The Fight Elon Musk Is Ready to Pick in a Trump Administration
If Elon Musk becomes chief red-tape cutter in a second Trump administration, he is already giving a taste of what’s to come.
His recent comments suggest the Federal Aviation Administration and Environmental Protection Agency would be where he directs scrutiny if he is put in charge of leading Donald Trump’s government efficiency commission, tasked with reducing government and regulations.
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On Tuesday, Musk said he planned to sue the FAA, claiming it was engaging in “lawfare” and “regulatory overreach” after seeking roughly $633,000 in fines against his rocket company, SpaceX, for alleged violations. Those comments followed similar critiques a week earlier of the EPA.
“The FAA space division is harassing SpaceX about nonsense that doesn’t affect safety,” Musk tweeted.
No businessman today works regulators the way Musk does—threatening, cajoling, flattering—as he advocates for his companies’ interests. He has essentially gone through an entire can of alphabet soup of agencies, from the SEC and NHTSA to EPA and NLRB. In doing so, Musk is making it clear he is willing to fight over any perceived slight.
The risk is that such tactics, often done publicly before his almost 200 million X followers, makes even a tough agency think twice about going up against him again—especially as appointed leadership thinks about post-government work or underlings worry about losing protection once an administration turns over.
Now, Trump is promising to give Musk even more leverage in such fights: the implied power of the presidency.
Musk would say he isn’t against regulations in general—just specific ones that don’t make sense to him.
“If you sum up all of the times that I had an argument with regulators—of hundreds of regulators over decades—it can sound really terrible except they forget to mention that there were 10 million regulations we complied with and only five that I disagreed with,” Musk said last year during a conference.
Still, he often talks about how regulations can be like little strings that collectively tie down a giant like Gulliver, and strip us of our freedoms.
History would suggest that one man’s red tape is another’s line of defense against those masters of the universe unconcerned about the safety of employees, customers or the world at large.
Musk has effectively said so himself, in particular about the FAA, as he has advocated for rules around the development of artificial intelligence.
“Airplanes used to crash frequently!” Musk posted last year. “Eventually, so many people died that the FAA was created to ensure that commercial aircraft makers & airlines didn’t cut corners on safety. Now, flying on an airliner in America is super safe.”
A year ago, Musk sounded a bit more measured about the FAA. “In fairness to the FAA, it is rare for them to cause significant delays in launch,” he tweeted. “Overwhelmingly, the responsibility is ours.”
But now, as SpaceX is blasting rockets into space at a record rate for paying customers and to expand its Starlink satellite business, Musk is laying blame for delays with the agency, warning: “The fundamental problem is that humanity will forever be confined to Earth unless there is radical reform at the FAA!”
The FAA hasn’t responded to Musk’s social-media barbs. In announcing the proposed fines, Chief Counsel Marc Nichols said the agency was driven by safety. “Failure of a company to comply with the safety requirements will result in consequences,” he said in a statement.
A Trump victory could give the country, according to Musk, a rare opportunity to clean house unseen since the Reagan administration’s massive deregulation effort.
“It’s been a long time since there was a serious effort to reduce the size of government and to remove absurd regulations,” Musk said during an appearance this month at the “All-In Podcast” conference.
While he skirted what exactly he would do, Musk made it clear that the EPA was the kind of agency on his mind. He pointed to a proposed fine of about $148,000 by the EPA announced this month over claims of SpaceX improperly discharging deluge water and spilling liquid oxygen at its South Texas launchpad.
Musk called it an example of “irrational regulation” and compared the company’s actions to dumping drinking water on the ground. “There was no actual harm done,” he said. “It was just water to cool the launchpad during lift off.”
Observers in Texas disputed Musk’s characterization. “Elon & Co is making this way harder than it has to be,” tweeted Chap Ambrose, an Austin-area programmer who has been critical of Musk’s environmental record in the state. “If a corporation wants to discharge anything into Texas water it needs a permit. Even space companies. That process allows independent experts to measure, set limits, and ensure minimal impact.”
In the end, Musk said SpaceX agreed to the proposed settlement because the EPA threatened to withhold approval for future launches. The EPA hasn’t responded to Musk’s claims.
It isn’t just the FAA or EPA where Musk’s businesses have make-or-break relationships, which is why some observers have raised conflict-of-interest concerns about the potential of his role in a Trump administration.
Next month, Musk has promised to reveal Tesla’s robotaxi, a technology that regulators are still trying to digest as they consider safety ramifications.
Neuralink announced a regulatory win this past week. Musk’s brain-implant company said the Food and Drug Administration had awarded its experimental Blindsight microchip, which aims to restore sight, a special designation intended for medical devices aimed at treating life-threatening or irreversible debilitating conditions.
If successful, it sounds like the stuff out of TV’s “Star Trek: The Next Generation.”
“Provided the visual cortex is intact, it will even enable those who have been blind from birth to see for the first time,” Musk said this past week.
It is those kinds of advancements that excite his fans and why it can be so hard to rein him in amid public support.
Write to Tim Higgins at tim.higgins@wsj.com