Elon Musk’s secret for-profit shadow presidency has come into full view.
The space tech billionaire hijacked an Oval Office news conference, with his 4-year-old atop his shoulders—when the boy wasn’t toddling around the Resolute Desk, where Donald Trump slumped, nearly motionless, seemingly happy to cede dominion over the world’s greatest superpower to the world’s richest dad.
Musk, who has fathered 12 children with three different women, held forth on the failures of bureaucracy as the son he calls Lil X pinched his dad’s cheeks and picked his ears, yawning and struggling to use his father’s “Dark MAGA” cap as a pillow.
At one point, young X, whose mother is the MAGA-weary Canadian musician Grimes (who was not happy about her son’s White House trip), playfully attempted to tease Trump, who appeared transfixed on the child.
Trump piped up occasionally to reaffirm his full support of Musk, whom he tapped to drain the swamp of “waste, fraud and abuse” but who wound up disemboweling the U.S. government.
“He’s a successful guy, that’s why we want him doing this,” Trump said. “We don’t want an unsuccessful guy doing this.”
Musk, who owns SpaceX, Tesla, and X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, has enjoyed many billions of dollars worth of contracts from the federal government. But he accused federal bureaucrats on Tuesday of getting rich off the government at taxpayers’ expense.
“We do find it sort of rather odd that there are quite a few people in the bureaucracy who have, ostensibly, a salary of a few hundred thousand dollars but somehow managed to accrue tens of millions of dollars in net worth while they are in that position,” he claimed.
SpaceX and Tesla were awarded at least $18 billion in federal contracts over the past decade—$17 billion of which went to SpaceX since 2015, according to an ABC News analysis of his profits from government contracts
Musk, who has admitted he voted for President Joe Biden four years ago, displayed permissive parenting as he allowed Lil X to run amok in the Oval Office. The boy charmed photographers as he shushed onlookers, made faces, struck poses, and used his father’s head as a squishy toy.
The head of Trump’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), Musk joined the president as he signed an executive order providing new guidance for federal agencies to “initiate large-scale reductions in force.”
The order followed Musk’s slash-and-burn style moves to cut billions in federal spending, shutter the State Department’s U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and give unclear buyouts to federal workers as he stands to gain from more billion-dollar government contracts.
Musk insisted Tuesday that he personally won’t be the one filing for the contracts for his companies, and that DOGE is “trying to be as transparent as possible.”
“And I fully expect to be scrutinized and get a daily proctology exam, basically,” Musk added. “Might as well just camp out there.”
