Much attention has been paid to how Elon Musk’s high-profile role in President Trump’s White House has hurt Tesla: Sales are falling, its stock price has slipped from its peak and embarrassed liberals are turning their cars back in.
Some of that attention is being supplied by Trump himself. “I know you’ve been through a lot,” Trump told Musk during today’s cabinet meeting, at which Musk perched at one end of the table wearing a red hat that said “Trump was right about everything.” Trump portrayed him as stoically weathering the backlash against his businesses.
“He has never asked me for a thing,” Trump said.
Perhaps not. But even as Tesla suffers, another of his companies is poised to profit off billions of dollars in new government contracts. That company is SpaceX.
My colleague Eric Lipton, an investigative reporter in The Times’s Washington bureau, has laid out the myriad ways that SpaceX stands to benefit from enormous sums in federal spending even as Musk, focused on cutting costs, slices his way through the government.
SpaceX is positioning itself to win billions in new federal contracts from the Pentagon, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Federal Communications Commission and NASA, Eric writes. The scale of the business is staggering, as is the potential for conflicts of interest.
Conflicts could arise not just from Musk’s dual roles as the chief executive of SpaceX and an adviser to Trump. Current and recent employees of SpaceX also now hold government positions, some of which could allow them to steer work back to SpaceX.
Some SpaceX employees are temporarily working at the F.A.A., for example. One of them, who Eric reported got official permission to take actions that could help SpaceX, boasted on X about building Starlink satellites into systems that send weather data to pilots — which could bring more federal business to SpaceX in the future.
Then there’s NASA, which already had more than $10 billion in contractual commitments to SpaceX over the past decade. Trump’s nominee to run the agency, Jared Isaacman, purchased a stake in SpaceX several years ago, Eric reported, although it was recently sold. Isaacman also traveled to space twice on the company’s private flights.
What’s more, Michael Altenhofen, SpaceX’s former director of human spaceflight sales and products, is now a senior adviser at NASA. (Altenhofen left the company on New Year’s Eve after working there for 15 years, according to a NASA spokeswoman.)
All of this appears to be good for SpaceX’s bottom line. The company is privately held, but Forbes recently estimated that Musk’s stake in the company was worth $147 billion, more than his stake in Tesla.
AGENCY REPORT
‘I’m ready to walk away’
The Veterans Affairs agency pioneered the practice of virtual health care two decades ago as a way to reach veterans who were socially isolated or living in rural areas, and over the years it hired mental-health providers into fully remote positions to focus on delivering that care from a distance.
The return-to-office orders pushed by President Trump and the Department of Government Efficiency have drawn those providers into offices where there isn’t enough room to accommodate them, or to ensure patient privacy, my colleagues Ellen Barry, Nicholas Nehamas and Roni Caryn Rabin reported over the weekend.
Drawing on over three dozen interviews with current and recently terminated mental health workers at the V.A., they learned that a system that Trump campaigned on improving is in turmoil.
“I’m ready to walk away if it comes to it,” one psychiatrist wrote to her manager in a text message.
“I get it,” the manager replied. “Many of us are ready to walk away.”
Read the full story here.
More on government agencies
MEANWHILE on X
Deriding judges and lawyers, too
Elon Musk is using his X account as a megaphone. My colleague Kate Conger explains how he’s using it to try to influence legal proceedings.
One of Musk’s targets on X this past weekend was a state judge in Delaware.
“Kathleen McCormick’s legacy will be bankrupting the state of Delaware,” he wrote on Sunday, calling out a state judge who last year voided his Tesla pay package, worth almost $50 billion. (His post misspelled her given name, Kathaleen.)
He also went after a federal district judge, James E. Boasberg, who has questioned the Trump administration over its use of a powerful wartime statute to summarily deport Venezuelan immigrants accused of being members of a violent street gang. Reposting an account of the judge’s having said that the sentences of some Jan. 6, 2021, rioters had not been harsh enough, Musk wrote, “Wow, this is insane.” He also wrote that Boasberg had “a villainous look.”
But one of Musk’s most surprising posts called out a major law firm, Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, which managed his $44 billion bid for Twitter back in 2022. Despite his history with the firm, Musk took issue with its work on Sunday, coming to the aid of Dinesh D’Souza, the writer and director of “2,000 Mules,” a film that falsely claimed widespread fraud took place during the 2020 election.
D’Souza has said that the analysis used in the film, which claimed to depict a vast ring of “mules” illegally gathering large numbers of ballots and surreptitiously placing them in drop boxes, was incorrect. He has apologized to a Georgia voter falsely accused in the film of committing voter fraud.
But D’Souza wrote on X on Sunday that Skadden Arps had “engaged in systematic lawfare” to harm his project.
To which Musk responded: “Skadden, this needs to stop now.”
It’s unusual to see a major client like Musk make public demands about a law firm’s work for other clients, and it was unclear whether Skadden Arps, which did not respond to a request for comment, would comply.
— Kate Conger
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These wrestling fans love Trump, but not Musk
My colleague Shawn McCreesh spent his Saturday night at the Division I wrestling championship, where President Trump and Elon Musk were also taking in the fight.
The fans there were largely thrilled with Trump. But their feelings about Musk were a little more complicated.
“Not a big fan of Elon,” said Blaize Cabell, a 32-year-old wrestling coach from Independence, Iowa.
“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 Musk. “He’s just there all the time.”
Read more about Shawn’s night here.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/24/us/politics/musk-spacex.html
