Since November 5, Elon Musk has been more than the wealthiest person on the planet, more than the one who revived spaceflight’s aura, more than the man who showed electric cars could rival combustion engines, and more than the architect of billions of views on misleading election content. That day, amid Donald Trump’s decisive victory, he also became the right hand of the leader who would become the most powerful political figure in the world once sworn in. Given his frenetic pace in recent weeks, he seems intent on leveraging that influence to the fullest.
In the cover story published this week, Time compares Musk with William Randolph Hearst. That says a lot: the editor who inspired Orson Welles’s Kane was a magnate who did not settle for wielding influence from the newspapers he controlled, but played a pivotal role in historic events such as Cuba’s war and the rise to power of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In that analogy, Twitter, renamed X by Musk, would be akin to Hearst’s newspapers. And the expectation is that political feats will unfold from here. His fearless entrepreneurial track record, filled with things that once seemed impossible but were made real, underpins this perception.
The Uncle Elon
After the elections, Musk has taken residence at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, which in these days has become a focal point of global politics. The closeness between the two magnates, once rivals — Musk even urged Trump to drop out, only for Trump to retort by ridiculing the price he paid for Twitter — is such that the future president has joked: Elon does not want to go away; I cannot rid of him. Trump’s granddaughter calls him Uncle Elon, and he describes himself as the first buddy of the Republican leader, a wordplay on First Lady.
Musk has not only gained a privileged seat in the Trump circle; he has also taken part in most high‑level political gatherings held at the Florida mansion in recent days, for example with Argentine President Javier Milei, and in calls with world leaders such as Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine and Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey. The New York Times reports that he also met with Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations with the aim of easing tensions between Tehran and Washington. For years, he has kept in touch with Vladimir Putin.
He has been given the formal mandate to cut government spending by two trillion dollars, roughly a third of the federal budget. To that end, Trump has created for him an office called the Department of Government Efficiency, external to the federal machinery rather than part of it.
End to remote work
In a Wednesday article in The Wall Street Journal, Musk and his deputy at the DOGE, Vivek Ramaswamy, finally offered a hint of their plans. They want to end telework, cut subsidies to all kinds of agencies, and push for massive staff reductions across the federal bureaucracy. But it is far from clear whether these measures could achieve such a large cut in social spending, since the bulk goes to health, pensions, or unemployment subsidies, nor whether an external department could, for example, decide the firing of public employees.
As that role takes shape, close associates of the entrepreneur begin to position themselves for influential roles in the future administration. He says he wants to assemble the best team of people aligned with that drastic-cut strategy, and has even suggested two prominent SpaceX leaders, the space transportation company that fuels his Mars ambitions, for key positions.
Growing wealth
In the meantime, the days since the election have solidified Musk’s status as the wealthiest person on the planet. He widened the gap with the runner-up, Jeff Bezos: while Forbes estimated in September that Musk’s net worth stood at about 243.7 billion dollars, the value of his shares jumped by more than 50 billion in the week after the election, driven largely by Tesla, his electric vehicles company.
Arriving at Mars, a core motive
But according to Time magazine sources close to Musk, money is not his primary driver; what matters most is his Mars project. They say his backing of Trump—he contributed 120 million dollars to the campaign—stems from realizing that controlling government budgets, directly or indirectly, could speed up reaching Mars while he is alive, whereas a private effort would be slower. Trump joined the entrepreneur last Tuesday at the launch of a SpaceX rocket in Brownsville, Texas.
The richest man in the world appeared to confirm that this was his ultimate motivation in a tweet this week. On a photo listing his supposed life goals, including “getting Trump elected” or “working from Mar-a-Lago,” he noted: “I am trying to make life multiplanetary to maximize the potential duration of consciousness. For that, some of the elements listed here are needed.”