Last Wednesday, as the first fires in Los Angeles were breaking out and destroying homes, the world’s richest man Elon Musk tweeted on his social media platform X that the city’s fire department “prioritized DEI over saving lives and homes.”
As the conflagration has spread, Musk has continued tweeting. He attacked state Governor Gavin Newsom, deeming him a “subtard.” He took aim at Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, who was traveling in Ghana when the fires broke out, calling her “utterly incompetent.” As of Monday afternoon, Musk has tweeted dozens of times about the wildfires, placing blame on the state’s Democratic regime and amplifying posts about illegal immigrants looting abandoned homes. Newsom has accused Musk of spreading misinformation and encouraging looting.
Musk is hardly the only Republican booster to blame California’s Democratic leaders as the state’s largest city burns. (His pal President-elect Donald Trump said on Sunday that California’s leaders were incompetent and declined an invitation from Newsom to come see the fires for himself). But unlike many GOP heavyweights, Musk was a California resident for decades and has a long, lucrative history of building businesses there. From 1995 until 2021, Musk lived in the Golden State—and benefited richly from its policies.
For years it was a symbiotic relationship. Musk founded several successful companies, boosting California’s gross domestic product and employing thousands of its residents. In turn, the tech tycoon tapped San Francisco’s community of venture capitalists and engineers, and then Los Angeles as a hub of space exploration. California’s pro-green regulatory policies were instrumental in the launch and growth of Tesla, which received over $3 billion in state subsidies and tax benefits from the state.
Musk’s relationship with California’s leaders only became contentious when Covid-19 arrived in 2020 and California introduced a raft of shelter-in-place orders that included bans on businesses from operating, including Tesla’s factory in Fremont, California. That led to a very public spat that pitted Musk and business interests against California regulators. Musk attacked California’s pandemic restrictions as “fascist” and defied the state’s orders in May when he reopened Tesla’s plant, which still employs over 10,000 people. “If anyone is arrested, I ask that it only be me,” Musk dared.
The local officials quickly backed off and agreed to allow Tesla’s factory to resume operations, but the damage was done. In 2021, Musk moved Tesla’s corporate headquarters from Palo Alto to Austin and reestablished his personal residence, leaving California for Texas. Last year Musk moved the headquarters of both X and SpaceX from California to Texas. He explained those moves as a response to a new California law that bars school districts from notifying parents of a child’s gender identification change. Musk is estranged from one of his 11 children, Vivian Jenna Wilson, a transgender woman who has described her father as “cruel.”
Newsom claimed during a public appearance in 2022 that Tesla would not exist without California: “There was no Tesla without California’s regulatory bodies, and regulation.” The governor’s office subsequently compiled an estimate that Tesla received more than $3.2 billion worth of direct and indirect state subsidies from its founding until late 2022, including zero-emissions credits that Tesla sold to other automakers and tax rebates for Tesla buyers. Sales of zero-emissions credits accounted for nearly $2.5 billion of revenue for Tesla as of 2022, according to the governor’s office.
“Sales of those credits were critical to Musk’s business plan because Tesla was losing money on operations,” says Mary Nichols, former Chair of the California Air Resources Board, the regulatory body that devised the zero-emissions credits scheme. That program mandated other automakers purchase credits from EV makers, which consisted almost entirely of Tesla in the early years. Musk, Nichols recalls, “lobbied incessantly to make the mandate more aggressive. Now of course he is opposed to government mandates.”
On the demand side, Tesla benefitted heavily from California’s Clean Vehicle Rebate Project, which ran from 2007 until 2023. The program, which offered electric car buyers in California a cash rebate, distributed more than $1.4 billion to consumers. Thanks in part to that initiative, California became Tesla’s largest individual U.S. market; and despite Tesla losing market share in recent years to competitors, over half (53.4%) of all electric cars in California remain Teslas, according to data published last July by the California New Car Dealers Association.
Musk’s business career began in California. In the summer of 1994, between his junior and senior years at the University of Pennsylvania, the South African-born student scored two internships—at a defense contractor and a videogame maker—both in Palo Alto. After graduating, he relocated to Palo Alto and lived there from 1995 to 2001 while building his first two companies, Zip2, an online business registry which was acquired in 1999 for $307 million, and X.com, a digital banking company that merged with PayPal. He moved to Los Angeles in the early 2000s to start SpaceX.
“The probability of success for a rocket company was quite low, and it was even lower if I did not move to Southern California, where the critical mass of aerospace engineering talent was,” Musk told author Walter Isaacson in his biography of Musk. From 2004 onward, after investing in the San Carlos-headquartered Tesla, Musk “would fly up from Los Angeles every couple of weeks” to help get the company off the ground, Isaacson wrote.
In a sign of just how far Musk’s politics have shifted, Musk did not criticize California’s government when fires broke out in Butte County and near Malibu in November 2018. “If Tesla can help people in California wildfire [sic], please let us know,” he tweeted. Likewise, in October 2019, as fires broke out in Sonoma County and in Los Angeles, Musk apologized to Tesla customers who lived in other states and were waiting on shipments of wall chargers for their Teslas. “[W]e are prioritizing those affected by wildfires,” he said.
Still eager to be perceived as helpful, Musk is busily posting about Tesla’s deployment of Cybertrucks in the Los Angeles area to serve as mobile base stations for WiFi, and provide snacks, though now his posts are competing for attention with his other interests, such as his support of German’s far-right party and his blasting of National Public Radio as “propaganda.”
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