Even before Donald Trump was re-elected, his best-known backer, Elon Musk, had come to him with a request for his presidential transition. He wanted Trump to hire some employees from Musk’s rocket company, SpaceX, as top govt officials – including at the defence department, according to two people briefed on the calls.
That request, which would seed SpaceX employees into an agency that is one of its biggest customers, is a sign of the benefits that Musk may reap after investing more than $100 million in Trump’s campaign, pushing out a near-constant stream of pro-Trump material on his social media platform, X, and making public appearances on the candidate’s behalf across the hard-fought state of Pennsylvania.
The outreach regarding the SpaceX employees, which hasn’t been reported, shows the extent to which Musk wants to fill a potential Trump administration with his closest confidants even as his billions of dollars in govt contracts pose a conflict to any govt role. Musk and SpaceX and Tesla, his electric-vehicle company, did not respond to requests for comment. A spokesperson for Trump’s transition team also did not respond to a request for comment.
The six companies that Musk oversees are deeply entangled with federal agencies. They make billions off contracts to launch rockets, build satellites and provide space-based communications services. Tesla makes hundreds of millions more from emissions-trading credits created by federal law. And Musk’s companies are facing at least 20 recent probes, including one targeting a self-driving car technology that Tesla considers key to its future.
Now, Musk will have the ear of the president, who oversees all of those agencies. Musk could even gain the power to oversee them himself, if Trump follows through on a promise to appoint him as head of a govt efficiency commission. Trump has told Musk that he wants him to bring the same scalpel to the govt that he brought to Twitter after he bought the company and rebranded it as X. Musk has spoken of cutting at least $2 trillion from the federal budget.
The effect could be to remove, or weaken, one of the biggest checks on Musk’s power: the federal govt. “All of the annoying enforcement stuff goes away,” said Stephen Myrow, managing partner at Beacon Policy Advisors, a firm that sells corporations daily updates on regulatory and legislative trends in Washington. NYT