Former President Donald Trump’s plan to have Elon Musk lead a government efficiency commission would catapult the world’s richest man into an unprecedented role: American oligarch.
Details of the commission and Musk’s involvement remain sketchy, but any formal role in government would give greater influence to the billionaire owner of Tesla, Space X, satellite company Starlink and social media platform X — iconic companies that have benefited from federal contracts, tax credits and government incentives.
“This is like red lights going off and there are all kinds of conflicts of interest,” said Danielle Brian, president of the Project on Government Oversight.
Beyond potential competing interests, Musk’s potential foray into government would represent a stunning development for the tech giant, which would essentially have a role at the highest levels of business, manufacturing, media and Washington.
At the same time, giving Musk a seat in his potential administration would fit neatly with Trump’s governing strategy. The former president tapped billionaires Wilbur Ross and Steven Mnuchin to serve in his Cabinet, though they had much smaller public personas than Musk and had less to gain directly from their involvement.
“Musk is the latest example of a Silicon Valley guy totally obsessed with engineering and technology who looks at government and says, ‘How hard can it be? Let me do it and I can figure it out for you,’” said Peter Leyden, founder of the strategic foresight firm Reinvent Futures and former editor-in-chief of Wired. “There have been a lot of characters like this before and he’s the latest.”
That Musk has firmly ensconced himself in politics comes as no surprise to those who have watched him go from electric-car innovator to space entrepreneur to owner of X (and online troll for liberals). But tech experts say Washington can be tricky terrain for a Silicon Valley entrepreneur unaccustomed to the complexities of federal bureaucracy.
“He’s always been a maverick,” said Will Rinehart, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. “He’s worked on electric cars when nobody cared about electric cars. He’s worked on space when nobody cared about space.”
“That has pushed him into this space where being a nonconformist has this value for me.”
Musk has described himself in the past as a moderate, but he shifted his allegiance to Trump, formally endorsing him after the assassination attempt in July.
“I look forward to serving the United States if the opportunity arises,” Musk said. wrote in X“No pay, no title, no recognition needed.”
Like Trump, Musk has expressed hostility toward government oversight, particularly in California.
The billionaire has had longstanding feuds with the state’s deeply Democratic government and has often clashed with the state’s powerful labor interests. Early in the pandemic, he defied local public health orders and continued to build cars at Tesla’s Fremont plant despite the threat of Covid-19; he later sued to block what he called “fascist” restrictions and threatened to move the headquarters out of state.
He ended up moving some company operations to Texas later that year but continued to grow Tesla’s presence in California. He made similar threats of withdrawal earlier this year when, outraged by new protections for LGBTQ+ youth, he vowed to move X and SpaceX to the Lone Star State. Last month, he announced that the social media platform would close its downtown San Francisco offices and relocate employees to the nearby cities of Palo Alto and San Jose.
Musk has also faced legal scrutiny for his labor practices at both Tesla and X. A California judge found that he and other Tesla executives violated labor laws in 2017 and 2018 by sabotaging attempts to organize workers. Hundreds of former Twitter employees sued him after his $44 billion acquisition of the social media platform in 2022, accusing him of failing to pay severance pay.
Lorena Gonzalez, director of the California Federation of Labor, has been trading barbs with the billionaire for years. She noted that state lawmakers often viewed Musk as a positive for the state, giving Tesla millions in subsidies and promoting it as a prominent California company.
“Their product used to be labeled as environmentalist,” he said. “But there was nothing in it that suggested it was progressive or liberal.”
Musk did not respond to a request for comment.
Musk’s push into national politics grew with his 2022 purchase of Twitter, which he later rebranded as X. He immediately oversaw mass layoffs and implemented a new vision that promoted free speech, reforms that drew partisan criticism that he was enabling misinformation and harassment on the platform. Under Musk’s leadership, X’s valuation has plummeted and Investors lost more than $24 billion.
At Thursday’s Reboot conference, hosted by the right-leaning technology think tank Foundation for American Innovation, attendees were largely indifferent or inattentive to Musk’s bold promise to lead Trump’s commission.
Patrick Blumenthal, founder of venture capital fund Anomaly, suggested that given his apparent lack of involvement with any of Musk’s tech projects, he reflected a certain level of dilettantism that is not uncommon in the tech world.
“I think technology and politics are, to a certain extent, incompatible,” Blumenthal said. “But we have an industry full of smart people, so it’s inevitable that some of them will want to see if that intellect works in another realm.”
