Musk's Trump-Enabled Corruption Is Out in the Open

An essay on the stunning greed and dishonesty of Trump and Musk, and a rumination on where it all might end.

(Every good father takes his four-year-old son to an Ultimate Fighting Championship match at 10 p.m. For more on Elon’s status as father, and how he manages his “legion” of babies (probably way more than 14) and their mothers, see this astonishing story.)

I. Trump’s Brazen Corruption

One of Donald Trump’s superpowers is his ability to flatten the political discourse. He makes one outrageous statement after another, tells one astonishing lie after another, takes one despicable act after another.

Any “normal” politician would be excoriated for a single such instance. Imagine, for instance, that Obama had suggested using the U.S. military against the “enemy within,” threatened to redraw our border with Canada, or spouted the patently false talking points of a Russian war criminal while insulting a courageous leader whose country is fighting for its life.

The reaction would be swift and the damage enduring.

But with Trump, we scarcely have time to catch our breath. Things that are outrageous but unlikely (threatening to invade Greenland) merge with things that are positively malignant (stripping Mike Pompeo of his security detail). It all flattens out until we are almost too numb to respond.

For this reason, we have become desensitized to Trump’s blatant corruption. No other president in U.S. history could, for instance, have gotten away with issuing his own meme coin, reserving 80% to himself, thereby enabling anyone seeking to influence him to privately funnel money directly to him.

No other president would have dared have his cronies suggest to Jeff Bezos that Amazon pay $40 million to the First Lady to participate in a documentary about herself, or suggest to Warner Brothers that Don, Jr. might like a hunting and fishing show on the Discovery Channel.

No other president would have his company (Trump Media and Technology Group) launch actively managed investment accounts that “offer investors access to curated, thematic investment strategies rooted in American values and priorities,” thereby creating a massive and obvious potential for conflicts of interest.

II. Trump’s Corrupt Favors to Musk

With $288 million in campaign donations, enthusiastic social media support, and numerous MAGA rally appearances, Musk is a big reason why Trump was able to win last November. To date, Trump has richly rewarded Musk.

A. Placing NASA Under Musk’s Control

Musk asked Trump to appoint his friend, Jared Isaacman, as head of NASA. Trump quickly complied. Through Isaacman, Musk “is working to recast [NASA’s] programs, reallocate federal spending and install loyalists to aid his decadeslong goal of sending people to Mars.”

That means, of course, more government contracts for SpaceX, and a punch in the nose to Boeing, whose Space Launch System vehicle the Trump Administration now proposes to cancel so that the money can be reallocated to SpaceX’s Mars ambitions. (Trump has given Boeing a further punch in the nose with his tariffs, which have prompted China to halt deliveries of Boeing airplanes.)

Worth noting is that Musk’s Mars ambitions are absurdly impractical, especially given the serious problems being experienced by SpaceX’s Starship program, which almost surely will be unable to land astronauts on the moon by 2027 as part of the so-called Artemis III mission. If Musk cannot even get to the moon on time, he sure as hell will never get to Mars.

In other words, Trump effectively turning NASA over to Musk is crony capitalism at its worst.

B. Assuring that Musk Remains Above the Law

Trump has also neutered numerous federal regulatory agencies that were investigating Musk companies. For example:

• Last year, the Department of Labor’s National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) filed a complaint against SpaceX after eight employees said they were fired for speaking critically of Musk. Trump fired the Department’s Inspector General in the infamous January 24 purge, and then fired the chair of the NLRB, effectively blocking NLRB’s ability to issue rulings.

• Consumers had filed some 300 complaints against Tesla with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, mostly concerning debt collection or loan issues. Upon taking office, Trump fired the agency’s director and appointed as its acting director Russell Vought, a self-described Christian Nationalist. Vought, with Musk’s enthusiastic support on X, has greatly scaled back the agency’s activities.

• In his role as chief of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), Mike Whitaker clashed frequently with Musk over SpaceX safety issues. Musk was publicly unhappy about $600,000 in fines the FAA had levied against SpaceX for making launches with unapproved changes. Musk tweeted last September that Whitaker “needs to resign.” Seeing the writing on the wall, Whitaker stepped down when Trump took office.

Few people ever reflect on how integral the rule of law is to our prosperity. How important it is that no one be able to violate the law with impunity. How vital it is to our freedom to enter into contracts, knowing they will be enforced.

The functioning of financial markets, imperfect though they be, is a crucial component of that prosperity. And that functioning depends on a Securities and Exchange Commission that has unquestioned integrity and vigorously enforces the laws that protect those who invest in the stock of publicly traded companies.

Pause to remember that, to Elon Musk, here’s what SEC means:

III. Musk’s Leveraging of Trump: the Modern Mafia

Secure in the knowledge that Trump has his back, Musk has himself engaged in some corruption. Some of it is garden variety crony capitalism; some of it amounts to shocking extortion.

A. The X Factor: Proximity to Trump Brings Supplicants to Musk

The garden variety crony capitalism features in the revived fortunes of X, formerly Twitter. Musk vastly overpaid for that company and then proceeded to drive advertisers away by allowing it to become a predominately alt-right platform that tolerated racism and anti-semitism.

However, Musk was able to leverage his connection to Trump to draw advertisers back. A prominent example is Amazon, with Jeff Bezos obviously appreciating the benefit of getting close to Musk in order to stay in the good graces of Trump:

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos was seen hobnobbing with Musk at inaugural events, a stark contrast to a once-frosty relationship in which Musk would insult Bezos and his rocket company on X. Musk referenced the new friendship on X this month, showing a meme from the movie “Step Brothers” that said, “Did we just become best friends?”

B. Advertise on X, or I’ll Have Donnie Hurt You Bad

In the case of X, it’s more than just crony capitalism. It’s outright extortion:

With Musk ascendant after the election, X took a new approach to ginning up new ad spending. In December, a lawyer from X called a lawyer at advertising conglomerate Interpublic Group, hinting that its recently announced $13 billion deal to merge with rival Omnicom Group could face trouble from the Trump administration, given Musk’s powerful role, The Wall Street Journal previously reported. IPG signed a new annual deal with X for potential client spending.

The corruption of Trump and Musk is so pervasive and overwhelming, and the damage they are doing to the fabric of American society and to the world order itself is so massive and stunning, that Musk’s despicable shakedown of Interpublic Group has scarcely registered with the public, despite being reported on the front page of the country’s leading financial newspaper.

IV. Where Does It End?

I don’t know where it ends. But I’m an optimist, so let me offer you this scenario:

As a malignant narcissist who has surrounded himself only with toadies, and whose principal information source is Fox News, Trump has, quite predictably, overreached.

Thanks in large part to the flawed approach of Joe Biden, Trump’s immigration policies are relatively popular. However, the American people have a sense of decency about them, and as they learn more and more about the Abrego Garcia scandal, it will create a backlash.

The discovery just ordered by U.S. District Court Judge Paula Xinis in the Abrego Garcia case, and the criminal contempt inquiry by U.S. District Court Judge James Boasberg in the larger deportation case, will create increasing peril and the real likelihood of a Constitutional crisis.

If Trump fails to return Abrego Garcia by April 30, or if his administration fails to return the deportees to U.S. custody before Judge Boasberg makes a criminal contempt ruling, the Supreme Court will not be on Trump’s side.

Meanwhile, Trump’s utterly idiotic tariffs will continue to create havoc throughout world markets and to visit great harm on many American manufacturers, farmers, consumers, and investors. Those tariffs have contributed to his falling poll numbers, and that fall is likely far from over.

Trump’s embrace of Putin, which has shocked some of his closest supporters, will continue to disgust many Americans and much of the Western world.

After that, the path branches. There are many possible paths, most of which are impossible to predict.

One possibility is that the spineless GOP members of Congress (not you, U.S. Rep. Don Bacon, and may God bless you) will begin to fear for their political futures. The fear they feel will no longer be a primary challenge from a Musk-backed MAGA candidate, but rather the fear of being too closely associated with Trump, his tariffs, or his embrace of Putin.

If that comes to pass, Congress will finally awaken to the realization that it is, without question, the branch of government that the framers of the Constitution intended to be the most powerful, and it will start the very healthy process of clawing back its powers from the president. (The Supreme Court will be delighted with this, and reject every Trump challenge.)

Another possibility is that one of the lawsuits challenging the legality of the tariffs will result in a lower court injunction blocking any further imposition of tariffs after the “90-day pause.” That will quickly force the issue to the Supreme Court.

Which, in some ways, would be a shame, because a Supreme Court ruling that the tariffs were unlawfully imposed would spare American citizens from a full realization of how damaging and stupid the tariffs were in the first instance, and would give Trump an opportunity to assert that the “elites” had, yet once more, thwarted his efforts to Make America Great Again.

Of this I am certain: after the 2026 midterm elections, Trump and Musk both will be permanently hobbled. Whether the Democrats can capitalize by building a lasting coalition is To Be Determined (but in my next post, I will offer them my advice, which many of them undoubtedly will hate).

However… whether, after all the damage Trump and Musk have wrought, the United States can ever recover its standing in the world, or indeed enjoy again the prosperity it now enjoys, are open questions.