The former president and vice president’s relationship continues to decline. Their may be no coming back for them.
And Joe Biden is bitter with rage thanks to what Kamala Harris said about him.
Kamala Harris, the former Vice President, didn’t hold back when she took a shot at Joe Biden’s boneheaded decision to leave Elon Musk out of a major White House electric vehicle summit back in 2021. Speaking at Fortune’s Most Powerful Women Summit in D.C., she flat-out called it a “big mistake.”
Harris is out there hustling her new memoir, “107 Days,” where she rips into Biden for his “recklessness” in pushing for another term despite his obvious health issues. And now, she’s doubling down in public, saying the EV event snub was all about kissing up to big labor unions, which ended up biting them in the backside.
“I write in the book that I thought it was a big mistake to not invite Elon Musk when we did a big EV event,” Harris said when speaking with Fortune Editor-in-Chief Alyson Shontell.
“I mean, here he is, the major American manufacturer of extraordinary innovation in this space,” Harris stated, referring to Elon Musk. It’s refreshing to hear a Democrat admit that Musk, the guy revolutionizing cars and space travel, deserved a seat at the table instead of getting iced out.
That 2021 event brought in bigwigs from General Motors, Ford, and Stellantis, all to hype Biden’s pie-in-the-sky goal of half the new cars being zero-emissions by 2030.But Tesla, the real leader cranking out more EVs than those three combined, got zero love from the White House.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki at the time tried to spin it, saying the invite list was stacked with “the three largest employers of the United Auto Workers.”
When reporters grilled her on whether this was payback for Tesla going non-union, Psaki dodged the question: “I’ll let you draw your own conclusion.”
Musk fired back on X, tweeting: “Yeah, seems odd that Tesla wasn’t invited.” He wasn’t wrong; it reeked of favoritism toward the union bosses who prop up Democrats.
Just a month later, Musk slammed the Biden crew as “not the friendliest” and accused them of being “controlled by unions.” He had a point—the administration was bending over backward for organized labor while ignoring the company actually driving the EV boom.
The White House kept defending their cozy ties with the three companies, calling them essential for creating those precious union jobs. But Musk wasn’t buying it, especially when Biden snubbed SpaceX’s groundbreaking all-civilian space mission without a peep.
Harris nailed it at the summit, insisting that real leaders need to “put aside political loyalties” when it comes to celebrating tech breakthroughs.
“So, I thought that was a mistake, and I don’t know Elon Musk, but I have to assume that that was something that hit him hard and had an impact on his perspective,” she stated. And boy, did it—Musk swung hard toward the GOP, pumping nearly $300 million into Republican groups in 2024.
Harris didn’t stop at the Musk snub; she tore into the administration’s messed-up priorities, saying they blew it by shoving the infrastructure bill and CHIPS Act to the front of the line. “When we made the decision as an administration to put the infrastructure bill and the CHIPS Act first, I actually think that was a mistake,” she admitted to Fortune.
“Very important work, no question, but we did that before putting the immediate needs ahead of anything else.”
Harris warned that ignoring everyday Americans led to massive pushback. “If we can’t meet the basic needs of the people, there will be this backlash, which is going to resonate and sound like it is about ‘blame the rich’,” she explained.
“It’s about, ‘we need help for our basic needs, and please prioritize those needs’.”
Harris’s book and her comments pull back the curtain on a White House more interested in union payoffs than American innovation.
Stay tuned to The Federalist Wire.
