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Exposed: Elon Musk's Real Reasons for Going Full MAGA for Trump
"As eccentric and provocative as Elon Musk wants people to think he is, he's really just another corporate billionaire who wants to avoid accountability."
Oct 22, 2024
Tesla founder Elon Musk has spent his career cultivating the image of a provocateur who's driven by a passionate commitment to free speech and technological innovation—but a new report by consumer advocacy group Public Citizen makes the case that when it comes to Musk's political priorities, there's nothing unique or trailblazing about him.
Musk, said Public Citizen research director Rick Claypool, is galvanized by the same concerns that lead oil executives to pour money into the campaigns of pro-fossil fuel politicians like Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump: self-preservation.
Claypool published research cataloguing the numerous business-related incentives Musk has for supporting Trump, whose rallies the billionaire has spoken at recently and for whose campaign he has created a super political action committee.
At least three of Musk's businesses—electric car maker Tesla, space exploration company SpaceX, and social media platform X—face a total of at least 11 criminal and civil investigations over alleged fraud, labor violations, and other accusations.
"Enforcement priorities can shift significantly when administrations change," wrote Claypool. "Musk's self-serving desire to thwart the numerous civil and criminal investigations into his businesses seems a likely reason for the billionaire's increased involvement in electoral politics."
"Trump has promised to put Musk in charge of government efficiency. Since Musk's companies receive billions in government contracts every year—and often clash with government regulators—Musk would in effect be given the power to trim the very agencies that regulate him."
The report points to federal investigations into Tesla's claims about the "self-driving" capability of its vehicles, with the Department of Justice (DOJ) examining whether the claims constitute criminal fraud, and a case at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) charging that Tesla retaliated against Black workers who reported being subjected to racist harassment at work.
The Securities and Exchange Commission is also investigating Musk's $44 billion takeover of X and the Federal Trade Commission has received reports that Musk gave orders to employees that would have breached an FTC consent decree which the company, formerly called Twitter, entered in 2011 as part of a settlement for alleged deceptive practices and privacy violations.
SpaceX has been accused by the Environmental Protection Agency of pollution that violated the Clean Water Act, and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) last month accused the company of safety violations in its rocket launches in Florida.
Musk, who is the richest person in the world with a net worth of nearly $250 billion, has attempted to fight federal investigations and cases against his companies by threatening a lawsuit against the FAA alleging "regulatory overreach" and challenging the constitutionality of the National Labor Relations Board and a DOJ case.
Last October, as the DOJ was expanding its probe of Tesla and just after the EEOC sued the company over racial discrimination, Musk called for "comprehensive deregulation."
"As eccentric and provocative as Elon Musk wants people to think he is, he's really just another corporate billionaire who wants to avoid accountability," said Claypool. "Nobody—not government officials or massive corporations or billionaire executives—is above the law. But if self-serving campaigns to the contrary succeed, the injustice of America's two-tiered justice system will only deepen."
The Public Citizen report comes days after Musk urged his followers to sign his petition supporting "free speech and the right to bear arms," promising a random $1 million payment each day to one registered voter who signs—a scheme legal experts say amounts to illegal vote-buying for Trump.
At The Nation on Monday, Jeet Heer noted that Trump has pledged to put Musk in charge of a “government efficiency commission” that could help eliminate federal regulations and advised Democrats to fight Musk's attempts to influence voters by calling attention to what he really is: "an oligarch threatening democracy."
"Musk's eagerness to elect Trump is clearly rooted in a squalid quid pro quo," Heer wrote. "Trump has promised to put Musk in charge of government efficiency. Since Musk's companies receive billions in government contracts every year—and often clash with government regulators—Musk would in effect be given the power to trim the very agencies that regulate him."
"Musk," wrote Heer, "is the perfect face of the new American robber barons."
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How US Taxpayers Helped Elon Musk Become the Richest Man on Earth
Now it's time to tax it back to where much of it came from.
Oct 19, 2024
Once upon a time, here in the United States, we taxed the rich. Significantly. Today, by contrast, we’re actively enhancing their fortunes. Including the biggest personal fortune of them all, the quarter-trillion-dollar stash that belongs to Elon Musk, the current numero uno on the Forbesreal-time list of the world’s largest fortunes.
Musk owes a hefty chunk of his own personal fortune to the taxes average Americans pay. He just happens to be, notes a just-published Politico analysis, “the single biggest beneficiary of U.S. government contracts.”
Two of Musk’s commercial operations, Tesla and SpaceX, have received billions in American taxpayer support. The federal government, Politico points out, has essentially “outsourced its space program” to SpaceX, and Tesla, a shaky electric vehicle company when Musk bought it, only “took off after receiving $465 million in subsidies from the Obama administration in 2010.”
All the tax dollars that Musk has collected from the Defense Department, NASA, and the U.S. intelligence community — coupled with the “generous government subsidies and tax credits to the electric-vehicle industry” that have so boosted Musk’s Tesla — have Council on Foreign Relations senior fellow Max Boot fairly fuming.
Taxpayers like himself, Boot notes, are subsidizing the “fire hose of falsehoods” that now appear on X, the former Twitter, the social media app that Musk bought for $44 billion two years ago. Our tax dollars have essentially supersized our world’s single wealthiest individual.
Back in the middle of the 20th century, the United States took quite a different approach to the money pouring into rich people’s pockets. From the early 1940s through the mid-1960s, the incomes of America’s richest faced a tax bite that would be unimaginable today.
In 1942, then-president Franklin Roosevelt proposed a 100 percent tax rate on income over $25,000, the equivalent of about $484,000 today. Congress wouldn’t go along with that 100 percent top rate. But lawmakers did give the okay to a 94 percent top tax rate on 1944 income over $200,000.
In the 1950s, under the Republican president Dwight Eisenhower, the federal tax rate on top-bracket income never dipped below 91 percent.
Today’s top-bracket federal income tax rate? That stands, on paper, at 37 percent on income over $693,751 for a couple filing jointly. But assorted loopholes have left the tax rate the rich face on their actual annual gains enormously lower.
In 2021, a joint report from the Biden administration’s Office of Management and Budget and Council of Economic Advisers calculated that America’s wealthiest 400 billionaire families, between 2010 and 2018, “paid an average of just 8.2 percent of their income” — counting the gains in the value of their investments — in federal individual income taxes.
“That’s a lower rate,” the report noted, “than many ordinary Americans pay.”
Could we ever get back to anything close to Eisenhower-era tax rates on the richest among us? This past March, the Biden administration proposed a 25 percent minimum tax on the total income — including unrealized capital gains — of the nation’s top 0.01 percent, households worth at least $100 million.
About the same time, progressive lawmakers — led by U.S. senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and representatives Pramila Jayapal from Washington State and Brendan Boyle from Pennsylvania — introduced the Ultra-Millionaire Tax Act, legislation that would impose a wealth tax on America’s 100,000 wealthiest households, our richest 0.05 percent.
Under this proposed legislation, wealthy households worth up to $1 billion would face an annual tax of 2 percent on their wealth over $50 million. Richer households would face an additional 1 percent tax on wealth over $1 billion.
One of the Senate co-sponsors of that legislation, Vermont’s Bernie Sanders, has also gone a step further and called for a 100 percent tax on wealth over $1 billion.
“I think people can make it on $999 million,” Sanders told journalist Chris Wallace last year.
Sanders and one of America’s most famous deep pockets, Bill Gates, have actually had a friendly podcast discussion over whether our tax rates should allow billion-dollar fortunes to even exist. The Sanders proposal, noted Gates, would tax away over 99 percent of his personal fortune. Gates would be willing to let the IRS take 62 percent, about $100 billion.
For a better America, that certainly might make a good place to start.
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Alarm as Trump Judge Sides With Company Claiming NLRB Is Unconstitutional
"This is yet another move by a Trump-appointed judge in favor of wealthy corporations."
Sep 17, 2024
The National Labor Relations Board was prevented on Tuesday from moving forward with an unfair labor practices case against the social services tech company Findhelp, after a Trump-appointed judge granted the Texas-based firm's request for a temporary injunction.
In the Northern District of Texas, U.S. District Judge Mark Pittman ruledin favor of Findhelp's claim that administrative law judges at the NLRB have unconstitutional protections from being dismissed by the White House.
The argument has been used by other large companies including billionaire Elon Musk's aerospace firm SpaceX and a subsidiary of the fossil fuel giant Energy Transfer, which have both also obtained preliminary injunctions from Trump appointees in Texas, shielding them from labor rights cases.
In the SpaceX case, the NLRB argued that "granting an injunction would encourage any employer or labor union unhappy with scrutiny of their labor practices to seek preliminary injunctions against NLRB proceedings."
Starbucks, Amazon, and Trader Joe's have also joined the corporate effort to strip the NLRB of its ability to carry out its duties as a federal agency tasked with protecting workers from unfair labor practices. The companies have claimed that the agency's structure, which was established by the New Deal's National Labor Relations Act nearly a century ago, violates the president's "removal powers" under Article II of the U.S. Constitution.
"Prior to the New Deal, judges claimed things like overtime and child labor rules were unconstitutional," said journalist Ryan Grim.
Lawyers for the NLRB argued in the Findhelp case that the company is not entitled to relief from a court until the president tries to remove the administrative law judge assigned to Findhelp's case, but Pittman said he was "unpersuaded by the NLRB's arguments."
Pittman cited a precedent established by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, which ruled in 2022 that removal protections for the Securities and Exchange Commission's judges were unconstitutional.
This month, two federal judges—one appointed by former President Barack Obama and one by President Joe Biden—have rejected other corporate challenges claiming the NLRB is unconstitutionally structured, teeing up a potential U.S. Supreme Court case to settle the matter in the future.
Tuesday's ruling comes 18 months after the Office and Professional Employees International Union filed a complaint with the NLRB, saying Findhelp had illegally fired and coerced workers who were involved in organizing their workplace. The employees had voted 95-52 in favor of joining the union.
With Pittman's injunction in place, an NLRB administrative hearing on whether Findhelp unlawfully fired organizers and surveilled employees will not move forward.
"The NLRB protects Americans' right to unionize, fight unjust firings, and collectively bargain for higher wages," said the U.S. Congressional Progressive Caucus. "Without it, employers can ignore labor laws and deprive workers of their rights. This is yet another move by a Trump-appointed judge in favor of wealthy corporations."
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