In unveiling a panel to study the future of warfare this week, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth did more than announce some advisers. He brought Elon Musk, the world\u2019s richest man, back into the Trump administration fold.<\/p>\n
With him came a raft of potential new conflicts of interest.<\/p>\n
Mr. Musk had largely failed at his high-profile government cost-cutting expedition last year, not coming close to meeting his stated goals<\/a> and leaving some agencies in disarray<\/a>. After departing government duty, he prompted an epic fight<\/a> with President Trump and threatened to start his own political party<\/a>.<\/p>\n But after a long make-nice campaign, Mr. Musk is back in Washington with a seat at the table of the Pentagon, as a co-director of a group advising an agency that is a source of his vast personal wealth. As before when he was a special government employee, Mr. Musk\u2019s appointment immediately set off concerns about whether he would have too much sway over decisions affecting his interests and those of his allies.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s extraordinary to see the return without any recognition of the exceptional harm that he was responsible for in round one,\u201d said Max Stier, the chief executive of the Partnership for Public Service, a nonpartisan organization that estimates that Mr. Musk\u2019s cost-cutting efforts, dubbed the Department of Government Efficiency, cost each taxpayer more than $1,000 last year<\/a> in waste.<\/p>\n Now, added Mr. Stier, \u201cthere\u2019s no question that his financial interests are directly engaged in the position he\u2019s going to fill here.\u201d<\/p>\n Other members of the panel have major defense contract interests, including another co-director, Palmer Luckey, the founder of Anduril, which makes semiautonomous fighter jets. (Representatives from legacy defense companies, like Lockheed Martin and Raytheon, are largely absent.)<\/p>\n The members largely share Mr. Hegseth\u2019s desire for a nimbler military that relies more on autonomous, state-of-the-art technology, like drones. But their appointments, like Mr. Musk\u2019s, raise the potential for actual conflicts, or the perception of conflicts, even if they remain sincere and impartial in their advice, ethics advisers say.<\/p>\n Though Mr. Musk and Mr. Luckey may never explicitly say that the Defense Department should increase its reliance on their companies, they could still benefit from their insider vantage points, according to Virginia Burger, a senior defense policy analyst for the Project on Government Oversight, an independent watchdog organization.<\/p>\n \u201cThey could easily tailor the suggestions and findings to fall directly in line with the products they have in development,\u201d Ms. Burger added in an email, \u201cor turn around and use the developed materials to shape SpaceX and Anduril\u2019s future operations in a twisted version of insider trading, eliminating competition from the start.\u201d<\/p>\n Officials involved in the new initiative said conflicts of interest would be managed so such activity would not occur.<\/p>\n A Pentagon spokesman said that the nonprofit organization Mitre Corporation, which conducts independent research for federal government agencies, was overseeing the group\u2019s analysis and recommendations. As part of that, Mitre \u201cwill evaluate all inputs with technical rigor while applying appropriate conflict-of-interest and information safeguards,\u201d the spokesman wrote in an email.<\/p>\n Mitre, which was founded in 1958 to address air-defense challenges, uses its own laboratories and focuses on a range of issues from aviation<\/a> to cancer treatment.<\/p>\n Mr. Musk appeared in the Washington area on Wednesday in his new role as a co-director of what the Pentagon has named Project Meridian, which will consider the evolving nature of battle and pinpoint gaps in readiness to prepare U.S. armed forces for the next two decades.<\/p>\n He then spent three days meeting with fellow panelists in Quantico, Va., at the Pentagon and at the Mitre offices in McLean, Va., hashing out ideas, according to Newt Gingrich, a former Republican House speaker and a co-director of the initiative.<\/p>\n Mr. Musk did not respond to requests for comment on the potential conflicts in his new role. But in a brief phone interview on Friday from Dulles International Airport, Mr. Gingrich criticized those who had raised conflict concerns.<\/p>\n \u201cAs if the richest guy in the world is going to think that deeply about something that will help him,\u201d Mr. Gingrich said, \u201cthat he\u2019s going to go, \u2018Oh, gosh, I could get a real advantage here, I could make another $5 million.\u2019 It just tells you how sick the system is.\u201d<\/p>\n A spokesman for Anduril said in a statement that \u201cas Palmer works with Pentagon leadership, he and Anduril will commit to complying with highest ethical standards where actual conflicts of interest arise.\u201d<\/p>\n Mr. Musk’s selection, which Mr. Hegseth announced at a gathering<\/a> of 600 junior officers and enlisted leaders at a military base in Quantico, comes as the billionaire entrepreneur\u2019s influence is waxing once again.<\/p>\n In the final months of the 2024 presidential campaign, Mr. Musk gave more than a quarter of a billion dollars<\/a> to groups supporting Mr. Trump, according to an analysis conducted by The New York Times. Mr. Musk became a headliner at Mr. Trump\u2019s political rallies, where the Tesla chief inveighed against government bloat and urged people to vote for the former president\u2019s return.<\/p>\n Mr. Trump in turn praised Mr. Musk at his presidential victory speech, calling him \u201ca special guy, a super genius.\u201d Mr. Trump put the tech billionaire in charge of DOGE, which conveyed broad access to the Oval Office and a number of powerful federal government agencies. The president also installed officials who were allied with Mr. Musk<\/a> at NASA and in the Air Force, two of SpaceX\u2019s key customers, and at the Federal Communications Commission, a key regulator.<\/p>\n But the honeymoon did not last. Mr. Musk\u2019s exaggerations about his DOGE efforts \u2014 including that he had discovered \u201cmassive\u201d fraud in Social Security spending \u2014 created an embarrassing distraction. His opposition to Mr. Trump\u2019s signature government funding bill was a nuisance. And within a week of Mr. Musk\u2019s exit from Washington, private tensions began spilling into public view.<\/p>\n \u201cWithout me, Trump would have lost the election,\u201d Mr. Musk wrote on X last June. \u201cSuch ingratitude.\u201d Mr. Trump fired back with a social media post of his own, describing himself as \u201cvery disappointed in Elon\u201d and musing about canceling Mr. Musk\u2019s government contracts to save money.<\/p>\n The two later reconciled. Mr. Musk has committed<\/a> \u2014 and spent \u2014 at least $100 million to help Republican candidates in battleground states around the country in the midterm elections.<\/p>\n Since early last year, his aerospace company SpaceX, which recently undertook the largest initial public offering of stock in history,<\/a> has received at least $6.9 billion in Pentagon and NASA contracts for services, manufacturing and technology, according to a New York Times analysis of spending records.<\/p>\n Mr. Gingrich and Mr. Luckey joined Mr. Musk in attending the speech in which Mr. Hegseth announced Project Meridian. The defense secretary requested a standing ovation for the co-directors, clapping and thanking them for being there.<\/p>\n The initiative, Mr. Hegseth said, would \u201ccreatively look to the future and identify the domains that we must conquer and capabilities we must master.\u201d The Pentagon \u201cshould have been thinking about autonomous warfare command\u201d \u2014 an area where Mr. Musk and Mr. Luckey both do business \u2014 \u201c10 years ago.\u201d<\/p>\n