Dear listeners,

Elon Musk has produced some new legal issues for us this week. He has sued a coalition of advertisers for colluding to boycott the Twitter platform, saying this is an antitrust violation. Ken says this claim isn’t serious — antitrust law prohibits certain kinds of cooperation among firms in the marketplace, but not this kind, and besides you can tell Musk doesn’t think this is a real lawsuit because he didn’t use his real attack-dog lawyers from Quinn Emmanuel to file it. Musk’s effort to judge-shop in this case failed, too — he got the case before Reed O’Connor, a favorite of conservatives, but O’Connor recused himself, likely because he owns stock in Unilever, one of the defendants.

Musk is also the subject, along with Donald Trump, of a labor law complaint before the National Labor Relations Board, filed by the United Auto Workers. The UAW says Musk and Trump broke federal labor laws when Trump praised what he takes to be Musk’s practice of firing workers who would dare to unionize, during their shambolic interview on Twitter. But as Ken notes, Trump’s comments were obviously First Amendment-protected — political commentary about labor, not a true threat aimed at Trump’s or Musk’s own workers, as courts have found is necessary in prior cases to get crosswise with the NLRA.

In more Trump legal news: Trump has laid groundwork to sue the federal government over the Mar-a-Lago raid — a meritless claim (and it’s hard enough to get relief against the federal government even if you really were wronged) but then, Trump may soon be president, and perhaps he could award himself a settlement anyway. Missouri will not get the Supreme Court to consider whether its voters were harmed by the gag order in Trump’s New York criminal case. Saying that JD Vance fucked a couch isn’t defamatory (it’s satire) and saying Trump wasn’t almost in a helicopter crash with Willie Brown isn’t defamatory either (it’s true). And Trump’s campaign was hacked — news outlets are still considering what to do with the materials, but publishing the hacked materials is legal, so long as you didn’t solicit the hack.

And oh my god, the Young Thug Georgia RICO trial, it’s an even bigger mess than the Trump Georgia RICO trial.

We hope you enjoy the episode,

Josh

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