Elon Musk’s fight with Alameda County over social distancing rules: Chamath Palihapitiya – YouTube

Tesla CEO Elon Musk is escalating his fight with California county, restarting a Tesla factory in Fremont despite a stay-at-home order. “Alameda should sit down with Tesla, have them walk through their entire testing mechanism, the protocols they are taking and actually make a decision and not fight him over Twitter,” Chamath Palihapitiya, founder and CEO of Social Capital and chairman of Virgin Galactic, told “Squawk Box” on Tuesday.Social Capital CEO Chamath Palihapitiya defended Elon Musk s reopening of Tesla facilities in defiance of local government orders, telling CNBC on Tuesday that local, state and government officials need to be more clear when setting regulations amid the pandemic. The federal government has this specific set of guidelines. People may think they fall into those guidelines. Then states then issue guidelines and then on top of that you have regulations at local levels. When you put them all together it s incredibly confusing, Palihapitiya said Tuesday on Squawk Box.

via www.youtube.com

Elon (I call him Elon, like we do in the Valley) is taking exactly the correct approach, except he could have been less confrontational. But what is he supposed to do, given the indecipherable bureaucratese he is undoubtedly getting from the county, ahem, officials. He should just start and let them send in the enforcement officers if they want to, which I doubt they will. Elon can submit the paperwork as soon as possible. The county officials don’t want a thousand videos of them officiously shutting down the assembly line. Wouldn’t look good.

This is a perfect illustration of the bottomless stupidity of this sort of massive shutdown. I’m glad I don’t have anything to do with it, except as a peripheral victim.