On Friday, President Joe Biden showed little patience with the hands of the world’s richest man on the U.S. economy, dismissing comments from Tesla CEO Elon Musk about job cuts in his company of electric car manufacturing.
According to a Reuters report on Friday, Musk said in an email to Tesla executives that he has “a very bad feeling” about the economy and that he will reduce 10% of salaried jobs while increasing the number of workers. per hour.
He also ordered the company, which employs about 100,000 people, to “pause all hiring worldwide.”
When asked by a journalist about Musk’s comments, Biden listed a number of American carmakers who are managing to increase their investments “overwhelmingly,” especially in the manufacture of electric vehicles. In contrast to Musk, who is strongly anti-labor, Biden noted that many of the new jobs in the industry are union jobs.
“I think Ford is increasing investment in the construction of new electric vehicles: 6,000 new employees – union employees, I might add – in the Midwest,” the president told a news conference on the May job report released Friday. “The former Chrysler Corporation, Stellantis, is also making similar investments in electric vehicles.”
“So you know, good luck on your trip to the moon,” Biden added, referring to Musk’s space exploration company SpaceX.
SpaceX is currently charging $ 62 million for its Falcon 9 rocket launch, and Musk has promised to resume landing on the moon and send a manned mission to Mars.
The Department of Labor’s May employment report showed that employers added 390,000 jobs and the unemployment rate stood at 3.6% for the third month in a row.
Tesla’s CEO has previously commented on inflation, which is currently in its 40s. Last month he joined Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, also one of the richest people in the world, to claim that pandemic relief packages were to blame.
As Common Dreams reported in April, corporations have passed on inflationary costs to consumers and denied the small wage increases given to workers during the pandemic by raising prices.
As economist and former Labor Secretary Robert Reich pointed out in an opinion piece published by Common Dreams earlier this week, the real problem with the economy right now is neither inflation nor wage increases. of the workers.
“The real problem is the increase in corporate power and the decline in worker power over the last 40 years,” Reich argued. “Unless we address this growing imbalance, corporations will continue to divert the profits of the economy from the pockets of their CEOs and shareholders, while everyday Americans are sinking.”