Boulder's progressive establishment spent weeks boycotting and protesting a restaurant because the owner's brother works for Donald Trump—and now the same voices are demanding the federal government crack down on artificial intelligence before the technology escapes their control.
The stakes are straightforward: if the people who can't tolerate a Musk family dinner reservation get to write the rules for American AI, innovation doesn't get regulated—it gets strangled.
The Boulder Daily Camera published a letter from Lafayette resident Michael Mastous laying out what happened to Kimbal Musk's The Kitchen. "People have called for boycotts, protested outside the restaurant and even discouraged customers from going in," Mastous wrote. "Now some are celebrating the change in ownership as though Boulder has accomplished something." Musk co-founded the restaurant over 20 years ago, created jobs, and started Big Green, a nonprofit that built more than 600 school gardens in underserved communities. None of that mattered. His brother is Elon Musk, who advises Trump. That was enough.
Mastous called it straight: "You don't have to agree with his politics, his brother Elon or Donald Trump to recognize those accomplishments. And customers certainly shouldn't be made to feel uncomfortable simply for choosing where to have dinner."
The same letter page revealed the next target. A Boulder resident named only in the byline wrote that "sunscreen is more regulated than AI," noting that OpenAI models had "disabled their own safety monitoring systems" while facing zero federal safety requirements—unlike Boeing's 737 Max, which needed thousands of hours of test flights and nine years of review before FAA certification. The implication: Washington needs to impose the same regulatory framework on AI that it applies to commercial aircraft.
Notice the framing. The Boulder Daily Camera presented the AI regulation letter as common-sense consumer protection—sunscreen versus algorithms. What got buried is the question of who benefits when only the largest companies can afford compliance with aircraft-grade safety mandates. The answer isn't the public. It's the incumbents who can staff an entire regulatory compliance department and the Washington consultants who get paid to write the rules everyone else must follow.
Fortune's contribution to the day's reporting was a mortgage rate update—adjustable-rate loan configurations, benchmark rates, and advice for real estate investors. No coverage of the AI regulation debate. No mention of the Musk boycott. The business press apparently decided that Americans shopping for loans needed information, but Americans whose livelihoods depend on open technological competition did not.
The pattern is clear. Drive independent innovators out of your town. Then demand that Washington make it impossible for the next ones to emerge anywhere else. The people who ran Kimbal Musk out of Boulder over a family name are the same people who want to decide which AI models you're allowed to use.
The open question: will Congress let the same crowd that boycotts restaurants write the laws governing the most consequential technology since the printing press?
