Why Joe Biden Hates Elon Musk…

The Richest Man in the World and the President of the United States hate each other. Over the last year, President Joe Biden has explicitly snubbed Elon Musk at every possible turn, and not just publicly, but through targeted legislation that specifically punishes Tesla for its business practices. Joe Biden even refuses to say Elon Musk’s name out loud, or include his company in praise directed to other American electric vehicle manufacturers, who are nowhere close to the size and scale of Tesla when it comes to EVs.

That’s especially ironic considering that Elon Musk also owns SpaceX which has direct contracts with NASA and the US military. In a way, it’s like Biden is trying to pretend that Elon Musk doesn’t exist. And as we all know, there is literally nothing that Elon Musk hates more than being ignored, so in response, Musk has been just as loud as Biden has been quiet.

After a recent White House event that included other electric car manufacturers, but deliberately not Tesla, Elon called Joe Biden a “damp sock puppet in human form”, and said that “Biden is treating the American public like fools.” Now, he’s not wrong - but that doesn’t make him right. In fact, Elon’s biggest criticism of Biden has been over the Build Back Better Act - which offers a $4,500 rebate on electric vehicles, but with the catch that they be assembled by union labor. This specific provision unambiguously targets Tesla, which is the only major American electric vehicle manufacturer to not have a unionized workforce - and Elon Musk is arguably one of the biggest anti-union proponents in the business world.

Not only has he openly opposed unionization at his companies he was actually cited in 2019 for illegally firing a worker for union organizing, and forced to delete a tweet illegally threatening to take away his workers’ stock options if they went through with unionization. But it’s no wonder that Tesla employees want a union, there is an almost nonstop flood of complaints and reports about high rates of injury, mandatory overtime, extremely low wages, and overall nightmarish working conditions for those lucky enough to work for the richest man in the world.

So for Joe Biden, that’s a political liability for a lot of reasons. First of all, to win in the midterms and general election, Biden unambiguously needs the support of states like Michigan, which is home to Ford and GM, and whose labor force is represented by the United Auto Workers - arguably one of the most powerful, and largest unions in America.

Meanwhile, Elon Musk lives in Texas, where he relocated from California to avoid paying taxes, and Biden’s chances of winning over Texas are slim-to-none, while California is a guaranteed nonissue. But there’s actually a lot more at stake here for Biden than just scoring political points.

Biden has come into office during the corporate reshaping of the American Dream, represented almost perfectly by Elon Musk - and it’s not pulling yourself up by the bootstraps, working hard, climbing the corporate ladder, and achieving lifelong security for you and your family.

The new American Dream starts with being born rich, preferably off the proceeds of your family’s apartheid-era share in an emerald mine, then buying an electric car company and pretending you founded it, and through bombastic showmanship, illegal market manipulation, and an army of obsessed followers, skyrocket the valuation of your company so far beyond it’s actual worth that you become the richest man alive while your company generates a revenue that’s barely 1/10 of your personal net worth.

It is purely antithetical to Biden’s promise to the American people; that the ultra-wealthy should pay their fair share to guarantee better labor and living conditions for the middle and working class, which by nearly every metric he has totally failed at fulfilling thanks to a combination of Congressional gridlock from conservative Democrats, and plain old inaction on issues that can be addressed directly, like student debt cancellation. Meanwhile, billionaires like Elon Musk are batting 1000, actually, they’re batting 5 trillion, up by 2 trillion since the start of the pandemic, which saw millions of American lose their jobs, and hundreds of thousands lose their lives, and thanks to political inaction, that two trillion dollars jump in wealth will go almost entirely untaxed. 

So it’s not really a surprise that Joe Biden’s efforts, or lack thereof, to fix the absurd and unconscionable wealth inequality he inherited from the last half century of hyper-capitalism is at odds from the single biggest recipient of this multi-generational capitalist offensive against the working and middle class.

What’s actually funny about it is that despite being so outrageously on the winning side of this conflict, all it takes is being occasionally ignored, for Elon Musk to cry out about being a disenfranchised victim. Personally, we think it’s fine that Joe Biden and Elon Musk hate each other.