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“When you’re a star, they let you do it,” Donald Trump famously said when bragging about sexually assaulting women and getting away with it. “You can do anything.”
While he was ultimately proven wrong to the tune of $83 million, most of the women who have accused Trump of molesting them have received no justice.
A modified version of what the former president said also applies to billionaire (and corporate) behavior in general. If you can afford an army of lawyers, you can say and do just about anything.
Therefore, it is not surprising that rich dudes like Trump and Elon Musk don’t have a lot of verbal filters, and the owner of X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, probably does not much about getting fined for (ab)using the site to push his right-wing agenda.
For example, if the European Union ends up determining that X violated its Digital Services Act and penalizes the company to the tune of $200 million, that constitutes less than 1/1000th of Musk’s net worth (and there are probably laws in place that allow fines to be used to lower one’s tax bill).
That’s a small price to pay if your goal is to spread white supremacist talking points (after all, a speeding ticket probably exceeds 1/1000th of what the average American has in the bank).
However, even for Musk and Trump, it may not be smart to boast about doing illegal stuff while talking to an audience of a million people.
That hypothesis is going to get tested in the aftermath of the duo’s “conversation” on X Monday night, specifically with regard to a claim about firing striking workers.
The two of them shared a laugh over Musk doing just that.
“They go on strike, I won’t mention the name of the company, but they go on strike and you say, ‘That’s OK, you’re all gone,’” the former president said. “You’re all gone. So, every one of you is gone.”
That, the United Auto Workers (UAW) union argues, is an illegal attempt to fire (or threaten to fire) workers who are striking for better compensation and benefits.
“When we say Donald Trump is a scab, this is what we mean. When we say Trump stands against everything our union stands for, this is what we mean,” said UAW President Shawn Fain. “Donald Trump will always side against workers standing up for themselves, and he will always side with billionaires like Elon Musk, who is contributing $45 million a month to a Super PAC to get him elected.”
The union filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board on Tuesday, alleging that the comments violate federal law against threatening striking workers with termination.
It is unclear whether the NLRB will take up the complaint since the quote is not very specific.
However, the real fallout from the event on X may be political.
Trump is trying to court union workers who traditionally favor Democrats.
Laughing about a billionaire letting go striking employees may not be the way to do so.
“Both Trump and Musk want working class people to sit down and shut up, and they laugh about it openly,” said Fain, whose union has endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris. “It’s disgusting, illegal, and totally predictable from these two clowns.”
