OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.
Elon Musk has been on a tear against the Democrat party, a party he once supported and identified with.
Last week the Tesla, SpaceX and Starlink CEO gave an interview where he tore into the unions “stranglehold” on the Democrat party and called it “next-level insanity,” Fox News reported.
Elon Musk criticized the Democratic Party in the second part of a long-form interview with the Tesla Owners Silicon Valley club.
Musk took the opportunity to explain his feelings about the Democratic Party, their relationship to labor unions, and Tesla’s exclusion from a White House electric vehicles event because the company is not unionized.
Musk took particular issue with the Democratic Party’s strong relationship with union leadership.
“The general public is not aware of the degree to which unions control the Democratic Party. One does not need to speculate on this point,” he said.
“Last year, Biden held an EV summit where Tesla was explicitly not allowed to come, but the [United Auto Workers] was. So, Tesla has made two-thirds of all the electric vehicles in the United States,” he said.
Tesla, which is owned by musk, is not unionized, which musk says is because of “negative unemployment” in the Bay Area, which means his employees can pursue other opportunities if they want to.
“So, deliberately excluding us from an EV summit at the White House — but including UAW — tells you everything you need to know,” the CEO said.
“They have so much power over the White House that they can exclude Tesla from an EV summit — insane,” he said.
He was annoyed that Biden praised GM CEO Mary Barra at the summit as the leader of the “EV revolution,” in a quarter when GM made a mere 26 electric vehicles. “That’s some next-level insanity,” he said.
In May he appeared on a podcast where he made some of the same points and gave his opinion on who he believes the “real president” is, Fox News reported.
“The real president is whoever controls the teleprompter,” he said. “The path to power is the path to the teleprompter.”
“I do feel like if somebody were to accidentally lean on the teleprompter, it’s going to be like Anchorman,” he said, which is a reference to the 2004 film in which Ron Burgundy, played by actor Will Ferrell, reads anything that is written on the teleprompter.
He said that he has voted “overwhelmingly for Democrats,” but he does not appear to be a fan of the current administration.
“This administration doesn’t seem to get a lot done,” he said. “The Trump administration, leaving Trump aside, there were a lot of people in the administration who were effective at getting things done.”
He said he believes that the Democratic Party is “overly controlled by the unions and by the trial lawyers, particularly the class action lawyers.” He said that when Democrats go against “the interests of the people,” it is because of unions and trial lawyers, and when Republicans do it, “it’s because of corporate evil and religious zealotry.”
“In the case of Biden, he is simply too much captured by the unions, which was not the case with Obama,” he said.
He also talked about comments made by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos who said that when President Biden talked about corporations paying their “fair share” in taxes to combat inflation it was a “misdirection”
“I mean, the obvious reason for inflation is that the government printed a zillion amount of more money than it had, obviously,” he said, which is the same argument Republicans have made.
“So it’s like the government can’t just, you know, issue checks far in excess of revenue without there being inflation, you know, velocity of money held constant,” he said. “If the federal government writes checks, they never bounce. So that is effectively creation of more dollars. And if there are more dollars created, then the increase in the goods and services across the economy, then you have inflation, again, velocity of money held constant.”
“If the government could just issue massive amounts of money and deficits didn’t matter, then, well, why don’t we just make the deficit 100 times bigger? The answer is, you can’t because it will basically turn the dollar into something that is worthless,” he argued.
“Various countries have tried this experiment multiple times,” he said. “Have you seen Venezuela? Like the poor, poor people of Venezuela are, you know, have been just run roughshod by their government.”
