Elon Musk enters the White House – what happens now?

Elon Musk has achieved the seemingly impossible many times before in the business world. But will he be able to cut the US government down to size?

Elon Musk Holds Town Hall With Pennsylvania Voters in Lancaster
(Image credit: Samuel Corum/Getty Images)

As it became clear that Donald Trump was heading for victory, Elon Musk posted a mocked-up picture of himself carrying a sink into the Oval Office – an echo of the day he took control of Twitter, says Richard Waters in the Financial Times. “It was easy to conclude that he was overplaying his hand.” Not a bit of it. “Musk is on the verge of the ultimate disruption – the US government itself.” Even Trump was prepared to take a back seat to his “super-genius” accomplice – at least for a while. “A star is born: Elon!” he said in a lengthy shout-out to his biggest donor while claiming victory. Trumpologists were quick to note that Musk and his four-year-old son, X Æ A-Xii, were the only outsiders included in the triumphant family photograph.

Musk, 53, who spent an estimated $200 million to help get Trump elected, might well conclude his bet has paid off handsomely. Already worth some $260 billion, his fortune shot up by £20 billion in a day as Tesla shares surged. “Pundits promptly wondered whether the world’s richest man was on a path to becoming its first trillionaire,” says The Economist.

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Jane writes profiles for MoneyWeek and is city editor of The Week. A former British Society of Magazine Editors editor of the year, she cut her teeth in journalism editing The Daily Telegraph’s Letters page and writing gossip for the London Evening Standard – while contributing to a kaleidoscopic range of business magazines including Personnel Today, Edge, Microscope, Computing, PC Business World, and Business & Finance.

She has edited corporate publications for accountants BDO, business psychologists YSC Consulting, and the law firm Stephenson Harwood – also enjoying a stint as a researcher for the due diligence department of a global risk advisory firm.

Her sole book to date, Stay or Go? (2016), rehearsed the arguments on both sides of the EU referendum.

She lives in north London, has a degree in modern history from Trinity College, Oxford, and is currently learning to play the drums.