Musk has much to gain financially from the incoming administration. He oversees an empire of six companies, several of which are highly entangled with the U.S. federal government.
In that role, Musk has vowed to help cut an unprecedented $2 trillion from the federal budget. He hasn’t specified the agencies he’d go after, but regularly rails against the regulators with oversight of his own companies. In a long diatribe on the Joe Rogan podcast this week, he described a SpaceX rocket that sat on a launchpad for two months waiting for regulatory approval.
“We could build the rocket faster than they could approve the paperwork,” he said. “It’s like Gulliver being tied down by a million little strings. It’s not like any one string is the problem but you’ve got a million of them.”
A broad remit would give the Tesla, SpaceX and X boss leverage to reshape federal agencies that both regulate — and have the power to investigate — his many companies. He has already said he would use whatever power he gets to push for a federal approval process of fully autonomous vehicles. Current rules prevent manufacturers from putting more than a couple thousand cars on the road per year without steering wheels or other controls.
