At a recent rally for Donald Trump, Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Howard Lutnick, the head of Wall Street firm Cantor Fitzgerald, took the stage together and contemplated the federal budget. “How much do you think we can rip out of this wasted $6.5 trillion Harris-Biden budget?” Lutnick asked. “I think we could do at least $2 trillion,” Musk said, to the cheers of the crowd. “Your money is being wasted, and the Department of Government Efficiency is going to fix that.”
This idea — that there is $2 trillion of “waste” in the yearly federal budget that could be eliminated if only someone like Musk were given the power to do it — exemplifies his orientation toward government. It’s brash, shockingly ambitious, contemptuous of what most Americans need, and fed by Musk’s combination of arrogance and ignorance. And it will never happen — not because the deep state will prevent it, but because Musk, while brilliant in some ways, is not smart enough to know what he doesn’t know.
Tempting as it is to take seriously Trump’s proposal for Musk to head up a new cabinet department or a commission on government efficiency (it has been described both ways) if Trump becomes president, the idea that Musk will spend his days in a government building in Washington poring over budget details is laughable. Plus, we already have a department of efficiency; it’s called the Government Accountability Office, and it does excellent work. But Musk does stand to have extraordinary influence in a Trump administration. So when it comes to policy, what does he actually want?
To start, let’s do some math. Without going too deep into it, if you add up Social Security, Medicare, military spending, veterans’ benefits, and interest on debt in the fiscal 2024 budget — none of which will be cut — you get $4.4 trillion. That leaves $2.25 trillion, of which Musk thinks he could cut $2 trillion. That, in turn, would mean eliminating almost everything the federal government does, from controlling the border to issuing passports to running national parks to medical research to federal prisons to food inspections to … you get the idea.
Also in that $2.25 trillion is, of course, the money the federal government spends on the energy transition, something Musk doesn’t seem to have much enthusiasm for. It isn’t that he has embraced Trump’s climate denialism, but he also doesn’t talk much about government’s role in reducing emissions.
This represents a shift: When Joe Biden took office, Musk said, “I’m super fired up that the new administration is focused on climate.” Biden followed through on his pledges in both regulation and legislation, but Musk was less enthusiastic as time went on, and eventually embraced Trump wholeheartedly, despite the latter’s promise to undo essentially everything Biden has accomplished on climate change.
Tesla has been quietly lobbying to maintain subsidies for electric vehicles and in favor of regulations that could phase out the production of internal combustion cars, even as the candidate for whom Musk is spending tens of millions of dollars promises to eliminate those policies. But he’s not trying to change Trump’s mind, at least not publicly. On an earnings call with shareholders earlier this year, Musk said that if Trump keeps his promise to repeal the Inflation Reduction Act, it would hurt Tesla “slightly,” but “long term, it probably actually helps,” since it would be “devastating for our competitors.”
In other words, Musk may want to address climate change, but that goal will always take a back seat to what’s good for Elon Musk — and what’s good for Musk just happens to be good policy, or so he seems to think. This is an occupational hazard for billionaires, who are inevitably surrounded by sycophants eager to tell them that any brain fart that comes tumbling out of their mouths is the height of wisdom.
This tendency shows up in Musk’s views on just about everything else, too. Like many a dilettante — albeit one with his own social media platform and 200 million followers there — Musk occasionally dips his thinking-emoji into policy issues without bothering to learn about what they actually entail, like his warning that Social Security is all but doomed. He worries a great deal about underpopulation, which few experts think is really a problem; his solution seems to be to distribute his own sperm as widely as possible.
But the most likely places where Musk will exercise influence in a second Trump presidency are not his grand notions of a remade American society, but rather in his own relationship with government. That largely means two things: He would like government to give him more money, and he would also like it to get out of his way.
On the first point, Musk is already a significant beneficiary of federal contracts. As The New York Times recently documented, Musk’s “companies were promised $3 billion across nearly 100 different contracts last year with 17 federal agencies.” How handy it would be if he were in charge of rejiggering federal spending! But on the flip side, “His companies have been targeted in at least 20 recent investigations or reviews, including over the safety of his Tesla cars and the environmental damage caused by his rockets.” In a second Trump term — especially one in which the architects of Project 2025 will no doubt be busily reconfiguring the government to place nearly absolute power in the hands of the president — Trump could easily repay the nine figures Musk has spent to get him elected by making all those investigations disappear.
Musk is also counting on the courts to make it easier for him to treat his workers however he likes. He has repeatedly clashed with the National Labor Relations Board, and SpaceX is suing to effectively have the entire NLRB declared unconstitutional. (Other anti-union companies including Amazon and Starbucks are seeking the same outcome.) Trump has publicly praised Musk for firing striking workers, which is illegal; and while it appears Trump was referring to Musk firing most of the staff of Twitter, who were not actually on strike, their shared contempt for collective bargaining and worker rights is amply clear.
That Musk is an egomaniac is barely disputable, so it’s not surprising that he believes government will either be a tool in his hands or the destroyer of worlds, with no in-between. “While I have many concerns about a potential Kamala regime,” he recently tweeted, “the bureaucracy currently choking America to death is guaranteed to grow under a Democratic Party administration. This would destroy the Mars program and doom humanity.” Apparently, only by giving Musk whatever he wants can we avoid extinction.
The truth is that if Harris wins, Elon Musk will be just fine, and so will humanity. The big difference will be that Musk won’t be able to pick up the phone and tell the president what to do. But I’m sure he will react to that with all the maturity and thoughtfulness we’ve come to expect from him.
