Who can be House speaker? Asking for Elon.

During a December struggle over a government funding bill, several Republican members of Congress suggested that Elon Musk, the close Trump ally and billionaire businessman who was recently appointed co-director of the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), should be elected as the speaker of the House. While the suggestion seemed bizarre to some, given that Musk has never held elected office and is not a member of the House, the Constitution does not expressly forbid it.

What does the Constitution say about the speakership?

The speaker of the House is traditionally chosen by an internal vote of the party which holds the chamber's majority at the beginning of each new Congress. But there is a "unique footnote" that most Americans are probably unaware of, which is that the "job candidate doesn't have to be a member of the House of Representatives," said the National Constitution Center. Even so, every single speaker in American history has been one.

Republicans have a very recent history of flirting with the idea of electing a non-member as speaker. In January 2023, when it took 15 ballots for Republicans to elect Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) as speaker, there was a brief effort to give former President Donald Trump the gavel. Trump, who was not a member of the House, received a vote for speaker from Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) during McCarthy's tumultuous bid for the position. Trump, who had not publicly sought the position, reportedly thought that Republicans "would have overwhelmingly voted for him" had the caucus been "aware of his interest in the position," said Jonathan Karl at ABC News.

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In October 2023, Trump was once again the subject of speculation after McCarthy was ousted as speaker by a backbencher revolt. Trump "will make the House great again," said Rep. Troy Nehls (R-Texas) to reporters, promising to nominate the former president for speaker. Leading Republicans, especially those who eyed the position themselves, never warmed to the idea, in part because Trump had already launched his 2024 bid for the presidency. The episode was a "sobering reminder of the extent to which elected Republicans have sacrificed their own judgment to the cult of Trumpism," said John Nichols at The Nation.

How did Musk become a speaker possibility?

The idea to make Elon Musk, the world's richest man, the speaker of the House stems from another round of GOP difficulties navigating the party's narrow majority. Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) had worked out a bipartisan compromise to fund the government until after Trump's January 2025 inauguration for his second term, but Musk appeared to blow up the deal with a torrent of X posts that were "riddled with disinformation and false claims that revealed his lack of understanding of the basics of budgeting," said Charles Sykes at The Atlantic.

Trump himself then joined the chorus of people calling for House Republicans to reject the compromise and demanded that Johnson include a two-year suspension of the debt ceiling in any budget legislation. Johnson did so but the new bill failed due to a revolt of House fiscal conservatives who insisted on deep spending cuts in exchange for lifting the debt ceiling again. As Republicans faced a self-inflicted budget standoff, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) was the first elected Republican to propose making Musk the speaker. "Nothing would disrupt the swamp more than electing Elon Musk," said Paul in a Dec. 19 post on Musk's social media platform X. "The establishment needs to be shattered just like it was yesterday," said Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) while reposting Paul's idea at X. Sen Mike Lee (R-Utah) also endorsed the idea. Johnson and his allies eventually passed a continuing resolution that passed the Senate and funded the government through March 14, 2025, which ended the speculation about Musk serving as speaker.

But a number of House Republicans are "waffling on or outright opposing giving Johnson the gavel in the new Congress," said Olivier Knox at U.S. News & World Report. That means that Musk's name may very well come up again if Republicans once again have difficulty anointing a speaker.