Tag: tesla
Elon Musk

Musk's 'DOGE' Cuts Will Hit Red States (And Trump Voters) Hard

Billionaire Tesla/SpaceX CEO Elon Musk was a major donor to Donald Trump's 2024 campaign, and now that Trump is president-elect, he has picked Musk and MAGA businessman Vivek Ramaswamy to head a proposed new agency called the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Its goals, according to Trump and his transition team, include finding ways to cut federal spending and reducing the United States' federal deficit.

In an article published on December 11, Reuters reporters Andy Sullivan and Ally J. Levine examine possible areas in which Musk and Ramaswamy could recommend "deep cuts." And those cuts, they stress, could be the most painful in red states where Trump enjoyed the strongest support.

"Roughly two out of every three dollars is spent on pension, health care and other programs that provide tangible benefits to U.S. residents, meaning that any cutbacks could cause an outcry," Sullivan and Levine explain. "Consider the Affordable Care Act, the healthcare expansion that was the signature accomplishment of Democratic President Barack Obama. Republicans vowed to roll back 'Obamacare' when Trump was first elected in 2016, but they failed to do so. The program has dramatically grown since then."

Like Musk and Ramaswamy, Russell Vought — Trump's choice for White House budget director and a major architect of Project 2025 — has, according to Sullivan and Levine, "called for tightening veterans programs." And this, the Reuters reporters note, "could have an outsize effect in Trump country."

A chart published with the article shows that 63 percent of the United States' "total spending on veterans' benefits" is in states that Trump won in the 2024 election — while only 37 percent is in states that went to Vice President Kamala Harris.

"Trump has ruled out benefit cuts to the two biggest safety-net programs, Social Security and Medicare," Sullivan and Levine report. "The two programs, which provide pension and health benefits to seniors, play a bigger role in the states that backed his presidential bid. Other benefit programs aimed at low-income people may be easier for a Republican president like Trump to tackle."

The journalists continue, "Both the Medicaid health plan for the poor and the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program, which helps pay for groceries, tend to play a bigger role in Democratic-leaning states. But cutbacks in these areas also would hit hard in poor, conservative states like Louisiana."

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

DOGE Drama As CNN Unearths Tape Of Vivek Trashing Elon In 2022

DOGE Drama As CNN Unearths Tape Of Vivek Trashing Elon In 2022

Before billionaires Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy became co-chairs of Donald Trump’s bogus Department of Government Efficiency, Ramaswamy had all kinds of awful things to say about Musk, the Tesla CEO and world’s richest right-wing misinformation peddler. CNN’s KFile did a deep dive into Ramaswamy’s history of disparaging statements about his new co-chair.

“I think Tesla is increasingly beholden to China,” Ramaswamy opined during a podcast in 2023 in response to the company’s announcement that it would be building a new battery plant in Shanghai. "I have no reason to think Elon won’t jump like a circus monkey when Xi Jinping calls in the hour of need."

Musk's reliance on China has only increased over the years, and he has been trying very hard to maintain a favorable relationship with the country that provides a large share of his company's profits as well as so much of the raw materials used in Tesla's EV batteries.

In May 2023, Ramaswamy wrote on X that while he appreciated Musk’s purchase of the social media platform, Musk and other “prominent business leaders” were “puppets” of the Chinese Communist Party.

Ramaswamy further criticized Musk in a subsequent post.

“Now the crusader for “free speech” (@elonmusk) kisses the ring of the world’s biggest censor: Xi Jinping,” he wrote.

Musk and Ramaswamy have promised to use DOGE to target hundreds of billions of dollars in government spending cuts by focusing on slashing funding to entities such as the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which receives $535 million a year. It is an interesting tactic for Musk, whose entire business empire was buoyed by billions (with a “B”) of taxpayer dollars.

“Both Tesla and SpaceX quite likely would not exist as successful businesses if it were not for the use of public funding,” Ramaswamy told a Fox News podcast in 2022. “[E]ither through subsidies, through the electric car industry, or through actual government contracting in the case of SpaceX."

“Elon Musk has, I think, demonstrated his willingness to change his political tunes based on the favors that he gets to be able to do business in China,” Ramaswamy said in the same Fox News interview.

The increasingly tense trade battle over technology ramped up on Tuesday when China announced a ban on the exporting of rare minerals to the U.S. When you factor in Trump’s promises to add hefty trade tariffs to Chinese imports, Ramaswamy’s last claim is sure to be tested in the coming weeks and months.

Predictably, Ramaswamy has changed his tune toward Musk and is now even promising to use DOGE to harass and possibly extinguish Musk’s domestic EV rivals.

According to Ramaswamy, he now has heart eyes for Musk.

“I love him and respect the hell out of him, and I’m proud to call him a friend,” a smarmy Ramaswamy told CNN. “The only country he puts first is the same one I do: the United States of America.”

It’s easy to see how they’re now simpatico, since they both have the same obsessions: money and power.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

Elon Musk

Elon Musk's Ongoing Twitter Tantrum Targets National Public Radio

We don't know why tantruming billionaire child Elon Musk is engaged in a one-sided war against NPR, but he doesn't show signs of stopping.

Last week Musk's Twitter slapped a "state-affiliated media" label on NPR's Twitter account, despite NPR not being a candidate for such a label according to Twitter's own definition of the term, and despite Twitter's own Help Center specifically singling out NPR as an example of a corporation that wouldn't meet the definition. NPR is not "state-affiliated."

Somebody inside the now-skeletal company got embarrassed when news pieces about their move pointed that out, after which Twitter deleted the use of NPR as its Help Center example rather than admitting they weren't following their own rules. NPR itself expressed outrage that Elon was falsely lumping it in with the foreign state-sponsored propaganda outlets that the Twitter label is meant to warn users about and announced that they'd no longer be posting on Elon's site until the label was removed.

Faced with perhaps more public mockery than he expected, now Musk has flinched again. He's still lying his ass off, though. Now Musk's engineers have changed NPR's designation to read "Government Funded Media," which is ... still not accurately correct. And now Musk is claiming that he'll be applying it to more media outlets than just NPR, though apparently he hasn't worked it out enough to figure out how not to be wrong about it.

The catch here remains the same: NPR is not "state-affiliated." It's also not "government funded." NPR is a nonprofit corporation that gets somewhere around 1% of its funding from government grants and relies on donations, grants, and station dues for the rest. As Republican politicians have groused repeatedly over the years, the federal government has no ability to dictate NPR's news coverage.

What Musk here is attempting to do is to find a designation he can tar insufficiently friendly media outlets with as a way of discrediting them when they (repeatedly) report on his pandemic misinformation, his business flubs, or his fawning over internet white nationalists. Since Musk is a habitual liar in the best of times we can expect he's going to go through a few more iterations of these labels before he settles on one that the lawyers think they can defend. Perhaps he'll settle for a "Was Once Mean To Elon" label for his fanboys and then call this done?

The other catch here, though, is that Elon Internet Whiner Musk is the poster child of "government funded." Neither Tesla nor SpaceX would even exist right now if it were not for Musk sucking up government funds by the billions; his companies had guzzled nearly $5 billion in government money as of 2015, and both companies were saved from bankruptcy directly because of government credits or government contracts.

If there's anyone else in the world whose wealth is more tied to getting government cash than Elon's is, that person isn't coming to mind.

For Musk, though, this isn't about accuracy. It's never about accuracy. Elon Musk is mad at NPR for NPR's coverage of his own antics, and Musk purchased Twitter specifically so he would have the tools to get back at journalists and media outlets who he's felt disrespected by. He's a big whining baby and he's going to keep having this tantrum until he tires himself out and his handlers put him down for a nap.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

Elon Musk

Musk Says Media 'Is Racist Against Whites,' Defends Anti-Black 'Dilbert' Cartoonist

When Dilbert comic strip creator Scott Adams went on a racist rant last week about Black people being a “hate group” and urging white people to “get the fuck away” from them, it wasn’t a huge surprise. Just like it wasn’t a huge surprise that Twitter CEO Elon Musk would defend Adams and pivot away from the artist’s outrageous comments to a conversation about the alleged “racist” media.

By Saturday, Adams’ strip was pulled from multiple newspapers nationwide.

Sunday, Musk tweeted that the media “was against non-white people,” but now they’re “racist against whites & Asians.”

Musk added:

“Same thing happened with elite colleges & high schools in America… Maybe they can try not being racist.”

Since Musk’s $44 billion takeover of Twitter, there’s been a surge of hateful rhetoric.

“Systemic racism requires not only widespread bigotry to be held within a group but also a structural component that allows discrimination and oppression to be imposed on a minority because of an advantage of access and power. A white billionaire from South Africa who recently lost a high-profile racial discrimination case may not be in the best position to offer counsel,” Brian Levin, a civil rights attorney and director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, said about Musk’s comments, according to CNBC.

The Tesla owner is currently embroiled in a workplace discrimination suit filed by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) following complaints after the California Civil Rights Department, formerly known as the Department of Fair Employment and Housing, sued Tesla with claims of widespread racist discrimination at Tesla factories and facilities across the state.

According to the lawsuit, thousands of Black workers at Tesla’s Fremont factory were segregated into the most physically demanding positions and forced into the lowest-level contract roles.

The segregated areas where they worked were called the “porch monkey station,” “the slave ship,” and “the plantation,” and that’s not the worst of it. When Black workers complained, they were retaliated against, ignored, and denied bonuses, promotions, and other opportunities, the lawsuit reads.

In addition to defending racists, Musk was busy this weekend laying off at least 50 employees, The Daily Beast reports. Not even sparing one of its most loyal employees, the head of Twitter payments, Esther Crawford, who, according to The Daily Beast, slept in her office to show her dedication.

Adams’ segregationist outburst, the one that caused his strip to be kicked to the curb, came out of his YouTube channel. A poll from the Rasmussen Reports, a conservative firm, found that nearly half of Black people surveyed disagreed with the statement, “It’s okay to be white.”

“Based on the current way things are going, the best advice I would give to white people is to get the hell away from Black people. Just get the fuck away,” Adams said. “Wherever you have to go, just get away. Because there’s no fixing this. This can’t be fixed. So I don’t think it makes any sense as a white citizen of America to try to help Black citizens anymore. It doesn’t make sense. There’s no longer a rational impulse. So I’m going to back off on being helpful to Black America because it doesn’t seem like it pays off.”

This isn’t Adams’ first time at the racist rodeo.

In 2016, Hunter wrote extensively about the cartoonist’s support for then-candidate Donald Trump.

“If Trump gets elected, and he does anything that looks even slightly Hitler-ish in office, I will join the resistance movement and help kill him. That’s an easy promise to make, and I hope my fellow citizens would use their Second Amendment rights to rise up and help me kill any Hitler-type person who rose to the top job in this country, no matter who it is,” Adams said, according to Hunter.

On Saturday, Daily Kos’ Mark Sumner wrote that in past podcasts, Adams has said that the January 6 insurrectionists weren’t actually supporters of Trump, but the mob on the U.S. Capitol was a conspiracy—”a conspiracy he blamed on the racist and anti-Semitic ‘replacement theory.’”

In 2022, Variety reported that Adams introduced a Black character to his strip for the first time. “Dave the Black Engineer” was used to denigrate diversity and inclusion in the workplace and transgender identity. “I identify as white,” the character said in one strip.

According to Variety, Adams also claimed, in 2020, that after UPN canceled the Dilbert animated series, it was for “being white” and because “UPN decided it would focus on an African American audience,” alleging it was his “third job lost for being white.”

As Sumner wrote, Adams’ strip was once featured in over 2,000 newspapers but has since been dumped by hundreds of distributors in a list too long to mention.

Goodbye and good riddance.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

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