There’s deeply cynical and then there’s things which might be illegal. In the first category we have an Elon Musk-funded PAC microtargeting Jewish and Arab communities with diametrically opposed ads about Kamala Harris’s support for Israel or Palestine. Amazingly cynical.
But then you have what I’m going to describe next which comes from another Musk-funded dark money operation. They have set up fake sites impersonating the Harris campaign using fake policy positions and then sending out text messages also impersonating the campaign which aim to drive voters to the fake site. (A lot of potential legal and regulatory questions turns on word like “fake” and “impersonating”, which we’ll return to in a moment.)
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I didn’t realize that. Too bad Space X can’t divest from that turd.
Or Harris can just fund NASA to build the rockets themselves and steal all the talent from X.
She could literally nationalize all his interests, and he is so unlikeable even his investors would probably welcome a government buyout on the cheap.
The thing about SpaceX and NASA is that their purposes aren’t really the same. NASA does space exploration and science type work to a large extent, which requires them getting their equipment up into space, but since rocket launches themselves are no longer the frontier of space technology, they don’t really want to be in charge of launching everything up the that people want launched (which is a lot these days), they want to focus their efforts on pushing the boundary. It would be like trying to solve the problems with Boeing by making the FAA build all the country’s planes instead. Not to say that nationalization is necessarily bad, but more that if it were done, it would make more sense to keep SpaceX it’s own entity as a state run corporation than to fold it’s commercial rocket launching into NASA.
Alternatively, something else I could imagine threatening Musk with, if the government had the stomach for it, would be to seize SpaceX and then make it employee-owned, which avoids changing it’s competitiveness in the launch industry (it has become so dominant because, for the moment, it has actually done a pretty good job at reducing launch costs and improving rocket technology, and doing anything too disruptive with it while it remains in that position might disrupt that), but takes away Elon’s share of the money and decision making.
Hopefully they can, some day. Maybe another entity will make Elon an offer he can’t refuse when he needs cash, as the synergy with his other ventures doesn’t seem huge.
Elon may be a face of the Company, he’s not responsible for much other than general long term vision. Despite what he may claim, he isn’t handling the engineering directly, and Gwynne Shotwell has been running operations for nearly it’s entire existence.