New York Times journalist Eric Lipton explains how Musk's companies are benefiting as he cuts federal jobs and agencies, and reporter Teddy Schleifer explains how Musk's political views turned right, and why he thinks the billionaire's relationship with Trump might actually last.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
Chapter 1: What conflicts of interest does Elon Musk have in the Trump administration?
This is Fresh Air. I'm Terry Gross. A new investigation into conflicts of interest posed by Elon Musk overseeing the drastic cost-cutting and dismantling of some federal agencies was published yesterday afternoon in the New York Times online. A few hours later, Musk and President Trump held a joint press conference during which they insisted Musk was operating with full transparency.
Trump said he wouldn't allow Musk to look into areas that posed a conflict of interest. Musk controls six private companies, including SpaceX, Tesla, and X, formerly Twitter. He gets billions of dollars from the federal government. My guest Eric Lipton, along with Times reporter Kirsten Grind, spent the past year investigating Musk's business with the federal government.
they learned that at least 11 federal agencies have more than 32 continuing investigations, pending complaints, or enforcement actions into Musk's companies. Yesterday, before the Trump-Musk press conference, I spoke to Lipton about what the investigation uncovered. Eric Lipton, welcome to Fresh Air. You're a reporter looking into these conflicts of interest.
Is there anyone in an official capacity in the Trump administration or in Congress or in any other official capacity who is doing an investigation into possible conflicts of interest between Elon Musk and the departments and agencies that he is cutting jobs and costs?
That's the somewhat startling thing to me as a reporter at this moment is that there's really no one else beyond us, the team that's working on it from the New York Times and other journalists. Because just in the last few days, Trump fired the head of the Office of Government Ethics. He's removed the inspectors general across the government, at least 17 of them.
The Congress is controlled by Republicans, so therefore the Democrats who might be more critical of him don't have subpoena power, and they don't really therefore have significant investigative powers. And the Department of Justice is controlled by someone who's completely loyal to Trump.
So there really is not much of an investigative capacity or an investigative desire beyond reporters that are attempting to drill into this without subpoena power.
And the Office of Government Ethics, which you mentioned, Trump just fired the head of it this week. That office had pending requests to investigate Musk for conflicts of interest. On what grounds?
That's right. I mean, really, there's never been anything quite like Elon Musk. This is a guy whose companies just last year in 2024 received $3.8 billion worth of federal government contracts from And in the last five years, $13 billion worth of contracts. He has investigations pending of his various corporate entities in the dozens.
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Chapter 2: Why are federal investigations into Musk's companies significant?
In the fall, we spent a month looking at all of Musk's operations with the federal government, all of his contracts, all the investigations. We had a database that was built and that allowed us to quickly know what the pending lawsuits, investigations, and contracts were.
So it was actually didn't take nearly as much time now that we knew where all the matters were to go back and look and see, okay, several members of the National Labor Relations Board have been fired and no longer has a quorum or two members of the SEC have left or the chairwoman of the Federal Election Commission has just been fired or the head of the Office of Government Ethics has been removed.
And we were able to cross-reference all of these actions that Trump has taken and look at the investigations that we knew about and see that these have been disrupted. We did not find evidence so far that Musk reached in himself and determined these outcomes. But what we were able to establish is that he has clearly benefited from all of the disruption that has occurred.
How much do you think Musk's efforts combined with Trump's desire to basically gut a lot of government, how much is that reshaping what the federal government is?
I mean, I think that this is going to be significant depending on whether or not it's not completely overturned by federal courts. But I think that this is going to be one of the bigger realignments in modern decades of the scale and reach of the federal government if they are able to play this out as they hope.
And I don't, you know, do I really believe that Musk is doing this to try to influence how his companies are treated? No, I don't. I think that he does think that the government has, you know, there's too much federal regulatory overreach, that there's inefficiencies.
I mean, this is a guy who has the reason that he is so massively successful in building SpaceX is he built the most efficient spacecraft. commercial space company in the history of the space industry. And the cost of getting to orbit has radically reduced because of his efficiencies. He's a master at reducing the cost of assembly line operations and building rockets that get into orbit.
And he's bringing that same approach to the federal government, and he's really disrupting it. But in the process of that, the disruption is benefiting his own companies, and that is a conflict of interest.
So, you know, we've been talking about several agencies that Musk has conflicts of interest with. But if you put all of the departments and all the agencies together that he is using his team to cut costs and cut jobs, if you put it all together, what is the significance that's different than looking at individual places?
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