Tag Archive for: Elon Musk

Politico’s Dasha Burns reports something that isn’t making headlines elsewhere: the fun of the Trump-Musk fight may be short-lived.

White House aides are trying to broker a peace.

White House aides, after working to persuade the president to temper his public criticism of Musk to avoid escalation, scheduled a call Friday with the billionaire CEO of Tesla to broker a peace.

“Oh it’s okay,” Trump told POLITICO in a brief telephone call when asked about the very public breakup with his onetime megabacker. “It’s going very well, never done better.” Trump went on to tout his favorability ratings saying, “The numbers are through the roof, the highest polls I’ve ever had and I have to go.”

Update, 1:30 ET: One after another access journalist has spoken to Trump and are now reporting that Trump thinks Elon has a problem. One after another access journalist has left unanswered — if Elon is nuts, why did Trump let him run unfettered through government for four months and what will Trump do to make sure Elon didn’t damage the government?

Aside from that actual news report, much of the rest of the reporting is no better — and often worse — than what we can do from the comfort of our own EU perch.

The same Politico lists seven right wingers who could get caught between the two narcissists. But only JD Vance — whose endorsement of Trump in the wake of Elon’s seeming endorsement of impeaching Trump was rather mild — is really stuck between the Silicon billionaires and Trump.

I’m really not worried, for example, about the Millers (though agree Stephen is the most likely peace broker, since he had a big role in recruiting Elon in the first place). And while David Sacks was one of Elon’s entrees into the Trump world, Trump’s increasing addiction to cryptocorruption guarantees Sacks some protection inside the White House.

Meanwhile, NYT has an inane post about eight ways Trump and Musk might damage each other. It doesn’t seem to realize that Musk could not just use Xitter as an irritant (which is what it reports), but could also rejigger Xitter to undercut the way it favors right wing discourse and disinformation generally. NYT simply doesn’t understand how important Xitter is to the far right project, not even with Charlie Kirk’s slavering tribute to it amid the worst of the blowup, not even with the way Elon destroyed Xitter’s gateway function to real journalism, in the process damaging outlets like NYT.

Worse still, NYT doesn’t seem to understand the ways Trump has used the presidency to pay off his election debt to Elon; it even calls DOGE a “pet project.”

Wield the power of the presidency against him. Mr. Trump has a tremendous array of powers at his disposal, with the ability to sign executive orders punishing political adversaries and to direct agencies like the Justice Department to initiate investigations. He could end some of Mr. Musk’s pet projects, such as the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, as well as his embrace of white South Africans, a priority of Mr. Musk’s.

As I noted, Elizabeth Warren made a list of 130 ways Elon exploited his access to Trump, many of them involving short-circuiting regulation of his businesses (this is an entirely different set of benefits to Elon than I included in this post).

34. Musk has direct business interests before over 70% of agencies and departments targeted by DOGE.

35. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) was a top target. Musk called for “delet[ing]” the agency and DOGE attempted to fire up to 90% of CFPB staff, who would regulate X Money.

36. President Trump fired the CFPB Director and the new head of CFPB forbade the agency from doing work — after CFPB had received over 300 consumer complaints about Tesla.

37. X also deleted CFPB’s official account on the social media platform, limiting the public communications of an agency that regulates Musk companies.

38. X deleted the account of Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) Commissioner Richard Trumka Jr. after he posted about President Trump’s allegedly illegal firings of Democratic CPSC commissioners.

39. The Trump Administration fired Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) commissioners after EEOC investigated Tesla for alleged racial harassment and retaliation at the company’s Fremont Facility.

40. The Trump Administration plans to cut potentially thousands of EPA employees, after the EPA found that SpaceX violated the Clean Water Act, investigated Tesla’s actions at its Austin Facility, and investigated an xAI facility in Tennessee for air pollution.

41. The Trump Administration began requiring any EPA spending greater than $50,000 to obtain DOGE approval, potentially allowing Musk to slow down environmental enforcement actions, like past investigations into Tesla and SpaceX for hazardous waste dumping and other alleged activity.

42. The Trump Administration attempted to fire hundreds of FAA employees, including some who directly contribute to air safety, after the FAA required SpaceX to abide by environmental requirements.

And NYT’s treatment of DOGE as a “pet project” ignores one of the real risks exacerbated by this blowup. Elon’s DOGE boys remain burrowed into government agencies, rewarded for their lack of experience and ties to criminal hackers with GS-14 and GS-15 salaries.

Although Elon Musk has said that he is largely exiting his role at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), at least three of his early operatives and key lieutenants throughout his government takeover have recently become full-time government employees.

Edward Coristine, Luke Farritor, and Ethan Shaotran’s employment designations at the General Services Administration (GSA) have been officially converted to full-time from the restricted special government employee classification that limited their time in government to a period of 130 days, according to documentation viewed by WIRED.

Coristine, who has gone by “Big Balls” online and previously worked for a telecommunications firm known for hiring former blackhat hackers, was converted to full time on May 31, along with Farritor. Shaotran became full time on April 10.

[snip]

Coristine, Farritor, and Shaotran, according to documentation viewed by WIRED, each maintain their “senior adviser” titles. Coristine and Farritor are drawing some of the largest salaries possible for government employees through the “General Schedule” employee rankings. They have a salary grade of GS-15, one of the highest grades, and Shaotran is one step below at GS-14. When they were special government employees, Coristine, Farritor, and Shaotran did not appear to be drawing salaries at all through GSA, WIRED reported in March.

These boys have access to our data! We still haven’t learned who was exfiltrating data from NLRB — as reported by whistleblower Dan Berulis — or why entities using a Russian address seemed to know the new login accounts created by DOGE boys.

18. I started tracking what appeared to be sensitive data leaving the secured location it is meant to be stored. I initially saw gigabytes exiting the NxGen case management system “nucleus,” within the NLRB system, and I later witnessed a similar large spike in outbound traffic leaving the network itself. From what I could see the data that was being exfiltrated added up to around 10 gigabytes– in the case that the data was almost all text files it would be the equivalent of a full stack of encyclopedias worth if someone printed these files as hard-copy documents. It is unclear which files were copied and removed, and I’ve tried multiple routes to prove this was not an exfiltration event but none have yielded fruit and some have been stopped outright. I also don’t know if the data was only 10gb in total or whether or not they were consolidated and compressed prior. This opens up the possibility that even more data was exfiltrated. Regardless, that kind of spike is extremely unusual because data almost never directly leaves NLRB’s databases.

[snip]

21. On or about March 11, 2025, NxGen metrics indicated abnormal usage at points the prior week. I saw way above baseline response times, and resource utilization showed increased network output above anywhere it had been historically – as far back as I could look. I noted that this lined up closely with the data out event. I also notice increased logins blocked by access policy due to those log-ins being out of the country. For example: In the days after DOGE accessed NLRB’s systems, we noticed a user with an IP address in Primorskiy Krai, Russia started trying to log in. Those attempts were blocked, but they were especially alarming. Whoever was attempting to log in was using one of the newly created accounts that were used in the other DOGE related activities and it appeared they had the correct username and password due to the authentication flow only stopping them due to our no-out-of-country logins policy activating. There were more than 20 such attempts, and what is particularly concerning is that many of these login attempts occurred within 15 minutes of the accounts being created by DOGE engineers.

Whether the fight between Elon and Trump is real and ongoing or whether it’ll be patched up, the blowup should lead people from both parties to demand that these DOGE boys be removed from government systems and agencies and a thorough audit of their work be done systemwide. Yes, Elon’s meltdown is cause to revisit his security clearances (with a consequent review of the SpaceX relationship), but the national security and privacy risk posed by Elon’s infiltration of government is actually far broader than that.

Finally, I’m not seeing any outlets point out that making one small change to the Big Ugly bill at the center of this dispute — the huge tax cuts for people like Elon — would not only limit the damage it does to the deficit (Elon’s claimed complaint with it) but also call Elon’s bluff (since he very much wants to eat his tax cut too).

Let’s tax Elon. That’ll make this blowup go someplace productive!!

The narcissistic explosions of last night really aren’t just fun and games, as they’re largely being treated by the press.

They’re a visible reminder of the problem with access, the problem with wealth inequality, the problem with campaign finance failures,  the problem with Trump’s unbound corruption.

To pay off a campaign debt, Donald Trump let an unstable man — allegedly abusing drugs — with no understanding of government bureaucracy unleash a tribe of DOGE boys throughout government for four months, countering the will of Congress based on his whims and conspiracy theories. And now that man has threatened vengeance on Trump.

This may get papered over because Trump needs to paper it over.

But it’s high time the political press caught up to Wired and ProPublica in unpacking the grave risk of all this.

It’s fashionable to focus reporting about Elon Musk’s attacks on Trump’s Big Awful on the spat within the Republican party.

Politico has separate stories on how “hard-liners” like Tom Massie and Rand Paul are “rejoic[ing]” over Elon’s tweets and parroting White House excuses for Musk’s comments, which both repeat four claims Marc Caputo first aired (half of which are dubious or dated) and demand that journalists view Elon’s comments as exclusively about the effect on his own business.

“When businessmen criticize legislation, journalists don’t take them at their word, they look at how the legislation would impact their business interests,” said a Republican close to the White House. “They should be doing that in this case.”

I wonder if this anonymous Republican close to the White House raised similar concerns about Elon’s business interests driving his decisions as he shredded regulators overseeing his own businesses? In a brilliant summary of 130 shitty things Elon did in his 130 days in government, Elizabeth Warren cited 29 Federal contracts and 34 instances where Elon fiddled with his regulators, of which this is just a selection:

55. Musk’s cost-cutting team is laying off workers at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), the auto safety agency investigating Tesla for crashes stemming from its “full self-driving” and remote control features.

56. The Trump Administration first shut down NLRB altogether — which had cases against multiple Musk companies (including SpaceX, Tesla, and X).

57. Then President Trump removed independent NLRB members.

58. DOGE is gutting NOAA while Musk eyes privatization of NOAA weather satellites, which could present a business opportunity for Starlink.

59. President Trump signed an executive order halting operations of the Labor Department’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance, which had Tesla on its list of contractors scheduled for audits.

60. OSHA has 27 cases against Tesla for workers rights violations and investigated SpaceX for workplace injuries — and now DOGE is limiting the agency’s work.

61. President Trump tried to fire over 90% of National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), which put two Musk companies — Boring and Tesla — on its “dirty dozen” list of worst workplace safety offenders.

All that drama is amusing. All the tweets from House members like Scott Perry and Marjorie Taylor Greene disavowing their votes could become more interesting once this bill returns to the House, but probably won’t

I’m more focused in the extent to which Elon’s comments will unsettle the dynamic that otherwise would permit (as Politico also reported was the plan) John Thune to ram through changes and Mike Johnson in turn to ram through the changed bill.

Elon’s comments unsettle things. Who knows what could happen as a result.

Consider the several instances where local communities have stood up against Stephen Miller’s authoritarian dragnet. There was the backlash to a heavy-handed raid in San Diego where ICE agents deployed flash bangs before bystanders chased them off, chanting, “Shame, shame.” Then there was the spontaneous protest yesterday in response to a restaurant raid in Minneapolis.

A more controversial case involves Carol Hui, whose plight mobilized a conservative Missouri town, with a number of Trump voters claiming they didn’t vote to deport their sweet neighbor.

“I voted for Donald Trump, and so did practically everyone here,” said Vanessa Cowart, a friend of Ms. Hui from church. “But no one voted to deport moms. We were all under the impression we were just getting rid of the gangs, the people who came here in droves.”

She paused. “This is Carol.”

Whatever you think of such disavowals — Never Trumper JV Last is unimpressed; Greg Sargent did a great interview that conveys why she’s the kind of person non-liberals might rally behind — G Elliot Morris made a compelling argument that these Trump voters are precisely the kind of people you’d need to combat these policies.

The other way to say that — and the way Carol’s friends put it — is that millions of Americans voted for Trump, but they didn’t vote for this.

[snip]

If you are a Democrat, I know it is tempting to do schadenfreude and voter-bashing toward regretful Trump voters, who you see as enabling authoritarianism. But it is very important right now to make the point that people who voted for Trump did not support all of his policy agenda (the vast majority of which is unpopular) for four reasons.

First, internalizing that voting for someone is not an endorsement of their future policy agenda gives people data to fight the worst excesses of Trump’s agenda, especially on trade and immigration. Data can be a very powerful rhetorical tool in catalyzing opposition to unpopular policies.

In Trump’s first administration, for example, polling on his separation of families crossing the border was almost 50 points underwater. That data and related protests convinced the administration to change course.

The alternative to this is assuming that moderate Trump supporters actually support deporting non-criminal parents, which we know (given the data above) to be false. If you assume that, then there is a much smaller landscape of opinion on which to do battle about politics. You have to believe these people are persuadable to move them.

You will not defeat fascism with just the people who voted for Kamala Harris, or even just the people who voted for Joe Biden in 2020. You need some of Carol Hui’s neighbors to stand up for what is decent.

All the better if the process of standing up leads them to rethink their support for MAGAt.

The point being, we’re beginning to see real activism against Trump’s immigration dragnet, the same kind of activism that (Morris notes) led Trump to temper his plans in the first term.

And we’re seeing it before it’s too late to, one way or another, defeat (or at least impose a cost for) the vast expansion of Stephen Miller’s dragnet in the Big Ugly.

Yesterday, Miller listed the immigration provisions first among the reasons he likes the bill — ahead of giving Elon a tax cut, ahead of taking food from poor children.

There’s a reason Miller is so excited about the bill. It would dramatically expand ICE, ICE detention centers, and ICE’s ability to deputize cops, making ICE — rather than the FBI — the biggest federal law “enforcement” agency.

The House GOP-crafted bill includes some $45 billion that would go toward detaining immigrants until 2029.

That’s roughly $9 billion per year — an amount that far surpasses a previous record-high of $3.4 billion Congress appropriated for ICE detention a little over a year ago, under the Biden administration.

ICE currently has capacity to detain roughly 41,000 people. Under the GOP bill, that number would increase to some 100,000.

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, says there’s not currently enough space to detain that many people.

“ICE would be forced to use this funding to build new detention centers, new soft-sided detention camps, where tents would be thrown up by detention contractors, where immigrants would be held, potentially en masse,” he said.

The bill includes over $150 billion for various components of immigration enforcement, including detention, border wall construction and deportation transportation.

“Taken together, this funding would make ICE the best funded federal law enforcement agency in U.S. history, with more detention bed funding that the entire Federal Bureau of Prisons and potentially more agents on board than the entire Federal Bureau of Investigations,” Reichlin-Melnick said.

He says the new bill also includes additional funds for ICE to hire new agents and increase collaboration initiatives with local law enforcement agencies — like 287-g agreements. But, no funding for DHS oversight.

ICE is the leading edge of Miller’s assault on the Constitution. His goons are already struggling to find as many migrants as he demands be arrested, leading to screaming sessions and threats (first reported in the Washington Examiner!!).

“They’ve been threatened, told they’re watching their emails and texts and Signals,” the first official said. “That’s what is horrible about things right now. It’s a fearful environment. Everybody in leadership is afraid. … There’s no morale. Everybody is demoralized.”

ICE’s top 50 field officials were given roughly a week’s notice of an emergency meeting in Washington.

ICE’s 25 Enforcement Removal Operations, or ERO, field office directors and 25 Homeland Security Investigations, or HSI, special agents in charge flew into Washington and descended on the agency’s Washington headquarters last Tuesday, May 20. There, they were met by Miller, ICE confirmed to the Washington Examiner.

“Miller came in there and eviscerated everyone. ‘You guys aren’t doing a good job. You’re horrible leaders.’ He just ripped into everybody. He had nothing positive to say about anybody, shot morale down,” said the first official, who spoke with those in the room that day.

“Stephen Miller wants everybody arrested. ‘Why aren’t you at Home Depot? Why aren’t you at 7-Eleven?’” the official recited.

One of the ERO officials in attendance stood up and stated that the Department of Homeland Security and the White House had publicly messaged about targeting criminal illegal immigrants, and therefore, ICE was targeting them, and not the general illegal immigration population.

“Miller said, ‘What do you mean you’re going after criminals?’ Miller got into a little bit of a pissing contest. ‘That’s what Tom Homan says every time he’s on TV: ‘We’re going after criminals,’” the ICE official told Miller, according to the first official.

The (un)intended consequences of this vast expansion, with Stephen Miller screaming that ICE has to go search places for people who are definitely not the criminal aliens he lied about during the election, are pretty obvious.

Now is the time for the people shaming ICE’s invasions of their neighborhood to make a stink about this bill.

To be clear: it won’t kill the bill. The only way the bill will die is if the conflict between hardliners and those who want to preserve health care reaches an impasse which, so far, it has not.

But it would be useful if the localized mobilization raised the cost of this bill going forward, especially if the bill happens to die via other means.