The Elon Musk Thread

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[wjfox]

[firestar464]

[weatheriscool]

[firestar464]

What Elon Musk’s dangerous war with ‘60 Minutes’ is really all about

https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/18/media/el ... index.html

Elon Musk is doing everything conspiracy theorists accuse George Soros of

https://forward.com/opinion/697000/elon ... rge-soros/

[wjfox]

Part 2:

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Across the US, Protesters Rally Against Donald Trump and Elon Musk
by Arianna Coghill
February 18, 2025

(Mother Jones)On Monday, thousands of protesters across the country hit the streets to tell Donald Trump and Elon Musk “No kings on Presidents’ Day” in response to the barrage of alarming actions—from legally questionable executive orders to mass firings—taken by the administration since the inauguration.

From California to Florida, demonstrators were seen armed with signs that read “Resist fascism” and “Fight for Democracy,” as they marched against Trump’s agenda. Some braved freezing temperatures.

“I thought it was important to be here on Presidents Day to demonstrate for what America stands for,” 55-year-old Emily Manning, an engineer who was one of nearly a thousand protesters in Boston, told the Associated Press. “American values are not the values of the plutocracy or the limited few rich people.”

Many of the protests were organized by the 50501 Movement, a grassroots organization aimed at mobilizing against “the anti-democratic and illegal actions of the Trump administration and its plutocratic allies.” The group started as a decentralized effort born from a Reddit thread of the same name; it organized a similar set of nationwide protests earlier this month.

Meanwhile, despite reports of tension, Trump and Musk’s partnership in upending the federal government seems stronger than ever. Last week, the pair sat down for their first joint interview with Fox News‘ Sean Hannity, where Musk compared reactions among Democrats to Trump’s policies to “rabies.”

See related photos and captions here: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2 ... ay-2025/

Edit: Here is background supplied by NPR on the 50501 Movement: https://www.npr.org/2025/02/17/nx-s1-52 ... -protests

Here is another organization also involved in organizing protests: https://actionnetwork.org/event_campaig ... of-action

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The Trump Administration Told a Judge Elon Musk Does Not Head DOGE. Huh?
by Andrew Prokop
February 18, 2025

Introduction:

(Vox) As Elon Musk has rampaged around the federal government for four weeks, canceling contracts and dismantling whole departments, he’s claimed all the actions of his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) were “maximally transparent.”
…
For some time after Trump was sworn in, it was unclear whether Musk even was officially working for the government. Two weeks in, the administration confirmed he was indeed a “special government employee,” but declined to give further details.

Late Monday, White House aide Joshua Fisher finally provided an answer of sorts. As part of court proceedings in a lawsuit, Fisher made a declaration about Musk’s role under penalty of perjury — though that answer was rather curious.

Fisher revealed that Musk is a White House senior adviser to the president with “no greater authority than other senior White House advisers.” That means, he continued, that “Musk has no actual or formal authority to make government decisions himself.” Musk can only “advise the President and communicate the President’s directives.”

But what about DOGE, which Trump established in the executive branch as the “US DOGE Service”? Well, Fisher said, Musk is not the head of the US DOGE Service, or even an employee of it. As for who does run it: the administration hasn’t said.

Read more here: https://www.vox.com/politics/400096/el ... -chutkan

[firestar464]

Elon Musk asks voters to brace for economic 'hardship,' deep spending cuts in potential Trump Cabinet role

https://www.nbcnews.com/business/econom ... rcna177807

[wjfox]

[firestar464]

Agree with everything except the last part. Elon will be remembered VERY poorly. Seriously, who gives a f*ck about rockets when he will be responsible for the attempted (if not successful) dismantling of US democracy, as well as possibly various future atrocities?

[firestar464]

People Are Mass-Emailing Elon Musk In Response To His "What Did You Do Last Week?" Message To Federal Workers

https://www.buzzfeed.com/meganeliscomb/ ... -musk-doge

[firestar464]

Elon Musk Only Has 100 Days Left in Government

https://prospect.org/politics/2025-02-1 ... overnment/

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Elon Musk, Apartheid, and America’s New Boycott Movement
by Clara Jeffery
February 27, 2025

Conclusion:

(Mother Jones) On Valentine’s Day, Sheryl Crow put her Tesla on a flatbed and donated the sale’s proceeds to NPR. The following day, I went to the local Tesla dealership to witness the first in what has become an ongoing series of protests in San Francisco and across the country. The “Tesla Takedown” movement is, as such movements usually are, organized by an oddball coalition of folks, including documentary filmmaker Alex Winter (also “Bill” of Bill & Ted fame) and disinformation scholar Joan Donovan, who alleges that a donation from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative prompted Harvard to cancel her research on Meta’s role in online extremism. The goal is to get people to protest at dealerships, sell their cars, divest from any stock. Indivisible has joined the effort, organizing “Musk or Us” protests.

There’s a real strategy here: essentially that Tesla’s stock is wildly overpriced—it’s both an automaker and a memestock, as John Herman notes—and were it to approach a more reality-based level, Musk, who’s super leveraged, could see his fortune decline precipitously. That could push a shareholder revolt and also weaken his threat to use his vast fortune to fund a primary against anybody who opposes Trump. And in any case, people need a place to locate their anger and fear.

There are signs this is working. Tesla sales in Europe are catastrophically down—50 percent lower in January than from a year earlier, even as EV sales overall rose 34 percent. January sales were down 12 percent in California, and that’s before DOGE started playing havoc with the country. Tesla’s stock price has fallen 37 percent since its peak in December, knocking tens of billion off of Musk’s wealth; 23 percent of that is in the last few weeks (see also graph posted by W J Fox in this thread on February 26, 2025) . And people are taking their rage out on individual Teslas, stickering and even vandalizing “swasticars,” especially cybertrucks, which were already performing horribly, in terms of sales and just…performance.

Read more here: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2 ... ge-trump/

[firestar464]

Musk’s embrace of right-wing politics risks turning off car buyers and sinking Tesla’s stock

https://apnews.com/article/elon-musk-do ... d15e89956c

LET'S GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

[firestar464]

Elon Musk to meet with House GOP

https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2 ... p-00210414

Musk survives UK Royal Society expulsion calls

https://phys.org/news/2025-03-musk-surv ... ciety.html

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A Little Agency Is Standing Up to Musk with a Tell-All Lawsuit
by Pema Levy
March 7, 2025

Introduction:

(Mother Jones) Nearly two months into President Donald Trump’s lawless dismantling of the federal government, a small agency has stood up with a tell-all lawsuit. The lawsuit from the president of the United States African Development Foundation (USADF) asks the courts to spare the agency from obliteration at the hands of Elon Musk and his band of tech bros. In doing so, it lays out in detail just how Musk and his so-called Department of Government Efficiency go about their illegal takeovers—and how one tiny agency stood up for its mission and the rule of law.

Since the opening days of the administration, Musk and his minions have barged into agencies, including such august institutions as the Treasury Department, where they demanded access to the most sensitive systems and were handed the keys to the kingdom. Across government, career officials facing DOGE orders have resigned quietly, leaving the public to guess as to what is happening as reporters rush to share snippets.

But the lawsuit offers something that has been generally lacking—an example of top agency officials who not only fought DOGE’s attacks, but are sharing with the public exactly how these attacks are taking place.

Read more here: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2 ... awsuit/

[firestar464]

Rep. Pocan to Introduce ELON MUSK Act to Ban Federal Government Contracts for Special Government Employees, Similar To Bans For Members of Congress, Many Other Federal Employees

https://pocan.house.gov/media-center/pr ... ts-special

[firestar464]

Rolling Stone- ‘Musk’s Involvement in Politics Could Be the Downfall of Tesla’

https://archive.ph/Ru59g