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      Can democracy survive now the world’s richest man has it in his sights? | George Monbiot

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      This is what happens when successive US governments fail to tackle inequality. While millions of people live in poverty, a handful grow unimaginably rich. Wealth begets wealth, and they acquire political power to match. It was inevitable that one of them – now the richest man on Earth – would launch what looks like a bid for world domination.A vote for Donald Trump next week is a vote for Elon Musk. Just as Trump is using Musk, Musk could be using Trump as a springboard to perhaps even greater power than the US president can wield. Musk’s secret conversations with Vladimir Putin, reported by the Wall Street Journal last week, and his contacts with other extremist world leaders, suggest a pattern of power-seeking that could be even more alarming than the prospect of a second Trump presidency.Trump, if he wins, will do to the nation what Musk did to Twitter: the US will be e-Muskulated. What this means is that those with the power to swarm, harass and crush people who do not share their noxious ideology will be unleashed.Elon Musk claims to be a “free speech absolutist”. But his absolutism seems to extend only to his allies. Since he bought Twitter and renamed it X, the platform has complied with 83% of requests by governments for the censorship or surveillance of accounts. When the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, demanded the censorship of his opponents before the last general election, the platform obliged. When Indian government officials asked it to remove a hostile BBC documentary, X did as they asked, and later deleted the accounts of many critics of the prime minister, Narendra Modi.Last month, X blocked links to a dossier about Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, and suspended the account of the journalist who revealed it. Musk has sued organisations that criticise him. Because the most vicious and antisocial people – racists, antisemites, misogynists, homophobes, even outright Nazis – have been reinstated and often boosted, millions of other users have been driven from the platform, their own free speech diminished. Musk’s own posts are reportedly amplified a thousandfold by a boutique algorithm. Free speech absolutism? My left foot.Now he has bent his immense wealth, power and blatant double standards to a frantic effort to get Trump elected. Some of his tactics – cash rewards and cash prizes – look to me like attempts to buy votes and interfere in an election. His lawyers were able to prevent him having to attend court this week for a hearing challenging these tactics: another privilege of wealth. He has used his X account to spread rampant misinformation on Trump’s behalf, giving him many millions of dollars’ worth of advertising. He has poured $118m into his pro-Trump super Pac (political action committee).What would the world’s richest man gain from the e-Muskulation of US – and perhaps global – politics? He would gain what capital has sought since workers acquired the vote: the truncation of democracy. Democracy is the problem capital keeps trying to solve. Why? Because it ensures that workers have rights and fair wages; that the living world has some (though never enough) protections; that we cannot be ripped off, poisoned and robbed without restraint.Capitalism has used two powerful tools to try to solve its problem: fascism and neoliberalism. But now, though drawing on both those ideologies, it reverts to an older and cruder mode: oligarchy. Why, the billionaires might wonder, should they rely on intermediaries to wield political power? After all, in every other sphere, the world bows to them, not to their concierges. This, I think, is where Musk and some of his fellow tech authoritarians have been heading.A Trump victory would allow Musk to escape the regulators with which he is often in conflict. In fact, if he takes up Trump’s offer of running a government efficiency commission, Musk becomes his own regulator, able to erase the rules that make the difference between a good society and barbarism.But Trump’s election might also permit even greater opportunities. Musk controls key strategic and military assets, such as SpaceX satellite launchers and the Starlink internet system. As Ukraine discovered to its cost last year, he can switch them off at whim. The kind of decision-making powerful states deploy has been privatised. The Kremlin is reported to have asked him to withhold Starlink access from Taiwan, as a favour to the Chinese government. Terrestrial broadband operators claim that Starlink could interfere with and degrade their own systems. Starlink has refuted this. It is not hard to see how his power could grow to the point at which governments feel obliged to do as he demands.He might not look the part. Villains bent on world domination are meant to be suave, laconic, self-possessed. Musk dresses like an attention-hungry teenager and behaves accordingly. Yet he has been equipped with the means to multiply his power beyond any that a plutocrat has wielded in the democratic era.For decades now, the centrist pact with capital has worked as follows: we might seek half-heartedly to improve the lives of people at the bottom, but we will do almost nothing to hold down those at the top. As a short-term tactic it worked: Rupert Murdoch and other members of the plutocrats’ trade union struck an uneasy truce with Tony Blair, Bill Clinton and their ilk. But the long-term result is that the ultra-rich became so wealthy that they could present a direct threat to sovereign nations, even to the most powerful nation of all. Some of us have spent decades warning that this was the likely outcome: appeasement makes your opponents more powerful. But our governments claimed they were simply being “pragmatic”: it didn’t matter how rich some people became, as long as the lot of the poor improved.Decades of studies, some of which were summarised 15 years ago in The Spirit Level by Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson, show what nonsense this is. A highly unequal society, whatever its absolute levels of wealth and poverty, is devastating for social outcomes, for wellbeing, cohesion and democracy. But “pragmatism” prevailed, and turned out not to be pragmatic at all. The slippage from democracy to oligarchy should surprise no one.So now we face a generalised e-Muskulation: of public life, of trust, of kindness, of mutual aid, of a world in which the poor could aspire to something better, and in which all of us could aspire to a healthy living planet. Governments that have not yet fully succumbed must do what should have been done long ago: make the poor richer, and the very rich poorer.

      George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist More

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      Elon Musk’s ‘election integrity community’ on X is full of baseless claims

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      While Elon Musk faces his own election integrity questions offline, the X owner has deputized his followers to spot and report any “potential instances of voter fraud and irregularities”. The community he spawned is rife with unfounded claims passed off as evidence of voter fraud.Musk opted not to show up to a required court appearance Thursday in Philadelphia to respond to a lawsuit challenging his political action committee’s daily $1m voter giveaway. Meanwhile, online, he has started a dedicated community space on X, formerly Twitter, where he’s asked users to share any issues they see while voting. Users posting on the self-contained feed, the “election integrity community”, quickly began pointing out what they deemed as evidence of fraud and election interference.Tweets showing everything from ballots that arrived ripped, an ABC news system test, a postal worker doing his job and dropping off mail-in ballots were all presented as evidence that the upcoming presidential election had been compromised. Some users posted videos of individuals they deemed suspicious, despite providing little or no proof of suspicious activity and asked others in the community to help identify them.Among the tweets are attempts at doxxing and identifying people who users falsely accuse of ballot box stuffing or preventing Trump supporters from voting. In one case, a post with 14,000 shares and 31,000 likes includes a video of a postal worker bringing ballots into a polling location in Northampton county, Pennsylvania.The same video had been shared throughout X and other forums and retweeted by rightwing influencers like Alex Jones. The user asks for help identifying the man. “He says he’s with the post office but idk if I buy that,” the post reads. “He wouldn’t talk to us and was acting very suspect.” The man in question was the acting postmaster and a 25-year-veteran of the US Postal Service, the Northampton county executive Lamont McClure confirmed to NBC News. McClure told NBC News that the postal worker was already being harassed over the video.Experts say the community, which has more than 50,000 members, follows the same playbook used in feverish online forums after the 2020 election to fuel claims that votes were stolen. In 2020, it was the “Stop the Steal” Facebook group, Telegram groups and message boards on alt-right social media firm Parler.These groups amassed hundreds of thousands of followers who perpetuated the baseless claim that the election was being stolen from Donald Trump. Much of the anecdotal and often unfounded stories shared in these groups by individuals were leveraged by rightwing influencers and other figures to create the narrative that the election was compromised, according to a report by the Election Integrity Partnership.“These are real rumors by real people that are being picked up and used by a propaganda machine that really wants to get that view out there,” said Renee DiResta, an associate professor at Georgetown University and former research manager at Stanford Internet Observatory. “That’s what happened in 2020. [It was the same] process of ‘stop the steal.’ The slogan came from the top but it was ordinary people who provided the ‘evidence’ to back up the idea that the election was stolen.”Before anyone can determine whether the claims are true or false, users seize on the posts and assume the often unsuspecting person being shown are guilty or doing something bad, said DiResta. “Unfortunately the people who bear the costs are the random people whose photographs they take.”

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      The “election integrity community” provides another glimpse into the echo chamber of individuals across the country who believe the election will be or has already been rigged against Trump. Though the space is separate from the normal X feed, Musk has also shared some of the concerns posted in the community on his own page.Among the narratives being pushed in the community is one that has become a pet conspiracy theory of Musk’s. The SpaceX CEO has loudly and often made the false claim that the Biden administration was “importing voters” in the form of “unvetted illegal immigrants”. In the last few days, a Musk-funded super Pac has been pushing a fake pro-Kamala Harris initiative called Project 2028. The initiative has posted fake pro-Harris ads and sent texts to voters that include claims that Harris will be opening the country’s borders and is pushing for undocumented immigrants to be able to vote. Non-citizens are not allowed to vote in the US, and there is no available evidence they are voting in droves as claimed. Users in the community are sharing videos they say provides evidence that Democrats are “bussing” undocumented immigrants to cast votes in their favor. More

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      Elon Musk skips hearing as $1m election giveaway case moves to federal court

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      Elon Musk failed to show up to a required hearing in a Philadelphia case challenging his $1m-a-day sweepstakes. His absence would have risked contempt of court had the case continued in Pennsylvania court, but it was moved to federal court in response to a motion filed by Musk’s attorneys, who did attend the hearing. No hearings were immediately scheduled in the federal case.Judge Angelo Foglietta agreed that Musk, as a named defendant in the lawsuit filed by the district attorney, Larry Krasner, should have attended the hearing in person, but he declined to immediately sanction the tech mogul. Musk’s attorney said his client could not “materialize” in the courtroom with notice only given the night before.Krasner’s team challenged the notion that the founder of SpaceX could not make it to Philadelphia, prompting a quick retort from the judge.“Counsel, he’s not going to get in a rocket ship and land on the building,” Foglietta replied.On Wednesday, the judge had ordered all parties to attend the Thursday morning hearing, including Musk. Musk’s attorneys had filed a motion to shift the suit from Pennsylvania state court to federal court in a filing late that day, which was granted shortly after Musk did not appear.Lawyers for the Philadelphia district attorney’s office requested the case be returned to state court, calling the move to the higher court a “cowardly” delay tactic meant to “run the clock until election day”. The federal judge assigned to the case ordered Musk’s attorneys to respond by Friday morning. Musk’s counsel had argued that state court was not the proper venue and that the Philadelphia district attorney was engaging in thinly veiled electioneering.“Rather, although disguised as state law claims, the complaint’s focus is to prevent defendants’ purported ‘interference’ with the forthcoming federal presidential election by any means,” the Tesla CEO’s attorneys wrote.In the original suit, Krasner argued that Musk’s petition and associated contest were “indisputably violating” specific Pennsylvania laws against illegal lotteries. Musk’s attorneys said he was engaging in legally protected political speech and spending.John Summers, an attorney for the DA’s office, told the judge on Thursday that Musk’s Pac had “brazenly” continued the sweepstakes despite the lawsuit, awarding about 13 checks of $1m since the contest began, including one the day of the hearing.“They’re doing things in the dark. We don’t know the rules being followed. We don’t know how they’re supposedly picking people at random,” Summers said. “It’s an outrage.”The cash giveaways come from Musk’s political organization, which aims to boost Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in the vital swing state, which is seen as a key to victory by both Trump and his opponent, Kamala Harris.Krasner, a Democrat, filed suit on Monday to stop the America Pac sweepstakes, which is set to run through election day and is open to registered voters in swing states who sign a petition supporting the constitution. Musk has been tweeting photographs of the winners holding novelty checks.Krasner has said he could still consider criminal charges, saying he is tasked with protecting the public from both illegal lotteries and “interference with the integrity of elections”.Election law experts have raised questions about whether Musk’s drawing violates a federal law barring someone from paying others to vote. Musk has cast the money as both a prize as well as earnings for work as a spokesperson for the group. More

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      The Washington Post is a reminder of the dangers of billionaire ownership | Siva Vaidhyanathan

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      Last week the Washington Post refrained from endorsing a candidate in the presidential race for the first time in 36 years. The decision was reportedly ordered by Jeff Bezos, the Post’s owner and one of the richest men in the world. The Seattle billionaire, who owns Amazon, purchased the flailing newspaper in 2013 in a rare fit of civic duty.The blowback was immediate and substantial. Within 48 hours of the announcement as many as 200,000 paying readers cancelled their subscriptions to the already money-losing news organization, according to reporting by NPR.Such withholding of revenue is usually more a symbolic message than a real threat to the viability of a company. But for the Post, which has been teetering for decades, any loss in subscribers is threatening. Hundreds of good journalists who had no influence on Bezos’s decision remain unsure of the viability of their employer. Residents of the District of Columbia and much of Virginia and Maryland also rely on the Post for coverage of state and local issues, culture and sports. All of this is threatened by Bezos’s decision and the public uprising against it.Some angry citizens also cancelled their subscriptions to Amazon Prime, the service that provides free shipping for many Amazon products and access to video and music streaming.While a widespread Prime resignation would not damage the public sphere or the prospects for democracy and good government the way that hurting the Washington Post does, it’s still a futile gesture that probably will not alarm or injure Bezos in the slightest.That’s because Prime is a classic loss-leader feature: Amazon uses the service to crush competitors by offering cheaper goods and services while the company makes its money elsewhere. Prime has about 180 million members in the United States, so if a few thousand quit, Amazon would hardly notice and Bezos hardly care.Amazon and Bezos are far more powerful than most people realize. The company’s power is deep, broad and largely invisible. The books and dog toys we buy through Amazon remind us of its public face and original mission. But it’s not 2004 any more.Amazon is not a normal retail company or a normal company in any way; it’s a sprawling leviathan wrapped around the essential processes of major governments, commerce and culture of most of the world.Amazon’s major source of revenue and profit, Amazon Web Services (AWS), is the leading provider of computing and data services in the world, ahead of Microsoft and Alphabet. AWS hosts the sites and data of more than 7,500 governmental agencies and offices in the US alone, including those of the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Reserve.Just about everything a 21st-century state or firm might want to do probably goes through Amazon and makes Bezos wealthier and more powerful in the process. All of this happened over the past 20 years as we enthusiastically chose convenience and mobility over all other human values. We clicked Bezos into power – and not by buying things through Amazon retail; we did it by choosing the internet again and again.In blocking the Washington Post endorsement, Bezos is not acting cowardly as much as slyly. Secure in his fortune and status regardless of the potential rise of fascism in the US, he has some more selfish concerns about the nature of the next administration.One potential Bezos-centric consequence of the election on 5 November is that Donald Trump will prevail over a bacchanal of greed and corruption, potentially opening federal contracts to all sorts of favored players and – more importantly – stifling investigations and prosecutions into firms and people Trump might favor.The other possible consequence is that a Kamala Harris administration would continue the aggressive and much-needed investigations into the ways internet companies like Amazon have restrained trade, concentrated wealth and solidified power by leveraging networks and scale.Bezos also founded and owns Blue Origin, a rocket and space technology firm that has many government contracts. Limiting the government’s regulatory oversight over space technology or contracting is in Bezos’s interest, which might explain why Blue Origin staff met with Trump around the same time as the Post announced its decision not to endorse. It’s also likely Bezos would like to muscle out Trump’s pal Elon Musk and his company, SpaceX, for what is to come.Given all this, it makes sense that Bezos, who is generally liberal and supports Democratic candidates, would try to limit how much Trump hates him (and Trump has long hated Bezos – a lot), if there is a small chance to curry favor with the once and future president. Perhaps Bezos figures his newspaper should not help Harris more than it already has by reporting the basic news.So there are many reasons to fear a Bezos-Trump rapprochement. Still, it does not make much sense to cancel a Post subscription or Prime membership. Neither would hurt Bezos at all.Most boycotts, especially when they are tiny, disorganized, ad-hoc, emotional and aimed at enormous, global companies, are mere expressions of self-righteousness. They have no significant influence on the world but they can make the boycotter feel a bit better for a few days. What’s worse, they often distract energy from real political action that might curb the excesses of the companies in question.Here is the problem: billionaires are mostly immune to consumer pressure. That’s how they became and remain billionaires.So how do we solve a problem like a billionaire? First, we must be blunt about the nature and scope of their power. It’s not a matter of describing their wealth, which flashes before us in numbers we can’t properly grasp or feel. We must describe their influence and how they control things in the world.Second, we must find ways to limit their wealth by taxing the various ways they accumulate and hide it.Third, we must be enthusiastic about breaking up big companies that do too many things in too many markets and thus crush or purchase potential competitors and insurgents. It’s not about prices. It’s about power.Most of all, we should do our best to elect leaders who are not beholden to billionaires, but actively seek to turn them back into millionaires.

      Siva Vaidhyanathan is a professor of media studies at the University of Virginia and the author of Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy More

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      US warns Musk’s Super Pac $1m-a-day giveaways may be illegal, reports say

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      The US justice department has sent a letter to Elon Musk’s Super Pac warning that the billionaire Tesla CEO’s $1m-a-day giveaways may violate federal law, according to multiple reports.A letter from the department’s public integrity section, which investigates potential election-related law violations, went to the Pac, reports in CNN and the New York Times said. The justice department and Musk’s America Pac did not immediately respond to a request for comment.South African-born Musk, who has thrown his support behind Donald Trump in advance of the 5 November election, announced on Saturday while speaking before a crowd in Pennsylvania that he was giving away $1m each day until election day to someone who signs his online petition supporting the US constitution.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHe handed $1m checks to two separate people over the weekend: one to a man in Harrisburg on Saturday and another to a women in Pittsburgh on Sunday. Another voter in North Carolina has won $1m. Between in-person campaign events in support of the Republican presidential candidate, Musk has tweeted his congratulations to the winners and urged other registered voters in swing states to sign his petition and enter the lottery.Election law experts had called the sweepstakes potentially illegal. The Pennsylvania governor, Josh Shapiro, had called on law enforcement to investigate.Musk, ranked by Forbes as the world’s richest person, so far has supplied at least $75m to America Pac, according to federal disclosures, making the group a crucial part of Trump’s bid to regain the White House. More

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      Elon Musk is Trump’s biggest cheerleader. How could he affect election results?

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      Less than a month before the presidential election, Elon Musk has made himself a near-constant presence in the race. At a rally for Donald Trump in Pennsylvania, Musk jumps with glee wearing a custom black Maga hat. On social media, he posts AI-generated images attacking Kamala Harris. Behind the scenes, he bankrolls one of the largest pro-Trump political action committees.The billionaire CEO of Tesla and SpaceX has emerged as a unique influence on the campaign in ways that set him apart from even the most politically active billionaires and tech elite. He is all at once a vocal Trump surrogate, campaign mega-donor, informal policy adviser, media influencer and prolific source of online disinformation. At the same time, he is the world’s richest man and the owner of one of the United States’ most influential social networks, while also operating as a government defense contractor and wielding power over critical satellite communications infrastructure.On Tuesday, Federal Election Commission filings showed that Musk donated $75m in the last three months to his pro-Trump America Pac. The group has become a major ground game operative in battleground states, and Musk is its only donor.Although the ultra-wealthy have always tried to influence politics, few people in US history have possessed the mix of immense resources and intent to use them to sway an election that Musk does. He has become symbolic of the outsize power over democracy held by the ultra-wealthy and is relishing the spotlight that his unique position has awarded him, said Larry Noble, former FEC general counsel.“He clearly likes attention,” Noble said. “Unlike a lot of very wealthy people who get involved in politics who want to be in the background and want to work through dark money groups so their name isn’t attached to certain things, he’s out there. He wants his name out there. I think he wants to be adored.”Musk’s X becomes a megaphone for TrumpTrump and Musk have a contentious past: Musk called Trump “too old” to seek re-election in a series of tweets in 2022 and Trump referred to Musk as a “bullshit artist”. But the two men have become extremely intertwined during the 2024 presidential race. Musk announced his full support for Trump in July following months of telegraphing his opposition to Joe Biden and the Democratic party. In the months since, Musk has fervently committed his money and influence to the Trump campaign. The tech mogul is fond of saying this will be “the last election” if Trump doesn’t win.Musk’s most visible Trump support takes place on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter that he bought for $44bn in 2022. Musk’s account has more than 200 million followers, and he has directed the company’s engineers to improve visibility of his tweets – the algorithm now boosts Musk’s own tweets beyond that of other users so that more people have to see them. It was Musk who made the decision to restore Trump to the social network in late 2022.As election day nears, Musk’s feed has become a constant stream of praise for Trump and vitriol against Harris. A large percentage of his tweets amplify false or misleading information, and the people who Musk interacts with on the platform are often far-right accounts with a history of spreading misinformation. Musk’s AI image generator, Grok, has also become one of the most prominent sources of political deepfakes that have permeated the election.Musk has used X to help the Trump campaign, not only by echoing its talking points or amplifying the president, but by preventing the spread of material that could be harmful. Reporter Ken Klippenstein published a dossier of background information on vice-presidential candidate JD Vance in early October that was obtained through a hack of the Trump campaign allegedly by Iran. The New York Times reported last week that the campaign asked X to prevent links to the published dossier from spreading there, which X followed through on, blocking links to it and suspending Klippenstein’s account.The move stands in contrast to Musk’s frequent proclamations about being a “free speech absolutist”, and to the incessant attacks by Republicans on content moderation decisions made by social media platforms that they claim are akin to censorship. Suffocating the Vance dossier also ran contrary to his own stated reasons for buying Twitter. Musk had tweeted that he would ensure something like Twitter’s suppression of links to the initial New York Post story of Hunter Biden’s laptop would never happen again.“People like Musk, they’re the ones using their money and lawfare to try and suppress real work that’s just trying to contribute to the public discussion,” said Callum Hood, head of research at the Center for Countering Digital Hate. Musk sued CCDH after it published research that showed hate speech and extremism had risen under Musk’s ownership. He lost the case but has appealed.Musk the mega-donorWhile Musk has rallied online for Trump, he has committed large amounts of money to financing on-the-ground operations and media campaigns for the former president. His spending is an escalation of a yearslong, quiet funding of Republican groups that has turned him into one of the country’s largest rightwing donors.Musk’s America Pac, which was founded earlier this year, is currently doing get-out-the-vote work on the ground in battleground states. Musk has in effect moved his base of operations to Pennsylvania to support the effort, according to the New York Times, and he is planning a series of events in the state following his appearance at a Trump rally there earlier this month.“That is what will decide this election, especially in Pennsylvania,” Musk said at the rally in Butler. “And honestly, you want to just be a pest. Just be a pest to everyone you know, people on the street, everywhere. Vote, vote, vote. Fight, fight, fight. Vote, vote, vote.”The money is not only flowing to get-out-the-vote initiatives, though. Musk has donated to the conservative group Building America’s Future, which has set up cash awards for people who bring the group evidence of election fraud. Building America’s Future has also funneled money to a Super Pac that HuffPost reported has run targeted ads calling Harris and her husband, Doug Emhoff, “America’s pro-Israel power couple” in areas of Michigan with large numbers of Arab and Muslim voters. The Pac is simultaneously running ads aimed at Jewish voters in Pennsylvania that accuse Harris of being too pro-Palestinian.

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      Musk is different from other wealthy donors in recent decades who have divided their political engagement into two styles, according to Benjamin Soskis, a senior research associate at the Urban Institute who is an expert in the history of philanthropy. One is to craft a non-partisan identity and work with people in both parties, for either strategic or personal reasons. The best example of that: Bill Gates. The other is to engage directly with partisan politics, but with a level of discretion, like the Koch brothers or George Soros.Musk falls into his own category, working in a highly partisan fashion but with virtually no discretion. He’s displaying “a kind of gleeful embrace of partisanship”, Soskis said, embodying a style of politics that feels similar to Trump.“That feels unusual for the wealthiest individuals – the complete eschewal of discretion as a mode of political engagement,” Soskis said. “That seems new.”A plan to gut regulatorsIf Trump and Musk occasionally seem like an odd pair on paper – Trump has threatened to remove an electric vehicle tax credit, while Musk is CEO of perhaps the world’s most famous EV company – one point of alignment is a vehement dislike for regulators. Musk’s longstanding battles with government offices like the Environmental Protection Agency and Federal Aviation Administration could shift in his favor under a Trump administration that is likely to drastically cut their resources and weaken their authority.“I suspect on some level that this is just a pocketbook issue for him, that he also wants lower taxes,” Noble, the former FEC counsel, said. “He wants to have his companies freed from safety regulations.”Over the past several years Musk has faced investigations, fines and delays over public safety concerns on a range of his projects. The FAA alleged last month that Musk’s SpaceX broke launch safety protocols, and over the years has grounded the company multiple times for violating regulations. California officials last week cited Musk’s politics and falsehoods as they voted against a SpaceX plan to conduct launches in the state. Musk sued in response. The EPA has also launched investigations into SpaceX for complaints that it is dumping unsafe amounts of wastewater into the ecosystem, while the FDA has cited Musk’s Neuralink brain implant company for animal welfare issues.Tesla’s attempts at developing fully autonomous cars have also come under scrutiny, presenting complications for a company that has staked its future on the ability to produce a self-driving robotaxi. Tesla is facing additional investigations from federal prosecutors and the Securities and Exchange Commission over its self-driving car claims, and earlier this year came under investigation from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration related to a recall of its autopilot function.These constant fights with the full alphabet of regulatory agencies has coincided with Musk making numerous public statements in favor of deregulation, as well as calling for a full-scale audit of the federal government. That idea has found purchase with Trump, who announced in September that he would launch a Musk-led government efficiency commission that would audit federal agencies for places to cut. Musk wants to call it the Department of Government Efficiency, or Doge, invoking one of his favorite memes, an expressive shiba inu.Although the plan is vague on details and fails to address the obvious conflict of interest in Musk auditing the regulators that oversee his companies, both Trump and Musk have repeatedly brought up the idea of Musk holding some role in a potential Trump administration. During an appearance on Fox News earlier this week, Trump said he would create a new position called “secretary of cost-cutting” and appoint Musk.“He’s dying to do this,” Trump said.Musk’s Maga support goes beyond businessMusk’s public rightward shift is an extension of years of allying himself with rightwing leaders around the world. In recent years, Musk has cozied up to nationalist and nativist politicians including Italy’s Giorgia Meloni and Matteo Salvini, Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu and India’s Narendra Modi.Some of these relationships have appeared to be in service of Musk’s business interests. He has forged a friendship with Argentina’s anti-regulation, far-right president, Javier Milei, who he brought on a personal tour of Tesla’s Texas headquarters and repeatedly endorsed on X. Argentina, meanwhile, has some of the world’s largest reserves of lithium, a key mineral used in electric vehicle batteries and one that Musk has previously demanded be processed in increasing quantities.Musk’s business empire is at risk when his relationships with governments sour, as evidenced during his recent conflict with Brazilian authorities that resulted in a judge banning access to X in the country. Musk ultimately capitulated to comply with local laws.But Musk’s promotion of far-right beliefs and support for Trump have also taken on a personal dimension that goes beyond business calculations. Musk’s rhetoric on X has fixated on conservative grievances and he has amplified racist and antisemitic narratives through his tweets. Anti-immigration and anti-trans views have become a frequent talking point.One of his 12 children is a trans woman, and Musk claims he was “tricked into” signing off on her medical treatment and that he “lost” his child in the process. He has since vowed to defeat what he calls the “woke mind virus”.This increasingly overt radicalization of Musk’s social and political views appears unlikely to abate following the campaign, leaving questions of how he may influence the country’s politics when the election ends regardless of its outcome.After the January 6 insurrection, Twitter, under its previous ownership, permanently suspended Trump’s account “due to the risk of further incitement of violence”. Under Musk, the tweets that got Trump banned seem quaint – and Trump is now back on the platform, as are a host of frequent superspreaders of election lies.A big test awaits Musk if Trump loses, something he joked would land him in either legal or bodily trouble with Democrats. Will he accept a loss? Or would he use X to keep spreading conspiracies he’s already promoted – that mail ballots are “too risky” or that non-citizens are swaying US elections, two of Trump’s pet election issues.X, under Musk, “is building now, as we speak, another fresh stolen election narrative, and we all know what the consequences could be”, Hood said. More

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      Musk steers X disputes to conservative Texas courts in service terms update

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      Elon Musk’s X has updated its terms of service to steer any disputes from users of the social media platform formerly known as Twitter to a federal court in Texas whose judges frequently deliver victories to conservative litigants in political cases.New terms of service that will take effect on 15 November specify that any lawsuits against X by users must be exclusively filed in the US district court for the northern district of Texas or state courts in Tarrant county, Texas.It is common for companies to include venue clauses in their terms of service specifying which forum would hear any disputes filed against them. But the choice of the northern district of Texas stands out because X is not located in the district.Following a move from San Francisco, X is headquartered in Bastrop, Texas, near Austin, whose federal court is in Texas’s western district. That district has far fewer Republican-appointed judges than the northern district, which has become a favored destination for conservative activists and business groups to pursue lawsuits seeking to block parts of Joe Biden’s agenda, a tactic Democratic lawmakers say smacks of “judge-shopping”.“It’s hard to imagine that’s unrelated to this new language,” said Stephen Vladeck, a law professor at Georgetown University.X did not respond to a request for comment. Musk, the world’s richest man, has increasingly embraced conservative causes and become a major financial supporter of Donald Trump in his campaign to win the 5 November presidential election.Texas’s northern district already is the host of two lawsuits X has filed after several brands pulled ads from Musk’s platform, including one against liberal watchdog group Media Matters after it published a report that said ads had appeared next to posts supporting Nazism.X, which the billionaire Musk bought in 2022, sued Media Matters last year, alleging the group defamed the platform. The lawsuit will go to trial in Fort Worth, Texas, next year. Media Matters has called the lawsuit meritless.X has also filed an antitrust lawsuit accusing several advertisers of conspiring to stage a boycott, causing it to lose revenue. Both of X’s lawsuits were initially assigned to the US district judge Reed O’Connor, a Fort Worth judge who once declared the Obamacare health insurance law unconstitutional in a ruling that was later overturned. He has since blocked Biden administration policies on gun control and LGBTQ+ rights.The judge, an appointee of George W Bush, the Republican former president, stepped aside from X’s antitrust case in August after National Public Radio reported that financial disclosure reports showed O’Connor had owned shares of another Musk company, Tesla. But the judge has declined to recuse himself from the Media Matters case.O’Connor is one of two active judges in Fort Worth’s federal courthouse. The other is Mark Pittman, a Trump appointee. More

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      JD Vance is the handpicked leader of the antidemocracy movement in America | Robert Reich

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      JD Vance, the Republican candidate for vice-president, will almost certainly be the Republican presidential candidate in 2028, regardless of whether Donald Trump wins in November.But who is JD Vance, really? An opportunist chameleon who once viewed Donald Trump as “Hitler” and is now his pit bull?Or does Vance have an agenda over and above mere political ambition?In one of the most important exchanges of Tuesday’s vice-presidential debate, Vance refused to say that the former president lost the 2020 election, and he downplayed the violent events of January 6. Vance also declined to rule out challenging the outcome of the upcoming election even if votes were certified by every state leader as legitimate.Trump picked Vance as his running mate because Vance publicly stated he’d do what Mike Pence refused to do – overturn democracy and place the US under Maga control.In response to a question ABC’s George Stephanopoulos asked Vance last February – “Had you been vice-president on January 6th, would you have certified the election results?” – Vance said: “If I had been vice-president, I would have told the states, like Pennsylvania, Georgia, and so many others, that we needed to have multiple slates of electors, and I think the US Congress should have fought over it from there.”In 2020, Vance alleged that the 2020 election was stolen and that Biden’s immigration policy meant “more Democrat voters pouring into this country”. In 2022, he suggested that Democrats were attempting to “transform the electorate” amid an immigrant “invasion”.Echoing the so-called “great replacement theory”, Vance told voters, “You’re talking about a shift in the democratic makeup of this country that would mean we never win, meaning Republicans would never win a national election in this country ever again.”In contrast to Trump, who has no ideology except accumulating power and wealth for himself and taking revenge on those who would deny these to him, Vance does have an ideology. He’s the emerging leader of the anti-democracy movement in the US.Vance would never have become a senator from Ohio in 2022 were it not for the billionaire tech financier Peter Thiel, who staked $15m on Vance’s election – a major portion of all the funds that went into Vance’s race.Thiel knew what he was buying. Vance had worked for Thiel’s California venture capital firm before running for the Senate and was part of Thiel’s libertarian community of rich crypto bros, tech executives, back-to-the-landers and disaffected far-right intellectuals.Because Thiel had been a major funder of Trump’s 2016 presidential run, he had significant influence with Trump when urging him to pick Vance for his vice-president.Why has Thiel been such a strong sponsor of Vance? Because Thiel sees in his protege a future leader of a political movement to turn the US away from democracy. “For Peter,” said one of the people familiar with his thinking, “Vance is a generational bet.”Thiel is a self-styled libertarian who once wrote: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”Hello? Freedom is incompatible with democracy only if you view democracy as a potential constraint on your wealth and power.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThat’s the point. Thiel and Vance – along with Elon Musk, Steve Bannon, Blake Masters, tech entrepreneur David Sacks, Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, Palantir adviser Jacob Helberg, Sequoia Capital’s Doug Leone, blogger Curtis Yarvin, and others in the anti-democracy movement – believe that the only way true libertarians can win in the US is for a Caesar-like figure to wrest power from the US establishment and install a monarchical regime, run like a startup.Yarvin comes as close as anyone as being the intellectual godfather of the anti-democracy movement. He has written that real political power in the United States is held by a liberal amalgam of universities and the mainstream press, whose commitment to equality and justice is eroding social order.In Yarvin’s view, democratic governments are inefficient and wasteful; they should be replaced with sovereign joint-stock corporations whose major “shareholders” select an executive with total power, who serves at their pleasure. Yarvin refers to the city-state of Singapore as an example of a successful authoritarian regime.How to achieve Yarvin’s vision? The first step, as Vance offered in a 2021 podcast, is to replace “every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state … with our people. And when the courts stop you, stand before the country, and say” – as did Andrew Jackson – that “the chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.”Vance has been anointed by Thiel and the rest of the anti-democracy movement as the post-Trump president, tasked with replacing the US establishment with an authoritarian regime.Make no mistake: the foundation for the US’s first anti-democracy president is being laid right now.

      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