The Week in Musk: Musk's "legion" of kids
The Department of Government Efficiency, the Elon Musk-led entity within the White House, appears to have reached a transitional phase. Last week, Musk appeared to lower the project’s cost-cutting goal from $1 trillion to $150 billion in fiscal year 2026. DOGE claims to have cut $155 billion in federal spending thus far, but that is still a massive overstatement. Musk Watch’s DOGE Tracker identified just $12.6 billion in verifiable cuts.
Nevertheless, Musk has claimed victory on DOGE’s founding mission as its focus turns to other projects. Among its new responsibilities is the creation of revenue through a program that would allow wealthy foreigners to purchase a special immigration visa for $5 million. According to the New York Times, DOGE engineers Marko Elez and Edward Coristine are collaborating with the State Department, the Department of Homeland Security, and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to develop a website and application process for Trump’s “gold card” scheme.
DOGE is also playing a leading role in the administration’s campaign to hunt down undocumented immigrants, using databases from the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Social Security Administration. From the Washington Post:
HUD knows which households include undocumented people because all applicants are required to report their status when seeking assistance. Undocumented immigrants are prorated out of the amount of assistance households receive but have been allowed to live in public housing for years. An undocumented grandparent or parent sometimes lives in public housing with other eligible family members.
The effort to locate and kick out mixed-status households is being led by Mike Mirski, a DOGE staffer at HUD who plans to target cities such as New York and Chicago first, according to one employee. The power to mine that information effectively lets Mirski “decide who is a citizen and who is not a citizen,” the employee said, adding that those decisions would be based on flawed analyses of datasets he doesn’t know how to use.
In most scenarios, HUD does not have the authority to knock on people’s doors and remove them from housing. But Immigration and Customs Enforcement and law enforcement do.
In another report, the Post found that DOGE has aided the Department of Homeland Security’s effort to list thousands of undocumented immigrants as deceased within the Social Security death database. Declaring immigrants deceased would make it nearly impossible for them to find legal work, access financial services, and obtain housing. DOGE is also using the Social Security database to determine the citizenship status of various individuals — a use of SSA data that its acting commissioner, Leland Dudek, reportedly considered illegal.
While DOGE’s purview expands, the initiative has continued to seek access to highly sensitive information housed by federal agencies. At the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, DOGE has requested read and write access to agency data, including “staff emails, personnel data, contracts, and payments systems,” Bloomberg reported this week.
Musk’s “legion” of children
On Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal published a comprehensive investigation into Musk’s various partners and how he has gone about soliciting them to have his children. Ashley St. Clair, a 26-year-old conservative influencer, provided the results of a paternity test that confirmed Musk is the father of a son St. Clair had last year. (Musk had previously questioned whether the child was his.) St. Clair also told the paper that Musk, through his fixer, Jared Birchall, offered her a one-time payment of $15 million and a $100,000 monthly stipend in exchange for her silence. St. Clair rejected the offer, fearing it would make her son, Romulus, “feel like he’s a secret.” Her decision defied a warning from Birchall. Taking “the legal route… always leads to a worse outcome for that woman than what it would have been otherwise,” the Musk deputy told St. Clair.
More on Birchall from the Journal:
Birchall’s formal responsibilities are wide ranging, from disbursing funds for Musk’s super PAC to assembling the team that helped Musk take Twitter private. His role as intermediary between Musk and some of the mothers happens in the background. Musk often has Birchall step in to handle negotiations with the women over arrangements for the pregnancy and financial support after. The arrangements play out in similar ways for the different women, according to a document and people familiar with the matter.
Birchall was involved in acquiring the property for a compound in Austin where Musk imagined the women and his growing number of babies would all live among multiple residences, according to a person familiar with the matter.
In a message to St. Clair, Birchall hinted at the other women who Musk has concieved children with, saying, “We have been through way too many issues where, to not sign some agreement associated with handing over 15-plus million dollars is absolutely insane and irresponsible, and because we have dealt with some very unstable, mentally unstable, people that all of a sudden misremember things.”
The report also revealed that Musk, after impregnating St. Clair, tried to convince another conservative influencer, Tiffany Wong, to have his child. The solicitation, which took place via direct message, came after Musk began sharing and interacting with Fong’s posts on X, driving engagement to her account and netting her thousands of dollars from the platform’s “revenue-sharing” program.” That revenue then dipped after Wong turned down Musk’s offer, and he subsequently unfollowed her account on X.
In texts with St. Clair, Musk discussed wanting a “legion” of children “before the apocalypse.” A legion was the largest military unit of the Roman army, composed of roughly 5,000 men. Musk texted another wartime reference to St. Clair as he was campaigning for Trump in Pennsylvania last fall. “In all of history, there has never been a competitive army composed of women. Not even once,” he wrote. “Men are made for war. Real men, anyway.” Through in vitro fertilization — Musk’s preferred method of breeding — parents can choose their child’s gender. The vast majority of his children are boys.
SpaceX in line for massive Golden Dome contract
SpaceX appears to be on track to win a significant portion of a contract to build Donald Trump’s Golden Dome program, according to Reuters. The staggeringly expensive missile defense system would involve a network of satellites designed to detect and neutralize incoming ballistic threats. Potential SpaceX partners for the Golden Dome include right-wing billionaire Peter Thiel’s Palantir and autonomous weapons maker Anduril, founded by Trump fundraiser Palmer Luckey. From Reuters:
The three companies met with top officials in the Trump administration and the Pentagon in recent weeks to pitch their plan, which would build and launch 400 to more than 1,000 satellites circling the globe to sense missiles and track their movement, sources said.
A separate fleet of 200 attack satellites armed with missiles or lasers would then bring enemy missiles down, three of the sources said. The SpaceX group is not expected to be involved in the weaponization of satellites, these sources said.
One of the sources familiar with the talks described them as "a departure from the usual acquisition process. There's an attitude that the national security and defense community has to be sensitive and deferential to Elon Musk because of his role in the government."
SpaceX has long been considered a shoo-in for at least a portion of the Golden Dome program, which could cost close to $1 trillion. But the Reuters report revealed a baffling way that Musk’s company hopes to capitalize on the project: A subscription model, wherein the government would pay recurring fees to access SpaceX’s share of the system instead of owning it.
Should SpaceX, Anduril, and Palantir secure the lion’s share of Golden Dome funding, it would mark Silicon Valley’s greatest triumph in its campaign to overtake the traditional Big Five defense contractors. Anduril already beat out Boeing, Northrop Grumman, and Lockheed Martin last year in securing a combat drone contract from the Air Force.
Musk questions Trump’s proposed NASA cuts
In a post on X last week, Musk called Trump’s proposed cuts to NASA’s funding “troubling.” News of the cuts were reported by Ars Technica, which cited a draft budget proposal from the White House Office of Management and Budget that included a 20% overall cut of NASA’s funding and a 50% cut of its science division. “I am very much in favor of science,” Musk remarked, “but unfortunately cannot participate in NASA budget discussions, due to SpaceX being a major contractor to NASA.”
FCC head lobbies for Starlink in Europe
European governments have been hesitant to adopt Starlink, SpaceX’s satellite communications provider, for their military and civil needs. Anti-Starlink sentiment on the continent arose after it was revealed that Musk had tampered with Ukraine’s Starlink access during a military operation, and was exacerbated after the Trump administration recently used access to the network as a bargaining chip against Ukraine.
In turn, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr, a longstanding Musk ally, told the European Union to get over it. “If you’re concerned about Starlink, just wait for the CCP’s version, then you’ll be really worried,” Carr said in an interview with the Financial Times. “If Europe has its own satellite constellation then great, I think the more the better. But more broadly, I think Europe is caught a little bit between the US and China. And it’s sort of time for choosing,” he added.
Cybercab production arrested by Trump’s trade war; Tesla sales continue to slide in California; Cybertruck production scaled back
As we noted last week, Trump’s trade war with China will likely hinder Tesla’s battery storage division, its top growth sector last quarter. Fallout from the tit-for-tat tariffs between China and the U.S. has now spread to the company’s planned rollout of autonomous semi-trucks and “Cybercabs,” the latter being a primary driver of Tesla’s stock price. From Reuters:
Tesla's plans to ship components from China for Cybercab and Semi electric trucks in the United States were suspended after President Donald Trump raised tariffs on Chinese goods amid a trade war, said a person with direct knowledge. The move could disrupt Tesla's plan to start mass production of the much-anticipated models, which its CEO Elon Musk has been touting to investors as major innovations providing growth momentum of the U.S. automaker.
Tesla was ready to absorb the additional costs when Trump imposed the 34% tariff on Chinese goods but could not do so when the tariff went beyond that, leaving shipping plans suspended, said the person, who declined to be named as the matter is private…
The company was scheduled to start receiving component shipments in upcoming months with the goal of starting trial production of the two models in October and mass production in 2026, the person said, with Cybercab to be produced in Texas and Semi in Nevada.
Musk has claimed that the Cybercab, a self-driving vehicle, would open a huge profit stream for Tesla, passively generating revenue for the company and individual owners in its role as a robotaxi. Its most aggressive shareholders have bought into this vision. Ark Invest founder Cathie Wood, the preeminent Tesla bull, recently predicted that Cybercabs “will account for 90% of the value of the company in five years.”
A number of high-ranking Tesla employees appear to disagree with that assessment. The Information reported this week that Musk, in 2024, rejected internal data indicating the Cybercab would lose money. “We had lots of modeling that showed the payback around FSD [Full Self Driving] and Robotaxi was going to be slow,” Rohan Patel, a former Tesla executive, told the outlet. “It was going to be choppy. It was going to be very, very hard outside of the U.S., given the regulatory environment or lack of regulatory environment.”
As for the White House’s tariffs on China, they currently stand at 145%, with some imports facing fees of up to 245%. Though on Thursday, Trump told reporters, “We’re going to make a deal. I think we’re going to make a very good deal with China.” The president has also hinted at providing relief to automanufacturers that source their parts abroad without specifying whether that would extend to imports from China.
Amid this uncertainty, Tesla’s sales force in China stopped accepting orders for the Model S and Model X. Both of the lines are made in the U.S. and shipped to China, the world’s top EV market. In the U.S., Tesla continues to face lagging sales numbers. In California, the top EV market in North America, Experian Automotive reported registrations of new Teslas declined 15.1% year-over-year in Q1, the company’s sixth straight quarterly decline.
Tesla also appears to be paring back its Cybertruck production after selling fewer than 50,000 units (as of last month) since its release in November 2023. A noticeable contingent of line workers behind the trapezoidal vehicle’s production have been reassigned to the Model Y, according to a report from Business Insider. (Perhaps to boost sales, Tesla launched a bare-bones, RWD version of the Cybertruck in the U.S. and Mexico last week. At $70,000, it is $10,000 less than the base model.)
Look for these problems to be addressed during Tesla’s Q1 earnings call, scheduled for Tuesday, April 22, at 5:30 p.m. Eastern. The call will be streamed live on X.
OpenAI countersues; ChatGPT’s X rival; Musk says no more IP laws
OpenAI, the research organization behind ChatGPT, has filed a countersuit against Musk, seeking a reprieve from what it describes as harassment and “unlawful and unfair action.”
“Through press attacks, malicious campaigns broadcast to Musk’s more than 200 million followers on the social media platform he controls, a pretextual demand for corporate records, harassing legal claims, and a sham bid for OpenAI’s assets,” reads the filing made in a California district court, “Musk has tried every tool available to harm OpenAI.”
Musk, who cofounded OpenAI with Sam Altman in 2015 but left the board in 2018, is suing the AI developer for allegedly departing from its philanthropic “founding agreement.” OpenAI currently operates as a nonprofit-for-profit hybrid but plans to transition fully to a for-profit public benefit corporation.
In what might be construed as another shot at Musk, OpenAI is developing a social network, according to The Verge. The outlet described the prototype as being “focused on ChatGPT’s image generation that has a social feed.”
Meanwhile, Musk, who is developing his own ChatGPT rival through xAI’s Grok, called for an end to all laws protecting intellectual property. “Delete all IP law,” wrote Twitter founder Jack Dorsey over the weekend. “I agree,” Musk replied. AI developers like Musk have had frequent battles over IP rights with companies and creatives that produce the copyrighted material that fills the internet and is then used to train AI models. OpenAI’s Altman has argued that using IP to train AI software should fall under “fair use,” but Musk's desire to do away with IP laws entirely is a unique escalation.
Musk Minutes
A whistleblower at the National Labor Relations Board has accused DOGE of exfiltrating data from the agency, which houses information on unions and labor organizers, corporate secrets, and complaints filed by employees against their employers. The whistleblower also said DOGE members went through great lengths to obscure what they were doing while accessing NLRB systems. SpaceX is currently suing the NLRB, arguing the agency is unconstitutional. (NPR)
To facilitate Musk’s long-held “self-driving” promise to customers, Tesla may have to replace computers in millions of its cars. (Electrek)
In a lawsuit, the owner of a Model Y in California has accused Tesla of manipulating the odometers in its cars to hasten “the expiration of Tesla vehicle warranties to reduce or avoid responsibility for contractually required repairs as well as increase the purchase of its extended warranty policy.” (The Street)
Trump reportedly stepped in to bar Musk from attending a Pentagon briefing on its operational plans should a war break out between China and the U.S. "What the f**k is Elon doing there? Make sure he doesn't go," Trump reportedly said. (Axios)
The U.S. Government Accountability Office, a congressional watchdog, plans to probe DOGE’s actions at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. (USA Today)
DOGE has taken control of grants.gov, the website the federal government uses to solicit applications for $500 billion in grants annually, and revoked access for some federal officials previously in charge of posting grant opportunities. (Washington Post)
Ahhh. Finally we begin to see some fraying in Dic Tater's relationship with Swastiman.
Best laid plans gan aft agley per the famous poet. Well musk's plans gan agley but no one can say they're were best laid. musk's big plan was basically to make big money gaming the system and then use that money to game it some more. Much like trump he used his inheritance, white male privilege and ample lying and cheating skills to take advantage of what ever opportunity presented itself. But also like trump, he's an incompetent, insecure, disgusting, narcissistic POS who can only run businesses into the ground. And so the opportunities appear to be drying up.