The chaos muppet California needed — but too late

Debra Kahn and Alex Nieves

Thu, Jun 5, 2025, 9:11 PM 3 min read

Has Elon Musk become the climate champion California wanted him to be all along?

The Tesla CEO's apparent pivot to self-interested electric vehicle policy advocate might be happening just in time to influence the Senate's direction on $7,500 electric vehicle rebates, which the House megabill gutted last week.

It's likely too late, though, to save the Clean Air Act waivers that let California enforce its stricter-than-federal clean-vehicle rules. Those are sitting on President Donald Trump's desk after Congress voted last month to roll back the state’s authority despite warnings that the move could be illegal.

And despite elected Democrats' seizing on Musk's sharp break with Trump as ammunition against the House bill, California climate advocates aren't following suit.

"He is certainly a chaos muppet, but whether he is the one California needs continues to be very much in question," said Craig Segall, a former deputy executive officer at the California Air Resources Board and a policy consultant. "He may sort of be blundering through a semi-appropriate door, but he doesn't really seem like someone people would want to keep company with."

Musk had reportedly been trying recently to save the tax credit behind the scenes, despite having declared himself indifferent to its fate early in the campaign cycle. He denied having flipped on Thursday, even after Tesla Energy, the company's solar and battery arm, began publicly opposing the bill's cuts to solar and battery tax credits last week.

"Keep the EV/solar incentives cuts in the bill, also cut all the crazy spending increases in the Big Ugly Bill so that America doesn’t go bankrupt!" he said on X.

But it's California's clean-vehicle targets that famously made his company billions through the sale of credits to other automakers who needed to meet the state's zero-emission sales targets. He hasn't mentioned those publicly, despite claims by Trump that they were at the heart of their sudden split.

"I took away his EV Mandate that forced everyone to buy Electric Cars that nobody else wanted (that he knew for months I was going to do!), and he just went CRAZY!" Trump said on social media Thursday.

Regardless of his positions on electric vehicles, Musk’s break from Trump world is a seemingly rational move as the company’s sales have plummeted in recent months amid backlash over his role in slashing the federal workforce and supporting far-right candidates around the world.

In California, where high electric vehicle penetration has long made it a barometer of Musk sentiment, drivers have turned on Tesla. The company now represents less than 44 percent of the state’s EV market, down from nearly 80 percent in 2020.