By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 11, 2024 ~
Elon Musk and Donald Trump in the Oval Office
Billionaires Donald Trump and Elon Musk share a common credo: It’s legal if you can get away with it. (Key evidence to support that claim is the jury conviction of Donald Trump on 34 felony counts and his ability to secure a second term as President and the fact that Musk and his companies were under investigation by five federal Inspectors General – right before Donald Trump fired them and made Musk the investigator. There is also the not insignificant detail reported by the Wall Street Journal that Musk uses illegal drugs.)
This credo came crashing down on the heads of both men yesterday.
The U.S. stock market, a barometer of presidential leadership, plunged. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 890 points while the tech heavy Nasdaq dived 727.89 points or 4 percent. Tesla, the electric vehicle company where Musk serves as the missing-in-action CEO, whose stock represents the largest portion of Musk’s wealth, lost a stunning 15.43 percent – in one day. That brings the decline in Tesla’s share price from the Friday before Trump took office on Monday, January 20, to yesterday’s closing bell, to 47.9 percent. Musk can now expect more shareholder lawsuits alleging breach of fiduciary duty — to the pile that already exist.
Trump will now attempt to do damage control by meeting with the CEOs at some of the largest U.S. corporations today.
Musk, for his part, on a day when his hubris was unraveling all around him, thought it appropriate to post a Tweet calling Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona, a decorated former Navy Captain and combat pilot and a former astronaut, a “traitor.” Musk was responding to Kelly’s visit to Ukraine and his Tweets about why the U.S. must stand firm in support of Ukraine.
It should be noted that supporting Ukraine over the illegal invasion of the country by Russia was the official policy of the U.S. until Trump unilaterally decided recently that it wasn’t.
Now, one has to question what role Elon Musk, Trump’s largest campaign donor to the tune of more than a quarter billion dollars, has played in that decision.
In October of last year, the Wall Street Journal reported the following in an article titled (paywall) Elon Musk’s Secret Conversations With Vladimir Putin.
“Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and a linchpin of U.S. space efforts, has been in regular contact with Russian President Vladimir Putin since late 2022.”
“At one point, Putin asked the billionaire to avoid activating his Starlink satellite internet service over Taiwan as a favor to Chinese leader Xi Jinping, said two people briefed on the request.”
“Musk has forged deep business ties with U.S. military and intelligence agencies, giving him unique visibility into some of America’s most sensitive space programs. SpaceX, which operates the Starlink service, won a $1.8 billion classified contract in 2021 and is the primary rocket launcher for the Pentagon and NASA. Musk has a security clearance that allows him access to certain classified information.”
At the same time that Musk was chatting it up with Putin, the Russian dictator was on a U.S. sanctions list over his illegal invasion of Ukraine and bombing of its cities and towns.
Immediately upon learning about the Wall Street Journal article, NASA administrator Bill Nelon called for a government investigation, citing national security concerns.
Musk owns the Twitter social media platform, which he renamed “X.” According to DownDetector data and comments posted on its website, Twitter (X) was inaccessible for much of yesterday to users in the U.S. and countries around the globe. According to Musk, it was under “a massive cyberattack.” That Musk cannot put up adequate firewalls to protect Twitter (X) from many hours of global outages is not a comforting thought for a man being allowed by Trump to send teams of his software engineers to tap into federal government computer systems.
The dangerous threats to U.S. national security, trust by our allies, market stability, consumer and business confidence, which directly impacts the U.S. economy, of this Musk/Trump/Russia realignment will no doubt come up when Trump meets with corporate CEOs today. Will any have the courage to break their silence on the subject?
The fact that the Dow is down another 361 points as of 10:03 a.m. EDT this morning suggests that the worst is yet to come.
