Biden’s administration has vowed to build 500,000 chargers, far fewer than the approximately 28m needed, and secured several billion dollars for this, although progress on this buildout has been painfully slow.Musk, the chief executive of Tesla who has pushed increasingly strident rightwing views via his ownership of Twitter/X, has backed Trump’s return to the White House despite the candidate’s repeated antipathy to electric cars on the campaign trail. Last month Musk denied reports he was planning to donate $45m a month to a Super Pac focused on getting Trump elected; he declined to clarify how much he planned to donate.Trump has warned that the president’s embrace of electric cars will bring a “bloodbath” to the US automotive industry, falsely claimed that battery-powered cars don’t work in cold weather and that they aren’t able to travel long distances. “You’re not going to be able to sell those cars,” he has warned of Mexico-made EVs in the US market.A new Trump administration will “immediately terminate Joe Biden’s insane electric vehicle mandate”, Trump has said. There is no such mandate, although Biden has overseen a tightening of vehicle pollution rules that should help make EVs more attractive and has signed legislation providing a tax rebate for new EV buyers.Last year, more than 1 million electric cars were sold in the US for the first time and analysts expect numbers to climb further this year, approaching a tipping point where even a withdrawal of government support for them will not slow the growth in sales.Several barriers still remain, however, such as the comparatively high cost of electric cars compared with gasoline and diesel models, a lack of chargers and supply chain snags. Environmental advocates, who point out that transportation is the largest source of US greenhouse gas emissions as well as a nexus of deadly air pollution, argue that more needs to be done to shift Americans away from gas-guzzling cars, or out of cars altogether.“The writing is on the wall: around the world, the future of personal transportation is electric, independent of whatever the United States decides to do,” said Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democratic senator and owner of two Chevy Bolts, last week.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“And that’s great. They’re quieter, faster and more fun to drive. They don’t have tailpipe emissions stinking up highways and neighborhoods. Repair and maintenance costs are nearly nonexistent.” More

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    Elon Musk attends Netanyahu’s congressional address as his guest

    Elon Musk attended Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to Congress on Wednesday as a guest of the embattled Israeli prime minister.A day earlier, the tech billionaire announced that his Starlink internet service was now active in a Gaza hospital, with the support of Israel’s government.Netanyahu’s congressional visit was met with thousands of protesters gathering near Capitol Hill to demonstrate against Israeli abuses during its war in Gaza. Lawmakers were divided over whether he should have been invited to speak.Musk has a history of courting rightwing leaders in countries that have overlapping business interests with his various enterprises. He previously hosted Javier Millei, Argentina’s president, at his Tesla factory and has been a cheerleader for his policies, while also cozying up to Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister, and Jair Bolsonaro, the former Brazilian president.Musk previously met with Netanyahu during a visit to Israel last year, as the tech leader sought to quell accusations of antisemitism after personally endorsing a post on his social network X, formerly Twitter, that claimed Jews hate white people. Far-right content on the platform has also increased.Musk’s visit also appears to have helped pave the way for SpaceX to provide its Starlink satellite internet to Gaza, which he announced on Tuesday was now in service at a hospital. The single location, which was supported by Israel and the United Arab Emirates, also reflects the tight controls that Israel has put on communications technology in the area.In recent weeks, Musk has also thrown his support behind Donald Trump’s election campaign and played a direct role in advising the former president to select JD Vance, Ohio senator, as his running mate.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAlthough Musk has continued to post conservative content and attacks against the presumptive Democratic nominee Kamala Harris, he appears to have tempered some of his support for Trump following Joe Biden dropping out of the race. Musk pushed back against a report he was set to donate $45m per month to a pro-Trump political action committee.Musk’s appearance as a guest of Netanyahu further aligns him with the Republican party line, which has thrown its support behind the Israeli leader as many Democrats condemn his actions. A number of progressive Democratic lawmakers declined to attend Netanyahu’s speech, with New York representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez denouncing him as a “war criminal”. More

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    Elon Musk is spending millions to elect Trump. Let’s boycott his companies | Robert Reich

    For many years I’ve argued that the consolidation of great wealth in the hands of a few undermines our democracy.Elon Musk is the poster child for that concern.Wealth is most dangerous when transformed into political power.One way Musk is transforming his gargantuan wealth into political power is by committing $45m a month, according to recent reporting, to a new pro-Trump super PAC founded and funded in May by other tech oligarchs. On Tuesday, Musk distanced himself from that claim, saying that the actual amount is lower.Either way, we may never know how much Musk is plunking down for Trump because of Musk’s avowed distaste for groups whose donors must be legally disclosed. Musk prefers to wield his political power through dark money.A second way Musk is transforming his wealth into political power is by posting pro-Trump, anti-Kamala Harris messages to his 189 million followers on X, formerly known as Twitter.The reason Musk has 189 million followers is that he owns X. He can adjust its algorithm to give his tweets maximum exposure and effectively buy and capture huge numbers of X users.Immediately after Biden withdrew from the race, Musk interacted with and reposted a number of X posts mocking and criticizing Harris while expressing support for Trump.Musk retweeted former Republican candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who said: “We’re not running against a candidate. We’re running against a system.”Musk also tweeted out a video of Harris in which she said the pronouns she uses and described her appearance for the accessibility of blind people. Musk captioned the post: “Imagine 4 years of this … ”Musk also retweeted and expressed approval of comments made by a QAnon-linked influencer, who had tweeted Biden’s resignation letter with the remark “Democrats destroy democracy in pursuit of power.” The Anti-Defamation League has highlighted this influencer as one of the “extremists and conspiracy theorists” that X has allowed back on to the platform.A number of X users have complained on the platform that they have been unable to follow the @KamalaHQ account, the official rapid response page of the vice-president’s presidential campaign. Instead, the users found a message that said they had reached their “limit” and could not follow any more accounts at this time.Trump is obviously delighted with Musk. The former president is reportedly thinking about offering the billionaire an advisory role in his administration, if there’s a second Trump presidency.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn all these ways, Musk and Trump seem on the way to merging into a single vortex of wealth and power. The result undermines American democracy and the rule of law.Maybe we should call it the Mump – the joining together of two rich and famous narcissists who crave attention, lie through their teeth, enjoy provoking critics, hate labor unions, refuse to be held accountable for anything and have utter contempt for democracy.Toward the end of America’s first Gilded Age, Louis Brandeis, the eminent American jurist, said: “We must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.”Musk demonstrates the truth of Brandeis’s insight now, in America’s second Gilded Age.High on the list of legislative objectives for Harris and the Democrats, if they regain power, should be a wealth tax that makes it impossible for future Mumps to use their great wealth to undermine democracy.If a wealth tax is not politically feasible, an alternative would be to end the “stepped-up basis” inherent tax rule that allows heirs to great fortunes to avoid paying a dime of capital gains taxes.What can you do about Musk in the meantime? Use your economic power. Boycott Tesla and tell advertisers to boycott X.

    Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His newest book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com

    This article was amended on 24 July 2024 to reflect Musk’s suggestion that the $45m figure is inaccurate More

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    Trump’s arrival and ‘our God saves’: key takeaways from day one of the RNC

    Just two days after a gunman targeted a Trump campaign rally in Pennsylvania, leaving the candidate grazed by a bullet and one of his supporters dead, the Republican national convention kicked off in Milwaukee in a strikingly normal fashion.Donald Trump, who made his first public appearance but did not yet address the convention, has now been officially nominated as the Republican presidential candidate. Here are key takeaways from the day:1. As VP, Trump picks JD Vance, Hillbilly Elegy author who once called him ‘America’s Hitler’ For his vice-president, Trump chose 39-year-old JD Vance, a bestselling author who swiftly transformed himself from a self-described “never Trumper” to a Trump loyalist.Now an Ohio senator, Vance first took public office 18 months ago, when he won a race for Senate after being backed by more than $10m in support from tech mogul Peter Thiel. Vance had previously worked as a venture capitalist, and lived for several years in the Bay Area before moving back to Ohio.Vance, who gained a national profile for a much-praised 2016 memoir about white family dysfunction in Appalachia and how he made it to Yale Law School, once publicly called Trump “reprehensible” and an “idiot”, and said he was a dangerous figure who was “leading the white working class to a very dark place”. But Vance worked hard to walk back these criticisms and gain Trump’s endorsement in his 2022 Senate race.Vance has endorsed a ban on abortion, continued to falsely claim that Trump won the 2020 election, said that the US should conduct “large-scale deportations”, and claimed the Democratic party is trying to “transform the electorate” amid an immigrant “invasion”, which Democrats have said is an endorsement of the white nationalist “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory. Vance was praised today by Donald Trump Jr for being a powerful surrogate for Trump on television.2. Trump makes his first public appearance since surviving a shooting attack in Pennsylvania Donald Trump looked unusually somber as he emerged from backstage and joined his sons, and his new vice-presidential pick, JD Vance, in a VIP section of the convention hall audience.There was a stiff white bandage covering his ear, which had been grazed by a bullet on Saturday when the former president narrowly avoided an assasination attempt at a Pennsylvania campaign rally that left one of his supporters dead.Trump waved to his supporters and occasionally held his fist in the air as he walked through the crowd. But he looked more moved than defiant in his first public appearance, mouthing “thank you”, to his supporters, and once gesturing to his ear and to the camera filming him backstage as if to suggest that he could still hear them despite the bandage.After Trump shook hands with other supporters, he joined Tucker Carlson, his sons, and Vance, to listen to the speakers, he appeared to relax somewhat, and began to smile more in response to the crowd.3. Post-shooting speeches focus on Trump’s relationship with God, not blaming Biden Amid multiple media reports that Trump wanted to strike a note of unity after what he saw as his own miraculous escape from death, Axios reported that “Trump ordered aides not to allow the convention’s prime-time speakers to update their remarks to dial up outrage over the shooting.”Many of the speeches on Monday appeared to reflect a more restrained approach to talking about the shooting, with Republicans focusing on Trump’s personal strength and framing the event in Christian terms.“Our God still saves, he still delivers, and he still sets free, because on Saturday, the devil came to Pennsylvania holding a rifle, but an American lion got back up on his feet, and he roared!” South Carolina senator Tim Scott said.4. Teamsters president Sean O’Brien praises Trump’s toughness in defiant pro-labor speech One of the most prominent labor union leaders in the US brought a fiercely anti-corporate message into the heart of the GOP convention, where he wove together a denunciation of corporate power with praise of Trump’s willingness to hear from alternate voices.Teamsters president Sean O’Brien faced sharp criticism for within his own union for what some called his “unconscionable” decision to speak at the RNC.In his speech, O’Brien pushed back at that response, saying: “The left called me a traitor,” but that “today, the teamsters are here to say, we are not beholden to anyone or to any party.”“The teamsters are doing something correct if the extremes of both parties think I shouldn’t be on this stage,” he added.O’Brien used the platform to argue for changes in labor laws to protect US workers and for “corporate welfare reform”.He received some cheers from the Republican audience when he said: “Elites have no party. Elites have no nation. Their loyalty is to the balance sheet and the stock prices at the expense of the American worker.”But his praise of Trump prompted an even more enthusiastic responses from the crowd, particularly his comment that, whatever else people might think of Trump, after the shooting on Saturday: “He has proven to be one tough SOB.”5. Elon Musk is reportedly discussing major donations to a pro-Trump Super PacTrump’s choice of former venture capitalist and Peter Thiel protege JD Vance as his vice-presidential nominee already strengthened the link between the 2024 Trump campaign and Silicon Valley.But a report from the Wall Street Journal today suggested that one of the biggest and most volatile tech titans is now considering pouring a record-breaking amount of cash into a Super Pac designed to boost Republican turnout.The Wall Street Journal reported that Elon Musk is discussing donating $45m a month, starting in July, to a pro-Trump Pac reportedly created by members of his tech executive inner circle. How much Musk has actually given so far is unclear, and may not be made public until the next round of campaign filings are made public on 15 July, but Bloomberg reported he had already given “a sizable amount”. More

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    Elon Musk is cosying up to Donald Trump. Haven’t we suffered enough? | Arwa Mahdawi

    What happens when two of the most influential and insufferable people in the universe join forces? Looks like we’re about to find out. Rumour has it that Elon Musk is cosying up to convicted felon, adjudicated fraudster and presidential hopeful Donald Trump, in the hopes of securing a job in the White House.Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported that the pair speak on the phone several times a month, and have discussed a possible advisory role for Musk if Trump is elected president again. It’s not clear what political pies Musk wants to stick his little fingers in: “The role hasn’t been fully hammered out,” the WSJ said. But, according to “people familiar with the talks”, Musk might get a position advising on border security and the economy.Is Musk really the right person to advise on these issues? Perhaps. As an immigrant from South Africa, he does have first-hand experience of border security. Indeed, his brother, Kimbal, publicly admitted that when the Musk bros first tried to set up business in the US they didn’t have the right work documents. “We were illegal immigrants,” Kimbal joked during a 2013 conference. Elon sheepishly protested that it was a “grey area”, while Kimbal, rather awkwardly, kept insisting it wasn’t: they didn’t have work authorisation. Meanwhile, the audience laughed uproariously. Working illegally makes for a fun little anecdote if you’re rich and white, it seems. But it’s grounds for immediate deportation and dehumanisation if you’re not. Elon himself is fond of demonising “illegal immigrants” and has said that migration has “invasion vibes”.Trump, of course, won’t have any issues with Musk’s border hypocrisy. Despite striking a hard line on immigration, he doesn’t seem to have been particularly bothered by an Associated Press investigation finding that his wife, Melania, modelled in the US before she had legal permission to work in the country. Melania also sponsored her Slovenian-born parents to become US citizens through a process that the Trump administration scornfully termed “chain migration” and aggressively tried to end. Musk and Trump seem firmly in agreement that there are rules for thee but not for me.As for Musk’s potential advice to Trump on the economy? One imagines it will somehow involve his companies getting even more government subsidies than the billions they’ve already received. Perhaps he’ll wangle a government contract to send migrants to Mars. Or – as he’s previously joked – send “space dragons with ‘lasers’” to Ukraine. Whatever he advises, you can expect it to be less policy and more publicity stunt.But I’m getting ahead of myself. Trump is not president yet and Musk has rebutted claims that he’s interested in Ivanka Trump’s old job. “There have not been any discussions of a role for me in a potential Trump presidency,” he tweeted on Thursday.Still, there is no denying that he’s been having a bit of a bromance with Trump. This is a significant shift: Trump and Musk are both afflicted with “main character syndrome” and their huge egos have rubbed each other the wrong way in the past. In 2022, for example, Trump declared Musk a “bullshit artist” for saying he hadn’t voted for a Republican before. Musk, in response, said it was time for Trump to “hang up his hat and sail into the sunset”. He added that Trump’s presidency was “too much drama. Do we really want a bull-in-a-china-shop situation every single day!?”It seems a bunch of billionaires have decided: yes we do. Musk isn’t the only mogul cosying up to Trump: depressingly, a number of wealthy donors have thrown their weight and money behind the ex-president in the past week. On Friday Musk also confirmed that X will host a livestream town hall-style event with Trump some time soon. Linda Yaccarino, who is somehow still CEO of X, chimed in with a fire emoji to tweet: “The People’s Town Hall!” More like Fracas With a Felon, surely? Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist
    Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. More

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    Why is a group of billionaires working to re-elect Trump? | Robert Reich

    Elon Musk and the entrepreneur and investor David Sacks reportedly held a secret dinner party of billionaires and millionaires in Hollywood last month. Its purpose: to defeat Joe Biden and re-install Donald Trump in the White House.The guest list included Peter Thiel, Rupert Murdoch, Michael Milken, Travis Kalanick, and Steven Mnuchin, Trump’s treasury secretary.Meanwhile, Musk is turning up the volume and frequency of his anti-Biden harangues on Twitter/X, the platform he owns.According to an analysis by the New York Times, Musk has posted about the president at least seven times a month, on average, this year. He has criticized Biden on issues ranging from Biden’s age to his policies on health and immigration, calling Biden “a tragic front for a far left political machine”.The Times analysis showed that over the same period of time, Musk has posted more than 20 times in favor of Trump, claiming that the criminal cases the former president now faces are the result of media and prosecutorial bias.This is no small matter. Musk has 184 million followers on X, and because he owns the platform he’s able to manipulate the algorithm to maximize the number of people who see his posts.No other leader of a social media firm has gone as far as Musk in supporting authoritarian leaders around the world. In addition to Trump, Musk has used his platform in support of India’s Narendra Modi, Argentina’s Javier Milei and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro.Some of this aligns with Musk’s business interests. In India, he secured lower import tariffs for Tesla vehicles. In Brazil, he opened a major new market for Starlink, SpaceX’s satellite internet service. In Argentina, he solidified access to lithium, the mineral most crucial to Tesla’s batteries.But something deeper is going on. Musk, Thiel, Murdoch and their cronies are leading a movement against democracy.Peter Thiel, the billionaire tech financier, once wrote: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”If freedom is not compatible with democracy, what is it compatible with?Thiel donated $15m to the successful Republican senatorial campaign of JD Vance, who alleged that the 2020 election was stolen and that Biden’s immigration policy meant “more Democrat voters pouring into this country”. (Vance is now high on the list of Trump vice-presidential possibilities.)Thiel also donated at least $10m to the Arizona Republican primary race of Blake Masters, who also claimed Trump won the 2020 election and admires Lee Kuan Yew, the authoritarian founder of modern Singapore.Billionaire money is now gushing into the 2024 election. Just 50 families have already injected more than $600m into the 2024 election cycle, according to a new report from Americans for Tax Fairness. Most of this is going to the Trump Republican party.In 2021, Stephen A Schwarzman, the billionaire chairman and chief executive of the Blackstone Group, called the January 6 attack on the US Capitol an “insurrection” and “an affront to the democratic values we hold dear”. Now he’s backing Trump because, Schwarzman says, “our economic, immigration and foreign policies are taking the country in the wrong direction.”Trump recently solicited a group of top oil executives to raise $1bn for his campaign, reportedly promising that if elected he would immediately reverse dozens of environmental rules and green energy policies adopted by Biden. Trump said this would be a “deal” for the oil executives that would avoid taxation and regulation on their industry.Speaking from the World Economic Forum’s confab last January in Davos, Switzerland, Jamie Dimon – chair and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, the largest and most profitable bank in the United States, and one of the most influential CEOs in the world – heaped praise on Trump’s policies while president. “Take a step back, be honest,” Dimon said. Trump “grew the economy quite well. Tax reform worked”.Rubbish. Under Trump the economy lost 2.9m jobs. Even before the pandemic, job growth under Trump was slower than it’s been under Biden.Most of the benefits of Trump’s tax cut went to big corporations like JPMorgan Chase and wealthy individuals like Dimon, while the costs blew a giant hole in the budget deficit. If not for those Trump tax cuts, along with the Bush tax cuts and their extensions, the ratio of the federal debt to the national economy would now be declining.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBut don’t assume that the increasing flow of billionaire money to Trump and his Republican party is motivated solely by tax cuts and regulatory rollbacks. The goal of these US oligarchs is to roll back democracy.When asked if he was becoming more political, Musk admitted (in a podcast in November): “If you consider fighting the woke mind virus, which I consider to be a civilizational threat, to be political, then yes … Woke mind virus is communism rebranded.”Communism rebranded? Hello?A former generation of wealthy US conservatives backed candidates like Barry Goldwater because they wanted to conserve American institutions. Musk, Thiel, Schwarzman, Murdoch and their fellow billionaires in the anti-democracy movement don’t want to conserve much of anything – at least not anything that occurred after the 1920s, including Social Security, civil rights, and even women’s right to vote.As Thiel wrote: “The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics. Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women – two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians – have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.”If “capitalist democracy” is becoming an oxymoron, it’s not because of public assistance or because women got the right to vote. It’s because billionaire capitalists like Musk and Thiel are intent on killing democracy by supporting Trump and the neo-fascists surrounding him.Not incidentally, the 1920s marked the last gasp of the Gilded Age, when America’s robber barons ripped off so much of the nation’s wealth that the rest of the US had to go deep into debt both to maintain their standard of living and to maintain overall demand for the goods and services the nation produced.When that debt bubble burst in 1929, we got the Great Depression. Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler then emerged to create the worst threats to freedom and democracy the modern world had ever witnessed.If America learned anything from the first Gilded Age and the fascism that grew like a cancer in the 1930s, it should have been that gross inequalities of income and wealth fuel gross inequalities of political power – as Musk, Thiel, Schwarzman, Murdoch and other billionaires are now putting on full display – which in turn generate strongmen who destroy both democracy and freedom.Under fascist strongmen, no one is safe – not even oligarchs.If we want to guard what’s left of our freedom, we must meet the anti-democracy movement with a bold pro-democracy movement that protects the institutions of self-government from oligarchs like Musk and Thiel and neo-fascists like Trump.
    Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His newest book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com More

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    Trump reportedly considers White House advisory role for Elon Musk

    Donald Trump has floated a possible advisory role for the tech billionaire Elon Musk if he were to retake the White House next year, according to a new report from the Wall Street Journal.The two men, who once had a tense relationship, have had several phone calls a month since March as Trump looks to court powerful donors and Musk seeks an outlet for his policy ideas, the newspaper said, citing several anonymous sources familiar with their conversations.Musk and Trump connected in March at the estate of billionaire Nelson Peltz. Since then, the two have discussed various policy issues, including immigration, which Musk has become vocal about in recent months.“America will fall if it tries to absorb the world,” Musk tweeted in March.Musk has said he will not donate to either presidential campaign this election, but has reportedly told Trump he plans to host gatherings to dissuade wealthy and powerful allies from supporting Joe Biden in November.It has only been just a few years since Musk and Trump were exchanging insults. At a rally in 2022, Trump called Musk “another bullshit artist”. Meanwhile, Musk tweeted that Trump should “hang up his hat and sail into the sunset”.Musk briefly served on Trump’s White House business advisory group early during his presidency, but Musk dropped out after Trump pulled the US out of the Paris climate accord in 2017.Now, relations appeared to have softened. When Musk acquired Twitter, renaming it X, in 2022, he reinstated Trump’s account. Musk has since asked Trump to be more active on X, according to the Journal, though Trump has largely been loyal to his Truth Social platform.In March, after meeting Musk at Peltz’s estate, Trump told CNBC: “I’ve been friendly with him over the years. I helped him when I was president. I helped him. I’ve liked him.”As the owner of Tesla and SpaceX, Musk has benefited from federal government policies and contracts over the last several years, including rocket-service contracts and tax credits for electric vehicles.Trump in March said he and Musk “obviously have opposing views on a minor subject called electric cars”, with Trump opposing ramping up electric vehicle production and supporting tariffs against foreign EV manufacturing.Peltz, an investor, has been a key connector between Trump and Musk. Peltz and Musk have told Trump that they are working on a large data-driven project designed to ensure votes are fairly counted, though details on the project remain opaque. More

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    Trader Joe’s and Starbucks are helping Elon Musk undermine the US government | Steven Greenhouse

    Elon Musk boasts that he’s a “free speech absolutist”, but that didn’t stop his rocket company, SpaceX, from firing eight workers who had criticized him for making light of reports that SpaceX had settled a sexual harassment claim against him.Not stopping there, SpaceX has moved to put the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the US’s top labor watchdog, out of business. Earlier this year, a day after the board accused SpaceX of illegally retaliating against those workers, SpaceX filed a first-of-its-kind lawsuit that seeks to have the labor board – which has successfully overseen relations between business and unions since the 1930s – declared unconstitutional and shut down.In so doing, Musk and SpaceX have joined a broader, rightwing effort that hopes to hobble the federal government’s ability to regulate business. Indeed, SpaceX’s lawsuit could serve as a potent wrecking ball in the right’s push to weaken and perhaps demolish the administrative state – the network of federal agencies that the US Congress created to, among other things, promote workers’ safety on the job, prevent fraud in financial markets, protect workers’ right to unionize, limit environmental hazards, make sure consumer products are safe and administer social security for seniors.With their lawsuit, SpaceX and Musk – who owns 42% of that company’s shares and controls 79% of its voting power – are seeking not just to silence the eight employees who criticized Musk, but also to shut down the agency that protects such workers’ rights to speak out at all. Musk, the $180bn man, is throwing a legal temper tantrum because the NLRB has sought to hold him and SpaceX accountable.Those employees wrote a letter saying: “Elon’s behavior in the public sphere is a frequent source of distraction and embarrassment for us.” They wrote that letter after Business Insider reported that SpaceX had paid $250,000 to silence a company flight attendant who accused Musk of exposing himself and propositioning her for sex. Musk dismissed her in a tweet, saying she was a “liar” and that the incident “never happened”.The NLRB’s complaint against SpaceX is based on a law, the National Labor Relations Act, that makes it illegal for companies to fire or otherwise retaliate against workers who join together to push to improve work conditions. In their letter, the eight employees also called on SpaceX to spell out its anti-harassment policies and enforce them more effectively.If SpaceX’s lawsuit succeeds in getting the federal courts to declare the NLRB unconstitutional, it could set a dangerous precedent that other courts seize on to weaken or even eviscerate other federal agencies, such as the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (Osha), and perhaps even the Federal Election Commission (FEC) and the Social Security Administration.SpaceX’s lawsuit seeks to build on a case in which George R Jarkesy Jr, a rightwing activist and radio talkshow host, persuaded the hard-right fifth circuit court of appeals to declare the Securities and Exchange Commission unconstitutional after it fined Jarkesy hundreds of thousands of dollars for defrauding investors.In their effort to blow up the NLRB, Musk and SpaceX are hoping to capitalize on the federal judiciary’s sharp rightward turn – a shift accelerated during Donald Trump’s presidency. It shouldn’t be a surprise that SpaceX filed its lawsuit in Texas, the state that arguably has the nation’s most extreme, most activist conservative federal judges. Following SpaceX’s lead, Amazon, Trader Joe’s and Starbucks also filed legal papers seeking to have the NLRB declared unconstitutional.Like SpaceX, those companies face NLRB charges of illegally retaliating against workers. One way to look at all this is that a band of billionaires – Elon Musk, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Starbucks’ Howard Schultz, and Trader Joe’s German owners, the Albrecht family – are seeking to kill the federal agency that protects typical workers when they seek to unionize or merely speak up for better conditions.Using uncharacteristically tough language, Jennifer Abruzzo, the labor board’s general counsel, slammed SpaceX, Starbucks and the other companies as “deep-pocketed, low-road employers” that seek to stop the NLRB from fulfilling its pro-worker mission “because they have the money to do so”.“Unfortunately,” Abruzzo added, it seems that SpaceX and the others “would rather spend money initiating court litigation than improving their workers’ lives”.If these “low-road employers” prevail, the whole NLRB process of holding union elections and prosecuting companies that violate labor laws could crumble. This “would leave US workers more vulnerable to exploitation”, Kate Andrias, a law professor at Columbia, wrote recently.Of course, for Starbucks and Trader Joe’s, this effort to have the NLRB declared unconstitutional could backfire – sabotaging the “progressive” image they have long sought to cultivate. Many Starbucks and Trader Joe’s customers might be outraged that the companies that furnish them with lattes and organic produce have joined this conservative legal and political assault.Many legal experts have derided one of SpaceX’s main arguments: that the labor board’s administrative law judges – who determine, for instance, whether a company violated the law by firing pro-union workers – should be deemed unconstitutional. SpaceX asserts that the NLRB’s judges exercise executive functions and therefore that the president, as the head of the executive branch, should be free to fire them. (Under federal labor law, they can be fired only for cause.) SpaceX makes this argument even though it’s crystal clear that the labor board’s judges merely do what judges do: issue judicial decisions.Moreover, what SpaceX is demanding would allow Trump, if re-elected, to do something that corporate America would hate – fire labor board judges because they upset him by ruling in favor of companies whose CEOs had criticized him or not donated to his campaign. Administrative judges – whether labor board judges, immigration judges or social security judges – have legal protections against being summarily fired so that they can make honest, independent decisions without fear of being terminated for political reasons.It is sad, if not altogether surprising, that SpaceX, Amazon, Starbucks and Trader Joe’s have joined a rightwing effort to destroy the federal agencies that set the rules that helped make the US the world’s richest nation and Musk, Bezos, Schultz and other billionaires fabulously wealthy. Now these billionaires are seeking to destroy the NLRB so that they can become even more fabulously wealthy.This is yet another unsettling example of plutocrats exercising their financial might to reshape government to their liking. It’s an effort that, if successful, will hurt millions of average Americans – consumers, workers, small investors and anyone who wants the environment protected.Here’s hoping that public interest prevails over Musk and the billionaires.
    Steven Greenhouse, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, is an American labor and workplace journalist and writer More