WASHINGTON (AP) — A federal appeals court cleared the way Wednesday for President Donald Trump’s administration to fire thousands of probationary workers, halting a judge’s order requiring them to be reinstated in a legal win for Trump’s effort to downsize the federal workforce.

The decision comes a day after the Supreme Court also sided with the Trump administration in another lawsuit filed over mass firings.

A split panel for the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals found the terminations of federal workers should probably be appealed through a separate employment process rather than fought out in federal court. Two judges appointed by Republican presidents sided with the administration, while a third Democratic appointed judge dissented.

The decision comes in a lawsuit filed by nearly two dozen states, who said the mass firings will cause irreparable burdens and expenses to support recently unemployed workers. They said at least 24,000 probationary employees have been terminated since Trump took office.

The states could still seek further review as the lawsuit continues to play out.

The Republican administration has argued that the states have no right to try to influence the federal government’s relationship with its own workers, but also had already reinstated some 15,000 workers to full duty or paid leave as the lawsuits played out, according to court documents.

The appeals court order halts a decision from U.S. District Judge James Bredar in Baltimore, who was one of two judges appointed by Democratic presidents who found that the Trump administration violated federal laws in carrying out the terminations at 20 agencies in the states that sued.

The Supreme Court blocked another order from U.S. District Judge William Alsup in San Francisco on Tuesday, finding that nonprofit groups lacked legal standing to sue over the firing of probationary workers. The case still has additional plaintiffs, however, and Alsup was weighing Wednesday whether to again order reinstatement on behalf of the state of Washington and labor groups.

Probationary workers have been targeted for layoffs across the federal government because they’re usually new to the job and lack full civil service protection.

The states suing the Trump administration in the Baltimore case are Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont and Wisconsin, along with Washington, D.C.

The post Appeals court clears the way for the Trump administration to fire thousands of probationary workers appeared first on The Hemet & San Jacinto Chronicle.

“We get attacked every day, but this was done with a lot of resources,” Musk claimed in a post. “Either a large, coordinated group and/or a country is involved. Tracing …”

Complaints about outages spiked Monday at 6 a.m. Eastern and again at 10 a.m, with more than 40,000 users reporting no access to the platform, according to the tracking website Downdetector.com. By afternoon, the reports had dropped to the low thousands.

A sustained outage that lasted at least an hour began at noon, with the heaviest disruptions occurring along the U.S. coasts.

Downdetector.com said that 56% of problems were reported for the X app, while 33% were reported for the website.

It’s not possible to definitively verify Musk’s claims without seeing technical data from X, and the likelihood of them releasing that is “pretty low,” said Nicholas Reese, an adjunct instructor at the Center for Global Affairs in New York University’s School of Professional Studies and expert in cyber operations.

Reese said the likelihood that a state actor is behind the outages “doesn’t make a lot of sense” given their short duration — unless it was a warning for something larger to come.

“There are kind of two types of cyber attacks — there are ones that are designed to be very loud and there are ones that are designed to be very quiet,” he said. “And the ones that are usually the most valuable are the ones that are very quiet. Something like this was designed to be discovered. So to me that almost certainly eliminates state actors. And the value that they would have gained from it is pretty low.”

Reese added that it’s possible that a group was trying to make a statement with causing X outages, but added that such a temporary outage “is not much of a statement to me.”

“It’s only really a statement if there is some kind of follow on action, which I would not rule out at this point,” he said.

In March 2023 the social media platform then known as Twitter experienced a bevy of glitches for over an hour as links stopped working, some users were unable to log in and images were not loading for others.

“X outage” was trending on rival social media platform BlueSky, with some posts welcoming users to the site and urging them to stick around.

Musk bought the former Twitter in 2022 and also serves as the CEO of Tesla. He’s running X while simultaneously having access to U.S. government data systems — often wearing a shirt that says “tech support.”

The post Elon Musk claims X being targeted in ‘massive cyberattack’ as service goes down appeared first on The Hemet & San Jacinto Chronicle.

U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers ruled late Tuesday that “Musk has not demonstrated likelihood of success on the merits” in his request for a preliminary injunction. She offered to hold a trial in her California courtroom as soon as this fall, “given the public interest at stake and potential for harm if a conversion contrary to law occurred.”

Musk, an early OpenAI investor, began a legal offensive against the ChatGPT maker and CEO Sam Altman a year ago, suing for breach of contract over what he said was the betrayal of its founding aims as a nonprofit.

He escalated the legal dispute late last year, adding new claims and defendants, including Microsoft, and asking for a court order that would stop OpenAI’s plans to convert itself into a for-profit business. Musk also added his own AI company, xAI, as a plaintiff, claiming that OpenAI was unfairly stifling business competition.

He and a group of investors more recently made an unsolicited $97.4 billion bid to buy a controlling stake in the nonprofit — a move that undermined Musk’s “claim of irreparable harm,” the judge wrote.

OpenAI said it welcomed the court’s decision.

“This has always been about competition,” a statement from the company said. “Elon’s own emails show that he wanted to merge a for-profit OpenAI into Tesla. That would have been great for his personal benefit, but not for our mission or U.S. interests.”

Musk alleges in the lawsuit that the companies are violating the terms of his foundational contributions to the charity. He had invested about $45 million in the startup from its founding until 2018, his lawyer has said.

Musk attorney Marc Toberoff said in a statement late Tuesday that he is pleased that the court offered an expedited trial on the core claims.

“We look forward to a jury confirming that Altman accepted Musk’s charitable contributions knowing full well they had to be used for the public’s benefit rather than his own enrichment,” Toberoff said.

Gonzalez Rogers in a hearing last month called it a “ stretch” to claim “irreparable harm ” to Musk, and she called the case “billionaires vs. billionaires.” She questioned why Musk invested tens of millions in OpenAI without a written contract. Toberoff responded that it was because the relationship between Altman and Musk at the time was “built on trust” and the two were very close.

“That is just a lot of money” to invest “on a handshake,” the judge said.

The dispute has roots in a 2017 internal power struggle at the fledgling startup that led to Altman becoming OpenAI’s CEO.

Emails disclosed by OpenAI show Musk had also sought to be CEO and grew frustrated after two other OpenAI co-founders said he would hold too much power as a major shareholder and chief executive if the startup succeeded in its goal to achieve better-than-human AI known as artificial general intelligence. Musk has long voiced concerns about how advanced forms of AI could threaten humanity.

Altman eventually succeeded in becoming CEO and has remained so except for a period in 2023 when he was fired and then reinstated days later after the board that ousted him was replaced.

Gonzalez Rogers, appointed by then-President Barack Obama in 2011, has handled a number of tech industry cases including Apple’s fight with Epic Games, though she said last month that Musk’s case is “nothing like” that one. That case was also the last time she granted a preliminary injunction, eight months before the case went to trial.

The post Judge denies Elon Musk’s request to block OpenAI for-profit conversion but welcomes trial appeared first on The Hemet & San Jacinto Chronicle.

I had already seen other surreal sights at the Conservative Political Action Conference — a man with a cat on his shoulder, freshly pardoned Proud Boys roaming around — but it was clear that this would be one of the indelible images of the annual MAGA confab.

Musk roared — or was he just making a chain saw noise? This, he said, was the chain saw he was taking to the bureaucracy. “Chain saw,” he repeated for effect. He did not turn it on.

It was a gift from Javier Milei, the far-right Argentine president who stormed to power in 2023 and who has drawn effusive, at times almost graphic, praise from Musk.

The episode showed how Musk doesn’t just cozy up to right-wing leaders — he also seems to copy them.

In 2022, Milei, an economist and former media personality, released a “chain saw plan” that would have cut public spending and sharply reduced the number of ministries in Argentina’s government. Milei showed up to campaign rallies with a functioning chain saw — and his supporters followed suit with replicas — that represented his demonization of a group he called “the political caste.”

Once Milei took office, Musk showered him with online compliments and talked business with him behind closed doors, as my colleagues wrote last year. He has done the same with right-wing leaders in India and Brazil, in a convenient marriage of his political beliefs and his desire to make more money for his companies.

And Musk has made a point of talking up Milei’s approach to government cuts, calling them “awesome” in a January post on X and praising Milei for “deleting entire departments.” He’s now calling for the United States government to do the same.

Musk’s embrace of the global right delighted the CPAC attendees, who welcomed him as one of their own even though it wasn’t so long ago that he was a Democrat warning the world about climate change. Everybody was on the same page about what really mattered.

“I don’t really approve of his, like, family situation, where he’s got so many kids,” said Pam Roehl, 59, referring to Musk’s 12 children with several different women.

But Ms. Roehl, a retiree who splits her time between Chicago and Nashville, loves the X platform. And she loves what Musk is doing in the government.

“Getting to the bottom of, like, government waste, I think, is phenomenal,” she said.

The post What That Chain Saw Was Really About appeared first on The Hemet & San Jacinto Chronicle.

Musk and his own AI startup, xAI, and a consortium of investment firms want to take control of the ChatGPT maker and revert it to its original charitable mission as a nonprofit research lab, according to Musk’s attorney Marc Toberoff.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman quickly rejected the deal on Musk’s social platform X, saying, “no thank you but we will buy Twitter for $9.74 billion if you want.”

Musk bought Twitter, now called X, for $44 billion in 2022.

Musk and Altman, who together helped start OpenAI in 2015 and later competed over who should lead it, have been in a long-running feud over the startup’s direction since Musk resigned from its board in 2018.

Musk, an early OpenAI investor and board member, sued the company last year, first in a California state court and later in federal court, alleging it had betrayed its founding aims as a nonprofit research lab benefiting the public good. Musk had invested about $45 million in the startup from its founding until 2018, Toberoff has said.

Musk and OpenAI lawyers faced off in a California federal court last week as a judge weighed Musk’s request for a court order that would block the ChatGPT maker from converting itself to a for-profit company.

U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers hasn’t yet ruled on Musk’s request but in the courtroom said it was a “stretch” for Musk to claim he will be irreparably harmed if she doesn’t intervene to stop OpenAI from moving forward with its planned for-profit transition.

But the judge also raised concerns about OpenAI and its relationship with business partner Microsoft and said she wouldn’t stop the case from moving to trial as soon as next year so a jury can decide.

“It is plausible that what Mr. Musk is saying is true. We’ll find out. He’ll sit on the stand,” she said.

Along with Musk and xAI, others backing the bid announced Monday include Baron Capital Group, Valor Management, Atreides Management, Vy Fund, Emanuel Capital Management and Eight Partners VC.

Toberoff said in a statement that if Altman and OpenAI’s current board “are intent on becoming a fully for-profit corporation, it is vital that the charity be fairly compensated for what its leadership is taking away from it: control over the most transformative technology of our time.”

Musk’s attorney also shared a letter he sent in early January to the attorneys general of California and Delaware.

“As both your offices must ensure any such transactional process relating to OpenAI’s charitable assets provides at least fair market value to protect the public’s beneficial interest, we assume you will provide a process for competitive bidding to actually determine that fair market value,” Toberoff wrote, asking for more information on the terms and timing of that bidding process.

The post Elon Musk-led group proposes buying OpenAI for $97.4 billion. OpenAI CEO says ‘no thank you’ appeared first on The Hemet & San Jacinto Chronicle.

DOGE’s efforts to stop USAID payments undermine assurances that the department gave to federal lawmakers in a Tuesday letter that it sought only to review the integrity of the payments and had “read-only access” to the system as part of an audit process.

The two people familiar with the matter spoke Thursday to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.

The actions by DOGE, a Trump administration effort to find ways to reduce the federal workforce, cut programs and slash federal regulations, have raised concerns among civil servants, Democratic lawmakers and others that Musk’s team is withholding funds appropriated by Congress to suit the president’s political agenda.

USAID, a federal agency charged with delivering humanitarian assistance overseas, has been a particular target of President Donald Trump and Musk, both of whom have argued that much of the agency’s spending is wasteful. Supporters of the agency, however, say that it is essential for national security, helping counter Russian and Chinese influence while providing humanitarian assistance across the globe.

A judge on Thursday sided with advocates and federal workers unions who sought to stop the department from giving DOGE and Musk access to the payment systems. U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly restricted DOGE’s read-only access to Tom Krause, a software CEO, and Marko Elez, who reported to Krause but has since left his role at Treasury. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The Treasury Department’s Fiscal Service conducts over 1.2 billion transactions annually and accounts for 90% of federal disbursements, including for Social Security and Medicare.

Krause, who is listed online as the CEO of Cloud Software Group, works at the department as a special government employee and is subject to less stringent rules on ethics and financial disclosures than other federal workers.

The department’s acting deputy secretary, David Lebryk, retired after more than 30 years of service when Krause and DOGE requested access to sensitive data, the two people told The AP.

Trump ordered a funding freeze at USAID his first day in office, saying, “the United States foreign aid industry” was “not aligned with American interests.” The funding freeze and subsequent stop-work orders shuttered most U.S. programs, which are worth billions of dollars and are in more than 100 countries.

While the funding freeze is supposed to last for as little as 90 days, aid workers say the damage done to aid work globally would require extensive investment and rebuilding to mend. Musk has tweeted repeated criticisms and unsubstantiated accusations about USAID as his DOGE crew dismantles much of the agency.

“Spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper,” Musk tweeted early this week.

The news that the department was trying to stop foreign aid payments was first reported by The New York Times.

The post DOGE was tasked with stopping Treasury payments to USAID, AP sources say appeared first on The Hemet & San Jacinto Chronicle.

Musk posted on X Tuesday that he plans on moving SpaceX from Hawthorne, California to Starbase, Texas. X will move to Austin from San Francisco.

He called a new law signed Monday by California Gov. Gavin Newsom that bars school districts from requiring staff to notify parents of their child’s gender identification change the “final straw.”

“I did make it clear to Governor Newsom about a year ago that laws of this nature would force families and companies to leave California to protect their children,” Musk wrote.

Tesla, where Musk is CEO, moved its corporate headquarters to Austin from Palo Alto, California in 2021.

Musk has also said that he has moved his residence from California to Texas, where there is no state personal income tax.

The post Elon Musk says he’s moving SpaceX, X headquarters from California to Texas appeared first on The Hemet & San Jacinto Chronicle.

Even when compared with other CEOs, who routinely get paid roughly 200 times more than their typical employees, Elon Musk’s pay package was eye-opening.

A judge in Delaware on Tuesday struck down the package that Tesla established for Musk in 2018, ruling that the process was “flawed” and the price “unfair.” Chancellor Kathaleen St. Jude McCormick called the package “the largest potential compensation opportunity ever observed in public markets by multiple orders of magnitude.”

So, if Musk isn’t worth the maximum $55.8 billion value of the package, how much is he worth? It’s a thorny question without an easy answer in the notoriously complex world of executive compensation.

McCormick’s ruling bumped Musk out of the top spot on the Forbes list of wealthiest people. The magazine on Wednesday lopped $25 billion off his net worth, reducing it to $185.3 billion, putting him behind fashion and cosmetics magnate Bernard Arnault and family.

Critics have argued for years that CEO pay packages are exorbitant. The median compensation for a CEO of an S&P 500 company was valued at $14.8 million, according to the latest AP CEO pay survey for 2022 conducted with the executive compensation research firm Equilar. It would take the typical worker at one of those companies more than 185 years to earn what their chief executive reaped in just 12 months.

In 2018, Tesla estimated the value of Musk’s compensation package at $2.28 billion, topping the previous highest package of $1.39 billion given to Blackstone’s Steven Schwarzman 10 years earlier, according to Equilar. The value of Musk’s package has grown as Tesla’s stock price increased. By comparison, in 2022 the median worker at Tesla made $34,084.

Under Musk’s pay plan, he received a chunk of stock options each time Tesla’s market value rose by $50 billion. Ultimately, he would have the chance to buy nearly 304 million shares for $23.34 each. Tesla has met each of the performance hurdles since the package was awarded. Its stock is trading at roughly $191 compared with $21 at the start of 2018.

The judge determined that Tesla’s board lacked independence from Musk. His lawyers said the package needed to be rich to give Musk an incentive not to leave — a line of reasoning the judge shot down.

“Swept up by the rhetoric of ‘all upside,’ or perhaps starry eyed by Musk’s superstar appeal, the board never asked the $55.8 billion question: ‘Was the plan even necessary for Tesla to retain Musk and achieve its goals?’” McCormick wrote.

Musk’s fans would argue that he shouldn’t be paid like other CEOs because he isn’t like other CEOs. He and Tesla are practically inseparable, so keeping him as CEO is key to the company’s growth. He built the company from an idea to the most valuable automaker in the world, last year selling more electric vehicles than any other company. His star power gets free publicity, so the company spends little on advertising. And he has forced the rest of the auto industry to accelerate plans for electric vehicles to counter Tesla’s phenomenal growth.

To figure out how much to pay their CEO, corporate boards often start by looking at how much their rivals are paying theirs: They need to pay enough to attract and keep the talent.

General Motors, for example, considers executive salaries at 3M, Boeing, Ford, IBM and other huge companies, and uses complex formulas to determine CEO compensation. For GM CEO Mary Barra, part of that depends on how GM’s stock return compares to its peers and how much progress the company makes on electric vehicles.

In 2022, Barra earned total compensation that GM valued at $29 million. That included $2.1 million in salary. Ford CEO Jim Farley’s compensation was valued at $22 million that year.

Even though Tesla makes automobiles, investors often lump its stock in with Big Tech stocks. They’re the companies disrupting industries and people’s ways of life.

Plus, Musk is closely identified with Tesla the way Meta Platforms’ Mark Zuckerberg or Apple’s Tim Cook are with their companies. Pay packages at Big Tech companies are among the largest in the U.S.

Cook’s compensation was valued at $63.2 million for 2023, mainly due to stock awards valued at nearly $47 million. A year earlier, he earned total compensation valued at roughly $99 million.

In the nuanced world of executive compensation, these numbers don’t indicate how much a CEO actually takes home, they’re just an estimate of the compensation package’s value. The final value may exceed or fall far below those figures because it is tied to stock.

Corporate law experts say any new compensation package for Musk will likely be challenged in court unless Tesla’s board either resigns en masse or follows a meticulous process to protect shareholders by passing a substantially smaller package.

“This is just a mess for them,” said Charles Elson, a retired corporate law professor and founder of the corporate governance center at the University of Delaware. “They kowtowed to this apparent superstar with poor results.”

Elson, who has followed the court for more than three decades, said this is the first time he can remember a judge invalidating an executive compensation plan at a public company.

Lawyers for Musk and the directors had countered that the plan was fairly negotiated by a compensation committee whose members were independent, and that it was blessed by a shareholder vote.

Shareholders who approved Musk’s deal, Elson said, were unaware that Musk essentially was negotiating with himself. “If the shareholders were aware of that, they may well have not approved it.”

Find your latest news here at the Hemet & San Jacinto Chronicle

The post A court rejected Elon Musk’s $55.8B pay package. What is he worth to Tesla? appeared first on The Hemet & San Jacinto Chronicle.

Elon Musk has restored the X account of conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, pointing to a poll on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter that came out in favor of the Infowars host who repeatedly called the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting a hoax.

It poses new uncertainty for advertisers, who have fled X over concerns about hate speech appearing alongside their ads, and is the latest divisive public personality to get back their banned account.

Musk posted a poll on Saturday asking if Jones should be reinstated, with the results showing 70% of those who responded in favor. Early Sunday, Musk tweeted, “The people have spoken and so it shall be.”

A few hours later, Jones’ posts were visible again and he retweeted a post about his video game. He and his Infowars show had been permanently banned in 2018 for abusive behavior.

Musk, who has described himself as a free speech absolutist, said the move was about protecting those rights. In response to a user who posted that “permanent account bans are antithetical to free speech,” Musk wrote, “I find it hard to disagree with this point.”

The billionaire Tesla CEO also tweeted it’s likely that Community Notes — X’s crowd-sourced fact-checking service — “will respond rapidly to any AJ post that needs correction.”

It is a major turnaround for Musk, who previously said he wouldn’t let Jones back on the platform despite repeated calls to do so. Last year, Musk pointed to the death of his first-born child and tweeted, “I have no mercy for anyone who would use the deaths of children for gain, politics or fame.”

Jones repeatedly has said on his show that the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, that killed 20 children and six educators never happened and was staged in an effort to tighten gun laws.

Relatives of many of the victims sued Jones in Connecticut and Texas, winning nearly $1.5 billion in judgments against him. In October, a judge ruled that Jones could not use bankruptcy protection to avoid paying more than $1.1 billon of that debt.

Relatives of the school shooting victims testified at the trials about being harassed and threatened by Jones’ believers, who sent threats and even confronted the grieving families in person, accusing them of being “crisis actors” whose children never existed.

Jones is appealing the judgments, saying he didn’t get fair trials and his speech was protected by the First Amendment.

Restoring Jones’ account comes as Musk has seen a slew of big brands, including Disney and IBM, stop advertising on X after a report by liberal advocacy group Media Matters said ads were appearing alongside pro-Nazi content and white nationalist posts.

They also were scared away after Musk himself endorsed an antisemitic conspiracy theory in response to a post on X. The Tesla CEO later apologized and visited Israel, where he toured a kibbutz attacked by Hamas militants and held talks with top Israeli leaders.

But he also has said advertisers are engaging in “blackmail” and, using a profanity, essentially told them to go away.

“Don’t advertise,” Musk said in an on-stage interview late last month at The New York Times DealBook Summit.

After buying Twitter last year, Musk said he was granting “amnesty” for suspended accounts and has since reinstated former President Donald Trump; Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West, following two suspensions over antisemitic posts last year; and far-right Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who was kicked off the platform for violating its COVID-19 misinformation policies.

Trump, who was banned for encouraging the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection, has his own social media site, Truth Social, and has only tweeted once since being allowed back on X.

Find your latest news here at the Hemet & San Jacinto Chronicle

The post Elon Musk restores X account of conspiracy theorist Alex Jones appeared first on The Hemet & San Jacinto Chronicle.

NEW YORK (AP) — Billionaire Elon Musk said Wednesday that advertisers who have halted spending on his social media platform X in response to antisemitic and other hateful material are engaging in “blackmail” and, using a profanity, essentially told them to go away.

“Don’t advertise,” Musk said.

He appeared to specifically call out Walt Disney Co. CEO Bob Iger, saying, “Hey Bob, if you’re in the audience … that’s how I feel.”

In an on-stage interview at The New York Times DealBook Summit, Musk also apologized for endorsing an antisemitic conspiracy theory in response to a post on X that helped fuel an advertiser exodus.

The comments come just two days after Musk visited Israel, where he toured a kibbutz attacked by Hamas militants and held talks with top leaders.

Musk has faced accusations from the Anti-Defamation League, a prominent Jewish civil rights organization, and others of tolerating antisemitic messages on the platform since purchasing it last year. The content on X, formerly Twitter, has gained increased scrutiny since the war between Israel and Hamas began in October.

A slew of big brands, including Disney and IBM, this month stopped advertising on the platform after a report by liberal advocacy group Media Matters said their ads were appearing alongside pro-Nazi content and white nationalist posts.

X has since sued Media Matters, saying the Washington-based nonprofit manufactured the report to “drive advertisers from the platform and destroy X Corp.”

Find your latest news here at the Hemet & San Jacinto Chronicle

The post Musk uses expletive to tell audience he doesn’t care about advertisers that fled X over hate speech appeared first on The Hemet & San Jacinto Chronicle.