The Dictatorship
Elon Musk railed against reporting self-driving car crashes. The DOT just killed the rule.
Happy Tuesday! Here’s your Tuesday Tech Drop, a weekly roundup of the past week’s top stories from the intersection of technology and politics.
One fewer rule for Elon Musk
Reuters reported in December that the incoming Trump administration was looking to weaken rules that require automakers to report crashes by self-driving cars. The potential move was widely viewed as a major boon to Elon Musk and his car company, Teslaand the administration officially announced the end of the rule last Thursday.
As The Associated Press reported:
The Transportation Department announced Thursday that it will no longer require automakers to report certain kinds of non-fatal crashes — but the exception will apply only to partial self-driving vehicles using so-called Level 2 systems, the kind Tesla deploys. Tesla CEO Elon Musk had complained the old reporting rules cast his company in a bad light.
If Tesla and other automakers are required to report fewer crashes into a national database, that could make it more difficult for regulators to catch equipment defects and for the public to access information about a company’s overall safety, auto industry analysts say.
The Associated Press reported Tesla’s stock price shot up 10% on Friday amid news of the rule rollback. That’s certainly good news for Musk, Donald Trump’s top megadonor — and timely, considering last week’s news that Tesla’s profits fell 71% year-over-year thanks in part to backlash over Musk’s involvement in the Trump administration.
Law school students list collaborating firms
Over at All Rise News, legal journalist Adam Klasfeld has a report on the “headaches” some law students have created for law firms by maintaining an online spreadsheet that’s tracking which firms have caved to Trump’s authoritarian overreach.
Read the All Rise report here.
‘Chatham House’ Signal chat
As part of a report on the rise in MAGA-friendly group chats that “have fueled a new alliance of tech and the US right,” Semafor exposed a Signal group chat, known as “Chatham House,” filled with some far-right techies. Read about some names you might recognize that have shown up in the Chatham House chat and how ideas make their way from right-wing text threads to the conservative media ecosystem, at Semafor here.
Trump’s alma mater tries to dodge his wrath
Trump’s alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania, recently unveiled an artificial intelligence tool to help grant writers navigate the Trump administration’s crackdown on words it doesn’t like. The new tool reportedly can assess the risks posed by certain terms (“racial justice,” for example) to the grant’s approval by the Trump administration.
On one hand, one might think of this as a neat tool. On the other, that an academic institution would need to devise a tool to help grant writers acquiesce to the administration’s “anti-woke” thought-policing is disturbingly dystopian.
UPenn shared a news release on the new program, known as the Risk Assessment Model for Proposal and Award Rapid Testing, or RAMPART.
You can view screenshots of the tool in action below:
Commerce secretary’s son goes big on crypto
Brandon Lutnick, the son of Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, launched a new bitcoin acquisition firm that is in prime position to cash in on his father and Trump’s cryptocurrency-friendly policies.
Read more at the Financial Times.
ActBlue has Trump seeing red
Trump once again turned the tools of the state on his political opposition, ordering the Justice Department last week to investigate liberal fundraising platform ActBlue, accusing it, without evidence, of allowing foreign contributions.
Read more at The New Republic.
Selling access to the White House
A website promoting one of Trump’s cryptocurrencies offered investors dinner with Trump and a White House tour in exchange for their money, in one of the most overt acts of corruption we’ve seen from Team Trump thus far.
