And how will this affect the world situation and America's domestic life
The Economist magazine, on the cover of its latest November 2024 issue, put a picture of Ilon Musk, in the form of a big kid, “playing” with his Starship rockets, Tesla car, a dog - symbol of his cryptocurrency DOGEcoin, a bull - symbol of America's financial center - Wall Street in New York and . . . White House.
The magazine's experts in the issue's lead article , “Elon Musk is Donald Trump's chief disruptor,” write:
“In 2017, Ilon Musk called Donald Trump a 'fraud' and 'one of the world's best bullshitters.' He is now known in Mar-a-Lago as Uncle Elon, and is part of the president-elect's inner circle. On Nov. 19, they watched the rocket launch together. The alliance of the world's leading politician and the richest man creates a concentration of power that both want to use to explosive effect: to cut bureaucracy, explode liberal orthodoxies and deregulate in the name of growth.
Trump has a mandate for such destruction. Despite America's economic success, much of Main Street, Wall Street and Silicon Valley is frustrated with government waste and incompetence. They are right. The state needs a restructuring. But Musk-led reform risks creating a new problem for America: the emergence of an explosive, corrupt oligarchy.
Weeks after he helped Trump win the election, Musk rose to the pinnacle of power. The president-elect appointed him to a new advisory body charged with cutting spending. Musk is already talking to foreign leaders and lobbying for cabinet appointments. This is far from the first time a tycoon has had extraordinary influence in America. In the nineteenth century, looters like John D. Rockefeller dominated the economy. In the early 20th century, when there was no Federal Reserve, John Pierpont Morgan acted as the sole central banker.
Musk's firms are more global than the large monopolies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and smaller when measuring profits to GDP. Musk Inc is worth the equivalent of just 2% of the US stock market. Its main divisions are Tesla, an electric car firm; SpaceX, its satellite communications and rocket business; X, formerly Twitter; and xAI, an artificial intelligence startup that was valued at $50 billion in a mid-November deal. They mostly have market shares below 30% and face real competition.
“The Economist calculated that 10% of Musk's $360 billion personal fortune is derived from contracts and free gifts from Uncle Sam, while 15% comes from the Chinese market and the rest is split between domestic and international clients.”
Musk is also notable for being a disruptor. Rather than exploiting monopolies to raise prices or creating a stable banking system as a basis for finance, much of Musk Inc uses technology to cut costs in competitive markets. This disruption is central to Musk's messianic ideology, in which innovation conquers humanity's intractable problems from climate change to colonizing Mars. Realizing these far-reaching goals depends on the genius of constantly reinventing industrial processes. His desire for freer action helps explain his disdain for orthodoxy, including what he considers awakened conformism. From the bureaucrats who allowed the U.S. government-run space launch market to be rigged by defense firms to the California galoots that regulate Tesla factories, he sees the state as an obstacle to growth."
Both Trump and Musk want to destroy the entire federal government. Musk said that DOGE (a new entity outside of government designed to fundamentally reform the U.S. government after Trump takes office, named after Musk's cryptocurrency symbol - V.O.) could seek to cut up to $2 trillion from the $7 trillion annual federal budget and abolish many agencies.
It 's easy to deride such goals as naive - $2 trillion is more than all of the government's discretionary spending. But with a budget deficit of 6 percent of GDP and a debt of nearly 100 percent, reforms are needed. The creaking Pentagon machine is struggling to adapt to the age of drones and AI. Lobbying by incumbent firms helps explain why federal regulations have reached 90,000 pages, close to an all-time high. Even if Musk achieved only a fraction of his liberalization, America has much to gain.
But what are the dangers? One is cronyism and bribery. The president-elect is an economic nationalist, and the industries in which Musk has interests have become strategic through rivalry with China, the militarization of space, and cross-border disinformation wars. His proximity to power may allow him to bend rules and tariffs and stiffen competitors in areas from cars and cryptocurrencies to autonomous vehicles and AI.
Musk Inc's total enterprise value has surged 50% to $1.4 trillion since the start of September 2024, far outperforming the market and its peers, as investors bet his boss can extract exceptional rents from his friendship with the president.
“At the same time,” the Journal writes, ”Musk can misstep, especially when he is outside his area of expertise. He has shown erratic judgment in international affairs, micromanaging the use of Starlink satellite service in Ukraine and comparing the status of Taiwan to Hawaii. His love of fame and conspiracies and the maelstrom of social media are troubling. With $50 billion of his personal fortune tied up in China, where half of Tesla's production is located, he is an obvious target for manipulation."
He could also fail before he even starts, due to the explosiveness of the Trump and Musk combination. The next president loves to hire and fire. The tech mogul burns executives and relationships. The fusion of Silicon Valley libertarianism and techno-utopianism with the maga-nationalism of Trump's world is inherently unstable. Reforming government requires patience and diplomacy, neither of which are Musk's strengths.
“If Musk's political career turns out to be short, it could still have two long-term deleterious effects. One will be politicians' aversion to reforming government. With his appointment, that goal has attracted more attention than ever. But if he embarks on a half-crude program that ends in spectacular failure, ambitions to tackle the spending problem will be set back years.
Another effect will be to normalize collusion between politicians and tycoons. As the state expands in trade, industrial policy, and technology, the incentives for state capture grow. At the same time, Trump's method involves weakening the institutions and practices that are supposed to guard against conflicts of interest. America is far from behaving like an emerging market. But if oligarchic business titans were constantly working with dominant politicians, it would do a lot of damage. It used to be unthinkable; now it's not.”
In an article in the same issue, “Elon Musk and Donald Trump seem to be in love with each other. Where is their friendship headed? “ the magazine's experts write:
“In his victory speech on election night, Donald Trump touched on most of the standard topics for such occasions. He thanked his supporters and his staff. He praised his wife and children. He pledged to remain loyal to voters. But mostly he talked about Ilon Musk. A full 17% of his remarks - the same amount of time he spent sketching out his plans for his presidency - were devoted to the “super genius” who took time off from running his various businesses to help Trump's campaign. He ranted about Musk's generosity, his efficiency and, above all, the technological prowess of his firms, “That's why I love you, Ilon”.
Musk, the world's richest man, and Trump, soon to be the world's most powerful man, are in the throes of a heady bromance. The pair have been inseparable since the election: Musk accompanied Mr. Trump to Washington to meet with Republicans in Congress, and Trump traveled to Texas with Musk to watch a test flight of a rocket built by SpaceX, one of Musk's firms.”
Musk, who describes himself as a “first mate,” appears to be involved in all elements of the presidential transition. He is present at interviews with potential cabinet nominees. He himself has been named co-director of the new “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE), which is supposed to cut both red tape and wasteful spending. He joined Trump's calls with world leaders. He also engaged in freelance diplomacy on his own, meeting with Iran's ambassador to the United Nations, according to the New York Times.
The hope that Musk can bring some business acumen and technical wizardry to the Trump administration is enticing. His deep thinking could help reduce America's gaping budget deficit, which is about 6 percent of GDP, and reshape its often clunky bureaucracy. But there are also plenty of reasons to worry about Musk's ascendancy. There will certainly be troubling conflicts of interest: Musk is partly interested in deregulation, after all, because of the many pesky regulations restricting his companies. Critics also fear that America's government could become dangerously dependent on one man, especially in space and satellites. Musk's forays into foreign policy could jeopardize both his own business interests and America's diplomatic goals. Perhaps the most pressing question is whether this bromance can last, given that both men are known for their huge egos and frequent bickering with friends and colleagues. In short, all is set for a tumultuous psychodrama with global repercussions.
Both Musk and Trump have already benefited immensely from their friendship. Musk is believed to have spent around $200 million to help Trump get elected, a huge sum considering that total reported spending by the campaign and outside groups is currently around $1.1 billion (and will increase as final reports are filed). Musk has played a big role in efforts to attract voters in swing states, focusing on those with little interest in politics. At the very least, it allowed the campaign to divert its limited funds to other causes. It may also have helped mobilize support for Trump among young people. Trump, whose campaign speech emphasizes his success as a businessman, clearly enjoyed the support of such a high-profile entrepreneur. The fact that Musk owns X, a social media platform beloved by politicians, and used it to energetically support Trump was another bonus.
The benefits to Musk from this alliance were even greater. Since the election, the market capitalization of Tesla, the electric car company that accounts for about two-thirds of his wealth, has grown by $300 billion. That increase alone is more than double the combined market value of General Motors, Ford and Stellantis, Detroit's “big three” automakers. While the U.S. stock market has risen across the board, Tesla's rise has been steeper (see chart). Since Musk owns roughly 20% of the company, its growth has added $60 billion to his personal wealth. The next largest company in Musk's portfolio, SpaceX, is privately held, so its jump in value is harder to gauge. But reports suggest that its stock also has a much higher price than it did before the election.
Investors clearly believe a Trump presidency will be good for Musk's firms. First and foremost, the government is a big customer of SpaceX in particular, with which it has signed contracts worth more than $15 billion over the past decade. Most of that amount is for NASA , but some transactions are for military purposes. SpaceX has a $14 million contract with the U.S. Space Force to provide communications for the Ukrainian military and government through Nov. 30 through its Starlink satellite network. The Space Force is also paying SpaceX $733 million to put satellites into orbit. The Pentagon plans to incorporate 100 satellites from SpaceX's military division, Starshield, into its own communications network. Starshield also has a $1.8 billion contract to help the secretive National Reconnaissance Office build spy satellites. The Space Development Agency has a $149 million contract to send messages between SpaceX satellites using a laser and so on.
For the record:
The U.S. Space Force has also been monitoring test flights of SpaceX's new Starship mega rocket, with the expectation that the super-heavy launch vehicle could be used by the U.S. Department of Defense to deliver military supplies from one point on Earth to another.
Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman oversaw Starship's sixth test flight from the company's Starbase in Texas on Nov. 19, which was also attended by SpaceX founder Elon Musk and President-elect Donald Trump. The 400-foot reusable launch vehicle consists of SpaceX's Super Heavy booster and the Starship spacecraft, giving it a much larger payload capacity than any other rocket available today.
While the development of the launch vehicle is critical to NASA's plans to resume missions to the moon and explore Mars, the Space Force is also monitoring the potential military use of Starship, particularly for logistics missions, Lt. Gen. Philip Garrant, head of Space Systems Command (SSC), told reporters Nov. 21.
"We're thinking about how we might utilize it. We think the first, most logical, given the payload volume ... would be some type of rocket-based cargo delivery mechanism,” Garrant said during a roundtable discussion hosted by the Defense Writers Group. “We're absolutely interested in the potential military utility and are definitely watching their progress.”
The Space Force recently took control of the Air Force Research Laboratory's Rocket Cargo Vanguard pilot program, renaming it Point-to-Point Delivery (P2PD). The concept aims to use commercially available rockets to rapidly deliver military cargo anywhere on Earth, including unconventional landing sites both near structures and in remote locations.
According to supporting documents, the service requested $4 million in its fiscal year 2025 budget request to “support the detailed engineering design required for a P2PD provider to perform airlift delivery” to support U.S. Transportation Command's supply missions.
Garrant also pointed to the rocket's potential to launch large numbers of satellites into low Earth orbit (LEO) - where both the government and commercial space industry are expected to deploy vast constellations of hundreds of platforms - as a “game changer.” In other cases, Starship may launch a few satellites to LEO to allow other orbital vehicles to deliver them to other points in space.
SpaceX has now carried out 90% of all orbital launches in America in 2023. Government agencies accounted for more than 20% of its business. For the same reason, during Trump's first term, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) offered subsidies to Starlink to expand broadband access in rural areas. But the nearly $900 million payment was canceled during Joe Biden's presidency. It may be reinstated during Trump's second term.
The rigor with which the government enforces the rules also affects Musk's firms. They are the subject of more than 20 investigations and audits by various federal agencies. For example, the National Labor Relations Board is upset with how Musk is handling workers' campaigns to unionize at Tesla. The Department of Transportation has complained about how Neuralink, Musk's brain implant company, transports hazardous materials. And the Fish and Wildlife Service believes SpaceX hasn't done enough to protect bird nests near the launch pad for its rockets in Texas. A less demanding administration could have addressed all of these concerns.
But in the grand scheme of Musk's business empire, his contracts with the government are minutiae and his regulatory complaints are minor annoyances. His companies are worth well over $1 trillion. His personal fortune is estimated at about $360 billion. For all of SpaceX's government contracts, most of its revenue comes from Starlink, almost all of whose customers are for-profit companies.
By far the most significant way the Trump administration could influence his fortunes is by creating new regulations and repealing old ones. Musk has long argued that Tesla's future depends on the successful development of autonomous vehicles. Currently, autonomous driving is regulated at the state level, which puts Tesla at a disadvantage compared to Waymo, a subsidiary of Alphabet, the company that owns Google. Waymo already operates “robot cabs” in several cities, while Tesla has yet to launch any fully autonomous services. After Bloomberg reported on Nov. 17 that Trump's transition team told advisers it planned to make the federal autonomous driving framework a priority, Tesla's stock soared, while shares of Uber and Lyft, which could be hurt by the competition, fell.
Another of Trump's other potential policies - eliminating a generous tax break for electric cars - would also have a big impact on Tesla. While it would make the company's cars more expensive, it would hurt other U.S. manufacturers more because Tesla's costs are lower. “It will be devastating to our competitors,” Musk gloats. In fact, eliminating the exemption along with higher tariffs (another Trump promise) could be particularly beneficial to Tesla, whose electric cars have the highest proportion of parts made in North America in the industry. Both domestic and foreign competitors will be undercut.
SpaceX's fate also depends largely on regulators. The company has received FCC approval to launch 12,000 satellites (already more than 6,000 in orbit), but has requested permission for another 30,000. Musk has also complained often and loudly about the lethargy of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), which he accuses of “stifling” innovation with “Kafkaesque paperwork.” He jokes that he can build a rocket faster than the agency can process the proper permits. SpaceX develops new spacecraft through frequent testing and redesign. Its commercial and government competitors tend to be slower and more methodical. Thus, the byzantine bureaucracy burdens SpaceX more. A more permissive approach would be a boon.
Musk's firms' sensitivity to regulation creates clear conflicts of interest in his proposed role as co-manager of DOGE. However, neither Trump nor Musk seems to have any qualms. Trump made the problem clear during the campaign when he muttered: “I'm in favor of electric cars. I should be in favor of them because Ilon supported me.” Musk, for his part, said his dream and SpaceX's apparent corporate goal of colonizing Mars will only be possible with DOGE: “The Department of Government Efficiency is the only way to extend life beyond Earth”.
“The potential conflicts are so obvious,” the publication's experts wrote, ”that Trump appears to be designing DOGE to circumvent the relevant rules. He specified in announcing the creation of the department that Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, a businessman turned politician who will be his joint chief of staff, would offer ideas for reforming the bureaucracy “from outside the government.” As an adviser rather than a federal employee, Musk will not be subject to various ethical rules, notes Kathleen Clark of Washington University in St. Louis.
But the arrangement could also reduce DOGE's effectiveness, since it would more closely resemble a commission than a regular government department. In fact, the prevailing view in Washington is that DOGE won't do much good. This is not because of any doubts about Musk's sincerity or abilities. He has been campaigning against bureaucracy for years, long before there was any real prospect of being given a formal mandate to cut it. He moved Tesla's headquarters from California to Texas in part to protest California's bureaucratic practices. In 2023, he took umbrage in a typical tweet, “Like Gulliver bound by thousands of little ropes, we are losing our freedom one rule at a time.”
At both Tesla and SpaceX, Musk has shown himself to be a master of efficiency, cutting the cost of previously rare technologies to a degree that incumbents thought impossible. Trump calls him “the greatest cost-cutter ever.” (The president-elect seems particularly impressed with Musk's decision to lay off about three-quarters of its employees after buying X, even though the value of X has declined dramatically during Musk's ownership, making it almost financially irrelevant to him.) Musk himself has talked about cutting $2 trillion, or about a third, from the federal budget and greatly simplifying the tax code.
But the history of attempts to cut regulation and government spending in America is not encouraging. The stumbling block is usually Congress, whose members are not eager to eliminate jobs in their districts. Ronald Reagan created a similar structure known as the Grace Commission, with an explicit mandate to “drain the swamp.” Congress shelved its proposals.
So Messrs. Musk and Ramaswamy have said they will recommend changes that Trump can make unilaterally, without passing new legislation. They argue that the opportunity to do so is enormous because of two recent Supreme Court rulings that have limited the power of the bureaucracy and thus called into question many existing rules. But legal challenges to any reforms are inevitable, and the pair will have just 18 months to get something done: DOGE can't officially begin operations until Trump becomes president on Jan. 20 and is expected to cease operations by July 4, 2026.”
Indeed, it's possible that Musk's influence may have already peaked. He has a lot of businesses to run, and he can't indefinitely put corporate life on hold for the sake of endless pats on the back at Mar-a-Lago, Trump's Florida estate, or - eventually - the White House. Presidential transitions are inherently fluid and their direction malleable, especially before the most important personnel are chosen. But in less than two months, the transition will be over, replaced by the more rigid bureaucratic structures of Washington.
There is no exact historical precedent for Musk's influence on Trump, but presidents and their business sponsors tend to squabble. William Hearst, the newspaper magnate, quickly became disillusioned with Franklin Roosevelt, whose first presidential campaign he enthusiastically supported. Andrew Carnegie, a steel magnate who was the richest man in the world in his day, could not get Theodore Roosevelt to listen to him on foreign policy issues. Theodore Roosevelt also ended up crossing swords with JP Morgan, the founder of the bank of the same name, after enlisting his help in ending a miners' strike.
There are already signs that Trump is not completely captive to Musk. Although Musk publicly called for the appointment of Howard Lutnick, a Wall Street financier, as Treasury Secretary, Trump instead gave him the less prestigious position of Commerce Secretary. Musk is rumored to be bickering with longtime Trump advisers. Trump showed a hint of fickleness at a recent meeting at Mar-a-Lago when he joked about Musk, “I can't kick him out of here.”
At the very least, concerns about Musk's outsized influence are probably exaggerated. SpaceX's dominance of the strategic industry is not unprecedented. IBM had 88% market share of tabulating hardware in 1932 and 70% of the nascent computer industry in 1967. Its devices were critical to the Pentagon and intelligence agencies, used for everything from air defense to cryptanalysis. AT & T had a monopoly on telephone services for most of the twentieth century and thus made itself indispensable to American spies. Both firms were eventually hobbled by antitrust suits, though the success of SpaceX and Tesla is due to superior products, not monopoly.
In practice, Musk's influence over military affairs is not as unhindered as it seems. First, SpaceX's position in space launches is commanding but not monopolistic, argues Doug Loverro, a former top Pentagon and NASA official . The vast majority of its launches are its own satellites, he notes. If you remove them, the picture looks more balanced. U.S. Space Force contracts for launches from 2022 through 2027 are split roughly equally between SpaceX and a competing consortium, he says. The Pentagon's plans for megastars for communications include a dozen different contractors. Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, is setting up a rival firm, Blue Origin. Starship, meanwhile, is well suited for sending lots of small satellites into low Earth orbit and delivering humans to Mars, he argues - but not for sending larger military and spy satellites into higher orbits. “The fact is that this is a very competitive field,” Loverro concludes.
It's also unclear whether Musk will actually be able to use his influence. “To the extent that the U.S. government needs SpaceX,” says John Plumb, who until recently was the assistant secretary of defense in charge of space, ”SpaceX needs the U.S. government.” The company needs operating licenses from the FCC and launch licenses from the FAA. While Musk is becoming an increasingly dominant supplier, the government is also a buyer with unusual buying power. “In my experience, SpaceX has been a great partner for the Department of Defense. But if SpaceX, for whatever reason, decided to challenge the full force of the U.S. government,” Plumb concludes, ”it would be a terrible, terrible business decision and, frankly, paralyzing for them.” If necessary, the president could even invoke the Defense Production Act of 1950, which allows the government to force private firms to act in the interest of national security.
Even the idea that Musk could exert undue influence on foreign policy could be turned upside down. Musk's closeness to Trump can be seen as a liability for his companies outside of America. The most obvious test is China, where just over half of all Tesla vehicles are made. The firm's dependence on China, if anything, is growing: in May 2024, it broke ground on a second factory in Shanghai to produce batteries.
The leverage this gives Chinese authorities over Tesla already appears to be limiting Musk's actions. While he is giving access to Starlink to Iranians with smuggled terminals in the name of free speech, despite their government's objections, he has done nothing similar in China. He tends to follow the official Chinese line on Taiwan and is unsparing in his praise of China as a place to do business.
The risk that Tesla could become embroiled in Trump's relationship with China is obvious. “I think the Chinese are thinking very carefully about how to use Musk to let Trump know that tariffs have costs,” says Zach Cooper of the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank. He notes that China has few contacts in the Republican Party and perhaps hopes Musk can help mend relations with the Trump administration. “If Musk wants to continue to make significant amounts of money in China, they will expect him to play a positive role,” Cooper says, noting that China only needs to tweak its electric vehicle regulations to have a big impact on Tesla's fortunes.
Similar risks apply to Musk's involvement in politics in general. He is now so closely aligned with Trump that he may push some people away from buying Tesla, said Tu Le of consulting firm Sino Auto Insights. While X saw record traffic during the election, the number of people leaving the platform for less magical competitors like Threads and Bluesky has since skyrocketed. Moreover, the alliance between tech libertarians like Musk and the nativist populists who are the backbone of Trump's support is fragile. One camp craves change, the other rejects it. It's an irresolvable contradiction.
If things go wrong, Musk could suffer dire consequences. His control of Tesla is not indestructible. Unlike other tech moguls like Mark Zuckerberg, who owns voting shares in Meta*, Facebook's parent company*, Musk's 21% stake in Tesla doesn't completely insulate him from other shareholders. If his policies end up hurting the company, he could still be kicked out. His large stake in SpaceX provides more protection, but a good relationship with Uncle Sam is necessary for it to work. Musk is entering an even more complex field than rocket science. It will take a supergenius to get through it without incident.
In the third article in this issue of the Economist, “ The Transformation of Ilon Musk,in his own words, ” the magazine's experts note:
“Sure, sometimes you might say something stupid like I did, but that's how people will know it's really you!” As part of a call for “political and corporate leaders” to join him in his rants on X, his social network, Ilon Musk repeatedly emphasized that such posts offer an unusual and appealing authenticity. We took him at his word. What do his tweets say about him?
To find out what topics Musk cares about and how his views have changed over time, The Economist analyzed his Twitter activity (as it was) and X (as it became in 2023). Using artificial intelligence to look at his 38,358 posts from December 2013 to November 2024, the magazine's experts found that he posted much more frequently and with a much more political bent. Climate change and clean energy used to be the policy areas on which he expressed his opinions the most, but now he's much more vocal about immigration and free speech.
Musk publishes a lot more than he used to. From December 2013 through mid-2018, he averaged just over a dozen tweets a week. From then until October 27, 2022, when he completed the acquisition of X, he published 50 posts a week. After the takeover, that number increased to about 220 per week.
Those who follow him (and there are over 200 million of them) may have also noticed the change in topics. From 2016 through 2021, 30% to 50% of his tweets each year were about Tesla or SpaceX, his two biggest companies. These days, it's only 11%. Meanwhile, the percentage of his posts that are political has risen from less than 4% in 2016 to more than 13% this year.
The changing themes of such posts are even more dramatic. In 2022, when he bought Twitter, posts about free speech spiked. That was followed by a jump in 2023 and 2024 in conversations about immigration, border control, election integrity and the “awakened mind virus.” The vicissitudes of bad regulation remained a common theme throughout.
Despite his significant business interests outside of America, few posts mention other countries. Between 2017 and 2020, about 1% mentioned China, but often in passing (“China and Japan have amazing trains...”) or to praise Tesla's local unit. Since then, his interest in the country has waned. Prior to Russia's war with Ukraine, Musk didn't show much interest in either country, but in 2022 they featured in nearly 3% of his tweets. The only other country mentioned in more than 1% of his posts in recent years was Brazil, after the country briefly blocked X in August 2024.
To his followers, Musk urges a tight focus on missions he considers urgent, such as turning humans into an “interplanetary species” by colonizing Mars. But his own posts show a shift in interests over the past few years, with the only really intense focus on the act of publishing itself. He may have more money than anyone else on Earth and the ear of the next president, but to an outside observer he may not seem so different from any other American in his 50s: politically lurching to the right, online most of the time, complaining about immigration and ridiculing the left.
Other major media outlets are paying close attention to Trump and Musk's relationship.
Stephen Collinson in a CNN article, “Now it's Trump's turn to bask in Musk's glory” (11/20/2024) writes:
“On Nov. 19, all eyes should have been fixed on the sky above the launch pad in Texas as the world's biggest rocket rumbled into space.
But the orbit that's getting the most attention now isn't in the heavens - it's an ever-closer connection on Earth, bringing together the future most powerful man on the planet and its richest man.
President-elect Donald Trump and Ilon Musk - after trips to meet Republicans in Washington, D.C., and an Ultimate Fighting Championship match in New York City, including a visit to McDonald's on a flight with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. - hit the road again to watch Musk's SpaceX Starship rocket take off on its latest test flight.
This time, Trump's hyperbole wasn't excessive. “I'm heading to the Great State of Texas to watch the launch of the largest object ever lifted not only into space but just off the ground,” he wrote on social media.
Musk, the Tesla and SpaceX visionary, has spent the past two weeks basking in Trump's reflected glory at Mar-a-Lago. He's been around so often that it feels like he's family, and he's even been in a photo of Trump's extended clan. Now it's time for him to share some of his aura with his new best friend.
Trump, clenched jaw, squinting his eyes against the bright lights and wearing a red MAGA cap with “45” and “47” emblazoned on it, assumed a Mount Rushmore pose, no doubt aware that split-screen TV screens would compare him to a rocket launching. He looked like he was taking some of the credit.
In the nervous moments before the launch, various smaller satellites swirled around Trump, including his son Donald Jr, Texas Senator Ted Cruz and Texas Representative Ronny Jackson, a former White House physician. But the president-elect seemed most animated when Musk appeared and explained what would happen when the rocket took off.
A small disappointment
In this case, Trump didn't get to see the ballistic ballet of SpaceX bringing back its huge booster to be overrun by the modern launch pad he raved about during the campaign. “I see this fire coming out of the bottom of the rocket coming from the side, and I say, 'It's going to hit the crane,'” Trump said earlier this month. “And these two big beautiful hands grabbing her - I said: “What the hell was that?"”
On Nov. 19, mission controllers made a split-second decision to instead land the giant Roman candle-like craft in the Gulf of Mexico after its slow descent. “Maybe they just want to be careful not to accidentally kill the president-elect of the United States”, Greg Autrey, deputy vice chancellor for space commercialization and strategy at the University of Central Florida, told CNN.
But the stunning sight of Starship roaring off the launch pad, circling the globe in just a few minutes and landing neatly feet-first in the Indian Ocean was a testament to the genius of Musk, who has revolutionized the space industry, revived the U.S. manned spaceflight program and is on track to return humans to the moon and eventually Mars.
This explains why Trump wants Musk by his side.
If he can disrupt the aerospace sector while reinventing the electric car business, what can Musk do with his new Department of Government Efficiency, which Trump has appointed him and Vivek Ramaswamy to head?
Trump believes he has a mandate to blow up the federal bureaucracy like one of the prototype rockets his new friend has used to accelerate progress on his space program.
But the president-elect's presence at the Starship launch and his endorsement of Musk also points to a huge problem in their relationship.
The South African billionaire now plays a huge role in space exploration, U.S. national security and the electric car industry. And Trump could do Musk extraordinary favors. Musk, armed with the powers of the presidency in his new role as government whip, could even roll back regulations that interfere with his business and profit from market distortions.
Conflicts of interest were not taken seriously in the first Trump administration. But Musk's omnipresence in Trump 2.0 as a prominent ally in the emerging inner circle of billionaires, millionaires and Fox News hosts means they have officially become a joke.
Why Trump likes Musk
He's dynamic and a certified genius. The president-elect also likes being pandered to by the world's wealthiest people - especially those who spent millions of dollars to get him elected and turned X into a place where everything is free, which reflects Trump's conspiracy worldview and has tremendous power to influence huge numbers of voters.
In many ways, Musk is a much more successful version of Trump himself. He tears things down before building anew, he has had several marriages, and he was shaped by an overbearing father who left a mark on his psyche. It's not often that Trump, who seeks to dominate every room and relationship, seems impressed with anything but himself. But his fan appreciation for Musk's rocket science seems entirely genuine.
But it's not just about money and dreams of space.
By befriending Musk, the 78-year-old Trump has secured his entrance into a young male subculture where the Tesla pioneer is considered an icon. Their friendship has also brought Trump credibility among other opinion leaders who embrace this demographic, which has been evident in his appearances on YouTube shows and podcasts with Joe Rogan, the Nelk Boys, Theo Vaughn and Barstool Sports.
All of this has helped improve Trump's standing in the polls among young male voters , an electorate that Democrats are trying to reach. Trump has rarely seemed as casual or sincere as he did on these platforms, speaking authoritatively about wrestling, soccer and conspiracy theories. One of the most notable moments occurred on Vaughn's show, when Trump became unusually animated when he asked his host questions about his past cocaine use.
Trump's growing cultural influence
Trump's visit to Musk's launch pad was also the latest instance since the election of inserting himself into high-profile photo ops. The image reflects the evolving reality that Trump, who has always been an icon in the world of UFC and reality TV, is undeniably becoming a cultural figure as well as a political one.
The image of the UFC with its killer mouth goes a long way toward explaining Trump's political style. And now Trump's dance is going viral.
His political opponents saw his bizarre shaking on stage during rallies as a sign of declining cognitive health. His supporters saw it as humor and self-deprecation. Now the president-elect's two-fist shake has been adopted by athletes in major sports, who dance Trump-style to celebrate big-fight victories, touchdowns and goals. It's an intoxicating sight for a Republican Party that has struggled for years to match the Democrats when it comes to celebrity endorsements.
But something more sinister is also coming into play. Trump is grinding the roughest corners of his extreme image, which has been anchored by the darkest closing argument of any presidential candidate in modern history.
The president-elect dancing at the state level to the Village People's “YMCA” is the same man who promises mass deportations of illegal immigrants, who tried to cancel the 2020 election, who is a convicted felon and who seems set to wield unchecked power after Jan. 20.
How long can this go on?
In addition to “YMCA,” another of MAGA's main campaign soundtracks is Elton John's “Rocket Man,” which sings about an astronaut “burning out his fuse” Trump-style as he flies solo through space. The hit may reflect Trump's dreamy passion for Musk's amazing set of spaceships and his boundless ambitions.
But despite their budding friendship, it's becoming fashionable to speculate about when Trump and Musk's strong bromance might itself crack, given that both men are edgy in their personalities, aspire to be stars in their own skies, and seem to find close friendships challenging.
Thanks to Musk, Trump may get more than he bargained for.
For example, he may not be willing to pay the political price in the form of massive layoffs of federal employees, lost productivity and the failure of government programs that Musk could trigger with the harsh cuts recommended by the new DOGE.
“At the end of the day, you can only have one star of the show, and that star of the show will be Donald Trump,” former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty told CNN's Erin Burnett on Nov. 19. But he also argued that Musk is brilliant, innovative and inventive and totally in line with the president-elect's brand. “Trump campaigned on the idea that we were going to break the pattern,” he said.
When Trump takes office as president of the United States for the second time, there will be no doubt about who the senior partner is - even if Musk wields enormous non-state power thanks to his wealth and business ventures that have deeply penetrated economies around the world.
Musk is also becoming a factor in Trump's growing influence - another reason to keep him around. French President Emmanuel Macron, a shrewd student of the art of Trumpian flattery, plans to invite the 47th president and Musk to an artificial intelligence summit in Paris in February 2025.
Another CNN article, “Fighting remote work: how Trump's DOGE could force federal employees to quit” (11/20/2024), states that President-elect Donald Trump's new Department of Government Efficiency, a nongovernmental organization headed by billionaire Ilon Musk and biotech entrepreneur and former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, will push to end remote work at federal agencies as a way to reduce the number of fi
Both Musk and Ramaswamy have recently publicly lamented the large number of employees working remotely in the government.
A source familiar with early discussions about the direction of DOGE (as the initiative is called) told CNN that while nothing is final yet, priorities include immediately ending remote work in all federal agencies and making a five-day work week mandatory for all federal employees.
“It's an obvious step, and many companies have done so. So why shouldn't federal employees who are paid with taxpayer money be required to be in their positions?” - the source said.
Such a mandate, combined with moving agencies out of Washington, D.C., is expected to force many federal employees to leave voluntarily, helping the new Trump administration to thin the ranks of federal employees and save the government money.
The source said ending remote work in government is seen as a potential “early candidate” for executive orders that DOGE members will recommend to Trump. “It's definitely on the table,” the source said, though it's unclear how much they think it will save the federal government.
On Nov. 20, after the story was published, Musk and Ramaswamy published an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal outlining their plans to reform the government and target remote work. “Requiring federal employees to come to the office five days a week will lead to a wave of voluntary layoffs, which we welcome: if federal employees don't want to come to work, American taxpayers shouldn't have to pay them for the privilege of staying home in the Covid era,” they wrote.
Currently, not all federal employees are required to be in the office five days a week. Each agency determines its own remote work policy to best fulfill its mission. According to the Office of Personnel Management, 1.3 million federal employees have been authorized to work remotely. Government data shows that federal employees who work remotely spend 60 percent of their time doing work in person.
“The assumption that federal employees in general don't work in person is simply not supported by data and reality,” Everett Kelly, national president of the American Federation of Government Employees, the union representing more than 800,000 federal employees, told CNN in a statement. “When it comes to changes in working conditions that could affect union contracts, AFGE takes the position that such changes should be negotiated with the union through the normal collective bargaining process.”
Sources also told CNN that conservative activist and Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, who has grown close to Musk, is expected to become an unofficial advisor to DOGE. Kirk took aim at the remote job, calling it “one giant looting operation, with the U.S. taxpayers as its mask” at X on Nov. 18, another sign that it could be a key early priority.
Other goals beyond remote work
Remote work isn't the only cost-cutting measure likely to be realized through executive orders.
Ramaswamy recently announced plans on social media to cut funding for programs that Congress no longer approves but still has appropriations for.
“We should not allow the government to spend money on programs that have expired. Yet that is exactly what is happening today, with half a trillion taxpayer dollars (more than $516 billion) being spent each year on programs that have expired by Congress. There are more than 1,200 programs that are no longer authorized but still receive appropriations. This is utter insanity,” he wrote on X.
A source familiar with early discussions told CNN that Musk and Ramaswamy don't plan to reinvent the wheel when it comes to how best to cut government spending.
“They will build on existing congressional and executive branch reports, as well as previous outside government commissions focused on cutting government spending,” the source said, noting that previous conservative goals will guide DOGE's actions. “They don't believe they have the only answer to government spending and efficiency.”
Musk and Ramaswamy are currently identifying all the places in the sprawling federal government where they could make cuts, the source said, while Ramaswamy is simultaneously taking the lead role in developing the legal justification for their recommended cuts.
They will eventually hire additional people, but it will be a small, flexible team, the source said. “It won't be hundreds of people. It's going to be very few. A lot of it will also involve the agencies that are going to be identifying places to cut. It will be on them as well.”
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Trump and Musk manage each other equally.
They both have a vested interest in keeping that relationship going for as long as possible.
China is a major factor in keeping their tandem together.
Musk needs to make sure that the new Trump entourage's hardline policies toward China don't hurt his business in China.
And Trump realizes that Musk is the only person who will be listened to in China at possible inflections of the Trump administration's new anti-China policies.
Musk's “tender” relationship with the Pentagon and CIA, which already can't live without his satellite system, will allow Trump to turn to Musk for help in mitigating the kinks of the new defense secretary and the new head of the intelligence community.
For Russia, this pairing is both very dangerous in its sophistication and, at the same time, provides more opportunities for political contact in critical situations, something that was virtually eliminated under the Biden administration.
*The Meta company (Facebook) is recognized as extremist and banned in Russia
Vladimir Ovchinsky
Source - Zavtra
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