Elon Musk’s drawn-out blood feud against the President seemed to have come to a conclusion last month when Biden mentioned Tesla in a speech promoting various American industries. Turns out that was just wishful thinking on our part. Musk is once again pissed at Biden for not name-dropping his allegedly racist EV company, this time during his State of the Union address.
Biden’s Tuesday evening speech focused heavily on Big Tech, especially on the ways in which we must hold social media companies accountable for — in Biden’s words — “the national experiment they’re conducting on our children for profit.”
Biden also took some time to share better news: Companies are, in general, investing more heavily in American manufacturing facilities, creating thousands of jobs in the process. Only GM and Ford were mentioned as evidence. So Musk took the opportunity to call up CNBC just to say: “Nobody is watching the State of the Union.”
Snub or no snub? —
The portion of the SOTU that has Musk back on the anti-Biden parade concerns the creation of new manufacturing jobs in the U.S.
“Companies are choosing to build new factories here, when just a few years ago, they would have built them overseas,” Biden said.
He then mentioned GM and Ford, both of which have made multi-billion-dollar investments in building electric vehicles domestically. Biden did not mention Tesla; Musk has taken this as yet another snub.
“Tesla has created over 50,000 US jobs building electric vehicles & is investing more than double GM + Ford combined (fyi to the person controlling this twitter),” Musk tweeted at @JoeBiden around 10 p. EST.
Of course, Biden didn’t name any companies outside of GM and Ford, either. It’s difficult to recognize this as a snub when there are so many other automakers that didn’t get a mention.
Please stop talking —
Here’s a small suggestion, Elon: If you’d like high-profile government officials to praise the work you’re doing, just stop being so annoying about it. Stop tweeting at the @POTUS account about how you feel left out of the conversation. Why, exactly, would Biden want to acknowledge your work when just last month you called him a “damp sock puppet in human form”?
And then there’s the problem of Musk’s ongoing scandals, of which there are many. Musk claims the SEC has been leaking Tesla info with no evidence; Tesla is being investigated by various government agencies for phantom breaking, overt racism at its factories, and, of course, for the dangers of its Full Self-Driving software. And then there are the dead Neuralink monkeys.
In the context of Musk’s larger world, it definitely feels like staying away from Tesla is the smart choice. Not that Elon will ever agree. The man knows how to hold a grudge, we’ll give him that.
