Elon Musk Is Already Using His New Power to Make Himself Even Richer

As he works to slash millions in federal spending, Elon Musk is boosting his own company through yet another government contract, this time at the disaster-ridden Federal Aviation Administration.

Following a number of high-profile plane crashes—including the first fatal crash involving a commercial airliner in over a decade—the FAA agreed to use Musk’s Starlink internet terminals to help manage U.S. airspace.

Three terminals are already being tested in Atlantic City, New Jersey, and at two separate sites in Alaska, according to an FAA post on X, which Musk also owns.

“Alaska has long had issues with reliable weather information for the aviation community. The 2024 FAA reauthorization required the FAA to fix telecommunications connections to fix those needs,” the post reads.

Starlink will eventually deploy 4,000 terminals across the country over the course of 12 to 18 months.

The contract announcement, first reported by Bloomberg, comes just days after Musk fired hundreds of FAA employees as part of his government-wide purge of federal workers through the Department of Government Efficiency.

Verizon has a similar 15-year contract with the FAA, which Musk believes “is putting air travelers at serious risk,” he wrote on X. What is more likely to put air travelers at risk, however, is sacking some 400 FAA personnel, many of whom worked in critical safety roles.

SpaceX’s deal with the FAA is just the latest of Musk’s business ventures to be overseen by the federal government. The billionaire’s companies, namely SpaceX and Tesla, also have a hand in NASA, the Department of Defense, Homeland Security, and other agencies. Over the last 10 years, SpaceX and Tesla were awarded at at least $18 billion in federal contracts, ABC News reported.

The contract has likely been in the works for several weeks. Following the plane crash that killed 67 people near Washington, D.C., which Donald Trump blamed on diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, Musk spoke with Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy about remaking American airspace and doing it “quickly,” CNBC reported.

“He thinks differently than I think probably a lot of us do, but he has access to the best technological people, the best engineers in the world,” Duffy said of Musk at an event earlier this month.

“Thinks differently” is one way of putting it.

Donald Trump is working on bullying his way out of public criticism.

In an alarming Truth Social post Wednesday morning, the president threatened to wield his attorneys against those who criticize him, and even proposed making a “nice new law” that would infringe on Americans’ First Amendment rights.

“As a President who is being given credit for having the Best Opening Month of any President in history, quite naturally, here come the Fake books and stories with the so-called ‘anonymous,’ or ‘off the record,’ quotes,” Trump posted. “At some point I am going to sue some of these dishonest authors and book publishers, or even media in general, to find out whether or not these ‘anonymous sources’ even exist, which they largely do not.

“They are made up, defamatory fiction, and a big price should be paid for this blatant dishonesty,” he continued. “I’ll do it as a service to our Country. Who knows, maybe we will create some NICE NEW LAW!!!”

Suing people has always been a part of Trump’s business ethos, but unfortunately for him, the U.S. Constitution protects anonymous speech—a text that was, itself, adopted in part due to the practice. Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay jointly wrote under the pen name “Publius” while publishing the Federalist Papers, their opus to promote the ratification of the Constitution.

It was not immediately clear if it was one author or several that set Trump out to publicly scorn them on his social media platform, but the threat comes on the heels of Michael Wolff’s latest exposé on the MAGA leader, All or Nothing: How Trump Recaptured America, an 18-month reporting journey drudging up behind-the-scenes details from Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign, which published Tuesday. The book reportedly holds salacious details, including that the far-right politico was “on the verge of cracking” after the July assassination attempt, that first lady Melania Trump allegedly “fucking hates” her husband, and that Trump feared he was going to die on a private jet owned by Jeffrey Epstein. It also covers Trump’s hot and cold relationship with conservative news mogul Rupert Murdoch.

Trump has lambasted Wolff, who has previously written several bestsellers on the real estate mogul’s political rise, as a “total loser.” In a statement to the Daily Beast this week, White House Communications Director Steven Cheung torched Wolff as a “lying sack of shit.”

“Wolff says he has sources, but he doesn’t have them, it’s a LIE, as is the case with many so-called ‘journalists.’ If he has sources, let them be revealed. Watch, it will never happen,” Trump posted on Sunday.

In defense of his first bombshell exposé of Trump—Fire and Fury—Wolff claimed that he had spoken to upward of 200 sources to build the text and had accumulated dozens of hours’ worth of interviews to back up his writing.

But Trump’s covert warning to those in the publishing realm also comes on the heels of a flurry of attacks by his administration on the press at large. On Tuesday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt announced that the administration would take control of the White House press pool, hand-selecting which outlets are allowed access to the president and possibly replacing reporters from legacy publications with podcasters.

The White House Correspondents’ Association, which has handled press pool coverage since its founding in 1914, said that the decision “tears at the independence of a free press.”

And earlier this month, the Trump administration banned the Associated Press from accessing Air Force One and the Oval Office on the basis that the newswire chose to continue referring to the recently renamed “Gulf of America” as the “Gulf of Mexico” for its global audience.

Elon Musk’s net worth dropped by $22.2 billion on Tuesday, suggesting that the markets don’t have nearly as much confidence in Musk and Trump’s DOGE slashing and grabbing as they do. This is the fourth-largest one-day drop in net worth for the billionaire, according to Bloomberg.

The losses are most visible in the European market for Musk’s Tesla company. Tesla sales were cut in half in January as Musk’s international political meddling grows increasingly unpopular across the continent. In the United States, Tesla shares fell by 8.4 percent, sending the company’s market value under $1 trillion for the first time in months.

A strong market was one of Trump’s biggest campaign promises. But his actions since then—particularly his proximity and deference to Musk—have only led to more instability.

Read more at Bloomberg.

Donald Trump shared a bizarre AI-generated video to his social media accounts late Tuesday night showing a disturbing future for Gaza.

The video, shared to Trump’s Truth Social and Instagram accounts, imagines the Palestinian territory full of resorts, Dubai-like skyscrapers, a luxury Trump hotel, a giant golden statue of the president, and bearded, bikini-clad belly dancers. An upbeat dance song plays in the background with the lyrics “Donald Trump will set you free, bringing the light for all to see, no more tunnels, no more fear, Trump Gaza is finally here. Trump Gaza shining bright, golden future, a brand new light.”

Tech mogul and fascism enthusiast Elon Musk shows up in the video multiple times, enjoying food and throwing cash at Gaza residents. Trump is shown dancing with a belly dancer and lounging poolside, shirtless, with Israeli prime minister and wanted war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu.

Trump has floated a plan for the United States to take over Gaza and transfer its Palestinian population to neighboring countries Egypt and Jordan, which they have rejected along with U.S. allies in Europe. Israel’s brutal military campaign in Gaza has killed more than 60,000 Palestinians and left most of the territory’s infrastructure in ruins.

The video is a disgusting look at Trump’s imagination for a territory currently experiencing a humanitarian catastrophe caused by U.S. support for Israel’s war in the form of military aid and tax dollars. Now Trump wants to expel Palestinians who have already lost their homes twice before to fulfill his sick development fantasies.

Elon Musk posted through the pain as he watched America’s checks and balances system spoil his plans in real time. 

On Tuesday, three different judges rejected three core Trump policies in the span of 90 minutes. Judge Loren AliKhan issued a preliminary injunction that stops the Trump administration from freezing federal grants and loans indefinitely, saying that Trump’s freeze was “irrational, imprudent, and precipitated a nationwide crisis.”

Judge Amir Ali ordered the Trump administration to pay foreign aid-related money owed to government contractors and nonprofit groups by Wednesday night, saying that Trump’s authority was “not limitless”  And finally, Judge Jamal Whitehead issued his own preliminary injunction blocking Trump’s refugee ban. 

These successive constitutional losses sent the South African billionaire into a frenzy. 

“What is the point of having democratic elections if unelected activist ‘judges’ can override the clear will of the people?” Musk wrote in response to Whitehead’s injunction. “Well, that’s no democracy at all!”

“If ANY judge ANYWHERE can block EVERY Presidential order EVERYWHERE, we do NOT have democracy, we have TYRANNY of the JUDICIARY,” he continued, complaining about a judiciary system that conservatives had no issue with when they happened to block Biden orders.

He also began to exchange posts with El Salvador’s authoritarian leader Nayib Bukele, who himself carried out a judicial purge to gain more power. 

“Unfortunately, as President Bukele eloquently articulates, there is no other option,” Musk wrote. “We must impeach to save democracy.”

A federal judge extended a block on the Office of Management and Budget’s sweeping order to freeze trillions in congressionally appropriated funds to federal agencies.

Judge Loren AliKhan sided Tuesday with a coalition of nonprofits that had sued the government over the budget freeze, describing the potential fallout of the Trump administration’s interference as “economically catastrophic” and in some cases “fatal” for the group that brought the case.

“In the simplest terms, the freeze was ill-conceived from the beginning,” AliKhan wrote in her ruling. “Defendants either wanted to pause up to $3 trillion in federal spending practically overnight, or they expected each federal agency to review every single one of its grants, loans, and funds for compliance in less than twenty-four hours. The breadth of that command is almost unfathomable.”

The extension is yet another blow to Donald Trump’s efforts to shrink federal spending. The coalition, which consisted of the National Council of Nonprofits, the American Public Health Association, Main Street Alliance, and SAGE, had asked the court to halt the freeze on the basis that OMB does not have the authority to unilaterally shutter funding to hundreds of agencies that have already had their spending approved by Congress.

The spending suspension would have impacted upward of 2,600 accounts across the government and paused the distributions of tens of billions of dollars to programs across the nation unless those agencies proved that their funding initiatives fell in line with his agenda.

The Trump administration gave federal agencies mere hours to prove that their programs did not promote or support elements that Trump has derided as “woke” ideology, including “environmental justice,” abortion, DEI initiatives, and “woke gender” programs, or provide services to “illegal aliens,” in order to tap back into the cashflow, according to an OMB memo.

Programs that were expected to be impacted by the ax included infrastructure initiatives, housing assistance, disaster relief, educational programs, grants for suicide-prevention efforts, including the suicide lifeline, money for rural hospitals, opioid prevention funding, and HIV/AIDS treatment.

AliKhan had previously issued a temporary restraining order on the freeze but ultimately agreed with the nonprofits that the government “may be crossing a constitutional line” in attempting to completely choke Congress’s purse strings.

“The scope of power OMB seeks to claim is ‘breathtaking,’ and its ramifications are massive,” wrote AliKhan. “Because there is no clear statutory hook for this broad assertion of power, plaintiffs are likely to succeed on the merits of this claim.”

In her ruling, AliKhan pointed to a “mountain of evidence” brought by the nonprofit coalition that showed “even the threat of a funding freeze was enough to send countless organizations into complete disarray.” Furthermore, she wrote that the Trump administration could not provide a “reasonable explanation for why they needed to freeze all federal financial assistance in less than a day to ‘safeguard valuable taxpayer resources.’”

But while turning off the flow of federal cash streams appeared to be “alarmingly easy” for Trump officials, AliKhan noted that turning them back on has “proven much more difficult.”

Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency is working on an artificial intelligence tool that can automate its sweeping (sometimes mistaken) cuts to the federal work force, Wired reported Tuesday.

Engineers at DOGE have been working on AutoRIF, a program developed by the Department of Defense. Its name stands for Automated Reduction in Force, and it has the capability to automatically generate lists of government employees, ranking them in order of how subject they are to being fired—a task traditionally done by human resources—a former government H.R. employee told Wired.

“However, even with the use of any automated system, the OPM guidance says all data has to be confirmed manually and that employees (or their representative) are allowed to examine the registers,” the employee added.

DOGE employees appeared to have accessed AutoRIF’s code in the Office of Personnel Management’s system, and have begun editing its code. The screenshots indicate that one DOGE employee, Riccardo Biasini, a former engineer at Tesla, has been shearing the code.

Federal government employees are bracing themselves for a second round of sweeping, government-wide layoffs. The first round of layoffs earlier this month targeted probationary employees, who have worked for the government for less than a year and lack the same protections as their colleagues.

So far, the sweeping layoffs that have helped contribute to the whopping 95,000 eliminated government jobs have all been determined by human beings who combed through government databases looking for employees to prune.

But DOGE’s efforts to shrink the size of the federal workforce have already led to significant issues, as essential workers are mistakenly dismissed and government agencies are sent scrambling to hire them back.

Earlier this month, the Department of Agriculture needed to rescind the terminations of “several” agency employees who were actively working to address the ongoing bird flu outbreak. A whopping 300 employees who oversee America’s nuclear stockpile were fired from the National Nuclear Security Administration and then quickly invited to return to their highly essential jobs. In another close call, approximately 950 employees at the Indian Health Service were informed that they would receive termination notices, but their jobs were miraculously saved by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at the last minute.

It’s not clear that employing an AI model would help to mitigate these mistakes, only make the pruning of federal employees that much more inhuman.

The White House wants everyone to know that the Department of Government Efficiency is incredibly transparent. They also don’t want you to know who’s actually running it.

During a White House press briefing Tuesday, press secretary Karoline Leavitt refused to name the administrator of DOGE, and in the same breath lauded the Trump administration’s transparency on the inner workings of its government-destroying machine. 

One reporter asked Leavitt to follow up on a hearing that had taken place the day before in Washington, where a Justice Department lawyer had openly admitted to the judge that he didn’t know who the administrator of DOGE was, while defending the organization’s unfettered access to sensitive government records. 

“Can you tell us who the administrator of DOGE is?” the reporter asked Leavitt.  

“Again, I’ve been asked and answered this question,” Leavitt replied, proceeding not to answer it. “Elon Musk is overseeing DOGE. There are—”

“Is he the administrator?” the reporter pressed. 

“No, Elon Musk is a special government employee, which I’ve also been asked and have answered that question as well,” Leavitt said.

“Who is the administrator?” the reporter pressed again. 

“There are career officials at DOGE. There are political appointees at DOGE. I am not going to reveal the name of that individual from this podium,” Leavitt said. 

“I am happy to follow up and provide that to you, but we have been incredibly transparent about the way that DOGE is working.”

To lend some perspective on the Trump administration’s obvious obfuscation, there is no reason to keep the identity of anyone running a federal department secret—and the names of those people are both in the public interest and publicly available, with the one exception of DOGE.

Only after the press briefing did it come out that Amy Gleason is the acting director of DOGE. It’s not clear she knows this, however—she was in Mexico when reached by reporters, despite the fact that the DOGE head has made in-office work a centerpiece of his reign of terror.

Gleason has served as the “senior adviser” to the U.S. Digital Service since the beginning of January, according to her LinkedIn page. Gleason previously worked for the USDS between 2018 and 2021. 

The USDS was originally an Obama-era group created to respond to issues with the Affordable Care Act’s website, and it later served as a port of technologists responsible for updating government technology services. Upon entering office, Trump issued an executive order rebranding the agency as DOGE. 

It’s unclear whether Gleason outranks Musk, the billionaire bureaucrat the Trump administration insists maintains the reins on its budget-slashing operation. Nor, for that matter, is it clear if she actually has any meaningful authority at DOGE—or if she’s just a front for Musk. 

The Trump administration has decided to take over determining the press pool that covers the White House, shutting out the White House Correspondents’ Association. 

Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt announced Tuesday that the White House’s press team would take over the press pool, effectively determining which journalists get to travel with Donald  Trump for their news coverage. 

“We want more outlets and new outlets to have a chance to take part in the press pool to cover this administration’s unprecedented achievements up close, front and center,” Leavitt said. “We are going to give the power back to the people who read your papers, who watch your television shows, and who listen to your radio stations.”

On Monday, a federal court ruled against restoring the Associated Press’s access to White House press events, causing Leavitt to declare victory and insist that “covering the American presidency in the most intimate and limited spaces in this White House … is a privilege, it is not a legal right.” The AP has been barred ever since Trump signed an executive order to change the Gulf of Mexico’s name to the Gulf of America, a change the wire service has not adopted. 

The WHCA issued a statement criticizing the Trump administration’s move, claiming that the White House gave no notice of the change and saying that it “tears at the independence of a free press in the United States.”

“Since its founding in 1914, the WHCA has sought to ensure that the reporters, photographers, producers and technicians who actually do the work—365 days of every year—decide amongst themselves how these rotations are operated, so as to ensure consistent professional standards and fairness in access on behalf of all readers, viewers and listeners,” WHCA President Eugene Daniels, a correspondent for Politico, said. 

It’s an unprecedented move for a president to determine the journalists that travel with him. In the past, presidents usually ignored the media outlets or journalists that they did not like, instead of barring them from the White House or Air Force One. The famously thin-skinned Trump has already filed lawsuits against media organizations he doesn’t like and is using the Federal Communications Commission to go after broadcast outlets that irk him. Now he’s trying to dictate news coverage of his administration. 

DOGE deleted the top five highest savings claims on its “wall of receipts” leaderboard after various news outlets pointed out multiple errors in its calculations, The New York Times’ David Fahrenthold reported Tuesday.

The savings, deleted with no explanation from DOGE or the White House, include: a $232 million cut to the Social Security Administration that actually amounted to only $560,000; an $8 billion cut at Immigration and Customs Enforcement that was actually only $8 million; and three $655 million cuts at the U.S. Agency for International Development that ended up being a measly $18 million. These mistakes all seem to be completely avoidable human errors.

The bottom of DOGE’s savings list reads: “Scoreboard normalized to agency size and budget.

“This is a preliminary leaderboard, and there will likely be some initial mistakes in the relative rankings.”

DOGE had claimed earlier this week that it has saved $65 billion thanks to all of its cuts. Its website still boasts this number, despite the recently deleted claims.