“Musk’s plan: Shut down parts of the govt investigating him. Claim that he’s stopping government spending … Give himself all the money,” Tristan Snell, an attorney who prosecuted Trump University, angrily commented. “Musk convinced MAGA he’s fighting to save their precious taxpayer dollars. Meanwhile, he’s teed up to win a $400 million contract making armored Tesla cars for the State Department. No talk of cutting that one, oddly enough!” wrote Jared Holt, a researcher at London’s Institute for Strategic Dialogue. A New York Times analyses noted Wednesday that Trump and Musk are hunting for corruption “very selectively” while the president “is rolling back anticorruption efforts and ethical standards for himself and allies like Elon Musk.”
The Independent has contacted the State Department and Tesla for comment. Musk was questioned by reporters about conflicts of interest during a bizarre press conference Tuesday evening in the Oval Office with his four-year-old son and Trump. When it comes to conflicts of interest, Musk insisted: “You have to look at the individual contract,” with little added explanation.
“I’m not the one, you know, filing the contract,” Musk said, attempting to distance himself from his business with the federal government. “It’s people at SpaceX or someone who will be putting the contract,” he added, referring to his other contract with the government. As Musk is making cuts through DOGE across government, SpaceX has been awarded a $39 million defense contract. “You’ll never believe who is still getting new government contracts while all the contracts at the Department of Education and USAID and other agencies are being nuked from orbit” by Musk, attorney and researcher Will Stancil wrote on X. Stancil shared a screenshot that appeared to confirm that Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SpaceX) was awarded a NASA contract worth just shy of $39 million on Tuesday.
