Elon Musk blurs the line between his government and business roles
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President Trump was speaking at a Saudi investment conference in Miami on Wednesday when he gave a shout-out to billionaire tech titan Elon Musk, seated with other business leaders and dignitaries in the audience.
"He's been making a bit of news lately, very positive news," Trump said, urging Musk to stand for applause.
It wasn't clear whether Musk was there in his role as the leader of DOGE — a project to slash the federal government — or as the man behind X, SpaceX, xAI and Starlink.
Musk is a "special government employee," a role created by Congress in the 1960s that allows parts of the federal government to bring someone on for a specific role, on a temporary basis. With this classification, Musk doesn't have to divest from his businesses, but he is supposed to follow conflict-of-interest laws and recuse himself when necessary.
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Ethics experts say that by continuing to run his businesses while also working for the government, Musk is blurring the lines between his roles in a way that could hurt the public trust. Musk and the White House say they will avoid conflicts of interest.
World leaders meet with Musk
As members of Musk's DOGE team are continuing their march through government agencies looking for waste, Musk himself seems to be everywhere, often at Trump's side but also making solo appearances, as he did Thursday at the Conservative Political Action Conference outside of Washington, D.C.
Musk was a surprise guest on the main stage. And as part of his introduction, the president of Argentina, Javier Milei, presented him with a red and chrome chainsaw.
"President Milei has a gift for me," Musk said as music pumped in the room.
Then Musk waved the chainsaw around excitedly, shouting, "This is the chainsaw for bureaucracy!"
Taking a chainsaw to bureaucracy is what Musk claims to be doing with his project known as the Department of Government Efficiency.
Video posted on X shows Musk and Milei sitting in front of U.S. and Argentinian flags to pose for a more formal photo, suggesting they met before Musk went out on stage.
Last week, when Musk met with Narendra Modi, the prime minister of India, there were questions about whether he was there as a member of the Trump administration or as the CEO of Tesla, which is looking to expand into India. Musk brought three of his children to the meeting, which was attended by aides to the prime minister. The setup looked much like a bilateral meeting between leaders; there were U.S. and Indian flags set up behind them as Musk presented Modi with a gift.
In India, news presenters excitedly speculated about the reasons for their meeting. Modi, asked about it later in a press conference at the White House, said he and Musk go way back. A White House official not authorized to speak about the matter publicly told NPR that Musk met with Modi in his personal capacity and not as a special government employee. Later, though, Musk was in the Oval Office for Trump's meeting with Modi. A press release from the prime minister's office highlighted Musk's roles as "head of the U.S. Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and CEO of Tesla."
"Prime Minister and Mr. Musk discussed strengthening collaboration between Indian and US entities in innovation, space exploration, artificial intelligence, and sustainable development. Their discussion also touched on opportunities to deepen cooperation in emerging technologies, entrepreneurship and good governance," read the press release.
Changing hats ‘by the hour’
In frequent posts on his social media site X, Musk ping-pongs between talking about his work slashing the government and promoting his business ventures, many of which have government contracts or are regulated by federal agencies. On Friday, Musk celebrated the Trump administration Department of Justice dropping a lawsuit against SpaceX.
"He's basically a walking conflict of interest," said Richard Briffault, who specializes in government ethics at Columbia Law School.
Briffault is not alone in raising alarms about Musk's large business holdings creating a conflict with his work in the government.
"Musk seems to be in a position with the White House's consent that he can just change hats by the hour as it suits him," said Don Fox, who was the top lawyer at the Office of Government Ethics during the George W. Bush and Obama administrations.
Fox said there's little indication the normal process to avoid conflicts is being followed. For high-level government employees, including those like Musk, that generally involves filing a financial disclosure report and coming to an ethics agreement with the Office of Government Ethics to identify potential conflicts and commit to a plan for avoiding them.
The White House says Musk will file a confidential disclosure of his financial interests by the end of next month and has been briefed on ethics requirements. Typically those disclosures are required within 30 days of starting work.
"The thing the public should be concerned about is, we don't know," said Fox. "Is he looking after our interests as taxpayers and citizens, or is he looking after his own business interests?"
In an interview with Sean Hannity that aired Tuesday on Fox News, Trump and Musk downplayed the risk. Musk said he had never asked Trump for anything "ever."
Musk said if a conflict arose, he would recuse himself. Trump chimed in, "If there's a conflict, you won't be involved. I mean, I wouldn't want that. And he won't want it."
The White House didn't provide any examples of Musk recusing himself thus far.
All these questions about Musk come as Trump just fired the Biden-appointed and Senate-confirmed director of the office of Government Ethics, who was only a couple of months into a five-year term. Other watchdogs have also been fired across the government.
"Whatever the guardrails are there in terms of preventing public officials from engaging in self-dealing, enforcement seems to be gone," said Briffault.
The nature of his leadership
With Musk's role, it's almost impossible for anyone on the outside to see what he's actually doing. Because Musk is working out of the Executive Office of the President, there are no requirements for public disclosure. Musk, however, insists his work is transparent, as he posts on social media regularly about contracts DOGE claims to have canceled.
In a recent court filing challenging the project's work, the Justice Department claimed that Musk is not an employee of the U.S. DOGE Service and is not the U.S. DOGE Service administrator. Instead, it asserted that Musk is an employee in the White House office and functions as a senior adviser to the president. That description is at odds with the way both Trump and Musk have described his job and the work of DOGE.
John Yoo, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, said the idea of bringing in an outside expert or, say, a family member to advise the president has happened many times before. It was even litigated, back when then-first lady Hillary Clinton was leading health care reform efforts for her husband's administration. Conservatives sued to block that effort and ultimately failed, with the district court in D.C. determining that Clinton could proceed.
"The real rule is to make sure that Hillary Clinton in 1993 or Elon Musk in 2025, all they're doing is giving advice," said Yoo of the ruling from the early 1990s. He was a clerk in the D.C. circuit court at the time and said he remembers it well. "As long as they have no power to order anyone to do anything, it stays on the legal side of the line."
Yoo, who was a top Justice Department lawyer in the George W. Bush administration, said this is the legal line the White House is trying to walk with Musk, who to any outside observer presents as a powerful figure in Trump's administration.
"And this is why the White House produced that funny declaration where they kind of said Elon Musk has no power," Yoo said.
This lack of clarity about Musk's authority makes the ethical waters particularly murky, according to Stephen Gillers, an emeritus professor of legal ethics at New York University.
"The hole we're in is the product of two facts: We'll never know, probably never know ... exactly what he's up to," said Gillers. "[And] even if we knew everything he was up to, there's nothing we can do about it."
The White House official dismissed the criticisms as partisan, saying there is no concern in the White House about whether Musk will follow strict ethics rules.
Copyright 2025, NPR
