Silicon Valley riders take conflicted reins in Washington
- sciart0
- May 19
- 2 min read
Excerpt: "Elon Musk’s role in government may shrink, but his companies and allies will continue to influence how Washington, D.C., does business with them.
Since January, more than three dozen employees and associates of Musk and fellow tech titans Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen and Palmer Luckey have been tapped for roles at federal agencies critical to their businesses, a Wall Street Journal analysis found.
The roles put them in departments that oversee, regulate and award business to the four men’s companies, according to personnel appointments, lawsuits, ethics disclosures and contract data, creating a web of potential conflicts that ethics experts call unprecedented.
The group includes current and former employees as well as lawyers, investors and financial advisers of the tech executives. They make up most of the identified people working for the Department of Government Efficiency, the powerful cost-cutting task force created to streamline federal bureaucracy, the Journal found. Others have been appointed to key roles across the government.
Companies founded, owned or invested in by Musk, Thiel, Andreessen and Luckey have won more than a dozen federal contracts totaling about $6 billion since President Trump’sinauguration, and are pursuing billions more, the Journal found. Their business interests are often intertwined: Musk’s SpaceX was backed by Thiel’s Founders Fund and Andreessen’s a16z; both venture funds also backed Anduril Industries, a defense-tech startup co-founded by Luckey.
Some of the new contracts were in the works before Trump’s election, and American corporations have long placed friendly faces in the senior ranks of government. But people affiliated with Musk’s firms have moved into the federal government at a greater scale than any other group in the history of recent administrations, said Richard Painter, a former chief White House ethics lawyer for the George W. Bush administration."