Just feels like corruption, tbh.
If a democrat did this, it would (rightly!) be seen as a front-page scandal on the scale of Teapot Dome if not worse.
There's already been a handful of impeachment-level events, such as the blatant quid pro quo of the Adams corruption charges dismissal which resulted in a series of DoJ resignations reminiscent of the Saturday Night Massacre. You know, a critical event that shifted public and Republican opinion of Nixon, leading to his resignation under the threat of impeachment.
Democratic congresspeople and senators can't do much without at least some of their Republican colleagues standing up to the bullies currently running the party.
And no, Susan Collins' inevitable but ineffectual "concerns" isn't the kind of outrage I mean.
All of the people with balls have been fired or quit.
North Carolina senator Thom Tillis told people that the FBI warned him about “credible death threats” when he was considering voting against Pete Hegseth’s nomination. - Vanity Fair, “They’re Scared Shitless”
To whatever degree they are really scared (Liz Cheney is far braver than these MAGA elected kooks, scared of their own shadows), let's accept the premise for the sake of the argument. They will permit an incendiary fire of epic proportion well beyond what we've seen so far before they do anything. They may in fact not be capable of it under any circumstances. And if that is the case, is there even a functioning Senate right now? In terms of 5 USC 3331? I think not. And that means the republic is in abeyance. It's a principate now. For however long, really depends on the American public - not any elected officials.
The govt can be paying those folks directly or Musk himself can be paying them like he did for some DOGE team members.
Significant improvement in cost and capabilities over competition that enabled SpaceX to capture so much of the market has massively driven prices down and certainly saved taxpayers a lot of money for the services.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_launch_market_competitio...
SpaceX does get government grants of course like most companies. It's by far not most of their revenue though, and generally competitively available and tied to particular goals. Investing and supporting in high tech, high value industries like this is often a good thing and returns more than cost to the country, as it certainly has with SpaceX. So it's the opposite of pockets getting emptied.
Sounds like the ideal government...
Tesla stock roughly doubled following the election! That's obviously not because Trump is going to be a champion for electric vehicles and green energy, he couldn't be more hostile to them. Investors know that Elon is going to suck insane amounts of money out of the government with his new level of access and most of that will flow through his companies.
If SpaceX has the best, most economical, and safest route to space, why would Nasa and DoD not use them? Who else is there? Blue Origin's not there yet; others are in the works but not there yet. SpaceX is proven; it does a good job and has brought manned space flight back to the U.S. Has nothing to do with whether Musk & his team are close to Trump or not.
More to the point, the DoGE audits are projected to save the federal government hundreds of billions of dollars, which should significantly reduce the deficit which is currently projected at two trillion dollars.
Even if we assume the worst, most absurd and political stance that Musk is in it for the money and influence, saving $500 billion or more is still worth it. And, in reality, Musk's political activity is costing Tesla a lot of sales; Tesla's sales numbers are in decline, actually.
Oh come the fuck on. Projected by whom? If they are looking to reduce the deficit, why are they floating tax breaks that will cost the country billions?
Have some skepticism, will you?
Not billions: trillions!
"Trump Tax Priorities To Cost $5 to $11 Trillion over the next Ten Years"
https://www.crfb.org/blogs/trump-tax-priorities-total-5-11-t...
Read Milton Friedman, not anti-Trump hit pieces that predict disaster.
> get a firsthand look at the current system, learn what air traffic controllers like and dislike about their current tools, and envision how we can make a new, better, modern and safer system
based on this they can come in to scope out a project and send it out for bidding
"According to Musk, the efficiencies gained by leveraging the exposure of the assessment team make SpaceX the only viable vendor. 'A bidding process to select the only possible applicant would be silly.'"
None?
> What was the bidding process like?
What bidding process? Remember when it's the "special WH employee" hiring his own company that's all fine and dandy
> Is there a problem statement beyond "it has some old bits"? What are the specific goals?
Every system can be improved, but I think the current issues with ATC in the US are not of a technical nature per se
ATC is much more than controllers watching planes on radar screens
Also remember this is a system that has been continuously evolving since WWII pretty much (and possibly before) and that one of the recent "breaking backwards compatibility" was NDBs being decommissioned in the US (bit by bit)
Source that SpaceX was hired for this? The article makes no such claims and has no sources saying that.
According to Trump, yes. This is what he said:
> When I land in my plane, privately, I use a system from another country because...I won't tell you what country... because the captain says this system is so bad, it's so obsolete, that we can't have that.
- https://www.forbes.com/sites/suzannerowankelleher/2025/02/06...
> Trump ... seemed to mix up a plane’s onboard electronics system with the federal air traffic control system.
Fits in with the first term in which Trump baffled airline executives by assuring them that he'd help solve the problem with the airports giving them the wrong equipment[1], also based on apparently failing to understand an anecdote from his private pilot
There is actually a very long term project to modernise US ATC (less on safety grounds and more on congestion minimization grounds) it's even one in which theoretically a satellite constellation operator could have some involvement as a data provider. But but it's something of an understatement to suggest that this is unlikely to be advanced by an administration lead by someone who thinks he understands aviation based on misunderstanding his pilot and someone whose first foray into improving the FAA was to arbitrarily fire hundreds of FAA staff and whose main goal for the FAA is to deregulate space launches...
[1]https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefings-statements/re...
400 non-ATC, non-safety related probationary new hires, out of 45,000.
Does this strike you as the approach of an administration that knows what its doing and cares deeply about safety?
It's recently been revealed that not only does the FAA require a "biography" of its ATC applicants, but have even been coaching black candidates how to use the keywords that will allow their applications to float to the top.
If the agency and the politicians overseeing it cared about safety, shouldn't they try to hire the best and the brightest, not the under-represented minorities that they have been struggling to hire in recent years? Meanwhile, White applicants who were fully qualified have been bypassed.
I personally don't care, and I suspect most thinking people don't care, what the ethnicity or gender are of the people in the towers. But we all care very deeply that they should be the very best of the best.
The problem statement is: I don't own this yet. And the goal is: I run everything now.
It IS blatant corruption. A foreign national is using his private enterprises to take over government agencies and is backed by a traitor who only cares about his own money and power.
If there ever was a more blatant episode of corruption it's what's going on in the US right now.
"Fuck you!" Musk shouted back.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/data-scientist-resigned-twitter-b...
Musk is not a terribly bright individual. He gets a lot of things wrong, and he does not care to be told he is wrong.
Building software which respect to probabilistic risk analysis. This includes techniques such as abstract interpretation and theorem for for the logic of dynamical system etc. I guess spacex expertise in these realm is quite advanced and they do something useful.
Anyway this is the least concern of what the Trump admin is doing. They siding with Russia putting America's carefully crafted world order down the drain. Read: winter is coming - garry kasparov