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Elon Musk threatened to take legal action against Democrat-led California after a state commission cited the Republican-backing mogul’s politics in its decision to reject a request for more frequent SpaceX launches.
The billionaire founder of SpaceX, which made history over the weekend when it conducted a successful test flight of its Starship Super Heavy booster rocket, slammed comments made by members of the California Coastal Commission after it denied an annual increase to 50 from 36 of Falcon 9 rocket blast-offs.
In a video of Thursday’s meeting, commissioner Gretchen Newsom – no relation to Musk’s nemesis and Democratic Calif. Gov. Gavin Newsom – expressed concerns over Musk’s political posts on his social media platform X before the committee voted down the request 6-4.
“Elon Musk is hopping about the country, spewing and tweeting political falsehoods and attacking FEMA while claiming his desire to help the hurricane victims with free Starlink access to the internet,” Gretchen Newsom said.
“It appears that rather than prioritizing the welfare of SpaceX employees and the environment, the focus has been on profit maximization.”
Commission chair Caryl Hart followed Newsom’s statement by saying: “You could argue that it’s bringing in politics, but this is a political matter to some extent because it involves the US government, it involves the Coastal Commission.”
A fuming Musk said the commissioners’ comments were “Incredibly inappropriate.”
“What I post on this platform has nothing to do with a ‘coastal commission’ in California!,” he posted on X on Sunday.
“Filing suit against them on Monday for violating the First Amendment.”
Musk- who endorsed Donald Trump and attended the former president’s rally in Pennsylvania two weeks ago- remained mum on Monday.
The Post has sought comment from the commission.
The panel — whose members are appointed jointly by the governor and the legislator — is in charge of protecting the state’s 840-mile coastline.
The launches are conducted from Vandenberg Air Force Base in Santa Barbara County. The official request was submitted by the US Space Force.
The commission said its decision was based on the need to cut down on the number of sonic booms caused by the rockets and to mitigate the environmental impact on local wildlife.
Musk’s fraught relations with California state and local officials have been well documented.
His company, Tesla, benefited from state tax exemptions and rebates as it grew into the nation’s most popular electric car maker.
But Musk was harshly critical of California’s regulatory bureaucracy, high taxes and the stringent lockdown measures imposed during the coronavirus pandemic — prompting him to relocate company headquarters from Palo Alto, Calif. to Austin, Texas in 2021.
Last month, X, which was known as Twitter when Musk bought the company for $44 billion in late 2022, permanently closed its San Francisco headquarters amid the city’s growing lawlessness. It has moved its operations to Texas.
Musk has also indicated that he plans to relocate SpaceX headquarters from California to Texas in response to a recently enacted state law that banned school districts from requiring that schools inform parents if their children ask to be referred to by a different pronoun.
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