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Elon Musk and the company that made him a household name have been at odds recently. There was the pay package debacle, the time Musk threatened to take the AI wing and leave, his recent weird waffling over climate change — Musk and Tesla TSLA-5.05% are far from seeing eye to eye. Now, that even extends to preferences in political action, according to Reuters:
When Elon Musk endorsed Donald Trump for president last month, the Tesla founder and chief executive backed a candidate who vows to “drill, baby, drill,” “end the electric vehicle mandate” and reduce subsidies of the sort that helped Tesla become the U.S.’s dominant EV manufacturer.
So instrumental have government loans, tax breaks and other EV policies been to Tesla’s fast growth that despite Musk’s gradual embrace of the former president and his Republican Party rhetoric in recent years, the company continues to lobby the U.S. and state governments for benefits championed by the Democratic Party.
In February, for instance, Tesla in a filing with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA, urged the Biden administration to allow California to pursue stricter vehicle emissions rules than the rest of the country – an idea Trump opposes.
Months earlier, in a previous filing with the agency, Tesla lobbied the government for regulations that would ban the production of most new gasoline cars by 2035 – the so-called “EV mandate” that Trump and others on the American right have criticized.
It’s likely that Musk simply cares enough about other political causes to ignore a mismatch on climate, but he’s become something of a right-wing figurehead — an odd position for a self-proclaimed environmentalist to hold. Does he still proclaim that?