Police won’t fine Elon Musk for illegally livestreaming while driving

“Had an officer observed the driver with the phone in their hand, they could have issued the driver an infraction ticket for violating California’s handsfree law,” writes Palo Alto PD Captain James Reifschneider.

“As no officer witnessed it happening in person at the time of occurrence, though, no ticket is forthcoming,” he instructed me through e mail.

Let me be clear: I’m fairly certain Palo Alto Police have higher issues to do than chase down the world’s richest man for a $20 fine. (That’s the one punishment for a primary offense — you may get a degree in opposition to your driving document for a second offense, however provided that it occurs inside three years of the primary violation.)

But Musk has been recognized to repeatedly flout the regulation — see my linkbox — and a few are starting to query his energy. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ronan Farrow not too long ago printed “Elon Musk’s Shadow Rule” at The New Yorker, a bit of reporting that exhibits, amongst different issues, how SpaceX’s Starlink satellites turned so vital to the warfare in Ukraine that the US authorities was pressured to deal with him with child gloves.

“He is more like a nation-state than an individual in terms of the implications of his power,” Farrow instructed Fresh Air.

As my colleague Andrew Hawkins factors out, the US authorities could also be about to make a significant determination concerning Musk — whether or not or to not drive a recall of Tesla’s autopilot software program following the NHTSA investigation into over a dozen crashes the place Autopilot automobiles hit stationary emergency automobiles.

Reifschneider, the police captain, says that there are sensible explanation why the division doesn’t ticket with out personally observing a driver — they want to have the ability to inform a decide what they noticed, confirm the motive force’s identification and driver’s license, and gather a license plate or VIN quantity for the car to assist the quotation.

“The officer needs to be prepared to testify in court about what they personally observed (namely, that they saw the phone in the driver’s hand),” he writes.