Chinese and American companies have long led the costly endeavor of developing autonomous ride-hailing services. Now, robotaxi firms are taking the competition global.
The Alphabet-owned Waymo, which launched the world’s first fully driverless service in Phoenix in 2020, remains the largest operator in the U.S. But Chinese rivals are quickly catching up in both scale and technological capability. Chinese tech giant BaiduiBaiduBaidu is a Chinese technology company that operates the country’s biggest search engine and video-streaming service iQiyi.READ MORE recently announced its Apollo Go robotaxi service has completed more than 11 million rides, surpassing Waymo’s reported 10 million. The company is now testing in Hong Kong and the United Arab Emirates, with reported plans to expand to Switzerland and Turkey.
Top Chinese contenders WeRide and Pony.ai — both listed in the U.S. and backed by investors including Nvidia and Toyota — are also rapidly expanding through partnerships with Uber in Europe and the Middle East. Both companies have secured permits to test in the U.S.
Meanwhile, Elon Musk recently said Tesla will launch its much-delayed robotaxi service in Austin this month, with San Francisco and Los Angeles to follow.
Robotaxis use a combination of advanced sensors, cameras, and artificial intelligence to operate with minimal human input. But commercial rollout remains complex, requiring extensive regulatory approvals and testing.
Chinese firms are highly motivated to expand globally to attract international investors, according to Zhang Xiang, a Chinese automotive expert and visiting professor at Huanghe Science and Technology University.
“There are very few robotaxi competitors outside of China, so it is easier for Chinese players to raise funds overseas … to continue with research and development needed to survive,” Zhang told Rest of World.
Baidu only began testing its robotaxi operations at scale in the central Chinese city of Wuhan in August 2022. In the first quarter of this year, it reported a 75% year-over-year increase in total rides, after expanding domestic service to 11 cities.
Even at the current level of automation — where vehicles can operate in driverless modes only in certain government-approved areas — robotaxis would commercially scale only by 2030, according to a McKinsey report. It would cost billions to reach expanded fully driverless capability.
While Waymo has continued to draw funding from its parent company and external investors, other U.S. players have pulled back. In December, General Motors halted investment in Cruise after spending $10 billion, citing the high costs of scaling. Motional paused its robotaxi partnership with Uber and Lyft last year, saying it would resume only when “unit economics are more favorable.”
Chinese companies benefit from strong automotive supply chains and enthusiastic support from a central government that views autonomous vehicles as a key area of innovation. More than 50 cities across China have introduced testing-friendly policies for autonomous vehicles.
While none of China’s robotaxi firms have reported turning a profit, Beijing’s push for a tech-driven economy and loosened regulations has helped attract investments in the sector.
Zhang noted that China’s population of 1.4 billion, compared with the U.S. population of 340 million, creates a naturally larger market for this new form of ride-hailing.
“The business model of robotaxis, like many consumer-facing tech industries, was first created by the U.S., and caught up in China quickly because of the market size — just like e-commerce,” Zhang said.
Both Chinese and American companies are working to reduce costs. But a robotaxi ride in China costs about 35 cents per mile, compared with $2 in the U.S., according to a 2025 report by U.S.-based investment firm ARK. China’s auto industry offers globally competitive prices due to government subsidies, a comprehensive supply chain, and cheap labour, analysts say.
Congresswoman Stacey Plaskett joins Michael Steele on the podcast. She describes the frustration of hearing people say that Democrats aren’t doing anything, despite their efforts in the House and the Senate. Rep. Plaskett also discusses not being allowed to vote for Speaker as a representative for the Virgin Islands, how Medicaid cuts would hurt Americans, Senator Joni Ernst’s bizarre comments about people dying and David Hogg’s disruption of the DNC.
REMINDER! Join Michael Steele, Molly Jong-Fast, Elie Mystal, Lucy Caldwell, John Fugelsang and Karen Hunter for Part II of our barbershop livestream on Tuesday, June 10th at 10am ET:
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Sam Stein and Jonathan Cohn take on RFK Jr’s Wall Street Journal op-ed, his lies to Sen. Cassidy, the administration’s thinly veiled crusade against science, and what it means for public health in America.
Read RFK’s op-ed in the Wall Street Journal.
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Tim Miller and Cameron Kasky team up for an especially unfiltered episode of FYPod, recorded just after Trump sent 500 Marines into Los Angeles in response to protests over ICE raids. Cameron reflects on his messy MSNBC appearance, overshares about his Hinge profile, and explains why Gen Z isn’t showing up in the streets—yet.
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Protesters shut down the 101 freeway as they clash with law enforcement on Sunday, June 8, 2025 in downtown Los Angeles due to the immigration raids in the city. (Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)
WHEN JOURNALIST RYANNE MENA TOOK TO THE STREETS of Los Angeles Friday to cover the protests against ICE, she figured she knew what to expect. As a Southern California News Group reporter whose beat includes crime, public safety, and (recently) immigration, Mena had covered her share of protests.
She’d never been shot before, however. But as she was covering it all from outside the Metropolitan Detention Center in downtown Los Angeles, that’s precisely what happened.
A protester threw a desk chair at an entrance to the detention center, prompting agents to launch a fusillade of pepper balls and rubber bullets. Mena was hit with a pepper ball projectile on her upper-left thigh, leaving a nasty bruise and the dark realization that this would be unlike any protest she’d covered before.
Mena’s injuries sustained while covering the protests. (Courtesy Ryanne Mena)
The next day brought further affirmation, as federal agents shot Mena again, this time with a rubber bullet that hit her on the right side of her head an inch above her ear. She and another journalist who was hit were then both tear-gassed by men Mena said were Homeland Security Investigations agents responding to protests in Paramount, California, after the ICE raid targeting the area around a Home Depot sparked the weekend’s protests. She posted photos to Instagram documenting her and her colleague’s injuries.
“It’s very violent, and it seems intentional,” Mena told The Bulwark. The Trump administration, she added, “is using Los Angeles as an example.”
Mena has her reasons to believe this. As she noted, Los Angeles “has a longstanding history of large protests going back to the civil rights era.” The city is also filled with immigrants. “Everyone knows someone who isn’t authorized to be in this country, so this hits home for Angelos because immigrants are the lifeblood of our city.”
Far from the musings of just one reporter on the ground, Mena’s comments reflect an emerging consensus of those pushing back on the Trump administration in this most precarious moment: L.A. was chosen for a reason; the White House wanted this to be their staging ground.
The first reason for this belief is historical: Los Angeles has for decades been a frequent site of major civil rights–related protests, from the 1968 East L.A. walkouts, when thousands of Chicano students protested inequality and prejudice in the public education system; to the riots in 1992 over the acquittal of police officers involved in the beating of Rodney King; to historic protest marches in 2006 for immigration reform.
The second point has to do with demographics. In covering that rollout so far, I’ve often written about Louisiana’s detention centers, which have come to be known for human rights abuses and for making detainees inaccessible to their lawyers and families. In such deep-red states, there’s also a sense among undocumented people that they are clearly, vastly outnumbered—and also with fewer allies. In that context, it makes sense to try to evade any kind of public scrutiny, to keep your head down and your profile low to try to keep your family together.
But Los Angeles? It’s almost half Latino; immigrants really are, as Mena said, the lifeblood of the city and the state. In L.A., nearly half a million people live in mixed-status families. Paramount—where agents sought out day laborers outside Home Depot after Stephen Miller suggested more Home Depot raids were needed—is 82 percent Latino, according to census figures. Once reports spread of the ICE offensive, it was only a matter of time before people took to the streets to defend their families, friends, and neighbors.
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THAT’S THE HISTORICAL AND DEMOGRAPHIC CONTEXT through which to view these protests. There is a similarly important political context too.
We are long past the phase of “mass deportation” in which bad actors or those with scary rap sheets are the main focus. Real, hard-working people—taken from the L.A. garment district or in front of a Home Depot while trying to find work—are being targeted. Americans were promised a crackdown on criminals and are instead watching masked people destroy families. Some were pleased to hear this. But others either did not believe Trump when he said he would do this or did believe him and opposed him—and it’s many of those people who now are rising up to say no.
Flor is one of those saying no. She’s a 24-year-old graduate student in Los Angeles, and her dad—who has lived in the United States for 27 years, quietly working and providing for his three daughters for all that time—was one of the garment workers seized outside Ambience Apparel on Friday by agents in tactical gear, helmets, and masks.
After the 9:30 a.m. raid, her father was taken to the Edward R. Roybal Federal Building in downtown L.A. Democrats reacted with alarm to the news that immigrants were being held in the basement of the building, which was not designed to hold immigrants for long periods. Flor was trying to establish that her father was there, and she said officials used the protests outside as an excuse to cut off visitation.
Officers inside the federal building told lawyers to return between 8 a.m. and 1 p.m. on Saturday and family members to return between 1 and 4 p.m., but Flor came at 7 a.m. to try to visit with her father. She never got the chance. While outside, she caught a glimpse of him and other immigrants being put into white vans to be shuttled to the Santa Ana USCIS offices. On Sunday, they were then moved to Adelanto ICE Processing Center two hours away. Each step of the way, Flor joined with activists and members of other families also dealing with what she was going through to try to get answers and figure out how to see their detained loved ones.
Flor learned resilience from her dad, she says, a man who has always worked, including in sweatshops, as the sole provider—“emotionally and financially”—for her and her sisters, who have gone on to succeed as college graduates and graduate students. Her father likes bike rides and is a fan of both Club America, a Mexican soccer club, and Real Madrid. When Flor played soccer, he made sure she had the pricey gear she needed. When she went through her ballet phase, he was there, too, paying for it all.
“He supported us through his labor and always wanted to give us a better life,” Flor told me. “They’re not doing these things to go against the law, they’re doing it to provide for their kids, to have a better job, and have good homes.”
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THESE STORIES, AND TRUMP’S DELIBERATE actions, have put Los Angeles on edge. And they’ve raised challenges for those who recognize that the president is trying to fan the flames rather than calm them. What is the best way to respond to it?
Angelica Salas, a veteran immigration leader for the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights (CHIRLA), watched as Flor did everything she could to see her father again, impressed with the young woman and speaking to her about her plight.
Salas told me that she expects Democrats to have the backs of Californians who are standing up to fight back against ICE. The question is what should that support look like?
Her view is that the real way through this is to find enduring solutions to the problems at hand. There are, after all, 13 million people who have been denied access to legal status—the result of inaction and neglect on the part of both major parties. As for now, she says Democrats have a responsibility to do everything in their power to back the cause of immigrants.
“On the Democratic side, this has to be an unapologetic fight for immigrants because it’s a fight for U.S. citizens now, too,” she said. “This is one of our most vulnerable communities, and we’re being used as a political piñata—they’re beating us up and denying due process. We cannot live like this.”
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The state’s governor, Gavin Newsom, has begun picking up the fight, even inviting “tough guy” border czar Tom Homan to arrest him. But for folks like Salas, more is needed. She challenged Newsom last month for proposing cuts to health care for undocumented immigrants in his budget.
“Someone has to stand with us and see us as your constituents,” she said. “They have to use their power at every level of government to stop this travesty.”
Many Democrats did credit Congressional Hispanic Caucus members for showing up to ICE facilities across the country to conduct oversight, which led to their being rebuffed (and sometimes charged with crimes) by federal officials. But they say the party has to do more.
“How will they get loud?” asked Alida Garcia, a veteran immigration advocate and Latino vote organizer for Kamala Harris. “This only gets worse when [Trump’s spending and tax cut] bill passes and Homan has a green light to hire 10,000 people, build millions of dollars in cages, and get a whole fleet of jets to send people God knows where.”
“I want to see Democrats not afraid to fight to defeat the expansion of the authoritarian regime,” she continued. “A lot of people will act like it’s a border bill, but it’s a family-separation-and-raid-workers-at-workplaces bill.”
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Trump’s administration ramps up mass deportations in Los Angeles, triggering intense protests and clashes. Against California’s wishes, Trump deploys the National Guard, raising tensions over immigration enforcement and the role of protests in political resistance. JVL and Sarah Longwell question whether demonstrations effectively challenge policies or inadvertently strengthen Trump’s hand.
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“You don’t think it’s gonna happen to you, quite frankly, until it does,” said Luisa, whose father was detained in a raid at the Ambiance Apparel factory in Los Angeles’s garment district. Immigration officers had arrived in force on Friday morning and invaded the warehouse, initiating what Luisa called “a manhunt for each and every one of the workers” on their list.
Luisa, twenty-four, has been unable to talk to her father, fifty-one, since he was taken from the factory floor.
A crowd immediately gathered outside Ambiance, drawn by the swarm of armored vehicles. Some protesters blocked vans in an attempt to physically prevent them from leaving the scene with detainees. Observing the action was David Huerta, president of Service Employees International Union–United Service Workers West (SEIU-USSW), who was tackled to the ground, injuring his head. Huerta was treated at a hospital but remains in federal custody.
Luisa’s family has been increasingly worried about separation since Donald Trump’s election last November. “My father made it a big deal to ensure us that if it did happen — he always said, ‘If it does happen, but it won’t’ — we’re gonna be fine,” Luisa told Jacobin. She has been given a pseudonym to protect her anonymity.
Now that the moment has arrived, the family’s optimism has given way to quiet dread. “We don’t know how to address it with each other even,” she said. “We want to remain strong for him, and for ourselves, so that we can find ways to help him.” She described the family’s interactions with officials so far as “suspicious and difficult to navigate.”
On Saturday morning, Luisa caught a glimpse of her father outside the federal building in Downtown Los Angeles. He was being loaded into a van for transport to a separate facility. Officials had promised her visitation but canceled at the last minute, citing the protests roiling outside.
By Friday night, the federal building had already become a focal point of protests against the raids. Police had fired rubber bullets, flash-bang grenades, and tear gas at protesters and journalists surrounding the building. The melee on federal property empowered Trump to intervene directly, and on Saturday, he called in the National Guard to protect the building.
California legislators had not asked for the federal government’s assistance. Instead, evidently eager to create a national spectacle, Trump went over their heads, putting the protests in the national spotlight. His border czar, Tom Homan, threatened to arrest the mayor of Los Angeles, Karen Bass, and the governor of California, Gavin Newsom, if they resisted Trump’s federal troop takeover.
Capitalizing on the media attention, Trump issued several sensationalist statements, promising that “the Illegals will be expelled” and Los Angeles would be “set free.” “A once great American City, Los Angeles, has been invaded and occupied by Illegal Aliens and Criminals,” the president wrote. He called the protests “violent, insurrectionist mobs.” He pledged to “liberate Los Angeles from the Migrant Invasion, and put an end to these Migrant riots.”
Luisa expressed concern about how swiftly Trump shifted the narrative from the detentions to the police clashes and his demonization of protesters. “The reason why we do these protests is beyond just wanting to make noise and cause chaos,” said Luisa. “It’s meaningful, and it has purpose. They want to steer away from that. They want to change that story and say that it’s because we’re violent.”
Los Angeles City Council member Hugo Soto-Martinez rejected Trump’s claim to be acting on behalf of Angelenos who are being held captive by migrants to the detriment of their city. “That is not the way the people of Los Angeles view immigrants,” Soto-Martinez told Jacobin. “People in Los Angeles understand that immigrants are part of the very fabric of the city. So for Trump to say that is completely deranged.”
Soto-Martinez, a former union organizer and the son of undocumented immigrants himself, views the Trump administration’s provocations as opportunistic and cynical. “In the last few days, we have seen an escalation of aggressive tactics by the president, provoking these conflicts and trying to intimidate people,” he said. “The public is responding to what they’re doing, not the other way around.”
Protests in Los Angeles grew in response to Trump’s announcement that he was deploying the National Guard. On Sunday, crowds were estimated in the thousands, with demonstrators representing labor unions, immigrant rights groups, students, and many unaffiliated local residents. They held signs, waved flags, chanted through bullhorns, and blocked intersections. As National Guardsmen arrived in Los Angeles, hundreds of protesters blocked a freeway, bringing traffic to a halt. They clashed with police in multiple locations.
The Trump administration provided running color commentary, dramatizing the crisis of its own making. “Insurrectionists carrying foreign flags are attacking immigration enforcement officers,” wrote Vice President J. D. Vance on social media. White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller characterized events in Los Angeles as “a fight to save civilization.” Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth threatened to send in the Marines to quell “violent mobs.” The administration placed a man who had thrown rocks at immigration vehicles on the FBI’s Most Wanted list alongside violent murderers and large-scale international drug traffickers.
On Sunday evening, Trump took to his social media platform, Truth Social, to call protesters “thugs” and demand the arrest of any protester wearing a face mask. He also called to deploy more federal forces, though it was unclear if he meant the National Guard or another body. “Looking really bad in L.A.,” he wrote. “BRING IN THE TROOPS!!!”
Gloria Gallardo, a Los Angeles public-school teacher who taught the son of a detainee, accused the Trump administration of “inciting people to build a narrative that the people here deserve to be deported.” By using inflammatory rhetoric and taking increasingly provocative action, like rolling tanks through the city streets, Gallardo said the administration is deliberately attempting to create scenarios that will go viral on social media. “They’re doing it on purpose because they want this to be circulating around the world,” she said.
Gallardo speculated that a small minority of protesters may be intent on giving Trump what he wants, whether undercover agitators or just frustrated individuals. “With any mass mobilization like this, there are people who are trying to make it more violent, and it’s not the seasoned organizers in our city,” Gallardo said. Many community activists, she said, were “at home like me trying to organize responses for our schools, or on the streets trying to be peaceful and not put people in danger.”
Luisa, the detainee’s daughter, told Jacobin that the Trump administration is “definitely enticing people to react in certain ways,” noting that “protests come with powerful emotions” and accusing the administration of “poking the bear.” She cautioned protesters not to play into their hands. “It’s important to have protests, but we need to do so in a way that does not prove the current administration right.”
The Trump administration purports to be responding to out-of-control events in Los Angeles. Many commentators challenge this order of events, arguing instead that he targeted the city and intentionally turned it into a political spectacle. He could have known, they argue, that high-profile, military-style workplace raids in a majority-Latino and largely immigrant city would be met with protests, that deploying two thousand National Guardsmen to quell those protests would draw even more ire, and that large unplanned protests frequently involve clashes that make for sensational media fodder, no matter how peaceful the vast majority of participants are.
Gloria Gallardo believes that the Trump administration chose this showdown to divert attention from his administration’s failure so far to relieve Americans’ economic distress. “He wants to distract from all the other problems that are happening — with the tariffs, with the high cost of living. People who rely on Medicaid and food stamps are finding that things are getting even more difficult. It’s so expensive when I go to the grocery store. I can’t move for economic reasons. Things are really rough,” Gallardo said.
Trump’s so-called Big Beautiful Bill has come under fire for drastic cuts to Medicaid coupled with a massive tax break for the richest Americans. “The budget is set to increase the wealth of the top 10 percent of Americans by 2 percent,” wrote Liza Featherstone in this magazine. Meanwhile, “the resources of the bottom 10 percent are expected to shrink by 4 percent, because of the cuts to health care and food assistance.”
Councilmember Soto-Martinez accused Trump of trying to blame Americans’ economic difficulties on immigrants to deflect from his own failed leadership. “The federal minimum wage is $7.25 per hour, and rents are only rising. People feel that frustration. To say that somehow immigrants are responsible for this is an absolute distraction,” Soto-Martinez said. “Meanwhile, the billionaire class continues to become richer. It’s the billionaire class that’s robbing us blind, and they’re not even doing anything illegal.”
Marissa Nuncio is the executive director of the Garment Worker Center, an organizing space for Los Angeles garment workers whose membership consists primarily of immigrants from Mexico and Central America. Nuncio said that this kind of scapegoating of immigrant workers is a tactic commonly used to distract from economic inequality. Accusing immigrants of driving down wages for native-born Americans obscures the real problem, Nuncio told Jacobin: a broader climate of exploitation.
“It is exploitative industries, exploitative bosses, and draconian immigration policies that place immigrants in vulnerable positions that create these ripple effects in these economies,” she said.
Nuncio described garment workers in Los Angeles as “skilled craftspeople creating garments from whole cloth. It’s amazing to see their work.” Undocumented immigrants are paid poorly not because what they do is easy, but because they are uniquely vulnerable to workplace abuses. Nuncio said that Trump hopes his raids will have a chilling effect on immigration, but instead they will have a chilling effect on workplace organizing, depressing wages further.
“Over twenty years of organizing workers,” she said, “we know that what we will see in the workplace is exploitative bosses saying, ‘Hey, if you complain about those wages, I know where you live, and I’ll call immigration.’”
While Trump’s xenophobia is particularly brazen, Gallardo sees a problem much bigger than Trump at play. “Republicans — or, really, the ruling class, the elites — don’t want Trump’s base to understand the material reasons for the way things are,” she said. “They want to stop their base from actually coordinating as a working class with these other groups of people.”
Undocumented immigrants and their families are bearing the immediate brunt, she said. But the division ultimately hurts the entire working class, including many people who are at home rooting for Trump to crush the violent mobs of illegal immigrants and crazy leftists.
The events in Los Angeles have played out in a familiar sequence: manufacture a crisis, amplify the conflict, then use the ensuing chaos to justify increasingly authoritarian measures while diverting attention from policies that hurt ordinary Americans. As Luisa waits for word about her father and protesters face off with National Guardsmen, the Trump administration is hoping that questions about who benefits from this cruelty and repression go unasked.
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Tim Miller and Sam Stein talk California Governor Gavin Newsom’s forceful response to Donald Trump and Tom Homan’s threats and deployment of the National Guard on anti-ICE protesters in Los Angeles, and how Democratic lawmakers can learn from his leadership at this defining moment.
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Trump and Stephen Miller wanted a backlash against the immigration raids, because even they know that humans will respond when the federal government is snatching people off the street. But the tenor of modern protests is not going to be like the Civil Rights Movement, because activists back then were trained to suppress their natural inclination to defend themselves. Plus, the key role of culture in politics, Dems have to show that the state does good things, and it’s the 10th anniversary of Ta-Nehisi’s landmark book, “Between the World and Me.” And in a special bonus segment from our live show last Friday for audio listeners, Tim interviews Andry’s lawyer and explains why he’s been so moved by the case to free Andry from CECOT.
Ta-Nehisi Coates and attorney Lindsay Toczylowski join Tim Miller
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In the wake of the catty social media meltdown between President Donald Trump and former “First Buddy” and possibly drug-addled Elon Musk last week, some Democrats are seeing an opportunity to bring the world’s richest and most deranged man back into their tent.
On Friday night’s episode of Real Time With Bill Maher, for instance, Maher argued that Democrats should aim to “win [Musk] back.” He claimed that, though Musk had previously supported Barack Obama and backed Joe Biden’s campaign in 2020, Musk had been “driven into the other camp by bad attitudes and bad ideas.” Now, Maher suggested, was a moment to persuade the “gettable voter” Musk to return to Team Blue.
In a similar vein, influential Democratic commentator Matt Yglesias tweeted on Thursday, “I feel like Jeffies [sic] and Schumer should give Elon Musk a call and tell him about the Democratic Party’s longstanding interest in electric cars, solar panels, space exploration, and balanced deficit reduction.”
But it’s not just center-left media provocateurs who are urging a rapprochement between the Tesla/SpaceX CEO and the Democratic Party. According to reporting from Semafor, progressive Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA), whose congressional district includes Silicon Valley, is trying to convince Musk to back Democrats in the 2026 midterm elections:
“Having Elon speak out against the irrational tariff policy, against the deficit exploding Trump bill, and the anti-science and anti-immigrant agenda can help check Trump’s unconstitutional administration,” Khanna told Semafor on Friday. “I look forward to Elon turning his fire against MAGA Republicans instead of Democrats in 2026.
Khanna isn’t the only Democratic congressperson hoping for some kind of reconciliation. On Sunday, Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) told NBC’s Meet the Press that he would not personally take any campaign donations from Musk, but nonetheless welcomed the billionaire’s help in opposing Trump’s budget bill.
Bernie Sanders, on the other hand, disagreed. When CNN asked him about the potential for an alliance with Musk, Sanders called the billionaire a “right-wing extremist” and argued that the real problem was that Musk’s wealth had allowed him to buy so much influence in the Trump administration to begin with.
There is a certain logic to the argument that Democrats should try to team up with Musk. In the not-too-distant past, Musk backed Democratic candidates because his interests were aligned with certain Democratic policy priorities: in particular, as Yglesias suggests, strong support for the high-tech sectors in which Musk’s businesses operate.
That support has translated to billions of dollars in federal subsidies and government contracts for those companies under the Obama and Biden administrations. Tesla was supercharged by $465 million in subsidies from Obama. And in fall 2024, Politico reported that Tesla and SpaceX together had received more than $15 billion in federal contracts. That included contracts worth billions for SpaceX from the Pentagon and NASA just under Joe Biden.
Musk’s financial success has been powered in large part by public largesse, forked over by Democratic politicians. The long-term consequences of this erstwhile alliance with Musk, however, have been disastrous for the Democratic Party — and, more importantly, for the country. In subsidizing Tesla and handing the US space program over to SpaceX, Democrats were clearly not thinking about the dangers of allowing one man to concentrate so much wealth and power. As Matt Bruenig recently observed:
We have now seen what it looks like when the government supports and subsidizes technological innovation and implementation without concerning itself with the inegalitarianism of the system. His name is Elon Musk. In its desire to promote electrical vehicles and rocketry innovations, the US government made him the richest man in the world and then he used his riches to take over a major political communications platform and then the government.
Now that Trump and Musk have fallen out, it’s natural that Democrats would see a chance to bring Musk back into the fold. After all, he is, in many ways, a creature of their own making.
But this is evidence of the rotten core at the heart of the party and American politics in general. The fundamental problem with Musk is not that he went from being a “good billionaire” to being a “bad billionaire.” The problem is that we have a political system that enables the existence of billionaires and that facilitates their subversion of democracy — a system propped up by both major parties.
That some Democrats are now seriously discussing whether and how they might woo Musk — an erratic, union-hating, austerity-crazed billionaire who promulgates fascist conspiracy theories about “the great replacement” and the genocide of white South Africans — back to their side is a consequence of this warped system.
In a saner world, an opposition party would be having very different conversations. It would be talking about reining in and regulating giant tech companies (that Democrats have, in fact, spent years boosting). It would be considering nationalization of SpaceX and Starlink, to wrest essential government programs from the autocratic control of the world’s richest man. It would be discussing taxing the rich to address the extreme inequality of which Musk is a stupidly grotesque symptom. It would be proposing bold, popular ideas like a federal green jobs guarantee instead of treating climate policy as an opportunity to funnel public funds to companies like Tesla.
In a saner world, such an opposition party might have a real shot at stopping right-wing attacks on our democracy and cohering a political alternative to Trumpism. But we don’t live in that world. We live in this one, where neither Democrats nor Republicans can imagine a politics where they’re not trying to out-compete one another to best kiss the ass of disgustingly self-obsessed, destructive, reactionary plutocrats like Elon Musk.
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