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
And the FAA is getting in our way. And he called for the firing of the FAA administrator, and he said, I'm going to sue the FAA. And then he went so far as to say, you know, they're preventing our efforts to get humans to Mars and, you know, our grand ambitions.
Yeah, it's trivial. I think the biggest thing that really frustrates him about the FAA is the amount of time it takes to get clearances to do new launches, particularly for the Starship, which is his newest rocket, the largest rocket that humans have ever built. And he is extremely frustrated at how long it takes to get clearance to do additional test flights of the Starship.
And he wants the FAA to get out of the way. He thinks that the FAA is slowing his effort to get humans to Mars.
And I mean, I think that that fine is really trivial and that that's just a kind of a small, you know, piddling thing that is a symptom of his bigger annoyance with the agency and also with the Department of Interior, which is looking at the environmental harm that the launches are causing in South Texas and the destruction of the habitat of threatened bird species, for example, which I've witnessed myself personally.
I was out there for a launch and then walked the grounds with a wildlife biologist from the Fish and Wildlife, and we saw the destroyed nest eggs from the blast of the Starship, which basically threw gravel across a state park towards Federal Wildlife Refuge. So that damage is occurring, and the fact that people are even looking at that and questioning it really frustrates Elon Musk.
The Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating whether or not Musk failed to honor a requirement to disclose at the moment that he obtained 5% of Twitter, he needed to make a public filing. And the reason you do that is that you need to share with other investors if you are a significant owner of any particular corporation. And that's relevant material information about the company.
But instead of notifying the SEC and making that public disclosure, he continued to buy thousands and thousands of additional shares. And so effectively, he was able to buy those shares at a significantly discounted price, saving approximately $150 million as he accumulated shares of Twitter before he ultimately took over the whole company.
So they filed a lawsuit saying you failed to honor the federal law that requires you to disclose once you exceed 5%. And Musk and his lawyers were like, this is a technicality. You're just being annoying. This is being done for political purposes to try to punish us when this is a minor violation that you shouldn't even be going after us about.
And now the two of the members of the SEC that voted to go ahead with that litigation are now gone. Now, in this case, it was not an action by Trump. This was Gary Gensler, the chairman, who was a Democrat who resigned and a second Democrat who, for personal reasons, left the agency. But the net result is that the Republicans now have a majority on the SEC.
And so the likely outcome is that this will be settled at a very modest penalty or maybe even withdrawn as litigation.
Other investors would have likely bought Twitter stock at that point. That would have been a sign that Musk had the intention of potentially buying the company out. If you're going to accumulate that much stock, then that would have led other people to buy in thinking, oh, well, I better buy it now because Musk is going to be willing to pay a higher price to take the whole thing over.
And so he saved $150 million by getting the stock at a cheaper price during the period between when he should have filed a disclosure and when he actually did.
In the fall, we spent a month looking at all of Musk's operations with the federal government, all of his contracts, all the investigations. We had a database that was built and that allowed us to quickly know what the pending lawsuits, investigations, and contracts were.
So it was actually didn't take nearly as much time now that we knew where all the matters were to go back and look and see, okay, several members of the National Labor Relations Board have been fired and no longer has a quorum or two members of the SEC have left or the chairwoman of the Federal Election Commission has just been fired or the head of the Office of Government Ethics has been removed.
And we were able to cross-reference all of these actions that Trump has taken and look at the investigations that we knew about and see that these have been disrupted. We did not find evidence so far that Musk reached in himself and determined these outcomes. But what we were able to establish is that he has clearly benefited from all of the disruption that has occurred.
I mean, I think that this is going to be significant depending on whether or not it's not completely overturned by federal courts. But I think that this is going to be one of the bigger realignments in modern decades of the scale and reach of the federal government if they are able to play this out as they hope.
And I don't, you know, do I really believe that Musk is doing this to try to influence how his companies are treated? No, I don't. I think that he does think that the government has, you know, there's too much federal regulatory overreach, that there's inefficiencies.
I mean, this is a guy who has the reason that he is so massively successful in building SpaceX is he built the most efficient spacecraft. commercial space company in the history of the space industry. And the cost of getting to orbit has radically reduced because of his efficiencies. He's a master at reducing the cost of assembly line operations and building rockets that get into orbit.
And he's bringing that same approach to the federal government, and he's really disrupting it. But in the process of that, the disruption is benefiting his own companies, and that is a conflict of interest.
The thing that is most striking to me is just the number of places that he, through either contracts or regulatory investigations, that they are looking at him at the same time as he now has the power over them. It's the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Interior.
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