Why are democrats worried about Musk buying Twitter?

[Winehole23]

really amazing how this all turned out for Elon, and for us


Elon Musk Lackeys Have Taken Over the Office of Personnel Management | WIRED

[Winehole23]

This is a paywalled article at Wired. But it makes a pretty good case that the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) is now basically being run at its highest levels by people installed by and working with Elon Musk. In other words, “DOGE” seems to be calling the shots at OPM, even though it’s run by people who aren’t even federal employees. Most of these people appear to come from Musk’s various companies. Wired declined to publish the names of two of the people because of their age. One graduated from high school last summer.



Some of this is already known. The nominee to run the agency, Scott Kupor, is a partner at the Andreessen/Horowitz VC firm. They’re aligned with Musk politically. So that’s consistent with the rest of the story. But it seems the upper echelons of the agency has already been stocked with a mix of Musk’s people and Republican operatives, notwithstanding the fact that this is a federal agency which is usually made up almost entirely of career staff.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/huma...ce/ar-AA1y1LiP

[Winehole23]

letting xAI, Palantir, the Boring Company,and Neuralink run OPM is wild

This afternoon OPM sent out an email to civilian government employees offering them “buy outs” if they resigned from their jobs in the next 10 days (by February 6th). This has been reported by the Post and I’ve also received copies of the email directly sent to me by TPM Readers. (If you’re a federal employee: send me all the information/do ents you have. We can also arrange to communicate through an encrypted channel.) The legal basis of these “buy outs” is dubious at best – though we need to learn more about that. It also seems highly questionable under what authorization the administration is dramatically trimming the entire federal workforce without any congressional authority. That said, the spending freeze already takes the administration fairly brazenly outside of its cons utional authority. But the whole picture comes into clearly view if this is being run and planned by people reporting to Elon Musk. This is essentially what he did when he took over Twitter.

This “buy out” email comes after an episode last week in which OPM was setting up a new distribution list that went over the org charts of individual government agencies and went directly to individual federal government employees. The “buy out” email and presumably other actions yet to come seem clearly to be what that was for.

[Winehole23]

Not a great sign when Wired says it won't name at least two fo the people Musk has installed to run the Office of Personnel Management because they may be minors

[Winehole23]

[velik_m]

Tesla slides in German EV ranking as new registrations plummet 41 percent

U.S. carmaker Tesla, which is headed by highly controversial CEO Elon Musk, registered the biggest slump of new registrations among all electric vehicle (EV) manufacturers in Germany last year. Registrations of new Teslas dropped 41 percent to less than 38,000 vehicles, data from the Federal Motor Transport Authority (KBA) showed, reported news agency dpa.

With a share of nearly 10 percent of all EV registrations, Tesla dropped to third place in Germany in 2024, after already ceding its pole position in 2022. Total EV registrations fell 27 percent to 381,000, a development that was partly driven by the end of e-car purchase premiums in late 2023.

However, some carmakers bucked the downward trend: Germany’s BMW overtook Telsa by registering just over 40,000 cars and claiming a market share of over 11 percent. Swedish brand Volvo also greatly increased its registrations, although at a lower total volume of only about 14,000 registrations. Germany’s largest car company VW defended its leading position in the country’s EV market with roughly 62,000 registrations and a market share of over 16 percent. Mercedes reached the fourth rank in registrations with 34,000 vehicles.
...

https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news...des-ev-ranking

[Winehole23]

Co-president Musk making the rounds at the GSA, which among other things is the US's real-estate manager

[Mr. Musk visited the agency’s headquarters in Washington on Thursday afternoon, according to three people briefed on his activities who insisted on anonymity, and met with the acting administrator of the agency, Stephen Ehikian. Mr. Musk, joined by one of his young children, arrived shortly after noon and spent a few hours at the agency, with several black S.U.V.s parked out front.

The so-called Department of Government Efficiency, President Trump’s new cost-cutting group led by Mr. Musk, has so far focused on terminating leases of what it has called “mostly empty” federal offices, which are managed by the General Services Administration. On Monday, the group said the agency had already terminated three leases.

“These are the first steps to right size the Federal real estate portfolio of more than 7,500 leases,” the group wrote in a post on X, Mr. Musk’s social media platform.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/30/u...istration.html

[Winehole23]

Meta is renewing its threats against employees, telling them today that they will hunt for leakers and tolerate zero leaks.

Want to know how that is going? Three Meta employees who I’ve never spoken to before just cold messaged/emailed me offering me to be sources.

[Winehole23]

Elon Musk issuing orders to executive agencies?

[Winehole23]

very irregular

[Winehole23]

Bezos bends the knee

gives tribute to Elon

[Winehole23]

[Winehole23]

as if from the standpoint of an uninvolved third country

What started Thursday as a political purge of the internal security services accelerated Friday into a full-blown coup, as elite technical units aligned with media oligarch Elon Musk moved to seize key systems at the national treasury, block outside access to federal personnel records, and take offline governmental communication networks.


With rapidity that has stunned even longtime political observers, forces loyal to Musk’s junta have established him as the all-but undisputed unelected head of government in just a matter of days, unwinding the longtime democracy’s cons utional system and its proud nearly 250-year-old tradition of the rule of law. Having secured themselves in key ministries and in a building adjacent to the presidential office complex, Musk’s forces have begun issuing directives to civil service workers and forcing the resignation of officials deemed insufficiently loyal, like the head of the country’s aviation authority.

[Winehole23]

Over the last two weeks, loyalist presidential factions and Musk-backed teams have launched sweeping, illegal Stalin-esque purges of the national police forces and prosecutors, as well as offices known as inspectors-general, who are typically responsible for investigating government corruption. While official numbers of the unprecedented ousters were kept secret, rumors swirled in the capital that the scores of career officials affected by the initial purges could rise into the thousands as political commissars continued to assess the backgrounds of members of the police forces.

[Winehole23]

The country’s other business oligarchs have watched Musk’s unexpected and rapid rise to power with trepidation, and leading media and technology companies who compete with Musk’s extensive business empire—like Meta, Amazon, Disney, Paramount, Apple, and OpenAI—have quickly lined up to negotiate and pay bribes to the president that would allow their companies to operate unimpeded; initial payment terms ranged from million-dollar gifts to the presidential inauguration to $15 million and $25 million payments, made by Disney and Meta, to fund the construction of a presidential shrine. The highest known payment was $40 million from Amazon, which was structured as a gift to the president’s wife in exchange for the media company having the opportunity to film a hagiographic biopic.

It was unclear, exactly, what deal terms any of those bribes and payments unlocked and when subsequent tribute payments would be expected, although on Saturday Trump moved to fire and neuter government watchdogs that had long bedeviled the country’s financial elite.

[Winehole23]

is X a state actor now?

[Winehole23]

will there be a Twitter Files investigation of how social media is intertwined with the state?

[Blake]

But her emails!

[Winehole23]

the only thing that matters is whose ox is getting gored, MAGAs are principle-free

[SnakeBoy]

Elon Musk issuing orders to executive agencies?

Purged

[Winehole23]

Run by the Bureau of the Fiscal Service, the sensitive systems control the flow of more than $6 trillion annually to households, businesses and more nationwide. Tens, if not hundreds, of millions of people across the country rely on the systems, which are responsible for distributing Social Security and Medicare benefits, salaries for federal personnel, payments to government contractors and grant recipients and tax refunds, among tens of thousands of other functions…. ‘This is a mechanical job — they pay Social Security benefits, they pay vendors, whatever. It’s not one where there’s a role for nonmechanical things, at least from the career standpoint. Your whole job is to pay the bills as they’re due,’ [Mark Mazur, who served in senior treasury roles during the Obama and Biden administrations] said. ‘It’s never been used in a way to execute a partisan agenda. … You have to really put bad intentions in place for that to be the case.'”

[Thread]

the only thing that matters is whose ox is getting gored, MAGAs are principle-free

Your side made us that way.

[Winehole23]

Your side made us that way.

you're not being honest with yourself or us

[Winehole23]

just admit it's good, that you like the way it feels to be evil and victorious

[Thread]

just admit it's good, that you like the way it feels to be evil and victorious

I've never denied it.