By NYA Staff
Elon Musk, the world’s wealthiest man, has been using his power and wealth to threaten our democracy. During the 2024 election, Musk was the largest individual political donor in American history, spending $288 million to support Donald Trump and other Republican candidates. Musk used his fortune to build a political operation called America PAC. Musk again is preparing to pour enormous sums into Republican campaigns. Reports say he could spend $100 million to $200 million on the midterms. Because of Citizens United, one person with unlimited wealth like Musk, is now able to buy an election.
But Musk’s political influence doesn’t stop with campaign contributions. He was given an extraordinary role in the Trump administration through the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, where he became the public face of an effort to shrink the federal government. His approach was more like a demolition derby than reform.
He gutted agencies haphazardly, laid off thousands of government employees, and killed programs that were saving lives. A recent Government Accountability Office review found that many of the savings claimed to have been made were lies. Auditors said more than $27 billion in supposedly terminated contracts had not actually been canceled, while 96% of claimed savings could not be substantiated.
One of the biggest impacts he did have was dismantling USAID, an agency established under the Kennedy administration. Public health experts determined that it will result in hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths, primarily among children and vulnerable populations in low-income regions around the world. The USAID program had been one of the most successful bi-partisan programs in helping poorer nations for decades.
Musk also made a mess of Twitter. He bought the company promising to create a forum for free speech. Instead, he turned it into something resembling a digital landfill, giving voice to bigots, anti-blacks, antisemitism, anti-gay, and anti-most everything.
Finally, there’s Tesla. Musk has been promising that Tesla cars are on the verge of driving themselves, setting deadlines that came and went. He continues to promise full self-driving (FSD) will soon be fully autonomous, while Tesla’s own safety statistics contradict that. As good as FSD is, it has its limitations, that Musk fails to acknowledge. As a result, it has resulted in a number of deaths due to faults with its design, a misunderstanding of its limitations, and driver misuse, and has become a legal problem for Tesla, resulting in multiple lawsuits.
This past week a federal jury in Florida found Tesla 33% responsible for a 2019 crash involving Autopilot that killed a woman and seriously injured a man. The jury awarded $129 million in compensatory damages and $200 million in punitive damages because Tesla claimed it didn’t have data on the crash, something that’s automatically transmitted to Tesla when an accident occurs. A hacker found the Tesla data, proving that Tesla had lied to the court, leading to the compensatory damages.
In short, Elon Musk is a polarizing billionaire who thrives on chaos. He shows little respect for our democratic institutions, for the lives of others, and seems to enjoy creating collateral damage with whatever he does,