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A few years ago, when Elon Musk was turning heel to people worried about climate change, joining forces with Republicans and breaking up with Democrats, I wrote about how the government couldn’t just quit him.
It’s still true now that Musk is breaking up with President Donald Trump, on whose candidacy Musk spent somewhere in the neighborhood of $300 million.
Musk got a literal golden key to the White House and the opportunity to take a chainsaw to the federal bureaucracy from Trump in exchange for the friendship that campaign coin bought him.
The Trump-Musk bromance, which burned hot during the campaign and for the first few months of Trump’s second term in the White House, has now experienced what SpaceX might euphemistically call a “rapid unscheduled disassembly.”
Even if Trump all but demands that key back and the relationship can’t be put back together again, a permanent divorce would necessarily be messy and drawn out.
At one point as they were lobbing shots at each other on their respective social media platforms, Trump suggested canceling Musk’s government contracts. Musk suggested not letting NASA use his SpaceX’s Dragon Spacecraft. Both have retreated from those suggestions.
As I wrote back in 2023: “NASA needs his rockets. The Pentagon needs his satellites. The government needs for electric vehicles to access his network of chargers. Officials need his social media platform — Twitter, now called X — to communicate with people.”
It’s all still true, although Trump has no interest in electric vehicles, and a standoff over whether a massive tax bill should continue to incentivize Americans to buy electric vehicles may have contributed to their beef. There are still a growing number of Americans buying electric vehicles, and Tesla’s charging network is a part of that infrastructure.
If anything, the intervening years have made the government even more dependent on Musk and particularly SpaceX, which not only provides rockets to NASA, but also has the Starlink internet system, which is key to the Pentagon and has been floated as an option to improve coverage for rural America.
SpaceX has gotten more than $20 billion in contracts from NASA and the Pentagon, according to CNN’s Chris Isidore.
Isidore also explains Trump can’t just go to another rocket company.
Replacing SpaceX on those contracts, however, is not realistic. That’s because there is no other company available to replace it. For example, Boeing, the only other company able transport astronauts to and from the International Space Station (ISS), had problems on its only crewed flight last year. That required its Starliner spacecraft to return to Earth without two astronauts, who were stranded at the ISS for nine months instead of the planned trip of a handful of days.
CNN’s Jackie Wattles, who covers space, told me the government’s reliance on SpaceX goes much further.
“It’s hard to understate how crucial SpaceX’s capabilities are for civil and military space endeavors,” Wattles said. “NASA not only relies solely on SpaceX to get astronauts to and from the International Space Station, the space agency awarded SpaceX nearly $1 billion last year to develop a way to safely drag the ISS out of orbit when it’s decommissioned — a move expected to happen in the early 2030s if not sooner.”
She ticked off a number of ways in which the US relies on SpaceX:
If the US does end up wanting to go to Mars, SpaceX’s Starship, which is still in development, is the only vehicle designed for the purpose.
The US is paying SpaceX $4 billion for moon landings. It’s relying on SpaceX to dispose of the International Space Station in the future.
SpaceX carries more payload for the military than any other company.
It launches most US spy satellites, and the Pentagon plans to count on Starlink for connectivity.
Plus, Starlink is now working on updating the technology the Federal Aviation Administration uses to manage US airspace, something that raised questions about conflicts of interest when it was announced, but now seems like one more thing binding the government to Musk.
Musk’s companies are at the mercy of federal regulators, as we explored with a look at the ethical minefield created by Musk’s involvement with the Department of Government Efficiency.
His Neuralink, which aims to implant chips in the brains of humans, will have to deal with the Food and Drug Administration.
SpaceX has to deal with the FAA and other agencies.
X, formerly Twitter, features in the oversight of the Federal Communications Commission.
Tesla has been investigated by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
Trump’s administration has shown no reluctance to use the cogs of government to go after perceived enemies. Just ask Harvard.
But if Trump were to use government to attack Musk, it would be like something out of Vladimir Putin’s playbook in Russia, where oligarchs rise and fall based on whether they are in favor with the government.
“Trump can go after (Musk’s companies), but then it’ll be pretty explicit that’s what he’s doing,” said the tech journalist Kara Swisher, appearing on CNN’s “The Situation Room” Friday.
“Then he’ll look exactly like what people accuse him of, which is an autocrat,” Swisher said.
It would hurt the country if Trump did target Musk, she said. In additoin to Tesla, SpaceX and Neuralink, she pointed to the importance of Musk’s forays into AI.
“We really do need cogent, important guidance on AI as it goes forward,” Swisher said.
