Elon Musk is escalating his public opposition to government efforts to slow the spread of the coronavirus, and in doing so he\u2019s found a cheerleader in President Trump.<\/p>\n
The Tesla founder and CEO recently announced that he would reopen\u00a0a plant for the\u00a0electric car maker in\u00a0California against county orders and would move operations out of the state if he meets resistance. On Monday night, he tweeted that he would reopen the facility in Fremont, Calif., offering himself up to arrest if Alameda County officials decided to block his move.<\/p>\n
Trump chimes in:<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0The tweets this week from the mercurial CEO were the latest in a series of outbursts that have drawn attention and scrutiny. But this time, his efforts were met with support from Trump, whose administration is eager to move past the pandemic and reopen businesses across the country.<\/p>\n \u201cCalifornia should let Tesla & @elonmusk open the plant, NOW,\u201d Trump tweeted on Tuesday.<\/p>\n Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin also voiced his support for Musk, telling CNBC on Monday that \u201cCalifornia should prioritize doing whatever they need to do to solve those health issues so that he can open quickly and safely, or they\u2019re going to find, as he\u2019s threatened, he\u2019s moving his production to a different state.\u201d<\/p>\n Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) encouraged Musk to move Tesla\u2019s operations to Texas, where residents \u201cvery much want to open up and get back to work.\u201d<\/p>\n Trump has praised Musk before, calling him one of the world\u2019s \u201cgreat geniuses\u201d during a CNBC interview at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, earlier this year.<\/p>\n Early in Trump\u2019s presidency, Musk joined a White House advisory council but later left when Trump announced he would be pulling out of the Paris climate accord.<\/p>\n That move by Musk was more in line with his earlier views on Trump. A few days before the 2016 election, Musk told CNBC that Trump \u201cis probably not the right guy\u201d to be president, adding that then-Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton\u2019s economic and environmental policies \u201care the right ones.\u201d<\/p>\n But whether Trump\u2019s latest embrace of Musk will help the entrepreneur prevail in California is yet to be seen.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Elon Musk is escalating his public...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-24661","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business","category-health"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24661","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=24661"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24661\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24662,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24661\/revisions\/24662"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=24661"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=24661"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=24661"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}