January 22, 2025
Breathtaking conflicts of interest are lining oligarchs’ pockets with our tax dollars.
Anyone who has consulted a media outlet in the past two months is well aware of the central role played by Donald Trump’s “first buddy,” tech billionaire Elon Musk, in the presidential transition. Musk’s influence is only set to grow as he serves as chair of the proposed Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Musk has pledged to use his position to push for an astounding $2 trillion in federal spending cuts—nearly one-third of the entire federal budget. Even a fraction of that level of cuts could decimate the social safety net and undercut basic government functions.
The DOGE is a profoundly undemocratic creation. Putting an unelected billionaire and major government contractor like Elon Musk in a position to set the terms of debate over government spending priorities is a breathtaking conflict-of-interest. Musk’s firm, SpaceX, has hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of contracts for military versions of its Starlink system, the civilian version of which has been used to provide internet service to Ukrainian forces in their war against Russia’s invading force. And there are likely billions more to come—SpaceX’s Starship system, developed in pursuit of Musk’s interest in reaching Mars, can put large amounts of material into space, a capability that many military experts see as having great value in a military space race with China. Military uses of Starship could yield tens of billions in Pentagon contracts for Space-X in the years to come. Bloomberg was so enthused about SpaceX’s prospects for a huge influx of Pentagon funding that it described it as “the world’s most valuable private company and most valuable defense contractor.”
Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives predicts that Musk’s revenues from the government are poised to skyrocket under the new administration, calling it “golden era” for him and his companies with Trump in the White House.
Musk is just one of a large cohort of Silicon Valley executives who are putting their stamp on the new administration. The New York Times summed up the influence the military tech industry has had from before day one: “[T]he Silicon Valley billionaires and millionaires … have been all over the transition, shaping hiring decisions and even conducting interviews for senior-level jobs.”
The corporate executive with the most influence over the Trump administration—after Musk—may be Marc Andreessen of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. He was camped out at Mar-a-Lago for much of the transition period, recruiting and interviewing candidates for top jobs at the Pentagon and other agencies. Meanwhile, his company’s American Dynamism fund has invested in prominent tech firms involved in military work, including Anduril, Shield AI, Skydio, and SpaceX.
In addition, Andreessen is a raging China hawk, vocally calling for an arms race with Beijing in the realm of militarized AI, and arguing that whoever wins that race will run the world, Therefore, in Andreessen’s view, any other concern about AI, whether about surveillance, the elimination of jobs, or the intensive use of energy, has to be cast aside in the face of the need to defeat China at all costs. A Washington Post profile of Silicon Valley executives involved with the Trump transition captured this point, noting that after his first meeting with the president-elect “Andreessen saw a potential ally whose ambitions to beat China could be a boon to the US tech industry.”
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Musk has suggested recruiting Silicon Valley colleagues to monitor every major US government agency to assess their performance in comparison to efficiency proposals put forward by DOGE. It’s a recipe for a permanent, day-to-day influence machine that threatens to put special interests above the public interest.
And none of the above accounts for the potential role of Vice President J.D. Vance, a protégé of Silicon Valley military mogul Peter Thiel. Not only was Vance employed for five years by one of Thiel’s companies, but Thiel helped bankroll Vance’s successful 2022 run for the Senate in Ohio to the tune of $15 million.
It will be up to Congress, independent media and vigilant public servants in the executive branch to push back against this unprecedented power grab. The public needs to speak out loudly and clearly on how we want the administration to spend our tax dollars, not leave it to government insiders and well-positioned lobbyists to shape the budget unopposed. There are trillions of tax dollars at stake, but there are also lives in the balance, both because of the cuts in social programs that will be the true targets of the “efficiency” drive, and the risk of a war between two nuclear armed powers that will only increase under the techno-militarists’ preferred policy of confrontation with China.
The potentially devastating consequences of a military tech-driven administration call for urgent action. We should start by making it abundantly clear that the most efficient thing Musk and his cohorts are likely to do is line their pockets with our tax dollars. But they want more than our money—they want to live forever, colonize space, beat China, and ultimately, run the world. And Donald Trump may just give them that chance. The time to build a counterforce to the new high tech robber barons is now, before they are so embedded in government that there’s no turning back.
