Elon Musk would like you to think he is invincible right now. But the world’s richest man is actually extremely vulnerable to public pressure at the moment — public pressure that federal workers and their unions can take advantage of.
Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, has bought Twitter. Musk says he’s trying to safeguard democracy and promote free speech — but what does a megabillionaire with a history of silencing critics and retaliating against workers know about democracy?
Tech CEOs are out for themselves, not the public good.
The myth of Silicon Valley touts the grit and flair of its tech bro champions. But the chaos of Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover has revealed that there’s no genius or elaborate game of multidimensional chess behind the curtain: just garden-variety capitalists.
Elon Musk’s cuts may have “saved” the public less than half a percent of the national debt, but they are already making Americans poorer and sicker and forcing them to spend hours waiting on phone help lines.
Much discussion about Elon Musk’s new ownership of Twitter has focused on his supposedly too-permissive attitude toward free speech on the platform. But his acquisition of the platform could actually have dire consequences for users’ privacy rights.
Elon Musk says The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress is one of his favorite books. That checks out: the novel is about a lunar colony that bravely cuts off resources to its starving Earth dependents.
Many fear that Twitter under Elon Musk will fall to bigots and harassers. Maybe. But instead of arguing over who should be kicked off Twitter, we should ask what it’s designed to do to those who stay on it.
Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, just used his political influence to shut down a bipartisan deal to keep the government open. It’s obscene — but it’s just one example of the ways billionaires dominate American democracy.
With Elon Musk’s unending display of incompetence in running Twitter, it’s easy to forget that the enterprise that made him famous, Tesla, is just as riddled with scandal, lies, and even death.
Nothing could have been more conventional, more boring, and more embarrassing than the way Bill Maher repeatedly and ceaselessly kissed Elon Musk’s ass on his show Real Time.
Elon Musk’s claim that South Africa’s land expropriation laws are part of a broader attack on the country’s white minority is divorced from reality. But it represents South African elites’ inability to understand the class tensions that define their nation.
We can't stand by while plutocrats like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos put themselves in charge of humankind's expansion to other worlds. The results would be more Blade Runner than Star Trek.
This week, as Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” was attempting to further gut the US government, his rocket company SpaceX was cementing a NASA contract adding millions of dollars to its already massive deal with the space agency.
Instead of counting on an allegedly benevolent billionaire like Elon Musk to guard free speech online by buying companies like Twitter, we should just take our digital public square out of rich people’s hands and into public ownership.
Hold your applause for luxury brand magnate Bernard Arnault, the billionaire who just surpassed Elon Musk as the richest man in the world. He may not be taunting the Left on social media, but he’s just as much an emblem of grotesque inequality.
Last Friday, authorities gave the go-ahead for Tesla’s Gigafactory near Berlin. The fast-tracked approval for the electric auto plant makes a mockery of environmental and labor standards — but suits the agenda of superficially “greening” German industry.
US regulations that fall between lax and nonexistent mean Tesla is able to treat car buyers as beta testers and public roads as a testing ground for its accident-prone “self-driving” cars. It’s a dangerous experiment that all Americans are being subject to.
Rural Americans need good internet and good jobs. And they were poised to get them — until Elon Musk saw an opening to grow his fortune with a plan that will provide worse internet and fewer jobs.
California has filed a civil rights lawsuit against Elon Musk’s Tesla based on shocking evidence that the company’s Fremont plant is operating as a systematically racist, segregated facility where discrimination is the norm.