Musk and Security Clearance
Is Musk too big to treat like all others with Clearances, or will we permanently damage the National Security apparatus? We may see if Harris wins.
I am not always a fan of Tom Nichols. He is a bit too much of a cold warrior for my taste, but yesterday he penned the Atlantic’s afternoon newsletter and it had the title that grabbed my attention: “Why Does Elon Musk Still Have a Security Clearance?” (gifted link).
Indeed, whilst I have never had a security clearance, my wife has (she worked for a government defense contractor) and when we lived in Tucson, our neighbor who worked at Raytheon on missiles got a “refresher”, and we were interviewed about him and our impressions.
So I am not completely ignorant of the depth of investigation that goes into it. My wife told me of having to tell about her handful of times of snorting coke, and a little pot she smoked in the mid 1970’s (like who the fuck didn't back then?)
Anyhow, Tom has experience from his time working in government and being an instructor in a military college so he has been through the rigamarole multiple times.
He leads off with the NY Times reporting about how Trump’s transition team is angling to circumvent the FBI security clearance investigations (probably recognizing that the MAGA train wrecks will get filleted by even the most cursory review).
Yesterday, The New York Times reported that people around Donald Trump are trying to figure out how “to quickly install loyalists in major positions without subjecting them to the risk of long-running and intrusive F.B.I. background checks.” Trump’s people, unsurprisingly, are worried about whether they’d pass a background check: As Atlantic contributor Peter Wehner wrote in September, the MAGA-dominated GOP “is a moral freak show, and freak shows attract freaks”—who tend to have a hard time getting security clearances. The first Trump administration was rife with people (including his son-in-law, Jared Kushner) who were walking national-security risks, none worse than Trump himself. A second term, in which Trump would be free of adult supervision, would be even worse.
Tom goes on to describe how invasive and intrusive the process is, and I am now glad that I never needed to be subjected to that scrutiny1.
Which brings me to Elon Musk, who runs SpaceX, America’s private space contractor and an organization presumably full of people with clearances. (I emailed SpaceX to ask how many of its workers have clearances. I have not gotten an answer.) Trump is surrounded by people who shouldn’t be given a clearance to open a checking account, much less set foot in a highly classified environment. But Musk has held a clearance for years, despite ringing the insider-threat bells louder than a percussion maestro hammering a giant glockenspiel.
Yep, the man is a walking risk factor:
Leave aside Musk smoking marijuana on Joe Rogan’s show back in 2018, a stunt done with such casual smugness that it would have cost almost anyone else their clearance. (The feds, including the U.S. military, don’t care about state laws about pot; they still demand that clearance holders treat weed as a prohibited substance.) But sharing a joint with bro-king Rogan is nothing. Six years later, The Wall Street Journal reported much more concerning drug use:
The world’s wealthiest person has used LSD, cocaine, ecstasy and psychedelic mushrooms, often at private parties around the world, where attendees sign nondisclosure agreements or give up their phones to enter, according to people who have witnessed his drug use and others with knowledge of it.
An attorney for Musk denied the report, but even the rumor of this kind of drug use would be a five-alarm fire for most holders of a high clearance. But fine, even if the report is true, maybe all it means is that Musk is just a patriotic, if somewhat reckless, pharmaceutical cowboy. It’s not like he’s canoodling with the Russians or anything, is it?
This seems bad, but when you are the wealthiest man whoever has lived on this planet.
But the real risk factor, the one that really makes the investigators get the hives, is his back channel conversations to Vladimir Putin. This is the one that really makes me scratch my head in wonder…
Bad news. Musk (according to another bombshell story from The Wall Street Journal) has reportedly been in touch multiple times with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The discussions, confirmed by several current and former U.S., European and Russian officials, touch on personal topics, business and geopolitical tensions. At one point, Putin asked the billionaire to avoid activating his Starlink satellite internet service over Taiwan as a favor to Chinese leader Xi Jinping, said two people briefed on the request.
Now, it’s not inherently a problem to have friends in Russia—I had some even when I was a government employee—but if you’re the guy at the desk next to me with access to highly classified technical information, and you’re chewing the fat now and then with the president of Russia, I’m pretty certain I’m required to at least raise an alert about a possible insider threat.
We can be sure that if Trump wins, all these indelicacies will be swept under the rug.
But if Harris wins, we will learn if the security clearance rules have any teeth, or of Musk is held to account. Alas, I suspect that he is too important to yank his clearances.
And that is pretty fucked up.
Not that I have anything sketchy, but I don’t want to have to admit that I inhaled the smoke of wisdom in my misguided youth.
If Harris wins and survives the inevitable coup attempt, the threat of yanking his clearances should be held over him to bring him back in line.
Also, ironically, if the New Axis makes any REALLY big moves, or Musk goes full-adversarial to the USG, that may provide the predicate for Harris using the DPA to nationalize his defense businesses. It'd be a dark ass path, but dark times lie ahead of us no matter what.
Because while cold warriors like Nichols may be outdated fossils, they aren't obsolete in the context of the Second Cold War.
My father was involved in the development and testing of the Patriot missile system back in the late 70’s. I’m not sure how strict they were with his clearance, but even though he has a mechanics coverall with Patriot Mech US Army emblazoned on the back of it, he never really told us what he did when he went on TDY to White Sands, New Mexico every six months or so. As a middle GenXer, there are still remnants of Cold War “patriotism” left in the dark corners of my psyche and Musk’s bullshit behavior plucks those rusty strings on a regular basis. Just as a human being, the dude seems unhinged, but as one of THE major defense contractors for the USGOV…? It doesn’t sit well with me at all. Long before the Starlink refusal over Ukraine, I thought he was shady. He’s like a shitty carbon copy of Steve Jobs: the face and the money behind innovation and technology he would fail a written exam on.
Wanna be a billionaire playboy? Cool, go do that. But he needs to be supervised just as strictly as any other business owner with US national security contracts. Just my $0.02.