File this under water is wet and the sun will rise tomorrow in known and unimpeachable facts, but it’s helpful to put a figure to Elon Musk’s obvious corruption in the government. The manbaby loves to brand himself as a czar of efficiency, when anyone with an understanding of how dependent his businesses are on government contracts could see the obvious grift at play in the most corrupt administration in America’s history. Public Citizen has released an extremely detailed report diving into Musk’s adventures in conflicts of interest, and they found over 70 percent of Musk’s targets represent a conflict of interest for him.
Public Citizen defines a conflict of interest as such: “This report considers Elon Musk to have a conflict of interest with one of the DOGE-targeted agencies if at least one of his companies meet one or more of these factors according to publicly available reporting: it has received contracts or grants from the agency; it has an interest in its proprietary data; it is subject to the agency’s regulations; or has been subjected to enforcement action by that agency.”
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) has been a wild success since its inception, as the agency estimates it has returned over $20 billion to people defrauded by our oligarchy. It has been the ire of America’s deranged billionaire class ever since its creation, as it makes it more difficult for them to participate in one of their favorite activities: using their power and financial might to steal from people poorer and less powerful than them. Musk wants to turn Twitter into his longstanding dream of a payments app nobody uses, which would make it fall under CFPB regulation. Gutting the CFPB would make it easier for Musk to pull his favored shenanigans on Twitter.
DOGE has also targeted the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), and this oversight committee is a classic bugaboo of a man who has long been hostile to unions while fostering a dangerous workplace and allegedly illegally firing people. SpaceX even claimed that the NLRB was unconstitutional in court, and I’m not sure that Musk would even push back against the notion he has a conflict of interest here. He wants the NLRB gone so he can make it easier to run his companies without any federal protections for his workers and DOGE is helping to accomplish that. Very simple stuff, and you can see this desire for unaccountability by Musk in the Department of Justice. It has its own internal DOGE team designed to search for spending cuts, but given that the DOJ has been investigating Tesla and SpaceX, the latter of which’s case has already been dropped, it’s not hard to see where those cuts are likely to be concentrated.
The Department of Defense is his most obvious conflict of interest, as even Trump has acknowledged that this is a sticky situation to have a huge government contractor with significant business interests inside of America’s chief foreign adversary digging into the Pentagon. Musk’s empire is built on $38 billion in government funding, with SpaceX being particularly dependent on the government. Last year it was awarded $3.8 billion in contracts, and it stands to gain even more both from the U.S. government and other governments being pressured by Trump in cartoonishly illegal manners.
The Washington Post reported this week that there is an open acknowledgement of a quid pro quo within the State Department, as they obtained an internal memo which states “As the government of Lesotho negotiates a trade deal with the United States, it hopes that licensing Starlink demonstrates goodwill and intent to welcome U.S. businesses.” There are additional memos they have uncovered from U.S. embassies and the State Department openly pushing countries to use Starlink in order to get on Trump’s good side in his deranged trade war. Entities inside India, Somalia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Vietnam have all reached agreements with Starlink the past couple of months, but WaPo acknowledges that “this is probably not a comprehensive count” of countries putting money in Musk’s pocket to try to stop Trump from destroying their economies.
These are just a handful of the agencies that Public Citizen has identified as conflicts of interest for apartheid South Africa’s preeminent ketamine enthusiast, and it’s worth reading the entire report just to see the staggering number of conflicts of interest that Musk has his grubby little hands in. This is shameless corruption, plain and simple. The meritocracy is a lie, and the meritocrats at the top of it are anything but. Musk would not exist without government aid, and now he is destroying the government to further enrich himself. If the United States is ever going to recover from this era of open grift and criminality, it must prosecute shameless criminals like Elon Musk who are more than willing to destroy everything that benefits us so he can make even more money to try to fill the endless void in his soul.
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