Wall Street Journal: Musk battles U.S. regulators

The Wall Street Journal published an article saying that in recent years, Musk, who has been highly praised by investors for his unconventional style of doing things, has been in constant conflict with many U.S. government agencies, but in a series of conflicts with these agencies, Musk has always been the winner.

The author of the article pointed out that many regulators have also been concerned about Musk's attempts to circumvent regulations or ignore law enforcement measures. In the past, financial market regulators and regulators responsible for workplace, road traffic, and aerospace safety have all lost. Several federal regulators said Musk violated the law and threatened public safety. Musk retorted that the regulatory authorities' actions were a drag on the progress of the times, and he adopted different strategies to avoid regulations becoming a stumbling block to his progress.

The article re-presents the process of Musk's head-on confrontation with law enforcement agencies from multiple aspects such as public speeches, SpaceX explosion accidents, super factory inspection incidents, and Tesla's fatal traffic.

Musk has been a particular maverick in his public rhetoric, even compared with other Silicon Valley titans who have long been unhappy with regulators. Rather than a give-and-take approach to dealing with regulators, Musk has routinely made derogatory, sometimes vulgar, comments on Twitter. The Securities and Exchange Commission has asked Tesla to provide information about whether it vetted Musk’s public information as required by a 2018 court settlement. But the billionaire responded last summer with a crude, sexual reference on Twitter: “SEC, three-letter acronym, the middle one is Elon’s.” Asked to comment on specific points for this article, Musk responded with a “poop” emoji. When asked to elaborate, Musk declined to comment on his interactions with federal agencies or his views on regulation. In an April 27 tweet, Musk said he agreed with regulators “99.9% of the time.” But he added that disagreements are "almost always caused by new technologies that were not anticipated by outdated regulations."

Nathan Weiss, an independent research analyst who has long followed Tesla, said Musk's fans see him as a "freedom fighter" and cheer him on.

When SpaceX was testing its Starship SN8 rocket in Boca Chica, Texas, the rocket collided with the launch pad and exploded. After the FAA asked SpaceX to postpone the launch scheduled for January this year, Musk accused the agency of slowing down research and development progress and said its regulations were outdated. "These regulations are for a small number of non-recoverable launches at government facilities each year," Musk wrote on Twitter on January 28. "Under these regulations, humans will never get to Mars." The FAA administrator called Musk to warn him that he must abide by FAA regulations.

Tesla also rejected a request from OSHA officials to enter its Nevada Gigafactory for an on-site inspection after an incident at the plant. Nevada OSHA obtained an administrative order from a judge on May 20, 2019, allowing it to conduct a full inspection of the Tesla Gigafactory. Despite the order, a Tesla manager refused to allow them to enter the plant.

"They were difficult to deal with, and that's how they treated us," the deputy sheriff said.

One of the more high-profile issues facing Tesla right now involves its advanced driver-assistance feature, called Autopilot. The system has come under regulatory scrutiny several times because of its links to a series of accidents. After a fatal crash in Florida in 2016, the National Transportation Safety Board found that Tesla's advanced driver-assistance technology played a role in the accident by allowing drivers to keep their hands off the steering wheel for long periods of time.

As a genius who could program and write games to make money at the age of 9, who could write extremely complete business plans for supercapacitors (the core technology of electric sports cars) and solar energy (these were extremely cutting-edge technologies at the time) while studying at the Wharton School of Business, who reinvented the electric car and planned to send people to Mars by rocket ship, how could he be a calm and normal guy?