Elon Musk holds enormous power over many critical industries. Is the government his next project?

How big is Musk’s empire? 
It stretches from Earth’s orbit to tunnels underground and is even interlaced with human brains. Musk, the world’s richest man, with a net worth of nearly $250 billion, heads or controls six companies. The two largest are electric-vehicle giant Tesla, the world’s most valuable automaker, and SpaceX, which dominates the space-launch business and operates more than 7,000 satellites—about two-thirds of all active satellites in orbit—through its Starlink satellite internet constellation. There’s social media platform X (formerly Twitter), tunneling venture The Boring Co., brain-chip startup Neuralink, and artificial intelligence firm xAI. This private empire has been helped by a substantial infusion of public money: Tesla and SpaceX had received more than $15 billion in federal contracts as of last year. But some officials and experts now worry that the government has become dangerously reliant on Musk, who has in recent years promoted racist and antisemitic conspiracy theories, interfered with U.S. foreign policy, and become an antagonist of the Biden administration and an ally of Donald Trump, giving at least $75 million to a pro-Trump Super PAC. “The government needs to cut @elonmusk and his companies out of contracting,” Trump critic and former GOP Rep. Adam Kinzinger recently wrote...on Musk-owned X. 

Why is the government so reliant on him? 
It wants to maintain a global edge in critical technologies, and Musk’s companies have unrivaled capabilities. That became clear in June, when glitches in Boeing’s new Starliner spacecraft stranded two NASA astronauts at the International Space Station, turning an eight-day stay into eight months; NASA has tapped SpaceX to bring them home next year. With no meaningful competition, SpaceX is now central to the U.S. space program. NASA in 2021 awarded SpaceX a $2.9 billion contract for its reusable Starship rocket. That same year, the company entered into a $1.8 billion classified contract to build a network of spy satellites for a U.S. intelligence agency, sources told Reuters. “The issue for the government is, can they get a better service somewhere else?” said James Andrew Lewis, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “If the answer is no, you have to hold your nose and stick with [Musk].” But officials say that as Musk’s power has grown, so has his hostility to any efforts to contain him. 

How has Musk pushed back? 
Faced with at least 20 recent investigations and reviews of his companies by federal regulators, Musk has tried to browbeat and sue officials into backing down. Officials with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which last week launched an investigation into Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (FSD) software over a string of deadly crashes, have reported that Musk screamed at them when they opened probes into his automaker. After SpaceX was accused by the National Labor Relations Board of improperly firing nine employees in 2022, the company filed lawsuits aimed at declaring the NLRB’s action—and the board itself—unconstitutional. “He considers himself to be a master of the universe,” said former Occupational Safety and Health Administration official Jordan Barab, “and these rules just don’t apply.” X has proved to be a useful weapon in Musk’s many tussles. 

How does he use X?
Not as a moneymaker: Since he bought the platform in 2022 for $44 billion and gutted its content moderation system, it has lost nearly 80 percent of its value. But X does give Musk a megaphone to deploy against his perceived foes. He has used the platform to attack President Biden (a “grim puppet” for the Democratic Party) and Vice President Kamala Harris (“literally a communist”), and to amplify far-right conspiracy theories in the U.S. (that Democrats are “importing” undocumented immigrants to vote in the coming election) and also abroad. In August, anti-immigrant riots erupted in Britain after three young girls were stabbed to death; the riots were fueled in part by viral false claims on X that the murderer—a 17-year-old British-born Christian—was a foreign-born Muslim. Musk appeared unbothered by the spread of misinformation, posting, “Civil war is inevitable” and accusing British Prime Minister Keir Starmer of failing to protect “all communities.” 

How else does his reach extend abroad? 
Musk has emerged as a key player in the Ukraine war. Pentagon officials were forced to plead with the mogul in 2022 after some Ukrainian troops lost access to Starlink, their main battlefield communication tool, while fighting Russian forces. Musk had previously demanded that the U.S. pay for Ukraine’s Starlink access—a deal was later reached—and had endorsed a pro-Kremlin peace plan after chatting with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Musk’s ties to China have also raised alarms. The country is Tesla’s largest market after the U.S., accounting for 33 percent of all sales. Musk last year repeated Beijing’s official line that the independent island nation of Taiwan is an “integral part” of China. Taiwan’s foreign minister replied on X that “Taiwan is not part of [China] & certainly not for sale!” 

What are Musk’s future plans? 
He recently unveiled a prototype for a self-driving “Cybercab,” which he claims will launch in 2026, and aims to put humans on Mars by 2030. Trump has said that if he wins the White House on Nov. 5, he will appoint Musk head of a proposed “government efficiency commission.” Musk could then target the very agencies that regulate his businesses. He has signaled wanting to go after “irrational regulation” at the FAA and the Environmental Protection Agency first, but has not said whether his companies’ subsidies will also be under consideration. “I look forward to serving America,” Musk posted on X. “No pay, no title, no recognition is needed.”

Musk’s hard turn right 
Long before he began sharing far-right lies on X about Haitian immigrants eating pets and “white genocide,” Musk considered himself a centrist. “I’m socially very liberal, and then economically right of center,” he said in a September 2020 interview. But by then, his metamorphosis was already underway. In April 2020, he called stay-at-home orders issued as a result of the pandemic “fascist” and shared content downplaying the risks of Covid. The same year, his then 16-year-old transgender daughter asked Musk to sign off on a medical transition from male to female. Musk did, but later claimed he’d been deceived. “My son is dead,” he said. “I vowed to destroy the woke mind virus after that.” In 2022, he declared that “unprovoked attacks by leading Democrats” had pushed him to vote Republican. He publicly endorsed Trump in July and stood beside him at a rally in Butler, Pa. “I’m not just MAGA,” Musk proclaimed. “I’m dark MAGA.”

It’s “boys vs. girls” this Election Day, said Rachel Janfaza in The Free Press. The gender gap has grown into a gaping chasm, with pollsters predicting the largest difference in voting preference between men and women in modern history. Polls have found Kamala Harris winning by 14 to 16 percentage points among women, while Donald Trump was up by 13 points among men. The divide is most striking among young voters. Young women have moved significantly leftward since Trump’s election in 2016 and the MeToo movement, and the demise of Roe v. Wade made it clear their bodies were part of the political battleground. Young men, meanwhile, feel that masculinity itself has been demeaned and demonized, and are “fighting for their dignity” as they struggle with loneliness and economic stagnation. They hear Democrats making specific appeals to women and minorities—but not to men. It feels as if both candidates are speaking only to their own gender, leaving each “at risk of alienating the other sex.” 

Harris can’t afford to cede the “bro vote” to Trump, said The Boston Globe in an editorial. He’s targeting young men by appearing on “the manosphere’s hottest podcasts,” like Joe Rogan’s, where sports talk, Ultimate Fighting, crypto, and politics meet. Trump is even mak- ing inroads among Black and Latino men. In 2016, 51 percent of men under 30 identified with or leaned toward the Democrats. Last year, it was just 39 percent. Trump, meanwhile, has made it clear he “believes women are intellectually inferior,” said A.B. Stoddard in The Bulwark, and calls Harris “dumb” and “mentally disabled.” To try to regain lost ground, he paternalistically promised women he’d be their “protector,” and bizarrely called himself “the father of IVF” at an all-woman town hall. Most women “aren’t buying it.” 

Trump’s message to men, however, is working, said John Della Volpe in The New York Times. Polls show many Gen Z men are pessimistic about their roles and their futures in a fast-­changing society, and Trump is “systematically exploiting” these anxieties by “making them feel that their masculinity and future are under siege.” His “hypermasculine message of strength and defiance” is “a master class in bro-­whispering.” If Harris and the Democrats do not address men’s fears “head on,” and offer a “bold vision” to restore their sense of purpose, the gender divide may “transform the country’s electoral math for years to come.”

Anna Kendrick knows what it’s like to be objectified, said Ryan Gilbey in The Guardian (U.K.). In her directorial debut, the new Netflix movie Woman of the Hour, there is an audition scene in which Kendrick’s aspiring-actress character is asked if she’s willing to appear naked. When she says no, the casting director looks down at her chest and says, “Oh, I’m sure they’re fine.” The exchange was “lifted verbatim from something that happened to me when I was 19,” says Kendrick, 39. That’s far from her only experience of Hollywood’s casual sexism. There have been times “where I found out there was a wardrobe change that the costume designer had been cagey about. It’s like you can’t get to the bottom of it: ‘Wait—sorry—um, why would I be in a bathing suit in this scene?’” Kendrick believes attitudes have shifted in the industry in recent years, and “when you say you’re uncomfortable, there’s more of a culture of being taken seriously.” 

These changes are long overdue, she says, noting how as recently as 2010 she’d hear people at Hollywood parties flippantly discussing director Roman Polanski’s 1977 alleged drugging and rape of a 13-year-old girl. “I remember having to choose my words really carefully so as not to upset people when I pointed out that she was 13 and couldn’t possibly have consented. It’s easy to forget how casually people would be apologists for that stuff.”