Former President Donald Trump’s plan to have Elon Musk lead a government efficiency commission would elevate the world’s richest man into an unprecedented role: American oligarch.
Details of the committee and Musk’s involvement are still unclear, but a formal role within the government would give greater influence to the billionaire owner of iconic startups that benefit from federal contracts, tax credits and government incentives, including Tesla, SpaceX, satellite company Starlink and social media platform X.
“This is like a red flag going off, there are all kinds of conflicts of interest,” said Daniel Bryan, executive director of the Government Oversight Project.
Potential conflicts of interest aside, Musk’s possible entry into government would be a surprising development for the tech giant, who essentially plays roles at the highest levels of business, manufacturing, media and Washington.
At the same time, giving Musk an administration post would fit well with Trump’s politics: The previous president appointed billionaires Wilbur Ross and Steven Mnuchin to his cabinet, but they had less name recognition and less to gain directly from their involvement.
“Musk is the latest example of a totally smart, engineering-brained Silicon Valley guy looking at the government and saying, ‘This isn’t that hard. Let me figure this out,'” said Peter Layden, founder of strategic forecasting firm Reinvent Futures and former editor-in-chief of Wired magazine. “There have been a lot of these guys, but he’s the latest.”
Musk’s move firmly into politics is no surprise to those who have followed his transformation from electric-car inventor to space entrepreneur to X owner (and liberal internet troll), but tech experts say Washington can be a tricky place for a Silicon Valley businessman unfamiliar with the intricacies of federal bureaucracy.
“He’s always been a contrarian,” says Will Reinerhart, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. “He’s worked on electric cars when nobody was interested in them. He’s worked on space when nobody was interested in them.”
“That put him in a realm where, for me, being a contrarian is valuable.”
Musk had previously described himself as a moderate, but after the assassination attempt in July he declared his loyalty to Trump and formally endorsed him.
“If I have the opportunity, I want to serve America,” Musk said. I wrote to X“I don’t need any compensation, titles or recognition.”
Like Trump, Musk has expressed hostility toward government oversight, particularly in California.
The billionaire has had a long-running feud with the state’s heavily Democratic government and has often battled with the state’s powerful labor unions. Early in the pandemic, he ignored local public health orders and kept Tesla’s Fremont factory producing cars despite the threat of COVID-19. He then sued to block restrictions he called “fascistic” and threatened to move his headquarters out of state.
He eventually moved parts of the company to Texas later that year, but Tesla’s footprint in California continued to grow. He made a similar threat to withdraw earlier this year, when he vowed to move X and SpaceX to California in anger over new protections for LGBTQ+ youth. Last month, he announced that the social media platform would close its offices in downtown San Francisco and move employees to nearby Palo Alto and San Jose.
Musk has also faced legal scrutiny for his labor practices at both Tesla and Twitter. A California judge found that Musk and other Tesla executives violated labor laws by thwarting workers’ attempts to organize in 2017 and 2018. Hundreds of former Twitter employees sued Musk for failing to pay them severance packages after Musk bought the social media platform for $44 billion in 2022.
Lorena Gonzalez, president of the California Labor Federation, has traded harsh words with the billionaire over the years, noting that state lawmakers have viewed Musk as a positive for the state, giving Tesla millions in subsidies and promoting the company as California’s flagship company.
“His products were often labeled as environmentally friendly,” she said, “but there was nothing to indicate he was a progressive or liberal.”
Musk did not respond to a request for comment.
Musk’s rise to national politics was furthered by his 2022 purchase of Twitter, which he later renamed X. He immediately oversaw mass layoffs and implemented a new vision to promote free speech. The reforms drew partisan criticism that he was encouraging misinformation and harassment on the platform. Under Musk’s leadership, X’s valuation plummeted, Investors lost more than $24 billion.
At the Reboot conference hosted Thursday by the Foundation for American Innovation, a right-leaning tech think tank, many in attendance were indifferent or uninterested in Musk’s bold pledge to lead President Trump’s commission.
Patrick Blumenthal, founder of venture capital fund Anomaly, suggested the project’s apparent unrelatedness to Musk’s tech projects might reflect a certain degree of dilettante mentality that’s not uncommon in the tech industry.
“I think technology and politics are mutually exclusive to some extent,” Blumenthal said, “but we have a lot of smart people in this industry, so inevitably people want to know whether their intelligence translates to other areas.”
