It is now fair to ask the question: Is Elon Musk a national security risk?
According to numerous interviews and remarks, Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency co-leader, Vivek Ramaswamy, once appeared to believe he was. In May 2023, Ramaswamy went so far as to publicly state, “I have no reason to think Elon won’t jump like a circus monkey when Xi Jinping calls in the hour of need,” a reference to China’s leader. In a separate X post targeting Musk, he wrote, “the US needs leaders who aren’t in China’s pocket.”
Ramaswamy has since walked back his numerous public criticisms of Musk, but he was right to raise concerns. According to news reports, Musk and his rocket company, SpaceX, face federal reviews from the Air Force, the Defence Department’s Office of Inspector-General and the under-secretary of defence for intelligence and security for failing to provide details of Musk’s meetings with foreign leaders and other potential violations of national-security rules.
These alleged infractions are just the beginning of my worries. Musk’s business ventures are heavily reliant on China. He borrowed at least $1.4 billion from banks controlled by the Chinese government to help build Tesla’s Shanghai gigafactory, which was responsible for more than half of Tesla’s global deliveries in the third quarter of 2024. China does not tend to give things away. The country’s laws stipulate that the Communist Party can demand intelligence from any company doing business in China, in exchange for participating in the country’s markets.
This means Musk’s business dealings in China could require him to hand over sensitive classified information, learned either through his business interests or his proximity to President-elect Donald Trump. No federal agency has accused him of disclosing such material, but as Ramaswamy put it, China has recognised that US companies are fickle. He added, “If Xi Jinping says ‘jump,’ they’ll say, ‘How high?’”
Musk’s relationship with China’s leaders could prove a problem for America’s national security given that SpaceX has a near monopoly on the United States’ rocket launches. The United States is in an intense space race with China. In a May interview, Maj Gen Gregory J. Gagnon, the deputy chief of space operations for intelligence at the US Space Force, said that there has never been a buildup comparable to what the Chinese are attempting in space — not even during World War II — and that “an adversary arming this fast is profoundly concerning.” The last thing the US needs is for China to potentially have an easier way of obtaining classified intelligence and national security information.
Musk already has a history of pleasing the Chinese Communist Party. He heaped praise on Xi to commemorate the party’s 100th anniversary. In 2022, earning thanks from Chinese officials, he went to bat for the party by arguing that Taiwan should become a special administrative region of China.
In May 2023, Musk also reportedly told Qin Gang, then the Chinese foreign minister, that Tesla opposed the US decoupling from China, stating that US and Chinese interests are “intertwined like conjoined twins.”
Although claiming to be a free-speech advocate, Musk was the first foreigner to contribute an article to China Cyberspace, a magazine that is run by the Communist regime’s Internet censorship agency.
Chris Stewart, a Republican former congressman and senior member of the House Intelligence Committee, whom Trump reportedly considered nominating as director of national intelligence, once pushed for closed-door briefings on Musk’s China ties. Trump’s choice for secretary of state, Senator Marco Rubio, who previously accused Tesla of covering up for the Chinese Communist Party, introduced a bill to prevent Nasa and other federal agencies from giving contracts to companies linked to China or Russia.
The question now is whether the incoming Trump administration will take this risk seriously.
Musk is one of Trump’s top advisers. Trump may have gone so far as to reject a bipartisan congressional budget measure because it did not have Musk’s stamp of approval. In November, after his election, Trump travelled to Texas to watch Musk’s Starship launch. That is fine, but doing nothing to ensure America’s space apparatus remains secure from potential vulnerabilities would not be.
The Musk-China concerns might be just the beginning. In a November letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland and the Pentagon’s inspector-general, two Democratic senators asked that they investigate Musk’s “reliability as a government contractor and a clearance holder” because of his reported conversations with Vladimir Putin and other Russian officials. In a separate letter, the senators asked the Air Force secretary, Frank Kendall, to reconsider SpaceX’s “outsized role” in America’s commercial space integration. Kendall wrote back stating that, while he was legally prohibited from discussing Musk’s case, he shared their concerns.
If the federal investigations demonstrate deep connections to China and Russia, the federal government should consider revoking Musk’s security clearance. It should already be thinking about using alternatives to SpaceX’s launch services.
The fact that Musk spent a quarter of a billion dollars to help re-elect Trump does not give the incoming White House the licence to look the other way at the national security risks he may pose. If Trump and his appointees mean what they say about getting tough on America’s adversaries, then they will act on this matter without delay. There is too much at stake to ignore what’s right in front of them.
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