Musk's Billionaire Bully Schemes
Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered--Thomas Paine
Elon Musk is –on paper– the richest man in the world. His arrogance is cartoonish. His ignorance about humanity is endless. The word empathy does not exist in his vocabulary. And he clearly thinks he’s superior to the rest of us.
As an adjunct to President Trump, he’s simultaneously adding to his wealth, indiscriminately dismantling the administrative government functions vital to the livelihoods and health of Americans, and hoovering up the private data of millions of people, all while mocking anyone who dares question his actions.
Fact: the increase in Elon's wealth since Trump was elected is greater than all of the American aid given to Ukraine over the last three years.
Legislators who once actually went through the motions of legislating now cower in the corners of the capital, afraid of facing a Musk funded primary challenger, a smear campaign complete with death threats, and being erased from history.
On Friday, every federal government employee, including judges, received an email ordering them to respond with a bullet list of five of the week’s accomplishments. This missive was preceded by a social media message warning that failure to reply would be considered notice of resignation.
Asked for his opinion on the email. Trump responded:
"I thought it was great because we have people that don't show up to work ... What he's doing is saying, 'Are you actually working?' And then if you don't answer, like you're sort of semi fired, or you're fired.'"
Federal agencies couldn’t agree on how employees should respond to the email.
Top leadership at the FBI, the State Department, the VA, the Department of the Navy (to its civilian employees) all said employees were not required to respond.
Early Monday morning, Musk posted on X, “Those who do not take this email seriously will soon be furthering their career elsewhere”
Employees working the 800 lines at the Social Security administration, an agency requiring policy changes to be announced at employee meetings, were pulled away from the posts to receive guidance and then allotted time to write their responses to the email.
As Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo explained:
…it’s worth remembering that the people who call this number are overwhelmingly people over 65, often much more elderly than that, and often people for whom Social Security checks are their primary or only source of income. In other words, calling the Social Security help line isn’t like calling the cable company because ESPN isn’t working. These are mostly seniors who are in what are by definition stressful and often frightening circumstances of need. If you can wait, it’s probably not a great day to call the SSA 800 number.
At Health and Human Services, guidance to employees responding included a line saying “Assume what you write will be read by foreign actors and respond accordingly.”
This directive about security didn’t come out of left field. DOGE mass emails came from a misconfigured server, causing them to fail SPF (Sender Policy Framework) validation, causing some agencies to mark them as spam. Some government employees who got the OPM email wouldn't open it because it seemed shady.
Meanwhile Musk was on social media saying
Americans love DOGE because watching Trump slash federal programs knowing it doesn’t affect you because you’re not a member of the parasite class.
Geez, what an asshole.
Finally, during a meeting of the Chief Human Capital Officers Council on Monday, the Office of Personnel Management informed everyone that responses to the “5 bullets” email are voluntary and confirmed that a non-response is not a resignation.
The Associated Press reported that the State Democracy Defenders Fund filed a newly amended lawsuit in a federal court in California on behalf of unions, businesses, veterans, and conservation organizations saying that Musk’s instructions for federal workers to list and explain five accomplishments from the previous week, or risk losing their jobs, violated the law.
“No OPM rule, regulation, policy, or program has ever, in United States history, purported to require all federal workers to submit reports to OPM,” the lawsuit states, calling the threat of mass terminations “one of the most massive employment frauds in the history of this country.”
“In the case against OPM for its alleged use of an unauthorized server to send mass emails to federal workers, a new filing indicates that the plaintiffs intend to file a motion for Rule 11 sanctions against OPM’s counsel.”
Since the email was made public, the HR email address was inundated with fake responses making light of the tech mogul–fascism enthusiast’s demand.
Get this: Responses to the email asking about what work they had accomplished in the last week are expected to be fed into an artificial intelligence system to determine whether those jobs are necessary, according to NBC News.
The information will go into an LLM (Large Language Model), an advanced AI system that looks at huge amounts of text data to understand, generate and process human language, the sources said. The AI system will determine whether someone’s work is mission-critical or not.
Later on Monday, Musk seemed to indicate that a second email could be sent to government workers who don't respond to the first one. "Subject to the discretion of the President, they will be given another chance. Failure to respond a second time will result in termination," he wrote.
Suffice it to say, this has been an absolutely disastrous week for Elon Musk—DOGE has completely failed in its mission so far, the far right AfD lost in Germany despite his full backing, and he keeps facing humiliation due to his own awful behavior. His private life is also a mess
The problem with Elon Musk is that he doesn’t care what us “parasites” think of him. In fact, he doesn’t care about much of anything beyond lining his own pockets.
But his greatest strength is also his greatest weakness. Would you like the opportunity to assist in bringing him down a notch? Read on…
Hamilton Nolan says the periodic protests at Tesla dealers are the ticket. It seems as though the basis for much of Musk’s wealth comes from the overvaluation of the company’s stock:
Tesla is not so much an auto company as a story. The story is, “Elon Musk is a genius and his genius will cause uninterrupted growth of this company, which will come to dominate the entire auto market.” If this story begins to seem less plausible, investor sentiment will get shakier. If Tesla finds itself the target of sustained protests, and if owning a Tesla begins to carry a negative social price, it is very likely that a large portion of consumers will conclude that buying a Tesla is not worth the hassle. That story of global dominance will therefore become increasingly questionable. High stock prices based on shaky sentiment are very fragile things.
I sketch all this out only to make the point that this is not anything that is out of the reach of ordinary people taking ordinary actions in line with their First Amendment rights.
There are Tesla dealerships all over the country. The idea of making Elon Musk $100 billion poorer might sound like some grand dream. It is not. If you think of it only in terms of your own spending, it seems difficult: You may not buy a Tesla, but you’re only one person, and you don’t spend billions. But that is not the right way to think of it. The task is not to organize an explicit national boycott so much as it is to tarnish Tesla’s brand—by simply making clear to potential Tesla consumers that their purchase represents support for an odious political agenda. You, picketing a Tesla dealership in your town, can play a very real part in this goal. The rest is nothing more than the unfolding of the relentless math of Wall Street.
Unpopular things don’t make money.
The hashtag for the protest campaign against Tesla is #TeslaTakedown. There’s even a website. You know what to do, I hope.
BONUS TIME: Right wing columnist Paul Sperry at the New York Post is already ginning up conspiracy theory on Tesla protests, claiming they are part of an Antifa plot: “Obama-trained agitators” are going to target Tesla: “Organized by radical group INDIVISIBLE, they are planning to mob Tesla dealerships, showrooms, factories to protest” how Elon Musk’s DOGE coup is harming working families.
Make sure your Antifa member ID is up to date.
How to buy your way out of a federal lawsuit by Judd Legum and Rebecca Crosby at Popular Information
In December, Coinbase donated $1 million to Trump's inauguration celebration. Coinbase also co-sponsored an "unofficial inaugural ball on Friday at the Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium in downtown Washington," which featured Snoop Dogg. Then, "Coinbase Global Chief Executive Brian Armstrong attended a black-tie dinner on Saturday hosted by Vice President-elect JD Vance at the National Gallery of Art while a group of other executives went to a Sunday dinner hosted by Trump," the Wall Street Journal reported.
In January, Coinbase hired Chris LaCivita, the co-manager of Trump's campaign, to be a member of its Global Advisory Council. According to Semafor, LaCivita will use his familiarity with "Trump’s network to help the industry navigate this Congress and beyond." Coinbase did not disclose how much it is paying LaCivita. "The crypto industry deserves better than what it received from the previous administration," LaCivita said.
Coinbase also helped personally enrich Trump, quickly listing his official meme coin, $TRUMP, on its platform. The Coinbase listing made it much easier for the average investor to purchase $TRUMP, driving up its value. Most $TRUMP coins are owned by Trump himself.
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Trump as the Real-life Manchurian Candidate by Charlie Angus at The Resistance
In the dark 1962 political thriller The Manchurian Candidate, a sleeper agent from the Kremlin is ready to steal the presidency. His name is Senator John Yerkes Iselin, a dim-witted boob whose only chance to take power is a planned assassination where Iselin, covered in blood, would stand up and do a "fight, fight, fight" speech to inspire and deceive a nation.
Thank God Frank Sinatra was there to put a stop to it.
Trump is a real-life John Yerkes Iselin. He is Putin's man in the White House. No doubt his willingness to repeat Kremlin talking points will feed into the scurrilous rumours about what Putin has on Trump.
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Trump Administration Fires Immigration Judges as It Tries to Ramp Up Deportations by Kate Morrissey at Beyond The Border
Biggs estimated that the fired judges would have held 10,000 hearings this year. The courts currently have a backlog of more than 3.7 million cases, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, which monitors government data on immigration through public records requests.
Days after the firings, immigration Judge Samuel B. Cole, who has been hearing cases in Chicago since 2016 and has served as executive vice president of the National Association of Immigration Judges, said that he would be stepping down. He declined to say more on the subject at this time.
The firings affected courts across the United States, with California and Texas losing the most, according to the union. Five of the judges were based in Texas with three in Houston, one in Laredo and one in El Paso. Four of the judges were based in California with one in San Diego and three in Concord.
