Elon Musk certainly has a lot of ideas. Since making a fortune from PayPal in the original dotcom boom, he’s taken over Tesla, pushing forward production of electric cars, and founded SpaceX, the rocket company that now flies plenty of NASA payloads.
Two newer companies — the Boring Company, focused on digging holes for transit tunnels, and NeuraLink, which is developing brain-computer interfaces — also occupy his time. Then there’s the Hyperloop, the high-speed land travel design he’s encouraged others to develop. Somehow, this brash billionaire still has time to get himself into trouble on Twitter.
And things can still get worse.
Though it might be a short-lived visit — after slamming Donald Trump and Elon Musk (perhaps attempting to bait the latter into banning him), the author swiftly returned to posting on his Threads account.
“After a brief check-in with Twitter, I can confirm it’s worse than ever—no longer a social gathering place but a propaganda organ, George Orwell’s Ministry of Truth,” King said.
This Wall Street Journal reports that beyond suing an ad group for an “illegal” boycott, X lawyers and executives have indicated that brands need to spend more on the Elon Musk-owned platform “or else.”
Ruben Schreurs, the CEO of an ad consulting firm, Ebiquity, is quoted saying the reason brands are choosing the route of spending a minimum viable amount on X is “Not because they want to advertise there and run their ads adjacent to the content on X, but because they are afraid of legal and political ramifications of not doing so.”
Elon Musk, the US’s would-be dictator, isn’t content with lying about the Boeing Starliner astronauts, who unexpectedly spent much longer in space than they planned after the Boeing craft had thruster failures. When Andreas Morgensen, a Danish astronaut, called the lies what they were, Musk replied with offensive name-calling.
Anne Marshall, whose LinkedIn says she was director of engineering for the US Digital Service (the White House tech task force that Elon Musk took over to shield DOGE from oversight), resigned today after he sacked a third of the team.
From her farewell post:
“If DOGE truly was concerned with efficiency, they also wouldn’t have fired experts in procurement - who prevent waste up front, before the funding is committed to contracts unlikely to have successful outcomes. These are the kinds of folks DOGE should have listened to when they joined the government. But they didn’t, and they clearly still don’t understand.”
President Donald Trump says he gave Elon Musk a “big discount” in his $10 million settlement with X over his account suspension lawsuit. Musk, who’s been working in the White House and publicly (although, supposedly, not technically) leading the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), said he hasn’t once seen Trump do something “that was mean or cruel or wrong.” Trump also brushed off critics’ efforts to “drive us apart” by calling calling Musk president.
A federal judge in the District of Columbia has granted a temporary restraining order that enjoins the Trump administration from laying off or terminating without cause any more employees of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, as well as from deleting agency data or transferring agency funds “other than to satisfy the ordinary operating obligations of the CFPB.”
[courtlistener.com]
It is not normal for the government to get sued so hard over something that it has to appear in federal court three times in three different lawsuits in a single day. In the Southern District of New York, which is currently also dealing with an entirely different Trump-related mess, Judge Jeannette Vargas has extended a temporary restraining order barring DOGE from accessing Treasury Department systems.
Tesla sales have plummeted in several countries over the last month, dropping by 38 percent in Norway, 63 percent in France, and 75 percent in Spain. Only 1,277 new Teslas were registered in Germany in January, a 60 percent drop compared to the previous year.
While Tesla now faces stiffer competition in Europe, Wired says the decline is probably linked to Elon Musk’s increasingly controversial behavior — an understandable reaction from a region that’s unlikely to tolerate certain arm gestures at political rallies.
That’s just one line in this Wall Street Journal article detailing money flowing to the presidential family via crypto or other means. Another section highlights Melania Trump’s documentary pitch to Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez during their December visit preceding Amazon’s $40 million deal that reportedly nearly tripled the next-closest offer.
But if you wondered how that January 6th Twitter lawsuit got settled, we have an answer:
The settlement talks with X began after the election and were more informal, with both Trump and Musk personally involved in hammering out the $10 million number, people familiar with the matter said.
Notes from another week of Musk’s coup.
The Democrat from Oregon says ‘we’re going to use every tool’ to try and thwart Elon Musk’s DOGE.
The nuclear arsenal is one thing DOGE can’t hack — but the risks of Musk’s Department of Energy access are still real.
Lawyers representing President Trump, former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, and what is now X moved to dismiss Trump’s pending case before the US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, reports Bloomberg.
He was appealing the dismissal of a lawsuit that accused Twitter, which is now owned by DOGE head Elon Musk, of violating the First Amendment when it banned his account in 2021.
Elon Musk sent a somewhat cryptic message on X hours after Wired reported that his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) entered the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, where DOGE staffers were set to gain read-only access to its systems. The CFPB has long been a Republican target so it’s unsurprising it’s been on the chopping block for DOGE along with the US Agency for International Development and Department of Education.
Firings, unfirings, forks, and lawsuits.
