Texas Gov. Greg Abbott doesn’t want you reading his emails with the world’s richest man — not because he doesn’t want the public knowing about Elon Musk’s rapidly growing influence in the state.
They’re simply too “intimate” and “embarrassing,” Abbott has claimed.
In April, The Texas Newsroom requested records of email correspondence between Abbott, Abbott’s staff, and Musk, in an attempt to keep tabs on Musk’s thriving influence in the state. Abbott’s office has contested the request, invoking common-law privacy — a rule protecting public records that might “invade another individual’s personal privacy,” according to FOIA, a federal law that allows the public to request government records.
The emails contain “information that is intimate and embarrassing and not of legitimate concern to the public,” Matthew Taylor, Abbott’s public information coordinator, wrote in his appeal letter to the Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office.
They include “financial decisions that do not relate to transactions between an individual and governmental body,” the letter claimed.
Privacy exemptions are not rare, but are often reserved for highly sensitive records containing medical data or information about children — not for “intimate” conversations between “an elected official and businessman,” attorney Bill Aleshire and expert on public records told The Texas Newsroom.
“You’re boxing in the dark,” Aleshire said. “You can’t even see what the target is or what’s behind their claim.”
Or, as a Reddit commenter put it: “That’s the stupidest thing they could have said. Now of course everyone wants to see the emails.”
While eyebrow-raising, Abbott’s appeal is not out of the ordinary for Texas legal precedent, where a June 27 court ruling decided that Abbott and Paxton did not need to release internal email communications about the Jan. 6 Capitol riots, or the May 2022 Uvalde shootings.
Even as Musk’s footholds in D.C. deteriorated during a very public spat with President Donald Trump, his power in Texas has remained strong.
His small, but mighty, team of a dozen lobbyists have influenced “several new Texas laws,” Lauren McGaughy reports for The Texas Newsroom. Musk’s advocacy efforts have flourished behind closed doors, though — shielded by the state’s murky transparency laws, which allow lobbyists to conceal which politicians they’ve “wined and dined.”
It’s safe to say many Texans love Musk. Tesla registrations soared in Texas, even though they plummeted nationally, Axios reported in June. This year, his lobbyists successfully passed swaths of policies that would benefit his SpaceX endeavors (and successfully killed a bill that would regulate autonomous vehicles, right when Tesla robotaxis are coming under fire for hit-and-run risks). And, Musk just won a city council fight with his neighbors about his, frankly, ugly fence.
And now, it seems unlikely his “intimate” emails with the governor will see the light of day. So needless to say, he seems to be doing fine.