The Scene
After the last two US presidential elections, there were questions about what it would mean for the tech industry. After this one, the results are clear: The big winner is Elon Musk and his vast empire of electric cars, rockets, brain implants and AI data centers.
Musk was Trump’s most vocal Silicon Valley ally, campaigning for him at rallies and touting his candidacy on his platform, X. The billionaire entrepreneur spent election night at Mar a Lago and posted a photo of him huddling with Trump, who has said he would put Musk in charge of making the government more efficient.
With Republican control of the White House, the Senate, and possibly the House, Musk will likely be a key beneficiary of that sweeping victory. And the next four years could turn him into something much bigger than he is today, a government-backed industrial titan with few equivalents in American history.
The View From Elon Musk
Here are some of the ways his business endeavors could benefit from US policy under Trump.
SpaceX: Musk’s rocket company is already the most important contractor for NASA — a relationship that is key for SpaceX’s success. When NASA orders a rocket from the company, it also gets to sell any extra payload space to private-sector customers.
It also allows SpaceX to continue to populate the low earth orbit with Starlink satellites that are quickly changing the way people around the world connect to the internet, including Ukrainians who have relied on them during the war against Russia.
A recent Wall Street Journal story that reported Musk’s ties to Vladimir Putin threatened SpaceX’s commercial ties to the US government, with NASA Administrator Bill Nelson saying at a Semafor event that the allegations should be investigated. That is less likely to happen under Trump.
Under President Joe Biden, NASA also at times seemed like it was bending over backwards to work with SpaceX rivals like Boeing and Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin, which are light years behind SpaceX. NASA’s next administrator will likely look to favor Musk.
Tesla: Musk’s electric car company is facing a potential threat from cheaper Chinese rivals. Tariffs, Trump’s favorite economic policy, could make those Chinese competitors unaffordable in the US, sparing Tesla.
The other thing Trump could do to help Tesla is end US subsidies for EVs. Tesla has taken plenty of government money and that was crucial for its growth, but it doesn’t need them anymore. Tesla, once more of a super luxury vehicle, is now a price-conscious choice for EV buyers. Ending subsidies would hurt Tesla’s competitors.
Tesla has also been at war with The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration over the company’s use of driver assistance technology. It’s a safe bet that, at least for the next four years, regulators will not stand in Tesla’s way. The company still needs to get the technology right. If its robotaxis harm passengers or pedestrians, the project would be derailed. But a successful launch of autonomous cars would change the regulatory environment forever.
xAI: Musk wants to win the race to artificial general intelligence, something that will likely require massive industrial efforts. xAI’s data center in Memphis became the first to connect 100,000 graphics processors together. In the process, Musk drew the ire of environmental regulators by connecting gas generators to produce enough power for the complex.
Most AI companies are asking state and federal officials for more energy resources and they want taxpayer funds to help modernize the country’s energy grid. Now, xAI could get special treatment on that hunt.
The incoming Trump administration is also on friendlier terms with Gulf nations like the United Arab Emirates, which has been chomping at the bit to build AI data centers in its backyard.
Musk would need a green light from US regulators to build the most advanced AI models there, which will likely be easier in the next White House after reluctance from Biden officials worried about the region’s ties to China. The UAE has been pumping out nuclear power plants and would gladly subsidize the gargantuan energy bills associated with training and running frontier AI models.
Neuralink: Musk’s brain implant company has received FDA clearance to run tests on humans. So far, those tests have been successful, giving two disabled patients the ability to use computers and play videogames with their brains.
It’s possible the head of the FDA will be Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a Trump ally whose own brain was infested by a worm, leaving him with what he says was temporary memory loss.
Musk’s technology could one day be used to help people like Kennedy gain back brain function lost due to disease and injury. If Kennedy, an FDA critic, is at the helm, he could help speed up regulatory approvals for Neuralink.
X: It’s easy to see X as a kind of loss leader for the rest of Musk’s government-linked businesses, an investment in politics and in helping the new president. But X is also positioned to become — with Trump’s help — a central media platform, particularly for right-leaning American audiences who helped build Fox Corp. into a profitable juggernaut.
X has turned out to be the more accurate depiction of reality. Under Musk’s stewardship, the platform has relaxed content moderation standards and allowed some unsavory characters back on. There are obvious downsides to that strategy, but the lack of censorship also gives us a more accurate representation of the world as it actually is.
Costs are also down, and at least some advertisers who fled the crudeness and racial provocation may make their way back to the platform. Musk’s xAI benefits from data on X, and can use it as a sales channel for AI chatbots and services. All of that corporate synergy and political relevance may restore X as a business in its own right.
The left has been fleeing X, preferring other platforms like Mastodon, Bluesky or Threads. But those platforms are starting to look like out-of-touch, urban bubbles of social media.