Who elected Elon Musk our arbiter of social norms? (2024)

By Michael Hiltzik

Sunday, July 28, 2024 | 2 a.m.

Here’s a handy two-step process for taking a thoughtful and judicious approach to the burning social and political issues of our time:

1. Examine closely the position taken by Elon Musk, and;

2. Go the other way.

Musk’s drift — more precisely, his headlong dive — into right-wing orthodoxies has been well-chronicled. He has openly endorsed antisemitic tropes, called for the prosecution of the respected immunologist Anthony Fauci (evidently buying into the right-wing fantasy that Fauci helped create the COVID-19 pandemic), and associated himself with a grotesquely ugly conspiracy theory about the assault on the husband of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

He reversed policies at X, formerly Twitter, designed to block hate speech, including racist and antisemitic tweets. That has turned the platform into a hive of repulsive partisan commentary.

(Musk blames an imaginary advertisers’ “boycott” for the user decline at X, though the repulsive atmosphere of the platform since his acquisition probably has done more to drive users and advertisers away.)

Musk again put his acrid personal worldview vividly on display with his announcement Tuesday that he would move two of his private companies, SpaceX and X, to Texas.

He made clear that his decision was triggered by California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s signing of a law that bars school districts from requiring teachers to notify parents of their children’s gender identity changes. Newsom signed the law Monday.

“This is the final straw,” Musk posted on X. He described the law as one of “many others” in California “attacking both families and companies.”

A few things about this.

If anything, Musk’s corporate activities point to what is often described as a “whim of iron.” He defends his policies and politics as derived from painstaking consideration based on immutable laws of human behavior, but they don’t hold water on those terms. Instead, they point to the social dangers of endowing self-interested personalities with the money to buy unaccountable influence in conflict with the public interest.

Musk appears to have a real problem with transgender rights. According to the Musk biography by Walter Isaacson, this may have originated with the decision of his eldest child, Xavier, to transition at the age of 16. “I’m transgender, and my name is now Jenna,” she texted a relative. “Don’t tell my dad.”

Jenna followed up with a political awakening that Musk ascribed to her attendance at a private school in California. “She went beyond socialism to being a full communist and thinking that anyone rich is evil,” he told Isaacson. Jenna broke off all contact with him.

Further, as is the case with much of Musk’s worldview, his claim about California’s attacks on families and companies is fundamentally incoherent.

The new California law is the antithesis of an attack on families. It aims to protect the right of parents to seek the most appropriate medical treatments for their children. Anti-transgender activists who have gotten laws enacted in 20 red states interfering with these medical consultations typically characterize them as “parents’ rights” measures, when they’re just the opposite — they interpose right-wing ideologies between these families and their doctors.

That’s the state of play in Texas, the putative new home of SpaceX and X. There, a law that became effective Sept. 1 prohibited treatments widely accepted by medical professionals for “gender dysphoria” experienced by adolescents.

These are chiefly the use of puberty blockers to give the patients more time to affirm their gender perception, and once that stage is achieved the use of cross-sex hormones — estrogen for males transitioning to female, and testosterone for females transitioning to male.

The Texas law threatens physicians who violate the law in treating their patients with the loss of their medical license.

A trial judge, ruling in a lawsuit brought by parents of transgender youths and by doctors who treat patients in that position, blocked the law shortly before it was to take effect. The injunction was overturned late last month by the Texas Supreme Court in an 8-1 decision.

The majority made clear that its decision had nothing to do with the weight of medical opinion, which overwhelmingly supported the treatments at issue when undertaken through careful consultation.

The issue at the heart of the debate, asserted Justice James Blacklock in a concurring opinion, “is one of philosophy, morality, even religion. The medical debates at issue in this litigation are merely the surface-level consequences of deep disagreement over the deepest of questions about who we are.”

The majority justices ruled that the Legislature was within its rights to place limits on medical practice and parental authority in Texas. They asserted that barring parents from seeking medically indicated treatment of their children’s gender dysphoria was no different from a state law forbidding minors from getting tattoos, even with their parents’ permission.

“Of course,” responded Justice Debra Lehrmann, the court’s lone dissenter, “there is nothing remotely medically necessary about tattooing.” Depriving adolescents of gender dysphoria therapies, on the other hand, can be severely injurious to the patient’s physical and mental health.

If Musk thinks Texas’ policies on parental rights are superior to California’s, he might ask the parents of transgender youths who have been driven out of Texas to seek treatment because of this ignorant and ideologically infected law.

Texas boosters, Musk included, like to describe the state as the coming place for venture investing. The truth is rather different. According to the National Venture Capital Association, Texas has been mired in also-ran status for at least the past decade, a period in which it has been supposedly booming.

California’s position as the top state in venture funding has never been seriously challenged. In 2023, California VC funds raised $37 billion; Texas ranked seventh, with less than $1.2 billion. Of the top 10 venture deals by value last year, the NVCA reckons, eight involved California companies. The others were located in New York and Washington, D.C. Texas had none.

And in terms of assets under management by firms based in the state, California continues to reign with $644.5 billion as of last year. Texas ranks fifth, at less than $32.5 billion. It was edged out by No.4 Florida, with $33.6 billion, but the figures for both Florida and Texas are a big drop-off from No. 3, Massachusetts, with $121.7 billion.

It’s not as if Austin, where Musk is hanging his Texas Stetson, offers newcomers a paradisiacal environment. In 2022, TechCrunch dubbed Austin “a city of unicorns and tech giants.” The thrill hasn’t lasted. Recent transplants have found that its boosters’ depiction of a vibrant intellectual climate was oversold. “Austin is where ambition goes to die,” an unhappy California immigrant told Business Insider.

Then there are its punishing summers — 78 days of triple-digit temperatures in 2023 — and soaring housing prices. Although Austin boasts one of the features of tech hubs, a leading research institution in the University of Texas, the state’s partisan political environment has turned increasingly hostile, with laws passed this year banning diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs and narrowing faculty tenure protections.

Texas has the most restrictive anti-abortion law in the nation, with an almost total ban and a prohibition even on private health plan coverage of abortions. That hardly makes for an inviting prospect for women of childbearing age or for young families interested in the full range of reproductive health care options.

One advantage Texas has over California is something a rich entrepreneur like Musk would appreciate the most: It has no state income tax.

Musk can scarcely claim that his own corporate policies are family-friendly. They are, however, arguably self-destructive. Consider his treatment of thousands of former Twitter employees who were summarily fired after he took over the platform in October 2022 and are suing to receive severance payments, bonuses and other benefits they were promised before the takeover.

The mass firings have given rise to about 2,000 arbitration cases and a dozen class-action lawsuits, according to Shannon Liss-Riordan, a Massachusetts labor lawyer who represents the workers in arbitration and filed the lawsuits.

Among the workers’ claims is that while Musk was working to close his acquisition of Twitter, as it was then known, the company promised employees that they would be entitled to “benefits and severance at least as favorable” as what Twitter provided before the Musk takeover. The promises were made by company executives in a series of all-hands meetings at Twitter headquarters and were written into the merger agreement Musk and Twitter management negotiated in April 2022.

“The promises were made to keep employees from fleeing the company during those chaotic months before Musk closed on the acquisition,” Liss-Riordan told me. “Then after he closed, he just defaulted on that promise.”

Neither Musk nor spokespersons for X or SpaceX could be reached for comment.

Although many if not most of the X employees were required to bring their claims to arbitration, Musk initially refused to pay the arbitration fees that are typically charged to the employer in such cases.

That has frozen the proceedings in more than 800 cases, though not those originating in California, Oregon and Nevada, where employers don’t have the legal ability to refuse. About a third of the 2,000 arbitration claims are in California, Liss-Riordan says.

Leaving aside the ethical implications of a company’s forcing employees into arbitration and then refusing to allow the cases to proceed, Musk’s demand that ex-employees submit to arbitration may be exceptionally more costly for the company than trying to reach a general settlement. Arbitration fees can average $100,000 per case, Liss-Riordan told me; hundreds of millions of dollars in claims may be at issue.

“You have to scratch your head over why Elon Musk has to fight this so hard,” she says. “Would it really be that big a deal to pay the employees what was promised to them? Frankly, it doesn’t seem worth his time.”

Michael Hiltzik is a columnist for the Los AngelesTimes.