The Ballad of Twitter and that Billionaire Bumpkin, Elon Musk

Italian police increase security at Tesla dealerships after 17 cars destroyed in Rome fire
State police anti-terrorism unit investigating whether blaze in Torre Angela was started by anarchists

Italy’s interior ministry has written to police forces across the country to increase security at Tesla dealerships after 17 of the electric cars made by Elon Musk’s company were destroyed in a fire in Rome.

Italy’s state police anti-terrorism unit, Digos, is investigating whether the fire at the Tesla dealership in Torre Angela, a suburb in the east of the capital, was started by anarchists.

Firefighters worked for hours to put out the blaze in the early hours of Monday. Drone images showed a row of the burnt-out remains of the vehicles in a parking area of the dealership. Using his social media platform, X, Musk referred to it as “terrorism”.

There are 13 Tesla dealerships in Italy, all managed by the parent company, the majority of them in Rome, but also in other cities including Florence and Milan.

An interior ministry source said the circular was aimed at “raising awareness” of possible anti-Tesla protesters amid a global wave of vandalism in response to Musk’s political activities in the US. If needed, surveillance of dealerships would be increased, it said.

Since the inauguration of Donald Trump as US president in January, Musk has been slashing the federal workforce as chief of the administration’s so-called “department of government efficiency”, prompting the emergence of “Tesla Takedown”, a boycott movement that started in the US before spreading to Europe.

Although most protests have so far been peaceful, Tesla dealerships and cars have increasingly been targets of vandalism. Seven vehicles were set alight at a dealership in Ottersberg, Germany, on Saturday and two Tesla stores in Sweden, one in the capital, Stockholm, and the other in the costal city of Malmö, were vandalised with orange paint on Monday.

Musk has nurtured close relations with European far-right party leaders including the Italian prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, who in an interview in early January described him as “a brilliant man”.

Matteo Salvini, who leads the far-right League, a member of Meloni’s ruling coalition, expressed solidarity with Musk after the Rome incident.

“Too much unjustified hatred against the Tesla car company,” Salvini wrote on X. “The season of hate and conflict must come to an end as soon as possible. My solidarity goes out to Elon Musk and to all the workers who have been threatened and attacked.”

he throws musk under the bus...

‘Loser’: Musk endures wave of gloating on X after liberal judge wins Wisconsin race
Democrats seize on result as a referendum on Musk and an emphatic repudiation of Trump’s richest supporter and ally

Democrats were tasting unfamiliar triumphalism on Wednesday after the election for a vacant Wisconsin supreme court seat turned into an emphatic repudiation of Elon Musk, Donald Trump’s richest supporter and key ally.

Musk endured a wave of gloating on Twitter/X, his own social media platform, after Brad Schimel, a Trump-endorsed judge that he spent $25m supporting lost by 10 percentage points to Susan Crawford, whose victory sustained a 4-3 liberal majority on the court.

On a day that Trump has earmarked as “liberation day” to mark his long-awaited roll out of trade tariffs, Democrats seized on the result as a referendum on Musk – who has spearheaded the president’s slashing of federal government workers and spending programmes – while casting it as a platform for a recovery in next year’s congressional midterm elections.

In a display of schadenfreude, the Democrats’ official account posted a picture of Musk donning a cheese head and accompanied with the single word “Loser”.

Crawford, a former attorney for Planned Parenthood, presented her success as a triumph over Musk. “As a little girl, I never could have imagined that I’d be taking on the richest man in the world for justice in Wisconsin. And we won,” she told cheering supporters on Tuesday night.

The result is politically significant because the court is due to issue abortion rulings while also deciding on electoral redistricting questions which now have the potential to help Democrats in future elections in a state where contests are traditionally close.

Democrats have sought to exploit Musk’s growing unpopularity to tar Trump and the Republican generally. Recent polls show a majority of voters have a negative view of Musk, who was once popular with the US public.

Hakeem Jeffries, the Democrat leader in the House of Representatives, said it was now on Republicans to separate themselves from Musk.

“Time for them to walk away from this unelected, unpopular, unhinged and un-American billionaire puppet master,” he told MSNBC. “He tried to spend his unlimited resources to buy a state supreme court seat in Wisconsin, and it failed spectacularly.”

Chuck Schumer, the party’s leader in the Senate, said the result “sent a decisive message to Elon Musk, Donald Trump and Doge… our democracy is not for sale.”

Other party figures were blunter. Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota and Kamala Harris’s running mate for the Democrats in the 2024 presidential election, was succinct on Musk’s social media platform X, formerly Twitter.

“Wisconsin beat the billionaire,” he posted.

Jasmine Crockett, a Democrat House member from Texas, posted: “Well well well, I guess Wisconsin agreed on the message for old Elon: “F’ off!,” she wrote.

Eric Swalwell, a California representative, called the result an “ass-kicking” for Republicans, adding: “Where else does Elon want to try and buy an election.”

JD Pritzker, the Democratic governor of Illinois and himself a billionaire, wrote: “Elon Musk is not good at this.”

Suspicions that Musk’s profile and conspicuous wealth have become an electoral turnoff also appeared to infect Republicans.

Pam Van Handel, a Republican party chair in Wisconsin’s Outagamie county, told Politico: “I thought [Musk] was gonna be an asset for this race. People love Trump, but maybe they don’t love everybody he supports.”

The site quoted Rohn Bishop, the Republican mayor of the Wisconsin city of Waupun, as saying: “I thought maybe Elon coming could turn these people to go out and vote, [but] I think… he may have turned out more voters against [Schimel].”

Charlie Kirk, a pro-Trump social media influencer and activist, implied – without mentioning Musk by name – that his wealth and profile might have played a role.

“We did a lot in Wisconsin but we fell short,” he wrote. “We must realize and appreciate that we are the LOW PROP party now. We are the party of welders, waiters and plumbers. We are the party of people who work with their hands, who shower before and after work.”

Neither Musk nor Trump mentioned the supreme court result in its immediate aftermath, trumpeting instead another Wisconsin ballot result that amended the state constitution to require photo ID as a condition for voting.

Then on Wednesday afternoon, Politico and ABC News reported that Trump told his inner circle, including some Cabinet secretaries, that Musk will soon leave his role as a top adviser to the president, overseeing federal government job cuts. The reports cited anonymous sources familiar with the matter.

Meanwhile, Republicans won victories on Tuesday in two special House elections in Florida caused by the resignations from the US Congress of Matt Gaetz, Trump’s original attorney general designee but who later withdrew amid sexual misconduct allegations, and Mike Waltz, now the national security adviser.

But the elections were won by margins of around half of what Trump achieved last November. Jimmy Patronis beat Democratic challenger Gay Valimont to win Gaetz’s former seat, while Randy Fine defeated Josh Weil in Florida’s sixth district, once held by Waltz.

The results bolstered the GOP’s wafer thin House majority to 220-213.

Trump hailed the outcomes, which he attributed to his personal endorsement. “THE TRUMP ENDORSEMENT, AS ALWAYS, PROVED FAR GREATER THAN THE DEMOCRATS FORCES OF EVIL. CONGRATULATIONS TO AMERICA!,” he posted on his Truth Social platform.

But Jeffries claimed the reduced victory margins augured well for the Democrats in next year’s midterms.

“One point that should have my Republican colleagues quaking in their boots,” he said. “In the Florida sixth race, which was a Trump +30 district, the margin was cut in half. There are 60 Republicans in the House who currently represent districts where Trump did worse than 15 or 16 points.”

Elon Musk's Embarrassing Gaming Session Disrupted By Merciless Cyberbullies
“YOU RUINED THE COUNTRY JUST LIKE YOU RUINED ALL YOUR MARRIAGES,” one viewer told Elon Musk during a livestream.

Tech billionaire Elon Musk was cyberbullied on Saturday while playing video games on a livestream in his personal jet, using satellite WiFi from his own company, Starlink.

Musk, who actively panders to the gaming community and brags about his purported skills, previously faced controversy after gamers accused him of paying a professional to level up his character in the game Path of Exile 2 so he could take the credit.

For a while, Musk fought the allegations, but he confessed to outsourcing his gameplay in January, telling one user on X, “It’s impossible to beat players in Asia if you don’t,” Rolling Stone reported at the time. Earlier that month, he had stopped posting from his apparent gaming account on X.

Musk’s daughter, Vivian Wilson, accused her father in March of pretending to be a skilled gamer, calling him “dogshit awful” in an interview with gamer and progressive political commentator Hasan Piker.

On Saturday, in an apparent attempt to rebuild his reputation amongst gamers, the SpaceX founder streamed Path of Exile 2 on hardcore mode, meaning that he had to create a new character every time he died in game.

Not long into the stream, Musk’s chat, which can be viewed by the audience, was flooded with personal attacks. Viewers made references to his close relationship with President Donald Trump, his three divorces, his parenting practices, and more.

“I’m your biggest fan! Please jerk off mr. trump so he dies of a heart attack!” one viewer wrote less than five minutes into the stream.

“Elon. It’s me, Ashley St. Clair. I have no other means of contacting you so I bought PoE2 early access just for this. Please pay your child support. Thank you Elon,” wrote another viewer who was almost certainly not the real Ashley St. Clair, a conservative influencer engaged in a legal battle with Musk over the son she says they share.

Some of Musk’s fans showed him love, telling him to turn on “Do Not Disturb” mode to censor the hate. Musk muted some trolls who spammed the chat and continued to play the game with an expressionless gaze.

Musk ended the stream after losing a number of his characters to hardcore mode. His last character died after the Tesla CEO complained of a “lost connection.”

“YOU RUINED THE COUNTRY JUST LIKE YOU RUINED ALL YOUR MARRIAGES,” one viewer wrote toward the end of his almost 2-hour gaming session.

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“Coming from Apple, the user interface, the way you deal with technology, is the most important thing in the world to me,” Wozniak said in an interview with CNBC Wednesday. “And Tesla is the worst in the world at that.”

“Every step up, where they changed a thing in the car, it got worse and worse and worse. And now it is just miserable for user interface."

...

“Where to find the time of day changes depending on what [driving] mode you’re in,” he said. “The buttons that go through your six favorite channels don’t work if it’s satellite radio channels. It takes so many tries to hit one button in your jiggly car, and it just doesn’t work.”

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“The modes hide things that aren’t there, and your finger knows how to get them,” he told CNBC. “Nothing makes sense in that car, intuitively.”

Wozniak shared the story of his wife, who was once pulled over after failing to signal a turn while driving a Tesla. The policeman had “never seen this yoke steering wheel,” Wozniak said. “When you’re already turning you can’t find the buttons for the turn signal.”

But the kicker was when the cop asked for the driver’s insurance information, which most drivers typically keep in the glove compartment.

“It’s kind of a new Tesla, with new software—[and] there’s no button for the glove box,” Wozniak said. “You have to go and search in menus until you stumble into finding it—it’s horrible.”