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      Trump administration briefing: education department to be halved as Trump walks back Canada tariffs

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      The US Department of Education intends to lay off nearly half of its workforce, the department has announced. The layoffs of 1,300 people were announced by the department on Tuesday and described by the education secretary, Linda McMahon, as a “significant step toward restoring the greatness of the United States education system”.In a post on X, McMahon said: “Today’s [reduction in force] reflects our commitment to efficiency, accountability, and ensuring that resources are directed where they matter most: to students, parents, and teachers.”After the most recent round of layoffs, the department’s staff will be roughly half of its previous 4,100, the agency said in a statement. According to the department, another 572 employees had already accepted “voluntary resignation opportunities and retirement” over the last seven weeks. The newly laid-off employees will be placed on administrative leave at the end of next week.US education department to lay off 1,300 people as Trump vows to close agencyThe announcement that the US Department of Education intends to lay off nearly half of its workforce has been met with swift condemnation from Democratic and progressive officials. The Texas representative Greg Casar wrote in a post on X that those in charge were “Stealing from our children to pay for tax cuts for billionaires.”Trump campaigned on a promise to close the Department of Education, claiming it had been overtaken by “radicals, zealots and Marxists”. At McMahon’s confirmation hearing, she acknowledged that only Congress had the power to abolish the agency but said it might be due for cuts and a reorganization.Read the full storyTrump walks back 50% Canada tariffs after tit-for-tat dayDonald Trump announced he was doubling tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum from 25% to 50% as a retaliation for the province of Ontario’s imposition of a 25% surcharge on electricity exports to several US states – and then walked back the decision after Ontario relented hours later.Tuesday was marked by chaos as the US and Canada escalated their trade war. New tariffs of 25% on all imported steel and aluminum are still scheduled to take effect at midnight on Wednesday, including against allies and top US suppliers Canada and Mexico, the White House confirmed to Reuters.Read the full storyUS resumes help for Ukraine as Kyiv accepts 30-day ceasefire deal Ukraine said it was ready to accept an immediate 30-day ceasefire in the war with Russia, as the US announced it would immediately lift its restrictions on military aid and intelligence sharing after high-stakes talks in Saudi Arabia.Donald Trump said he now hoped Vladimir Putin would reciprocate. If the Russian president did, it would mark the first ceasefire in the more than three years since he launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.Read the full storyJudge blocks Trump administration plan to cut millions for teacher trainingA federal judge in Boston on Tuesday blocked the Donald Trump administration’s plan to cut hundreds of millions of dollars for teacher training, finding that cuts are already affecting training programs aimed at addressing a nationwide teacher shortage.Read the full storyJudge halts Louisiana’s first death row execution in 15 yearsA federal judge has halted Louisiana’s first death row execution using nitrogen gas scheduled to take place next week. US district court judge Shelly Dick issued a preliminary injunction on Tuesday, stopping the state from immediately moving forward with the execution – which would have been Louisiana’s first execution in 15 years. Liz Murrill, the attorney general, said the state will immediately appeal against the decision.Read the full storyWhite House says Columbia University refusing to shop students for arrestThe Trump administration said on Tuesday that Columbia University was “refusing to help” the Department of Homeland Security identify people for arrest on campus, after immigration authorities detained a prominent Palestinian activist and recent Columbia graduate over the weekend.Read the full storyHouse Republicans pass Trump-backed spending billHouse Republicans pulled off a near party-line vote on Tuesday to pass their controversial funding bill to curb the looming government shutdown, shipping it off to the Senate, where it still will face an uphill battle to pass.The Trump-backed bill passed 217 to 213, with the Kentucky representative Thomas Massie casting the sole Republican “no” vote. The Democrat Jared Golden of Maine joined Republicans in backing the measure. The stopgap bill would fund the government through September.Read the full storyTrump says he’s buying a Tesla amid Musk boycottDonald Trump said he is buying a “brand new Tesla” and blamed “Radical Left Lunatics” for “illegally” boycotting Elon Musk’s electric vehicle company. The announcement came a day after Tesla suffered its worst share price fall in nearly five years.Read the full storyWhat else happened today:

      At Tuesday’s promotional event for Elon Musk’s line of Tesla electric vehicles at the White House, Trump refused to drive one of the cars, and scoffed at the idea that his predecessor, Joe Biden, had done so at a similar event. There is video of Biden doing so, in August 2021, at an event to promote electric vehicles that Musk reportedly was angry at being excluded from over anti-union policies.

      Elon Musk is “not a serious guy”, said Mark Kelly, the US fighter pilot and astronaut turned Arizona Democratic senator, after the Tesla owner and close Donald Trump ally called him a “traitor” for visiting Ukraine in support of its fight against Russia’s invading troops.

      Former Democratic House member Katie Porter announced she is entering California’s 2026 gubernatorial contest.

      Perkins Coie, a prominent law firm Trump is seeking to punish with an executive order, sued the Trump administration in federal court on Tuesday, saying the firm “cannot allow its clients to be bullied”. The 6 March executive order stripped the firm’s lawyers of security clearances and access to federal buildings, and said the government would review contracts with any of the firm’s clients. More

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      Ice accessed car trackers in sanctuary cities that could help in raids, files show

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      As Donald Trump’s administration ramps up its crackdown on undocumented immigrants to the US, advocates are increasingly worried immigration agents will turn to surveillance technology to round up those targeted for deportation, even in so-called “sanctuary cities” that limit the ways local law enforcement can cooperate with immigration officials.That’s because US Customs and Immigration Enforcement (Ice) in past years has gained access to troves of data from sanctuary cities that could aid its raids and enforcement actions. Among that information is data from the vast network of license plate readers active across the US, according to documents obtained by the Guardian.Local agencies across the country use license plate readers, high-speed cameras that scan and capture images and videos of every vehicle that passes, to collect information on vehicular activity, including the direction a vehicle is moving. They store those details in databases that are often shared with other local law enforcement agencies as well as federal ones. The volume of data gathered along with the wide breadth of bureaus that have access to it mean that federal agents in practice can often obtain information on individual immigrants gathered by local authorities those same agents are legally not allowed to work with.Take the example of Westchester county, New York, where police work with a license plate reader company named Rekor.Westchester, a 450-sq-mile mostly suburban area just north of New York City – has had laws limiting cooperation with federal immigration authorities on the books since 2018. But documents including emails and access logs newly made public show Ice has had access in the past to a major database that holds license plate reader information collected across the county.Westchester county police said they managed a network of 480 such cameras as of January 2023. Westchester police provided these figures in response to a freedom of information law request and are the most up-to-date figures available on the scale of the county’s license plate surveillance network. In just the last week of January 2023, the cameras scanned 16.2m cars, according to these documents. That’s up from 14m scans across 346 cameras in March 2022, these emails show. Ice, Customs and Border Protection and the agency they fall under, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), have all had access to this database as of February 2022, as do local law enforcement agencies outside New York state, these documents show. The license plate information that is stored in this database came from more than 20 cities across Westchester and spans two years.Neither Ice nor the Westchester county police department responded to questions about whether the federal agency still has access to the database.In the first few weeks of Donald Trump’s administration, a flurry of immigration enforcement activity across Westchester county prompted local mayors to reassure residents they were complying with local sanctuary laws and were not cooperating with Ice on these investigations. These laws “prohibit members of the police department from engaging in law enforcement activities solely for the purpose of enforcing federal immigration law, unless required to do so by a judicial warrant or other federal law”, the Peekskill mayor, Vivian C McKenzie, told the Westfair Business Journal.The data sharing between the county police and Ice, illustrated in the documents the Guardian reviewed, appear to have sidestepped and undermined the county’s sanctuary city laws. It also means that Ice can potentially use data captured in Westchester to pursue immigration cases elsewhere, including in other sanctuary cities.“Westchester can be a sanctuary county or a surveillance state. It can’t be both. This sort of mass tracking violates the promise made to undocumented residents that they will be safe in the county,” Albert Fox Cahn, the director of the privacy advocacy group the Surveillance Tech Oversight Project, said. “It’s unclear if Westchester county [was] violating the letter of its law, or merely its spirit, but either way it’s clear that immigrant communities are at risk.”Westchester county police, Ice and the mayors of several cities in the county did not respond to multiple requests for comment.The documents, which Westchester county police made public in response to a freedom of information law request by a legal non-profit and shared exclusively with the Guardian, include a list of its “users”, or organizations that had access to this database as of February 2022. The non-profit asked not to be named to avoid compromising the federal grants the organization was awarded. In addition to Ice and the DHS, agencies listed as having access include the Department of Justice, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), the Secret Service and the FBI.A separate list details individual users who have access to the database. Among the users were five individuals who had email addresses that ended in @ice.dhs.gov and two people with Secret Service email addresses ending in USSS.dhs.gov. There were 44 users with email addresses that end in FBI.gov, 40 with DOJ.gov addresses and just over a dozen featuring DEA.gov. Many of those included on the list indicated they were part of the investigative unit of their agency. It was not clear whether that list was current as of 2025 and if those users have ongoing access to the database.A nationwide surveillance netRekor sells license plate readers and the software used to analyze their data to law enforcement agencies, though it is among the smaller companies in an ecosystem of many working in similar ways. Together, these companies’ license plate readers blanket the majority of the US. Access to more than one major network can enable law enforcement agencies to monitor people’s movements across the country.In addition to accessing local networks like Westchester’s, Ice uses the national database of Vigilant Solutions, a Motorola subsidiary which offers license-plate reading technology that competes with Rekor for contracts with local law enforcement and business across the US. In 2019, documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) revealed 9,000 Ice agents had access to the database of Vigilant Solutions.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionPrivacy and civil liberty experts argue these technologies create a vast surveillance dragnet wherein the movement of every vehicle in the US is being tracked and examined regardless of whether there is an active investigation. Residents of places where these cameras have been set up are beginning to push back.In October, residents of Norfolk, Virginia, sued the city for allegedly violating their fourth amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures by installing license plate readers from another Rekor competitor called Flock Safety. When announcing the contract to install 172 Flock cameras across Norfolk, the police chief, Mark Talbot, said his office wanted to create “a nice curtain of technology” that would make it “difficult to drive anywhere of any distance without running into a camera somewhere”. Lee Schmidt, one of the plaintiffs, said four of the cameras had fenced in his neighborhood.“He was outraged by the loss of privacy,” said Michael Soyfer, an attorney at the Institute of Justice who is representing the plaintiffs on this case. “He noticed that he basically couldn’t leave his neighborhood without one of the cameras picking it up.”Local law enforcement across the country sharing license plate data with each other and with federal agencies means that anyone’s movements are in effect being tracked across state lines, experts say.“We’re moving to a day where someone getting in their car in New York City could drive to Boston or Washington and have their car basically map every moment of the drive,” Fox Cahn said. “It is profoundly and painfully ironic that American highways went from the symbol of freedom and the liberty of the open road to this metaphor for creeping surveillance and police control.”Westchester police discuss more surveillanceIn addition to informal data-sharing with various federal and local agencies inside and outside of New York state, emails show Westchester police actively discussed creating formal data-sharing relationships to enable a cross-county surveillance network, including with the New York police department and fire departments, as well as an out-of-state agency in Stamford, Connecticut.“If you get a chance I would love to discuss what possibilities exist with a Data Sharing plan,” a Westchester police lieutenant wrote in an email to an NYPD officer dated 10 March 2022. “We are currently at 346 cameras in Westchester with about 14 million reads per week. A lot of those reads are along the city line (Bronx).”The range of agencies and individuals that have access to this database is potentially far more expansive than those listed. Rekor advertises a nationwide law enforcement platform that allows any agency that uses it “to access real time data from any part of the network at no cost”, according to a company press release. Announced in 2019, the platform would make real-time data on the “150 million plate reads” a month that Rekor collects across 30 states available to any agency that wanted to opt in. More

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      Trump calls Tesla boycott ‘illegal’ and says he’s buying one to support Musk

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      Donald Trump said he intends to buy a “brand new Tesla” and blamed “Radical Left Lunatics” for “illegally” boycotting Elon Musk’s electric vehicle company a day after Tesla suffered its worst share price fall in nearly five years.On Tuesday, several Tesla vehicles were parked in the driveway of the White House for Trump to pick which vehicle to buy, accompanied by Musk and his young son. In August 2024, a podcaster gifted Trump a Cybertruck.“Elon Musk is ‘putting it on the line’ in order to help our Nation, and he is doing a FANTASTIC JOB! But the Radical Left Lunatics, as they often do, are trying to illegally and collusively boycott Tesla, one of the World’s great automakers, and Elon’s ‘baby,’ in order to attack and do harm to Elon, and everything he stands for,” Trump posted on Truth Social on Tuesday morning.Tesla’s shares fell hard on Monday as markets reacted to the threat of a recession and Trump’s tariff plans. Tesla’s slide came amid widespread protests over the billionaire Musk’s influence in the federal government at Tesla dealerships, a boycott campaign, car owners selling their Tesla vehicles, and activists pushing members of the public to sell Tesla shares.“In any event, I’m going to buy a brand new Tesla tomorrow morning as a show of confidence and support for Elon Musk, a truly great American. Why should he be punished for putting his tremendous skills to work in order to help MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN???”Trump’s claim the boycott is “illegal” is false. The supreme court ruled in 1972 that the first amendment of the US constitution protects Americans’ right to protest against private businesses.View image in fullscreenMusk’s net worth decreased by $29bn yesterday alone, and has fallen by $132bn over the past 12 months, as Tesla shares’ gains have been wiped out. Tesla shares have declined every week since Trump took office, declining 15% on Monday alone. He remains the richest man in the world with a fortune of more than $320bn, according to Forbes.Tesla’s board members, including Musk’s brother Kimbal Musk, have offloaded millions of dollars worth of shares in recent months. Tesla vehicle sales abroad have also dropped significantly, including by 76.3% in Germany in February 2025 compared with February 2024.The boycott has emerged as Musk’s so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) has wreaked havoc throughout the federal government in a proclaimed effort to reduce federal spending. The access and actions by Musk and his team have incited concerns over the lack of transparency, false claims about cancelled contracts and grants and the amount of savings made.Polls have shown public support for Doge is mixed to unfavorable, with the vast majority of Democratic voters polling that Musk has too much power. More

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      Where has the left’s technological audacity gone? | Leigh Phillips

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      View image in fullscreenTechno-optimism – the belief that technology will usher in a golden age for humanity – is in vogue once more.In 2022, a clutch of pseudonymous San Francisco artificial intelligence (AI) scenesters published a Substack post entitled “Effective Accelerationism”, which argued for maximum acceleration of technological advancement. The 10-point manifesto, which proclaimed that “the next evolution of consciousness, creating unthinkable next-generation lifeforms and silicon-based awareness” was imminent, quickly went viral, as did follow-up posts.Effective accelerationism, or “e/acc”, exploded from being a fringe movement dedicated to pushing back against AI extinction-fearing “doomers” to being namechecked by major Silicon Valley CEOs such as Garry Tan, the CEO of start-up accelerator Y Combinator; Sam Altman, head of OpenAI; Marc Andreessen, the billionaire software engineer; and Elon Musk.In 2023, Andreessen issued his Techno-Optimist Manifesto, expanding beyond the e/acc’s focus on AI to encompass all questions of technological progress. “We are told to be angry, bitter, and resentful about technology,” he writes, yet previously and for hundreds of years, we had glorified it. The enemies of techno-optimism are, he says, statism, economic planning and socialism. Andreessen tells us: “Technology is the glory of human ambition and achievement, the spearhead of progress, and the realization of our potential … It is time, once again, to raise the technology flag.”And last year saw the release of the Techno-Humanist Manifesto from the Roots of Progress Institute and Jason Crawford, who makes similar arguments for the liberatory power of technology, while also arguing that anything that can be for profit should be.But where is the left in all this?One would think that in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, which saw the market flounder and the state rise to the occasion with responses such as Operation War Speed’s vaccine development and rollouts, the left would be crowing about how it produced technological progress far better than all this market fundamentalism.It was the embrace of varieties of economic planning that produced the innovation needed to defeat the virus. For decades, large firms had gotten out of the business of vaccine development because it was insufficiently profitable. The mRNA vaccine delivery vehicle that is now recognized as revolutionary for the life sciences far beyond Covid had been sitting on the shelf for about a decade, spurned by uninterested, risk-averse investors.At the start of the pandemic, big pharma remained wary that transmission might fizzle out and they’d be left having spent billions on a white elephant. Instead, it was the advance purchase agreements, subsidies and coordination of the government – which does not need to turn a profit – via the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (Barda) and Operation Warp Speed that delivered the vaccine and saved the world.Meanwhile, free-market driven distribution of PPE, ventilators, medical fridges and oxygen had produced little more than corruption, bottlenecks and irrational allocation to those who could pay the highest price – not allocation where it was most needed. It was only when the White House deployed the Defense Production Act to enable the government to takeover distribution that the market’s deadly mess was cleared up.@font-face{font-family:Guardian Headline Full;src:url(https://assets.guim.co.uk/static/frontend/fonts/guardian-headline/noalts-not-hinted/GHGuardianHeadline-Light.woff2) format(“woff2”),url(https://assets.guim.co.uk/static/frontend/fonts/guardian-headline/noalts-not-hinted/GHGuardianHeadline-Light.woff) format(“woff”),url(https://assets.guim.co.uk/static/frontend/fonts/guardian-headline/noalts-not-hinted/GHGuardianHeadline-Light.ttf) format(“truetype”);font-weight:300;font-style:normal}@font-face{font-family:Guardian Headline Full;src:url(https://assets.guim.co.uk/static/frontend/fonts/guardian-headline/noalts-not-hinted/GHGuardianHeadline-LightItalic.woff2) format(“woff2”),url(https://assets.guim.co.uk/static/frontend/fonts/guardian-headline/noalts-not-hinted/GHGuardianHeadline-LightItalic.woff) 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      The left should be proudly flaunting the record of governments around the world in responding to Covid
      The left should be proudly flaunting the record of governments around the world in responding to Covid. It should make the case that all major technological and scientific advancements are best delivered by governments. And it should make the case that we – the people – should embrace faith in technological progress that is rooted in public investment.In other words, the left should be the real techno-optimists. But instead, in recent years, there has been a growing skepticism of technology on the contemporary left – from cynicism about space-faring to fear of genetic engineering and opposition to nuclear power.The left should be calling for government intervention to ensure decarbonization of data centers for AI. It should demand that we direct machine-learning research to prioritize the solving of grand scientific challenges such as prediction of protein folding instead of than bad fantasy-art fabrication and plagiarism. But instead, the most popular leftwing tech podcast calls for degrowth of generative AI and data centers due the latter’s carbon intensity.Progressives could be reminding the world of Neil Armstrong’s warning about the privatization of space – while still cheering on SpaceX’s work to develop reusable rocketry, radically reducing the cost of humans and payloads escaping our planet’s gravity well, all the better to deliver the space and planetary science we need to monitor and solve so many ecological challenges.We could be explaining how space colonization, a worthwhile multigenerational, perhaps millennia-long endeavor, will be public sector led or it will not happen, due to the risible likelihood of it being profitable. Musk won’t get to mars without Nasa. But instead the left declares space-faring to be settler-colonialism, oddly equating lifeless rocks with indigenous peoples.Environmentalists and green NGOs should be celebrating research into genetically modified crops that if successful will reduce pesticide use, nitrogen pollution, and land-use change. But instead, anti-GMO campaign groups vandalized an Italian research trial of rice-blast-resistant arborio (risotto) rice this summer, while Greenpeace successfully convinced a Filipino court to overturn approval of commercial cultivation of Golden Rice, a variety modified to combat vitamin A deficiency, which causes blindness and even death in tens of thousands of children annually in Asia.This leftwing technophobia is something of an historic aberration. Traditionally, the left had always been enthusiastic about the potential of technology for liberation, to release us from drudgery and boundlessly expand our degrees of freedom – so long as technology was unfettered from the irrationality of profit and hierarchy and yoked to egalitarian reason. Prometheus plus Spartacus, as mid-century Marxist Hal Draper put it.We sometimes forget that the Communist Manifesto was itself a techno-optimist declaration of intent. It was a critique of capitalism but it was also a celebration of the new technologies, both industrial and social, that this system had set loose.From Karl Marx’s enthusiasm for the Industrial Revolution through to British Labour prime minister Harold Wilson’s call to harness the “white heat” of the Scientific Revolution, the conventional left position was that its programme would enable society to surpass the technological progress of mere capitalism. The point was not to retreat from capitalism, but instead to advance from it. We the people would develop the “forces of production” much more rapidly through conscious, democratic planning (albeit to greater or lesser degrees of such planning, depending on the flavour of leftist) rather than leaving such development to the fetters imposed by the risk-averse, poorly coordinated and unconscious anarchy of the market.@font-face{font-family:Guardian Headline Full;src:url(https://assets.guim.co.uk/static/frontend/fonts/guardian-headline/noalts-not-hinted/GHGuardianHeadline-Light.woff2) format(“woff2”),url(https://assets.guim.co.uk/static/frontend/fonts/guardian-headline/noalts-not-hinted/GHGuardianHeadline-Light.woff) format(“woff”),url(https://assets.guim.co.uk/static/frontend/fonts/guardian-headline/noalts-not-hinted/GHGuardianHeadline-Light.ttf) format(“truetype”);font-weight:300;font-style:normal}@font-face{font-family:Guardian Headline 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      The left should be the real techno-optimists. But instead, in recent years, there has been a growing skepticism of technology on the contemporary left
      Scientific, technological and industrial development would not only be faster, but broader, for the left would share the fruits of development with all humanity as rapidly as economic capacity would allow, rather than limiting their spread to those locations and populations where such production was profitable. A virtuous circle was then supposed to emerge as a result: with ever more humans benefiting from such progress, ever more humans would be able to contribute to science, engineering, medicine and agronomy, resulting in yet more progress. Liberation would beget ever accelerating liberation.It was instead the counter-Enlightenment right – aristocrats, the church, Burkean critics of the French Revolution – who were horrified at how technology and industry constantly revolutionized society, washing away ancient traditions and endlessly transforming social relations. The industrial engineering of the factory and the “social engineering” of democracy were the same thing to the reactionary, anti-modernist mind. The children of the Radical Enlightenment, both liberals and socialists, also made little distinction between social and technological progress, but thought them good, and were intent on carrying out French revolutionary Georges Danton’s commandment: “De l’audace, encore de l’audace, toujours de l’audace!” (“Audacity; yet more audacity; always audacity!”)Today, however, that leftwing optimism and confidence about humanity’s capacity for superior, entwined social, scientific and technological progress – once political economy was thoroughly democratized, has been lost, especially on the environmental left. It has been replaced by a techno-scepticism and cynicism about progress that varies from a soft neo-Luddism through to a more thoroughgoing Malthusian opposition to further economic development, prompted by a fear that we have long since outstripped the carrying capacity of the planet. Many believe industrial modernity was a mistake.(Note that these contemporary neo-Luddites should not be confused with the historical Luddites, the 19th Century stockingers – workers running stocking frame mechanical knitting machines – who engaged in riot and sabotage of automated textile machinery to protest employers’ use of such machines to drive down wages. It was the capitalist socio-economic relations surrounding this technology that the Luddites were protesting, not technology itself. If anything, today’s neo-Luddites should learn from their namesakes and focus less on the machines and more on who owns them.)All of this creeping anti-modernism threatens not merely human development and the expanding freedom that flows from it, but also undermines our ability to adequately respond to a range of existential threats, from climate change to pandemics. We are caught between the capitalist techno-hucksterism of Musk and the Malthusian technophobia of Greenpeace and friends.Thankfully, there is – to coin a phrase – a third way.In place of technophobia, the left’s traditional arguments around the “market alignment problem” still offer a better path toward enhancing human liberation. In place of both market fundamentalist neoliberalism and green-inflected neo-Luddism, the left should be talking once again about conscious design of the economy – and thence which technologies we want to develop and accelerate – through industrial policy, public ownership and other forms of democratic economic planning.As of 2024, we are roughly at the halfway point between the first climate treaty, 1997’s Kyoto Protocol, and the 2050 deadline for net-zero decarbonization of the economy. Yet due to policymakers’ overdependence on market-based mechanisms such as carbon-pricing (and the developing world’s understandable demand for fossil-fueled development), the share of fossil fuels in global energy consumption has barely moved, dropping from 86% to 82%. But industrial policy domestically – building on Bidenomics’ version of the Green New Deal, the Inflation Reduction Act – and a properly egalitarian approach to climate finance and economic development internationally, can turn all this around.Our suite of antibiotics is rapidly failing and so in the absence of new discovery and development of new ones, as well as new diagnostic techniques and vaccines, clinicians warn that we are nearing a collapse of the foundation of antimicrobial protection upon which almost all of modern medicine depends. But decommodification of pharmaceutical production and, again, internationalism could solve the problem entirely.Similarly, pandemic monitoring and early warning systems require robust public-sector funding, restructuring of intellectual property rights, and even global democracy. All of this is optimized by a more muscular social democracy.@font-face{font-family:Guardian Headline Full;src:url(https://assets.guim.co.uk/static/frontend/fonts/guardian-headline/noalts-not-hinted/GHGuardianHeadline-Light.woff2) format(“woff2”),url(https://assets.guim.co.uk/static/frontend/fonts/guardian-headline/noalts-not-hinted/GHGuardianHeadline-Light.woff) format(“woff”),url(https://assets.guim.co.uk/static/frontend/fonts/guardian-headline/noalts-not-hinted/GHGuardianHeadline-Light.ttf) format(“truetype”);font-weight:300;font-style:normal}@font-face{font-family:Guardian Headline Full;src:url(https://assets.guim.co.uk/static/frontend/fonts/guardian-headline/noalts-not-hinted/GHGuardianHeadline-LightItalic.woff2) format(“woff2”),url(https://assets.guim.co.uk/static/frontend/fonts/guardian-headline/noalts-not-hinted/GHGuardianHeadline-LightItalic.woff) 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      There are so many areas where the left should have so much more to say about technology and progress
      Biodiversity loss threatens to undermine ecosystem services that we depend upon, but precision agriculture, new genetic techniques and “lab meat” can radically reduce humanity’s land-footprint, so long as there is strong state intervention to de-risk these new technologies.In order to overcome less well known but still profound risks from space debris and near-Earth asteroids, we need not cynicism about space, but a revival of space as primarily a public-sector enterprise and the sort of internationalism and global democracy that the left favours.But a left approach to technology is not just about avoiding harm, but about grand ambition. Getting to Mars and beyond, spreading life throughout the cosmos, is a gargantuan multi-generational endeavour, of the level of audacity that Danton commanded. Markets will never get us there if it isn’t profitable enough – and it is unlikely to be so.Artificial intelligence has already solved the hard problem of protein-folding, and soon it could radically enhance medical diagnosis, accelerate materials discovery, and reduce mineral exploration costs, and maybe even predict earthquakes, but much of this will require humans working alongside AI rather than AI replacing humans – meaning an increased cost over either humans or computers alone, which will thus tend to be far less attractive to capital. And so AI thus far appears to be primarily directed at much more profitable but far less freedom-enhancing endeavours such as enterprise software, theft from artists and musicians, and ever more panoptical state surveillance.To steal a phrase from artificial intelligence discourse, the market has an “alignment problem”. It is an algorithm independent of human control. And so it could be said that the techno-libertarians want to liberate themselves from all things that unconsciously dominate humanity – except for markets.There are so many areas where the left should have so much more to say about technology and progress, whether the challenges we face are existential threats or how to achieve the most soaring of ambitions.Neither Silicon Valley tech hucksters nor eco-austerity technophobes are up to the task.

      Leigh Phillips is a science writer and a political journalist More

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      The left needs its own version of techno-optimism | Amana Fontanella-Khan

      by

      Today we live in an era defined by crisis. Indeed, we are facing multiple overlapping threats at once: from accelerating climate breakdown to the rise of authoritarianism across the world, we are in a situation that the historian Adam Tooze calls “polycrisis”. It is no wonder that hope is scarce, pessimism is high and despair is pervasive. As one meme that captures the grim, morbid mood of our age reads: “My retirement plan is civilisational collapse.”But not everyone shares this gloomy outlook. On the extreme other end of public sentiment sit Silicon Valley billionaires: they are some of the most optimistic people on earth. Of course, it’s easy to be optimistic when you are sitting on enough money to sway national politics. And yet, the source of their optimism isn’t simply money. It is also a deep-seated faith in unfettered technological advances.The left is rightly skeptical of the rosy “techno-optimism” advanced by the likes of Elon Musk, far-right mega-donor Peter Thiel and hedge fund billionaire Marc Andreessen. To tech oligarchs, technological advancement is best delivered by unfettered free market capitalism. The democratic state is a hindrance to be opposed, dismantled and destroyed – a set of goals that they now enjoy the power to achieve. Their ideology ignores inequality and glosses over the material harms their companies wreak on workers and the environment. Silicon Valley’s billionaire techno-optimism is clearly incompatible with leftwing values and should be rejected.But can and should the left advance its own techno-optimism? Can it put forward a vision of a brighter future that can compete with the grand visions of space exploration presented by Musk? Can it make the case that science and technology ought to be harnessed to deliver breakthroughs, abundance, sustainability and flourishing of human potential? And what would a progressive, leftwing techno-optimism look like? A techno-optimism that the 99% could get on board with, especially communities of color, and Black people who have historically been excluded, or even harmed, by scientific and technological breakthroughs? These are some of the questions that this new series, Breakthrough, launched by the Guardian examines.The left used to embrace technology. Indeed, the most leftwing prophet of all, Karl Marx, was so pro-technology that he is often described as “Promethean”, a reference to the Greek god who stole fire to give to humans. And it was feminist Shulamith Firestone who in the 1970s envisioned a day where we might have artificial wombs and be liberated from housework, thanks to automation: a feminist utopia delivered by technology.Some of the most groundbreaking sci-fi imagery that we encounter in books and movies like the Matrix, such as people living virtual lives entirely untethered from their bodies, were first popularized by JD Bernal, the Marxist scientist and futurist who designed the so-called Bernal spheres, for permanent space settlement, in 1929. Writing of Bernal’s influential book, The World, the Flesh and the Devil: An Enquiry into the Future of the Three Enemies of the Rational Soul, Arthur C Clarke, considered one of the fathers of sci-fi, wrote that it was “perhaps the most remarkable attempt to predict the future of scientific possibility ever made, and certainly the most stimulating”. And it was all rooted in a firmly leftwing – and specifically, socialist – world view. And, of course, Star Trek, one of the most successful sci-fi series of all time, is widely considered to be depicting a socialist post-scarcity utopia.Today, however, the left is either fearful, agnostic or hostile towards technology. The green “degrowth” movement, for example, views industry and technology as the root of our climate crisis. For them, the solution to the climate crisis is not more technological growth and innovation, but less. As Kohei Saito, the author of the bestseller Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto, said in an interview: “I was initially more optimistic about the development of technology” but, after reading degrowth theories, “[I] abandoned the possibility of green growth.”Saito goes on to say: “If we want to have more, in today’s sense, it will simply bring about ecological catastrophe.” Reducing consumption and production – austerity and retreat, in other words – is the only path forward for the degrowth movement. But this ignores the fact that technology can help us replace fossil fuels with other sources of clean, affordable and scalable energy that would allow for continued growth and advancement, without harming the environment.Meanwhile, leftwing leaders such as Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are very good at the necessary and essential task of confronting tech monopolies and billionaires, who concentrate economic and political power in their hands. But what is often lacking is a positive, bold vision for what a science and technology agenda for the 99% would look like – how technology in the right hands might help provide abundance for all.This is a lost opportunity. For all the pessimism and decline that we are witnessing – declining rates of graduation, declining birth rates, declining rates of homeownership and a rise in deaths of despair and skyrocketing rents – we also may well be on the brink of unprecedented breakthroughs and advances that could create record levels of wealth to be enjoyed by all, if these breakthroughs are accompanied by a political system that favors the wellbeing of all over billionaires. It may be hard to imagine such a system at the moment, given that corporate interests have seized nearly all levers of power, but it is nonetheless critical to do so. Do we have a political vision of how tech and science might work for us all?In 2024, artificial intelligence (AI) was recognised with not one, but two, Nobel prizes. Google’s DeepMind discovered 2.2m entirely new materials – 800 years worth of science in a few months. Last year saw the first time that sickle cell disease, a disease that was hitherto incurable and predominantly affects people of African descent, was reversed in a novel Crispr gene-editing therapy. Cancer and heart disease vaccines could be ready within the next five years. And now, for the first time, AI is solving the intractable protein-folding problem – one of biology’s greatest challenges – and designing new proteins, which is essential for discovering new drugs and understanding why certain diseases occur.View image in fullscreenSo why is it that technology is almost never invoked by the left as a solution to polycrisis in general, or the climate crisis in particular? Why is it that the only people who offer bold, inspiring visions for the transformative role of technology are the likes of reactionaries like Musk?There are, of course, reasons for this. Technology alone is no panacea. Nor does technology guarantee progress. In fact, periods of technological advancement have almost always been accompanied by violence, dispossession and war. Many leftwing philosophers in the post-war period, having witnessed the ravages of fascism and Nazism, equated technology – and even the very idea of progress itself, with violence.As the Frankfurt school philosophers Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer – both of whom were Jewish intellectuals forced to flee Nazi Germany – argued in Dialectic of Enlightenment: “Technology … aims to produce neither concepts nor images, nor the joy of understanding, but method, exploitation of the labor of others, capital.”And Black artists such as Gil Scott-Heron, witnessing the advances of the space age, asked what benefit the Apollo mission might have for those struggling to make ends meet back on Earth. In Whitey on the Moon, Scott-Heron writes:“A rat done bit my sister Nell.(with Whitey on the Moon)Her face and arms began to swell.(and Whitey’s on the Moon)I can’t pay no doctor bill.(but Whitey’s on the Moon)Ten years from now I’ll be paying still.(while Whitey’s on the Moon)”Those critiques continue to resonate with many today. Especially as we witness one billionaire after another fly into space, as life on Earth grows more perilous by the day. And as billionaires push not simply the frontiers of space, but of the human body itself, it is right to remind ourselves of the legacy and history of eugenics. We can only benefit from warnings – such as those made by Timnit Gebru and Émile Torres – that the pursuit of longevity and eternal life, as well as transhumanist projects such as Neuralink, risk perpetuating eugenicist ideals in the 21st century.Perhaps, though, we would do well to adopt the position of the Frankfurt school philosopher, Herbert Marcuse, who accepted many of the critiques that his colleagues made of the Enlightenment, but who also left space for the possibility that it could go either way. In a 1941 essay on technology, he wrote: “[Technology] can promote authoritarianism as well as liberty, scarcity as well as abundance, the extension as well as the abolition of toil.”He envisioned a world in which technological progress might allow human flourishing and self-realization. In a world that is technologically advanced enough, “everyone could think and act by himself, speak his own language, have his own emotions and follow his own passions” once we are “no longer chained to competitive efficiency”.Perhaps the most important condition for us to flourish is to address our climate crisis. Today, to warm our homes and cook our meals, we still set fire to things. Those who cook on gas stoves heat their food over literal flames, as cavemen once did. If we are to move out of the fossil fuel era into a new, cleaner and sustainable era – while still maintaining our freedom to travel and fly and enjoy the material comforts that we do today – this will require a combination of political will and technology. Whether fusion energy, fission or a host of renewables, the path to a new era of energy production requires new technologies and breakthroughs. Right now, for example, Silicon Valley billionaires are investing billions in chasing the holy grail of limitless, clean fusion energy to power AI. Can and will the state match those efforts? And should the left make the case that it should?There is no inherent value in technology. It is neither good nor bad. It is up to us how machines are used. And indeed, who makes those machines, how, and to what ends are all political questions. While we push to change our political system and direct it towards a more equitable, inclusive and liberatory path, let us also, at the same time, push for technology to move in that direction, too.We live in dark, depressing and – frankly – terrifying times. Our planet’s fragile ecosystem is fast spiraling out of control. Our democracies are fracturing. And billionaires are seizing for themselves all of the spoils of the digital era. Technology might well be the thing that pushes us over the edge. But it could also, if we play our cards right, allow us to exit our era of polycrisis. But that won’t happen on its own. The path towards better technology – tech for the 99% – can only be achieved through a politics of the 99%. And it must start with a vision.It is time that the left deploy all of our energies and powers towards a political vision of abundance. Abundance that is delivered by a movement for the 99% that pushes for technological growth and development for the benefit of all.We hope this series might be a place for that political vision to be discussed, debated and laid out so that optimism about the future – in particular, techno-optimism – is no longer just something that the very rich in this world can have.

      Amana Fontanella-Khan is the Guardian US opinion editor More

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      The left needs to abandon its miserable, irrational pessimism | Aaron Bastani

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      View image in fullscreenAt the start of the millennium it was widely presumed each successive generation would achieve a higher level of prosperity than the last. Today that is no longer the case. Just 19% of Americans expect their children’s lives to be better than their own, while two-thirds believe their country will be economically weaker by 2050.So our zeitgeist is increasingly one of pessimism, from anxiety about the climate crisis to concern over rising inequality. According to the historian Adam Tooze, we are living through a “polycrisis” – where such challenges are not only simultaneous but mutually reinforcing.Yet there is one sliver of society where optimism still reigns supreme: Silicon Valley.For a long time technological utopianism was a leftwing idea. Its patron saint was Edward Bellamy whose 19th-century novel, Looking Backward, was more influential among the American left than Marx and Engels. In Britain this perspective was best represented by Fabian socialism. Its rationale was alluringly simple: human progress was a corollary of technological development, with both needing scientific management. Over time, more complex technologies would require a larger state. And a larger state would require socialism.Today such thinking has been inverted, with supporters of market capitalism, and a minimal state, most optimistic about the future. Marc Andreessen, co-founder of the venture capital fund Andreessen Horowitz, even penned a “techno-optimist manifesto” last year – in part to counter the prevailing winds of despair. If nothing else it reveals how Silicon Valley thinks, with Andreesen expressing this with particular clarity when he writes how “there is no material problem   … that cannot be solved with more technology”.As the magazine Current Affairs observed, no evidence is forthcoming alongside such bombastic claims. For instance, when Andreessen writes how “central planning is a doom loop”, he conveniently omits how the development of the internet, solar cells, lithium batteries, the jet engine and nuclear power all relied on state-backed R&D. But while his screed is bizarre, uninformed and in parts even dangerous, he is right about one thing: our instinctive miserabilism, increasingly pervasive on the left, is unwarranted.Take recurrent arguments against having children. Choosing to have kids is a personal matter. Yet in recent years I’ve repeatedly encountered the claim that having descendants is immoral because of climate change. Even if you agree that ours is an age of polycrisis, this is absurd.After all, 100 years ago the average person, in one of the the world’s wealthiest societies, could expect to live until 40. Today global life expectancy is 73. In 19th-century England, between 40 and 60 women died in childbirth for every thousand births. Today that figure is seven for every 100,000. As Ezra Klein has noted, no serious climate models suggest a return to the world of 1950, let alone 1150. Taking this argument to its logical conclusion, nobody should have had children before our grandparents – in which case humanity should have long been extinct.Such irrational pessimism inflects how we view technology too. Yes, there are moral questions surrounding innovations like gene-editing and Crispr, but these same tools could eliminate thousands of inherited conditions – from sickle cell to Huntington’s disease. The 2030s may well be a decade of inflationary shocks and extreme weather events, but it could also herald the arrival of real-time language translation and cancer vaccines used by billions.View image in fullscreenIn their defence many pessimists acknowledge such developments – they are simply aware that any benefits will be unequally shared. This is particularly relevant for machine learning and the world of work. AI could add as much as $13tn to the global economy between 2017 and 2030. Given recent technological changes have, according to the World Bank, meant that “advanced economies face increasingly polarized labour markets and rising inequality”, concerns around who benefits from an innovation as potentially disruptive as the steam engine make sense. While some will get rich from its commercial applications, many more will lose jobs or see their wages squeezed. Ignoring that, and maintaining technology as somehow neutral, is a covert form of class war.The philosopher Alfred Whitehead once declared that the greatest invention of the Victorian age was the idea of invention itself. Yet as humanity mastered how to innovate, we progressively lost touch with why we should. This now seems to have reached its apogee with “effective accelerationists”, whose answer to every challenge is simply more technology. I can think of no idea more ill-suited for a world of polycrisis.So what is the alternative from the left if mindless tech optimism will only deepen problems heading our way?As with the right it should be a project of individual freedom. But such freedom should be understood as meaningless, or even destructive, if it generates unfreedom elsewhere. The economist Amartya Sen defined unfreedom as constraints beyond our control which undermine our ability to pursue lives of meaning. Inadequate access to food is a source of unfreedom, as is being homeless or not having an education. Franklin Roosevelt put it best when he said that “necessitous men are not free men”.If eliminating unfreedom is the end, then the creation of Universal Basic Services (UBS), is the means. These UBS comprise housing, healthcare, transport and education, should be free at the point of use, and funded by progressive taxation. Accessing them should be viewed as necessary for any citizen to fully participate in economic life. Indeed they are just as fundamental to a life of freedom as legal and political rights.Markets would still exist for things like cars, or silk ties, but the logic of profit wouldn’t apply to UBS. So rather than machine learning creating the conditions for the world’s first trillionaire, as gleefully predicted by Mark Cuban, it could provide the basis for a post-carbon, autonomous transport infrastructure, or free adult education throughout one’s life.Alongside UBS, the dividend of technological progress would also make possible a four-day week. After all, countries with a shorter working week enjoy higher levels of social capital, more volunteering and greater gender equality. What is more, those who work less report greater feelings of personal satisfaction. To be clear: this isn’t a post-work society, not least because, in our lifetimes at least, there will be enough work to go around with an ageing population and climate adaptation. But a four-day week should be to the 2030s what the eight-hour day was to the late 19th century.For all the extraordinary inventiveness of recent decades, perhaps our greatest technology remains the state – that unique vehicle for collective action. To create UBS, and expand leisure time for all, means believing in it once again. Indeed meaningful optimism about technology requires political demands and a specific vision for our collective future. Without that we are always at the whim of the 0.01%.

      Aaron Bastani is the co-founder of Novara Media. He is also the author of Fully Automated Luxury Communism More

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      ‘Major brand worries’: Just how toxic is Elon Musk for Tesla?

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      Globally renowned brands would not, ordinarily, want to be associated with Germany’s far-right opposition. But Tesla, one of the world’s biggest corporate names, does not have a conventional chief executive.After Elon Musk backed Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) – calling the party Germany’s “only hope” – voters are considering an alternative to Tesla. Data released on Thursday showed that registrations of the company’s electric cars in Germany fell 76% to 1,429 last month. Overall, electric vehicle registrations rose by 31%.Tesla’s biggest shareholder, who has voiced support for rightwing leaders around the world, is now a de facto US cabinet member under Donald Trump’s administration.Tesla’s valuation has become inextricably tied to Musk’s politics. After he spent $288m backing Trump’s 2024 election victory, Tesla’s valuation passed $1tn. Yet Musk’s political involvements – unprecedented for the head of a company that size – could also be having a negative effect.On Friday, a group of Extinction Rebellion activists occupied a Tesla store in central Milan. Activists chained themselves to the cars’ tyres, and others glued themselves to the windows along with the slogans “Make millionaires pay again” and “Ecology for all, no ecofascism”.Analysts are openly wondering if Musk is causing lasting damage to a brand he has made synonymous with electric cars and, by extension, liberal aspirations to tackle climate change.Tesla was approached for comment.Tesla was the world’s biggest producer of battery electric cars in 2024, but sales dropped to 1.79m, the first time the company has endured a sales decline since 2011 after years of rapid growth that made it the world’s most valuable carmaker.The manufacturer said in January that global sales would grow during 2025, and Wall Street analysts expect Tesla to sell more than 2m cars this year. But even those forecasts would hardly represent a blazing return to form. As recently as October, Musk said he expected 20% to 30% annual sales growth, implying as many as 2.3m cars sold.“Customer retention will be key in 2025 as customers may begin to look for an ‘Alternative for Tesla’,” said Matthias Schmidt, a Berlin-based electric car analyst.View image in fullscreenOther analysts are more optimistic. Dan Ives, of Wedbush Securities, a US financial firm, is a longstanding Tesla supporter. Ives believes the company’s share price could rise from its current level of about $280 to hit $550. However, he acknowledged the negative perception created by Musk’s partnership with Trump and his work on the so-called department of government efficiency (Doge) – an issue he described as the “elephant in the room” for the brand.Calling them “major brand worries for Tesla”, he added in a note to investors that the direct impact on sales should be relatively small. “We estimate less than 5% of Tesla sales globally are at risk from these issues despite the global draconian narrative for Musk.”Ives said that Tesla was on the verge of making a new, cheaper vehicle – costing less than $35,000 – and would “own” the autonomous vehicle market, factors that would help push Tesla to a valuation of more than $2tn.Nonetheless there are clear signs in the US, Tesla’s biggest market, that would-be buyers are wavering, according to Strategic Vision, a market research company. Its new vehicle experience study tracks the buying preferences of up to 250,000 car buyers in the US, and it shows a sharp decline in regard for Tesla since Musk bought Twitter (now X) in 2022.Shortly before the multibillionaire bought the social media platform, 22% of new vehicle buyers would have “definitely” considered buying a Tesla. By the end of 2024 it was just under 8%. The proportion who would not consider buying a Tesla has risen from 39% over the same period to 63%.According to Strategic Vision, approximately half of non-Tesla EV buyers identify as Democrat or liberal, compared with about 20% identifying as Republican or conservative. Among Tesla owners, the Democrat owner group has fallen from 40% during the Biden administration to 29% now, with the Republican group averaging about 30% since 2021.“Democrats, the majority party of EV owners, are now actively rejecting Tesla and choosing other options,” said Alexander Edwards, president of Strategic Vision.Meanwhile, global protests against Musk and Tesla are intensifying. In America, there have been demonstrations outside dozens of Tesla showrooms, while in the UK a guerrilla poster campaign – “0 to 1939 in 3 seconds” – has emphasised Musk’s fascist-style salute at an inauguration rally. In Germany, he was recently caricatured on a carnival float as “Napo-Elon”.Ross Gerber, chief executive of the US investment management firm Gerber Kawasaki, which holds shares in Tesla, said Musk had given people an outlet to express their disdain for his politics.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHe said: “He has left himself open to a direct way for people to attack him if they don’t like his politics. It’s ironic because the vehicles were made for liberals who care about the environment and it has become a symbol of the conservative movement.”Tesla is valued at about $847bn – still more than the next 10 carmakers combined. Few investment banks have included any effect from Musk in their work trying to accurately value Tesla. Still, there are further reports of falling sales. In Australia, February sales were down about 72% compared with the same month in 2024, according to data released this week.View image in fullscreenSeveral analysts have raised concerns that the current valuation is much too high. JP Morgan is among the most pessimistic of the investment banks, suggesting that Tesla’s share price could fall as low as $135 – or a valuation closer to $400bn. Musk is the largest shareholder in Tesla, a key contributor to his status as the world’s wealthiest person.“Tesla shares continue to strike us as having become completely divorced from the fundamentals,” wrote JP Morgan in January, pointing out that 2025 profit expectations were down 70% since 2022. The share price has more than doubled since then – something that would not usually happen when investors expect lower profits.Analysts at UBS, a Swiss investment bank, concur, saying that Tesla’s valuation “continues to confound us”, with big risks in its efforts to make money from self-driving cars or humanoid robots.While sales declined steeply in January in several markets, several analysts have warned against relying on numbers for a single month. Schmidt said: “Some consumers are likely holding back purchase decisions and waiting for the updated Model Y which arrives this month. The big question though is, are these just the die-hard Tesla enthusiasts which remain in line while other potential consumers jump ship?”There have also been positive signs elsewhere. UK Tesla sales fell in January, but bounced back by a fifth in February to leave sales up year-on-year for 2025 so far. In the US there were also signs of a recovery after a fall in January, with preliminary data for February indicating rebound sales of about 42,000 cars, up 14% year-on-year, according to Wards Intelligence.But the UK sales figures also highlight another concern for investors: that Tesla’s lead on rivals could be narrowing as a flood of new models arrive. Tesla’s electric market share for the first two months of 2025 was 11%, down from 14% in 2024, according to New Automotive, a research group.Ben Nelmes, New Automotive’s chief executive, said: “The impact of Elon Musk’s political views on Tesla’s sales may have been overstated, but Tesla is gradually losing its position as the dominant EV seller in the UK as other carmakers bring more up-to-date and cheaper models to market.”In China Tesla is under big pressure from a slew of cheaper competitors, most notably BYD. In Tesla’s second-biggest market, sales of its China-made EVs dropped 49% year-on-year in February, to the lowest level since August 2022.Edward Niedermeyer, author of Ludicrous – a 2019 book about Tesla which focuses on Musk’s habit of making bold claims about the business that don’t stack up – argues that the prospect for new business like robotaxis and robots are distant. “The unique moment that we’re in now is the business has peaked,” he said.The worry for Tesla investors is whether Musk has turned that peak into a cliff-edge.Additional reporting Lorenzo Tondo More

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      ‘Musk? He’s horrendous’: Martha Lane Fox on diversity, tech bros and International Women’s Day

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      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