Elon Musk’s mother has a message for the White House: pay more attention to my son.
Maye Musk took to Twitter – where Elon, never one to stay out of the spotlight for long, recently became a board member – to complain that the White House hasn’t sufficiently lauded Mr Musk for his technical achievements.
She slammed Joe Biden and Kamala Harris for being what she called “completely unaware of the world’s most advanced rockets and spacecraft”, posting a photo of a recent successful rocket launch from Musks’s company SpaceX.
The Biden administration seems quite aware of Mr Musk’s rocketry prowess, having awarded SpaceX more than $3bn in NASA contracts for missions to the moon and the International Space Station.
Still, the billionaire CEO and the president have something of a frosty relationship.
In March, Mr Musk complained that the president hadn’t mentioned Tesla during the State of the Union address, which highlighted other American automakers who were investing in electric vehicles, telling CNBC, “Nobody is watching the State of the Union”.
A month before, Mr Musk said the White House has “pointedly ignored Tesla at every turn and falsely stated to the public that GM leads the electric car industry, when in fact Tesla produced over 300,000 electric vehicles last quarter and GM produced 26.”
Elsewhere, Mr Musk has compared Mr Biden to a “damp sock puppet in human form” and complained White House policy is “controlled by unions”. (Tesla has been the subject of frequent complaints about its labour conditions, and Mr Musk is a vocal critic of auto unions.)
Privately, White House staffers have told reporters that Mr Biden has kept Mr Musk at arm’s length for fears that he might say something controversial, or because of the perception that he is anti-union, a core base of support for the president.
In February, the president praised Tesla.
“Since 2021, companies have announced investments totaling more than $200 billion in domestic manufacturing here in America. From iconic companies like GM and Ford building out new electric vehicle production to Tesla, our nation’s largest electric vehicle manufacturer, to innovative younger companies like Rivian building electric trucks or Proterra, building electric buses,” Mr Biden said in a speech.
