Impeaching Crown Prince Elon Musk

In celebration of the fabulous ongoing takedown of fabulist Elon Musk and his shitty cars, I hereby present tales of woe about a South African billionaire who thinks he’s royalty.

Musk took to Fox and other MAGA sympathetic outlets to play the victim card this week, whining about how protests aimed at his chainsaw attacks on popular public programs were really just about people hating him personally.

He’s only partially right, in that he made himself the face of the billionaire war on the federal government, with the ultimate aim of replacing democracy with a techno-monarchy.

So, tough luck, Elon. You asked for it.

Tesla Takedowns are springing up around the nation like daffodils. There’s a weekly “sign waving” even at the Encinitas Tesla dealership on Thursdays at 4pm. It’s been growing in size, as have other non-violent First Amendment activities at facilities in other states.

The overall aim with these nonviolent protests is to depreciate Tesla’s stock value, by besmirching his brand and discouraging sales. They have been successful, with the carmaker’s stock price declining from a high of $479.86 on Dec. 17 to $224.32 on Tuesday afternoon. Four top executives at the company have sold more than $100 million in shares since early February.

The thing to know about the falling value of company stock is that much of Musk’s wealth is derived from leverage from the shares he owns. His purchase of Twitter (now X) was financed by loans using the value of his shares as collateral, and if the price goes below $114, the lenders will be looking at calling the debt.

I stress nonviolent about the protests because there was vandalism at the Encinitas Tesla dealership on Monday, which included “Multiple vehicles were found spray-painted with swastikas, several of the dealership’s windows had been smashed and profane messages were scrawled on walls,” according to the San Diego County Sheriff's Office.

We can expect County District Attorney Summer Stephan, who’s always looking to find an anti-MAGA conspiracy, to zero in on the sign waving folks because there’s a nationwide effort to criminalize citizens who dare speak evil of this hallowed first citizen.

The vandalism that occurred next to the Mount Soledad Veterans Memorial likely won’t get a response that involves inferring that everybody who drives an all-terrain vehicle is a suspect, unlike the sign wavers.

Our Dear Leader says the picketers are terrorists, and our Attorney General took time off from her busy schedule of being a guest on Fox News to promise prosecutions. You can be sure that our County District Attorney got the message.

Hallowed first citizen Musk has his own campaign in progress to besmirch his critics who dare wave signs. Here was his call to arms:

• An investigation has found 5 ActBlue-funded groups responsible for Tesla “protests”: Troublemakers, Disruption Project, Rise & Resist, Indivisible Project and Democratic Socialists of America.

• ActBlue funders include George Soros, Reid Hoffman, Herbert Sandler, Patricia Bauman, and Leah Hunt-Hendrix.

• ActBlue is currently under investigation for allowing foreign and illegal donations in criminal violation of campaign finance regulations. This week, 7 ActBlue senior officials resigned, including the associate general counsel.

Needless to say, coming from a MAGA adjacent individual, it was full of shit.

Two of the “ActBlue funders” are dead, for starters, and ActBlue itself is something Musk’s techie friends would call a “portal.” You’d think he’d know about such things, having been associated with Paypal and publicly promising a similar app within X.

A founder of Troublemakers, one of the groups listed in his declaration, Valerie Costa, was publicly called out by Musk with a post saying she was “committing crimes.” A video clip embedded in the post didn’t offer any suggestion of illegal activity, but the smear did the job as intended.

Via NPR:

• "When one of the most powerful, if not the most powerful person in the world is saying you've committed a crime, it doesn't matter what the truth is," Costa said.

• Dozens of Musk fans targeted Costa with menacing direct messages, social media posts and emails. In several messages reviewed by NPR, Musk supporters said they hope federal authorities will investigate her and even threatened physical violence against her.

One of Musk’s most high profile campaigns reflects his need to demonstrate superiority over us “parasites,” namely the quest to dismember Social Security.

From Paul Krugman:

• Musk’s big blooper was his claim that millions of dead people are receiving Social Security checks. This claim probably reflected the failure of young Musk staffers — what Dudek called the “DOGE kids” — to understand how the SSA’s databases work, combined with a complete lack of common sense. I mean, if there really were huge numbers of dead people receiving Social Security payments, don’t you think someone else would have noticed?

• In a normal political environment, getting something that big that wrong would have destroyed Musk’s credibility and led to his permanent exile from any role in setting policy. But this is America in 2025, so Trump amplified the already-refuted claim when addressing Congress, and Musk seems more powerful than ever.

• Furthermore, Musk refuses to give up his Social Security smears, making the completely implausible claim that fraudulent use of Social Security numbers accounts for 10 percent of federal spending. And I’d argue that the plan to effectively cut off many disabled Americans is best seen as part of a desperate effort to find or pretend to find Social Security fraud, retroactively justifying Musk’s big mistake.

Nobody voted for Elon Musk, who apparently sees inflicting smears and cruelty as virtuous pursuits. Nobody needs to accept the actions of a man who sympathizes with racists and wannabe vigilantes. I can hope that, when it comes to writing the history of this era (if such a thing is to be allowed) that Elon Musk is remembered as the man who inspired the start of a campaign to neuter the billionaire class.

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In other Musk-related news, Tesla Cybertruck deliveries have been put on hold because the trim keeps flying off. “Improperly adhered…trunk bed trim sail applique” led to a recall of 11,000 vehicles last summer. The Cybertruck has been recalled seven times since its official launch in December 2023.

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Grok is Elon Musk’s version of a Chatbot powered by Artificial intelligence, with a free version appended to the X social media app, and premium versions available for paying customers. Like any chatbot, the results are dependent on the nature of the inquiry. But if you ask Grok “who is the biggest spreader of lies, misinformation, and disinformation on X,” the answer is “Elon Musk.”

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Cory Doctorow’s essay for Tuesday, AI Can’t Do Your Job delves into the overblown sales pitches for AI (Musk’s promises for the post-DOGE afterlife) and the claims about the work it can do. Any remaining humans will be tasked with overseeing AI output and get blamed when garbage output occurs is the outcome AI hucksters are hoping to create..

• AIs want the future to be like the past, and AIs make the future like the past. If the training data is full of human bias, then the predictions will also be full of human bias, and then the outcomes will be full of human bias, and when those outcomes are copraphagically fed back into the training data, you get new, highly concentrated human/machine bias.

• By firing skilled human workers and replacing them with spicy autocomplete, Musk is assuming his final form as both the kind of boss who can be conned into replacing you with a defective chatbot and as the fast-talking sales rep who cons your boss. Musk is transforming key government functions into high-speed error-generating machines whose human minders are only on the payroll to take the fall for the coming tsunami of robot fuckups.

• This is the equivalent to filling the American government's walls with asbestos, turning agencies into hazmat zones that we can't touch without causing thousands to sicken and die.

Why Trump Is Erasing Ira Hayes by Charlie Angus at The Resistance

• Ira Hayes is a memory worth revering. But his story has been scrubbed from the Pentagon website.

• It's part of the war on "woke," aiming to eliminate the perceived threat of "diversity, equity, and inclusion." As part of this campaign, the Pentagon has also removed the incredible history of the Navajo code talkers, whose story was celebrated in the 2002 film Windtalkers.

• And just to make it clear that the white is right manifesto is once again ascendant, the Pentagon has removed references to Hasanoanda (known by his white name Ely S. Parker), who helped negotiate the terms of the surrender of the slave states rebellion at Appomattox.

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The Data Hoarders Resisting Trump’s Purge by Julian Lucas at The New Yorker

• “It’s a lot easier for the archival community to say, ‘Yeah, we have a bunch of data,’ than it is to say, ‘Yeah, we’re hosting a bunch of server-side applications that will help you navigate the data,’ ” Jack Cushman, the director of Harvard Law School’s Library Innovation Lab, told me. Last month, his organization released a backup of the more than three hundred thousand data sets hosted by data.gov. (At least three thousand of the originals have been removed.) They’re also working on open-source tools to make all this data navigable.

• “I think of the role that governments have had in building lighthouses,” Cushman said, framing deleted data not just as a matter of censorship or knowledge preservation but also of civic freedom. “In the data sets we’ve collected, there are ones on the leading causes of death, what cities and aquifers are growing or shrinking, which crops are growing, which vehicles are safe, and which schools are succeeding,” he said. “It’s all this stuff that lets us coördinate but doesn’t tell us what to do.”

• Last week, the guerrilla archiving movement reached an important milestone, when restoredCDC.org went online. It’s a replica of the health agency’s pre-Trump website based on backups from r/DataHoarder—one that’s fully functional, with a reconstructed back end and interactive tools. But fresh challenges loom. Librarians and data hoarders have been able to save only publicly available records; restricted ones, such as the D.O.J.’s National Database of Police Misconduct—or the internal records being shredded by employees of U.S.A.I.D.—may be gone for good. Some publicly available data sets have proved unmanageably large, such as N.O.A.A. weather data, which is generated more quickly than volunteers can pull it down.

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Are the people who Trump sent to a Salvadoran prison actually gang members? By Judd Legum, Rebecca Crosby, and Noel Sims at Popular Information

• Once in San Salvador, the detainees were transported to Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT), a notorious mega-prison that can house over 40,000 people. The inmates are confined to cells for 23.5 hours a day, sleep on metal bunks with no sheets, pillows, or mattresses, and relieve themselves in an open toilet. Upon arrival from the United States, the detainees were "forced to kneel while prison guards shaved their hair and shouted commands."

• Beyond the legalities, there is another fundamental problem with the deportation operation: many of the alleged gang members sent to CECOT do not appear to be gang members at all. The Trump administration appears to be linking some of the migrants to TdA through tattoos. But, according to experts, TdA affiliates do not “have any particular signs that identify their membership."