In a sign that U.S. President Donald Trump is curtailing Elon Musk's influence, the President conceded the possibility of a conflict of interest after a planned briefing on U.S. war plans with China was canceled.
"Certainly, you wouldn't show it to a businessman who is doing so much for us. Elon has interests in China, and he could be vulnerable to that," Trump told reporters on Friday after the cancellation.
Musk, the globe's richest man and a leading donor to Trump, has immense business interests in China, where his Tesla cars are produced. Some of Musk's businesses also have contracts with the U.S. Department of Defense.
On the subject of the briefing of war plans, Trump said, "I don't want to show it to anybody. You're talking about a potential war with China." He added, "We don't want to have a potential war with China, but I can tell you, if we did, we're very well equipped to handle it."
The New York Times and Wall Street Journal both reported individually that, sources say, Musk, who also directs the Department of Government Efficiency, was to be given a classified briefing on U.S. military planning for war with China. However, the White House, Trump, and the Pentagon said no such meeting was ever scheduled.
Even though he said that such sensitive information should not be given to Musk, Trump called the media reports "fake." The two newspapers reported that Musk was originally scheduled to meet Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Admiral Christopher Grady (acting chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff), and Admiral Samuel Paparo (Indo-Pacific Command chief) in a high-security Pentagon room called "The Tank," which is meant to shield against surveillance.
But when Musk came to the Pentagon on Friday morning, he only sat down with Hegseth in his office for an hour. The reports continued that the meeting was scaled back from being a classified one to an unclassified meeting after the news coverage.
After the meeting, Musk explained to reporters, "It was a great meeting." Asked about the talks, Hegseth replied, "Why should I tell you?" Later, in remarks at the White House, he described the meeting as "fantastic" and praised Musk as "a patriotic American."
The Pentagon made a statement where it stated, "Officials said the two men discussed innovation, efficiency, and more intelligent production." The statement further explained that the meeting had nothing to do with Musk's collaboration with the Department of Government Efficiency, but was a result of a personal invitation from Hegseth to Musk.
A hypothesis proposed by the newspapers about why the briefing had been conducted was that it sought to guarantee that Musk's austerity measures would not compromise the readiness of the U.S. to engage China, by alerting him to what the military requires.
Musk's growing clout has caused conflicts with U.S. leaders, and Trump intervened. After Musk shut down USAID, the State Department's international aid branch, and suggested Secretary of State Marco Rubio hadn't terminated enough staff, tensions escalated at a Cabinet meeting. In an effort to smooth things over, Trump invited Musk and Rubio to a private dinner.
On another day, Musk's insistence that every federal worker send him a list of five things they had done the previous week or be fired met with pushback from important people such as Rubio, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, and FBI Director Kash Patel, who told their staff to ignore Musk's demand.
Trump minimized the episode, describing, "They don't mean it in any kind of combative way with Elon. They're just saying there are a few people that you don't want to really have them report back to you on what they were doing last week."
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