Name: What Elon Musk Wants From Donald Trump
Uploaded: 2025-01-04T02:33:17.000Z
Duration: 8 min 49 s
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Donald Trump heading back to the White House.

This will usher in an unprecedented era in American history.

In a dramatic political comeback, Donald Trump will return to the White House.

And if he's going to share the credit for his victory with anyone, it's this guy.

Elon Musk, known for selling cars, making rockets, became one of the biggest political donors in American history.

Even with the Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling allowing corporations to spend unlimited amounts on campaigns, the nearly $200 million that Musk spent, along with his intense campaigning both on X and on the ground, dwarfs precedent.

Immediately after Trump's victory, Tesla shares went through the roof.

In a single day after the election, his net worth goes up, you know, by like $26 billion.

Trump is in a position to make him even richer.

Musk is like the de facto vice president, and he is going to have a role kind of reshaping the contours of the federal government going forward.

And by that, I mean in the sense that he is a very wealthy business person who has used and seems to be interested in continuing to use his political connections to make money.

Imagine Taylor Swift, Warren Buffett, Rupert Murdoch all rolled into one.

So what does Elon Musk want from this newfound power?

Musk wants a lot of things from Donald Trump.

Elon Musk's journey to kingmaker began, intentionally or not, with his acquisition of Twitter in 2022.

Elon Musk paid $44 billion to buy Twitter.

And conventional wisdom is Elon Musk destroyed Twitter.

And from a business standpoint, that is true.

If you look at what investors have said is about 80% less than it was when Elon Musk bought it.

But I don't think Elon Musk looks at this as a business decision.

He looks at it as a cultural and a political play, as influence, as a way to change the culture from what he sees as, you know, too left-wing, too woke, however you want to put it.

It is now basically the center from which a lot of right-wing culture and political advocacy is originating.

One of Musk's very first actions at Twitter, before even rebranding it as X, was to reinstate Donald Trump's account, which had been suspended in 2021 following the January 6th insurrection.

His return to Twitter was marked by this notorious post.

Even though Trump's own platform, Truth Social, is in competition with Twitter, Musk's reach exposed Trump to a whole new audience.

Musk kind of opened the door for a lot of people who maybe would never have looked at Trump or considered voting for Trump to take a look at him.

Like the young men who follow Elon and think that Elon is great, you know, now see Trump in a different light.

And he has given Trump like a gravitas that maybe he didn't have before.

You know, it's one thing to have Hulk Hogan speaking at Madison Square Garden for you.

It's another to have arguably like the most successful capitalists in a generation speak.

This is like a mutually beneficial business arrangement, right?

Musk gets sway over the federal government.

This mutually beneficial arrangement includes a new role for Musk that raises a whole host of potential conflicts.

At the Madison Square Garden rally, Howard Lutnick introduced Musk as the co-chair of the Department of Government Efficiencies.

I think the funniest name is DOGE, the DOGE, Department of Government Efficiency.

Musk wants the federal government to mostly get out of his way.

Tesla is a electric car company, and it very much would like the federal government to approve its business in robo taxis, driverless cars.

Elon Musk runs Neuralink, which sells brain implants.

Elon Musk would very much like the federal government to legalize that.

While pushing for less federal oversight, Musk also stands to gain billions.

Elon Musk owns a major defense contractor.

The U.S. government is their most important client.

SpaceX has already gotten billions of dollars worth of contracts between 2009 and 2024.

But this could pale in comparison to future contracts under the Trump-Musk alliance.

He would like as many more contracts as possible and would like a president who would, say, create a new Mars program and hire him to send the rockets up.

Starlink is SpaceX's network of space-based satellites.

They are operating in roughly 100 countries around the world.

They have applied for FCC licenses to kind of expand rural areas.

That satellite business would very much like some of its own defense contracts as well as subsidies for regular people to buy internet from it.

It's highly unusual for the CEO of so many companies to play such a strong role in an incoming administration where he will have sway over the agencies that the government regulates.

Ideally, he would recuse himself or he would not be involved in those agencies.

The sort of old rules of conflicts of interest may be out the window here.

He's a great business guy and he's a great cost cutter.

Elon Musk just sort of like laid off 80% of Twitter's workforce, you know, basically by waving his hand back in 2022.

He cut around 20% of Tesla earlier this year, you know, just kind of spur of the moment.

So if I were a federal worker, a civil servant, or maybe running a union that represents federal workers, I would be very worried.

He's going to go through every agency, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Department of Justice, NHTSA, the FAA.

But I think that everything is on the table.

Musk has proposed cutting up to $2 trillion from the federal budget. $2 trillion is a huge amount of money that really hits at entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid and Veterans Benefits.

Even with a friendly Congress, however, it's unlikely that members would approve such major entitlement cuts given the political risks.

And perhaps the most alarming conflict of Musk's cost-cutting role is his potential ability to halt unfavorable investigations into his business dealings.

Right now, there are between a half dozen and a dozen different investigations into Elon Musk's companies.

I can't comment, you know, because it's legal stuff, but I'm curious what you guys think.

It's not like he can just order those investigations closed, but if he is in a position to control the federal budget, what better way to deal with an investigation than to just defund the agency that is supposed to be doing that investigation?

There's one thing we learned from the last Trump presidency, which is that it doesn't really matter what your job is in the Trump White House.

What matters is who is talking to Trump on a regular basis.

Musk and Trump are very similar men in that they both love to be the main character, they don't like to share the limelight.

And it's hard to imagine that these two giant personalities will be able to stay in the same room and stay aligned for a really long time without running into problems.

 But Elon and Trump need each other, and that is what's different, and that is what could make Musk's influence much more lasting.