Elon Musk says he’ll fix the government under Trump. His track record paints a different picture

CNN
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Elon Musk is making some massive guarantees whereas campaigning for former President Donald Trump. However his enterprise record calls into query whether or not he can ship.

Musk and Trump have publicly discussed some form of government position for the Tesla and SpaceX CEO if Trump wins the presidency. Though Musk and Trump haven’t supplied any specifics, Musk has jokingly referred to his potential job as main a Division of Government Effectivity, or DOGE, the title of Musk’s favourite meme and cryptocurrency. Trump on Fox News last week mentioned Musk might function the “Secretary of Value-Chopping,” a government company that additionally doesn’t at present exist.

If he have been to guide some form of job power, Musk, on the marketing campaign path and in an August X interview with Trump, has promised to suggest steep cuts to scale back wasteful spending that doesn’t profit People, maybe utilizing AI to find out the place to chop. He has additionally mentioned he’d pitch a large rollback of government laws, which has has lengthy griped about. And Musk has promised a light contact, providing beneficiant severance packages to laid-off government employees, whereas at the similar time proposing an evaluation system that threatens layoffs to wasteful workers.

All of these are ways Musk has employed or promised at his companies. His track record is combined. Musk didn’t reply to a request for remark.

Trump, in his interview with Musk in August and in subsequent public discussions about a potential government position for Musk, has praised the CEO for his ruthlessness with layoffs. The UAW autoworkers union filed labor charges towards the pair in August after Trump referred to as Musk a “cutter” and urged he would fireplace putting autoworkers. And Trump, asserting in September his plans for Musk’s potential position, mentioned Musk would make suggestions for “drastic reforms.”

When discussing what he may do for the government, Musk mentioned in a Pittsburgh city corridor Sunday that main cuts to government spending can be crucial: “Step No. 1 is to spend a lot much less of it,” Musk mentioned. “Let’s begin from scratch.”

However cuts haven’t at all times labored out so properly for Musk’s firms.

At X, Musk has made vital layoffs, slashing roughly 80% of the company’s staff. That has led to a janky, unstable product, as evidenced by his disastrous know-how failures when interviewing Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in 2023 and Trump a couple of months in the past. Musk has additionally eliminated X’s trust and safety teams, resulting in an escalation in hate speech and unchecked misinformation — and an advertiser exodus from the platform.

X is value 80% less than what Musk bought it for in October 2022, in response to Constancy.

Rules have bugged Musk for years, who has railed towards what he has referred to as pointless forms and pink tape.

That’s not a new criticism amongst enterprise leaders. What’s different is Musk’s method to skirting or bending of guidelines, which have at occasions led to disastrous outcomes.

At Tesla, Musk has pushed ahead ambitiously in deploying “full self-driving” know-how, regardless of a number of accidents and government warnings and investigations. In a deploy-first-and-fix-it-later method, Tesla has issued a number of remembers of the know-how, although the firm has maintained that automated driver software program saves lives.

America’s prime security regulator on Friday introduced yet one more investigation into Tesla after a deadly accident involving a pedestrian hit by a automobile utilizing Tesla’s full self-driving options. Final 12 months, the Nationwide Freeway Site visitors Security Administration mentioned the know-how has “led to an unreasonable threat to motorized vehicle security based mostly on inadequate adherence to site visitors security legal guidelines.” And it warned that FSD might violate site visitors legal guidelines at some intersections “earlier than some drivers might intervene.”

And at SpaceX, skirting California government regulators has led to notoriously unhappy residents and lawsuits in a Texas city the place the firm arrange store to launch and check its large rockets. Amongst the complaints are trespassing, damaged home windows and enormous particles fields. Musk moved a lot of SpaceX’s operation out of California to Texas due to an excessive amount of regulation. And the firm sued a California regulator final week.

Musk urged providing ousted government workers two years’ severance, in response to the Wall Street Journal, which attended a number of of Musk’s rallies for Trump. “The purpose is to not be merciless or to have folks not be capable of pay the mortgage,” Musk mentioned Friday.

However Musk at X was sued repeatedly for failing to make good on his promise to honor laid-off workers’ severance packages — together with the former CEO and different main executives, who have been denied lots of of hundreds of thousands of {dollars} of their exit packages.

Earlier than Musk’s buy of Twitter — now X — in 2022, the firm’s severance plan dictated that workers who remained after the acquisition and have been subsequently fired would take residence as much as six months of pay, plus one week of pay for annually they labored for the firm. However the lawsuits towards Musk and the firm declare the firm refused that payout.

Musk won one such lawsuit earlier this 12 months however a number of stay lively.