Texas Governor Greg Abbott Refuses to Release His Emails With Elon Musk
The governor’s office said some of the correspondence with the billionaire and his companies contains “intimate” information that isn’t of “legitimate concern to the public.”
He using a personal email for that? Because I work for the state and I know ALL of my emails are subject to FOIA so I keep them clean of personal shit
I don't even work for the government, and my personal rule is "never put anything in writing that I wouldn't be able to explain to a judge."
For real, anything sent from a company email is owned by the company. Not that a company usually has time to go through such shit but they can if they need/want to. It's usually very easy to do and can be done without the worker ever knowing.
The only safe communication is with your lawyer. Second would be your spouse, just don't get a divorce.
I have a separate cell phone for city business, so I don't have ANY cross-contamination between personal and city data.
And it's been handy in Open Records requests where reporters have asked for my phone and text logs. With the personal and city info being separate, I don't have to worry about needing the state AG to authorize reductions.
I black out sensitive data (there's a list of what kinds of data should be redacted without an AG opinion), and I hand it over.
Elon's Boca Chica launch facility is a nightmare of violating all kinds of environmental and safety regulations, going way beyond the scope of what it was originally permitted and cleared for.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=-BavKuMDed0&list=PL-eVf9RWeoWEfSK9mjKe4E67IK1-1vZxB&index=24
This is from 3+ years ago now, and most of the shit brought up here got poo-poo'd online by ravenous Musk sycophants, and seems to have just led to nothing actually happening in terms of some kind of a lawsuit or punishment for Musk or SpaceX...
... and of course, its all only gotten worse with more time.
SpaceX launches showering debris over the Caribbean, latest rocket being prepped to be the next IFT launch just fucking detonated while being fueled, damaged much of the rest of the complex... and the complex itself is now a bunch of very densely packed storage tanks, which easily could have also all blown up if that most recent on pad explosion played out just a bit differently, or maybe a landing capture/catch attempt goes wrong.
Musk's whole... reason for having the chopsticks catch system is that he doesn't want to spring for a larger launch facility with things safely spaced out, he doesn't wanna pay for something akin to the giant NASA crawler vehicle that moves rockets something like a mile or so from the VAB to the actual launch/fueling site at Cape Canaveral.
There's no actual compelling reason for the lower stage, Booster, to not just have landing legs, like the Falcons. Its not going to get 'refurb, refly' times to even within two orders of magnitude of what he's shooting for. The fastest ever turn around time on a Falcon is like, 3ish weeks... and he's talking about launching multiple Starship+Boosters in a single day now.
To date, no Starship nor Booster has ever been re-used without suffering a catastrophic loss on that re-use. He is no where near a re-usable fleet of these things.
Err, well, there is actually a real reason for the chopsticks, and all the rest of his nonsense: His engines aren't as powerful or reliable or fuel efficient as he said they were for years.
But he can't actually directly say that or else SpaceX probably goes bankrupt or at best gets pared down to just running Falcons.
He recently revised Starship+Booster down to only being capable of 50 tons to LEO, not the long touted 100 tons.
He then proceeded to have ... 2, 3? Catastrophic failures on 'test' launches where the claim is that they're being done for the 'data', when the obvious fact is that no almost no useful data of any kind is being gained from all this.
Whats going on is quality control sucks, Musk/SpaceX have no idea how to actually properly assemble these things, oh right and the design is fundamentally flawed, but its fine, because Starship 2 and 3 are gonna come out... some time later.
You know, like how Roadster v2 is gonna come out any day now, for the past decade, how all Tesla cars will suddenly become perfectly fully autonomous, any day now, for the last decade.
From the article:
Kevin Bagnall, a lawyer representing Musk’s rocket company SpaceX, also wrote a letter to Paxton’s office arguing the emails should be kept secret. He cited one main reason: They contain “commercial information whose disclosure would cause SpaceX substantial competitive harm.”
Most of the rest of Bagnall’s letter, which further explained SpaceX’s argument, was redacted.
Musk and representatives for his companies did not respond to requests for comment for this story.
imo, Abbot and Musk are and have been colluding to maunever around SpaceX's frequent and flagrant violations, to get investigations stalled, to get authorizations rubber stamped... so they communicate outside official channels to pull this off.
I also work for the state, and occasionally have to remind myself that anything I email could be read in court in an anti-sarcastic deadpan tone.
Yeah, frankly, if you use your government email to share results of your colonoscopy and the details of your infidelity, that's on you. You don't get to hide your publically accessible documents behind those things just because you can't compartmentalize your personal life.
"intimate” information that isn’t of “legitimate concern to the public.”
You know - things like charges, payment methods, offshore bank accounts, preferred vacation destinations, scheduling private jet flights...
He argued they include private exchanges with lawyers, details about policy-making decisions and information that would reveal how the state entices companies to invest here. Releasing them to the public, he wrote, “would have a chilling effect on the frank and open discussion necessary for the decision-making process.”
Holy shit, that's definitely an argument in favor of making it public.
“If I can’t say ‘You take the taxpayer from the front and I’ll take them from the back’ then our communication will be chilled and it’ll take so much longer to screw you to the same degree 😩”
Dude! How gullible are the people of The Texas Newsroom that they'd give Greg Abbott money in advance knowing that the final arbiter of the question is Ken "not in jail for a long time on fraud charges because the prosecutor was his employee and worried about getting fired" fucking Paxton??
Not saying that they had it coming or anything, but DAMN! Those dudes are untrustworthy by REPUBLICAN standards!
It's probably just forty-five emails from Abbott with him telling Musk he wants to be his tampon and Elon sending a poop emoji back each time.
Greg Abbott refuses to stand for the national anthem. I also hear he is a little piss baby too.
A disability joke that attacks Abbott from the right. Stay classy, friend.
The fact any of these bozos use digital comms (email, whatever) for anything sensitive is mind-boggling.
Maybe it's cause I'm a "digital native" (sort of?) or whatever they call it. Old enough to have a childhood without widespread internet, but young enough to learn it easily. Do these dudes just not have the internal switch that realizes "email is forever"???
Paxton’s office, in an explanation of the common-law privacy exception on its website, mentions that “personal financial information” that doesn’t deal with government transactions “is generally highly intimate or embarrassing and must be withheld.”
Wait.. Is this an "allow bribes" law?
Abbott is a spineless cunt!
Grifter gonna grift.
So, it cannot be requested under the Freedom of Information Act? Can't that be escalated to a lawsuit?
"Yeah, but like... Could you not?"
I'll leave it alone if you cancel my student loan debt.
