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ssdd's avatar

Just spitballing here but he may also be trying to make the best of a bad situation. You’ve painted a picture of a house of cards just waiting to collapse -- Tesla drowning in debt, Cybercab and humanoid robots dead DOA, Starship fundamentally flawed, etc. In that case, being able to blame Trump for killing his businesses is preferable to them going belly up on Elon’s watch. It at least gives him the chance to preserve his “mystique.”

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DrBDH's avatar

As an aside, these massive tax cuts are the tax cuts in the 2017 budget that Republicans passed under reconciliation rules that require them to expire at the end of this year. Reconciliation spending has to include provisions that prevent exploding the national debt, in this case having them expire. Pushing a renewal of the cuts obviates that protection. The Senate has to try to pass this budget under reconciliation again because they don’t have 60 votes. The OMB of course has shown that the bill blows up the debt so reconciliation doesn’t apply. Watch for John Thune to walk back his promise to follow the reconciliation rules. But Musk’s thumb on the scales may kill that effort. Not extending the tax cuts would avoid the cuts to Medicaid and Medicare that Republican constituents are yelling about. Without knowing what Musk’s reasons are, we can say he has just made Thune’s job a hundred times more difficult.

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