Musk In Position to Reap Billions in U.S. Contracts

A mogul's role in cutting costs opens the door to influence policy

Author

Matt Davis
March 25, 2025

For those of you who are new here, I read the top story in the New York Times every morning so that you don’t have to. If you were forwarded this, you can subscribe here. I’m also doing a five-minute video version of this, each morning at around 9 a.m. (depending on how long it takes me to read the newspaper). If you’d like to follow me on LinkedIn (you can always watch the recording later). If you subscribe to my Youtube channel it’ll also send you a notification when I’m “going live.”

This morning’s front page carries a picture of bloodstained steps on the presidential palace in Khartoum, Sudan. It’s not for the faint of heart.

Today’s front page is an interesting exercise in restraint from the New York Times. Just at the bottom right, above the fold (see it? 👆🏻) there’s a story by Helene Cooper and Eric Schmitt, “Airstrike Plan Was Disclosed in Group Text” that’s made the front page of the New York Post. It’s about how Defense Secretary Pete Hesgeth texted the Editor of the Atlantic, along with the Vice President and Secretary of State, war plans for attacks on Yemen. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton tweeted yesterday, “You have got to be kidding me” — in part because you’ll recall all the fuss Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth made about her using a private email server at one point. Here’s the New York Post, doing its best to make light of the situation, because after all, these are incompetent white guys who belong to their favorite political party and not women who work for the other one.

But it is not a small deal. Here’s how the Atlantic Editor ran the story:

Yowch. And it was front-page, top, on all the websites of the major news outlets around the world yesterday afternoon. Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the ranking Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, said that the “story represents one of the most egregious failures of operational security and common sense I have ever seen.”

Let’s read that again.

“One of the most egregious failures of operational security and common sense I have ever seen.”

Okay. And here’s a wrinkle:

The group chat also included a dissent from Mr. Vance, who called the timing of the Yemen operation a “mistake.” He and Mr. Hegseth both argued in the chat that European countries benefited from the U.S. Navy’s efforts to protect shipping lanes from Houthi attacks.

But he added that “I just hate bailing Europe out again.”

Mr. Hegseth replied: “I fully share your loathing of European free-loading. It’s PATHETIC.” But, he said, “I think we should go.”

Again, these are not very bright guys. Bickering in a text group about bombing an African country and sharing it with a journalist by accident. It’s almost as if they’re not qualified to run the world’s most powerful country. 🤔

If I were the New York Times editors I would have run the story where it belongs, at the top of page one, but my sense is that they’re doing their best to pretend that the worst excesses of the Trump administration aren’t worth overreacting to. They’re in it for the long haul, and want to avoid suggestions that they’re partisan. Still, the placement was a mistake. It smacks of protesting too little.

The other story, the lead story, today, is by Eric Lipton, and focuses on Elon Musk’s SpaceX “positioning itself to see billions of dollars in new federal contracts or other support.”

It’s a long piece, and features this amusing graph:

To be clear: that graph says an awful lot. And the Times has dispatched its investigative reporter, Mr. Lipton, to nail down the details of how Mr. Musk and his SpaceX company is set to reap billions more in taxpayer dollars while insisting on the importance of cutting federal bureaucracy, after donating $300 million to Donald Trump.

It’s a very important story for the benefit of the historical record, and if I were the Times I would have saved it for tomorrow when it could have enjoyed the top billing it deserves. The truth is, editing the paper version of a newspaper involves some nuanced and artful decision making and the Times is called the grey lady for a reason. I just wish the grey lady could also read the room sometimes.

What’s wrong with Elon Musk, who is objectively a Nazi, taking billions of taxpayer dollars for various efforts, including sending American astronauts to Mars, when he screams about inefficiency in the federal government? I mean, what’s not wrong with it?

The overlap in these roles — Mr. Musk’s employees advising agencies while SpaceX is installing its Starlink devices at agency locations — present an ethical situation that has few precedents in modern American history.

“By any objective standard, this is inappropriate,” said Steven Schooner, a former government contracts lawyer who is now a professor studying government procurement at George Washington University.

“Given the power he wields and the access he enjoys,” Mr. Schooner added, “we just have never seen anything like this.”

It’s also worth noting that Mr. Trump’s pick to run NASA is a Musk fan who had to sell his stake in Mr. Musk’s company to avoid a conflict of interest.

Mr. Trump’s nominee to run NASA, Jared Isaacman, is a billionaire entrepreneur and a space enthusiast. He paid SpaceX hundreds of millions of dollars to fly — twice — into orbit aboard a rocket.

More importantly, his payment processing company, Shift4 Payments, purchased a stake in SpaceX several years ago, an investment that generated $25 million in gains in recent years, effectively making him and Mr. Musk business partners. That SpaceX stake was recently sold, a Shift4 executive said. In ethics documents released this month, Mr. Isaacman vowed to sever any remaining financial ties he had with SpaceX.

Mr. Isaacman, the story reports, is likely to revamp NASA’s mission to go back to the moon, and for that, Boeing’s rockets are likely to not be good enough. But do you know who else builds rockets? Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. That’s who.

One last story from the front page of the Times today is by Shawn McCreesh. He went to Philadelphia for the NCAA men’s Division I wrestling championship on the weekend, where Donald Trump and Elon Musk happened to show up. It’s a great piece of reporting juxtaposing the positive response to Mr. Trump with the crowd’s skepticism of Mr. Musk.

The wrestling fans who made their way to Philly were not entirely sure if that was what they bargained for when they voted for Mr. Trump, as many of them indeed did. The crowd was largely made up of cornfed men with cauliflower ears from places like Ohio, Missouri, Iowa and Pennsylvania, and while almost all of them said they were pleased with Mr. Trump’s time in office so far, interviews with more than a dozen attendees revealed more complicated feelings that were beginning to surface about Mr. Musk.

“Cornfed men.”

Such a patronizing descriptor. Well done, Shawn. And let the quotes roll in:

“Not a big fan of Elon,” said Blaize Cabell, a 32-year-old wrestling coach from Independence, Iowa, who nonetheless remains a big fan of the president. He said he viewed Mr. Musk’s career as a businessman as a series of failures and buyouts and said that the billionaire was “making a lot of callous cuts,” citing the Department of Agriculture. 

“I don’t even know what to think of him at this point,” David Berkovich, a 24-year-old wrestler and graduate school student from Brooklyn, said of Mr. Musk. “He’s just there all the time.”

“He’s going a little rampant — I think everyone can agree with that,” said Bobby Coll, a 24-year-old finance broker who lives in Manhattan’s West Village. He was there with his girlfriend, Julia Sirois, who said of Mr. Musk’s role in the administration, “It’s someone putting their hand in a cookie jar they don’t belong in.”

And there’s more.

The president’s supporters always want to afford him the benefit of the doubt, and they appreciate, in theory, what Mr. Musk is trying to do in Washington. They are also grateful to him for helping to get their guy elected — but it seemed to come as a surprise to some of them that Mr. Musk would be this involved more than two months in. Some worried that it was all starting to be a bad look for Mr. Trump, of whom they feel protective. The president hawking Teslas on the White House lawn was not exactly how they imagined this power pact playing out.

The issue, of course, is that I don’t think Elon Musk minds if people hate him. The moral of the stories is that he’s bought the right to the access he’s enjoying, and plans to take full advantage. You couldn’t make some of today’s news up, but this story about money and power is an old one.

Thanks for reading the newspaper with me so that you don’t have to.

Matt Davis lives in New York with his wife and kid.