Hello, and welcome to Techscape. I’ve been pondering screen-time and isolation after I suffered through a recent bout of Covid. Even a few days of seclusion coupled with lengthy, uninterrupted spates of staring at screens were enough to return me to the state of mind in which I spent most of 2020. I hope all of you reading have a wonderful winter and new year, filled with the opposite of that experience: family, friends, and cheery, in-person parties.
Today in Techscape: We look back at the biggest tech story of 2024, Elon Musk, and at the Amazon workers strike in the US.
Tech in 2024: Elon Musk becomes as famous and powerful as Donald Trump
The biggest tech story of the year is Elon Musk’s rise to omnipresence and an unprecedented level of global power. In 2024, he managed to become the world’s most influential unelected man. He has the ear of the president of the United States and influence over the very agencies that would rein his companies. Those companies have become vital to the digital infrastructure of many nations. His purse makes US lawmakers genuflect or cower, his tweets make leaders around the world cheer or fly into a rage.
Since Donald Trump’s election, Tesla’s stock price has nearly doubled. Musk’s fortune, already the biggest in the world at the start of 2024, has ballooned to $440bn, per Forbes. The nearest mogul on the list, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, is $200bn behind.
Musk hasn’t been shy to flex his newfound muscles of power since Trump’s election, weighing in fiercely on government appointments. His most daring move came last week, when he led the charge to tank the House’s bipartisan spending agreement, arguing it included too many giveaways to Democrats. Trump and a cadre of congressional Republicans soon followed suit, and the president-elect upped the ante by calling on Republicans to suspend the debt ceiling.
Republicans in the end did not cave to Trump and Musk’s demands, showcasing the limits of the CEO’s power, and offering a glimpse of the chaos that awaits us in 2025. Democrats responded with jabs of “President Elon Musk”. Users of X, formerly Twitter, flooded the social network with images of Musk in the White House and Trump on a dog leash. Trump responded by downplaying Musk’s influence: “No, he’s not going to be president, that I can tell you.”
In the center of this week’s political storm, it’s hard to think back on how we got into this mess – and how Musk worked his way up to the helm of US politics. So let’s look back at a timeline of his year. What it reveals: Elon Musk was inescapable. In 2024, reading his X feed became as unavoidable as Donald Trump’s from 2015 to 2021. Whatever his flights of fancy were on a given day, that set the news agenda.
January:
• A judge rejects Musk’s $56bn pay package as CEO of Tesla. Musk vows to move Tesla’s headquarters to Texas in response.
• Neuralink announces it has implanted a computer chip in a patient’s brain successfully for the first time, allowing the patient to move a computer mouse just by thinking.
• Tesla’s earnings are not good: the Cybertruck is not succeeding, and the company isn’t reaping large margins on sales of its other vehicles.
February:
• Musk moves SpaceX’s headquarters to Texas.
• Tesla jilted a California bakery after ordering $2,000 of mini-pies. Musk pays the debt after the incident goes viral on X.
• Ukraine claims Russian soldiers are using Starlink internet terminals, made by SpaceX, in occupied Ukrainian territory. Musk denies selling to Russia.
March:
• Musk says he won’t endorse a candidate in the US presidential race. Trump and Musk meet at Mar-a-Lago.
• Musk sues OpenAI over its planned transition to a for-profit company. The ChatGPT maker, founded by Musk himself alongside CEO Sam Altman, calls the suit “frivolous”.
• SpaceX conducts its third test flight of the Starship rocket, the largest and most powerful ever built. It’s successful until the very end, when it burns up on reentry into the atmosphere.
• Ex-Twitter executives sue Musk for $128m in unpaid severance.
April:
• Tesla sees its biggest revenue drop since 2012.
• Reports emerge that Trump and Musk are holding calls several times a month.
• Australia’s eSafety commissioner orders X to hide videos of a stabbing in a Sydney church from users globally. Musk fights the edict but loses in court.
• Australia’s prime minister calls Musk “an arrogant billionaire who thinks he is above the law”.
• Tesla keeps cutting its prices as it fights against the electric car giants of China, namely BYD.
• Musk makes a surprise visit to China.
May:
• Starlink says it will shut down in war-torn Sudan, which aid groups say would plunge the country deeper into chaos.
• Neuralink’s first implant partially detaches from its patient’s brain, hampering the miniature computer’s operations.
• Reports emerge that Trump is considering a White House role for Musk.
• Musk raises $6bn for his AI startup, xAI, to compete with OpenAI.
• Musk feuds with encrypted messaging app Signal.
• Australia’s eSafety regulator drops its case against X and Musk.
June:
• Tesla shareholders vote to reinstate Musk’s pay package.
• SpaceX successfully launches the next iteration of its Starship rocket.
• Tesla recalls the majority of all the Cybertrucks it has sold. It’s the fourth time the company does so.
July:
• Trump is nearly assassinated. Musk publicly pledges his full support to Trump.
• Reports emerge that Musk plans to give $45m a month to Trump’s campaign. He denies the reports. (He will eventually give about $243m to Trump.)
• A $500m lawsuit against Musk over the layoffs at Twitter is dismissed.
• Musk attends a session of the US congress as the guest of the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.
August:
• As violent riots over immigration and race rage across the UK, Musk tweets “civil war is inevitable”. He calls the Labour leader Keir Starmer “two-tier Keir” and shares false information about the clashes. Starmer is incensed and says Musk’s inflammatory comments have no justification.
• Musk conducts a glitchy livestreamed conversation with Trump via X.
• Neuralink announces it has implanted a second computer chip in the brain of a patient.
• X sues its own former advertisers, alleging a “massive boycott”.
• Venezuela’s prime minister feuds with Musk and blocks X for 10 days in the country.
• Musk touts X’s new AI image generator, which he uses to spread fake images of Kamala Harris.
• X goes offline in Brazil after Musk refuses to delete tweets with false information in compliance with the country’s laws.
• Starlink says it will not block X in Brazil. A court freezes its assets in response, and Starlink capitulates.
September:
• Passengers aboard SpaceX’s Polaris Dawn complete the first privately funded spacewalk.
• Musk calls Australian government officials “fascists” as they move to regulate online misinformation. They call his comment “crackpot stuff”.
October:
• Musk tweets, “no one is even trying to assassinate Biden/Kamala”. The Biden White House criticizes his comment.
• Musk is not invited to a tech summit in the UK because of his posts about the country’s violent race riots. He tweets that no one should go to the UK.
• Musk appears alongside Trump at a rally in the same town where the former president was nearly killed. Musk warns it will be the “last election” in the US if Trump does not win.
• Musk shares conspiracy theories about the devastation caused by Hurricane Helene in the southeastern US, accusing the government of deliberate obstruction of Starlink.
• Tesla fails to meet expectations for car deliveries in the third quarter.
• Brazil lifts its ban on X after the company complies with its laws.
• Musk announces he’ll give away $1m to registered Pennsylvania voters who sign his petition. Though he initially calls the drawing for the novelty-sized checks a lottery, his lawyers will later say in court that the selection was not random.
• The Philadelphia district attorney sues to block the scheme. He is not successful.
• Tesla unveils what it says will be a self-driving taxi to be made available within the next three years. Investors are not impressed, and Tesla loses $60bn in value.
• Musk colludes with the Trump campaign to keep a leaked dossier on JD Vance from spreading on X.
• SpaceX launches the Starship rocket again and catches it in a giant pair of metal arms on its return to earth.
November:
• Donald Trump wins the election. Musk is elated, tweeting after Trump claimed victory: “It is morning in America again”.
• Trump announces that Musk and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy will lead an advisory body that will not be part of the federal government, the “department of government efficiency”, charged with making major cuts to federal payrolls. Musk has pledged to fire tens of thousands of federal employees.
• Musk makes a surprise appearance on a call between Trump and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
• Tesla’s value hits $1tn.
• Trump joins Musk for a test flight of SpaceX’s Starship rocket.
• MPs summon Elon Musk to testify about X’s role in UK summer riots. He does not acquiesce.
December:
• Trump nominates a close ally of Musk to lead Nasa, a billionaire who has captained SpaceX flights.
• Nigel Farage and Reform UK treasurer Nick Candy meet with Musk at Mar-a-Lago to discuss doing “great things together”, reigniting speculation Musk could fund Reform UK.
• The Delaware judge who rejected Musk’s pay package in January rejects it again.
• Musk ardently campaigns against a last-minute spending bill proposed by the US congress.
• Musk endorses Germany’s far-right anti-immigrant party Alternative für Deutschland, tweeting: “Only the AfD can save Germany”.
Amazon workers strike at the height of holiday shopping season
Amazon workers across the US are striking. The company’s workforces is not heavily unionized, but it’s a strong symbolic gesture, as the holiday season is the biggest for shopping in the US, Amazon’s largest market.
My colleague Mike Sainato was first to report the strike:
Amazon workers at seven US facilities walked off the job early on Thursday during the holiday shopping rush, aiming to pressure the retailer into contract talks with their union.
Warehouse workers in cities including New York, Atlanta and San Francisco took part in what their representatives called the “largest” strike against Amazon. In a statement, the general president of the Teamsters, a union that represents workers across a variety of industries, said in a statement: “The corporate elitists who run Amazon are leaving workers with no choice. Greedy executives are pushing thousands of hardworking Americans to the brink.” Amazon accused the Teamsters of unfair labor practices.
Read Mike’s full story here.
