Biden’s alarming harassment of Elon Musk

Even as President Biden accuses Donald Trump of threatening our democracy, he is employing agencies of the federal government to harass and punish Elon Musk, whom he seems to consider a political opponent. Why? Because the mercurial entrepreneur has the temerity to criticize Biden and champion free speech.

In addition, Musk released the infamous Twitter files, which showed the White House conspiring to censor communications on platforms like Facebook and Twitter. A judge last summer described the administration’s efforts to control information about COVID-19 vaccines on social media as “an almost dystopian scenario.” He further said, “During the COVID-19 pandemic, a period perhaps best characterized by widespread doubt and uncertainty, the United States Government seems to have assumed a role similar to an Orwellian ‘Ministry of Truth.’”

The White House was not pleased and is getting even — by attacking Musk’s business empire.

Biden is throwing everything it can find at Musk, hoping that the endless barrage of regulatory, reputational and legal attacks will cause the world’s wealthiest man to kneel before its authority. The viciousness of the investigations being conducted by the Department of Justice, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Federal Trade Commission, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the National Labor Relations Board, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service against a successful American business leader is unprecedented. It says much more about the vindictive nature of Joe Biden than it does about the founder of Tesla, SpaceX and the Boring Company.

Especially considering that Musk has been an asset to Biden’s presidency. He made electric vehicles, the cornerstone of Biden’s Green Dream, a reality, and provided Ukraine, the White House’s war-time dependent, with internet capabilities critical to staving off a Russian victory. And SpaceX is almost single-handedly keeping the U.S. in the space race.

Notwithstanding Musk’s contributions, the White House appears determined to drag down Tesla and SpaceX. Just recently, Tesla announced it would recall 2 million cars because the government has alleged that its autopilot system is unsafe. The claim stems from investigations by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) into accidents purportedly caused by Tesla’s automatic features and covers nearly all cars sold in the U.S. Tesla maintains its devices make cars safer, an assertion that even Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg allowed “could be true.”

It appears many of the collisions that the NHTSA has investigated involve drivers not paying attention (one was searching the floor of his car for his phone) or not heeding the system’s warnings. In the first such lawsuit to be brought, a California jury two months ago determined that the autopilot feature was not to blame for a crash that killed a Tesla driver who had alcohol in his system. The win for the automaker was a relief, but other lawsuits will doubtless follow, armed with the government’s accusations of flaws in the Tesla system.

The software fix to Tesla’s autopilot system can reportedly be accomplished remotely and will not be expensive. But that’s not the point. The win for the Biden White House shows up in the New York Times’s write-up, which begins, “Tesla’s reputation for making technologically advanced cars suffered a blow on Tuesday when the company, under pressure from regulators, recalled more than two million vehicles.”

As new competitors launch rival models and seek to dethrone America’s number one electric vehicle producer, doubts about Tesla’s engineering could prove expensive. The Times glides effortlessly from referencing officials’ claims that Tesla “had not done enough to ensure that drivers remain attentive” to “recent public statements by Elon Musk…have been widely interpreted as antisemitic…”  

Elsewhere, the government has just announced that Starlink, Musk’s satellite internet provider, is ineligible for $885 million in subsidies designated to help expand rural broadband coverage to 643,000 and businesses in 35 states. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) explained its decision by saying that Starlink “failed to demonstrate that it could deliver the promised service.”  

On X, Starlink claims it is “available on all 7 continents, in over 60 countries and many more markets, connecting 2M+ active customers and counting with high-speed internet!” The firm provides high-speed service in Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands, in Benin, in Costa Rica, in the Maldives and – crucially – in Ukraine. Do we seriously believe the company would not be able to provide service to underserved rural communities in the U.S.?

The FCC’s decision is a reversal of its 2020 first-round finding, in which it initially awarded Starlink the funds. About the decision, Musk posted on X: “Doesn’t make sense. Starlink is the only company actually solving rural broadband at scale!” He explained the agency’s change of heart, writing, “What actually happened is that the companies that lobbied for this massive earmark (not us) thought they would win, but instead were outperformed by Starlink, so now they’re changing the rules to prevent SpaceX from competing.”

A dissenting statement from FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr appears to support Musk’s claims. Carr writes that the FCC demanded that Starlink demonstrate that it is “reasonably capable” of providing high-speed internet service “to at least 40% of those roughly 640,000 rural premises by December 31, 2025.” Carr says Starlink “did exactly that in a voluminous series of submissions” that the FCC then completely ignored.

Weirdly, the FCC also denied Starlink’s bid because it “is not providing high-speed Internet service to all of those locations today,” even though that was apparently not a condition of the funding.

The FCC’s decision reeks of political favoritism, and is consistent with other attacks on Elon Musk by the Biden White House. At a press conference last year, asked if he thought Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter (backed by some foreign governments) was a threat to national security, President Biden told reporters that Elon Musk “is worth being looked at.” His government quite obviously took him at his word.

Remind me…who is threatening our democracy?

Liz Peek is a former partner of major bracket Wall Street firm Wertheim & Company. Follow her on Twitter @lizpeek.