Earlier than billionaires Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy grew to become co-chairs of Donald Trump’s bogus Division of Authorities Effectivity, Ramaswamy had all types of terrible issues to say about Musk, the Tesla CEO and world’s richest right-wing misinformation peddler. CNN’s KFile did a deep dive into Ramaswamy’s historical past of disparaging statements about his new co-chair.
“I think Tesla is increasingly beholden to China,” Ramaswamy opined throughout a podcast in 2023 in response to the corporate’s announcement that it could be constructing a brand new battery plant in Shanghai. “I have no reason to think Elon won’t jump like a circus monkey when Xi Jinping calls in the hour of need.”
Musk’s reliance on China has solely elevated through the years, and he has been making an attempt very exhausting to take care of a good relationship with the nation that gives a big share of his firm’s income in addition to a lot of the uncooked supplies utilized in Tesla’s EV batteries.
In Might 2023, Ramaswamy wrote on X that whereas he appreciated Musk’s buy of the social media platform, Musk and different “prominent business leaders” had been “puppets” of the Chinese language Communist Social gathering.
Ramaswamy additional criticized Musk in a subsequent submit.
Musk and Ramaswamy have promised to make use of DOGE to focus on a whole bunch of billions of {dollars} in authorities spending cuts by specializing in slashing funding to entities such because the Company for Public Broadcasting, which receives $535 million a yr. It’s an fascinating tactic for Musk, whose complete enterprise empire was buoyed by billions (with a “B”) of taxpayer {dollars}.
The more and more tense commerce battle over know-how ramped up on Tuesday when China introduced a ban on the exporting of uncommon minerals to the U.S. Whenever you consider Trump’s guarantees so as to add hefty commerce tariffs to Chinese language imports, Ramaswamy’s final declare is bound to be examined within the coming weeks and months.
Predictably, Ramaswamy has modified his tune towards Musk and is now even promising to make use of DOGE to harass and probably extinguish Musk’s home EV rivals.
In accordance with Ramaswamy, he now has coronary heart eyes for Musk.
“I love him and respect the hell out of him, and I’m proud to call him a friend,” a smarmy Ramaswamy advised CNN. “The only country he puts first is the same one I do: the United States of America.”
It’s simple to see how they’re now simpatico, since they each have the identical obsessions: cash and energy.
