Jeff Skoll, an eBay billionaire who was among the biggest donors to Joe Biden’s 2020 election campaign, criticized Biden in a social media post on Saturday for his remedy to Tesla, the US electric vehicle giant led by the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, according to Bloomberg. On Friday it had been donated to a super political action committee that supports former President Donald Trump.
In a long post on Musk’s Platform because Tesla doesn’t. union members and calling on Biden to “stop going after our entrepreneurs” like Musk.
Musk responded to the post with “Thank you Jeff ?” and the relationship between the “dear friends” dates back to 1995, when the two men established themselves in Silicon Valley.
The scathing complaint from Skoll, who contributed $645,600 to Biden’s 2020 election efforts, adds to the years-long gap between Biden and Musk, whose pivot to the political right remains an ideological marvel given Democrats’ traditionally more potent for electric vehicle initiatives, such as the $7,500 bill. Federal tax credits for EV buyers that Trump could simply cut.
The first affront to Biden that Skoll raised was a White House summit on electric cars in August 2021 with executives like Ford and General Motors but not Tesla, with Musk lamenting at the time that “it looks like Tesla wasn’t invited” and complained in December about the administration’s “indifference. “
Biden, whose leadership hopes to increase the share of electric cars on the road to 50% by 2030, hasn’t said much publicly about Musk, but at a press conference in 2022 he said, “Musk’s cooperation and/or technical appointments with other countries are worth examining,” in a nod to the Saudi sovereign wealth fund’s involvement in Musk’s 2022 acquisition of the social media company then known as Twitter, and to its warm relationship with the ruling party in China.
His management has also taken aim at Musk and his corporations on several occasions, adding from an ongoing investigation by Justice Dement into Tesla’s questionable self-driving program.
Get Breaking News Text Alerts from Forbes: We send text alerts to keep you on top of the biggest stories making headlines of the day. Text “Alerts” to (201) 335-0739 or register here.
Biden spokesman James Singer attacked Musk for his alleged donation to Trump, telling Bloomberg, “Elon knows Trump is a fool who is going to sell out to United States” and is one of the “arrogant billionaires they are looking for themselves. “
About 70%. This is Tesla’s market share among U. S. automakers in domestic EV sales in the first quarter of 2024.
Musk said in February 2023 that he had voted for Biden and made a donation to Trump’s opponent, Hillary Clinton, ahead of the 2016 election. Trump said last month that he was an “Elon fan,” who shortly thereafter told Tesla investors that the former president occasionally called him “out of nowhere. “The Wall Street Journal reported in May that the two had discussed a role in an imaginable Trump administration, which Musk later denied. Wall Street analysts believe a Trump presidency would be “negative” for the EV industry as a whole due to a potential slowdown in demand, but a potential boon for Tesla in that Trump’s proposed price lists for Chinese goods would ban less expensive electric cars from rivals BYD and NIO from entering the U. S. market.
After making its fortune on eBay, Skoll Participant Media is dedicated to creating socially culpable entertainment. In its 20-year history, Participant has made a number of award-winning films, from documentaries such as Al Gore’s “Inconvenient Truth” and “The Cove,” to George Clooney’s “Good Night and Good Luck” to the Oscar-winning “Spotlight. “But they closed their businesses this year, saying they were not in a position to turn a profit.
Musk is the world’s richest man with a net worth of $249. 8 billion, about 40% of which is tied to his Tesla shares. Skoll ($4. 5 billion) and Trump ($5. 3 billion) are among the 800 richest people on the planet. , according to our estimates.
A community. Many voices. Create a free account to share your thoughts.
Our network aims to connect other people through open and thoughtful conversations. We need our readers to share their perspectives and exchange ideas and facts in one space.
To do so, please comply with the posting regulations in our site’s terms of use. Below we summarize some of those key regulations. In short, civilians.
Your message will be rejected if we realize that it seems to contain:
User accounts will be blocked if we become aware that users are participating in:
So how can you be a user?
Thank you for reading our Community Guidelines. Please read the full list of posting regulations discovered in our site’s Terms of Use.