Texas officials are suppressing a journalist's public records request into why tech billionaire Elon Musk called the police on his neighbors in the upscale Austin-area community of West Lake Hills.
According to Lauren McGaughy of The Texas Newsroom at KUT, "Elon Musk has called the cops on some of his neighbors in West Lake Hills, TX. So I asked for all police calls made from that address from the last few years. The sheriff wouldn't give me the records." Then, she said, two days ago, Attorney General Ken Paxton's office stated in a filing that those records could not be released because there would be a "substantial risk of physical harm."
This kind of stonewalling is unprecedented, McGaughy wrote.
"I have seen this exception [from the Texas Public Information Act] for elected officials like judges, who have come under attack. I have not seen it for a private businessman."
Musk, who has been moving more of his operations from California to Texas in recent years, has taken an aggressive hard line against anyone who reveals information about his personal activity and movements, even when that information is legally supposed to be public.
In one of the most high-profile examples, after Musk took over the Twitter platform and renamed it to X, he banned an account that was tracking the movements of his private jet based on publicly logged flight plan information with the Federal Aviation Administration, and then proceeded to ban a cohort of journalists who had done nothing more than report on the controversy about it. Trump's FAA this year changed the rules to prevent this information from being trackable altogether.
More broadly, any attempt by reporters to detail the identities of people working under Musk's Department of Government Effiency (DOGE) task force have been met with fury from Musk's supporters, with a recent deep dive into how DOGE employee Luke Farritor dismantled the U.S. foreign aid system sparking fierce debate online about whether he has a right to operate outside of the public eye.