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‘Musk? He’s horrendous’: Martha Lane Fox on diversity, tech bros and International Women’s Day
by Evelyn Reynolds 8 March 2025, 06:37
As Elon Musk grinned in the Oval Office, one of Britain’s most influential tech investors looked on in horror. “He is absolutely horrendous. I have said it multiple times: I think it is horrifying what is happening,” says Martha Lane Fox.For the British peer and ex-Twitter board member, the sight of Musk holding forth from the bully pulpit of Donald Trump’s White House shows the Silicon Valley dream has gone sour.“The richest man in the world, who can stand there alongside the president, and kind of carte blanche make jokes about how he’s carving up people’s jobs in the government. Then he can be there with a chainsaw laughing on stage…“It is really, really alarming, and I find it extremely unpleasant at a values-based level – but also, just how can we be watching this in plain sight? It makes me feel very anxious. I think it is gross.”In an interview with the Observer to mark International Women’s Day, the president of the British Chambers of Commerce (BCC) warned the diversity pushback orchestrated by Trump and his tech bro acolytes will not only damage society, but also the economy at large.Since his return to the White House, the US president has shut down all federal diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, while Musk’s “department of government efficiency” (Doge) is ripping up funding schemes.Some of the world’s biggest companies are following suit. Amid a wider pushback against everything from environmental targets to sustainable development, among the most prominent taking part are US finance and tech companies, including Goldman Sachs, Accenture and Amazon, while UK businesses such as GSK have also fallen in line.“He needs to be contained,” Lady Lane Fox says of Musk’s role in the rollback. “I find it extraordinary that the richest man in the world is trampling all over these things and that we still have kind of fanboying from the tech sector. It’s already been corrosive for society, and I would argue it is going to continue to be.”For businesses, she says the bottom line is that companies that take diversity seriously appeal to the widest possible employee talent pool and are better placed to target a broad range of customers. This, she adds, is about profit as much as social justice. However, she has a broader concern about the future.“The first thing, it’s financial. But the second thing, it’s about power and money – like everything, right?“If you’re looking at a sector like the digital sector, where there’s the growth in jobs, growth in opportunity – it is the growth sector in the economy. Yet you are not including a whole bunch of people in that. Then you are going to be creating inequality. Full stop. So it’s financial and it’s a question of social justice.”Given the close ties between Britain and the US, there is a view that where corporate America treads, the UK naturally follows. But there are signs that some UK businesses – and even the British operations of some US companies – are prepared to stand apart.The accountancy firm Deloitte instructed staff working on contracts for the US government to remove pronouns from their emails, while also announcing the end of its DEI programme. But its UK boss told staff its British operations remained “committed to [its] diversity goals”.“It feels as though global companies rooted in the US are making a politically motivated slight shift in emphasis and tilt, through to rowing back everything. And it does feel a bit more tempered here,” says Lane Fox.UK businesses have an opportunity to do something different, she says, which could bring financial benefits. “I think we’ll build more robust companies, attract talent and have a much better shot at building the most resilient companies of the future.”For almost three decades, Lane Fox has built a career – and multimillion-pound fortune – in tech. She made her first big money floating Lastminute.com, the online travel site co-founded alongside fellow Oxford graduate Brent Hoberman in 1998.View image in fullscreenShe joined the board of Twitter – now X – in 2016, landing herself a huge payday in Musk’s $44bn hostile takeover in 2022, before he dissolved the board and appointed himself the sole director.Seeing Musk in the Oval Office, parading his son X on his shoulders, made her question the gender divide. “Can you imagine if that was a woman? Can you imagine what that would look like? I mean, I just think the whole thing is really gross.”But while railing against Musk in a personal capacity, the BCC president does not suggest this approach is for everyone. “It is really tricky to navigate. You have a responsibility to your customers and your employees that might be different to our personal view sometimes.”Government regulation to enshrine diversity targets is also a bad idea, she says, preferring instead that companies report their progress. “Keeping it in the light, keeping up the reporting, is important – keeping up good investors, looking at the right metrics and investing in the right companies all helps.”However, not enough progress is being made. Analysis this week showed that worsening unemployment and workforce participation for women has pushed the UK behind Canada to its lowest global ranking for workplace equality among large economies in a decade.The gender pay gap has been declining slowly over time, but average pay is still 7% less for women than for men. It is a challenge Lane Fox is all too aware of. “Look at the data and it is really freaking depressing – and it is not moving,” she says.“What worries me is that it’s far too easy to find numbers that I thought we were moving on from.“In this week of International Women’s Day, we see representation at the executive level has gone back. I see progress on boards is still good at the FTSE 100 level, but bad at FTSE 250 and 350 level.“I know there will be people in the sector thinking: ‘Oh, here she goes again.’ That’s true of many women [that people think that]. But it is so important to keep making these arguments.” More
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Trump to host crypto leaders after creating strategic reserve of bitcoin
by Evelyn Reynolds 7 March 2025, 17:09
Cryptocurrency industry elite are set to meet with Donald Trump at the White House on Friday to discuss how the government will enact Trump’s vision of making the country the “crypto capital of the world”. The day before, the president signed an executive order creating a strategic reserve of cryptocurrency for the United States.Trump will host players including Michael Saylor, co-founder and the executive chair of MicroStrategy, and Zach Witkoff, one of the founders of the president’s own crypto business, World Liberty Financial, according to the executives’ social media posts.Vlad Tenev, the CEO of Robinhood Markets, will also attend, according to a spokesperson for Robinhood. Witkoff and Saylor did not respond to requests for comment. Attenders expect the event to focus on Trump’s plans to build the strategic reserve, which the president said will contain bitcoin and four other coins. Trump directed the secretaries of treasury and commerce to develop “budget-neutral strategies” for acquiring additional bitcoin that have no “incremental costs” on taxpayers.“For the first time, industry leaders feel they’re walking into a collaborative discussion,” said Les Borsai, co-founder of Wave Digital Assets, a crypto investment adviser, who said he did not receive an invitation.Participants said they were focused on any further details on the strategic reserve, a government stockpile of crypto assets.The reserve will be capitalized with bitcoin owned by the federal government that was forfeited as part of criminal or civil asset forfeiture proceedings, the White House “crypto czar”, billionaire David Sacks, said in a post on social media platform X.“This [strategic reserve] is going to be the biggest point of contention for many of us,” said JP Richardson, co-founder and CEO of Exodus, a bitcoin wallet developer. Although he owns the four other coins that Trump has suggested including in the reserve, he does not think they have a place in a strategic reserve.“Crypto has made big strides, but it’s still a relatively nascent industry,” Richardson said. The other coins are smaller and function in a very different way, one he said may create more risk. Brian Armstrong, co-founder and CEO of Coinbase, posted on X on Sunday that a bitcoin-only reserve was “probably … the best option”. Both Richardson and Armstrong will attend the summit.In a post on X, Brad Garlinghouse, the CEO of Ripple, who also confirmed his attendance at the summit, hailed Trump’s recognition that “we live in a multichain world” stretching beyond bitcoin. XRP, the coin tied to Ripple, is one of the four other cryptocurrencies Trump has suggested may be added to a crypto reserve. Attendees said they were optimistic about working with an administration that views crypto as a mainstream asset class and expressed hope for a straightforward regulatory process.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“What everyone really needs to have at this point is clarity on what the level of scrutiny and intensity of regulation will be, who the key regulators will be,” said Yesha Yadav, the associate dean and a professor of law at Vanderbilt University. That could speed up the process of approval by the Securities and Exchange Commission of a flurry of new listings of exchange-traded funds.Trump’s family has launched cryptocurrency meme coins and he also holds a stake in World Liberty Financial, a crypto platform, which has sparked some conflict-of-interest concerns. His aides have said Trump has handed over control of his business ventures, which are being reviewed by outside ethics lawyers. The White House did not respond to a request for comment. More
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Crypto giant Tether CEO on cooperating with Trump administration: ‘We’ve never been shady’
by Evelyn Reynolds 7 March 2025, 15:21
Paolo Ardoino, CEO of the cryptocurrency company Tether, was flying over Switzerland last week as he contemplated the changing regulatory landscape.Tether used to be at war with the establishment. Now it is the establishment.The crypto giant – tether is the most traded cryptocurrency in the world – has had a strange trip. Four years ago, banks were dropping Tether as a client, and regulators in New York had the company against the wall over questions about commingled client and corporate funds. Treasury officials were complaining that dollar-backed cryptocurrencies enjoyed the international privileges of the dollar without the responsibilities of preventing its misuse. Federal investigators were looking into Tether for possible violations of anti-money-laundering and sanctions rules.The cryptocurrency industry anecdotally – and conspiratorially – describes the Biden administration’s posture toward crypto as a systematic effort to debank crypto in the form of tactics such as “Operation Choke Point 2.0”. Ardoino says Tether’s leadership needed to become globetrotters in search of someone to take their business.And it’s a lot of business. Tether currently is the 17th largest holder of US government debt, with nearly as much in treasury bonds in its digital vaults as Saudi Arabia. Tether’s value remains stable because it is pegged one-to-one to the dollar, meaning the value of each individual tether coin is $1. The company backs the total value of the cryptocurrency with dollar assets like treasury bonds in an American bank – in this case, $140bn deposited with Cantor Fitzgerald.Tether comes just behind bitcoin and ethereum as the most valuable cryptocurrency, and by most measures it is the most widely traded. Investors in countries with unstable currencies, like Turkey or Argentina with their 40%-plus inflation rates, use it to hold on to the value of their savings against the dollar. Crypto traders use tether to park their digital assets in a safe place.The degree of cooperation between Tether and law enforcement reflects an evolving shift in the government’s posture toward the company, even as federal agencies had been cracking down on cryptocurrency more broadly under Joe Biden.“We’ve never been shady,” Ardoino said. “The company has been great. It has been attacked. Debanked. You know, when you’re trying to be a disruptor – in a good sense – you are going to always be attacked by the establishment.”Previous administrations’ hostility to crypto – and perhaps to tether in particular – was the product of strategic mistakes the company had made, Ardoino said.“We were very naive. We thought: ‘Oh, we are going to keep our head down.’ We were not communicating. We were not telling what’s going on, and that was used against us,” he said. “And that’s fair, right? So, if someone is not communicating, or you feel is not transparent enough, then that is how people get to fear.”After settling its case with New York regulators in 2021, Tether began to come out of its shell, publishing quarterly statements and expanding its cooperation with the government. Today, things are different for Tether. Its banker – the Cantor Fitzgerald CEO Howard Lutnick – has been confirmed as secretary of commerce in the Trump administration. The company says it is proud of its cooperation with US law enforcement. Though Tether’s holding company is headquartered in crypto-friendly El Salvador, the cryptocurrency is expanding in a way that Ardoino says will help the United States secure its position as the world’s reserve currency.“We have 400 million users in emerging markets,” Ardoino said. “We are basically selling the US debt outside the US … We are decentralizing the US debt as well, basically pushing for dollar hegemony. That’s how the US can maintain its dominance when it comes to its currency.”It’s a line Lutnick might have written into his confirmation hearing speech himself. The Senate confirmed Lutnick on a party-line vote 51-45 in February. Ardoino said their relationship is at arm’s-length now, though.“Cantor [Fitzgerald], they are our custodian. So, we will continue to have this relationship with Cantor,” he said. “They have been a great custodian for us. They are primary dealers, so we can have basically direct access to the Fed[eral Reserve] to purchase [government] debt. With Howard, when he goes into government, we cannot talk to him.”Lutnick has been a vocal backer of cryptocurrency and tether’s position in the industry in particular. Senators had some sharp questions for him about tether at his 29 January hearing, with Senator Maria Cantwell pressing him about audited holdings.“Do you think the market needs to comply with audits about whether one-to-one ratios really exist on stablecoins?” Cantwell asked Lutnick.“I believe stablecoins, US dollar stablecoins, should be audited, should be completely backed by US treasuries 100%,” Lutnick replied.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“How do we prove that?” Cantwell then asked.“A US audit and one-to-one backed by US treasuries,” Lutnick continued. “And lastly, you can’t change the rules; meaning if someone has bought the stablecoin, you can’t change the price. If someone’s made a deposit with you, you can’t say: ‘I’m going to withdraw, you’re going to change the price.’”She also asked about reports that “as much as $19bn of Tether could be illicit activity by the North Koreans, the Russians, the Chinese. And so, what do we do about that? What is your solution?”“It’s like blaming Apple because criminals use Apple phones,” Lutnick replied. “It’s just a product. We don’t pick on the US treasury because criminals use dollars. So, I think it’s just a product … They are signed up with all US federal law enforcement. They follow all federal law enforcement instantly.”Ardoino rejects the suggestion of tether’s usefulness to criminals. “There is no financial institution – even the big banks, they don’t have this breadth of collaboration,” he said, citing more than 200 agencies in 50 countries that work with Tether.A Swiss bank might rebuff an American law enforcement agency coming for money in its accounts. Tether, however, touts its ability to return money stolen from others. For example, a notable “pig butchering” scam last year sent Shan Hanes, CEO of Heartland Tri-State Bank in Elkhart, Kansas, to a 293-month federal prison term for embezzling $47.1m and sending it overseas as cryptocurrency. Tether was able to recover $8.3m for the victims.The traditional banking system is more porous than a cryptocurrency wallet right now, Ardoino argued.“When [criminals are] finally trying to use blockchain and move money on the blockchain in USDT [tether’s trading symbol], we see them and we freeze them,” he said. “And it takes 15 minutes to freeze an address from our stock. We are much more granular and faster than any bank or any other financial institution. So, I’ve been saying very loudly and publicly that any criminal using USDT is a very stupid criminal, because we can see everything and we can catch it.”Ardoino does see a threat in an adversarial regulatory relationship toward crypto, both in the United States and Europe. Both Coinbase, the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the US, and EU-based exchanges removed USDT because it does not comply with the EU’s Markets in Crypto-Assets regulation, which went into effect at the end of 2024. Traders can hold Tether in non-custodial wallets but can’t trade it on an exchange that complies with European regulations.“I think that the US understands very well that they should very, very much avoid a DeepSeek moment for finance and crypto,” Ardoino said, suggesting that it is possible that some invention in a stealth-mode lab somewhere beyond the industry’s attention could radically change the competitive environment. Ardoino was referring to the Hangzhou-based startup DeepSeek, a large language model AI that emerged seemingly from nowhere in January that could compete with Meta and OpenAI’s offerings at a fraction of the cost. Its emergence is disrupting AI business plans by changing the competitive environment.Ardoino hopes the new administration will have settled on its approach to regulations – likely to be much friendlier than its predecessor’s – by September, he said. “I think that they want to get regulations done by June. June would be very aggressive as a timeline, but September is realistic.” More
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White House to overhaul $42.5bn Biden-era internet plan – probably to Elon Musk’s advantage
by Evelyn Reynolds 5 March 2025, 14:36
The Trump administration is preparing to overhaul a $42.5bn Biden-era program designed to connect tens of millions of rural Americans to reliable and affordable high-speed internet, in a move that is expected to benefit billionaire Elon Musk.Howard Lutnick, the commerce department secretary who has oversight of the federal program, recently told senior officials inside the department that he wants to make significant changes to the federal program, sources with knowledge of the matter told the Guardian.Instead of promoting an expensive buildout of fiber optic networks – as the Biden administration sought to do – Lutnick has said he wants states to choose the internet technology that would be low cost for taxpayers.That, experts agree, would favor satellite companies like Musk’s Starlink. Musk, whose company owns about 62% of all operating satellites, has not hidden his disdain for Biden-era program, telling voters last year that he believed it should be brought down to “zero”.Sources spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter.Experts generally agree that using satellite services costs less to connect difficult-to-reach homes than fiber. But fiber also provides a more reliable, faster and less expensive option for consumers.Any change to the program could face substantial pushback from states and Congress, including Republican senators who have previously sought assurances from administration officials that the federal program, which is expected to generate billions of dollars in long-term economic growth across some of the poorest states in the US, would largely be left alone.The so-called Bead program (which stands for “Broadband Equity Access and Deployment”) was passed with bipartisan support in 2021 and aimed to connect 25 million Americans to high-speed internet. Under the Biden plan, states were left to make their own plans, request federal funding and hold competitive bids for internet service providers that would build the network. Given different choices of how to connect homes to high-speed internet, the Biden administration said it wanted states to build fiber optic networks, which are expensive to set up but are considered reliable and can offer affordable rates to consumers. In cases where fiber optic networks were too expensive to build, states could opt for cheaper options, like using satellite.“I don’t think there is doubt that Bead will continue,” said Blair Levin, policy advisor to New Street Research, a telecommunications and technology analysis firm. “What is in doubt is whether people get a long-term solution or something that is definitely good for Elon Musk.”Lutnick has told commerce officials that he wants Bead to be “tech neutral”, which means not favoring one technology over another. It is unclear whether Lutnick would try to force states to choose satellite service over others.Such changes – which would probably be challenged by individual states – would radically alter a program that has faced some criticism but has generally been embraced by both Republican and Democratic governors across the US, who have been expecting to receive billions of dollars in federal funding. The funds would provide an economic lifeline that would connect an estimated 56m household in mostly rural communities who are unserved or underserved to high-speed internet. It is estimated that the program, as it stands now, would generate at least 380,000 new jobs and fuel more than $3tn in economic growth.The commerce department did not respond to a request for comment.“The driving force behind Bead was parity. Can you get internet service in rural Wyoming what you can get in suburban Denver?” said one analyst who requested anonymity because they are providing advice to some states on the issue. “Fiber is utterly critical. If the internet is the most important infrastructure asset a state has, and you are using satellite, then it means you are not building something in your state. It can be turned on and off by the satellite provider.”Any dramatic change to the federal program also raises legal questions. States have spent years planning for Bead, including holding competitive bids for companies to build fiber networks. It is unclear whether the commerce department can force these states to restart their planning from scratch. The overriding criticism of the Biden program is that the bureaucracy took too long, and that not a single household has yet been connected to high-speed internet yet. The Trump administration might argue that states may as well start again to benefit taxpayers.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionFor states like Louisiana, which was poised to receive $1.355bn under the Biden program and was the first state to get full approval for its plan, any change could upend estimates that the fiber optic build-out would drive $2bn to $3bn in economic growth for the state and between 8,000 and 10,000 new jobs. Planned investments, like a $10bn AI center that is poised to be built by Meta in Richland parish, a poor farming region in the north-east corner of the state, would depend on fiber optic connections. In a recent letter to Lutnick, the Louisiana governor, Jeff Landry, said the state would be ready to break ground on its fiber optic network within the first 100 days of the administration.The top Louisiana official working on the program, Veneeth Iyengar, has said about 95% of the state’s funds will be used to build fiber, and the remaining 5% will be used for cable, fixed wireless and satellite.Trump administration officials have balked at the program’s price tag.Musk made his views about the program clear at a town hall meeting in Pittsburgh last October, before the election. When he was asked about what he would do to help make the government more efficient, Musk immediately raised Bead as an example of a program he would cut.“I would say that program should be zero,” he quipped at the time, while also suggesting that his own satellite company, Starlink, could provide internet connectivity to rural homes at a fraction of the connectivity cost.Starlink did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Some Republican senators asked Lutnick about his views on Bead during his confirmation hearing, but he offered no promises. When Republican senator Dan Sullivan of Alaska asked Lutnick whether he could assure him that commerce would not rely on Starlink “as a solution to all of our problems”, Lutnick declined to answer, saying only that he would work to pursue the “most efficient and effective solutions for Alaskans”.Do you have a tip on this story? Please message us on Signal at +1 646 886 8761 More
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UN human rights chief ‘deeply worried by fundamental shift’ in US
by Evelyn Reynolds 3 March 2025, 15:18
The UN human rights chief has warned of a “fundamental shift” in the US and sounded the alarm over the growing power of “unelected tech oligarchs”, in a stinging rebuke of Washington weeks into Donald Trump’s presidency.Volker Türk said there had been bipartisan support for human rights in the US for decades but said he was “now deeply worried by the fundamental shift in direction that is taking place domestically and internationally”.Without referring to Trump by name, Türk, an Austrian lawyer who heads the UN’s rights body, criticised the Republican president’s measures to overturn longstanding equity and anti-discrimination policies, as well as repeated threats against the media and politicians.“In a paradoxical mirror image, policies intended to protect people from discrimination are now labelled as discriminatory. Progress is being rolled back on gender equality,” Türk said in comments to the UN human rights council in Geneva.“Disinformation, intimidation and threats, notably against journalists and public officials, risk undermining the work of independent media and the functioning of institutions,” he added. “Divisive rhetoric is being used to distort, deceive and polarise. This is generating fear and anxiety among many.”Since returning to power, Trump has continued to attack the press. Last month, he barred the Associated Press news agency – on which local and international media have traditionally relied for US government reporting – from the White House.His administration has launched a purge of anti-discrimination policies under the umbrella term of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), and moved to slash rights for transgender people. At the same time, the administration has sent panic through communities with its widespread and muddled immigration crackdown.Internationally, the US has moved to withdraw funding for international organisations that promote health and human rights, such as the World Health Organization, and imposed economic sanctions on the international criminal court, which is investigating war crimes in Gaza.Washington’s traditional allies, including Canada, France and Germany, are feeling increasingly alarmed as Trump lashes out at democratic leaders while expressing a fondness for autocrats, including the Russian president, Vladimir Putin.In his speech on Monday, Türk presented a concerned overview of the global rights situation, saying the world was “going through a period of turbulence and unpredictability”.“[What] we are experiencing goes to the very core of the international order – an order that has brought us an unprecedented level of global stability. We cannot allow the fundamental global consensus around international norms and institutions, built painstakingly over decades, to crumble before our eyes.”He called out the growing influence wielded by “a handful of unelected tech oligarchs” who “have our data: they know where we live, what we do, our genes and our health conditions, our thoughts, our habits, our desires and our fears”.Türk added: “They know how to manipulate us.”While his comments were not directed at the US, they come at a time of rising and consolidated power among American tech and social media billionaires who have fallen in line behind Trump.They include Elon Musk, who owns X and has been the 78-year-old president’s most prominent backer, but also Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, who has ended factchecking programmes on Facebook and Instagram – a move the UN chief, António Guterres, has warned will open the “floodgates to more hate, more threats, and more violence”.Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, the world’s third-richest man and owner of the Washington Post, which in the last US presidential election declined to endorse a candidate for the first time in decades, recently banned opinion articles that did not support his views on “personal liberties and free markets”.Türk, whose comments were not limited to the situation in the US but could also apply to tech leaders in China and India, said that “any form of unregulated power can lead to oppression, subjugation, and even tyranny – the playbook of the autocrat”. More
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‘I’m selling the Nazi mobile’: Tesla owners offload cars after Musk’s fascist-style salutes
by Evelyn Reynolds 2 March 2025, 12:00
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View image in fullscreenWhen Elon Musk unveiled Tesla’s “truck of the future” in 2019, Filipos could barely contain his excitement. He quickly paid $100 to get on the waitlist. Filipos described himself as a “true Tesla fanboy”, and the Cybertruck would be the third vehicle he’d buy from the company.“When the Cybertruck came out, I watched the live event that night, and my wife was sitting there going, ‘No. No. No,’” said Filipos, who lives in a suburb of Philadelphia and whose last name is being withheld for fear of online retribution. Despite his wife’s disapproval, Filipos loved the bulky trapezoidal truck. “I was truly geeking out on it,” he said.Now things have changed. Filipos bought a Ford F-150 Lightning instead of the Cybertruck. And even though his other car, a Model 3 Performance Tesla, had just 30,000 miles on it, he traded it in for an Acura in February. Frustration had been building for Filipos over the last few months, but the turning point was when Musk did back-to-back Nazi-style salutes during an inauguration day celebration for Donald Trump in January.“I didn’t want to be saddled with a vehicle that was associated with something so awful,” Filipos said. “When you own a vehicle like that, you are advertising for that company.”Filipos is part of a growing movement of Tesla enthusiasts who are now turning their backs on the company – selling their cars, dropping their leases and getting rid of Tesla stock. Many say that, while they still love the cars, they can’t square the CEO’s politics and behavior with their own. Musk is synonymous with Tesla; his vehicles, the Cybertruck in particular, are his calling cards.The Guardian spoke with three people who offloaded their Teslas in protest of Musk over the last month alone. All said they did so explicitly because of Musk’s salutes during the inauguration. Another person who spoke with the Guardian on the condition of anonymity started the process of dropping her lease on the day of the salute with an email to Tesla reading: “Your boss is a Nazi.”Across Reddit, TikTok, Instagram and Facebook, dozens of posts are popping up with people saying they are also getting rid of their Teslas. Some have added photos of themselves flipping the bird as a goodbye gesture to their cars. 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When you own a vehicle like that, you are advertising for that company
One celebrity Tesla owner has even taken part. Singer Sheryl Crow posted a video of herself to Instagram waving goodbye to her vehicle as it was hauled off in a flatbed truck on Valentine’s Day. Her caption read: “There comes a time when you have to decide who you are willing to align with. So long Tesla.” She said she was donating the sale proceeds to National Public Radio because it was under threat by “President Musk”.Musk, the world’s richest man, has wholeheartedly thrown his weight behind Trump. He donated $288m to his presidential campaign and uses X, the social media platform he owns, as a megaphone to tout the new administration’s policies and goad anyone who disagrees. This support has earned Musk a coveted position heading the unofficial “department of government efficiency” (Doge), which is tasked with cutting federal spending. His government overhaul has been so sweeping that Democrats such as Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer have called Doge an “unelected shadow government”.Musk and Tesla did not return requests for comment. The CEO responded to backlash over his fascist-style salute with jokes and memes on X.‘No Swastikars’: protesters across the US lambast MuskThe Tesla selloffs come amid nationwide US protests against Musk and his actions. Protesters have gathered outside Tesla showrooms in cities including New York, Seattle and Kansas City, and in towns as small as West Chester, Pennsylvania.In San Francisco, roughly 100 people descended on the city’s Tesla showroom in late February chanting: “Hey hey, ho ho, Elon Musk has got to go”. They unfurled a banner reading “Musk must GO” showing a boot kicking a swastika and carried signs saying “No Swastikars”, an apparent new nickname for Teslas. Passing cars drove by honking enthusiastically.Several anti-Musk websites and social media accounts have also popped up. Tesla Takedown encourages people to protest. One of the organizers is actor and activist Alex Winter, the titular Bill from Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure. A TikTok account called Cybertruck hunters has also surfaced. It’s filled with posts of people projecting anti-Musk videos onto the massive rear bumpers of Cybertrucks.The Instagram account Everyone Hates Elon is distributing stickers that say, “Don’t buy a Swasticar” and sending out posters for people to plaster around their cities that say “Goes from 0 to 1939 in 3 seconds” with a picture of Musk doing the Nazi salute. Tesla showrooms and individual cars are also being vandalized, according to Wired. One Cybertruck in downtown Manhattan was spraypainted with a swastika last week.This anti-Musk protest movement started to percolate over the summer, when Tesla owners began to put bumper stickers on their own cars that said: “I bought this before Elon went crazy”.Rebekkah, who lives in the Tampa area and is only going by her first name for fear of retribution, said she started looking for one of those bumper stickers to put on her Model 3 after Musk endorsed Trump for president in July.“It was just the shame of driving it around and getting out of it,” she said. “The potential optics that we were supporting him.”Rebekkah bought the car in 2020 because she was passionate about the climate crisis and wanted an electric vehicle, she said. She was initially thrilled with her Tesla, but like Filipos, things started to sour as she watched the Musk-Trump alliance grow. Then came Musk’s two-time inauguration day salute.“I was dead set on selling the car after that,” Rebekkah said, adding that her grandmother was a Holocaust survivor. Rebekkah said she called her mom and told her: “I’m selling the Nazi mobile.”The car was gone within days. “We haven’t looked back since,” Rebekkah said. She put down a deposit for a Rivian.Tesla owners sell at a loss: ‘I happily paid $4,000 to get rid of that car’Ron likewise decided to sell his Tesla after Musk’s salute, even though he knew he would lose money. He bought his first Tesla in 2020, a gray Model 3 Performance, and loved it from the minute he test drove it. In 2023, he upgraded to a Model Y. Ron said he hadn’t really followed Musk at the time, but last summer, he began to pay attention to the billionaire’s increasing involvement in politics.“I started looking back at some of the things he said, and I started to feel guilty that I didn’t do more research beforehand,” said Ron, who lives in Los Angeles and is only going by his first name for fear of retribution. “I always just assumed he was a quirky, nerdy, you know, space-first exploration technology type of guy.”As time progressed and Musk became more outspoken, Ron said he grew increasingly embarrassed to drive the Tesla. “I felt like I was driving a billboard that supported his endeavors and his thoughts and ideologies,” he said.In the beginning of February, Ron swapped out his Model Y, which only had 15,000 miles, for another electric vehicle, a Hyundai Ioniq. He still owed thousands of dollars on his Tesla. 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I felt like I was driving a billboard that supported his endeavors and his thoughts and ideologies
“I guess you could say I happily paid $4,000 to get rid of that car,” Ron said. “That’s how much I disagree with his politics.”Tesla sales have plummeted over the last year. In California, the biggest US market for electric vehicles, they fell by 12%. And registrations for new Tesla vehicles fell by 11.6%, according to the California New Car Dealers Association, even as overall registrations for electric vehicles have grown in the state. Nationwide, the slump in Tesla sales marked the company’s first decline in how many cars it delivered to buyers annually. It’s unclear if the decrease can be fully attributed to Musk, since the electric vehicle market has seen increased competition over the past couple of years, especially out of China.In Europe, Tesla has taken an even more severe hit. In January, sales fell by 12% in Britain, 38% in Norway and 63% in France, according to the New York Times. Sales in Germany fell by 59% that month, coinciding with Musk’s outspoken support for the far-right alternative party AfD and with scolding Germans for focusing too much on “past guilt” for the Holocaust.Tesla stock flies, then plummetsIn spite of its poor sales and weak earnings reports, Tesla’s stock price soared in 2024 – likely boosted by Musk’s proximity to Trump and a regulatory outlook that’s friendlier than ever to the car maker. The day after the election alone, shares jumped 14%. But, as Musk has become increasingly involved in the day-to-day of the new administration, that has changed, too. Since mid-December, Tesla’s stock has plunged 25%.On social media, people are encouraging others to sell their Tesla stock. Reddit has threads of people posting their share sales with headlines like, “Never normalize Nazis” and “This is my way of fighting Nazis and I’m damn proud.” Since inauguration day, there’s been a 21% selloff of Tesla stock, according to ABC. Musk has lost more than $100bn from his personal fortune and the company’s valuation has now dipped below $1tn.Filipos is one of the people who sold his stock. He first bought 40 shares in 2020, not long after he joined the Cybertruck waitlist. Over the years, that number grew to 717 shares. He planned to keep holding, but when Musk endorsed Trump last summer, Filipos changed his mind.“I had to come to a reckoning,” he said. Filipos didn’t see Trump as standing up for the environment, and Musk’s endorsement “was against what I perceived as the original vision for Tesla”.In late July, Filipos sold all of his shares – even though he knew he probably would have made more money if he held. Now, he and his wife have gotten rid of their Model 3 too and are free of all things Tesla.“We feel lighter not being saddled with a symbol of hate,” he said. More
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Read the signs of Trump’s federal firings: AI is coming for private sector jobs too
by Evelyn Reynolds 2 March 2025, 12:00
The Trump administration recently announced that it would be laying off approximately 6,700 workers at the Internal Revenue Service, about 8% of the people employed by the agency. Tens of thousands of federal employees at other agencies are also losing their jobs.The timing could not be worse. We’re in the middle of the tax season with corporations and individuals facing filing deadlines in March and April. Millions of returns will need to be processed. Refunds will be due. Questions will need to be answered. But that’s not all.In just a few short months, Congress will be debating – and probably passing – new rules that will significantly change our tax laws. Republicans are pushing to either extend or make permanent many of the provisions of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, most of which expire at the end of this year. There are proposals to eliminate taxes on tips, social security income and overtime wages. The Democrats will be fighting some of these provisions, arguing their effect on future deficits. Regardless, there will be an enormous amount of change to rules, forms and guidance that will need to be made by the IRS.The remaining employees at the agency, already demoralized and now seriously short-staffed, will now be asked to handle this looming workload. Taxpayers and their accountants will need to be patient. I can already foresee my profession’s future frustration as they wait for guidance on a myriad of tax changes that will affect their clients. After barely recovering from all the disruptions caused by the pandemic, these layoffs are sure to set things back.But let’s not pretend this isn’t part of a wider trend.We all know the technology already exists to do much of the work that many IRS employees do now. My clients already use tech platforms to automate their accounts payment and payments. These systems – which leverage AI and optical character recognition – can very accurately (and affordably) scan, read and extract data from any document and ensure that the information is integrated into their accounting systems, where payments are automatically scheduled for review and disbursement. Considering that most of the tax returns filed are done in a similar fashion – and are mostly routine – it seems obvious that similar systems could be doing the same functions, which would probably eliminate a much greater percentage of workers who have already been chopped by the current administration.Look what technology is doing elsewhere. The financing platform Klarna announced last summer it was laying off about 2,000 workers – half of its workforce – as a result of its new AI customer service system that did their work instead. Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan Chase, UBS and other Wall Street firms are building AI-based systems that are eliminating the need for investment analysts, wealth managers and other human workers. Google, Ikea, Salesforce and a number of other firms are rapidly replacing their workers with AI systems. Mark Zuckerberg has publicly said that AI applications will be doing the work of mid-level engineers at Meta this year.About $80bn was allocated to the IRS under Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act to “modernize” tax collection. Government being the government, I’m sure that progress has so far been slower than it should be. But if you’re working at the IRS, or any federal agency, do you not see the writing on the wall? And if you’re working in customer service, marketing, accounting or any of these jobs in the private sector do you also not see what’s happening?The firing of federal workers is a preview of what’s about to happen in the corporate world. CEOs at numerous companies have already demonstrated that technology can do the work of people and replace them. And they’re just getting started. The tech companies like to say that AI will “work alongside” humans or “increase employees’ productivity” but that’s nonsense. Like the federal workers, many in the private sector are about to be replaced too. More
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It might be a small consolation, but Elon Musk is getting poorer by the day | John Naughton
by Evelyn Reynolds 1 March 2025, 15:00
Extreme wealth has always played a role in democracies. Money has always talked, especially in the US. Years ago, Lawrence Lessig, the great legal scholar, calculated that most of the campaign funding for members of Congress and aspiring politicians came from one-twentieth of the richest 1% of Americans – about 150,000 people. This is about the same number as those who are named “Lester” and explains the title of his book: The USA Is Lesterland.But that particular corruption of American politics only involved billionaires like the Koch brothers playing organ-grinders to congressional monkeys. The obscene wealth generated by the tech industry has catapulted a new organ-grinder into the heart of the machine. He was able to pay his way in with a spare quarter of a billion dollars that he happened to have lying around. And now the wretched citizens of the US find themselves living in Muskland.At the time he made the decision to ensure that Trump got elected, Musk was estimated to be worth $244bn. That didn’t mean, of course, that he had that amount of hard cash in his possession, just that he owned millions of shares in a number of companies that he had founded which were judged by investors to be valuable liquid assets that could be sold if necessary.Hold on to that thought: it may come in useful.How did Musk become so rich? It started, really, with PayPal, of which he was one of the founders, and from the sale of which he emerged with enough money ($175.8m) to become an early investor in Tesla and chair of its board. In 2002, he founded the rocket company SpaceX and, later, Starlink – which has launched thousands of low-orbit satellites for providing internet connectivity to remote regions. In 2015, he founded a solar power company, Tesla Energy, and Neuralink, a company aiming to integrate the human brain with AI the following year. In 2017, he founded The Boring Company, which did what it said on the tin, namely digging tunnels.And then in October 2022 he lost his mind, bought Twitter, and renamed it X. This last decision was a commercial disaster, but it gave him a huge megaphone which he deployed to support Trump’s campaign. It also got him a place right at the heart of the US government, with a mandate to dig deep into the machine, find out how it worked and – allegedly – to detect fraud and eliminate waste.As his goons were rooting through the innards of the federal payment system, one wonders if they came across some of the disbursements that the government has made to his companies. Payments from Nasa to SpaceX, for example, for launching stuff into orbit – or eventually bringing home astronauts from the International Space Station. Or subsidies and tax refunds to Tesla, whose early survival was ensured by government loans.There are some rich ironies to be found here. Could the Elon Musk who ranted that the US should “get rid of all subsidies” be the same Elon Musk who decided to build SpaceX, Tesla, Neuralink and Starlink in the US rather than in his native South Africa? For, as the tech pundit Scott Galloway puts it: “There would be no SpaceX without Nasa, its largest customer. Tesla built its Fremont factory with a $465m DoE loan in 2010, and its first 200,000 cars benefited from tax credit subsidies of up to $7,500. For years the company was able to report profits thanks to the ‘sale’ of emissions credits to other carmakers. All told, the company has accepted an estimated $2.5bn in government support.” And all of those subsidies went through the federal payments machine.At the moment, Musk looks unstoppable because he hasn’t yet triggered Trump’s narcissistic envy, and his wealth isolates from the consequences of his actions. But nothing lasts for ever and there are some encouraging straws in the wind. One is that Tesla is no longer looking as good as it once did. Sales of its cars are down 45% in Europe – at a time when EV sales there are generally up by 37%. And Muskwagens are losing ground to increasingly more attractive EVs from Kia and the Chinese challenger BYD.And then there’s what Tesla owners are ruefully calling “the Musk factor”. Owners of the company’s hideous Cybertruck, for example are finding red swastikas spray-painted on them in car parks. One sometimes sees Tesla saloons with embarrassed notices on their side windows saying “I bought this before we knew Elon was crazy”. There’s even a poster showing Musk standing in a Tesla giving a Nazi salute with the caption “0 to 1939 in 3 Seconds”. And Tesla stock is now on a downward track, which means that Musk’s net worth is not what it was. Who knows, maybe one day Trump will be richer than him after he’s finished looting Ukraine.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionWhat I’ve been readingTalking to ourselves
A fine essay by Renée DiResta on what’s happened to democracies’ public sphere.Herd mentality
A really sombre Substack post by Charles Arthur.How Europe was left in the cold
Nicholas Colin is back online. This post shows why he was missed. More

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It might be a small consolation, but Elon Musk is getting poorer by the day | John Naughton

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