Newsom on SpaceX rejection: ‘I'm with Elon’

CHARLOTTE, North Carolina — Gov. Gavin Newsom is backing Elon Musk in the billionaire’s dispute with a California agency that rejected a plan to increase SpaceX's rocket launches off the Pacific coast.

"I'm with Elon," Newsom, a Democrat, said in an interview late Thursday, after campaigning for Vice President Kamala Harris in the battleground state of North Carolina. "I didn't like that."

Musk sued the California Coastal Commission on Tuesday in federal court in Los Angeles, alleging it “engaged in naked political discrimination” when commissioners cited his support for former President Donald Trump in rejecting a Department of Defense proposal to expand the number of SpaceX launches at Vandenberg Space Force Base.

“Look, I’m not helping the legal case,” Newsom acknowledged. He added, "You can't bring up that explicit level of politics.”

Newsom indicated he broadly agreed with the lawsuit and that the independent agency should have confined its debate to the merits of the permit rather than engage in a discussion of Musk's political activities.

"These are friends of mine that said that," said Newsom, who appoints some of the members. "These are good commissioners. But you got to call balls and strikes. And trust me, I'm not big on the Elon Musk bandwagon right now. So that's me calling balls and strikes.”

Newsom has sparred with Musk on X over everything from the state’s protections for transgender and gay students in schools to a bill the governor signed banning political deepfakes . Musk responded to a measure outlawing AI-generated content before the November election by referring to Newsom as an evil comic character. “The Joker is in charge,” Musk wrote on X, repeating the insult in an interview.

There also has been considerable static between Musk and California officials over his see-sawing relocations of his companies to cities outside San Francisco or California.

And Newsom has mercilessly attacked Trump over myriad issues. In the interview with POLITICO, Newsom took the former president to task for threatening to hold back significant sums of federal disaster relief funding if California didn’t acquiesce to his many demands, which the governor derided as detached from reality.

Newsom said that while it was “encouraging, in this respect, that Elon saw the daylight” in understanding that punishing political opponents is wrong, the fact that the ultra-rich technology, space and automotive titan has donated at least $75 million to help Trump win the presidency again “goes to another question about his character, or his consistency in character."

The California Coastal Commission’s 6-4 rejection of the Air Force’s plan for increased launches hinged on concerns that all SpaceX activity would be considered military operations, making it harder to enforce environmental requirements. But the hourslong debate prior to the vote veered into a discussion about Musk’s political rhetoric, his support for Trump, his comments about transgender people and his companies’ labor records.

“Elon Musk is hopping about the country, spewing and tweeting political falsehoods and attacking FEMA while claiming his desire to help the hurricane victims with free Starlink access to the internet,” Commissioner Gretchen Newsom, who isn’t related to the governor, said at the meeting last week in San Diego.

Gretchen Newsom and agency Chair Caryl Hart both voted to reject the plan after condemning Musk’s conduct. Commissioners Mike Wilson and Justin Cummings also expressed concerns about Musk himself or SpaceX’s labor practices, but ultimately voted in favor of the launch increase. Wilson is a Newsom appointee, while Hart and Cummings were appointed by the state Assembly and Gretchen Newsom was appointed by the state Senate.

Newsom emphasized that his appointees had voted for the permit and that his administration had worked with the Defense Department prior to the vote to help reach a compromise on the proposal to increase rocket launches.

“I do not control that commission, infamously, in any way, shape or form, but two appointees did what I thought was the right thing," he said. "We worked with Space Force. We worked with the base commander [Colonel Mark Shoemaker] there in good faith.”

The two sides seemed to reach a detente heading into last week's meeting after the Air Force, which oversees Space Force, agreed in September to meet the commission’s seven conditions, including reducing the sonic booms and increased wildlife monitoring.

"Our team was working with them behind the scenes, Dee Dee [Myers], Wade [Crowfoot], others, there were legitimate concerns the coastal staff expressed,” Newsom told POLITICO Thursday, referring to his business adviser and his natural resources director.

“We engaged in the spirit of finding compromise. It wasn't about SpaceX, it was about exploration and other precedent,” Newsom said. “So I saw that [decision, and thought] that's not what this was about. … They certainly could have said, ‘We are just not comfortable with [the proposal] right now.’ But that wasn't what they said.”