January 22, 2025
Breathtaking conflicts of interest line the pockets of oligarchs with our tax dollars.
Anyone who has consulted the media over the past two months is well aware of the central role that Donald Trump’s “first crony,” tech billionaire Elon Musk, is playing in the presidential transition. Musk’s influence will only increase as he chairs the proposed Department of State Efficiency (DoJ). Musk promised to use his position to achieve the stunning 2 trillion dollars in federal spending cuts – nearly one-third of the entire federal budget. Even a small fraction of this level of reduction could destroy the social protection system and undermine basic government functions.
DOGE is a profoundly undemocratic creation. Allowing an unelected billionaire and major government contractor like Elon Musk to dictate the terms of the debate on government spending priorities is a staggering conflict of interest. Musk’s company, SpaceX, has hundreds of millions contracts for military versions of its Starlink system, the civilian version of which was used to provide Internet services to Ukrainian forces in their war against Russian invaders. And, most likely, there are still billions ahead — SpaceX Starship The system, developed in pursuit of Musk’s interest in reaching Mars, can send large volumes of material into space, a capability that many military experts see as of great value in the military space race with China. Starship’s military use could bring the Pentagon tens of billions in Space-X contracts in the coming years. Bloomberg was so excited about SpaceX’s prospects of receiving a huge influx of Pentagon funding that he described it as “the world’s most valuable private company and most valuable defense contractor.”
Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives predicts that Musk’s government revenue would skyrocket under the new administration, calling it a “golden era” for him and his campaigns with Trump in the White House.
Musk is just one of a large cohort of Silicon Valley executives putting their stamp on the new administration. The New York Times summed up the military-tech industry’s influence from day one: “(T)he billionaires and millionaires of Silicon Valley … were all over the transition, making hiring decisions and even interviewing for high-level jobs.”
The corporate executive with the most influence in the Trump administration — after Musk — may be Marc Andreessen of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. He spent most of the transition period at Mar-a-Lago, recruiting and interviewing candidates for top positions at the Pentagon and other agencies. Meanwhile, his company American dynamism the fund has invested in prominent military technology firms, including Anduril, Shield AI, Skydio and SpaceX.
Also, Andreessen is a ferocious China hawk, vocally urging to an arms race with Beijing in the field of militarized artificial intelligence, and claiming that whoever wins this race will rule the world. Therefore, according to Andreessen, any other concern about artificial intelligence, be it surveillance, job elimination or energy intensity, must be pushed aside in the face of the need to beat China at all costs. A Washington Post profile of Silicon Valley executives involved in Trump’s transition captured the moment, noting that after his first meeting with the president-elect, “Andriessen saw a potential ally whose ambitions to defeat China could be a boon for the American technology industry.”
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Musk suggested recruitment Colleagues from Silicon Valley will monitor every major US government agency to assess their performance against DOGE’s performance recommendations. This is a recipe for a constant daily influence machine that threatens to put special interests above the public.
And none of the above explains the potential role of Vice President J. D. Vance, a protégé of a Silicon Valley military magnate Peter Thiel. Not only did Vance work for one of Thiel’s campaigns for five years, but Thiel helped fund Vance’s successful 2022 Ohio Senate bid to the tune of 15 million dollars.
Congress, the independent media, and vigilant civil servants in the executive branch must resist this unprecedented power grab. The public needs to speak loud and clear about how we want the administration to spend our tax dollars, not leave it up to government insiders and well-placed lobbyists to shape the budget without objection. Trillions of tax dollars are at stake, but lives are also at stake, both because of cuts to social programs that will become the real targets of the fight for “efficiency” and because of the risk of war between two nuclear powers, which will only increase with committed to the policy of confrontation with China by techno-militarists.
The potentially devastating consequences of an administration focused on military technology call for urgent action. We should start by making it clear that the most effective thing Musk and his colleagues can do is line their pockets with our tax dollars. But they want more than our money—they want to live forever, colonize space, conquer China, and eventually rule the world. And Donald Trump might just give them that chance. The time has come to create a countermeasure to the new high-tech robber barons before they become so entrenched in government that there is no turning back.
