By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 24, 2024 ~

Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla

Elon Musk

American taxpayers are footing the bill for 17 U.S. intelligence agencies. Those agencies allowed Donald Trump to become Commander in Chief in 2017, despite multiple women charging him with sexual assaults, his six business bankruptcies and a long history of inflating his wealth to defraud banks. These same 17 intelligence agencies then sat back for four years and allowed Donald Trump to receive Top Secret intelligence briefings and purloin dozens of boxes of classified government documents as he angrily left office after a failed insurrection at the Capitol building.

Now, yet another billionaire, Elon Musk, has shown these intelligence agencies to have little bark and no bite when it comes to confronting powerful, ultra wealthy men. The Wall Street Journal reported last week that Elon Musk, who as CEO of SpaceX holds a Top Secret government security clearance and is launching spy satellites into orbit under U.S. government contracts, “has been in regular contact with Russian President Vladimir Putin since late 2022.” Putin has been on a U.S. sanctions list since February 2022 for his aggressions against Ukraine.

According to a U.S. government website, Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SpaceX) has received over $19 billion in government contracts since 2009, with $14.4 billion of that coming from NASA, and over $5 billion coming from the Department of Defense. The same website shows that SpaceX received 54 new government contracts in 2023 and 32 new contracts in 2024, worth more than $3 billion in each year. Those are the same years that the Wall Street Journal reported that Musk was communicating with Putin.

On March 16, the international wire service, Reuters, reported the following about SpaceX’s growing involvement with U.S. intelligence agencies:

“SpaceX is building a network of hundreds of spy satellites under a classified contract with a U.S. intelligence agency, five sources familiar with the program said, demonstrating deepening ties between billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk’s space company and national security agencies.

“The network is being built by SpaceX’s Starshield business unit under a $1.8 billion contract signed in 2021 with the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), an intelligence agency that manages spy satellites, the sources said.”

Musk has inserted himself into the Trump presidential campaign, with the anticipation that he will get a key post to revamp the federal government if Trump wins the election. Musk, and/or his companies, are under investigation by a host of federal agencies, raising the potential that he might choose to eliminate those same agencies under the rubric of “efficiency.” On this past Sunday’s Meet the Press, Senator Bernie Sanders said this: “What really interests me is, if, God forbid, Trump would win, whether it would be Elon Musk running the government and Trump working for him, or the other way around.”

Musk is, on paper, the richest man in the world. In addition to heading the private company, SpaceX, Musk is co-founder, CEO and the largest shareholder of Tesla, the electric-vehicle company that trades publicly and constitutes the largest part of his wealth. Musk also heads the private companies Neuralink (brain-computer interface research), The Boring Company (tunnel construction), and X Corp. (formerly Twitter), the social media platform that is regularly accused of engaging in misinformation. As if those do not represent enough of a drain on his focus and energies, in July 2023 Musk announced the creation of his new artificial intelligence startup, xAI.

Senator Elizabeth Warren, a former law professor and long-tenured member of the Senate Banking Committee which oversees Wall Street’s regulators, was so alarmed by Musk’s sprawling conflicts, that she sent a 10-page letter in August to Tesla’s Board Chair, outlining the conflicts and suggesting that she might have to get the Securities and Exchange Commission involved if the Board continues to fail its duties to shareholders.

Prior to the Journal’s bombshell last week revealing Musk’s conversations with Putin over two years, in January and February of this year, the Wall Street Journal ran two separate articles revealing Musk’s use of illegal drugs – which, if confirmed, should have stripped him of his government security clearances and put SpaceX’s government contracts under immediate investigation.

The Wall Street Journal’s January 6, 2024 (paywall) article carried this assessment of Musk’s drug use:

“The world’s wealthiest person has used LSD, cocaine, ecstasy and psychedelic mushrooms, often at private parties around the world, where attendees sign nondisclosure agreements or give up their phones to enter, according to people who have witnessed his drug use and others with knowledge of it. Musk has previously smoked marijuana in public and has said he has a prescription for the psychedelic-like ketamine.”

As far as we are aware, the Journal has not been sued by Musk on the basis that it falsely reported his drug use 10 months ago.

In a November 2022 article, Wall Street On Parade called out Musk’s reckless behavior as follows:

“…Musk has smoked marijuana on a widely circulated podcast and called the Securities and Exchange Commission ‘bastards’ at a TED conference because it charged Musk in 2018 with fraud for falsely Tweeting that he had secured financing for taking Tesla private at $420 per share. The SEC case was quickly settled with Musk and Tesla each paying $20 million in penalties. Musk was also removed as Tesla’s Chairman as part of the SEC settlement and the Board was forced to ‘establish a new committee of independent directors and put in place additional controls and procedures to oversee Musk’s communications.’ ”

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