Elon Musk Miffed That Joe Biden Hasn’t Personally Praised SpaceX’s Inspiration4 Mission

Musk later replied “Seems that way” to a meme portraying the United Auto Workers, which Tesla has long tried to suppress from organizing workers at its auto plants, as having a facehugger-like stranglehold on Biden’s face. Tesla was recently not on the invite list at a White House event promoting electric vehicles, quite possibly because of its anti-union record. This month, Musk has publicly complained that a Biden administration proposal to give a $12,500 tax incentive to buyers of electric vehicles must have been written by “Ford/UAW lobbyists” because it includes a $4,500 credit for cars that are union-made.

What could be said about this is that it’s pretty standard Musk stuff, referring to both the tweeting what might have been left better unsaid, the paper-thin ego drawing trouble for one of his companies, and the pages of resulting coverage on Google News (including this article). He’s historically been pretty contemptuous of the government when it isn’t doing exactly what he wants it to do. That includes a long-running spat with the Securities and Exchange Commission, a showdown with health authorities in California over whether Tesla workers were “essential” during the pandemic, and the concerns over Autopilot raised by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB). While the NTSB doesn’t have the kind of regulatory authority necessary to interfere with Tesla’s plans to roll out upgraded “Full Self-Driving Capability,” the agency has already warned that Tesla needs to address “basic safety issues” before doing so. Its chief, Jennifer Homendy, has called Tesla’s marketing of the feature “misleading and irresponsible.”

As CNN noted, the SpaceX flight was acknowledged repeatedly by Bill Nelson, who as the Biden-appointed administrator of NASA overseeing the Commercial Crew Program is of course the federal official whose job description most closely entails weighing in on successful private missions to orbit.

On Saturday, Nelson tweeted, “Congratulations #Inspiration4! With today’s splashdown, you’ve helped demonstrate that low-Earth orbit is open for business.” Nelson had also previously commented on the day of the Inspiration4 launch, tweeting “Low-Earth orbit is now more accessible for more people to experience the wonders of space. We look forward to the future—one where NASA is one of many customers in the commercial space market. Onward & upward.”