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Giving Elon Musk access to some of the nation’s most closely guarded military secrets is a major expansion of his role as an adviser to President Trump and highlights his conflicts of interest.
The Pentagon is scheduled on Friday to brief Elon Musk on the U.S. military’s plan for any war that might break out with China, two U.S. officials said on Thursday.
Another official said the briefing will be China focused, without providing additional details. A fourth official confirmed Mr. Musk was to be at the Pentagon on Friday, but offered no details.
Providing Mr. Musk access to some of the nation’s most closely guarded military secrets would be a dramatic expansion of his already extensive role as an adviser to President Trump and leader of his effort to slash spending and purge the government of people and policies they oppose.
It would also bring into sharp relief the questions about Mr. Musk’s conflicts of interest as he ranges widely across the federal bureaucracy while continuing to run businesses that are major government contractors. In this case, Mr. Musk, the billionaire chief executive of both SpaceX and Tesla, is a leading supplier to the Pentagon and has extensive financial interests in China.
About an hour later, Mr. Parnell posted a message on his X account: “This is 100% Fake News. Just brazenly & maliciously wrong. Elon Musk is a patriot. We are proud to have him at the Pentagon.”
Mr. Hegseth also commented on X late on Thursday, saying: “This is NOT a meeting about ‘top secret China war plans.’ It’s an informal meeting about innovation, efficiencies & smarter production. Gonna be great!”
The meeting reflects the extraordinary dual role played by Mr. Musk, who is both the world’s wealthiest man and has been given broad authority by Mr. Trump.
Mr. Musk has a security clearance, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth can determine who has a need to know about the plan. A choice of sharing lots of technical details with Mr. Musk, however, is another matter.
Mr. Hegseth; Adm. Christopher W. Grady, the acting chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; and Adm. Samuel J. Paparo, the head of the military’s Indo-Pacific Command, are set to present Mr. Musk with details on the U.S. plan to counter China in the event of military conflict between the two countries, the officials said.
Mr. Musk has already called for the Pentagon to stop buying certain high-priced items like F-35 fighter jets, manufactured by one of his space-launch competitors, Lockheed Martin, in a program that costs the Pentagon more than $12 billion a year.
Yet Mr. Musk’s extensive business interests make his access to strategic secrets about China a serious problem in the view of ethics experts. Officials have said revisions to the war plans against China have focused on upgrading the plans for defending against space warfare. China has developed a suite of weapons that can attack U.S. satellites.
Mr. Trump has already proposed that the United States build a new system the military is calling Golden Dome, a space-based missile defense system that recalls what President Ronald Reagan tried to deliver. (The so-called Star Wars system Mr. Reagan had in mind was never fully developed.)
Perceived missile threats from China — be it nuclear weapons or hypersonic missiles or cruise missiles — are a major factor that led Mr. Trump to sign an executive order recently instructing the Pentagon to start work on Golden Dome.
Even starting to plan and build the first components of the system will cost tens of billions of dollars, according to Pentagon officials, and most likely create large business opportunities for SpaceX, which already provides rocket launches, satellite structures, and space-based data communications systems, all of which will be required for Golden Dome.
Separately, Mr. Musk has been the focus of an investigation by the Pentagon’s inspector general over questions about his compliance with his top-secret security clearance.
The investigations started last year after some SpaceX employees complained to government agencies that Mr. Musk and others at SpaceX were not properly reporting contacts or conversations with foreign leaders.
asked questions about Mr. Musk and asserted that he was not complying with security clearance requirements.
The Air Force, in fact, had denied a request by Mr. Musk for an even higher level of security clearance, known as Special Access Program, which is reserved for extremely sensitive classified programs, citing potential security risks associated with the billionaire.
In fact, SpaceX has become so valuable to the Pentagon that the Chinese government has said it considers the company to be an extension of the U.S. military.
“Starlink Militarization and Its Impact on Global Strategic Stability” was the headline of one publication released last year from China’s National University of Defense Technology, according to a translation of the paper prepared by the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Mr. Musk and Tesla, an electric vehicle company he controls, are heavily reliant on China, which houses one of the auto maker’s flagship factories in Shanghai. Unveiled in 2019, the state-of-the-art facility was built with special permission from the Chinese government, and now accounts for more than half of Tesla’s global deliveries. Last year, the company said in financial filings that it had a $2.8 billion loan agreement with lenders in China for production expenditures.
a column for the magazine of the Cyberspace Administration of China, the country’s censorship agency, trumpeting his companies and their missions of improving humanity.
That same year, the billionaire told The Financial Times that China should be given some control over Taiwan by making a “special administrative zone for Taiwan that is reasonably palatable,” an assertion that angered politicians of the independent island. In that same interview, he also noted that Beijing sought assurances that he would not sell Starlink in China.
The following year at a tech conference, Mr. Musk called the democratic island “an integral part of China that is arbitrarily not part of China,” and compared the Taiwan-China situation to Hawaii and the United States.
On X, the social platform he owns, Mr. Musk has long used his account to praise China. He has said the country is “by far” the world leader in electric vehicles and solar power, and has commended its space program for being “far more advanced than people realize.” He has encouraged more people to visit the country, and posited openly about an “inevitable” Russia-China alliance.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/20/....SRAZ.aIZGK_LvUkAE&smid=nytcore-android-share
The Pentagon is scheduled on Friday to brief Elon Musk on the U.S. military’s plan for any war that might break out with China, two U.S. officials said on Thursday.
Another official said the briefing will be China focused, without providing additional details. A fourth official confirmed Mr. Musk was to be at the Pentagon on Friday, but offered no details.
Providing Mr. Musk access to some of the nation’s most closely guarded military secrets would be a dramatic expansion of his already extensive role as an adviser to President Trump and leader of his effort to slash spending and purge the government of people and policies they oppose.
It would also bring into sharp relief the questions about Mr. Musk’s conflicts of interest as he ranges widely across the federal bureaucracy while continuing to run businesses that are major government contractors. In this case, Mr. Musk, the billionaire chief executive of both SpaceX and Tesla, is a leading supplier to the Pentagon and has extensive financial interests in China.
About an hour later, Mr. Parnell posted a message on his X account: “This is 100% Fake News. Just brazenly & maliciously wrong. Elon Musk is a patriot. We are proud to have him at the Pentagon.”
Mr. Hegseth also commented on X late on Thursday, saying: “This is NOT a meeting about ‘top secret China war plans.’ It’s an informal meeting about innovation, efficiencies & smarter production. Gonna be great!”
The meeting reflects the extraordinary dual role played by Mr. Musk, who is both the world’s wealthiest man and has been given broad authority by Mr. Trump.
Mr. Musk has a security clearance, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth can determine who has a need to know about the plan. A choice of sharing lots of technical details with Mr. Musk, however, is another matter.
Mr. Hegseth; Adm. Christopher W. Grady, the acting chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; and Adm. Samuel J. Paparo, the head of the military’s Indo-Pacific Command, are set to present Mr. Musk with details on the U.S. plan to counter China in the event of military conflict between the two countries, the officials said.
Mr. Musk has already called for the Pentagon to stop buying certain high-priced items like F-35 fighter jets, manufactured by one of his space-launch competitors, Lockheed Martin, in a program that costs the Pentagon more than $12 billion a year.
Yet Mr. Musk’s extensive business interests make his access to strategic secrets about China a serious problem in the view of ethics experts. Officials have said revisions to the war plans against China have focused on upgrading the plans for defending against space warfare. China has developed a suite of weapons that can attack U.S. satellites.
Mr. Trump has already proposed that the United States build a new system the military is calling Golden Dome, a space-based missile defense system that recalls what President Ronald Reagan tried to deliver. (The so-called Star Wars system Mr. Reagan had in mind was never fully developed.)
Perceived missile threats from China — be it nuclear weapons or hypersonic missiles or cruise missiles — are a major factor that led Mr. Trump to sign an executive order recently instructing the Pentagon to start work on Golden Dome.
Even starting to plan and build the first components of the system will cost tens of billions of dollars, according to Pentagon officials, and most likely create large business opportunities for SpaceX, which already provides rocket launches, satellite structures, and space-based data communications systems, all of which will be required for Golden Dome.
Separately, Mr. Musk has been the focus of an investigation by the Pentagon’s inspector general over questions about his compliance with his top-secret security clearance.
The investigations started last year after some SpaceX employees complained to government agencies that Mr. Musk and others at SpaceX were not properly reporting contacts or conversations with foreign leaders.
asked questions about Mr. Musk and asserted that he was not complying with security clearance requirements.
The Air Force, in fact, had denied a request by Mr. Musk for an even higher level of security clearance, known as Special Access Program, which is reserved for extremely sensitive classified programs, citing potential security risks associated with the billionaire.
In fact, SpaceX has become so valuable to the Pentagon that the Chinese government has said it considers the company to be an extension of the U.S. military.
“Starlink Militarization and Its Impact on Global Strategic Stability” was the headline of one publication released last year from China’s National University of Defense Technology, according to a translation of the paper prepared by the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Mr. Musk and Tesla, an electric vehicle company he controls, are heavily reliant on China, which houses one of the auto maker’s flagship factories in Shanghai. Unveiled in 2019, the state-of-the-art facility was built with special permission from the Chinese government, and now accounts for more than half of Tesla’s global deliveries. Last year, the company said in financial filings that it had a $2.8 billion loan agreement with lenders in China for production expenditures.
a column for the magazine of the Cyberspace Administration of China, the country’s censorship agency, trumpeting his companies and their missions of improving humanity.
That same year, the billionaire told The Financial Times that China should be given some control over Taiwan by making a “special administrative zone for Taiwan that is reasonably palatable,” an assertion that angered politicians of the independent island. In that same interview, he also noted that Beijing sought assurances that he would not sell Starlink in China.
The following year at a tech conference, Mr. Musk called the democratic island “an integral part of China that is arbitrarily not part of China,” and compared the Taiwan-China situation to Hawaii and the United States.
On X, the social platform he owns, Mr. Musk has long used his account to praise China. He has said the country is “by far” the world leader in electric vehicles and solar power, and has commended its space program for being “far more advanced than people realize.” He has encouraged more people to visit the country, and posited openly about an “inevitable” Russia-China alliance.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/20/....SRAZ.aIZGK_LvUkAE&smid=nytcore-android-share
