The fight over a key position in Donald Trump’s Cabinet is heating up, as business leaders, billionaires, and Wall Street executives are all pushing the president-elect to choose their preferred candidates to lead the Department of the Treasury.
Hedge fund manager Scott Bessent and Howard Lutnick, the CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald, emerged over the weekend as two of the leading candidates for Treasury Secretary—an important economic position that will play a critical role in the president-elect’s plan to raise tariffs on imports.
However, sources told The New York Times that Lutnick, who is the co-chair of Trump’s transition team, has been annoying the president-elect by spending too much time around him in recent weeks. Trump also reportedly bristled at Lutnick’s performance as transition chief, believing that he may have manipulated the effort to benefit himself.
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Lutnick is the preferred candidate of Elon Musk and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who publicly threw their weight behind the candidate over the weekend. Musk’s very public fight over the role has also annoyed Trump and his top aides in recent days, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Musk, the billionaire CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, weighed in on the debate in a post on X on Saturday. “My view fwiw is that Bessent is a business-as-usual choice, whereas @howardlutnick will actually enact change. Business-as-usual is driving America bankrupt, so we need change,” Musk wrote in a post on Saturday morning, hours before he would sit beside the president-elect at Madison Square Garden for a UFC event.
Kennedy, Trump’s pick for Secretary of Health and Human Services, also backed Lutnick in his own post, citing his support for Bitcoin and cryptocurrency. Unlike many other traditional finance companies, Cantor Fitzgerald has embraced crypto, announcing the launch of Bitcoin financing services at the Bitcoin Conference in July.
Sources told the Times that Trump was also considering former Federal Reserve Gov. Kevin Warsh and Apollo Global Management CEO Marc Rowan for the job. Two other candidates—billionaire hedge fund manager John Paulson and Trump’s former Director of the National Economic Council Larry Kudlow, have both taken themselves out of the running.
Bessent has met with the transition team multiple times since Trump’s electoral victory on Nov. 5—most recently on Friday, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Sources familiar with the decision-making process told the Financial Times that Trump’s advisors are seeking assurances from the candidates that they would commit to the president-elect’s plans to enact significant tariffs—a centerpiece of his economic agenda that he previewed frequently on the 2024 campaign trail.
Sources also said a dark horse candidate might yet emerge, with several naming Robert Lighthizer, the former U.S. Trade Representative during Trump’s first term, as a potential candidate.
Trump is also considering appointing Lighthizer, a major tariff proponent who helped wage his trade war with China during his first term, as a “trade czar,” sources told the Journal last week.
