For Elon Musk, it's Darned if You Do, Darned if You Don't

The Department of Justice targets SpaceX for hiring Americans.

In yesterday’s item on the space boom, driven in large part by SpaceX and Starlink, we mentioned that politicians and the media have put Elon Musk into a pressure cooker of insinuation and threat.

For Musk, however, no good deed goes unpunished. A new profile of Musk in the New Yorker insinuates that his quick delivery of Starlink satellites to Ukraine, after the Russian invasion, was less than noble….

…All of Musk’s properties are under siege. Twitter, the pseudocrats say, spreads dangerous misinformation, and Tesla’s EV charging stations are a monopoly. The Musk companies are now critical infrastructure and may be too important to be left to one man’s whims. You can see where these self-serving storylines are going. Maybe it’s because Musk is challenging the status quo and building alternative, parallel networks evading pseudocratic control.

No sooner had we published than the Department of Justice announced a lawsuit against SpaceX. The Civil Rights Division accuses Musk’s company of discriminating against refugees when hiring.

Musk quickly replied that other laws require companies which deal in some high-tech and national defense industries to only hire U.S. nationals.

Darned if you do, darned if you don’t. The legal and extralegal harassment of Musk will continue.