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Tesla CEO Elon Musk Joins President Trump's New Manufacturing Council (electrek.co)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Electrek: Tesla CEO Elon Musk was already on President Trump's Strategic and Policy Forum, but the White House announced today that he will also be joining the administration's new manufacturing council, a private sector group that advises the U.S. secretary of commerce. He headed a meeting on Monday at the White House. Musk was present along with several other industry leaders who are now also formally joining the manufacturing council. CNBC reports: "The group of business leaders includes Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk and chief executives of large American companies like Ford, Dow Chemical, General Electric, Boeing and Lockheed Martin. Richard Trumka, president of the labor federation AFL-CIO, will also give advice." As we recently reported, while Musk's mission to accelerate the advent of renewable energy might seem at odd with Trump's plan to unlock fossil fuel reserve, but Musk is betting that job creation is more important to the new President than simply satisfying the oil industry. If Trump wants to be the champion of job creation and Tesla shows that renewables create a lot of jobs, then their interests are aligned. Tesla currently employs over 30,000 people, more than 25,000 of which are in the U.S. The company wants to add over 3,000 manufacturing jobs at its factory in Fremont, California, 1,000 at its solar panel factory in Buffalo, New York, and over to 6,500 at the Gigafactory in Nevada.
On the one hand, Trump is so terribly awful that any sort of support of him is problematic and dangerous. It risks becoming swept up in his complete disregard for facts or decency. On the other hand, having a few people involved like Musk are very sane and wealthy enough that Trump will listen to them (wealth being apparently one of the very few things he cares about), and might be positive moderating influences.
Fucking American putting America before his tribalism and support of the causes which you support which must be the right ones. How horrible a person he must be.
Seeing the heads explode for all the deranged Trump haters who also are Elon fanbois - both very common /. denizens.
Oh, the hilarity!
I think it's more a case of Musk running a number of companies which are extremely vulnerable to the whims of the federal government, especially SpaceX, and he is acting to protect those. As to his personal beliefs and how hard he may have bite his tounge along the way, I've no idea.
~.~
I'm a peripheral visionary.
...it's as if a million progressives' heads exploded.
Holy shit! Tesla alone employs almost as much people as 20% of the entire oil and gas extraction workforce!!!
https://www.bls.gov/iag/tgs/iag211.htm
Quit complaining about how others are bettering their lives that incidentally make their lives more unequal from others and work on bettering your life and incidentally make your life more inequal from other. That's what this general complaint boils down to. When people focus on equality, the result is that everyone's life is worse off.
10) Illegal Immigrants now deported by rocket, greatly increases number of tests for rocket landings and speed of deportation.
9) Trump rides in custom presidential self-driving Model X with steering wheel replaced by custom Twitter console.
8) Trump hair dryer now completely battery powered and can operate to 1000 degrees.... C.
7) Any time Republicans disagree with Trump, forced to come over and watch hours of taped footage of Musk unveiling products.
6) Any time drug dealers are cornered and will not emerge from imposing drug fortress, hours of taped footage of Musk unveiling products is projected through windows and audio tuned to frequency of fortress walls.
5) Nuclear weapon implosion stage upgraded from high explosives to 100% solar fusion initiation.
4) Taking after Obamacare mandate, all citizens forced to enter into contract with Solar City.
3) On a very special season of The Apprentice, final candidates for first U.S. Mars mission are selected. All Democrats and most of Hollywood immediately applies.
2) All Model 3's now ship with gold interior, including the leather.
1) Hyperloop runs along the entire top of Mexico wall. Better be able to scale it un under 30 seconds before the next Loop pod comes screaming by!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Probably Trump's biggest weakness is that he lacks knowledge about policy issues. He's a real estate developer, not a policy wonk or career politician. He's also impulsive, saying things without thinking carefully about the consequences, but his lack of information is probably his biggest weakness.
On the other hand, he's an effective manager who gets big projects done.
Therefore, we can expect him to do big things - sometimes the wrong things. However, he's shown the ability to (sometimes) listen to experts around him. For example, he's said that while he disagrees with Secretary pf Defense Mattis, he's going to defer to Mattis in those areas because Mattis is an expert in the field. Mattis obliged defense better than Trump does, amd Trump recognizes and respects that fact.
Given that Trump is in fact president (unfortunately), the best we can hope for is that he gets good advice from people who know a subject well, the advisers tell Trump which projects need to get done, then Trump uses his skills to get those projects completed.