What Elon Musk really wants

If there’s one person former president Donald Trump can thank for his decisive election night victory, it’s Elon Musk. The tech billionaire propelled Trump to a second term on a wave of $119 million in funding to his America PAC, a spree of $1 million giveaways to registered voters, a spate of misleading ads online, and an aggressive voter turnout operation in swing states. 

And that’s to say nothing of the way Musk used his own bully pulpit—the social media platform X—to beat the drum for Trump and boost conspiracies about immigration and election fraud.

Given all the ways Musk shaped the election, it seems undeniable that he’ll be a chief architect of Trump’s second term, too. The former president (and now, president-elect) has already said he would make Musk the head of a new commission focused on eliminating government waste and spent at least four minutes of his ">victory speech praising Musk as a “super genius.”

The question now is: What exactly does Musk want? 

Here’s a look at where the world’s richest man stands on the issues that matter to tech.

On artificial intelligence

Musk recently supported a controversial bill in California that would have required developers of the most advanced AI models to “mitigate the risk of catastrophic harms.” Musk posted on X about the bill (which was later vetoed by Governor Gavin Newsom) writing that AI should be regulated “just as we regulate any product/technology that is a potential risk to the public.” Indeed, Musk was one of the people behind the infamous 2023 letter calling for an industry-wide “pause” on giant AI experiments. He also sued OpenAI, which he helped found, for allegedly prioritizing commercial ambitions over the public interest.

And yet, none of this has stopped Musk from racing ahead with development of his own AI startup, xAI. Unlike OpenAI, xAI’s chatbot, Grok, is open-sourced, an indication that Musk may encourage the Trump White House to embrace open-source development of AI over the closed approaches favored by competitors like OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic. 

On electric vehicles

Under the Biden administration, the Environmental Protection Agency issued a rule limiting future vehicle tailpipe emissions to ensure that, by 2032, the majority of vehicles sold are either electric or hybrid. Trump has vowed to undo this rule—which he erroneously refers to as an “EV mandate”—on Day One. Musk, for one, has seemed unbothered by that news. The Tesla CEO has, in the past, argued against government subsidies both for EV purchases and for charging infrastructure and has said that they benefit Tesla’s competitors more than Tesla.  

But it is possible that Musk could sway the Trump administration when it comes to restrictions on self-driving vehicles, including an ongoing investigation by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration into Tesla’s “full self-driving” technology. On a recent earnings call, Musk said one of his top priorities under a possible “department of government efficiency” would be to create a federal approval system for autonomous vehicles. 

On broadband 

Musk’s satellite internet service, Starlink, has a complicated history with the federal government. Under the Biden administration, the Federal Communications Commission denied Starlink nearly $1 billion in subsidies that it had previously been awarded to serve rural homes and businesses. The FCC argued that Starlink could not meet the service speeds required to receive the grants. Musk has said the FCC revoked the awards “illegally.” 

At the same time, The National Telecommunications and Information Administration, which is charged with doling out $48 billion in broadband infrastructure grants approved under the bipartisan infrastructure law, has said that Starlink service may be necessary to close connectivity gaps in the hardest to reach places. With Trump as president, it seems likely that whatever barriers stood in the way of Starlink deployment until now will be lowered substantially.

On high-skilled immigration

Since the beginning of this year, Musk has posted relentlessly on X about illegal immigration and alleged voter fraud, making it the topic he discusses most on the platform, according to a Bloomberg analysis. But he has simultaneously argued that the U.S. should “greatly increase legal immigration.” Musk has said that Trump will “fix” what he’s argued is an “upside down system.” 

But if Trump were to push for the expansion of high-skilled worker visas, known as H-1Bs, it would be a dramatic about-face from his first term. In 2020, the former president issued temporary halts both on the issuance of new green cards and new H-1b visas. 

On China

The biggest potential area of conflict for Trump and Musk may be their respective approaches to China. Where Trump has threatened to impose 60% tariffs on Chinese goods, Musk has said he opposes tariffs on Chinese EVs and produces half of Tesla’s vehicles in China. And yet, these apparent differences could also make Musk a powerful messenger for Chinese interests as the  Trump administration faces a range of issues related to China, from tariffs to EVs to Taiwan. 

On crypto

In addition to Musk’s massive donations, the Trump campaign benefited from a flood of crypto donations this cycle. Trump, in turn, became a major crypto booster, appearing at a Bitcoin conference this summer where he vowed to make the U.S. the “crypto capital of the planet.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, Trump’s election sent crypto prices soaring, including Musk’s favorite memecoin, Dogecoin. 

In office, Trump has promised to fire Securities and Exchange Commission chair Gary Gensler (though it seems more likely Gensler would step down), which could solve another problem for Musk: Gensler has been leading an investigation at the SEC into Musk’s $44 billion takeover of Twitter.

On online content moderation

Perhaps the issue that connects Trump and Musk more than any other is the topic of online speech. Restoring “free speech” to Twitter was, after all, the main reason Musk gave for acquiring the platform in 2022 in the first place. Trump, meanwhile, spent his first term as president castigating tech giants for supposed censorship and calling for the breakup of big tech. 

At the time, Trump’s proposed solution to the problem was repealing Section 230, the law that protects online platforms from legal liability for the things their users post. Such a change would be a legal disaster for X, as well as Truth Social, the online platform Trump launched in 2021. Not coincidentally, the former president was virtually silent about Section 230 this time around.

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