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AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Drop Site News has revealed that procurement plans from the State Department include some $400 million to buy new Tesla armored Cybertrucks. This comes as Tesla owner and the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, is already one of the biggest beneficiaries of U.S. government contracts and is now also the head of the newly created Department of Government Efficiency, tasked with slashing the federal budget and firing thousands.
On Wednesday, the newly created House DOGE subcommittee held its first meeting, chaired by Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene. Elon Musk did not testify as Democrats blasted Republicans for giving him free rein to dismantle government agencies. This is Democratic Congressmember Robert Garcia.
REP. ROBERT GARCIA: This entire plan is about hurting the American social safety net and destroying our institutions. And it’s important that we actually call out what is happening at this subcommittee. This is not about working with the richest man on the planet. This is actually about empowering — this committee wants to empower the richest person in the world to hurt people, so they can take all of this money, that they so-called want to save, and then give it to themselves, their companies and their billionaire friends.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Congressional Democrats have also called on officials to, quote, “uphold federal ethics laws in relation to Elon Musk’s role as a special government employee.”
On Tuesday, Elon Musk spoke to reporters from the Oval Office, standing alongside President Trump, who remained seated at the Resolute Desk. It was the first time Musk took questions about his DOGE operation.
REPORTER: Mr. Musk, the White House says that you will identify and excuse yourself from any conflicts of interest that you may have. Does that mean that you are, in effect, policing yourself? What are the checks and balances that are in place to ensure that there is accountability and transparency?
ELON MUSK: Well, we actually are trying to be as transparent as possible. In fact, our actions — we post our actions to the DOGE handle on X and to the DOGE website. So, all of our actions are maximally transparent. In fact, I don’t think there’s been — I don’t know of a case where an organization has been more transparent than the DOGE organization.
AMY GOODMAN: For more, we’re joined by Eric Lipton, three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, investigative reporter at The New York Times, part of a team investigating Elon Musk’s business with the federal government. His latest piece, “Elon Musk’s Business Empire Scores Benefits Under Trump Shake-Up.”
Eric, welcome back to Democracy Now! Why don’t you lay out the agencies that Elon Musk has gone after — the wealthiest man in the world — and also the fact that these are the very agencies that have been investigating him, whether we’re talking about the NLRB or the EEOC, whether we’re talking about the FAA or fining him or talking about the Consumer Protection Board, all of this?
ERIC LIPTON: Right. I mean, what we examined was the fact that Elon Musk, as you said, is one of the largest contractors that the federal government has. He’s received, you know, over $15 billion worth of contractual obligations from the federal government in the last decade, $3.8 billion just in 2024. The bulk of that comes from the Department of Defense and NASA, because he is launching almost everything they put up into orbit — spy satellites, astronauts, cargo, communication satellites.
And so, you know, at the same time, he is also the subject of dozens of distinct investigations and lawsuits and complaints that the federal government agencies are handling, from across the landscape. Just about every acronym you can come up with, they’ve got some investigation of him. And so, for example, the Federal Aviation Administration is simultaneously currently examining the recent explosion of the Starship rocket that blew up and sent debris coming down over the Caribbean last month, and the planes had to get out of the way, or else they would have been struck by falling debris as that rocket blew up. And they’re also examining whether or not to allow SpaceX’s Starship to launch 25 times a year out of Boca Chica in South Texas near the Mexican border. And they’re also looking at the damage that those launches are having to the wildlife in this adjacent wildlife refuge. I was there in June of 2024 during one of the launches and then walked the area nearby and saw, you know, various eggs that were destroyed, from threatened species of birds, that had been blown up by the debris that was sent out by the rocket. And there was an investigation of that. So, all these things are ongoing.
So, the guy, at the same time, has billions of dollars of pending contracts. He’s got all of these investigations. And now he’s been tasked by Trump to look into the FAA, to look into the Department of Defense. And so, that creates — at a minimum, it’s an appearance of conflict of interest. And the open question is: What role is he playing in potentially putting restraints on some of the same regulators that are investigating him? And we do not have transparency into that. Despite what he said, it is not a transparent operation. It is incredibly hard to see into it. And all we know is that there is this overlap between the things that he interacts with the government on as a private businessman and the things he’s doing as a special government employee.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Eric, could you explain? There are something like 24 ongoing investigations by the National Labor Relations Board into Musk’s companies. If you could elaborate on that a little?
ERIC LIPTON: Yeah. So, when Musk bought Twitter and was in the process of basically, you know, reducing and/or significantly cutting its staff, there was some criticism of his actions. And there was some of the — there were some allegations by employees there that he was — that the company was snooping on employees and mistreating the employees and improperly dismissing the employees, and there were complaints that were filed with the National Labor Relations Board. And there are many complaints. And the NLRB, as it’s called, is an entity that Elon Musk does not even think constitutionally should exist. He’s sued to try to get rid of it. And so, the NLRB now has lost its quorum, because Trump removed some members of the staff and a member of the board. And so, effectively, it is now in a static state.
So, in all of these cases that we examined, in more than 10 different federal agencies, we did not find a situation where Musk himself used his power at DOGE to fire or to stop an investigation of himself. But what we did find was that all of the disruption that is happening across the federal government has benefited his operations, to the extent that there are investigations that have been stalled, or there are quorums on oversight bodies that no longer exist, or the chairwoman of the Federal Election Commission, for example, Trump fired, and the FEC was investigating whether or not Musk had made illegal campaign contributions and had an illegal — you know, essentially, a lottery or a sweepstakes during the election, giving out a million dollars to people who were registering to vote. So, what we found was this overlap between changes that have occurred and investigations that were targeting Musk and his operations.
AMY GOODMAN: And explain how it works. How is it possible that he does not have to be investigated or signed off on conflict of interest agreements, that we don’t know what these conflicts of interest are, and yet he has this enormous power? People are now calling him the “X president,” not in terms of past, but the letter “X.”
ERIC LIPTON: Yeah, I mean, you know, normally, if you’re a federal government employee, you can’t have a contract with the federal government. And also, if you’re a federal government employee, you are prohibited, under criminal law, from taking any action that could, on a particular matter — so, it can be a general policy, but on a specific matter — that directly impacts your family or yourself financially. And that’s a criminal offense if you do that. And so, a special government employee, which Musk is, means that you are essentially a private person who’s not a full-time employee, but you’re advising the government, but your role is significant enough that you actually have this status as special government employee. And SGEs, as they’re known, are actually subject to the same federal conflict of interest criminal law. So he is prohibited, under federal criminal law, from taking any action, specific action, that can benefit himself.
Now, but there is a waiver process. A waiver can be granted to a person who’s a special government employee that effectively allows them to take actions that benefit themselves. We’ve asked the White House if such a waiver has been granted to him. The answer that we got earlier this week is that Musk is filling out his financial disclosure report, because as a special government employee, you’re required to fill out a financial disclosure report, which details all of your financial holdings. And what happens then is, then, the ethics lawyer reviews that document and then evaluates where your conflicts of interest emerge, based on your holdings, and then they write up what’s called an ethics letter. And the ethics letter says, “You must recuse from this, this, this and this, or else you will have a conflict of interest.” And it’s only after the ethics letter exists that typically you get a waiver. So, that would suggest he doesn’t yet have a waiver, because he’s just filling out the financial disclosure report. And they also told us that that financial disclosure report is not going to be made public, which is actually allowed under law if you’re a special government employee and you’re not paid. It is a confidential financial disclosure report.
So, that’s a long answer for: We don’t really have a basis of evaluating if he’s doing things that violate the conflict of interest law, because we don’t know what the ethics letter, the limits that it sets, and we can’t even evaluate if he’s honoring the ethics letter, because it doesn’t appear as if the ethics letter exists yet.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, Eric, ewe want to go to the other reporting that you’ve done on the Trump memecoin in an article headlined “Early Crypto Traders Had Speedy Profit on Trump Coin as Others Suffered Losses.” Could you lay out what you found in that piece?
ERIC LIPTON: Yeah, this is an entirely separate line of reporting. It’s been an incredibly busy period since Trump went into office, working crazy hours and seven days a week trying to try to examine so many different things that are happening simultaneously.
But my colleague David Yaffe-Bellany and I have written three or four articles now about the Trump memecoin, which was introduced on January 17th at 9 p.m., at the same moment that a bunch of cryptocurrency executives were gathering in Washington for what they call the Crypto Ball. And what we were really particularly interested on was how is the Trump family profiting from this new cryptocurrency memecoin, and who is making money and who is losing money. And we spent two weeks really digging into that, while we were working on other stories, and trying to gather the data based on examining the blockchain, which records every single transaction, every purchase and every sale, and looking at who the winners and losers were by looking at their wallets.
And what we found was that more than 800,000 people that followed Trump’s advice lost more than a billion dollars. And at the same time, the Trump family and its partners have made more than $100 million in transaction fees. And there are other traders who got in really quickly, who know what a memecoin is all about, which is a speculative, sort of worthless platform — you know, it has no inherent value. It’s just a speculative vehicle. And these really sophisticated traders instantly purchased large amounts of the Trump memecoin, and then they sold it just as the retail traders, the fans of Trump who were sort of, you know, just getting onto their computers and more slowly purchasing them — those retail buyers became, effectively, the liquidity for the sophisticated seller, that then was selling to them, and they were buying those tokens.
And so, the short answer is that a certain small group of people made enormous profits, but hundreds of thousands of people that followed Trump’s advice lost money. And the Trump family is walking away, and its partners, with more than $100 million simply in fees. And so, you know, you sort of wonder, you know, “Who benefited in that situation?” And it is not, clearly, the people that follow Trump.
AMY GOODMAN: And finally, Eric, we just have a minute, but another piece that you wrote, “What to Know About the Trump Family’s Deals in the Middle East.”
ERIC LIPTON: Yes, busy times. So, yes, we were also examining how — the Trump family, during the first term, limited its new international deals. They’re not doing that now. They’re doing a bunch of deals with, in particular, a Saudi Arabian company called Dar Al Arkan. They’ve got a deal in Dubai and two in Saudi Arabia, one in Oman. And so, they are moving full steam ahead on new international deals, and, in fact, even on deals, for example, in Serbia, in Belgrade, that the government of Serbia owns the land. So, Trump is both setting foreign policy relative to Serbia at the same time as his family is going to be building a hotel on government-owned land. You know, that’s a conflict of interest right there.
AMY GOODMAN: And, of course, there’s Ivanka and Jared Kushner in Albania, and Jared Kushner, of course, getting $2 billion from Mohammed bin Salman in Saudi Arabia.
ERIC LIPTON: Yeah, a lot to write about. We are very busy right now, and I hope that you’re reading these stories. I mean, you know, accountability matters, but it’s important that you take the time to read these stories, that you share these stories. You know, just writing into a vacuum doesn’t make a difference.
AMY GOODMAN: Eric Lipton, thanks so much for being with us, three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, investigative reporter at The New York Times, investigating Elon Musk’s business with the federal government. We will link to your latest pieces, including “Elon Musk’s Business Empire Scores Benefits Under Trump Shake-Up.”
When we come back, Indian Prime Minister Modi meets with President Trump at the White House today. Modi met with Tulsi Gabbard last night right as she was sworn in as head of national intelligence. We’ll speak with the acclaimed Indian writer Pankaj Mishra about India, Israel and Palestine. His new book, The World After Gaza. Stay with us.
