The world‘s richest man has a lot to gain from Trump’s return to the Oval Office
Hang on a minute. Whom did we just elect? The Republican ticket had two names at the top: Donald Trump and J.D. Vance. But parts of this delirious November created the impression that someone else has taken hold of our collective destiny.
We already knew him in various roles—the guy who bought Twitter and fired more than half its staff, the inventor who brought the space program back to life, the carmaker whose new trucks make kids stop and stare on the sidewalk. All of a sudden, Elon Musk had moved into the realm of politics, headlining rallies, steering government appointments, shaping the agenda for the next President of the United States.
For more than three years he’s been one of the world’s richest and most powerful men. Markets soar and tumble on his tweets. Astronauts fly in his spaceships. Armies advance with the signals from his satellites. Conspiracy theories go mainstream through his embrace. But it was only in the spotlight of these elections that the full extent of his influence came into view.
Not since the age of William Randolph Hearst, the newspaper magnate who greased FDR’s ascent nearly a century ago, has a private citizen loomed so large over so many facets of American life at once, pulling the nation’s culture, its media, its economy, and now its politics into the force field of his will. Standing beside him, even Trump can seem almost in awe, less of a boss than a companion to the man for whom this planet and its challenges are not big enough.
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For now they act like partners, bonded through the favors they are trading and their shared desire to disrupt the institutions of government. They may deliver commands with one voice for a while. But their agendas do not align on everything. Both are willful, impulsive, and accustomed to being in charge. What will happen if they start to clash?
In that kind of fight, Musk may not have the upper hand. History is strewn with the wreckage of kingmakers who went to war against the leaders they installed. No matter how much wealth or influence Musk collects, the tools of state power will remain with the President, and things will get messy if he decides to use them against the billionaire who helped him return to the White House.
In the end, the durability of their partnership may depend on Musk’s motives: What drove him to become a MAGA prophet in the first place? If it was money he wanted, then mission accomplished.
The value of his fortune surged by more than $50 billion in the week after the election, peaking at more than $320 billion, as investors went berserk for shares of Tesla. But wealth has never been Musk’s obsession. The way he has bet his fortune on moony passion projects, like putting a greenhouse on Mars, should be proof enough that he dreams differently than the average Klingon aboard Starship Trump.
Read more: Why Elon Musk Was Person of the Year for 2021
People close to Musk say his ultimate goal has not changed since he launched SpaceX, his rocket company, in 2002. (Among its investors are Marc and Lynne Benioff, the owners of TIME.) For more than two decades, Musk’s white whale has been the red planet. It’s written right there on his favorite T-shirt: OCCUPY MARS. “Everything goes to that mission,” says a member of Musk’s social circle who recently talked to him about his plans. “He’s just realizing that being in control, directly or indirectly, of U.S. government budgets, is going to put us on Mars in his lifetime. Doing it privately would be slower.”
That does not mean U.S. taxpayers would foot the bill for Musk’s dream of interplanetary travel. But the public does tend to pay a price when eccentric visionaries take the reins of government. Millions of Americans, from retired factory workers to debt-laden graduates and newborn children, benefit from the social programs that Musk has promised to slash. Though he fires off multiple tweets a day to his 205 million followers, Musk has declined to answer questions from reporters, including this one, since he became consigliere to the President-elect. He has not explained his reported contacts with American adversaries, from China and Russia to Iran. Nor has he addressed the conflicts of interest that arise from playing a key role in a government whose regulators investigate his businesses.
So far, Trump seems happy to play along. In the middle of his victory speech on Nov. 6, he spent four minutes praising Musk, the “super genius” who helped run his ground game in Pennsylvania, reportedly paying canvassers to knock on 11 million doors and hiring vans to bring Amish people to the polls. “We have a new star,” Trump crowed from the stage in Florida. “A star is born—Elon!” Only later, roughly 19 minutes into his speech, did the President-elect turn back to his teleprompter and remember to thank his voters.
What Musk meant to the Trump campaign went far beyond the $120 million he pumped in, the field program he established, or the social-media boost he provided. To many of the young men who flocked to Trump in record numbers, Musk was an ideal avatar. He injected a sense of ingenuity and possibility into a familiar nostalgia act. If Trump thrills supporters by pledging to destroy corrupt institutions, Musk represents the promise of building new things and solving hard problems. Trump did not seem so old at his rallies with this Diablo-playing edgelord bouncing around beside him. And it became harder for Trump’s opponents to paint his team as a gaggle of halfwits when the greatest innovator of our time, with a record of delivering on outlandish plans, was pledging to slash spending by $2 trillion.
No matter how often the Democrats reminded us that Trump’s fortune grew out of inherited wealth, multiple bankruptcies, and decades of corporate shenanigans, they could not deny Musk’s achievements as a businessman. Even Senator Bernie Sanders, scourge of the billionaire class, hedged his criticism in a recent podcast: “Elon Musk is a very, very aggressive and capable businessperson, very impressive with what he’s accomplished. He says, I could do more in a week than the government can do in, you know, five years, and in some ways he’s right.”
At a time when faith in government has cratered, that’s all many voters want to see—a capable outsider, ruthless and independent, who knows how to take a gargantuan machine and make it leaner, faster, and more productive. Musk’s promise to do that with the American bureaucracy has already created momentum and cover for cutting costs on a scale that Washington has not seen in many years. That agenda did not get far during Trump’s first presidential term. Millions of people depend on government jobs, and on the protections that regulators provide from predatory businesses, like those that gave us opioid abuse and cigarettes as a cure for asthma. But small-government Republicans will be eager to follow Musk into ugly budget battles over federal waste and bloated entitlements. Many Americans will be rooting for them.
On the campaign trail, the most convincing argument Musk offered was not on Joe Rogan’s show or onstage at Trump’s rallies. It was on the launch pad in Boca Chica, Texas, where Musk’s aerospace company dazzled the world by catching a returning rocket with a pair of robotic arms. If the man who did this supports Trump with such fervor, couldn’t Trump accomplish even some of what he promised?
Read more: What Elon Musk Really Believes
A lot of voters seem to think so, especially the young men Musk targeted for Trump with his bravado. “The biggest factor here is that men need to vote,” Musk told Rogan on the eve of the election. The next day, when 60% of white men turned out for Trump, Musk tweeted: “The cavalry has arrived.” But his appeal reached well beyond the manosphere. It also moved a swath of voters who were put off by Trump’s character but excited by his policies. TV pundits said these people needed a “permission structure”; Musk provided just that to suburban women like Betsy Stecz. As she stood in line for his October rally in Lancaster, Pa., Stecz described a sense of relief: “You have people finally feeling like, OK, I can hold my head up and say: I’m not ashamed to vote for Donald Trump.” The reason, in her view, was Musk.
Given his role in the victory, Musk may have expected some reward. But his perch in Trump’s transition has reportedly unnerved some members of their entourage. For much of November, Musk camped out at Mar-a-Lago, weighing in on Cabinet picks and advising Trump on policy priorities. He went golfing with the President-elect, sat ringside with him at an Ultimate Fighting Championship event and took pictures with the Trump family; one grandkid raved on social media that Musk had attained “uncle status.” Musk coined a different term for his position: “First Buddy.”
Even that was an understatement. The leaders of Turkey and Ukraine had Musk listening in on their calls with Trump. An envoy from Iran, which stands accused of trying to assassinate Trump, reportedly met with Musk to talk about defusing tensions. (Iran’s Foreign Ministry has denied the meeting.) When House Republicans invited Trump to a closed-door session on Capitol Hill, Musk tagged along, the window of his car in Trump’s motorcade labeled GUEST 1.
Read more: Iran, Trump, and the Third Assassination Plot
By that point, Trump had appointed him to lead a new entity called the Department of Government Efficiency. Its acronym, DOGE, was a nod to the canine-themed cryptocurrency Musk has promoted as a kind of joke. But its mandate was serious. Trump claimed it would “dismantle” the federal bureaucracy and “restructure” its agencies. “This will send shock waves through the system,” Musk said.
It could also give Musk influence over the many agencies that regulate his work. A few weeks before Election Day, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration announced it is investigating Tesla’s self-driving vehicles after reported crashes. In June, regulators in California ordered Tesla to “correct ongoing air quality violations” at its Fremont plant. Tesla has said its cars are safe and its facilities comply with environmental standards. SpaceX has also had run-ins with the Federal Aviation Administration, which Musk threatened to sue for overreach in September. A review by the New York Times found that his companies are facing at least 20 regulatory battles and investigations from “all corners of the government.” Musk and multiple representatives declined to comment or to respond to TIME’s questions for this article, including about potential conflicts of interest.
He has yet to explain what principles would guide his purge of the bureaucracy. The co-director of DOGE, Vivek Ramaswamy, ran on a pro-business, libertarian platform in the last Republican primary. Musk’s politics, by comparison, are harder to pin down. This summer he referred to himself as “historically, a moderate Democrat.” He has called climate change the defining challenge of our age. When Barack Obama ran for President in 2008, Musk stood in line for six hours to shake his hand.
His relationship with Trump has often been rocky. Their views on tariffs are far apart, and Musk lasted less than six months as an adviser to the White House in 2017 before quitting in protest over Trump’s climate policies. Five years later, Musk said it was time for Trump to “sail into the sunset,” eliciting a furious response. “Elon should focus on getting himself out of the Twitter mess,” Trump said, “because he could owe $44 billion for something that’s perhaps worthless.”
Trump had a point. Musk’s purchase of Twitter made little evident business sense. He paid at least double the company’s value in 2022, then spent weeks dynamiting its revenue streams and cashiering its talent. The company’s head count, he has said, fell from 8,000 to around 1,500 under his leadership. Some of his posts on the platform, which he rebranded as X, came off as spasms of corporate self-harm. One referred to an antisemitic theory as the “actual truth.” (He later apologized.) Another shared a conspiracy theory about the hammer attack that put House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband in the hospital with a fractured skull. Dozens of companies, including Microsoft and Coca-Cola, pulled their ads from the platform in response. “Don’t advertise,” he told them last fall from the stage of a conference. “If somebody is going to try to blackmail me with advertising, blackmail me with money, go f-ck yourself. Go. F-ck. Yourself. Is that clear?” The investment firm Fidelity assessed in October that X had lost nearly 80% of its value in the past two years.
Musk didn’t seem to care. Even without most of its workforce, the platform continued to function, routinely topping the list of the most-downloaded news apps in the Apple app store. Major advertisers have returned. For some observers, all this has been reason enough to applaud Musk’s takeover as a master class in corporate efficiency. “What Elon did with Twitter is he got inside, cleaned house, and now it’s working better than before,” says the member of Musk’s social circle. “So the mood is that hopefully Musk can do the same thing with the U.S. government.”
That’s a tall order. Even fiscal hawks have balked at Musk’s promise to eliminate $2 trillion in federal spending. It would require taking an axe to Medicare, Social Security, and other parts of the social safety net. Musk warned the nation to prepare for a period of “temporary hardship” as these cuts take effect. But it’s far from clear that he will even have the power to make them. DOGE will remain outside of government, with no authority to fire federal employees. Many budgetary experts expect it to go the same way as countless blue-ribbon panels that tried and failed to pressure politicians to cut the programs their constituents love. In identifying waste, fraud, and abuse, the U.S. Congress needs no help: it already has an oversight branch called the Government Accountability Office, which assiduously tries to do that job.
Many early fans of DOGE say they recognize the limits of its potential and celebrate it all the same. “Yes, a Department of Government Efficiency is probably a pipe dream and might end up as essential as Monty Python’s Department of Silly Walks,” the Wall Street Journal columnist Andy Kessler wrote on Nov. 17. “But even if Mr. Musk’s DOGE simply trims some bloat and saves a few hundred billion, it will be worth it.”
On the campaign trail, Musk talked a lot about the need for the U.S. to live “honestly” and “within its means.” But if his social-media platform is any guide, his aims may have less to do with efficiency than ideology. His stated goal in acquiring Twitter matches one of his favorite reasons for supporting Trump: he says he wants to salvage free speech in America. “Freedom of speech is the bedrock of democracy,” he told Joe Rogan on the eve of the election. “Once you lose freedom of speech, you lose democracy. Game over. That’s why I bought Twitter.” Multiple reports and studies concluded that under his stewardship the platform has become a refuge for hateful and harmful content, in part because he fired its content-moderation team.
Read more: Elon Musk and the Tech Bro Obsession With ‘Free Speech’
Asked to explain his shift to the right, Musk often brings up the “woke mind virus,” his term for the leftward shift in American society that, in his view, gave rise to identity politics, cancel culture, and supposedly rampant online censorship. His grudge against these forces is not merely political. During the pandemic, one of his children sought gender-affirming medical care, and Musk has said he was tricked into approving it. His transgender daughter, who is now 20 years old and estranged from her father, legally changed her name in 2022 to Vivian Jenna Wilson. On a podcast in July, Musk said his child “is dead, killed by the woke mind virus. I vowed to destroy the woke mind virus after that.”
Wilson posted her response the next day: “I look pretty good for a dead bitch.” On Nov. 5, as the results of the election became clear, Wilson published another message: “Blame the f-cking politicians and oligarchs who caused this to happen,” she wrote. “Direct your anger towards them.”
In ancient Greek, the word oligarkhia meant “rule by the few.” Its earliest critic was Aristotle; in the 4th century BCE, the philosopher described it as a state of affairs in which “men of property have the government in their hands.” In medieval Venice, the leader of the oligarchy ruled for life, and he went by the same title that Musk gave to his new department: the Doge.
The purest expression of this system in modern times took shape in Russia in the 1990s, when a few businessmen bought up control of the national economy during its chaotic transition to capitalism. The Russian term for their oligarchy is semibankirshchina—the reign of the seven bankers.
The most powerful among them, Boris Berezovsky, used his media assets to help Putin win his first election in 2000, and he expected the new President to share the spoils of power. Instead, the two of them began to feud. Soon the Russian state forced Berezovsky into exile and seized his television network. Broke and lonely, the oligarch died in 2013 at his mansion in the English countryside. Authorities ruled it a suicide. To this day, his former media channel carries the Kremlin’s message.
One of Berezovsky’s close associates, Alex Goldfarb, now lives in New Jersey, and he has followed the tandem of Musk and Trump with a mix of familiarity and dread. “There seems to be an oligarchy forming here as well,” he says. “Under Putin in the early years, we had the oligarchs fighting the state with everything they had,” says Goldfarb. “Here it seems we have two oligarchs, Musk and Trump, working together to take over the state.”
The outcome may depend on the way this new duopoly treats the institutions they will soon control. If the aim is to sharpen them into leaner and more effective tools of governance, the public could benefit from the remaking of a system that has long been weighed down with bureaucratic flab. But Trump has also used those tools the way Putin has done in Russia—to benefit his friends and sideline his enemies.
Musk has a lot to gain from that arrangement. As long as he sticks to the role of First Buddy, he might expect an easy ride from the regulators Trump appoints throughout the government. His clearest path to Mars could thus run straight through the Oval Office. But apart from watching the spectacle of his success, what benefit will trickle down to everyday Americans?
The institutions that give us health care, keep our water clean, and educate our kids are not meant to be run like businesses. They are not built to make a profit, but that does not make them any less valuable, especially for the citizens who can least afford to pay. If those institutions get culled amid the Muskian push for efficiency, the hardship will not be temporary for those who rely on government support. For them, the pain could be devastating, and none of Musk’s promises of an interplanetary future will help them get through the problems of today.
—With reporting by Eric Cortellessa/Lancaster and Leslie Dickstein/New York