Eric Lipton
speaker
759 appearances
6 recordings
4 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard 5 Aug
Eric Lipton’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
That's right. I mean, really, there's never been anything quite like Elon Musk. This is a guy whose companies just last year in 2024 received $3.8 billion worth of federal government contracts from And in the last five years, $13 billion worth of contracts. He has investigations pending of his various corporate entities in the dozens.
And it's just sort of an acronym soup of federal agencies that either have pending investigations, lawsuits. subpoenaing him, all kinds of things that are active and that are in play and therefore vulnerable to being shut down.
Not only therefore does he have billions of dollars at stake financially, but he has dozens of investigations targeting him at the same time as he has this immense power reaching across really the whole breadth of the federal government. There really has never been a conflict so broad in probably in American history.
Well, I mean, again, President Trump just neutered all 17 of the inspectors general who really had the greatest capacity to investigate potential waste, fraud, and abuse in his contracts.
And we know that multiple IGs had pending investigations, including the Department of Defense, which was examining whether or not he had violated the terms of having a top secret security clearance because he wasn't properly reporting engagements he had with foreign government figures previously. As far as we understand, there are still questions being asked relative to that inquiry.
But the individual who oversees that office has been replaced. And therefore, it could be a dead end, even if staff is still working on it. So the short answer is, it's unlikely that he will be the subject of very close scrutiny, just like it's unlike President Trump will be the subject of close scrutiny, because there really is no one left outside of journalists to be asking hard questions.
Well, for example, during the takeover of Twitter and its transformation into X, there were employees who felt that they were being improperly treated. They were dismissed. They were being subject to internal investigations. And they felt as if they had been unfairly treated. And they filed complaints with the National Labor Relations Board.
But what Trump then did in the last few weeks was to eliminate the quorum at the National Labor Relations Board by firing several of the commissioners. And so therefore, the commission can no longer act on recommendations from the staff to file a lawsuit against the target of any investigation or to agree to a settlement if there were to be a settlement proposed.
So he's effectively frozen the National Labor Relations Board by removing the majority of its board.
Yeah, and Musk is taking a very similar approach to that which he took at Twitter and applying it to the federal government, which is to slash it radically and rapidly without much consideration for the consequences, both for the services that it provides and for the people that work there.
You know, the Democrats in Congress can write letters asking for reviews, and they can have protests and press conferences, but that's about the limit of their power as well. They don't have subpoena power. And they cannot have bipartisan investigations into really anything at this point.
I mean, the courts, as we've seen, are really the one place. And the state attorneys general, the Democrats, have filed litigation. And there are various nonprofit groups and employee groups and labor unions that have filed litigation. And that has actually made a significant difference so far.
I think to some extent the strategy on the part of the Trump administration is just to blow through those district court rulings.
to continue to operate the way that they are, to sometimes even potentially ignore the court orders and just wait for it to get the Court of Appeals and then the Supreme Court to try to prove their argument, which is that the executive power is supreme and that they can largely do what they want. You know, Trump and Musk both have a history of basically doing what they want.
And despite inquiries or at times even, you know, court orders.
I mean, they're mostly small bore things that people who bought cars were having disputes with the company over loans or the terms of financing or the cars were being repossessed because of potentially unpaid debts. That's not that unusual for a big company to have complaints like that. You can just go do a query on the CFPB's website. If it still is up when you do the query.
He called for, he said the CFPB, you know, RIP. Now, whether or not he actually shut it down, he clearly supported it. He was mocking it and, you know, said RIP, rest in peace for the agency. Now, I can't tell you that he's the one that decided or that he's the one that executed on that shutdown, but he clearly supported it and played a role.
In the fall of 2023, there was a launch of a 10-ton satellite into geosynchronous orbit, which is like 22,000 miles out there. And it's the largest satellite ever launched in terms of its mass to that orbit. And it's a pretty big deal. It was there for a satellite communications company. And that launch went off without really much public notice.
Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy are launching so frequently now, we don't even almost pay attention to them. But what was happening behind the scenes was that even before that, as the countdown was underway, the FAA concluded that SpaceX did not have proper authorization for a new fueling system that they had built there at the Space Launch Facility in Florida.
And they were challenging the continuation of the launch, but the launch went ahead anyway. And so after it was over, the FAA said that was a safety violation and we're going to fine you hundreds of thousands of dollars. And Elon Musk was very angry at that. He was like, what do you think you're doing? You're interfering in our operations. There was no safety threat.
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