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In April, after Tesla reported a 70 percent decline in profits in the first quarter, Elon Musk announced he would be stepping back from his role at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency. Pretty quickly, his presence in Washington tapered off. The president is no longer using his name to fundraise, and he is gone from many White House meetings. President Donald Trump barely even posts about him anymore.
For axing the parts of the federal bureaucracy he didn’t like, Musk has earned a cushy second act — as the recipient of sweetheart deals from foreign governments looking to gain favor with the president.
It began last week in Saudi Arabia, where Musk tagged along with Trump for meetings with the royal family and top investors. While in Riyadh, he announced that SpaceX made a deal to provide Starlink internet service to firms in the kingdom. From there, Musk traveled with Trump to Abu Dhabi, where SpaceX will be taking over a contract to provide internet service to the government-owned Emirates airlines. While there, Musk also announced that Neuralink, his brain-chip company, would be running a clinical trial in Abu Dhabi in coordination with local health officials.
In his native home of South Africa, his connection to Trump is paying off as well. Bloomberg reports that President Cyril Ramaphosa intends to give Starlink a contract to operate there ahead of his trip to see Trump at the White House on Wednesday. Such a deal would require an exemption to the postapartheid laws that require 30 percent Black ownership in a company to get such a contract. The move comes amid increased tensions with Trump, who has offered refugee status to a small number of white farmers who he claims (without much evidence) are facing a genocide.
Musk has made deals with Saudi leaders long before his connection to Trump, but the reported carve-out in South Africa appears to be a direct effort for the nation to appease the president and his extremely rich ally. Earlier this year, Musk said he could not run Starlink in his home nation “because I’m not Black” and claimed that South Africa had “openly racist ownership laws.” But because he’s close to Trump, it looks like Musk’s Starlink is coming to Johannesburg.
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