Musk's reach
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Anybody read the piece in The Intercept? Have to give an email, but it's free.
This Is the Way to Stop Elon Musk
Senate Democrats have the power to block federal contracts to Tesla and SpaceX. It’s the path to pushing Musk out of politics.
https://theintercept.com/2025/02/17/elon-musk-trump-government-tesla-spacex/
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X is reportedly blocking links to secure Signal contact pages
Signal has recently become a popular organizing tool among government workers.
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@Rontuner For starters, Musk and the gang getting access to everyone's personal information and access to all the government's computers means, in this day and age, they control everything. Why do words like blackmail and sabotage come to mind? Brought to us by our very own royal couple: Trump and Musk.
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Two weeks ago, SpaceX engineer Ted Malaska showed up at the Federal Aviation Administration’s headquarters in Washington to deliver what he described as a directive from his boss Elon Musk: The agency will immediately start work on a program to deploy thousands of the company’s Starlink satellite terminals to support the national airspace system.
Malaska told those in attendance that the employees had up to 18 months to get the new program up and running, an unsettling timeline for aviation safety employees accustomed to a more deliberate pace. Anyone who impeded progress, Malaska said, would be reported to Musk and risked losing their jobs, according to two people familiar with the matter, who were not authorized to speak publicly.
Since he began overseeing the newly created Department of Government Efficiency, Musk has upended the norms of bureaucracy with a far-reaching initiative to scale back the size and scope of the federal government. So far, the tech billionaire’s team has moved to drastically scale back the US Agency for International Development, which provides life-saving medicines to people around the world, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which helps protect American consumers from financial fraudsters. At least 30,000 federal jobs have been eliminated under his watch.
Now a ubiquitous presence within the highest echelons of politics, Musk has shown up at a White House cabinet meeting, at President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, with a chainsaw on stage at the Conservative Political Action Conference. But his team’s recent appearance at the FAA presents the starkest test yet of Musk’s ability to not just shrink government, but to transform his political power into potential business for his companies.
Malaska’s first visit to the FAA was on President’s Day, at the agency’s Air Traffic Control System Command Center in Virginia. That day he and two of his colleagues received ethics waivers from the Department of Transportation’s deputy general counsel, and were designated as temporary special government employees, according to the documents obtained by Bloomberg News. The waivers say that Malaska and his colleagues are tasked with conducting a review of the FAA technology, including the air traffic control systems. They are not paid for their work, and the waivers say they cannot make any decisions “regarding federal funding or awards of contracts to SpaceX.”
While at the command center, Malaska told agency officials that SpaceX was the only company up to the task of quickly upgrading the aging flight safety network. The following day, this time during a meeting at FAA headquarters in Washington, he unveiled a more official version of a new FAA-SpaceX partnership. It would be called TDM-X, a trademark Musk “X” riff on the antiquated switch technology known as Time Division Multiplexing, or TDM.
Malaska, whose special government employee status has been extended, is now a fixture at the agency. He holds regular meetings with several high-ranking officials inside the FAA’s Air Traffic Organization. He instructs officials on minutiae, including what equipment to procure to get moving on the overhaul. During at least one meeting, Malaska stepped out several times to take calls that he said were from Musk himself, according to two people familiar with the matter.
Malaska described to FAA officials how SpaceX planned to send 4,000 Starlink satellite terminals and equipment to the agency, according to people familiar with the matter. Musk has said he’d provide Starlink terminals to the FAA at no cost to taxpayers, but the terms surrounding any such transaction—including how any usage or maintenance costs would be paid—remain unclear.
One terminal was immediately installed at the FAA’s air traffic control technology lab in Atlantic City, New Jersey, for testing. It’s also being tested at an FAA facility in Oklahoma City, an agency spokesperson said.
Last week, the Starlink terminal at Birchwood Airport in Alaska went online. It’s being used to transmit weather information over a satellite internet connection, marking the first time the FAA has sent data using Starlink, one of the people said.
The FAA is "testing multiple communication technologies, including satellites, fiber and wireless to ensure the safety of the national airspace system," the agency said in a statement. "Beyond that, no decisions for other deployments have been made."
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/how-elon-musk-muscled-his-way-into-the-faa/ar-AA1AhZGe
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Clipping Musk's wings, though I think it may be a little late for that.
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Americans are still in the dark about the scope and scale of what Elon Musk is doing with DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency, which is working to drastically shrink the size of government by aiming to cut $1 trillion or more in government spending.
But there’s some insight into what’s driving Musk — namely, an effort to combat what he referred to as “civilizational suicidal empathy.”
During a three-hour interview with the podcaster Joe Rogan released February 28, Musk talked about his deeply held belief in the conspiracy theory that Democrats are working to import as many undocumented immigrants as possible so that they can take over the US government forever.
“If they had another four years, they would legalize enough illegals in the swing states to make the swing states not swing states,” Musk told Rogan. “They would just, they would be blue states. Then they would … win the presidential; they’d win the House, the Senate and the presidency.”
https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/05/politics/elon-musk-rogan-interview-empathy-doge/index.html
