Inside the fallout between Gavin Newsom and Elon Musk | Latest Tech News
In February 2023 California governor Gavin Newsom and Elon Musk stood aspect by aspect at a press convention celebrating Tesla’s new AI innovation lab in Palo Alto.
They traded jokes about a $100,000 deposit Newsom had made on a Tesla Roadster, the first electric car the company produced.
“That was a lot of money in 2007,” Musk, now the richest man in the world, said.
“It’s still a lot of money,” Newsom replied. “Trust me, brother, you haven’t looked at my salary.”
Gavin Newsom and Elon Musk have been duking it out in public boards in current months.
That was the high-water mark of their relationship, and it’s been all downhill, and more and more fast, ever since.
On Wednesday, Newsom appeared on “The Axios Show” and called Musk — CEO of Tesla, founder of Space X, mind implant company Neuralink and proprietor of social media company X — “this generation’s Thomas Edison.”
Then, in the same breath, he called him “one of the great disappointments” of this period, including, “It breaks my heart.”
The event was ostensibly a dialog about electric autos, but it was also one thing more personal, a public eulogy for one of the stranger political friendships in current California historical past.
On one aspect: Newsom, 58, the fourth-generation California politician who has been governor since 2019, married to documentary filmmaker Jennifer Siebel Newsom, and the father of 4 kids ranging in age from 9 to sixteen. He’s widely regarded as the frontrunner for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination, main early surveys against a subject that consists of Kamala Harris and Pete Buttigieg.
Elon Musk is the richest man in the world, price over $800 billion. He also created and initially headed the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) at the starting of Donald Trump’s second time period as president. Getty Images
California Governor Gavin Newsom has been a key determine in the state’s politics for a long time. WireImage
On the other aspect: Musk, 54, the South Africa-born engineer who is by a appreciable margin the richest man in recorded historical past. Forbes pegs his internet price at $839 billion, more than 3 times that of the second-wealthiest particular person on the planet.
His acknowledged ambition, however, isn’t merely accumulating wealth but relocating humanity to Mars.
Edward Niedermeyer, writer of “Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors,” has been watching this relationship longer than most, and he’s not sentimental about it. The historical past of California’s relationship with Tesla, he says, is a story of a state bending over backward for a company that took all the things on offer and saved its palms clean of nothing.
Musk pictured in 2010 with his second spouse, Talulah Riley, and his twins sons, Griffin (left), and Xavier (proper), then 6. Their mom is Musk’s first spouse, Justine Wilson. AP
Gavin Newsom, his spouse Jennifer Siebel Newsom and their 4 kids: Montana, Hunter, Brooklynn, Dutch. AFP via Getty Images
“Tesla has been one of the largest manufacturers in California for some time, so Newsom has long had strong incentives to play nice with Musk,” Niedermeyer said. “Any time you have that many jobs in a single state, the governor usually tends to be quite friendly.”
Tesla also functioned as one thing more than an employer. It was, he notes, “a kind of flagship company for California, in the sense that it both enhances the state’s high-tech image and diversifies it into new industrial dimensions.”
The state’s generosity had limits that weren’t always enforced. Tesla’s Fremont manufacturing unit still carries rampant Clean Air Act violations, Niedermeyer said, despite Lila Bringhurst Elementary sitting within a mile of that plant.
State regulators, he says, have repeatedly given Tesla “sweetheart deals where they just have to hire an expert to help them remain in compliance.”
Musk touring his Tesla manufacturing unit in Texas alongside ex-Hungarian President Katalin Novák, with one of his 11 kids in tow. EyePress News/Shutterstock
Musk moved the HQ of the social media company he purchased in 2022, X, from San Francisco to Bastrop, Texas. AFP via Getty Images
The association labored because each man needed the other. California needed Musk as dwelling proof that environmental regulation and world-changing technology may coexist. Musk needed California’s coverage setting, its engineering expertise, its client market, and its symbolic status. For years, it bordered on mutual flattery.
The cordial part has a paper path. In March 2020, Musk announced Tesla would supply 1,000 ventilators to California during the first COVID wave. When Newsom announced manufacturing reopening guidelines two months later, Musk responded on X with an enthusiastic “Yeah!”
That same yr, despite Musk overtly feuding with Alameda County officers over shutdown guidelines at the Tesla Fremont plant, he was cautious to direct his ire at local officers reasonably than Newsom himself. The governor returned the favor, praising Musk as a great innovator and job creator even as other Democrats have been taking pictures.
The 2023 Palo Alto lovefest was the relationship’s last uncomplicated second. Newsom beamed and told CNBC that California had given Tesla $3.2 billion in subsidies over 20 years, calling it money properly spent.
President Trump holding a news convention with Musk on May 30, 2025, after which Musk stepped down from DOGE. The Washington Post via Getty Images
Elon Musk with the musician Grimes, another of his companions and their son, X. @WalterIsaacson/X
What Newsom didn’t say, or couldn’t, was that the headquarters being celebrated was Tesla’s second. The unique had relocated to Austin, Texas, two years earlier, after Musk threatened to depart during the COVID shutdown struggle and then really did, first transferring his own residence, and then his corporations.
By Niedermeyer’s account, the cracks had already been widening for some time before that event. “This roughly coincided with Musk’s [2022] purchase of Twitter and his increasing turn toward right-wing politics,” he said, “which was also reflected in a turn away from California. By 2024, Tesla was reducing its headcount in the state, and Musk was actively badmouthing it.”
The ideological break hardened through 2024. Until that level, Musk had been one thing of a standard political donor. He contributed $11,800 to Newsom’s 2018 gubernatorial marketing campaign, and his giving historical past across 20 years was roughly cut up between the events — California Democrats up and down the poll alongside contributions to Republican organizations. He’d voted for Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden.
Elon Musk talking at the “Cyber Rodeo” opening of the Tesla Giga Texas manufacturing facility in Austin, Texas, in 2022. AP
In May 2022, he announced publicly that the Democratic Party had turn into the “party of division and hate.” Then, in July 2024, got here the full rupture: Musk publicly endorsed Donald Trump, and finally directed at least $277 million to Trump and Republican candidates, making him the largest single donor of the whole 2024 cycle.
Within days of that endorsement, he announced he was also transferring the headquarters of X and SpaceX from California to Texas, citing a new California law barring faculties from notifying dad and mom about a scholar’s gender identification without the scholar’s consent.
He called the law “the final straw,” and announced he had been personally reworked by the expertise of having a transgender baby, Vivian Wilson, whose mom is his first spouse, Justine Wlison. Musk wrote on X he had “lost my son.”
Vivian Wilson is Musk’s transgender daughter, who sparked an argument between her father and Newsom. Vu/Haedrich/SIPA/Shutterstock
Newsom is widely seen as a frontrunner to turn into a Democratic presidential candidate in 2028. REUTERS
Newsom had signed that law. In fact, he’d signed a great many pro-transgender payments and was proud of it. By December 2025, the gloves have been absolutely off. Newsom’s press workplace posted a pointed message on X about Musk’s estrangement from Vivian, writing “We’re sorry your daughter hates you, Elon,”
Musk responded by writing on X, “I assume you’re referring to my son, Xavier, who has a tragic mental illness caused by the evil woke mind virus you push on vulnerable children.”
“My daughters are Azure, Exa (she goes by Y) and Arcadia, and they do indeed love me very much,” he assured.
Newsom’s transfer into personal assaults and social media taunts is seen by some as him combating back against Republicans with the same ways Trump and Musk use. Others see it as Newsom copying others’ ways to look powerful and draw consideration to himself.
Musk was given a chainsaw by Argentinian President Javier Milei, to symbolize all of the cuts he was making. AP
Ashlee Vance, who spent more than fifty hours with Musk while reporting his 2015 biography “Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future,” thinks Newsom’s social media digs are misguided, saying: “Newsom should spend less time trying to get attention on social media and more time fixing things in his state.”
Niedermeyer, for his half, isn’t shopping for the thought that the relationship was ever what it appeared to be from the outdoors. “The reality is that Gavin Newsom is very pro-business and would likely be happy to continue supporting Tesla, if Musk weren’t so hell-bent on aligning himself with the right wing,” he said.
Niedermeyer thinks Newsom would have most popular what many California Democrats quietly maintained even at the top of the feud: public criticism paired with non-public lodging.
A view inside Tesla’s Texas manufacturing facility, with vehicles being made. AP
What Niedermeyer finds strangest is what Newsom hasn’t achieved. “Tesla alone has given Newsom all kinds of ammunition to attack Musk with,” he said. “They’ve polluted the state’s air, ground and water, they’ve had one of the worst worker safety records, and all after receiving billions in state subsidies.”
The pretense, at this level, is totally ruined. California still has Tesla’s factories. It still has tens of 1000’s of Tesla employees. It is still, by a broad margin, Tesla’s largest American market.
What it no longer has is the fiction that any of that creates goodwill between these two males, or that it ever actually did.
Newsom paid $100,000 for one of the first Tesla Roadsters ever constructed, because he believed it stood for one thing. A California company fixing a California drawback, with money and engineers from the state, building one thing the relaxation of the world would ultimately have to copy.
What the feud reveals, beneath all the posturing, is that Newsom and Musk have been never actually allies. They have been each other’s best prop. California needed a billionaire who made clean power look cool. Musk needed a authorities that would pay him to do it. Now China has 70 p.c of the global EV market.
Newsom constructed the cathedral and Musk walked out. Now they’re arguing in the parking zone over who will get to keep the car.
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