President-elect Donald Trump’s full-throated support for oil and gas drilling might be expected to send a chill through the electric vehicle industry were it not for a wild card in his fledgling administration: Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk.

Trump has long railed against EV mandates and subsidies. Then came August, when Musk endorsed Trump and began pouring millions of dollars into the Trump campaign. Not long after, Trump said he was now in favor of some market share for EVs.

“I have to be, you know, because Elon endorsed me very strongly,” Trump said at a rally in Atlanta.

Clean transportation advocates are hopeful that Musk will continue to influence Trump’s position on EVs.

“If there’s a silver lining” to Trump’s victory, said Ramses Madou, chair of the Open Mobility Foundation, “it’s that Elon Musk can dial back on Trump’s anti-EV-ness.”

Here are some of the issues facing supporters of electric cars and trucks, and how Musk might influence them.

BUYER INCENTIVES

Reuters and other news organizations reported Friday that Trump plans to end the $7,500 consumer tax credit for EVs — a move that Musk supports.

After building his company on the back of federally financed buyer incentives, Musk believes Tesla no longer needs them — and that taking away the subsidies will mainly hurt his competitors.

“Take away the subsidies,” Musk wrote on X in July. “It will only help Tesla.”

Why would a company turn away such free money? Because Tesla is profitable, and the EV business at the traditional automakers as yet is not. Taking away buyer credits would hurt them more than it would hurt Tesla, whose EV market share has begun to drop in the face of new competition.

But there’s more to the story: So far this year, Tesla has posted $4.79 billion in profit. Of that, $2.07 billion came from government-required credits bought from Tesla by other automakers. That’s 43% of net income.

The EV federal credit system is simple in concept: Sell too many gasoline-powered cars, you accumulate deficits. If most of the vehicles you sell are EVs, you earn credits. To avoid government penalties, deficit holders must buy credits from companies like Tesla.

In other words, Tesla’s competitors are directly and dramatically boosting Tesla’s profits with rich flows of cash that they otherwise might have used in their own EV development.

How do EV buyer incentives fit in, and why might Musk want to see them gone? The fewer EVs other carmakers sell, the more credit money Tesla takes in as pure profit, boosting its own stock price and putting pressure on the shares of competitors. Since the election, Tesla stock is up 28%, closing at $320.72 on Friday. Most other automakers’ shares are stuck in neutral.

FEDERAL GRANTS

Tesla doesn’t just build passenger vehicles, it builds commercial trucks too. At least it’s trying to. To great fanfare, Musk introduced the Tesla Semi all-electric big rig in 2017. To date, the company has sold very few. It plans to begin mass production in 2026. Meanwhile, traditional truck builders are selling their own electric big rigs, and can’t keep up with demand.

The demand is high because of government mandates in California, sweetened with generous state and federal grants worth billions. Few would buy an electric truck today without government help. A new diesel truck typically costs $150,000 to $200,000. An all-electric version costs two to three times that amount.

Cutting off those federal grants could help Tesla against the competition. It would hurt major truck makers and could destroy electric truck startup companies, while giving the long-delayed Tesla Semi time to catch up.

The federal grant money is available to buyers of hydrogen fuel-cell trucks too. Musk has long belittled fuel-cell vehicles and Trump has often talked about hydrogen cars blowing up like an “atomic bomb.” That’s a gross exaggeration, as gasoline, battery and hydrogen vehicles all are subject to fire and explosion, albeit in different ways. Nonetheless, if Trump asks Musk’s opinion on dropping support for hydrogen vehicles, Musk is sure to egg him on.

TARIFFS

Musk’s conversations with Trump on tariffs could be tricky. Tesla runs a huge assembly plant in Shanghai, subject to Chinese government control. While showing little self-regulation on issuing blistering attacks on politicians he does not like, Musk has only kind words for Chinese leaders including President Xi Jinping.

Early this year, Musk seemed to support trade barriers against a potential influx of Chinese electric vehicles to the United States, saying Chinese companies could “demolish” other EV makers around the world. Within months, though, he changed his tune, opposing tariffs on EVs because “things that inhibit freedom of exchange or distort the market are not good.”

One of the main pillars of Trump’s economic policy is “beautiful tariffs” of 60% or more on Chinese goods. Business leaders, economists and even members of his own party have warned that such a policy could boost inflation and hurt economic growth.

“Much of the goods America imports are intermediate goods used in the production of other things,” thus lifting costs across the board for products manufactured in the U.S. and causing economywide “self-harm,” according to Jonathan Humphrey, senior economist at Benchmark Mineral Intelligence. He’s talking mainly about all the intermediary products that go into making cars, batteries and their enabling parts, even for goods made in America.

Trump is getting advice from all sides on the matter, and it remains to be seen whether decisions on tariffs go Musk’s way — or Xi’s.

CHARGING

Musk doesn’t talk much about federal funding for public EV charging stations, but it’s hard to see why he’d fight against it.

Biden’s bipartisan infrastructure bill devoted $5 billion to build public charging stations for cars and trucks every 50 miles along interstate highways. Tesla has built a widespread and dependable network of charging stations, and is now inviting owners of non-Tesla EVs to pay Tesla to use them, but more EV stations in more places will make things easier for owners of Teslas — and ease the need for Tesla to spend capital on building more of them.

Trump is unlikely to ax a program that will produce economic benefits across the country, in congressional districts red and blue. In any case, the money is already allocated, and “it would take an act of Congress to change that,” Debs Schrimmer of the U.S. Joint Office of Energy and Transportation said at the CoMotion LA mobility conference in Little Tokyo last week.

CERTAINTY

Musk has never been considered one to inject certainty into any situation. That adds to the tension around Trump’s economic plans.

Alex Gold, chief executive of BWD Strategic North America, is optimistic about the future for EVs, even under Trump.

“Rather than pulling back on clean energy, maybe he’ll just relax on the dirty [energy] so people can do both,” Gold said. “If Trump is pro-business, what business wants is certainty, and to make a U-turn right now would be surprising.”

Molly White is the model of an indefatigable and intrepid journalist. Through her website Web3 is Going Just Great and newsletter Citation Needed, she keeps tabs on the hacks, scams, failures, hype and assorted legal difficulties swirling about the cryptocurrency world.

She’s also independent, which means she’s unprotected by the fortification of lawyers and resources erected by the owners of newspapers such as The Times to fend off legal threats, frivolous and otherwise, that are part of the arsenal of people and firms we write about.

So she has some advice for journalists tempted by the burden of having bosses to “just go independent,” enticed, say, by the siren call of freelancing: “Just do a substack! It’s the future of journalism.”

White’s warning is, in a nutshell: “It’s not for everyone.”

Anyone who follows crypto scams is familiar with White’s work. A software engineer by training, she is a longtime Wikipedia editor who got interested in the dark underbelly of crypto when she tried to write a Wikipedia article about it.

She doesn’t find much if anything to like about the field, which she sees as a hive of people aiming to take advantage of the innocent and unwary — the facetious subtitle of her Web3 website calls it “definitely not an enormous grift that’s pouring lighter fluid on our already smoldering planet.”

But she does it all by herself.

“As an independent writer and publisher,” White wrote recently, “I am the legal team. I am the fact-checking department. I am the editorial staff. I am the one responsible for triple-checking every single statement I make in the type of original reporting that I know carries a serious risk of baseless but ruinously expensive litigation regularly used to silence journalists, critics, and whistleblowers…. I am the one who ultimately could be financially ruined by such a lawsuit. I am the one in charge of weighing whether I should spring for the type of insurance that is standard fare for big outlets to protect themselves and their staff, but often prohibitively expensive for independent writers.”

In recent weeks, White has had to fend off a couple of fatuous legal threats stemming from her work — one from a putative lawyer demanding that she take down a post for infringing a copyright under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (it wasn’t an infringement), and some sinister legalistic-sounding noise from the crypto platform Coinbase. We’ll return to both in a moment.

Experts in the potholes and pitfalls facing writers — especially investigation-minded or merely activist journalists — say they’ve received a rising number of inquiries from those considering launching a freelance career. Lloyd Jassin, a New York lawyer specializing in publishing law — including copyright and libel law, among other issues important to independent writers — says he’s referred several clients to brokers who represent insurance firms for writers in the last few months.

Curiosity about the freelance life is rising for several reasons. Mass layoffs in the media industry have put thousands of journalists on the street, forcing them to ponder new ways to exercise their professional skills.

Substack and other such platforms purport to offer writers a way to acquire followers of their own, building their personal brands. And the performance of established news media in the recent election, including the decision of the owners of The Times and the Washington Post not to endorse a presidential candidate, may have inspired established staffers to consider an exit from corporate media.

Independent writers’ works are protected, if theoretically, by U.S. libel laws, which discourage defamation lawsuits by public figures, and by so-called SLAPP laws, which discourage “strategic lawsuits against public participation” — that is, lawsuits designed chiefly to intimidate or silence critics. But exercising one’s rights under those laws can require hiring a lawyer, sometimes at considerable expense. Plaintiffs deemed to have filed a SLAPP lawsuit can be required to cover the defendant’s legal costs, but that would happen only after motions in court.

White is no stranger to efforts to intimidate her. The most concentrated pushback she has received recently has come from Coinbase. The crypto platform is irked at White’s reporting that it may have violated federal law by making political contributions while negotiating for and subsequently holding a federal contract.

In conjunction with the watchdog group Public Citizen, White filed a formal complaint against Coinbase with the Federal Election Commission on Aug. 1. In her reporting, White has shown that some of its contributions to the crypto industry super PAC Fairshake were made within the period in which political contributions are barred, which extends from the start of a contributor’s contract negotiations through the completion of the contract. The U.S. Marshals Service awarded Coinbase the $7-million, one-year contract to help manage the government’s hoard of seized crypto assets in July.

Coinbase hasn’t responded directly to White. Its response to the accusation has come through a series of tweets by its chief legal officer, Paul Grewal.

The gist of Grewal’s argument is that the funding for Coinbase’s contract comes from seized crypto assets in the Justice Department’s Assets Forfeiture Fund, not from congressional appropriations. Therefore, he contends, Coinbase didn’t violate the law prohibiting political contributions by contractors paid from “funds appropriated by the Congress.”

“Seized crypto assets are not Congressionally appropriated funds, period,” Grewal wrote.

As it happens, the legal question is far from being so cut and dried. In fact, the definition of “appropriated” was settled conclusively by the Supreme Court, in a 7-2 decision handed down in May and written by Justice Clarence Thomas. The only dissenters were justices Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Neil M. Gorsuch.

In that case, the justices turned away a challenge to the funding of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which derives from the Federal Reserve System. (The plaintiffs made an elaborately legalistic argument that such funding violates the “appropriations clause” of the Constitution and therefore the CFPB is unconstitutional.)

Thomas wrote that the plaintiffs had offered “no defensible argument” that the appropriations clause requires more than a congressional law authorizing “the disbursement of specified funds for identified purposes,” as was the funding for the CFPB.

By extension, so is the funding for the Coinbase contract. Indeed, the Congressional Research Service, in a close examination of the Assets Forfeiture Fund in 2015, found that for most purposes, the fund was the beneficiary of “a permanent appropriation” by Congress.

Grewal went further. Noting that he had placed his interpretation of the law on the record, he wrote that “repeating misrepresentations of facts after previously being put on notice is …. unwise.”

That sinister ellipsis is Grewal’s.

Grewal told me by email that no legal threat was implied by his tweet, and that Coinbase “certainly would make plain if it were our intent” to progress to a lawsuit.

Still, White interpreted Grewal’s tweet as “certainly a threat of something. I don’t think Coinbase is going to come and break my kneecaps, so a legal threat is the most obvious interpretation. It seems like a pretty clear threat to stop writing about this, or else.”

Public Citizen is sanguine about Coinbase’s swaggering. “Whenever corporate misconduct is pointed out, they always say ‘We didn’t really break the law, or the law doesn’t apply to us the way you think it does,’” says Rick Claypool, a research director at Public Citizen who co-filed the complaint with White. “It would be surprising if they said, ‘Oh, yeah, you’re right, whoops.’ Going up against a Goliath, they have a lot of strength to squish the Davids coming after them.”

Separately, White fielded a “takedown” notice from supposed representatives of Roman Ziemian, a co-founder of the alleged crypto pyramid scheme FutureNet. In an Aug. 19 post on Web3 is Going Just Great, White posted news reports that Ziemian had been arrested in Montenegro, and that he faces international warrants from authorities in Poland and South Korea.

The representatives tried to bribe her $500 to take down the post. When she refused, they copied the post to a blogging website, backdated it, and then claimed she had plagiarized it in an example of copyright infringement. She posted the notice, which came from a purported lawyer named Michael Woods with a Los Angeles address that doesn’t exist in Postal Service records. He didn’t respond to a message I left at the telephone number he listed.

How can independent journalists keep intimidation efforts like these at arm’s length? The goal of those threatening legal action, no matter how frivolous, is “to suppress criticism,” Jassin says. “Being a good journalist is the first defense,” he adds, so getting the facts right is indispensable.

White doesn’t keep a lawyer on retainer, but she knows lawyers who are “willing to glance at something I’ve received in my email inbox and reach out to offer support should one of those threats escalate into something more tangible” — which hasn’t yet happened.

“In a perfect world, reporting the facts would be enough to avoid frivolous lawsuits,” she told me. “But obviously, companies and people with resources are willing to file frivolous lawsuits regardless. That is a risk I take on, with hopes that being cautious and being very careful about fact-checking will at least stave off the worst.”

She advises journalists thinking about going independent to “think through if it would be life-altering to be on the risky end of an actual lawsuit.” There are ways, she notes, to “structure your business so you’re not risking your personal assets,” including finding insurance to cover one’s legal defense.

“Legal threats are only one component” of life as a freelancer. “There are a lot of other challenges — you don’t have employer-sponsored healthcare, or a 401k. A lot of readers think it’s an easy decision to quit a job and go independent. But despite all the challenges, I really love being independent.”

To try to keep young people from becoming addicted to tobacco, Congress took two steps in 2020 to keep minors from posing as adults to buy vaping products online: It barred e-cigarette sites from delivering through the U.S. Postal Service, and it required whatever delivery service they did use to check the recipient’s ID.

The state of California added its own twist that year, banning most flavored tobacco products. That prohibition did not explicitly cover online sales, but the city of San Diego is one of a number of local governments that adopted laws to eliminate any potential loophole.

Researchers at UC San Diego, Cal State San Marcos and Stanford decided to test how well those protections were working. If the results in San Diego are any indication, they’re hardly working at all.

The team lined up eight pairs of adults to try to buy flavored nicotine vaping products from 78 online retailers in October 2023. Each team made two identical orders from each retailer, with one buyer ordering from within the city of San Diego and the other in a different city in San Diego County with no explicit restrictions on online delivery of flavored vapes. In each order, they asked for delivery by the Postal Service if it was offered.

Ideally, the researchers would have struck out completely — none of the 156 orders delivered, given the state’s ban on the sale of flavored e-cigarettes, and certainly none delivered by the Postal Service. Failing that, at least the purchasers within the city of San Diego should have come up empty, considering the city’s explicit ban on online sales of flavored vapes.

And even if those measures failed, at the very least, each buyer’s ID should have been checked upon delivery to make sure they weren’t minors.

The results of the study, which were published online Monday by the Journal of the American Medical Assn., showed that more than two-thirds of the buyers successfully obtained flavored vapes, including almost 70% of the buyers in the city of San Diego — again, where those sales are explicitly prohibited, the study said.

Of the successful deliveries, 80% were handled by the Postal Service, which shouldn’t have carried any of them, the study found. An additional 9% came from services such as UPS and FedEx that have policies against delivering tobacco products.

Finally, 93% of the deliveries were completed with no attempt to verify the buyer’s age. In the vast majority of cases, the products were dropped off without any interaction between the buyer and the delivery person, according to the study. And in only one case did the delivery person scan the buyer’s ID, as required by federal law.

“These results demonstrated pervasive nonadherence to age verification, shipping, and flavored tobacco restrictions among online tobacco retailers,” the study’s authors wrote.

The authors also acknowledged that they examined sales in just one county. But that county has some of the toughest anti-tobacco measures in the country.

Eric Leas, an assistant professor at UCSD and director of the Tobacco E-commerce Lab, said in a statement that online sales of e-cigarettes are the largest and fastest growing sector of the tobacco industry.

“There are longstanding surveillance systems in place that help implement laws at brick-and-mortar stores, but we do not have a system in place for online retailers,” Leas said, adding, “The results of this study highlight the need for greater oversight and enforcement of online tobacco retailers.”

A top official at the Vapor Technology Assn., a trade group for the e-cigarette industry, said the study raised “an academic issue that is interesting, but not particularly relevant to what is really happening in this country with respect to youth and vaping products.”

Tony Abboud, the association’s executive director, said vaping by youth has plummeted since the age to purchase these products was raised to 21 in 2019. “The daily use of vaping products by youth is almost negligible,” he said, especially compared to other products that are banned for minors, such as alcohol and marijuana.

Abboud also said the UCSD research didn’t examine the age-verification systems used by online retailers. “There is no reason to believe youth are accessing vaping products online,” he said.

The latest survey by the CDC and the Food and Drug Administration found that although vaping remains the most popular form of tobacco use among minors, the number of middle- and high-school students who said they were currently vaping dropped sharply from 2023 to 2024.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “No tobacco products, including e-cigarettes, are safe, especially for children, teens, and young adults.”