"We had several black servants who were their friends"

(Photo by Katherine KY Cheng/Getty Images)

In an apparent effort to bolster Elon Musk’s waning but still enormous wealth, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick on Wednesday urged Americans to buy up Tesla stock. “If you want to learn something on this show tonight: Buy Tesla,” Lutnick said during a primetime appearance on Fox News. “It’s unbelievable that this guy’s stock is this cheap. It’ll never be this cheap again.”

He then praised Musk as “the best entrepreneur and technologist in America, and I bet on him,” adding, “I wish I was allowed to buy any stock.” (Shortly before those comments, Cantor Fitzgerald, the investment bank where Lutnick served as CEO, upgraded its rating of Tesla to a buy. Cantor Fitzgerald is currently managed by Lutnick’s sons.)

Lutnick’s financial advice was the continuation of a concerted effort by the Trump administration to boost Tesla. Last week, Donald Trump turned the White House lawn into a Tesla showroom. Tesla’s stock price, which accounts for much of Musk’s wealth, has been on the downturn since January amid lagging sales figures, persistent recalls, and protests at its showrooms nationwide.

In recent days, vandals have torched cars and charging stations at numerous Tesla facilities — attacks that Musk views as personally threatening. “They basically want to kill me because I’m stopping their fraud,” he said in a Tuesday interview on Fox News. “And they want to hurt Tesla because we’re stopping this terrible waste and corruption in the government.”

The Trump administration has promised to prosecute the perpetrators of those crimes as terrorists. “The swarm of violent attacks on Tesla property is nothing short of domestic terrorism,” U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi said in a Tuesday statement that echoed Trump’s feelings on the matter. The FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force is currently investigating an arson that took place in Las Vegas on Tuesday in which five Teslas were damaged. The FBI is also investigating a similar incident that occurred in Kansas City on Monday.

Starlink at the White House

Starlink, a satellite internet provider owned by SpaceX, has been installed on the White House campus, according to a Monday report from the New York Times:

Starlink terminals, rectangular panels that receive internet signals beamed from SpaceX satellites in low-Earth orbit, can be placed on physical structures. But instead of being physically placed at the White House, the Starlink system is now said to be routed through a White House data center, with existing fiber cables, miles from the complex. White House officials said the installation was an effort to increase internet availability at the complex. They said that some areas of the property could not get cell service and that the existing Wi-Fi infrastructure was overtaxed… White House officials said that Starlink had “donated” the service and that the gift had been vetted by the lawyer overseeing ethics issues in the White House Counsel’s Office.

This is a bizarre arrangement that provides no clear technical benefit, as internet speeds from Starlink’s satellites are easily outclassed by its terrestrial competitors. Jake Williams, a cybersecurity expert who spoke to the Times, said he had never heard of the government doing anything like it. “It introduces another attack point,” Williams said. “But why introduce that risk?”

Director of federal broadband program quits

The director of a massive Department of Commerce program to improve rural broadband access has quit the government over concerns that the agency would delay the initiative to lavish Starlink with federal funds. In a departure email last week, Evan Feinman, who led the $42.5 billion Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program, directed his ire at Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. “Stranding all or part of rural America with worse internet so that we can make the world’s richest man even richer is yet another in a long line of betrayals by Washington,” he wrote. Feinman urged the Trump administration against changing BEAD “to benefit [satellite] technology that delivers slower speeds at higher costs to the household paying the bill.”

Lutnick recently said he would overturn BEAD guidelines prioritizing wired internet providers over satellite providers. But the change, according to Feinman, will lead to complications for multiple states on the verge of starting their BEAD-funded projects. “These more-sweeping changes will only cause delays,” he wrote. “Shovels could already be in the ground in three states, and they could be in the ground in half the country by the summer without the proposed changes to project selection.”

Starlink asks for government help entering foreign markets; Tesla requests tariff relief

In a letter to the U.S. Trade Representative’s Office (TRO) last week, SpaceX urged the federal government to intervene against foreign governments whose “protectionist” policies hinder the sale of Starlink. “These anti-competitive policies have been used by foreign operators to block or slow SpaceX from providing a better quality and lower cost service to customers in those countries,” wrote SpaceX’s Matt Dunn, who complained about Starlink being forced to pay for spectrum access and cover import fees on its terminals.

Tesla, meanwhile, wrote its own letter to the TRO on Tuesday asking that it consider how Trump’s tariffs could “inadvertently harm U.S. companies.”

“U.S. exporters are inherently exposed to disproportionate impacts when other countries respond to U.S. trade actions,” the company wrote in an unsigned letter. “For example, past trade actions by the United States have resulted in immediate reactions by the targeted countries, including increased tariffs on EVs imported into those countries.”

Despite keeping much of its production and parts procurement within the U.S., Tesla said it would not be immune to a trade war, writing, “Certain parts and components are difficult or impossible to source within the United States.”

Tesla’s China struggles continue

Tesla’s sales in China, the top EV market in the world, are down about 4,000 vehicles this quarter. To increase demand, Tesla China has begun offering 0% financing on its brand-new Model Y. According to Electrek, this is not a good sign for the company:

Most people also didn’t expect Tesla to have to reintroduce 0% financing on the new Model Y so quickly in China. Thanks to the excitement for the new Model Y, they believed that Tesla would enjoy at least a few more months of unsubsidized demand. It looks like the few months were actually just a few weeks.

Tesla is also offering a free one-month trial for its Full Self-Drving (FSD) service in the country. Due in part to data and information restrictions imposed by China and the U.S., the Chinese version of FSD has entered a state of arrested development. Unable to keep up with the free-of-charge autonomous driving software from Tesla rivals, FSD — which retails at nearly $8,850 — is simply a bad deal for Chinese consumers. Tesla is reportedly working with the mapping team from a top Chinese tech company to improve the product.

---

The Musk Watch DOGE Tracker Update

The Musk Watch DOGE Tracker, our comprehensive audit of DOGE's claimed spending cuts, was updated on March 18. DOGE claims to have cut $115 billion in spending. But the DOGE Tracker finds that only $12.6 billion of those cuts are verifiable.

You can explore all the data at doge.muskwatch.com.

---

This Week in Popular Information

EXCLUSIVE: Memo details Trump plan to sabotage the Social Security Administration

EXCLUSIVE: Secret policy shift could overwhelm Social Security offices with millions of people

---

Musk Minutes

Last week, Musk shared and then unshared a post from a far-right X user claiming that Hitler “didn’t murder millions… public sector workers did.” (Forbes)

In a Washington Post story chronicling how Musk’s views on racism and diversity have changed over the years, the billionaire’s father, Errol Musk, provided the following anecdote: As children, Musk and his brother were “interested in motorbikes, computers, basketball and a little about girls. They were not into political nonsense, and we lived in a very well-run, law-abiding country with virtually no crime at all. Actually no crime. We had several black servants who were their friends.” (Washington Post)

Citing conflict of interest concerns, a watchdog group has urged the inspector general at the Department of Transportation to probe the Federal Aviation Administration’s recent business with Starlink. (The Hill)

Joining Musk’s effort to impose crippling cuts at the Social Security Administration is his close friend Antonio Gracias, a corporate raider who has served on the boards of SpaceX and Tesla. Gracias assisted Musk in his leveraged buyout of Twitter and has spent a significant amount lately at Mar-a-Lago. (New York Times)

CNN published a behind-the-scenes report on DOGE’s haphazard takeover of the Internal Revenue Service. The story demonstrates how DOGE has used its sweeping authority within the government to serve as the White House’s parapolitical enforcement arm. “Two IRS employees who spoke to CNN said that some of the actions taken by DOGE inside IRS appear to be aimed at finding ways to use the agency’s protected data to find undocumented immigrants,” the network reported. Those actions came after the IRS rejected demands from the Department of Homeland Security to access taxpayer databases for the purpose of hunting down undocumented immigrants. (CNN)

DOGE, through its control of the General Services Administration, has moved to cancel nearly 800 federal office leases by the end of June. Among the hardest hit agencies are the IRS, the Social Security Administration, and the Department of Agriculture. However, some of the leases previously canceled — or purportedly canceled — by DOGE have since been restored. (Associated Press)

A combination of Musk’s deferred buyout offer and DOGE layoffs has hobbled the National Nuclear Security Administration, the federal agency charged with building nuclear reactors and overseeing the assembly and testing of nuclear warheads. (New York Times)

DOGE staffer Marko Elez violated the Treasury Department’s privacy policies by sharing spreadsheets of personally identifiable information over email. A former SpaceX engineer, Elez previously made headlines by quitting DOGE after his racist social media posts were uncovered. After rejoining DOGE, he was assigned to its team at the Social Security Administration. (Bloomberg News)

A federal judge in Maryland has issued a temporary restraining order blocking DOGE from accessing personally identifiable information housed by the Social Security Administration. The judge also ordered DOGE members to delete any personal data they may have collected. (Associated Press)

On Tuesday, a different federal judge in Maryland ruled that DOGE’s teardown of the U.S. Agency for International Development “likely violated the United States Constitution in multiple ways… these actions harmed not only plaintiffs, but also the public interest.” (BBC)

xAI, the artificial intelligence firm behind Musk’s Grok chatbot, announced on Wednesday that it would join the AI Infrastructure Partnership between BlackRock, Microsoft, and Nvidia. The consortium hopes to raise $30 billion to "accelerate the scaling of critical and diverse energy solutions for AI data centers." (Investopedia)

Also this week, xAI acquired Hotshot, a text-to-video generative AI startup. (TechCrunch)

Tesla has received permission from a California regulator to transport “Tesla employees on a prearranged basis and in Tesla-owned vehicles.” The permit represents a preliminary step in Tesla’s ultimate goal to deploy a fleet of self-driving “cybercabs” in the state. To operate on public roads, Tesla would require a number of additional permits from the California Public Utilities Commission and the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles. (The Verge)