The U.S. Government Must Reconsider Elon Musk’s Role as a Defense Contractor

Joan Westenberg
@Westenberg
Published in
4 min readSep 16, 2024

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Elon Musk’s latest unhinged claims aren’t “bad takes” — they’re national security risks. Is it time for the U.S. to cut ties with a defence contractor who’s fanning political violence?

For a petulant edgelord, Elon Musk exercises far too much influence on American technology, space exploration, and defense.

His companies, especially SpaceX, have entrenched themselves industries long dominated by traditional contractors.

And what does the man himself do while his companies take on Government contracts? He tweets dangerous, irresponsible, idiotic and incendiary bullshit that can be broadly interpreted as either:

  1. Assassination attempts on Donald Trump are orchestrated by the President and Vice President of the United States, or
  2. Someone should attempt to assassinate the President and Vice President of the United States, or
  3. He‘s too fucking stupid to understand that his primary school-grade fucking humour has far reaching fucking consequences.

And any one of them should be enough to disqualify him from holding any public contract.

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