Sunday, July 28, 2024 | 2 a.m.
Right here’s a useful two-step course of for taking a considerate and considered method to the burning social and political problems with our time:
1. Study intently the place taken by Elon Musk, and;
2. Go the opposite means.
Musk’s drift — extra exactly, his headlong dive — into right-wing orthodoxies has been well-chronicled. He has overtly endorsed antisemitic tropes, referred to as for the prosecution of the revered immunologist Anthony Fauci (evidently shopping for into the right-wing fantasy that Fauci helped create the COVID-19 pandemic), and related himself with a grotesquely ugly conspiracy principle concerning the assault on the husband of former Home Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
He reversed insurance policies at X, previously Twitter, designed to dam hate speech, together with racist and antisemitic tweets. That has turned the platform right into a hive of repulsive partisan commentary.
(Musk blames an imaginary advertisers’ “boycott” for the person decline at X, although the repulsive ambiance of the platform since his acquisition most likely has performed extra to drive customers and advertisers away.)
Musk once more put his acrid private worldview vividly on show along with his announcement Tuesday that he would transfer two of his personal firms, SpaceX and X, to Texas.
He made clear that his determination was triggered by California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s signing of a regulation that bars faculty districts from requiring lecturers to inform dad and mom of their youngsters’s gender id adjustments. Newsom signed the regulation Monday.
“That is the ultimate straw,” Musk posted on X. He described the regulation as one in all “many others” in California “attacking each households and firms.”
Just a few issues about this.
If something, Musk’s company actions level to what’s typically described as a “whim of iron.” He defends his insurance policies and politics as derived from painstaking consideration primarily based on immutable legal guidelines of human conduct, however they don’t maintain water on these phrases. As a substitute, they level to the social risks of endowing self-interested personalities with the cash to purchase unaccountable affect in battle with the general public curiosity.
Musk seems to have an actual downside with transgender rights. In accordance with the Musk biography by Walter Isaacson, this will have originated with the choice of his eldest baby, Xavier, to transition on the age of 16. “I’m transgender, and my identify is now Jenna,” she texted a relative. “Don’t inform my dad.”
Jenna adopted up with a political awakening that Musk ascribed to her attendance at a non-public faculty in California. “She went past socialism to being a full communist and pondering that anybody wealthy is evil,” he advised Isaacson. Jenna broke off all contact with him.
Additional, as is the case with a lot of Musk’s worldview, his declare about California’s assaults on households and firms is basically incoherent.
The brand new California regulation is the antithesis of an assault on households. It goals to guard the suitable of fogeys to hunt probably the most acceptable medical remedies for his or her youngsters. Anti-transgender activists who’ve gotten legal guidelines enacted in 20 purple states interfering with these medical consultations usually characterize them as “dad and mom’ rights” measures, after they’re simply the alternative — they interpose right-wing ideologies between these households and their medical doctors.
That’s the state of play in Texas, the putative new residence of SpaceX and X. There, a regulation that grew to become efficient Sept. 1 prohibited remedies extensively accepted by medical professionals for “gender dysphoria” skilled by adolescents.
These are mainly the usage of puberty blockers to offer the sufferers extra time to affirm their gender notion, and as soon as that stage is achieved the usage of cross-sex hormones — estrogen for males transitioning to feminine, and testosterone for females transitioning to male.
The Texas regulation threatens physicians who violate the regulation in treating their sufferers with the lack of their medical license.
A trial decide, ruling in a lawsuit introduced by dad and mom of transgender youths and by medical doctors who deal with sufferers in that place, blocked the regulation shortly earlier than it was to take impact. The injunction was overturned late final month by the Texas Supreme Court docket in an 8-1 determination.
The bulk made clear that its determination had nothing to do with the burden of medical opinion, which overwhelmingly supported the remedies at subject when undertaken by cautious session.
The difficulty on the coronary heart of the talk, asserted Justice James Blacklock in a concurring opinion, “is one in all philosophy, morality, even faith. The medical debates at subject on this litigation are merely the surface-level penalties of deep disagreement over the deepest of questions on who we’re.”
The bulk justices dominated that the Legislature was inside its rights to put limits on medical apply and parental authority in Texas. They asserted that barring dad and mom from looking for medically indicated remedy of their youngsters’s gender dysphoria was no totally different from a state regulation forbidding minors from getting tattoos, even with their dad and mom’ permission.
“After all,” responded Justice Debra Lehrmann, the court docket’s lone dissenter, “there may be nothing remotely medically crucial about tattooing.” Depriving adolescents of gender dysphoria therapies, then again, might be severely injurious to the affected person’s bodily and psychological well being.
If Musk thinks Texas’ insurance policies on parental rights are superior to California’s, he would possibly ask the dad and mom of transgender youths who’ve been pushed out of Texas to hunt remedy due to this ignorant and ideologically contaminated regulation.
Texas boosters, Musk included, like to explain the state as the approaching place for enterprise investing. The reality is fairly totally different. In accordance with the Nationwide Enterprise Capital Affiliation, Texas has been mired in also-ran standing for no less than the previous decade, a interval through which it has been supposedly booming.
California’s place as the highest state in enterprise funding has by no means been severely challenged. In 2023, California VC funds raised $37 billion; Texas ranked seventh, with lower than $1.2 billion. Of the highest 10 enterprise offers by worth final 12 months, the NVCA reckons, eight concerned California firms. The others had been situated in New York and Washington, D.C. Texas had none.
And by way of belongings underneath administration by companies primarily based within the state, California continues to reign with $644.5 billion as of final 12 months. Texas ranks fifth, at lower than $32.5 billion. It was edged out by No. 4 Florida, with $33.6 billion, however the figures for each Florida and Texas are a giant drop-off from No. 3, Massachusetts, with $121.7 billion.
It’s not as if Austin, the place Musk is hanging his Texas Stetson, gives newcomers a paradisiacal setting. In 2022, TechCrunch dubbed Austin “a metropolis of unicorns and tech giants.” The joys hasn’t lasted. Latest transplants have discovered that its boosters’ depiction of a vibrant mental local weather was oversold. “Austin is the place ambition goes to die,” an sad California immigrant advised Enterprise Insider.
Then there are its punishing summers — 78 days of triple-digit temperatures in 2023 — and hovering housing costs. Though Austin boasts one of many options of tech hubs, a number one analysis establishment within the College of Texas, the state’s partisan political setting has turned more and more hostile, with legal guidelines handed this 12 months banning range, fairness and inclusion (DEI) applications and narrowing school tenure protections.
Texas has probably the most restrictive anti-abortion regulation within the nation, with an virtually whole ban and a prohibition even on personal well being plan protection of abortions. That hardly makes for an inviting prospect for girls of childbearing age or for younger households within the full vary of reproductive well being care choices.
One benefit Texas has over California is one thing a wealthy entrepreneur like Musk would admire probably the most: It has no state earnings tax.
Musk can scarcely declare that his personal company insurance policies are family-friendly. They’re, nevertheless, arguably self-destructive. Contemplate his remedy of 1000’s of former Twitter staff who had been summarily fired after he took over the platform in October 2022 and are suing to obtain severance funds, bonuses and different advantages they had been promised earlier than the takeover.
The mass firings have given rise to about 2,000 arbitration instances and a dozen class-action lawsuits, based on Shannon Liss-Riordan, a Massachusetts labor lawyer who represents the employees in arbitration and filed the lawsuits.
Among the many employees’ claims is that whereas Musk was working to shut his acquisition of Twitter, because it was then recognized, the corporate promised staff that they’d be entitled to “advantages and severance no less than as favorable” as what Twitter offered earlier than the Musk takeover. The guarantees had been made by firm executives in a collection of all-hands conferences at Twitter headquarters and had been written into the merger settlement Musk and Twitter administration negotiated in April 2022.
“The guarantees had been made to maintain staff from fleeing the corporate throughout these chaotic months earlier than Musk closed on the acquisition,” Liss-Riordan advised me. “Then after he closed, he simply defaulted on that promise.”
Neither Musk nor spokespersons for X or SpaceX may very well be reached for remark.
Though many if not many of the X staff had been required to carry their claims to arbitration, Musk initially refused to pay the arbitration charges which are usually charged to the employer in such instances.
That has frozen the proceedings in additional than 800 instances, although not these originating in California, Oregon and Nevada, the place employers don’t have the authorized capability to refuse. A couple of third of the two,000 arbitration claims are in California, Liss-Riordan says.
Leaving apart the moral implications of an organization’s forcing staff into arbitration after which refusing to permit the instances to proceed, Musk’s demand that ex-employees undergo arbitration could also be exceptionally extra pricey for the corporate than making an attempt to succeed in a basic settlement. Arbitration charges can common $100,000 per case, Liss-Riordan advised me; a whole lot of hundreds of thousands of {dollars} in claims could also be at subject.
“You need to scratch your head over why Elon Musk has to battle this so arduous,” she says. “Would it not actually be that huge a deal to pay the workers what was promised to them? Frankly, it doesn’t appear value his time.”
Michael Hiltzik is a columnist for the Los Angeles Occasions.
