Tag: Elon Musk

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free trade & free markets judiciary

Musk’s Bête Noire

Elon Musk, judge, space

Should a judge decide how much Elon Musk can be paid?

Well, when the job that Musk is doing is not a government job and a company’s internal process of determining the compensation is voluntary and aboveboard … no.

But according to a Delaware judge, Chancellor Kathaleen McCormic, who last January rescinded Tesla’s compensation package then worth $56 billion, now worth more than $100 billion, Musk is not entitled to this compensation. And she has just affirmed her ruling.

Musk says that “shareholders should control company votes, not judges.”

Tesla says: “The ruling is wrong, and we’re going to appeal.”

The appeal could take a year or more.

There’s nothing in the U.S. Constitution authorizing judges to run private companies or decide how much their most valuable personnel may be paid. The judge has no constitutional warrant. And no moral warrant. 

Not her business.

Ignoring the enormous success of Tesla, McCormic is simply deciding that Musk’s pay is way too much with respect to some arbitrary personal criterion that is irrelevant to the decisions that companies must make to attract and keep their greatest entrepreneurial talents, the ones who do the most to make it all go.

Still, maybe we should give the judge a break — I mean, just a tad?

Remember, it was Chancellor McCormic who forced Musk to go through with his Twitter purchase — which turned out to be the most consequentially favorable free-​speech/​-​free-​press event of our time. 

Sure, then too she was grinding a personal or ideological animus against the magnate.

But credit where credit’s due!

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights international affairs

Musk Avoids a Trap

Elon Musk, UK, censorship, freedom

After reports that British MPs wanted to summon Elon Musk to interrogate him about the role of his company, X (Twitter), “in disseminating ‘disinformation’ during the summer riots,” I didn’t suppose that he’d be eager to rush across the pond to be grilled by enemies of freedom of speech.

One of his would-​be interrogators, Chi Onwurah, a Labour committee chairwoman, said she wanted to “cross-​examine him to see … how he reconciles his promotion of freedom of expression with his promotion of pure disinformation.”

What a mystery. How can someone champion freedom of speech and letting people say things with which others disagree? Isn’t freedom of speech only for government-​authorized speech, the kind King George III would have approved?

On X, a Malaysian commentator sought to warn Musk: “This is a trap,” tweeted Miles Cheong, “They’ll detain him at the border, demand to see the contents of his phone, and charge him under counterterrorism laws when he refuses.”

If we were concerned even a little that Mr. Musk might fall into this or a similar trap, we needn’t have been.

In reply to Cheong, Musk asserted that MPs will, rather, “be summoned to the United States of America to explain their censorship and threats to American citizens.”

In September, in response to being pointedly and publicly not invited to a British investment conference, Musk had said, “I don’t think anyone should go to the UK when they’re releasing convicted pedophiles in order to imprison people for social media posts!”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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EU to Axe X?

Elon Musk, EU, European Union, censorship

Sandro Gozi, European Union parliament member, wants Elon Musk’s Twitter operation gone. Out of the European Union.

Not no matter what. Only if Twitter — “X” — keeps flouting the EU’s censorship rules.

Gozi says: “If Elon Musk does not comply with the European rules on digital services, the EU Commission will ask the continental operators to block X or, in the most extreme case, force them to completely dismantle the platform in the territory of the Union.”

Oh dear.

This threat comes right after EU official Thierry Breton’s threatening letter to Musk about his impending Twitter interview with Donald Trump. Musk told Breton to “[obscenity deleted]” and proceeded with the interview. Other EU arbiters of speech quickly dissociated themselves from Breton’s threat.

So maybe Gozi’s confidence about what fellow EU commissars will do if Musk does not play ball is misplaced. Perhaps the others will think about how Twitter users throughout Europe would react if their X accounts became “ex-” accounts.

Various Italian officials, Gozi’s countrymen, roundly repudiated his gabble.

“Silencing the voice of millions of people in order to strike out at those who think differently from them?” challenged Italian Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini. “Unacceptable and disturbing.”

The political party of Giorgia Meloni issued a statement saying that the “contemporary left [are] allergic to opinions that are not aligned with their mainstream, and inquisitors of anyone who does not submit to their suffocating cloak of conformism.”

Elon Musk likely sees the truth: this fight is winnable.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Elon Musk’s Right Answer

Elon Musk, censorship, EU, free speech, democracy

“By the rules of the complicated pretense which all those people played for one another’s benefit, they should have considered his stand as incomprehensible folly; there should have been rustles of astonishment and derision; there were none; they sat still; they understood.”

These words are from a scene in Atlas Shrugged in which beleaguered industrialist Hank Rearden rejects “this court’s right to try me” and refuses to put on a defense. Thereby giving the best defense of all.

Elon Musk didn’t give a speech.

Instead, when an EU muck-​a-​muck, Thierry Breton, sent him a letter on the eve of Musk’s Twitter interview with presidential candidate Donald Trump, a letter babbling about dire consequences for Twitter if it were to “amplify potentially harmful content [i.e., any deviation from current government dogma] in connection with events with major audience around the world,” Musk responded with a quote and a clip from the movie Tropic Thunder.

Other EU officials are now rushing to disavow Breton’s letter, widely castigated as an attempt to interfere with the U.S. election.

I can’t repeat the line Musk quoted, because we don’t use cuss words here. If you don’t like to hear such words, don’t click into the video clip. Just don’t go there.

Mega-​magnate Elon Musk is often badly wrong about China. But when he’s right, he’s right. Even super right. 

And we need a million more CEOs to be thus willing to stand up to regulators foreign and domestic.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights national politics & policies partisanship

The Governor Who Parodied Himself

Political campaigns are hard. Presidential campaigns in which your Selected Candidate is mediocre at best are harder. So wouldn’t it be good to be able to outlaw all things that highlight this mediocrity?

Things like, say, effective parody?

This seems to be the thinking — I hope I’m channeling it accurately — of the governor of California, unhappy with a popular video available at the Mr Reagan YouTube channel.

The video’s maker may have thought he was covering every base by calling it a parody in the very title, an indignity of self-​labeling that Jonathan Swift would never have permitted. People consuming Swift’s satire were left to figure out for themselves that when he proposed that the children of poor people be eaten to render them “beneficial to the publick,” he was engaging in satire.

In contrast, the Kamela Harris campaign ad parody in question is called “Kamala Harris Campaign Ad Parody.” Clear. Unmistakable. 

Like the content.

Still, this video has not escaped the agenda of would-​be censors like Governor Gavin Newsom. The parody uses a “deepfake” AI-​generated voice that sounds like Harris. It’s even got the Harris Cackle. So Newsom wants to outlaw it.

“Manipulating a voice in an ‘ad’ like this one should be illegal,” he says. (Why?) “I’ll be signing a bill … to make sure it is.”

But as Reclaim the Net points out, California has already outlawed certain uses of deepfake media. 

These forbidden uses do not, however, include parody, which is constitutionally protected speech.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment insider corruption international affairs

Hunter’s Pseudo-​Crime

Hunter Biden has been found guilty of buying a gun while being a crack addict.

Yes, that’s a federal crime.

The jury “heard testimony from Hunter Biden’s ex-​wife and former girlfriends,” UK’s Mirror explained yesterday, “and were shown photos of him with drug paraphernalia and other salacious evidence to make the case that he had lied when he checked ‘no’ on the form at a gun shop asking whether he was ‘an unlawful user of, or addicted to’ drugs.”

While the U.S. President’s son is guilty as charged, the prosecution was almost as bogus as Trump’s.

Rep. Thomas Massie (R‑Ky.) put it best, on X: “Hunter might deserve to be in jail for something, but purchasing a gun is not it. There are millions of marijuana users who own guns in this country, and none of them should be in jail for purchasing or possessing a firearm against current laws.”

Elon Musk, who owns X (ex-​Twitter), concurred: “I agree. He (and others) should be in jail for impugning the integrity of the United States by taking bribes for political favors, but not for this pseudo-crime.”

But pseudo-​crimes are what the Department of Justice, and your local lawfare Democratic prosecutors, specialize in. 

“They picked the gun charge because it was the only one not attached to Joe Biden,” explained Natalie F. Danelishen. “They also convicted Hunter Biden because they needed a fall guy so that Trump’s 34 felonies look less like political prosecution. Now ‘Justice’ seems fair. It’s a chess game.”

Exactly. No matter what the president says, or Merrick Garland says, or the talking heads on cable news say, it’s a scam.

Set Hunter free — and prosecute him, his uncle and his father for their evident corruption.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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