By Glynn Wilson - 

WASHINGTON, D.C. — It’s hard to imagine that no one in the Biden administration and America’s space agency NASA is concerned about the behavior of Elon Musk at Twitter, considering he is also the CEO of Space X, which NASA has become dependent on for servicing the International Space Station and for playing a leading role in the Artemis Mission to return to the Moon and push on to Mars.

The public perception of Musk’s companies is already taking a hit because of his incendiary and politically partisan comments on social media, according to survey research. Surveys show the approval of Tesla, Twitter and SpaceX have all dropped significantly since Musk announced his offer to buy Twitter in April, took it over last month and immediately began taking sides publicly with discredited MAGA Republicans.

Musk even announced that he would reinstate former President Donald Trump’s account, which was disabled for his incendiary remarks inciting sedition and insurrection against the U.S. Constitution and the federal government itself and claiming the 2020 election was stolen by fraud. This prompted many liberals and Democrats to leave the platform, including a number of prominent celebrities like Elton John.

The stock prices of Tesla and Space X have also dropped precipitously as a result, an indication that the market is losing confidence in Time magazine’s person of the year for 2021.

“Musk’s increasingly provocative attacks against the Biden administration on Twitter is tarnishing the brand image of SpaceX and could potentially damage future business of the rocket company,” according to the UK Observer, which pointed out its largest customer is the U.S. government.

But so far, public comments about Musk from NASA and a stony silence from Space X have served to downplay the problem. NASA Administrator Bill Nelson, the former Senator from Florida and a longtime friend of President Joe Biden, said he saw SpaceX president and COO Gwynne Shotwell at a Kennedy Center event in Washington and asked her about Musk, his hostile takeover and public behavior at Twitter.

In comments first reported by NBC News, Nelson said he ran into her and said: “Tell me that the distraction that Elon might have on Twitter is not going to affect SpaceX.”

“I assure you, it is not,” Shotwell reportedly responded, according to Nelson. “You have nothing to worry about.”

Nelson, who first mentioned the exchange after a news conference in Houston, said the encounter took place after the Kennedy Center Honors in Washington D.C., on Dec. 5.

“I hugged her with a smile on my face, because I know she is running that thing,” Nelson said. “She’s running SpaceX.”

Asked whether he has any concerns about SpaceX, Nelson said, “No, I don’t.”

When he asked whether Twitter was a distraction, Shotwell told Nelson, “I assure you, it is not,” Nelson said in the NBC report published Sunday, Dec. 11.

“As you know, she has been designated as the person to lead SpaceX,” Nelson said. “So I take it straight from what we in the South say: the horse’s mouth. And she’s the horse that’s running SpaceX.”

That’s disconcerting for other inside sources in Washington, in the Biden administration and some who work for NASA in Greenbelt, Maryland, who shall remain nameless, considering that NASA is an agency that has long been driven by and for positive bipartisan public relations. It pays billions to SpaceX to shuttle astronauts and cargo to and from the space station. It won the contract to take Americans to the moon at the end of 2025 as part of NASA’s Artemis 3 mission.

“That one will go into lunar orbit, and the crew will transfer into a SpaceX lander, and that will go down to the surface of the moon,” Nelson said, praising SpaceX for cutting costs and providing good service “in terms of delivery of both crew and cargo …”

SpaceX has remained mum on the subject, and Shotwell’s Twitter account is just a PR shell. She has published no public posts and does not allow comments.

Nelson, a former U.S. senator and House member from Florida, used to represent the Kennedy Space Center in his old congressional district. He flew on a Space Shuttle Columbia mission as a House member in 1986.

A longtime friend and former Senate colleague of President Joe Biden, Nelson was tapped to lead NASA last year and has been a booster of public-private partnerships in space exploration, especially with SpaceX. Citing a Department of Defense official, Nelson told a Senate panel in May that SpaceX might have saved taxpayers as much as $40 billion in launch costs.

Soon after he took over at NASA, Nelson had a major Twitter troll problem of his own. But it had nothing to do with Musk. It concerned belligerent tweets by Dimitry Olegovich Rogozin, the head of the Russian space agency, Roscosmos, who suggested Moscow could crash the International Space Station into Earth or leave a U.S. astronaut behind.

Nelson urged calm, and Russian President Vladimir Putin replaced Rogozin with Yuri Borisov, whom Nelson calls a “real professional.”

From a space perspective, Nelson said, the relationship with Russia is a “very professional relationship, and it’s been that way ever since 1975, Apollo–Soyuz,” which was the first crewed international space mission between the U.S. and Russia, known then as the Soviet Union.

But that’s also a bit concerning, sources say, considering the U.S. is sending billions and funding defensive weapon systems on the side of Ukraine in its war against the Russian invasion, which the Biden administration has called “illegal.” Many pro-Trump Republicans have questioned U.S. policy in support of Ukraine, and hinted that funding to support their war effort would not be a “blank check” once the Republicans take over Congress in January.

NASA did not respond to a question Friday morning about its concerns over Musk’s incendiary and partisan comments on Twitter, but then again, most people working for the federal government in Washington are on a Christmas-New Years holiday vacation.

According to a Morning Consult poll, Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter has had a deeply politically polarizing effect on the social media brand, an effect that’s rippled into his other companies, Tesla and SpaceX.

“This has profound implications for advertisers, investors and consumers,” Morning Consult’s Jordan Marlatt said.

Musk has turned Twitter’s fan base upside down in the past few weeks, the data shows, as Democrats are increasingly viewing the platform with antipathy and distrust as Trump supporting Republicans move to embrace Musk and Twitter. The data also suggests “it’s fair to question whether Musk’s stewardship of the social media giant runs the risk of collateral damage to his other well-known properties.”

Musk’s acquisition of Twitter has dominated major news cycles for months, with each new revelation throwing the company’s fate into question, according to MC.

Since the takeover became official on Oct. 27, Musk has laid off thousands of Twitter employees and contractors, fired many of Twitter’s top executives or seen them resign in disgust, released an ill-fated revamp of the platform’s verification system, threatened to “thermonuclear name & shame” companies that pull their advertisements from the site, and banned well known mainstream media journalists while at the same time claiming he is for “free speech.”

Musk’s polarizing postings have had an impact on Tesla and SpaceX, which were largely seen as nonpartisan — until now. But after Musk shared misinformation about the attack on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband in a tweet that was later deleted, along with his very public and explicit endorsements of Republican positions and candidates — recently encouraging people to vote Republican in the midterms — are impacting the other brands he manages, according to the data.

Musk recently tweeted that he has set a “New Twitter policy … to follow the science…”

New Twitter policy is to follow the science, which necessarily includes reasoned questioning of the science

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 28, 2022

So here it is.

Net favorability of Tesla is down around 20 points among Democrats since last month. Net favorability of SpaceX is also down among Democrats, which at this time are in control of the White House and the Senate and control appointments to federal agencies, such as NASA.

“For Tesla and SpaceX, the partisan spillover effects could have profound implications,” MC says. “If the Tesla brand becomes increasingly right-leaning, that could put it out of alignment with core electric vehicle purchasing profiles, which lean more liberal. And for SpaceX, Musk’s tussles with government officials and recent threats to pull the company’s Starlink satellite internet service out of Ukraine could be creating the impression that he and his companies are too unreliable when it comes to government contracting.”

“For Twitter and Tesla, these trends could mean trouble because they’re consumer-facing and audiences that have engaged with these brands historically were more left-leaning,” Marlatt said.

For SpaceX, the impact isn’t as easily measurable since its largest customers are NASA and the Department of Defense, which have more rigorous procurement processes than traditional consumer-facing businesses, Marlatt said.

“The wild card isn’t so much that Musk’s companies are more favored by Republicans, but his unpredictability. If the perception of chaos at Twitter spills over to SpaceX, then confidence in the company to execute on its obligations will likely decline.”

Musk is the space company’s CEO, CTO and chief designer, and SpaceX also has a contract to develop a rocket to transport weapons and humanitarian aid around the world for the U.S. Air Force.

SpaceX won these contracts through bidding against longtime government contractors, such as Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and their jointly owned rocket manufacturer, United Launch Alliance (ULA). SpaceX’s reusable rocket technology allows it to perform space missions for the government at a lower price than competitors. Lockheed Martin has criticized SpaceX for starting a price war among aerospace contractors.

Lockheed Martin was among the companies that may have lost billions in the stock market after a “verified” fake Lockheed account tweeted that the aerospace giant would stop its military sales to the United States, Israel and Saudi Arabia.

An account impersonating the pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly and Co. tweeted that the company would make insulin free. Then Eli Lilly had to officially respond that this was not the case. For an $8 subscription, an impersonator sparked a 4.5 percent drop in Eli Lilly’s stock, and also potentially cost Twitter millions in lost ad revenue. The company pulled its digital ad campaigns from the platform indefinitely.

Leaders of large companies, particularly those dependent on government contracts, generally refrain from attacking any political party for fear of alienating customers with a different political affiliation.

But it seems Musk could care less. He was the world’s richest man until he spent $44 billion to buy Twitter, and sold more than $3 billion in Tesla stock to finance some of it. He did not buy it alone. He is in debt up to his eyeballs, and has investor partners, including other conservatives such as Andreessen Horowitz and Larry Ellison, who has ties to Trump, along with a Saudi prince, an investment bank in Qatar, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America and Barclays, according to a recent Washington Post story.

On Dec. 2, Musk began releasing “Twitter Files,” a collection of the company’s internal communications in 2020 showing how the social media company decided to ban former President Donald Trump’s account and restrict sharing of a tabloid New York Post story in October 2020 about Joe Biden’s son Hunter’s hacked laptop. He hand-picked a few reporters to cover the story, including the former Rolling Stone Gonzo journalist Matt Taibbi, and Bari Weiss, a conservative Jewish writer who was run off as a columnist for the New York Times awhile back and has now launched a new media outlet on Substack that seems to be interested in competing with the alt-right Breitbart News.

Musk has also joined Trump and other MAGA Republicans in Congress in calling for an investigation and prosecution of Dr. Anthony Fauci, the face of the federal government’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic, which seems inevitable once the Republicans are sworn in and take the gavel in the House on Jan. 3.

Earlier this year, Musk called the Democratic party the “party of division and hate” in a tweet in May and indicated he will vote Republican in the future.

Starting in 2025 or 2026, SpaceX has been tasked with landing NASA astronauts on the moon on Artemis 3 and Artemis 4 using Starship, a new spaceship that has yet to achieve orbit.

Even before Musk took over Twitter on Oct. 28, his behavior has caused consternation in industries and government. On Twitter before the takeover, various media reports have shown that he used crude jokes and insults and even called a rescuer of Thai children a pedophile. Musk was in recent months accused of sexual misconduct with a flight attendant in 2016, and his behavior of “distraction and embarrassment” was also the subject of an open letter by numerous anonymous employees of SpaceX.

Of course Musk also published a poll on Twitter and promised to abide by the results about whether he should step down as CEO of Twitter. A clear majority of over 51 percent said he should. He then said he would — when he could find someone “foolish enough” to take the job.

He must be having great fun with his newfound media power and celebrity, and maybe the drugs and parties are better in San Francisco than Texas or Florida, sources say. But he might want to consider stepping down sooner rather than later. The longer this controversy drags on, the more money and followers he will lose.

If he loses Tesla and SpaceX, and can’t turn Twitter profitable, then what?

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Related Satire: A Faustian Bargain? Elon Musk’s Behavior Hints That His Time is Almost Up

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