We Always Knew It Was Going to Get Weird — As Elon Musk Can Tell You – The American Spectator | USA News and PoliticsThe American Spectator

On Monday, you might have noticed that X, which has become our national online town hall, went down. It was exceedingly wonky most of the morning before returning to normal function in the afternoon.

Why? A cyberattack.

By Monday afternoon, a hacker group called Dark Storm, which has been known as a pro-Hamas organization and has specialized in Directed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks on pro-Israel organizations, had taken credit for several DDoS attacks on the X platform. DDoS attacks typically involve large numbers of bots being simultaneously pointed at a web domain, which overwhelms its servers and shuts down access by the public.

Was it Dark Storm? Maybe. Or maybe it was something else. On Monday afternoon, Musk wasn’t sure.

X is by no means the only Elon Musk property suffering some challenges. Amid a very bad day at the New York Stock Exchange, where a 1,000-point correction was scaring the bejesus out of investors and fueling talk of an economic recession (that’s for another column, but the short version goes like this: buy the dip), Tesla took a bath for the ages…

Tesla’s stock has dropped by nearly half in three months. Even so, investors are still debating whether Elon Musk’s electric-vehicle maker remains overpriced.

The company’s market capitalization has dropped 45 percent since hitting an all-time high of $1.5 trillion on December 17, erasing most of the gains the stock made after CEO Musk helped finance the election victory of U.S. President Donald Trump.

And yet Tesla (TSLA.O), opens new tab continues to fetch a valuation far above those of the world’s biggest automotive and technology firms, judging by standard financial metrics. That’s because most investors and analysts have bought Musk’s pitch that the world’s most-valuable automaker isn’t really a car company at all, but rather an artificial-intelligence pioneer that will soon unleash a revolution in robotaxis and humanoid robots

…

After this article was published on Monday, Tesla shares fell by more than 15 percent, slicing off more than $125 billion in market value, after UBS cut its forecast for the automaker’s first-quarter deliveries. The decline came in tandem with a broader market selloff on worries about tariffs and recession fears, with the Nasdaq losing 4 percent and the S&P 500 dropping 2.7 percent.

It pays to take Musk at his word, of course, because the market for domestic robots, built mostly from tech that has been pioneered in the EV car industry, is going to dwarf anything electric vehicles would ever be.

And of course Tesla stock would drop when the $7500 bribe the Biden administration was paying to buyers of EVs went away.

Musk is playing the long game on Tesla. He always was. When, in a few years, the company begins mass-producing domestic robots that revolutionize the American home in the same way that electric household appliances revolutionized it in the 1940s and 1950s, the breaking of its current stock bubble won’t hardly be remembered.

That said, the turn in market conditions deflating Tesla stock isn’t the only unfortunate thing happening to the company…

Anti-Elon Musk demonstrations have erupted across the U.S. with protesters attacking Tesla showrooms with guns and molotov cocktails.

Dozens of fired-up crowds assembled outside Tesla stores across the country on Saturday afternoon to protest against Musk’s efforts to slash government spending and enact reforms. Demonstrations also erupted in London, Portugal, Malaysia and Iceland.

Roughly 250 activists were gathered outside a showroom in New York City, holding anti-Musk placards that read “Block Facism Now” and “Musk Must Go” as they shouted “Elon Musk is not elected! Democracy must be protected!”

Five protesters were arrested for disorderly conduct at the Manhattan demonstration and one was taken into custody for resisting arrest, obstruction and violation of local law, the New York Daily News reported.

There have also been more than a dozen acts of vandalism against Tesla vehicles, dealerships and charging stations since President Donald Trump’s inauguration, according to police and local reports.

A Tesla showroom in Salem, Oregon, was shot at with an AR 15-style rifle in February. Suspected vandal Adam Matthew Lansky, 41, is also accused of causing major damage at the same store with molotov cocktails in January.

Similarly, four Tesla cybertrucks were set ablaze overnight at a storage lot in Seattle’s industrial SoDo neighborhood, KING-TV reported.

Officials say at least two vehicles were severely damaged in the fire. Seattle police are investigating if the blaze was an act of arson.

Like everything else that seemingly turns out to be, this isn’t really organic despite the attempts by some well-known vacationers to a certain island to present it that way…

So far, there aren’t any apparent attacks afoot on Starlink, Musk’s satellite internet provider, though the mainstream media is full of doomsaying about Starlink access in Ukraine being cut off…

In late February, reports suggested that U.S. officials had threatened to cut Ukraine off from Starlink during negotiations over a deal regarding access to Ukraine’s mineral resources. Elon Musk, chief executive of SpaceX, the company that operates Starlink, has since denied those reports. Nevertheless, European countries are now considering what alternatives they might deploy in Ukraine. Alongside this, the European Union is closing in on an agreement to massively increase defense spending in the wake of the U.S. withdrawing military aid to Ukraine.

It was apparent early on in the war that Ukraine had become highly dependent on Starlink, and Ukrainians have long wondered whether they might get booted off the service, especially given the notorious whims of Musk. SpaceX’s chief executive is now positioned at the heart of the new Trump administration, which says it is trying to force an end to fighting between Russia and Ukraine.

Starlink has supported Ukrainian military and civilian activities ever since Russia invaded in early 2022. With many fixed-line and mobile networks destroyed in the conflict, Starlink enables soldiers to relay footage from the battlefield and to coordinate maneuvers, artillery fire, or drone attacks. Military personnel also have access to the encrypted Starshield network, a special version of Starlink that is especially difficult to jam or intercept.

Those reports led to a fight between Musk and Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the Polish government after its foreign minister claimed Poland is paying the freight for Starlink service in Ukraine and used that claim as backing for pre-emptively trashing Musk for shutting down Starlink service…

That came in the wake of media reports last week, which had it that Musk and Rubio were fighting about DOGE’s suggested cuts to the State Department…

Secretary of State Marco Rubio launched into a heated argument with Elon Musk during a Cabinet meeting, according to a new report.

Musk and Rubio went at it in a back-and-forth on Thursday in front of President Donald Trump and nearly two dozen others, the New York Times reported.

Rubio has been privately furious at Musk for weeks over his role in dismantling USAID, which the secretary believed should have been under his control, according to the Times.

The conflict began when Musk accused Rubio of not firing State Department workers despite mandates from the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

Rubio reportedly shot back, pointing out that 1,500 State Department employees had taken early buyouts, which should be tallied as a reduction in the workforce.

He then sarcastically asked Musk if he should rehire those employees just so they could be fired again, mocking DOGE’s stumbles in firing workers they had to rehire soon after because of bad decisions.

Except nobody seemed to be able to confirm those stories. Trump certainly didn’t confirm them…

And on Monday, the supposed “fight” between the two was clearly resolved…

What do all these data points add up to?

During Musk’s three-hour interview with Joe Rogan almost two weeks ago, he noted that there are now people trying to kill him. The death threats and the attacks on his businesses from crazies and regime-media types alike are multiplying.

They’re trying to take him down for a couple of obvious reasons.

Musk is the man being held most responsible for draining the Deep State and the globalist Left of its taxpayer-funded network of hidden programs and non-governmental organizations that have artificially warped American politics and created a mountain of debt. He’s the embodiment of Saul Alinsky’s Rule #13…

“Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions.

Because he has a lot to lose, they’ve decided to try to destroy him. And by extension, they’d be destroying Donald Trump and his project of reforming the federal government.

But it isn’t just that. Elon Musk is on the cusp of utterly disrupting a very large number of economic incumbents.

Take cable TV, which is already in a serious death spiral given the number of people “cutting the cord” and eliminating costly and wasteful cable packages. Most of the cable providers are hanging on by inducing their customers to bundle high-speed internet with cable television. In many places around the country, those bundles are the only real option for high-speed internet service and home wi-fi.

But with Starlink, which offers unlimited-data residential home internet service for $120 per month and $500 in equipment costs (use Starlink for internet and sub out your cable for Roku or Sling and a few streaming services, and your cable/internet bill gets cut in half for no appreciable decline in TV options and likely a much-improved wi-fi connection), cable begins to look like an obsolete service for most consumers.

Take the social media competitors of X, not to mention the other tech companies whose censorious business models are crumbling in the face of the platform’s free-speech directives. Initially, advertisers were attempting to crush its profitability with boycotts; that didn’t work, and Musk has X profitable and larger than ever. X is now a bigger threat than ever to Big Tech.

And, take SpaceX.

In Friday’s Five Quick Things column, I noted that the entire Rule #13 project going on where Musk is concerned is about to run into a massive brick wall when SpaceX brings Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, the two astronauts who have been stranded for nine months at the International Space Station, back home in a couple of weeks.

If you’ll recall, Wilmore and Williams traveled to the space station aboard a Boeing Starliner capsule, but the vehicle was so fraught with defects and malfunctions that NASA ruled it unsafe for manned travel back to Earth and sent it home without them.

Then it turns out that the Biden administration blocked the use of a SpaceX Dragon vehicle to get them last year for political reasons, prolonging Wilmore and Williams’s ordeal completely unnecessarily.

So it’ll be Musk getting those astronauts and taking them home, which is going to be a heroic American moment and a massive feather in Elon Musk’s cap…

…coming after weeks of screeching and unhinged attacks on him and his businesses for having helped Trump win an election and for performing a high-tech, very effective audit of federal spending that is finding hundreds of billions of dollars in savings against a crippling federal deficit.

The political risk of Elon Musk emerging as a hero and their cementing themselves as villains upon Wilmore and Williams’s return is fairly high.

So high, in fact, that it’s now worth wondering whether the next cyberattack against Musk will come against SpaceX just in time for the rescue mission.

Is that a crazy thought? Has to be, right? Who would want to see SpaceX fail?

I don’t know.

Is it crazy? A test flight of SpaceX’s Starship module ended in an explosion last week, and there were lots of reactions like this…

Here.

Here.

And, here.

It’s going to be a very weird next couple of weeks. In fact, it’s likely to stay weird for quite a while. Elon can tell you that.

READ MORE from Scott McKay:

Five Quick Things: Our National Crazy Eurotrash Girlfriend

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