The Ballad of Twitter and that Billionaire Bumpkin, Elon Musk

X terms specify Northern District, where Judge Reed O'Connor is a Tesla investor.

Elon Musk's X updated its terms of service to steer user lawsuits to US District Court for the Northern District of Texas, the same court where a judge who bought Tesla stock is overseeing an X lawsuit against the nonprofit Media Matters for America.

The new terms that apply to users of the X social network say that all disputes related to the terms "will be brought exclusively in the US District Court for the Northern District of Texas or state courts located in Tarrant County, Texas, United States, and you consent to personal jurisdiction in those forums and waive any objection as to inconvenient forum."

X recently moved its headquarters from San Francisco to Texas, but the new headquarters are not in the Northern District or Tarrant County. X's headquarters are in Bastrop, the county seat of Bastrop County, which is served by US District Court for the Western District of Texas.

The new terms take effect on November 15. They will replace terms that said all "disputes related to these Terms or the Services will be brought solely in the federal or state courts located in San Francisco County, California."
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Experts say Musk $1 million giveaways to registered voters may be illegal

In an interview Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro said Musk’s giveaway was “deeply concerning” and is “something that law enforcement could take a look at.” Shapiro, a Democrat, was previously the state attorney general.

Federal law makes it a crime for anyone who “pays or offers to pay or accepts payment either for registration to vote or for voting.” It’s punishable by up to five years in prison. After legal outcry over the weekend, Musk’s group tweaked some of their language around the sweepstakes.

“When you start limiting prizes or giveaways to only registered voters or only people who have voted, that’s where bribery concerns arise,” said Derek Muller, an election law expert who teaches at Notre Dame Law School. “By limiting a giveaway only to registered voters, it looks like you’re giving cash for voter registration.”

Offering money to people who were already registered before the cash prize was announced could violate federal law, Muller said, but the offer also “can include people who are not yet registered,” and the potential “inducements for new registrations is far more problematic.”

He dined with Rupert Murdoch and a handful of other billionaires, for Donald Trump.

He intends to appear at Madison Square Garden this weekend, for Donald Trump.

He is planning future speeches and possibly a campaign push in Wisconsin, for Donald Trump.

He is donating “substantial” amounts of money to a super PAC focused on Hispanic turnout, for Donald Trump.

With less than two weeks left before Election Day, Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, has grown only more frenzied in his efforts to help elect the former president. Mr. Musk has emerged as a central character of the campaign’s closing days, so much so that Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, Vice President Kamala Harris’s running mate, referred to him this week as Mr. Trump’s true “running mate.”

Mr. Musk, the leader of Space X, Tesla and X, has already poured $75 million into a pro-Trump super PAC called America PAC. But his efforts in recent weeks have become more labor intensive — and more expensive.

Tony Gonzales, the Republican congressman from Texas whose allied super PAC he said he expected would receive the “substantial” gift, has grown close with Mr. Musk since bringing him to tour the southern border last year. He described Mr. Musk as especially hands-on.

“He’s going all in — and you see that with the amount of resources that he and his team and the group has provided,” said Mr. Gonzales, who said he didn’t know the size of Mr. Musk’s check to the super PAC. “But I would argue it’s, more importantly, time. There’s nothing more valuable than a person’s time. And Elon is literally campaigning every day in Pennsylvania.”

Mr. Musk, fresh off several town hall appearances in Pennsylvania in advance of Monday’s voter registration deadline in the state, is now plotting his next moves, according to a dozen Republicans with insight into his operations.

On Monday evening, Mr. Musk abandoned his political team’s makeshift war room in a Pittsburgh hotel to travel to New York City for a dinner with Mr. Murdoch, the conservative media mogul, and other business leaders to discuss the state of the race, according to a person with knowledge of the meal.

On Wednesday, he was back to performing the quotidian tasks of being a public company C.E.O. — speaking to Tesla shareholders and answering questions from Wall Street analysts on a quarterly earnings call.

“Peter was lamenting that the future doesn’t have flying cars,” he said at one point, referring to his fellow entrepreneur Peter Thiel. “Well, we’ll see.”

In some ways, what Mr. Musk has done for Tesla, the electric car company, is not terribly different from what he is doing now for Mr. Trump. Mr. Musk, not known for his humility, is throwing himself into a work project with the same exacting demands, penchant for cost-cutting and belief in himself that have defined his three decades as a Silicon Valley founder.

Rarely has a political megadonor made himself such a star of his own operation.

Mr. Musk, who considers himself the best marketer of his own companies, has leveraged his celebrity, enjoying a rush of media coverage for his PAC’s efforts, thanks to a publicity gambit.

Earlier this month, Mr. Musk’s leadership team held an open call within the super PAC to brainstorm creative ideas for using Mr. Musk’s money, according to a person with knowledge of the matter. The idea that emerged was a proposal to pay $47 apiece to people who found others to sign a petition — helping Mr. Musk identify likely Trump voters in the process.

Mr. Musk’s petition eventually expanded to a random $1 million daily prize, and it generated well over one million signatures.

It also generated legal attention. The Department of Justice sent a warning letter this week to America PAC, suggesting that prosecutors could be investigating this as a possible criminal activity. An interest group, Public Citizen, filed a complaint on Wednesday with the Federal Election Commission.

Even skeptics of America PAC, including those within the organization, say that the sheer amount of money it is spending is bound to produce some results despite some major hiccups. The group has spent $134 million on the presidential campaign and 18 congressional races, 60 percent of which has been dedicated to voter canvassing operations. The super PAC is expected to disclose tens of millions of dollars in additional contributions from Mr. Musk in a federal filing on Thursday evening.

Mr. Musk has assembled a team that resembles the landing group that he used on a recent mission that he also considered critical: buying Twitter. Mr. Musk’s cousin James Musk has helped the super PAC, reprising a role he played in the weeks following the Twitter purchase, as is a longtime executive from Mr. Musk’s entourage.

Mr. Musk has also recruited veterans of the world of field organizing. The latest hire was Chris Carr, a well-respected Republican field operative who is an expert on the state of Nevada, according to two people with knowledge of the matter.

Mr. Musk has built a get-out-the-vote team that Mr. Trump is largely depending upon in these final weeks, and the Trump campaign is largely thankful for Mr. Musk’s help, according to people close to Mr. Trump. Still, some of those same people cautioned that while Mr. Musk would surely be celebrated if Mr. Trump wins, the billionaire would, fairly or not, be denigrated if he loses.

America PAC, through its contractors and subcontractors, employs over 2,500 canvassers knocking on well over 100,000 doors a day, according to a person with knowledge of the group’s activities. Some canvassers have been recently poached by other firms offering higher pay. The group has in recent days focused on targeting those voters who are least likely to participate in the election, especially in the suburbs, according to two people briefed on the activities. And the PAC has recently been circulating information on early-vote totals to interested parties, although that data has not gone to some of the PAC’s own donors, who have long-simmering complaints that they feel that they are being kept in the dark.

Mr. Musk also appears to be playing a long game. He and his family-office chief, Jared Birchall, filed paperwork in Texas this month to incorporate two new entities with names that appear to carry political objectives: Group America L.L.C. and United States of America Inc. The entities were first reported by Forbes.

Their purpose is unclear, but the timing is revealing for a billionaire who may seek voter data for future political projects. One person close to the super PAC said the group had recently begun testing some techniques for targeting voters that could yield data for the future.

Mr. Trump, meanwhile, has made Mr. Musk part of his closing argument, promoting a fund-raising appeal to small-dollar donors that promises that Mr. Musk would match their contributions.

Mr. Musk is particularly popular among young men. But on Wednesday, a Democratic messaging firm, Blueprint, released a study it had conducted to determine which of 14 recent quotes by Mr. Trump on podcasts resonated with male, and particularly young male, voters.

Mr. Trump’s praise of Mr. Musk ranked the worst.

Investors in Musk’s first company worried about “our founder being deported” and gave him a deadline for obtaining a work visa.

PALO ALTO, Calif. — Long before he became one of Donald Trump’s biggest donors and campaign surrogates, South African-born Elon Musk worked illegally in the United States as he launched his entrepreneurial career after ditching a graduate studies program in California, according to former business associates, court records and company documents obtained by The Washington Post.

NEWS: More than 200,000 subscribers have canceled their digital subscriptions to the Washington Post after the revelation that owner Jeff Bezos blocked an endorsement of VP Harris.
That's about 8 percent of WaPo's subscriber base - a staggering sum
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Yesterday, The New York Times reported that people around Donald Trump are trying to figure out how “to quickly install loyalists in major positions without subjecting them to the risk of long-running and intrusive F.B.I. background checks.” Trump’s people, unsurprisingly, are worried about whether they’d pass a background check: As Atlantic contributor Peter Wehner wrote in September, the MAGA-dominated GOP “is a moral freak show, and freak shows attract freaks”—who tend to have a hard time getting security clearances. The first Trump administration was rife with people (including his son-in-law, Jared Kushner) who were walking national-security risks, none worse than Trump himself. A second term, in which Trump would be free of adult supervision, would be even worse.

By the way, elected government leaders (even if they are convicted felons) do not go through background checks or have actual security clearances. Their access to classified information is granted by virtue of the trust placed in them by the voters; the president, as the chief executive, has access at will to information produced by the military, the intelligence community, and other executive-branch organizations.

For many other federal workers, however, security clearances are a necessary component of government service. Over the course of some 35 years, I held relatively ordinary secret and top-secret clearances while in various jobs, including my work for a defense contractor, my time as an adviser to a U.S. senator, and then in my position as a professor at a war college.

All of these, even at the lowest levels, involve allowing the government to do some uncomfortable peeping into your life—your finances, your family, even your romantic attachments. Clearances are meant to mitigate the risk that you will compromise important information, so the goal is to ensure that you aren’t emotionally unstable, or exploitable through blackmail, or vulnerable to offers of money. (Want to get a really thorough investigation? See if you can get cleared for CNDWI, or “Critical nuclear weapons design information.”)

You screw around with this process at your own professional and legal peril. Don’t want to admit that you cheated on your wife? Too bad. After all, if you’ll lie to her and then lie to the government about lying to her, what else will you lie about? Are you a bit too loose at the poker table, or are you a casual drug user but don’t think either is a big deal? That’s not for you to decide: Better fess up anyway. (And of course, you have to promise not to do it anymore.)

Once you have a clearance, you’ll be subjected to refresher courses on how to keep it, and you’ll have to submit to regular reinvestigations. You must also sit through “insider threat” training, during which you are taught how to recognize who among your co-workers might be a security risk—and how to report them. Red flags include not only signs of money issues, emotional problems, or substance abuse but also extreme political views or foreign loyalties.

Which brings me to Elon Musk, who runs SpaceX, America’s private space contractor and an organization presumably full of people with clearances. (I emailed SpaceX to ask how many of its workers have clearances. I have not gotten an answer.) Trump is surrounded by people who shouldn’t be given a clearance to open a checking account, much less set foot in a highly classified environment. But Musk has held a clearance for years, despite ringing the insider-threat bells louder than a percussion maestro hammering a giant glockenspiel.

Leave aside Musk smoking marijuana on Joe Rogan’s show back in 2018, a stunt done with such casual smugness that it would have cost almost anyone else their clearance. (The feds, including the U.S. military, don’t care about state laws about pot; they still demand that clearance holders treat weed as a prohibited substance.) But sharing a joint with bro-king Rogan is nothing. Six years later, The Wall Street Journal reported much more concerning drug use:

• The world’s wealthiest person has used LSD, cocaine, ecstasy and psychedelic mushrooms, often at private parties around the world, where attendees sign nondisclosure agreements or give up their phones to enter, according to people who have witnessed his drug use and others with knowledge of it.

An attorney for Musk denied the report, but even the rumor of this kind of drug use would be a five-alarm fire for most holders of a high clearance. But fine, even if the report is true, maybe all it means is that Musk is just a patriotic, if somewhat reckless, pharmaceutical cowboy. It’s not like he’s canoodling with the Russians or anything, is it?

Bad news. Musk (according to another bombshell story from The Wall Street Journal) has reportedly been in touch multiple times with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

• The discussions, confirmed by several current and former U.S., European and Russian officials, touch on personal topics, business and geopolitical tensions. 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.

Now, it’s not inherently a problem to have friends in Russia—I had some even when I was a government employee—but if you’re the guy at the desk next to me with access to highly classified technical information, and you’re chewing the fat now and then with the president of Russia, I’m pretty certain I’m required to at least raise an alert about a possible insider threat.

So why hasn’t that kind of report happened? Apparently, it has: Last week, the NASA administrator Bill Nelson said that Musk’s alleged contacts with Russia “should be investigated.” But the United States government seems to think that Musk is too big to fail and too important to fire. As an opinion piece in Government Executive put it this past winter:

• In the case of Musk, it is clear the government has decided the benefits of his maintaining eligibility are worth the risks. It’s an easier case to make when you’re creating groundbreaking technology and helping get humans to Mars. It may be a harder case for you to make if your name is Joe and your job is to get a truck to the naval yard … That may seem like a double standard, but that’s if you forget that there is no universal standard.

If Trump is reelected, Musk likely won’t have anything to worry about. But at what point does Musk’s erratic behavior—including allegations of drug use, accusations of some two years of regular discussions with the leader of Russia, and his obvious, intense devotion to one party and its candidate—become too much of a risk for any other U.S. administration to tolerate?

It’s bad enough that Musk could be careless with classified data or expose himself to blackmail; it’s even more unsettling to imagine him undermining American security because of poor judgment, political grudges, and unwise foreign associations. Remember, this is a man who had to pay a $20 million fine for blabbing about taking Tesla private and had to agree to have some of his social-media posts overseen by a Tesla lawyer—and that’s not even close to classified information.

As a former clearance holder, I also worry that indulging Musk (and allowing future Trump appointees to bypass the clearance process) would be a toxic signal to the conscientious public servants who have protected America’s secrets. They have allowed the government to intrude deeply into their personal lives; they have worked to keep their finances tidy; they have avoided the use of prohibited substances and the abuse of legal ones.

If only they were more important; they could get away with almost anything.

America PAC, the pro-Trump political group Musk formed and funded with at least $118 million of his own money, “is going to keep going after this election, and prepare for the midterms and any intermediate elections,” Musk said on a live stream on his social media platform X. In the next round of races for the House, the Senate and even some local offices, he said his super PAC “is going to aim to weigh in heavily.”

Later, as Musk hung out at Mar-a-Lago with other wealthy donors and a Trump victory appeared guaranteed, his posts on X became increasingly triumphant. “The future is gonna be fantastic,” he wrote over a picture of a SpaceX rocket launching on a pillar of flame.
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As the election results poured in, Musk tweeted about his excitement about working with Trump on a commission to slash government spending. He posted a picture of himself deep in conversation with the former president and Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO Dana White at the Trump watch party, adding a fire emoji and four American flags. And over a meme of himself holding a ceramic sink in the Oval Office, he wrote: “Let that sink in.”

Trump added to the sense of destiny, fawning over Musk, his rockets and his satellite internet service as he declared victory early Wednesday. “We have a new star,” Trump said. “A star is born — ELON!”

Musk spent election night with Trump at his Mar-a-Lago estate.