Stephen Lepore writes for the DailyMail.com about a comment from President Biden that helped turn one of the world’s most high-profile billionaires against him.
Joe Biden outraged Elon Musk when he said a rival EV executive had ‘electrified the entire automobile industry’ in America.
When he said that about General Motors CEO Mary Barra in 2021, he gave the cold shoulder to Musk, the Tesla billionaire who most credit with the popularity of electric vehicles in the United States.
Whether he knew it or not, Biden planted a seed that day that has led Musk – a 2020 Biden voter who claimed to have never cast a ballot for Republicans – toward an alliance with Donald Trump.
Biden and Barra were attending multiple events celebrating Biden’s infrastructure law and an executive order outlining a goal to have electric and other zero-emissions vehicles make up half of the new cars and trucks sold by 2030.
Musk was not invited and had to watch Barra – whose General Motors had produced just 26 EVs compared to Tesla’s 115,000 in the fourth quarter of 2021 – be hailed by Biden as having ‘electrified the entire automobile industry’ while adding that Detroit – and not Austin, the home of Tesla – was ‘leading the world in electric vehicles’.
Now, Musk has promised to spend money on behalf of Trump and has recently launched social media attacks against the president’s successor, Kamala Harris.
A new Wall Street Journal story suggests it didn’t have to be this way, as Musk made multiple overtures toward Biden after he defeated Trump in 2020.
However, Biden wanted to burnish his credentials as a pro-union president and faced pressure from the United Auto Workers to avoid Musk given Tesla’s anti-union practices.
‘We made it clear to the administration about where things were,’ said a former UAW official.
‘We didn’t have to make an ultimatum. They understood.’
Tesla and Musk were outraged by Biden showing the company the cold shoulder but Democrats as a whole seemed to be drawing Musk’s ire as the Biden presidency went on.
