President Elon Musk
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Elon Musk suggests the U.S. should privatize the Postal Service and Amtrak
During a virtual appearance at a Morgan Stanley technology conference, Musk told attendees about his experiences riding bullet trains abroad and said, "And we come back to America, like, Amtrak is a sad situation."
By Garrett Haake and Alexandra Marquez
March 5, 2025
www.nbcnews.com
White House senior adviser to the president, Elon Musk, at the Capitol on Wednesday.
During a virtual appearance at a Morgan Stanley technology conference, Musk told attendees about his experiences riding bullet trains abroad and said, "And we come back to America, like, Amtrak is a sad situation."
By Garrett Haake and Alexandra Marquez
March 5, 2025
Elon Musk suggests the U.S. should privatize the Postal Service and Amtrak
During a remote appearance at a technology conference in San Francisco, Musk told attendees the U.S. should privatize "as much as possible."
White House senior adviser to the president, Elon Musk, at the Capitol on Wednesday.
Inside the Explosive Meeting Where Trump Officials Clashed With Elon Musk
Simmering anger at the billionaire’s unchecked power spilled out in a remarkable Cabinet Room meeting. The president quickly moved to rein in Mr. Musk.
By Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman
March 7, 2025
www.nytimes.com
Marco Rubio was incensed. Here he was in the Cabinet Room of the White House, the secretary of state, seated beside the president and listening to a litany of attacks from the richest man in the world.
Seated diagonally opposite, across the elliptical mahogany table, Elon Musk was letting Mr. Rubio have it, accusing him of failing to slash his staff.
You have fired “nobody,” Mr. Musk told Mr. Rubio, then scornfully added that perhaps the only person he had fired was a staff member from Mr. Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.
Mr. Rubio had been privately furious with Mr. Musk for weeks, ever since his team effectively shuttered an entire agency that was supposedly under Mr. Rubio’s control: the United States Agency for International Development. But, in the extraordinary cabinet meeting on Thursday in front of President Trump and around 20 others — details of which have not been reported before — Mr. Rubio got his grievances off his chest.
Mr. Musk was not being truthful, Mr. Rubio said. What about the more than 1,500 State Department officials who took early retirement in buyouts? Didn’t they count as layoffs? He asked, sarcastically, whether Mr. Musk wanted him to rehire all those people just so he could make a show of firing them again. Then he laid out his detailed plans for reorganizing the State Department.
Mr. Musk was unimpressed. He told Mr. Rubio he was “good on TV,” with the clear subtext being that he was not good for much else. Throughout all of this, the president sat back in his chair, arms folded, as if he were watching a tennis match.
After the argument dragged on for an uncomfortable time, Mr. Trump finally intervened to defend Mr. Rubio as doing a “great job.” Mr. Rubio has a lot to deal with, the president said. He is very busy, he is always traveling and on TV, and he has an agency to run. So everyone just needs to work together.
The meeting was a potential turning point after the frenetic first weeks of Mr. Trump’s second term. It yielded the first significant indication that Mr. Trump was willing to put some limits on Mr. Musk, whose efforts have become the subject of several lawsuits and prompted concerns from Republican lawmakers, some of whom have complained directly to the president.
Cabinet officials almost uniformly like the concept of what Mr. Musk set out to do — reducing waste, fraud and abuse in government — but have been frustrated by the chain saw approach to upending the government and the lack of consistent coordination.
Thursday’s meeting, which was abruptly scheduled on Wednesday evening, was a sign that Mr. Trump was mindful of the growing complaints. He tried to offer each side something by praising both Mr. Musk and his cabinet secretaries. (At least one, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who has had tense encounters related to Mr. Musk’s team, was not present.) The president made clear he still supported the mission of the Musk initiative. But now was the time, he said, to be a bit more refined in its approach.
From now on, he said, the secretaries would be in charge; the Musk team would only advise.
It is unclear what the long-term impact of the meeting will be. Mr. Musk remains Mr. Trump’s biggest political financial supporter — just this week his super PAC aired $1 million worth of ads that said, “Thank you, President Trump” — and Mr. Musk’s control of the social media website X has made administration staff members and cabinet secretaries alike fearful that he will target them in public.
But if nothing else, the session laid bare the tensions within Mr. Trump’s team, and news of the sharp clashes spread quickly through senior ranks of cabinet agencies after it was over. This account is based on interviews with five people with knowledge of the events.
In a post on social media after the meeting, Mr. Trump said the next phase of his plan to cut the federal work force would be conducted with a “scalpel” rather than a “hatchet” — a clear reference to Mr. Musk’s scorched-earth approach.
Mr. Musk, who wore a suit and tie to Thursday’s meeting instead of his usual T-shirt after Mr. Trump publicly ribbed him about his sloppy appearance, defended himself by saying that he had three companies with a market cap of tens of billions of dollars, and that his results spoke for themselves.
But he was soon clashing with members of the cabinet.
Just moments before the blowup with Mr. Rubio, Mr. Musk and the transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, went back and forth about the state of the Federal Aviation Administration’s equipment for tracking airplanes and what kind of fix was needed. Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary, jumped in to support Mr. Musk.
Mr. Duffy said the young staff of Mr. Musk’s team was trying to lay off air traffic controllers. What am I supposed to do? Mr. Duffy said. I have multiple plane crashes to deal with now, and your people want me to fire air traffic controllers?
Mr. Musk told Mr. Duffy that his assertion was a “lie.” Mr. Duffy insisted it was not; he had heard it from them directly. Mr. Musk, asking who had been fired, said: Give me their names. Tell me their names.
Mr. Duffy said there were not any names, because he had stopped them from being fired. At another point, Mr. Musk insisted that people hired under diversity, equity and inclusion programs were working in control towers. Mr. Duffy pushed back and Mr. Musk did not add details, but said during the longer back and forth that Mr. Duffy had his phone number and should call him if he had any issues to raise.
The exchange ended with Mr. Trump telling Mr. Duffy that he had to hire people from M.I.T. as air traffic controllers. These air traffic controllers need to be “geniuses,” he said.
The secretary of veterans affairs, Doug Collins, has been dealing with one of the most politically sensitive challenges of all the cabinet secretaries. Mr. Musk’s cuts will affect thousands of veterans — a powerful constituency and a core part of the Trump base. Mr. Collins made the point that they should not wield a blunt instrument and cleave off everyone from the V.A. They needed to be strategic about it. Mr. Trump agreed with Mr. Collins, saying they ought to retain the smart ones and get rid of the bad ones.
In response to a request for comment from The New York Times, Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said in a statement: “As President Trump said, this was a great and productive meeting amongst members of his team to discuss cost-cutting measures and staffing across the federal government. Everyone is working as one team to help President Trump deliver on his promise to make our government more efficient.”
Tammy Bruce, a spokeswoman for the State Department, responded, “Secretary Rubio considered the meeting an open and productive discussion with a dynamic team that is united in achieving the same goal: making America great again.”
A Department of Veterans Affairs spokesman said, “As President Trump has said, it’s important to increase efficiency and reduce bureaucracy while keeping in place the best and most productive federal employees. V.A. is working with DOGE and the rest of the administration to do just that.”
In a post on X on Friday, Mr. Duffy praised Mr. Trump and the work Mr. Musk’s team is doing and said it was an effective cabinet meeting. He added that “the DEI Department at the FAA was eliminated on day 2” and that Mr. Trump’s “approach of a scalpel versus a hatchet and better coordination between Secretaries and DOGE is the right approach to revolutionizing the way our government is run.”
Mr. Musk, who later claimed on X that the cabinet meeting was “very productive,” seemed far less enthused inside the room. He aggressively defended himself, reminding the cabinet secretaries that he had built multiple billion-dollar companies from the ground up and knew something about hiring good people.
Most cabinet members did not join the fray. Mr. Musk’s anger directed at Mr. Rubio in particular seemed to catch people in the room by surprise, one person with knowledge of the meeting said. Another person said Mr. Musk’s caustic responses to Mr. Duffy and Mr. Rubio seemed to deter other cabinet members, many of whom have privately complained about the Musk team, from speaking.
But it remains to be seen how long this new arrangement will last.
Simmering anger at the billionaire’s unchecked power spilled out in a remarkable Cabinet Room meeting. The president quickly moved to rein in Mr. Musk.
By Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman
March 7, 2025
Rubio and Trump Officials Clash With Elon Musk in an Explosive Meeting
Simmering anger at the billionaire’s unchecked power spilled out in a remarkable Cabinet Room meeting. The president quickly moved to rein in Mr. Musk.
Marco Rubio was incensed. Here he was in the Cabinet Room of the White House, the secretary of state, seated beside the president and listening to a litany of attacks from the richest man in the world.
Seated diagonally opposite, across the elliptical mahogany table, Elon Musk was letting Mr. Rubio have it, accusing him of failing to slash his staff.
You have fired “nobody,” Mr. Musk told Mr. Rubio, then scornfully added that perhaps the only person he had fired was a staff member from Mr. Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.
Mr. Rubio had been privately furious with Mr. Musk for weeks, ever since his team effectively shuttered an entire agency that was supposedly under Mr. Rubio’s control: the United States Agency for International Development. But, in the extraordinary cabinet meeting on Thursday in front of President Trump and around 20 others — details of which have not been reported before — Mr. Rubio got his grievances off his chest.
Mr. Musk was not being truthful, Mr. Rubio said. What about the more than 1,500 State Department officials who took early retirement in buyouts? Didn’t they count as layoffs? He asked, sarcastically, whether Mr. Musk wanted him to rehire all those people just so he could make a show of firing them again. Then he laid out his detailed plans for reorganizing the State Department.
Mr. Musk was unimpressed. He told Mr. Rubio he was “good on TV,” with the clear subtext being that he was not good for much else. Throughout all of this, the president sat back in his chair, arms folded, as if he were watching a tennis match.
After the argument dragged on for an uncomfortable time, Mr. Trump finally intervened to defend Mr. Rubio as doing a “great job.” Mr. Rubio has a lot to deal with, the president said. He is very busy, he is always traveling and on TV, and he has an agency to run. So everyone just needs to work together.
The meeting was a potential turning point after the frenetic first weeks of Mr. Trump’s second term. It yielded the first significant indication that Mr. Trump was willing to put some limits on Mr. Musk, whose efforts have become the subject of several lawsuits and prompted concerns from Republican lawmakers, some of whom have complained directly to the president.
Cabinet officials almost uniformly like the concept of what Mr. Musk set out to do — reducing waste, fraud and abuse in government — but have been frustrated by the chain saw approach to upending the government and the lack of consistent coordination.
Thursday’s meeting, which was abruptly scheduled on Wednesday evening, was a sign that Mr. Trump was mindful of the growing complaints. He tried to offer each side something by praising both Mr. Musk and his cabinet secretaries. (At least one, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who has had tense encounters related to Mr. Musk’s team, was not present.) The president made clear he still supported the mission of the Musk initiative. But now was the time, he said, to be a bit more refined in its approach.
From now on, he said, the secretaries would be in charge; the Musk team would only advise.
It is unclear what the long-term impact of the meeting will be. Mr. Musk remains Mr. Trump’s biggest political financial supporter — just this week his super PAC aired $1 million worth of ads that said, “Thank you, President Trump” — and Mr. Musk’s control of the social media website X has made administration staff members and cabinet secretaries alike fearful that he will target them in public.
But if nothing else, the session laid bare the tensions within Mr. Trump’s team, and news of the sharp clashes spread quickly through senior ranks of cabinet agencies after it was over. This account is based on interviews with five people with knowledge of the events.
In a post on social media after the meeting, Mr. Trump said the next phase of his plan to cut the federal work force would be conducted with a “scalpel” rather than a “hatchet” — a clear reference to Mr. Musk’s scorched-earth approach.
Mr. Musk, who wore a suit and tie to Thursday’s meeting instead of his usual T-shirt after Mr. Trump publicly ribbed him about his sloppy appearance, defended himself by saying that he had three companies with a market cap of tens of billions of dollars, and that his results spoke for themselves.
But he was soon clashing with members of the cabinet.
Just moments before the blowup with Mr. Rubio, Mr. Musk and the transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, went back and forth about the state of the Federal Aviation Administration’s equipment for tracking airplanes and what kind of fix was needed. Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary, jumped in to support Mr. Musk.
Mr. Duffy said the young staff of Mr. Musk’s team was trying to lay off air traffic controllers. What am I supposed to do? Mr. Duffy said. I have multiple plane crashes to deal with now, and your people want me to fire air traffic controllers?
Mr. Musk told Mr. Duffy that his assertion was a “lie.” Mr. Duffy insisted it was not; he had heard it from them directly. Mr. Musk, asking who had been fired, said: Give me their names. Tell me their names.
Mr. Duffy said there were not any names, because he had stopped them from being fired. At another point, Mr. Musk insisted that people hired under diversity, equity and inclusion programs were working in control towers. Mr. Duffy pushed back and Mr. Musk did not add details, but said during the longer back and forth that Mr. Duffy had his phone number and should call him if he had any issues to raise.
The exchange ended with Mr. Trump telling Mr. Duffy that he had to hire people from M.I.T. as air traffic controllers. These air traffic controllers need to be “geniuses,” he said.
The secretary of veterans affairs, Doug Collins, has been dealing with one of the most politically sensitive challenges of all the cabinet secretaries. Mr. Musk’s cuts will affect thousands of veterans — a powerful constituency and a core part of the Trump base. Mr. Collins made the point that they should not wield a blunt instrument and cleave off everyone from the V.A. They needed to be strategic about it. Mr. Trump agreed with Mr. Collins, saying they ought to retain the smart ones and get rid of the bad ones.
In response to a request for comment from The New York Times, Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said in a statement: “As President Trump said, this was a great and productive meeting amongst members of his team to discuss cost-cutting measures and staffing across the federal government. Everyone is working as one team to help President Trump deliver on his promise to make our government more efficient.”
Tammy Bruce, a spokeswoman for the State Department, responded, “Secretary Rubio considered the meeting an open and productive discussion with a dynamic team that is united in achieving the same goal: making America great again.”
A Department of Veterans Affairs spokesman said, “As President Trump has said, it’s important to increase efficiency and reduce bureaucracy while keeping in place the best and most productive federal employees. V.A. is working with DOGE and the rest of the administration to do just that.”
In a post on X on Friday, Mr. Duffy praised Mr. Trump and the work Mr. Musk’s team is doing and said it was an effective cabinet meeting. He added that “the DEI Department at the FAA was eliminated on day 2” and that Mr. Trump’s “approach of a scalpel versus a hatchet and better coordination between Secretaries and DOGE is the right approach to revolutionizing the way our government is run.”
Mr. Musk, who later claimed on X that the cabinet meeting was “very productive,” seemed far less enthused inside the room. He aggressively defended himself, reminding the cabinet secretaries that he had built multiple billion-dollar companies from the ground up and knew something about hiring good people.
Most cabinet members did not join the fray. Mr. Musk’s anger directed at Mr. Rubio in particular seemed to catch people in the room by surprise, one person with knowledge of the meeting said. Another person said Mr. Musk’s caustic responses to Mr. Duffy and Mr. Rubio seemed to deter other cabinet members, many of whom have privately complained about the Musk team, from speaking.
But it remains to be seen how long this new arrangement will last.
Because people will give their life for his.
Elon Musk's Father Warned In November That If Elon Had To Step Away From His Companies For Government Duties, It Could Be 'A Big Concern'
“Elon has a tremendous task on his hands,” Errol said. “He has a couple hundred thousand employees and a lot of very serious things going on in his life, so he has to be available for all that he started... [he] can't just walk away from things.”
Adrian Volenik
March 12, 2025
Elon and his Father, Errol Musk
“Elon has a tremendous task on his hands,” Errol said. “He has a couple hundred thousand employees and a lot of very serious things going on in his life, so he has to be available for all that he started... [he] can't just walk away from things.”
Adrian Volenik
March 12, 2025
Elon and his Father, Errol Musk
In south africa they called this state capture we had a sitting president who had an usually close relationship with a business family, the cacs over here weren't happy
"State capture is a type of systemic political corruption in which private interests significantly influence a state's decision-making processes to their own advantage."
Pentagon to brief Musk on top-secret plan for potential war with China, NYT reports
By Reuters
March 20, 2025
Billionaire Elon Musk, U.S. President Donald Trump's close ally, is due to be briefed on Friday by the Pentagon on the U.S. military's plan for any war that might break out with China, the New York Times reported on Thursday, citing U.S. officials.
Access to the closely guarded military plan would mark an sharp expansion of Musk's role as a Trump adviser who has spearheaded efforts to cut U.S. government spending.
It would also fuel questions about conflicts of interest for Musk, who as the head of both Tesla (TSLA.O), opens new tab and SpaceX has business interests in China and with the Pentagon.
The White House has previously said Musk will recuse himself if any conflicts of interest arise between his business dealings and his role in cutting federal government spending.
The briefing for the China war plan has about 20 to 30 slides that lay out how the United States would fight such a conflict, the New York Times reported.
The Pentagon confirmed that Musk will be visiting on Friday but did not share further details. "The Defense Department is excited to welcome Elon Musk to the Pentagon on Friday. He was invited by Secretary (Pete) Hegseth and is just visiting," a Pentagon spokesperson said.
Washington and Beijing have had tense relations for years over differences ranging from access to technology, trade tariffs and cybersecurity to TikTok, Taiwan, Hong Kong, human rights and the origins of COVID-19.
By Reuters
March 20, 2025
Billionaire Elon Musk, U.S. President Donald Trump's close ally, is due to be briefed on Friday by the Pentagon on the U.S. military's plan for any war that might break out with China, the New York Times reported on Thursday, citing U.S. officials.
Access to the closely guarded military plan would mark an sharp expansion of Musk's role as a Trump adviser who has spearheaded efforts to cut U.S. government spending.
It would also fuel questions about conflicts of interest for Musk, who as the head of both Tesla (TSLA.O), opens new tab and SpaceX has business interests in China and with the Pentagon.
The White House has previously said Musk will recuse himself if any conflicts of interest arise between his business dealings and his role in cutting federal government spending.
The briefing for the China war plan has about 20 to 30 slides that lay out how the United States would fight such a conflict, the New York Times reported.
The Pentagon confirmed that Musk will be visiting on Friday but did not share further details. "The Defense Department is excited to welcome Elon Musk to the Pentagon on Friday. He was invited by Secretary (Pete) Hegseth and is just visiting," a Pentagon spokesperson said.
Washington and Beijing have had tense relations for years over differences ranging from access to technology, trade tariffs and cybersecurity to TikTok, Taiwan, Hong Kong, human rights and the origins of COVID-19.
Fine, show us the minutes... WH like, "Nuh-uh, we didn't!"
Tesla has $1.4 billion that seems to have gone astray
Accounting experts say there are plausible explanations for the discrepancy as Elon Musk tries to rally the EV giant.
Musk Is Positioned to Profit Off Billions in New Government Contracts
The boost in federal spending for SpaceX will come in part as a result of actions by President Trump and Elon Musk’s allies and employees who hold government positions. Supporters say he has the best technology.
By Eric Lipton
Eric Lipton has spent the past year writing about SpaceX and its work for the federal government.
March 23, 2025
www.nytimes.com
Within the Trump administration’s Defense Department, Elon Musk’s SpaceX rocketry is being trumpeted as the nifty new way the Pentagon could move military cargo rapidly around the globe.
In the Commerce Department, SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet service will now be fully eligible for the federal government’s $42 billion rural broadband push, after being largely shut out during the Biden era.
At NASA, after repeated nudges by Mr. Musk, the agency is being squeezed to turn its focus to Mars, allowing SpaceX to pursue federal contracts to deliver the first humans to the distant planet.
And at the Federal Aviation Administration and the White House itself, Starlink satellite dishes have recently been installed, to expand federal government internet access.
Mr. Musk, as the architect of a group he called the Department of Government Efficiency, has taken a chain saw to the apparatus of governing, spurring chaos and dread by pushing out some 100,000 federal workers and shutting down various agencies, though the government has not been consistent in explaining the expanse of his power.
But in selected spots across the government, SpaceX is positioning itself to see billions of dollars in new federal contracts or other support, a dozen current and former federal officials said in interviews with The New York Times.
The boost in federal spending for SpaceX will come in part as a result of actions by President Trump and Mr. Musk’s allies and employees who now hold government positions. The company will also benefit from policies under the current Trump administration that prioritize hiring commercial space vendors for everything from communications systems to satellite fabrication, areas in which SpaceX now dominates.
Already, some SpaceX employees, temporarily working at the F.A.A., were given official permission to take actions that might steer new work to Mr. Musk’s company.
The new contracts across government will come in addition to the billions of dollars in new business that SpaceX could rake in by securing permission from the Trump administration to expand its use of federally owned property.
SpaceX has at least four pending requests with the F.A.A. and the Pentagon to build new rocket launchpads or to launch more frequently from federal spaceports in Florida and California. The F.A.A. moved this month toward approving one of those deals, more than doubling the annual number of SpaceX launches for its Falcon 9 rocket allowed at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, to 120.
SpaceX is the fastest-growing company of Elon Musk’s ventures
And SpaceX is pushing the F.C.C. for more federal radio spectrum — its Starlink satellite service depends on radio spectrum to send signals back and forth to Earth, meaning if it gets more it can increase its profits — a move its cellular provider rivals see as a power grab. The first of those awards was approved this month, after Mr. Trump replaced the head of the F.C.C. with a new chairman, Brendan Carr, who has been supportive of Mr. Musk.
The potential new revenue stream for Mr. Musk’s company comes after he donated nearly $300 million to support the 2024 campaign of Mr. Trump as he sought a return to the White House.
Mr. Musk then persuaded President Trump to put him in charge of the cost-cutting effort. From there, as a White House employee and adviser, he can influence policy and eliminate contracts.
“The odds of Elon getting whatever Elon wants are much higher today,” said Blair Levin, a former F.C.C. official turned market analyst. “He is in the White House and Mar-a-Lago. No one ever anticipated that an industry competitor would have access to those kinds of levers of power.”
Executives at SpaceX did not respond to requests for comment.
Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said in a statement that Mr. Musk, as a so-called special government employee had received briefings on ethics limits including those related to conflicts of interest and would abide by all applicable federal laws.
SpaceX had built itself into one of the nation’s largest federal contractors before the start of the second Trump administration, securing $3.8 billion in commitments for fiscal year 2024 spread over 344 different contracts, according to a tally by The Times of a federal contracting database.
Even if Mr. Trump had never given Mr. Musk and his employees a government role — or if former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. had been elected to a second term — SpaceX would have continued to secure new government work. What has changed is the overall value of the work expected to be delivered to SpaceX.
Douglas Loverro, a former senior NASA and Pentagon official who also served as an adviser to the Trump transition team on space issues, said SpaceX deserved to win many of these additional contracts.
“He does have the best tech,” Mr. Loverro said of Mr. Musk. “All of this will lift the space industry as a whole, obviously — but it will certainly help SpaceX even more.”
Other government contracting experts say they remain concerned Mr. Musk is positioned to secure special favors, particularly after Mr. Trump fired officials charged with investigating ethics violations and potential conflicts of interest.
“We will never know if SpaceX would authentically win competitions for these awards because all of the offices in government intended to prevent corruption and conflicts of interest have been beheaded or defunded,” said Danielle Brian, the executive director of Project on Government Oversight, a nonprofit group that tracks federal contracts.
“The abuse of power and corruption that is spreading across federal agencies because of Musk’s dual roles is horrifying,” she said.
Pentagon Rising
Even before Mr. Trump’s return, SpaceX had been working behind the scenes for several years to expand its business with the Pentagon and intelligence agencies.
It would hire former military officials who then reached back into the Defense Department to nudge former associates and friends to buy more SpaceX services.
Gary Henry, a former Air Force space and missile program supervisor, was among them. He joined SpaceX as it was developing Starship, the largest and most powerful spacecraft ever constructed.
During Mr. Henry’s tenure at SpaceX, the company secured a $102 million Air Force contract to study how Starship could deliver military cargo to points around the world within 90 minutes. Currently, that task is mostly done with the Air Force’s pack mules, C-130 cargo planes, which take much of a day for the trip.
SpaceX is still having trouble getting Starship operational. The two most recent test flights resulted in explosions that sent debris raining over the Caribbean.
Nonetheless, Mr. Henry — now back working for the Pentagon as a consultant — is promoting Starship as an option for the military.
Last month, while speaking on behalf of the Pentagon at a satellite industry conference in California, he described how Starship might be used during the Trump administration to deliver a major piece of military equipment “to any point on the planet very quickly.”
SpaceX’s Dragon cargo spacecraft undocking from the International Space Station last year.
A few weeks later, the Air Force disclosed plans to build a rocket landing pad on Johnston Atoll, a tiny island in the Pacific Ocean, to test these cargo ship landings. The Pentagon’s initial goal: to move 100 tons of cargo per flight, a total that only Starship, at least according to its design, has the power and size to handle.
“It’s frustrating,” said Erik Daehler, a vice president at Sierra Space, which also wants to sell cargo services to the Pentagon. “Things can’t just go to SpaceX.”
Maj. Gen. Steve Butow, the director of the space portfolio at the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit, when asked by The Times about Mr. Henry’s public comments on behalf of the agency for a project he had worked on as a SpaceX employee, said: “The optics were unfortunate.”
Mr. Henry, in an interview, said the nation would benefit from tools that SpaceX and other commercial space companies like Rocket Lab offer.
“Commercial space in general is very relevant to the problems we need to go solve,” he said. “It just turns out that SpaceX is kind of leading — it is the pointy end of the spear.”
An even bigger boost for SpaceX is likely, current and former Pentagon officials said, through a missile defense project called the Golden Dome.
For that project, Mr. Trump has ordered the Pentagon to rapidly figure out how to shoot down nuclear missiles headed for the United States, as well as strikes from lower-flying cruise and hypersonic missiles — an effort that could cost $100 billion annually, according to one estimate.
SpaceX already is positioned to handle a large share of the Pentagon’s military launch jobs in the next several years, along with Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin and United Launch Alliance, a consortium run by Lockheed Martin and
A space-based missile defense system would drive launch spending even higher, as the government would need to purchase more devices to track missile threats and transmit the data to target them, services that SpaceX also provides.
Ann Stefanek, an Air Force spokeswoman, said in a statement that the Space Force would adhere to all laws and regulations to ensure ethical and effective partnerships, which generally require competitive bidding for new contracts.
But industry observers said SpaceX would almost certainly secure a large share of this lucrative new work.
Laura Grego, a senior researcher at the nonprofit Union of Concerned Scientists, said: “Golden Dome is quite an apt name, as it is certainly going to cost a lot of coin.”
Mars Bound at NASA
Mr. Trump’s nominee to run NASA, Jared Isaacman, is a billionaire entrepreneur and a space enthusiast. He paid SpaceX hundreds of millions of dollars to fly — twice — into orbit aboard a rocket.
More importantly, his payment processing company, Shift4 Payments, purchased a stake in SpaceX several years ago, an investment that generated $25 million in gains in recent years, effectively making him and Mr. Musk business partners. That SpaceX stake was recently sold, a Shift4 executive said. In ethics documents released this month, Mr. Isaacman vowed to sever any remaining financial ties he had with SpaceX.
If confirmed, Mr. Isaacman will join Michael Altenhofen, who in February was named a NASA senior adviser after 15 years at SpaceX.
NASA has already paid SpaceX more money than even the Pentagon — a total $13 billion in contractual commitments over the past decade. Those deals include hiring SpaceX to deliver cargo and astronauts to orbit and to send NASA’s biggest and most expensive probes into the universe.
President Trump has nominated Jared Isaacman, a billionaire entrepreneur who is close to Mr. Musk, to take over NASA
Just last month, NASA awarded SpaceX a contract worth an estimated $100 million to launch a new space telescope that will search for asteroids that might threaten Earth.
But that is a relatively tiny chunk of how much new money SpaceX could secure from the agency in Mr. Trump’s second term.
Former NASA officials predict that Mr. Isaacman will quickly push to revamp the space agency’s Artemis project, which intends to return American astronauts to the moon. That move could generate resistance — as the program has many allies in Congress.
Currently, Boeing has one of the main contracts to build the rockets for Artemis. But Mr. Loverro and other former agency officials said they expect the government to phase out this rocket, as it is years behind schedule and billions of dollars over budget.
This will allow NASA to turn to commercial space companies such as SpaceX or Blue Origin to lift astronauts into orbit for future missions to the moon or even Mars.
Mr. Musk boasted this month that SpaceX would launch an uncrewed Starship to Mars by the end of 2026 and then send the first humans there by perhaps 2029 — an effort that he will likely push NASA to help finance. (Mr. Musk’s timeline predictions have been wrong in the past.)
Executives at Boeing and Blue Origin each declined requests for comment.
SpaceX “will almost certainly see massive new business,” said Pamela Melroy, a retired astronaut and Air Force officer who served as NASA’s deputy administrator during the Biden administration. “All of the indicators for SpaceX are trending positive.”
Bringing Broadband to Rural America
Until recently, Starlink had mostly been on the outside looking in — unable for the most part to tap into federal incentives to provide internet access to remote areas.
Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary, vowed in his confirmation hearing in January to change that.
Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary, who was sworn in last month. He made clear during his confirmation hearing that he wants to change the way the agency manages $42 billion in funding to expand broadband access
He promised to end the way the Commerce Department manages $42 billion in funding it is distributing to states to expand broadband access. The Biden administration chose to prioritize systems that wired homes directly to internet networks, rather than satellite-based systems like Starlink.
“Let’s use satellites, let’s use wireless and let’s use fiber,” Mr. Lutnick said at the hearing. “And let’s do it the cheapest, most efficiently we can.”
Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, who has often taken up battles with Washington on behalf of Mr. Musk, had already been pressuring the Commerce Department to ease grant rules to allow satellite-based broadband in rural areas, where the cost of running cable can be expensive.
Now, Mr. Cruz’s former Senate aide, Arielle Roth, who was helping with this push, has been nominated by Mr. Trump to lead the Commerce Department agency that will oversee the grant program.
The Federal Communications Commission has its own, smaller grant program that also provides funding to deliver broadband to underserved parts of the United States. Starlink had originally been slated to get nearly $1 billion in funding before the F.C.C. withdrew the offer in late 2023, saying that the service did not meet agency requirements.
The commission’s board chair has now been taken over by Mr. Carr, who had protested the decision to deny SpaceX these funds. Industry analysts and two former F.C.C. members interviewed by The Times said they now expect the agency to once again offer some of these grant funds to Starlink.
The commission also approved a SpaceX request this month, despite protests from Verizon and AT&T, to boost power on its Starlink satellites so they can provide smartphone service directly from orbit, ending cellphone dead zones for some customers.
A Starlink satellite kit being used in a community in Burnsville, N.C., after the destruction of Hurricane Helene last year. SpaceX is hoping to get federal incentives to provide internet access via Starlink to remote areas
A victory on each of these fights by SpaceX “could be huge — in the tens of billions of dollars,” said Drew Garner, a researcher at the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society.
But at the same time, there could be long-term costs to consumers nationwide.
Monthly satellite subscription costs for consumers are higher than wired internet, in most cases. Satellite-based systems also tend to be slower compared to cables wired to the house.
“Stranding all or part of rural America with worse internet so that we can make the world’s richest man even richer is yet another in a long line of betrayals by Washington,” Evan Feinman, who led the Commerce Department’s rural broadband program during the Biden administration, wrote in an email to his colleagues this month, on the day he left the agency.
Modernizing Aviation
After a fatal midair collision between an Army helicopter and a commercial jet in January, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy asked for Mr. Musk’s help.
The Federal Aviation Administration, which is trying to modernize its air traffic control and weather data systems, needed a boost in technical know-how, Mr. Duffy said.
Teams from SpaceX were brought into the agency to assist with this work.
Mr. Musk soon complained on social media that Verizon was moving too slowly on a multibillion dollar agency contract awarded in 2023 to deliver the new technology.
“The Verizon system is not working and so is putting air travelers at serious risk,” Mr. Musk wrote on X last month.
Theodore Malaska, one of the SpaceX employees working at F.A.A., was granted a special ethics waiver by the Trump administration to participate in “particular matters which may have a direct and predictable effect” on the financial interest of SpaceX, according to documents obtained by The Times.
Soon after, Mr. Malaska was boasting on X how the F.A.A. was now building SpaceX’s Starlink satellites into agency systems that send weather data to pilots. It is a design that could bring future federal business to SpaceX.
An F.A.A. spokesman said that as of mid-March, only eight of the Starlink terminals were in use and Mr. Musk said they had been donated. But other Starlink terminals have recently been installed at the White House and at the offices of the General Services Administration.
“I am working without biases for the safety of people that fly,” Mr. Malaska said in a social media posting.
The overlap in these roles — Mr. Musk’s employees advising agencies while SpaceX is installing its Starlink devices at agency locations — present an ethical situation that has few precedents in modern American history.
Federal rules generally prohibit awarding contracts to federal employees, including special government employees. Federal employees also are prohibited from taking actions that might benefit their own families or outside entities they have a financial relationship with.
Mr. Musk has argued he is not personally involved in pursuing SpaceX contracts. But federal contracting systems require the government to avoid not only actual conflicts of interest, but even the appearance of them.
“By any objective standard, this is inappropriate,” said Steven Schooner, a former government contracts lawyer who is now a professor studying government procurement at George Washington University.
“Given the power he wields and the access he enjoys,” Mr. Schooner added, “we just have never seen anything like this.”
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket preparing to launch in Cape Canaveral, Fla., in January
The boost in federal spending for SpaceX will come in part as a result of actions by President Trump and Elon Musk’s allies and employees who hold government positions. Supporters say he has the best technology.
By Eric Lipton
Eric Lipton has spent the past year writing about SpaceX and its work for the federal government.
March 23, 2025
Musk’s SpaceX Could Secure Billions in New Contracts Under Trump
The boost in federal spending for SpaceX will come in part as a result of actions by President Trump and Elon Musk’s allies and employees who hold government positions. Supporters say he has the best technology.
Within the Trump administration’s Defense Department, Elon Musk’s SpaceX rocketry is being trumpeted as the nifty new way the Pentagon could move military cargo rapidly around the globe.
In the Commerce Department, SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet service will now be fully eligible for the federal government’s $42 billion rural broadband push, after being largely shut out during the Biden era.
At NASA, after repeated nudges by Mr. Musk, the agency is being squeezed to turn its focus to Mars, allowing SpaceX to pursue federal contracts to deliver the first humans to the distant planet.
And at the Federal Aviation Administration and the White House itself, Starlink satellite dishes have recently been installed, to expand federal government internet access.
Mr. Musk, as the architect of a group he called the Department of Government Efficiency, has taken a chain saw to the apparatus of governing, spurring chaos and dread by pushing out some 100,000 federal workers and shutting down various agencies, though the government has not been consistent in explaining the expanse of his power.
But in selected spots across the government, SpaceX is positioning itself to see billions of dollars in new federal contracts or other support, a dozen current and former federal officials said in interviews with The New York Times.
The boost in federal spending for SpaceX will come in part as a result of actions by President Trump and Mr. Musk’s allies and employees who now hold government positions. The company will also benefit from policies under the current Trump administration that prioritize hiring commercial space vendors for everything from communications systems to satellite fabrication, areas in which SpaceX now dominates.
Already, some SpaceX employees, temporarily working at the F.A.A., were given official permission to take actions that might steer new work to Mr. Musk’s company.
The new contracts across government will come in addition to the billions of dollars in new business that SpaceX could rake in by securing permission from the Trump administration to expand its use of federally owned property.
SpaceX has at least four pending requests with the F.A.A. and the Pentagon to build new rocket launchpads or to launch more frequently from federal spaceports in Florida and California. The F.A.A. moved this month toward approving one of those deals, more than doubling the annual number of SpaceX launches for its Falcon 9 rocket allowed at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, to 120.
SpaceX is the fastest-growing company of Elon Musk’s ventures
And SpaceX is pushing the F.C.C. for more federal radio spectrum — its Starlink satellite service depends on radio spectrum to send signals back and forth to Earth, meaning if it gets more it can increase its profits — a move its cellular provider rivals see as a power grab. The first of those awards was approved this month, after Mr. Trump replaced the head of the F.C.C. with a new chairman, Brendan Carr, who has been supportive of Mr. Musk.
The potential new revenue stream for Mr. Musk’s company comes after he donated nearly $300 million to support the 2024 campaign of Mr. Trump as he sought a return to the White House.
Mr. Musk then persuaded President Trump to put him in charge of the cost-cutting effort. From there, as a White House employee and adviser, he can influence policy and eliminate contracts.
“The odds of Elon getting whatever Elon wants are much higher today,” said Blair Levin, a former F.C.C. official turned market analyst. “He is in the White House and Mar-a-Lago. No one ever anticipated that an industry competitor would have access to those kinds of levers of power.”
Executives at SpaceX did not respond to requests for comment.
Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said in a statement that Mr. Musk, as a so-called special government employee had received briefings on ethics limits including those related to conflicts of interest and would abide by all applicable federal laws.
SpaceX had built itself into one of the nation’s largest federal contractors before the start of the second Trump administration, securing $3.8 billion in commitments for fiscal year 2024 spread over 344 different contracts, according to a tally by The Times of a federal contracting database.
Even if Mr. Trump had never given Mr. Musk and his employees a government role — or if former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. had been elected to a second term — SpaceX would have continued to secure new government work. What has changed is the overall value of the work expected to be delivered to SpaceX.
Douglas Loverro, a former senior NASA and Pentagon official who also served as an adviser to the Trump transition team on space issues, said SpaceX deserved to win many of these additional contracts.
“He does have the best tech,” Mr. Loverro said of Mr. Musk. “All of this will lift the space industry as a whole, obviously — but it will certainly help SpaceX even more.”
Other government contracting experts say they remain concerned Mr. Musk is positioned to secure special favors, particularly after Mr. Trump fired officials charged with investigating ethics violations and potential conflicts of interest.
“We will never know if SpaceX would authentically win competitions for these awards because all of the offices in government intended to prevent corruption and conflicts of interest have been beheaded or defunded,” said Danielle Brian, the executive director of Project on Government Oversight, a nonprofit group that tracks federal contracts.
“The abuse of power and corruption that is spreading across federal agencies because of Musk’s dual roles is horrifying,” she said.
Pentagon Rising
Even before Mr. Trump’s return, SpaceX had been working behind the scenes for several years to expand its business with the Pentagon and intelligence agencies.
It would hire former military officials who then reached back into the Defense Department to nudge former associates and friends to buy more SpaceX services.
Gary Henry, a former Air Force space and missile program supervisor, was among them. He joined SpaceX as it was developing Starship, the largest and most powerful spacecraft ever constructed.
During Mr. Henry’s tenure at SpaceX, the company secured a $102 million Air Force contract to study how Starship could deliver military cargo to points around the world within 90 minutes. Currently, that task is mostly done with the Air Force’s pack mules, C-130 cargo planes, which take much of a day for the trip.
SpaceX is still having trouble getting Starship operational. The two most recent test flights resulted in explosions that sent debris raining over the Caribbean.
Nonetheless, Mr. Henry — now back working for the Pentagon as a consultant — is promoting Starship as an option for the military.
Last month, while speaking on behalf of the Pentagon at a satellite industry conference in California, he described how Starship might be used during the Trump administration to deliver a major piece of military equipment “to any point on the planet very quickly.”
SpaceX’s Dragon cargo spacecraft undocking from the International Space Station last year.
A few weeks later, the Air Force disclosed plans to build a rocket landing pad on Johnston Atoll, a tiny island in the Pacific Ocean, to test these cargo ship landings. The Pentagon’s initial goal: to move 100 tons of cargo per flight, a total that only Starship, at least according to its design, has the power and size to handle.
“It’s frustrating,” said Erik Daehler, a vice president at Sierra Space, which also wants to sell cargo services to the Pentagon. “Things can’t just go to SpaceX.”
Maj. Gen. Steve Butow, the director of the space portfolio at the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit, when asked by The Times about Mr. Henry’s public comments on behalf of the agency for a project he had worked on as a SpaceX employee, said: “The optics were unfortunate.”
Mr. Henry, in an interview, said the nation would benefit from tools that SpaceX and other commercial space companies like Rocket Lab offer.
“Commercial space in general is very relevant to the problems we need to go solve,” he said. “It just turns out that SpaceX is kind of leading — it is the pointy end of the spear.”
An even bigger boost for SpaceX is likely, current and former Pentagon officials said, through a missile defense project called the Golden Dome.
For that project, Mr. Trump has ordered the Pentagon to rapidly figure out how to shoot down nuclear missiles headed for the United States, as well as strikes from lower-flying cruise and hypersonic missiles — an effort that could cost $100 billion annually, according to one estimate.
SpaceX already is positioned to handle a large share of the Pentagon’s military launch jobs in the next several years, along with Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin and United Launch Alliance, a consortium run by Lockheed Martin and
A space-based missile defense system would drive launch spending even higher, as the government would need to purchase more devices to track missile threats and transmit the data to target them, services that SpaceX also provides.
Ann Stefanek, an Air Force spokeswoman, said in a statement that the Space Force would adhere to all laws and regulations to ensure ethical and effective partnerships, which generally require competitive bidding for new contracts.
But industry observers said SpaceX would almost certainly secure a large share of this lucrative new work.
Laura Grego, a senior researcher at the nonprofit Union of Concerned Scientists, said: “Golden Dome is quite an apt name, as it is certainly going to cost a lot of coin.”
Mars Bound at NASA
Mr. Trump’s nominee to run NASA, Jared Isaacman, is a billionaire entrepreneur and a space enthusiast. He paid SpaceX hundreds of millions of dollars to fly — twice — into orbit aboard a rocket.
More importantly, his payment processing company, Shift4 Payments, purchased a stake in SpaceX several years ago, an investment that generated $25 million in gains in recent years, effectively making him and Mr. Musk business partners. That SpaceX stake was recently sold, a Shift4 executive said. In ethics documents released this month, Mr. Isaacman vowed to sever any remaining financial ties he had with SpaceX.
If confirmed, Mr. Isaacman will join Michael Altenhofen, who in February was named a NASA senior adviser after 15 years at SpaceX.
NASA has already paid SpaceX more money than even the Pentagon — a total $13 billion in contractual commitments over the past decade. Those deals include hiring SpaceX to deliver cargo and astronauts to orbit and to send NASA’s biggest and most expensive probes into the universe.
President Trump has nominated Jared Isaacman, a billionaire entrepreneur who is close to Mr. Musk, to take over NASA
Just last month, NASA awarded SpaceX a contract worth an estimated $100 million to launch a new space telescope that will search for asteroids that might threaten Earth.
But that is a relatively tiny chunk of how much new money SpaceX could secure from the agency in Mr. Trump’s second term.
Former NASA officials predict that Mr. Isaacman will quickly push to revamp the space agency’s Artemis project, which intends to return American astronauts to the moon. That move could generate resistance — as the program has many allies in Congress.
Currently, Boeing has one of the main contracts to build the rockets for Artemis. But Mr. Loverro and other former agency officials said they expect the government to phase out this rocket, as it is years behind schedule and billions of dollars over budget.
This will allow NASA to turn to commercial space companies such as SpaceX or Blue Origin to lift astronauts into orbit for future missions to the moon or even Mars.
Mr. Musk boasted this month that SpaceX would launch an uncrewed Starship to Mars by the end of 2026 and then send the first humans there by perhaps 2029 — an effort that he will likely push NASA to help finance. (Mr. Musk’s timeline predictions have been wrong in the past.)
Executives at Boeing and Blue Origin each declined requests for comment.
SpaceX “will almost certainly see massive new business,” said Pamela Melroy, a retired astronaut and Air Force officer who served as NASA’s deputy administrator during the Biden administration. “All of the indicators for SpaceX are trending positive.”
Bringing Broadband to Rural America
Until recently, Starlink had mostly been on the outside looking in — unable for the most part to tap into federal incentives to provide internet access to remote areas.
Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary, vowed in his confirmation hearing in January to change that.
Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary, who was sworn in last month. He made clear during his confirmation hearing that he wants to change the way the agency manages $42 billion in funding to expand broadband access
He promised to end the way the Commerce Department manages $42 billion in funding it is distributing to states to expand broadband access. The Biden administration chose to prioritize systems that wired homes directly to internet networks, rather than satellite-based systems like Starlink.
“Let’s use satellites, let’s use wireless and let’s use fiber,” Mr. Lutnick said at the hearing. “And let’s do it the cheapest, most efficiently we can.”
Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, who has often taken up battles with Washington on behalf of Mr. Musk, had already been pressuring the Commerce Department to ease grant rules to allow satellite-based broadband in rural areas, where the cost of running cable can be expensive.
Now, Mr. Cruz’s former Senate aide, Arielle Roth, who was helping with this push, has been nominated by Mr. Trump to lead the Commerce Department agency that will oversee the grant program.
The Federal Communications Commission has its own, smaller grant program that also provides funding to deliver broadband to underserved parts of the United States. Starlink had originally been slated to get nearly $1 billion in funding before the F.C.C. withdrew the offer in late 2023, saying that the service did not meet agency requirements.
The commission’s board chair has now been taken over by Mr. Carr, who had protested the decision to deny SpaceX these funds. Industry analysts and two former F.C.C. members interviewed by The Times said they now expect the agency to once again offer some of these grant funds to Starlink.
The commission also approved a SpaceX request this month, despite protests from Verizon and AT&T, to boost power on its Starlink satellites so they can provide smartphone service directly from orbit, ending cellphone dead zones for some customers.
A Starlink satellite kit being used in a community in Burnsville, N.C., after the destruction of Hurricane Helene last year. SpaceX is hoping to get federal incentives to provide internet access via Starlink to remote areas
A victory on each of these fights by SpaceX “could be huge — in the tens of billions of dollars,” said Drew Garner, a researcher at the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society.
But at the same time, there could be long-term costs to consumers nationwide.
Monthly satellite subscription costs for consumers are higher than wired internet, in most cases. Satellite-based systems also tend to be slower compared to cables wired to the house.
“Stranding all or part of rural America with worse internet so that we can make the world’s richest man even richer is yet another in a long line of betrayals by Washington,” Evan Feinman, who led the Commerce Department’s rural broadband program during the Biden administration, wrote in an email to his colleagues this month, on the day he left the agency.
Modernizing Aviation
After a fatal midair collision between an Army helicopter and a commercial jet in January, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy asked for Mr. Musk’s help.
The Federal Aviation Administration, which is trying to modernize its air traffic control and weather data systems, needed a boost in technical know-how, Mr. Duffy said.
Teams from SpaceX were brought into the agency to assist with this work.
Mr. Musk soon complained on social media that Verizon was moving too slowly on a multibillion dollar agency contract awarded in 2023 to deliver the new technology.
“The Verizon system is not working and so is putting air travelers at serious risk,” Mr. Musk wrote on X last month.
Theodore Malaska, one of the SpaceX employees working at F.A.A., was granted a special ethics waiver by the Trump administration to participate in “particular matters which may have a direct and predictable effect” on the financial interest of SpaceX, according to documents obtained by The Times.
Soon after, Mr. Malaska was boasting on X how the F.A.A. was now building SpaceX’s Starlink satellites into agency systems that send weather data to pilots. It is a design that could bring future federal business to SpaceX.
An F.A.A. spokesman said that as of mid-March, only eight of the Starlink terminals were in use and Mr. Musk said they had been donated. But other Starlink terminals have recently been installed at the White House and at the offices of the General Services Administration.
“I am working without biases for the safety of people that fly,” Mr. Malaska said in a social media posting.
The overlap in these roles — Mr. Musk’s employees advising agencies while SpaceX is installing its Starlink devices at agency locations — present an ethical situation that has few precedents in modern American history.
Federal rules generally prohibit awarding contracts to federal employees, including special government employees. Federal employees also are prohibited from taking actions that might benefit their own families or outside entities they have a financial relationship with.
Mr. Musk has argued he is not personally involved in pursuing SpaceX contracts. But federal contracting systems require the government to avoid not only actual conflicts of interest, but even the appearance of them.
“By any objective standard, this is inappropriate,” said Steven Schooner, a former government contracts lawyer who is now a professor studying government procurement at George Washington University.
“Given the power he wields and the access he enjoys,” Mr. Schooner added, “we just have never seen anything like this.”
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket preparing to launch in Cape Canaveral, Fla., in January
God help us