What Elon Musk wants from Washington

Elon Musk's emergence as the big-spending, rocket-launching, joy-jumping alter ego for former President Donald Trump has transformed the conversation about what might really happen to Washington if Trump takes the White House back.

Musk, the world's richest man, has a sprawling industrial empire, billions of dollars of business with the federal government, a hardening set of anti-progressive cultural views and an unpredictable management style born of Silicon Valley's top-down " founder culture ."

If that were all, he'd still be inescapable in politics. But Musk could also be handed a huge lever to change Washington. Trump has promised to put Musk in charge of an ambiguously defined "Department of Governmental Efficiency." That role would give Musk sweeping authority over eliminating "waste" in government, and Musk has already promised to use the job to take $2 trillion out of the federal budget.

Some wonks are even wondering if his influence could extend beyond mere bureaucracy, given the historical precedent for a Trump White House to be swayed by the last person to have the former president's ear.

"If he's the effective chief of staff ... his influence could go deeper," said Matthew Mittelsteadt, a fellow at George Mason University's Mercatus Center. "In that scenario, if he wants to lash out at his AI competitors, having the direct ear of the president could enable him to cancel contracts and sic regulators on anyone he doesn't like."

So what happens to the capital, and to America, if Musk gets the shot he desires to remake the regulatory state to his own ends? What is it that he actually

Musk's views are hard to map against traditional party platforms. He has described himself as "politically moderate" in the past, but taken a hard turn to the right in the past year. He's an avowed environmentalist making new climate-skeptic friends; he's bragged in the past about Tesla's score on the Corporate Equality Index but now digs in against trans rights and other DEI issues. He's a small-government crusader who backed California's bid to put the clamps on powerful AI.

Fortunately for those trying to figure him out, Musk is one of the few people on the planet Earth both as garrulous and as well-documented in his views as Trump himself.

Musk doesn't give mainstream media interviews, and his companies SpaceX and X did not respond to a request for comment for this story. He has, however, tweeted endlessly, gone on podcasts, and now spoken at length on the campaign stage about what he wants and — more vaguely — how he might do it.

There's a caveat, of course: The federal government is big, slow-moving and surrounded by a web of rules and forces that just don't apply to Musk's companies. That could make it not just difficult for a Musk-run "DOGE" to set priorities, but to execute them against an ossified Washington bureaucracy. And his political patron, Trump, isn't known for his interest in process details.

"We already had an outsider billionaire businessman as president, yet nothing unique happened," said Mercatus' Mittelsteadt, who argued that a lack of resources and statutory authority would likely hamper Musk's efforts.

Still, a Musk-inflected Washington could be in for some changes. Compiled from his voluminous social media posts, podcast appearances and public remarks during his life in the spotlight, here is a rough guide by subject to exactly how Musk would attempt to reshape American life.

He wants his company Starlink to get paid

Some of Musk's policy interests are abstract. Some are extremely specific.

Starlink, Musk's satellite broadband service, is in line for hundreds of millions, possibly billions of federal dollars, and Musk has made no secret of the fact he thinks that money should be his.

As POLITICO's John Hendel reported in October , this requires the FCC and National Telecommunications and Information Administration to change its rules on whether the service is eligible for President Joe Biden's rural subsidy program. And to tilt the game his way, Musk has forged personal allies in Washington who could help him if Trump is elected, chief among them commissioner Brendan Carr of the Federal Communications Commission Commission.

Musk was furious when the FCC clawed back a potential $885 million subsidy in 2022, and he's never let up on his complaints about the agency. Carr, who could lead the agency in a Trump administration, has taken Musk's side in the dispute, and could play a major role in unlocking that money for Musk's Starlink service. Musk has other allies in this fight, like Nathan Simington, the FCC's junior Republican, and congressional Republicans like Rep. Kat Cammack (R-Fla.) who have called for more Starlink subsidies.

He wants to stop AI from killing us all

Artificial intelligence might be a new object on Washington's policy radar, but it's not new on Musk's. In 2014 he called the technology humanity's " biggest threat ." Musk is a major believer in what AI experts call "x-risk," or existential risk, the possibility that a powerful enough AI system could disobey its creators and turn on humans — a civilizational threat on the level of an asteroid strike or nuclear war.

To that end he's called for greater government oversight of AI companies, including something he described on the Lex Fridman Podcast in November 2023 as "at least an objective third party who can be like a referee that can go in and understand what the various leading players are doing with AI, and even if there's no enforcement ability, they can at least voice concerns publicly." Musk has eagerly participated in international summits like the one held last year (also featuring Vice President Kamala Harris!) at the United Kingdom's Bletchley Park ; he notably backed a failed California bill that targeted existential risk and met with lawmakers on Capitol Hill to hash out AI policy.

In Washington, however, it's far from clear how this would shake out as a policy issue. President Joe Biden's executive order asks the government to exercise more oversight for the most powerful AI models. Trump says he'll repeal that order, leaving regulation of AI's existential risks very much in doubt. Musk has yet to publicly comment on this.

He wants to save the climate — but no rush

As founder of the most successful electric vehicle company in the world, Musk has arguably pushed the climate-friendly technology forward more than any single figure. In 2017, after Trump as president exited the Paris Climate Accord, Musk said " Climate change is real. Leaving Paris is not good for America or the world ." As recently as 2023 he described himself as " super pro climate ," and has previously advocated for a carbon tax .

All of which might lead to some awkwardness in the second Trump White House, which he would share with a president who has called climate change a "hoax" and repeatedly promised to revitalize the fossil fuel industry.

But there are signs that as Musk has signed on to the rest of Trump's political platform, he's also embraced the former president's "what, me worry?" approach to the climate: In the mogul's August interview with the former president, he said "we still have quite a bit of time" to fight climate change and "we don't need to rush."

Musk has also repeatedly complained about "nonsense" environmental regulations , especially when they get in his way — sparring with agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration over SpaceX's heavy-industrial rocket launches. Given his softening on the risk of climate change and loathing for environmental rules on , a Musk-in-government would likely mean the stripping of many rules favored by climate and environmental activists.

He wants less illegal immigration, but more immigrants like him

The machine-gun pace and volume of Musk's newly partisan X feed is powered largely by immigration, the central issue of Trump's campaign. Musk constantly echoes the Trump-favored theory that the Democratic Party allows mass illegal immigration on purpose to swamp the voter rolls in its favor and create a " one-party state ." Last September he livestreamed a visit to Texas' border with Mexico in an attempt to publicize the issue, and has even weighed in on Europe's immigration woes, citing in a tweet the "invasion vibes" of German non-governmental organizations coming to the rescue of immigrants stranded in the Mediterranean Sea.

Again, this is slightly awkward considering ... Musk himself is an immigrant from South Africa. He insists there's no daylight between his position and his life experience, posting on X Thursday morning that Trump and his "DOGE" will "fix" an "upside down system that makes it hard for highly talented people to come to America legally, but trivial for criminals to come here illegally."

Trump's closest allies, however, have been planning widespread restrictions on legal immigration as well as illegal, continuing the policies of the first Trump administration. That means that a DOGE intent on building the wall, but handing out more H1B visas, could face internal competition from rival power centers in a second Trump White House.

He wants organized labor brought to heel

Labor might not be at the forefront of this election, but it's of great interest to Musk. Though often seen as a high-tech mogul, Musk is actually a heavy-industry impresario: Most of his wealth comes from manufacturing cars and rockets (with a curious sideline in tunnel digging ).

As a capitalist in the strictest sense of the term, Musk is staunchly anti-labor, telling The New York Times' Andrew Ross Sorkin last year that " I disagree with the idea of unions ." He earned a lawsuit from the United Auto Workers union (one of many labor cases against Tesla ) in August after sharing a chuckle with Trump during their interview on X about the joy of firing workers who sought to unionize.

A live interview for the "All In" podcast in May 2022 gave a preview of things to come politically, when he alluded to Biden's union support as a motivating factor in his turn to the right. Musk has repeatedly protested on social media that he has no problem with unionization and Tesla simply offers better incentives than a union would, but complaints to the National Labor Relations Board on the behalf of Tesla workers indicate otherwise. Tesla remains the only major U.S.-based automaker to be non-unionized, and a Musk-led bureaucracy would all but certainly ensure it remains that way while loosening labor rules writ large where it could.

He wants humanity to leave Earth — on his rockets

Space is Musk's paramount issue, as he believes that establishing self-sustaining human life on other planets is necessary to ensure a future for humanity. Musk's SpaceX is his vehicle to achieve that goal, with sources telling The New York Times in July that the mogul has directed its employees to design and research a hypothetical Martian environment.

To that end they've achieved breakthroughs like this month's promising early test of a reusable rocket, enabling far more numerous spaceflights than would otherwise be possible. Musk views the regulatory state as a major hurdle to this goal, calling it the "limiting factor" on Fridman's 2023 podcast. (In an earlier podcast from 2021 , he hinted at his expansive civic vision for off-planet life: a "direct democracy" with "laws ... short enough that people can understand them" that he believes would be less beholden to "special interests.")

This goal overlaps almost entirely with the business of SpaceX, the Musk-controlled rocket launch company that dominates government space contracting and recently demonstrated an impressive proof of concept for its long-promised Starship reusable rocket system. SpaceX has at least $15.6 billion in contracts with the Department of Defense and NASA according to a recent report from The New York Times , and Musk hasn't been afraid to use his outsized presence to fight everyone from the Federal Aviation Administration to the California Coastal Commission if they stand in the way of the company's ambitions.

At a rally for Trump in Lancaster, Pennsylvania on Saturday , Musk riffed about what it would take to transform Mars into a planet suitable for humanity (where we would, har, "be illegal aliens"). Musk's single-minded passion for expanding our reach across the solar system would ensure that a Musk-headed administrative state would do everything in its power to further that goal — namely in the clearing of red tape for SpaceX's rocket launches.

He wants to end DEI as we know it

Second maybe only to immigration as the subject of Musk's obsession on social media is what he calls the "woke mind virus," or the shifting of elite norms over racial and social justice issues that has characterized much of the past decade's public life. "DEI must DIE," Musk wrote in December 2023 , saying "The point was to end discrimination, not replace it with different discrimination."

To hear Musk tell it, this issue is almost as paramount as getting humanity to Mars: The "woke mind virus" has infected Wikipedia , Google , the Associated Press ; it is " killing Western civilization ," justifying a " battle to the death " via his business and now political enterprise. Tesla has removed all references to DEI from its 10-K filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and in a tense interview with Don Lemon on X earlier this year Musk contrasted DEI programs with ones where people are treated "according to their skills and integrity."

As anti-DEI bills have popped up across the country in recent years, Musk's Department of Governmental Efficiency would not likely throw up any federal roadblocks to such initiatives.

He wants free speech ... with some exceptions

By purchasing a social media platform, Musk made himself not just a critic but a major player in the ongoing debate over the role social media platforms should play in governing or moderating public speech.

Despite describing himself as a " free speech absolutist " and gutting the company formerly known as Twitter's moderation and safety team as part of his anti-"woke" crusade against perceived censorship, his actual track record is mixed. A transparency report published in September revealed that X complied with 71 percent of legal requests to remove content in the first half of 2024. The majority came from a small group of foreign governments including Turkey, South Korea, Japan and the European Union.

One major exception to this conciliatory attitude, however, was the case of his company's outright war earlier this year with Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, whom he called an " evil dictator cosplaying as a judge " and said " deserves prison ." Musk's fury was inspired by de Moraes' decision to ban the platform in Brazil after it refused to comply with an order to remove some conservative accounts it deemed harmful.

Musk's selective acquiescence when it comes to censoring his platform could create a dynamic in government with little daylight between his view and Trump's: one set of commitments for friends, and one for everyone else.