Texas Gov. Abbott Vows to Fight for SpaceX to Launch From Boca Chica
by Douglas Messier
Managing Editor
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has vowed to fight for SpaceX to receive federal approval to launch its Super Heavy/Starship system from the company’s Starbase facility in Boca Chica, Texas. Rio Grande Guardian reports:
Asked by veteran broadcaster Ron Whitlock of Ron Whitlock Reports whether he is concerned about losing SpaceX, Abbott said:
“What I am going to do if Biden interferes with the ability of SpaceX to launch from Boca Chica; I am going to be working every step of the way to make sure that they are going to be able to launch from Boca Chica. We heard the vision from Mr. Patel himself about what they are working on and our job is to make sure they are able to achieve their vision. And I have worked with Elon Musk very closely with regard to Tesla and the Giga factory in Austin, Texas. And we will be working with him very closely, every step of the way in Boca Chica for the future of SpaceX. We want that future and that vision to come from Boca Chica, from Brownsville, Texas.”
Whitlock followed up with: “And not to Florida?” Abbott responded: “Correct.”
Whitlock interviewed Abbott at an economic development event held recently at the Port of Brownsville. Since this event, SpaceX has learned that its application to expand its Boca Chica rocket launching site has hit a new hurdle.
The new hurdle is that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers suspended consideration of SpaceX’s proposal to expand Starbase on the grounds the company had failed to adequately respond to a series of questions about the plan the Corps had raised last May. The matter can be reopened if SpaceX responds with the requested information.
The Corps sent a letter to SpaceX dated March 7 that lists a number of deficiencies in the application. The overriding concern is that SpaceX eliminated alternative locations — Cape Canaveral in Florida and Vandenberg Space Force Base in California — without providing a thorough analysis of why those sites were not viable.
SpaceX had originally said Boca Chica was the only viable launch site. Earlier this year, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said that if approval of the Texas site was delayed, the company would move operations to Kennedy Space Center in Florida. SpaceX subsequently ramped up Super Heavy/Starship construction in the Sunshine State.
Musk’s company wants to build a launch complex near Pads 39A and 39B, which are being used for launches of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy boosters and NASA’s Space Launch System, respectively. SpaceX also wants to develop a site situated north of that location which would be known as Pad 49. Environmental groups in Florida have raised objections to the Pad 49 plan.
The Corps is evaluating how the expansion of SpaceX’s permit would affect 17.16 acres of land adjacent to SpaceX’s current footprint at Boca Chica. The expansion would involve the “addition of test, orbital, and landing pads, integration towers, associated infrastructure, stormwater management features and vehicle parking. The proposed expansion will impact 10.94 acres of mud flats, 5.94 acres of estuarine wetlands, and 0.28 acres of non-tidal wetlands,” according to the Corps’ project description.
The review is being done in conjunction with the Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) programmatic environmental assessment (PEA) of SpaceX’s plan to expand the spaceport and launch Super Heavy/Starship vehicles from the location just north of the Mexican border. FAA originally planned to complete the PEA by the end of last December; however, the estimated completion date is now April 28.
Some people are arguing on various Internet sites that the Corps application only covers expansion for a second Boca Chica launch pad and is separate from the PEA document being prepared by the FAA. So, the FAA could approve launches from a pad SpaceX has already built. However, an expert in the subject who writes under the name ESG Hound said that is not so.
“The land covered in the Corps application covers all the stuff in the PEA, including support buildings and other site infrastructure. The two actions are intimately intertwined but go ahead in thinking this is some Elon Musk 4D Chess,” he tweeted.
You can read his full analysis of the Corps’ decision and its likely impact on the review process here.
What SpaceX is looking for in the FAA’s PEA is a finding that launching the world’s most powerful rocket from Boca Chica would have no significant impact (FONSI) on the surrounding area. FAA could issue a FONSI subject to a number of conditions designed to limit the impact of launches and launch failures from the site.
However, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) and National Park Service have raised serious questions about whether a FONSI can be issued even with conditions. A number of environmental groups have opposed SpaceX’s plans, saying launching the rocket is not compatible with the sensitive nature of the surrounding area.
There are several possible outcomes:
- FAA issues a FONSI with conditions, resulting in legal action by opponents that could tie up the project in court for years;
- FAA requires a much more rigorous environmental impact statement (EIS), a process that would take years and likely lead to a lawsuit from SpaceX;
- SpaceX sues to overturn an EIS decision, and in the meantime moves launch operations to Florida while continuing to use Boca Chica as a test site.
An EIS was originally conducted before the FAA granted approval for SpaceX to launch Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets from Boca Chica. The company abandoned those plans and began testing Starship prototypes at the site, which it named Starbase.
FAA decided that a less rigorous EA was required to approve launches of the even larger Super Heavy/Starship from the location. That in itself has proven controversial; opponents have argued that a full EIS should have been started when SpaceX changed its plans several years ago.
57 responses to “Texas Gov. Abbott Vows to Fight for SpaceX to Launch From Boca Chica”
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From the article:
At Starbase:
A number of environmental groups have opposed SpaceX’s plans, saying launching the rocket is not compatible with the sensitive nature of the surrounding area.
At Kennedy:
Environmental groups in Florida have raised objections to the Pad 49 plan.
The FAA really needs to cut through the BS and give SX the go-ahead.
There are laws that need to be followed.
Easy to scapegoat environmentalists. They haven’t held up anything. Objections are coming from other agencies that have raised serious issues about the appropriateness of the use for Boca Chica. And the diligence of the environmental assessment and applications that SpaceX completed.
In Germany, environmentalists held up Tesla production for a very long time. In France, environmentalists are trying to stop Starlink licensing. I wouldn’t exactly call me, pointing out the obvious, as “scapegoating”.
By the way…thanks for the article.
You’re welcome.
For the second time in a week, a post I’ve made on this site has been marked as spam. If you want me to go away, just say so.
No. It was an automated designation. I didn’t do it. I welcome your comments here. Let me see what happened here.
Thanks.
It is easy because it was the environmentalist lobby that started this show using all of their Washington leverage…
ENVIRONMENTAL ORGANIZATIONS SPOTLIGHT INADEQUATE OVERSIGHT BY FAA OF SPACEX’S BOCA CHICA TESTING FACILITY, CALL FOR AN EIS
Date: July 8, 2020
From: States News Service
BROWNSVILLE, Texas — The following information was released by Defenders of Wildlife”
Groups point to incomplete environmental studies, numerous explosions and uncontrolled fires, and excessive closures of the public beach
“SpaceX is operating in one of the most pristine stretches of the Texas coast, in an area that is rich with biological diversity and home to numerous endangered species, including ocelot and Kemp’s ridley sea turtles,” said Paul Sanchez-Navarro of Defenders of Wildlife.
“We need the FAA to do its due diligence as a regulatory agency and ensure that the company minimizes and mitigates the impacts of its project on this special place.”
In a letter sent to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), environmental groups are calling on the agency to require a new Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) that fully details the impact of the SpaceX Boca Chica testing and launch site.
The groups, including Save RGV, Defenders of Wildlife, Frontera Audubon, Friends of Laguna Atascosa National Wildlife Refuge, the Center for Biological Diversity and the Lower Rio Grande Valley Sierra Club claim that recent disasters at the facility are a sign that the safety and environmental impact of SpaceX operations have not been adequately studied and disclosed to the public. The letter also lists numerous stipulations that SpaceX has failed to uphold and that the FAA has failed to enforce.”
“most pristine stretches of the Texas coast” ROFLOL…
Boca Chica hasn’t been pristine since the 1840’s. A major resort used to be located there during prohibition which was wiped out by a hurricane in the 1930’s. Two resort communities were tried, the first wiped out by a hurricane, and the last just never made it and the folks only who bought in only got their money back when SpaceX bought them out for far above the appraisal prices for their homes.
And the only Ocelot seen there was a road kill 20 years ago when it had the misfortune of wandering over from the Mexican side. The Ocelot is a species of Least Concern by the IUCN due to stable populations across Central America into South America. It is only endangered in Texas because ranchers hunted it out in the 1800’s. It could be re-established any time in the United States, but the ranchers in Texas won’t allow it. Same for the Jaguar.
The law, in it’s magnificent impartiality, forbids the Sierra Club and SpaceX alike from doing anything that might adversely affect the fetid mudflat that is Boca Chica.
fetid 😀
I bet it’s got its rich aromas, for sure
But you probably won’t be able to smell the aroma over the mosquito repellent.
It won’t be the first time that SpaceX got kicked out of a location because it scared the locals. It was kicked off of VAFB with the Falcon 1 because folks there were scared of it blowing up.
As for Texas, a very proper response to FWS would be to threaten to withdraw all the state land being managed by FWS, including Boca Chica. It wouldn’t stop the environmentalist from engaging in economic warfare with SpaceX by filing numerous nuisance lawsuits because some word was misspelled in the decision or typo in the application, but it would send a message the working folk are tired of being bullied by elitist environmentalists.
The booting from Vandenburg was the work of General William Shelton, who also locked SpaceX out of the Air Force block buy bidding, and has since served on the boards of a couple of Old Space companies: Aerospace Corp and Airbus U.S. Space & Defense. Three years ago he was appointed to the board on a New Space company, Voyager Space Holdings. All is forgiven or forgotten, apparently.
Attempting to protect the environment is truly despicable, of course. Indeed, it’s un-American. It’s high time that true patriots rise up and thoroughly despoil the environment beyond hope of redemption, particularly the elitist environment.
Nope, that is a real misrepresentation. I am very interested in protecting the environment and endangered species which is why I am a space advocate. If these folks actually were interested in protecting the environment there are hundreds of more worthwhile projects that they ignore. For example, stopping the decimation of American bird and bat populations by poorly placed wind turbines in mountain passes critical to migration by birds and bats.
BTW the effort to protect the environment was started in the 1800’s by folks like President Theodore Roosevelt. But in the 1970’s after the Vietnam War ended many of the anti-protesters turned Environmentalists for something to keep protesting and started the crusade against technology with the nuclear power industry, since nuclear energy came from military technology, as their first target. They waged economic warfare against the industry using lawsuits, forcing many utilities to expand their use of coal since nuclear power was blocked, resulting in the current global warming crisis. Incidentally, if you dig up the old reports and stories from the 1950’s and 1960’s you will see that one argument the A.E.C. used for nuclear energy was to reduce CO2 emissions to counter global warming.
No, the “environmentalists” are not interested in protecting the environment or endangered species, they only use it as a tool to block progress in technology and to force folks into a more “sustainable” low technology lifestyle. In short they want the peasants back on their farms, riding bicycles, or horses, living like it was the “good old days.” Elon Musk is of course a threat to that goal with his high tech electric cars, Starlink and rockets big enough to start space industrialization.
I cannot refute any of those points, as I have myself posted them in the past. Nevertheless, Before we had laws and regulations to protect the environment, we ravaged it with great abandon. Rivers burned. Folks dropped dead in the middle of cities due to lack of oxygen. The Hudson River could not be fished nor could you swim in it. It was a superfund site. When I was a kid I hated getting dragged into Manhattan because the air was so bad. If you looked up at night, you saw reflections of the illuminated skyscrapers in the smog clouds above. And I was raised on leaded gas fumes in bucolic Brooklyn.
But over time, due to regulation, these things have improved.
Yes, and that was good. And it is why it is a real shame that some folks are misusing those regulations in a way that doesn’t actually help the environment, resulting in a backlash against further regulations.
Remember how the environmentalist used the snail darter to block a dam and Congress got fed up with them and responded by excluding the project from the Environmental Protection Act so the Dam was finally built? Well the endangered Snail Darter which according to environmentalists was suppose to go extinct because it couldn’t be moved to a new habit was taken off the endangered species list last summer because it is doing very good in its new habitats.
https://apnews.com/article/…
Snail darter, tiny and notorious, is no longer endangered
By KIMBERLEE KRUESIAugust 31, 2021
I actually used the Teddy Roosevelt line on this site 17 hours ago. Stop stealing my material!
Some of what environmental activists do is good. Some of what environmental activists do is bad. It’s like anything else. Civility is good. Speech codes on college campuses are not good. Actually, taboos of any sort in a university setting is so obviously antithetical as to be absurd. But I’ll still support civility.
Labeling all environmental activism as radical robs the word of its meaning. Anyone running into an environmental obstacle is going to feel oppressed. “Feelings are not facts” used to be a popular phrase in my youth. Getting rid of leaded gas was good but don’t mess with my thing, that’s an understandable position, but not necessarily a valid one.
It’s probably true that the Fish & Wildlife folks, on occasion, go a bit overboard in their attempts to protect fish and wildlife. It’s an occupational hazard. But it is good that we have people looking out for the fish and wildlife, and if they get too enthusiastic, they’ll get checked.
I want SpaceX to get their Boca Chica Super Heavy launch site license. But I want environmental regulations enforced based our best effort determination of what is appropriate, not what it is that I would prefer. Sometimes we’ll get it wrong. All scientific truths are contingent, perhaps some more than others, and it all involves people, so it’s a messy process. But we’ve got no one to look after us. We should give it our best shot.
Yes, they have. Command and control environmental regulation has been a considerable success in places where people gather in their millions like my long-time home of Greater L.A. The low-hanging ripe fruit of environmental protection, though, has long since been picked, but the envirocrats continue to pursue ever more recondite – and trivial – “victories” at ever-greater cost.
SpaceX went to Boca Chica precisely because it was nearly deserted. Nothing it has done there, or proposes to do in future, is going to constitute a significant threat to the local environment.
Anyone trained in environmental law should recognize that the places you’re going to attract the most attention from the environmental community is a deserted underdeveloped location. Andrew Beal found this out the hard way 20 years ago. If I were going for a new launch site, I’d look for some blighted landscape on a Superfund site. It’s probably cheaper to clean up old cadmium spills than to fight it out in court for years and years.
Which describes the old Matagorda Island AFB perfectly. It is currently controlled by FWS, which along with the National Park Service seems to control almost the entire Texas coast south of Corpus Christi except for the few miles of the community of South Padre Island. FWS took over as no one wanted it when the USAF left which is why SpaceX passed it up, so essentially FWS and the National Park Service forced SpaceX to select the site at Boca Chica because of their iron gripe on hundreds of miles of the coastline of Texas.
USSF is looking for a home, maybe Governor Abbot should talk them into reactivating it as a USSF base for R&D and invite SpaceX there for flight testing.
I’ve always thought that you had a really good take on this problem. I remember your making this argument over the past 5 odd years. Your argument for Matagorda in place of Boca Chica, and your recognizing the current licensing issues was going to become an issue as soon as the function of Boca Chica was changed from Falcons to BFRs came true were part of your ‘finest hours’ when your arguments played out well with time and real world events.
There’s something to be said for that approach. But I suspect the portfolio of Superfund sites at low latitudes and on coastlines with water to the east is not large – perhaps even zero. The real lesson here is that the enemies of progress and capitalism will hound you wherever you choose to set up shop.
Yes i have gotten several replies of roughly “the law is the law and must be followed”. Ignoring the many times “the law” has been changed to fit changed reality, or the political winds. Protecting endangered species that aren’t is one. And sacred wetlands that become subdivisions when the winds change.
I see a lot of claims of government taking credit for things that happened due to technological progress and of using those claims to add more restrictions. Clean air that we enjoy now is far more about better tech than government control.
Too true!
Matagorda Island AFB is the one that best fits that description with Wallops Island and Stennis being close as well.
I wonder why SX didn’t choose one of those sites. Any thoughts?
That is because of all the research that I did on spaceports over the last thirty years, including developing a model to predict public support for my dissertation.
Andrew Beal avoided selecting a site in the U.S. because of the problems he feared from the government and environmentalists. As a result in made the mistake of picking even worst sites outside the U.S., first in the British Virgin Islands where he had to deal with British bureaucrats, than an coastal site that both Venezuela and Guiana claimed ownership of nearing starting a war when they saw the possibility of making money from what was a mosquito ridden swamp.
Meanwhile Andrew Beal could have simply done a deal for the old Matagorda Island AFB that the DoD was trying to get rid of in the 1980’s that no one wanted.
BTW the effort to protect the environment was started in the 1800’s by folks like President Theodore Roosevelt.
https://www.npr.org/2022/01…
No, the “environmentalists” are not interested in protecting the environment or endangered species,
Indeed.
*facepalm*
The elitists are not, in this case attempting to protect any environment because none is threatened in any substantive way. They are simply engaging in unrestricted lawfare against a billionaire who refuses to tug the forelock to them like most of the nation’s other billionaires do.
If that were the case, it would make for a good series of articles and news stories. I’m surprised the likes of FoxNews does not pick up on it were it true.
They are too scared of their power as a lobby. Look at how they even turned space advocates like Robert against SpaceX with their propaganda.
Very few at Fox News go looking for stories anymore. But, as I’ve been saying for awhile now, there really is no story about bureaucratic interference at Boca Chica until and unless SpaceX is actually ready to launch a Starship stack and a regulatory slow-walk still besets it. At that point, perhaps Fox News – or Daily Wire or Timcast.com – might take an interest. All three have certainly taken a lively interest in Musk’s attempted hostile takeover of Twitter.
Teslarati has a very good article on the Florida Starship launch tower.
https://www.teslarati.com/s…
SpaceX rapidly constructing Starship’s first Florida launch pad and tower
By Eric Ralph
Posted on April 13, 2022
A bit of a mess, for sure. SpaceX should have accounted for this better when they switched plans from using Boca Chica as a supplementary F/FH launch site to a SS/SH Starbase, including testing to failure.
A reasonable outcome would seem to be the first option listed in the article, “FAA issues a FONSI with conditions” – limited operations during limited times of year so that the required test flights can be done without unduly impacting sensitive wildlife and their habitats. That’s how launches from Vandenberg work, after all.
Then, when SpaceX is ready to move into operations, start mainly from Florida + a few Texas launches. As operations start to ramp up, then add the 2nd Florida pad and the offshore platforms and go from there.
The last part of the first option in Doug’s possible outcomes list is the only part that has me worried: “…resulting in legal action by opponents that could tie up the project in court for years;”. We gotta do better than that
The local wildlife, far from being “impacted” by Starbase seem to love the place, at least to judge by their ubiquity in video shot at Starbase.
The path forward from here is still uncertain and the earliest we might get some indication of how things are going to specifically go is April 29, when the FAA is supposed to hand in its environmental assessment. Meanwhile, SpaceX continues to push ahead on all fronts, including KSC facilities and both ex-oil rigs. With hot-fires and launches ruled out by long-running GSE soap operas at Starbase, bureaucracy has, to this point, been irrelevant to SpaceX’s schedule. I still think the net effect of the FAA’s review process will turn out to be negligible. Noisy and fiery testing will resume – somewhere – as soon as physical facilities render that possible. SpaceX’s full-court press on infrastructure is simply going to insure that earliest operations start almost immediately after initial testing completes and will be faster and more extensive than might otherwise have been the case.
“GSE soap operas”aren’t. For a company like Space X that accepts risk, a delay due to ground support equipment means there’s issues all up and down the line. Ground
support equipment matches the needs of flight systems, so the requirements for
GSE should be well defined and meeting requirements should be firmly understood. This
hints to me that the flight hardware that the GSE supports is changing, or not well known, so the GSE has to change, or misses performance metrics. Starship
or Superheavy are not ready to fly is the only conclusion I can some to. When you
tell me GSE is not ready, what you’re really telling me is flight hardware is not ready.
They didn’t follow local regulations with their initial tank farm, so they’ve had to redo some of it. Quite a bit of work
Oh that’s just nuts. When you don’t even follow the basic rules of the locality. I’m sorry, that’s just dumb.
Most of the GSE-related delay has been due to building the initial tank farm out-of-code and in a way that couldn’t be rectified easily. Once aware of this miscue, SpaceX had two choices:
1) build some additional “homemade” tankage that complied with TX building codes or
2) see if enough suitable tankage built by others could be located, purchased and transported to Starbase faster than the homemade stuff could be run up.
SpaceX chose Door No. 2. The last of that tankage has only recently arrived and even more recently been plumbed and tested.
There have also been some problems of the sort you posit. Notably, the quick-disconnect arm on the launch support tower has been partially disassembled and has yet to be reassembled with new or modified parts to accommodate the fact that the quick-disconnect fitting on the side of Starship is now located higher on the newer prototypes than it was on S20.
Had the original tank farm been built to code, it is likely B4 and S20 would have participated in an initial jaunt to orbit months ago. In the interim, both have been rendered obsolete by continued refinement and improvement of the designs of both Super Heavy and Starship. A new version of the former is now being cryo-tested. A new version of the latter is nearing completion in the production area as is an even newer Super Heavy version. A new complete stack will likely be ready to test and then launch starting a month or less from now or as soon as GSE readiness equals that of the vehicles. If no further bureaucratic obstacles remain by then, that stack should fly this summer.
Wait, let me get this strait. Even Texas is too oppressive a government for SpaceX? You know the guys who actually built the tanks knew that there was a permitting and standards process, it was not them who made the decision to ignore local law and code. That decision came from the top. It runs in perfect parallel with the environmental mess they’re in now. This bed SpaceX is sleeping in now was made totally by Musk. Think about all the refineries up and down the Texas coast. There’s LOX and LN2 trucks everywhere on the road and large cryo tank farms everywhere. Those laws and regulations are in place for a reason based on real life experience and applied engineering. Ignoring that rich tradition and local expertise is just nuts.
I’m with you on building to codes and that should have been obvious. I probably disagree on the severity of the environmental infractions. I’ve seen thousands of acres of housing subdivisions go in that seem more damaging than the Boca Chica stuff. And see several ways that simple cooperative mitigation could take place. Whether I would strongly disagree with you depends on information that I don’t have, and am not going to spend the hours/weeks researching.
Likely that is going to be the fate of Boca Chica if SpaceX leaves, a new resort community after the factory and tank farm are disassembled, and hordes of folks driving on the beach disturbing the local wildlife. But it won’t be Elon Musk so the environmentalists will claim it’s better just like they claim the wind turbines that kill billions of birds each year are better environmentally than nuclear power stations that actually create bird habitat.
My understanding is that the basic problem was that instead of SpaceX buying storage tanks from contractors SpaceX choose to just home build the storage tanks and so they were basically the same fuel tanks used in the rocket. Seems logical as they could be fabricated by the same workforce building the Starship. However, since this tank design hadn’t gone through the testing the building code requires for them to certify them for fuel storage they were ruled to outside the building codes and they had to correct it.
Well, it’s probably just as well. This isn’t Starship any more..it’s that and SuperHeavy both…so they are going to creep along almost SLS style—that’s a lot of hardware to blow up in the fail-fast approach and I think that has Elon a little spooked.
Let us see what Abbot really does for him.
every time the faa has revised its deadline, it’s been obvious that it was coming well in advance. if you follow faa’s project timeline, there’s a planned end date for their consult with fws, which has most recently been set to april 21st. if that day comes and goes and the fws consult isn’t finished yet, you can already consider the faa deadline postponed again, even tho faa won’t announce it until april 29th comes and goes. this is how it’s worked each time.
Actually the delay announcements have come a few days before the notional due dates. The latest notional due date being 4-29 – two weeks hence – I would expect any additional delay announcement to be made no later than 10 days hence. And it is certainly possible another such month-long delay will happen. If it does, and SpaceX makes no squawk, it will be because it is still working GSE issues. But I think SpaceX is likely to have solved all of its GSE problems by late May if not before, so a fifth announced delay until late June is likely to provoke protests and perhaps even legal action by SpaceX.
Watch the road to the Port of Brownsville. Given the progress of the launch facility at the Cape the likely practical result while lawyers fight it out will be to start moving the Super Heavy Boosters and Starships down that road to be loaded on barges to take to Florida for launch. At least the will be that pattern until the Florida Starship factory is ready.
ESG Hound is not an “expert” in anything but buncombe. He’s a left-wing political activist.
The folks on the NSF forum do not consider ESG Hound as any sort of expert,
So?
So his alleged “expertise” is pretty much that he doesn’t like Elon Musk either.
Yes, when you go to Austin you see the same crowds of homeless on the streets, just like San Francisco and LA. And the traffic is bumper to bumper the same way as the focus is on public transit systems for the public “good”. It is a shame what those Californians have done to it.
Which, I’m sure, is the reason Gigafactory Texas is not actually located within the Austin city limits.
It is also why the State Texas authorized the 130 Tollway, an 85 mph 4 lane limited access road that allows Texans to go from San Antonio to I-35 while avoiding the “Austin California” enclave.
https://www.youtube.com/wat…
Gee, it looks like Elon Musk really wants to upset the liberals, taking over the Great and Powerful Twitter… Just imagine all of the howls if he does takes it private like SpaceX…
https://apnews.com/article/…
Tesla CEO Elon Musk offers to buy Twitter for $43 billion
By MICHELLE CHAPMAN and MATT O’BRIEN
April 14, 2022
“I invested in Twitter as I believe in its potential to be the platform for free speech around the globe, and I believe free speech is a societal imperative for a functioning democracy,” Musk said in the filing. “However, since making my investment I now realize the company will neither thrive nor serve this societal imperative in its current form. Twitter needs to be transformed as a private company.”
It’s due to nothing more than awareness that the war on TX that was waged by the Obama administration has been renewed on Joe Biden’s watch. Elon Musk, whose TX footprint was fairly modest until the Trump administration, is now a prime target of this renewed assault.