Updated 5/14/25:
• Musk Adviser May Make as Much as $1 Million a Year While Helping to Dismantle Agency that Regulates Tesla and X
(Jake Pearson, ProPublica, 5-14-25)
Records show that Chris Young is simultaneously working as a political adviser to Musk while serving in the Department of Government Efficiency, helping to gut the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Ethics experts said Christopher Young’s dual role — working for a Musk company as well as the Department of Government Efficiency — likely violates federal conflict-of-interest regulations. Musk has publicly called for the elimination of the agency, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, arguing that it is “duplicative.’’ Government ethics rules bar employees from doing anything that “would cause a reasonable person to question their impartiality” and are designed to prevent even the appearance of using public office for private gain.
• White House fires head of Copyright Office amid Library of Congress shakeup (Kyle Melnick and Hannah Natanson, WaPo, 5-11-25) 'Shira Perlmutter’s termination comes after her office this month released a report that raised concerns about using copyrighted materials to train AI. Perlmutter, the register of copyrights and director of the Copyright Office, was terminated by email, Newlen said in his brief message to employees, according to a copy The Washington Post reviewed. The news came two days after President Donald Trump fired the Librarian of Congress, Carla Hayden, who appointed Perlmutter in October 2020.
'Under the second Trump administration, Elon Musk’s brainchild, the U.S. DOGE Service, which is charged with reducing federal spending and the workforce, has sought to use AI to fuel sweeping changes to government. DOGE, which stands for Department of Government Efficiency, is working to combine federal data into one database that could be searchable, including by AI tools, which might speed the process of identifying programs to cut, The Post reported.
'Musk, who owns artificial intelligence firm xAI, wrote “I agree” last month in response to a post on X that said “delete all IP law,” referring to intellectual property. The Copyright Office reviews hundreds of thousands of applications annually, advises Congress on intellectual property issues and sets regulations.'
'The Librarian of Congress, whom the president picks and the Senate confirms, doesn’t usually depart with the outgoing administration. The last time an incoming president replaced the Librarian of Congress was in 1861.
The comments express strong criticism of the White House's decision to fire Shira Perlmutter, suggesting it was politically motivated and linked to her report on AI and copyright law. Many commenters argue that her firing was due to her challenging the interests of powerful figures like Elon Musk, who benefit from the use of copyrighted material in AI. There is also a recurring theme of the administration's alleged pattern of dismissing competent women and minorities, with some comments highlighting broader concerns about the erosion of intellectual property rights and the influence of big tech on government decisions.
• Techno-Fascism Comes to America (Kyle Chayka, New Yorker, 2-26-25) When a phalanx of the top Silicon Valley executives—Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Google’s Sundar Pichai—aligned behind President Trump during the Inauguration in January, many observers saw an allegiance based on corporate interests.
The ultra-wealthy C.E.O.s were turning out to support a fellow-magnate, hoping perhaps for an era of deregulation, tax breaks, and anti-“woke” cultural shifts. The historian Janis Mimura saw something more ominous: a new, proactive union of industry and governmental power, wherein the state would drive aggressive industrial policy at the expense of liberal norms.
In the second Trump Administration, a class of Silicon Valley leaders was insinuating itself into politics in a way that recalled one of Mimura’s primary subjects of study: the élite bureaucrats who seized political power and drove Japan into the Second World War. The historic parallels that help explain Elon Musk’s rampage on the federal government.
• Inside Elon Musk’s ‘Digital Coup’ (Makena Kelly, David Gilbert, Vittoria Elliott, Kate Knibbs, Dhruv Mehrotra, Dell Cameron, Tim Marchman, Leah Feiger, and Zoë Schiffer, 'The Big Story,' Wired, 3-13-25) Musk’s loyalists at DOGE have infiltrated dozens of federal agencies, pushed out tens of thousands of workers, and siphoned millions of people’s most sensitive data. The next step: Unleash the AI. 'In Musk’s mind, Washington needed to be debugged, hard-forked, sunset. His strike teams of young engineers would burrow into the government’s byzantine bureaucratic systems and delete what they saw fit. They’d help Trump slash the budget to the bone.'
• How Elon Musk Became a Kingmaker (Simon Schuster, Time, 11-21-24) No matter how often the Democrats reminded us that Trump’s fortune grew out of inherited wealth, multiple bankruptcies, and decades of corporate shenanigans, they could not deny Musk’s achievements as a businessman. Not since the age of William Randolph Hearst, the newspaper magnate who greased FDR’s ascent nearly a century ago, has a private citizen loomed so large over so many facets of American life at once, pulling the nation’s culture, its media, its economy, and now its politics into the force field of his will. For now Musk and Trump act like partners, but their agendas do not align on everything. Both are willful, impulsive, and accustomed to being in charge. What will happen if they start to clash? Musk is “just realizing that being in control, directly or indirectly, of U.S. government budgets, is going to put us on Mars in his lifetime. Doing it privately would be slower.”
• How Is Elon Musk Powering His Supercomputer? (Bill McKibben, New Yorker, 5-6-25) "With typical modesty, he renamed his vacuum factory Colossus, and started stuffing it with Nvidia graphics-processing units, or G.P.U.s, the basic building blocks of A.I. systems. At the moment, he has two hundred thousand of these G.P.U.s, and he’s headed for a million; by some estimates, he is expected to build the “largest supercomputer” in the world.
"All that processing takes power to run, and so the xAI team moved about thirty-five mobile methane-gas-powered generators onto the site to support the data center. These are truck-mounted units, many of them designed by Caterpillar, which give off some of the same brew of pollutants as other gas-combustion devices—including nitrogen oxides and formaldehyde—and which are currently operating without a permit.
“xAI has essentially built a power plant in South Memphis with no oversight, no permitting, and no regard for families living in nearby communities,” the Southern Environmental Law Center said, in a report released in April."
..."But cost is evidently not a big issue for Musk. (DOGE claims to have saved a hundred and sixty billion dollars in government spending, but a new analysis by the nonprofit Partnership for Public Service estimates that it only did so at a cost of a hundred and thirty-five billion dollars, because it has operated so quickly and ineptly.) Neither, judging from DOGE’s performance, is saving lives, but he could help do so in Memphis, if he wanted to. Pearson says, “Solar panels and battery storage would be a much cleaner alternative to methane gas turbines. Solar panels also don’t pump smog-forming pollution or chemicals like formaldehyde into nearby communities.”
• Elon Musk’s Most Alarming Power Grab: Can anyone stop his space-based internet? (Ross Andersen, The Atlantic, 5-25) If Elon Musk continues to dominate the space-based internet, he could end up with more power over information than anyone in history. "Musk first announced his intention to build a space-based internet, which he would eventually call Starlink, in January 2015. He had plans to settle Mars, then the moons of Jupiter, and maybe asteroids too. All those space colonies would have to be connected via satellite-based communication; Starlink itself might one day be adapted for this use. Indeed, Starlink’s terms of service ask customers to affirm that they “recognize Mars as a free planet and that no Earth-based government has authority or sovereignty over Martian activities.”
• Elon Musk has direct business interests in 70% of the government agencies that DOGE targeted (Robert Reich chart on Facebook, 5-9-25) "Elon Musk has financial conflicts of interest at more than 70% of the departments and agencies targeted by DOGE — including the CFPB, NLRB, and DOJ. DOGE was never about "efficiency." It was about making Musk more wealthy and less accountable."
• Bill Gates warns Elon Musk’s DOGE cuts will cause ‘millions of deaths’ (Clare Duffy, CNN, 5-9-25) Gates's "comments followed an interview Gates gave to the Financial Times earlier this week, during which he accused Musk of “killing the world’s poorest children” with the government spending cuts.
• Trump Team Eyes Politically Connected Startup to Overhaul $700 Billion Government Payments Program (Christopher Bing and Avi Asher-Schapiro, ProPublica, 4-17-25) SmartPay, a little-known firm with investors linked to JD Vance, Elon Musk and Trump, could get a piece of the federal expense card system — and its hundreds of millions in fees.
“This goes against all the normal contracting safeguards,” one expert said.
• Inside Elon Musk’s War on Washington (Simon Shuster and Brian Bennett, Time, 2-9-25) No single private citizen, certainly not one whose wealth and web of businesses are directly subject to the oversight of federal authorities, has wielded such power over the machinery of the U.S. government. So far, Musk appears accountable to no one but President Trump, who handed his campaign benefactor a sweeping mandate to bring the government in line with his agenda.
• Labor Leaders Fear Elon Musk and DOGE Could Gain Access to Whistleblower Files (Caroline Haskins, Business, Wired, 4-10-25) Companies tied to Elon Musk have dozens of workplace health and safety cases open at OSHA. Union leaders and former OSHA officials are concerned.
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