From golf to crypto, the President is using political power to pursue personal enrichment, while Elon Musk's X has quadrupled in value since the election
When it comes to things that should never happen in the Oval Office, Britain was understandably riveted by the public knifing of President Volodymr Zelensky. But the week before, another summit between Donald Trump and a foreign leader was wrong in a different way.
It concerned the slightly less important geopolitical issue of golf – less important to the rest of us, at least, but part of what is becoming a core purpose of Trump’s government – using the presidency and the institutions of state to enrich himself, his donors and his family on a scale perhaps unknown in democratic history.
TURNBERRY, SCOTLAND - MAY 02: Former U.S. President Donald Trump during a round of golf at his Turnberry course on May 2, 2023 in Turnberry, Scotland. Former U.S. President Donald Trump is visiting his golf courses in Scotland and Ireland. Back in the United States, he faces legal action on 34 counts of falsifying business records. (Photo by Robert Perry/Getty Images)
Donald Trump plays golf at his Turnberry course in Scotland (PhotoL Robert Perry/Getty Images)
Athough the tone was politer than the confrontation with Zelensky, the idea was the same – to push a deal one of the parties had doubts about. Trump brought together the two most powerful men in golf – Jay Monahan, commissioner of the long-established PGA Tour, and Yasir al-Rumayyan, chairman of its smaller, newer rival, LIV Golf – to encourage a mooted merger between them.
Golfing partners
The meeting, also attended by the PGA Tour’s superstar players Tiger Woods and Adam Scott, lasted nearly four hours, an eternity in Oval Office scheduling time, almost eight times longer than Zelenskyy ended up getting and almost 16 times what Keir Starmer got (though the Prime Minister was also given a lunch and press conference).
Efforts to reunite professional golf had, Monahan said later, been “significantly bolstered by President Trump’s willingness to serve as a facilitator.” But Scott cautioned: “We’re starting from two different sides of this, so I think it’s hard to find the balance that’s acceptable for everybody. And it also may not be ultimately possible.”
Why was “serving as a facilitator” for some golf tournaments worth half a working day of the President’s time? Because the Trump Organisation is a LIV Golf business partner. In two years, Trump has hosted five LIV events at his golf venues; a sixth is planned next month. A merger with the older and better-known PGA Tour would be enormously lucrative for the Trumps.
Yasir al-Rumayyan, meanwhile, is not just chairman of LIV Golf: he is the governor of Saudi Arabia’s £700bn sovereign wealth pot, the Public Investment Fund (PIF), which owns and bankrolls the tournament as part of the Saudis’ attempt to improve their image through sport. The PIF has invested $2bn (£1.5bn) in a business run by Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner.
Friends and family
Two days before the White House golf meeting, the President made a special trip to Miami to speak at a conference organised by the PIF. Al-Rumayyan and the Saudi investment minister circulated amongst what was almost a roll-call of Trump friends, relatives and beneficiaries: Kushner; Trump’s son Donald Jr; Steve Witkoff, the president’s special envoy to the Middle East and Russia – and Trump’s biggest donor and newly-minted White House adviser, Elon Musk.
On the back of his links to Trump, the value of Musk’s social media company, X, has more than quadrupled to $44bn (£34bn), according to the Financial Times – the amount he paid for it, before it cratered under his stewardship. Only six months ago, before the election, X’s implied valuation was less than $10bn (£7.7bn). The improvement, in a so-called secondary deal with X investors, was due in part to Musk giving them a stake in his artificial intelligence start-up – but the other reason is very obvious.
(FILES) Elon Musk shows off a shirt that says "DOGE" as he walks on the South Lawn of the white House after stepping off Marine One upon arrival to the White House in Washington, DC on March 9, 2025. A US judge on March 10, 2025, ordered billionaire Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to release its internal documents, saying the agency's work to slash the size of government has been marked by "unusual secrecy." (Photo by Oliver Contreras / AFP) (Photo by OLIVER CONTRERAS/AFP via Getty Images)
Elon Musk arrives at the White House after disembarking from Marine One (Photo: Oliver Contreras/AFP via Getty Images)
Bonfire of the regulations
Musk’s first acts as head of DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency, were often not to cut significant amounts of spending, but to cut regulatory capacity – including regulators which were causing, or could cause, problems for his own businesses. One early target was the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), whose small team dealing with autonomous vehicles was halved by DOGE, saving less than $1m (£772,000). Headcount at the NHTSA as a whole was only reduced by 10 per cent. Musk’s car company, Tesla, is developing an autonomous vehicle.
At the Agriculture Department, the inspector-general, Phyllis Fong, was fired (directly by Trump, not by DOGE). She had opened an investigation into Neuralink, Musk’s brain-implant startup, which was accused of mistreating laboratory animals.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) was effectively ordered to stop work, DOGE staff gained access to its systems and more than 70 of its staff were fired. Musk is creating a payment platform on X that would have been regulated by the bureau. “CFPB RIP,” he tweeted.
WASHINGTON, DC - MARCH 14: U.S. President Donald Trump and ?? A-Xii, the son of White House Senior Advisor, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, walk towards Marine One on the South Lawn on March 14, 2025 in Washington, DC. Trump is headed to Mar-a-lago in Palm Beach, Florida for the weekend. (Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)
President Donald Trump and A-Xii, the son of White House Senior Advisor, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, in the grounds of the White House. Trump is headed to Mar-a-lago, Florida for the weekend (Photo: Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)
The chair and members of the National Labour Relations Board, who need to sign off on investigations, were fired (although a judge has blocked the chair’s dismissal for the moment). The board had 24 active cases into Musk companies, including an investigation of X (then Twitter) for alleged illegal surveillance of its employees after Musk bought it.
Then there is the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which had accused Musk of breaking disclosure rules during the Twitter takeover, saying he underpaid by at least $150m (£116m) and effectively cheated existing shareholders. It took legal action demanding he repay the whole amount plus a penalty. The SEC’s commission, which oversees litigation, has now been gutted, and the case is likely to be settled for a much more modest sum.
The Federal Election Commission (FEC), under new leadership, is likely to drop its investigation of Musk for offering one voter a day $1m (£772,000) to encourage registration in swing states. Even the Fish and Wildlife Service has reassigned the full-time biologist it employed to monitor the federal lands near Musk’s SpaceX base for damage to wildlife caused by the rocket launches.
Most interesting, perhaps, is the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), which fined SpaceX for safety failings, prompting furious demands from Musk for the resignation of its director. On the last day of the Biden presidency, he got his wish.
CAPE CANAVERAL, FL - MARCH 14: (EDITOR'S NOTE: This Handout image was provided by a third-party organization and may not adhere to Getty Images' editorial policy.) In this NASA handout, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying the company's Dragon spacecraft for the Crew-10 mission to the International Space Station takes off at NASA's Kennedy Space Center on March 14, 2025 in Cape Canaveral, Florida. NASA's SpaceX Crew-10 mission is the tenth crew rotation mission of the SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft and Falcon 9 rocket to the International Space Station as part of the agency's Commercial Crew Program. McClain, Ayers, JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) astronaut Takuya Onishi, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Kirill Peskov launched on schedule at 7:03 p.m. EDT, from Launch Complex 39A at the NASA's Kennedy Space Center. (Photo by Aubrey Gemignani/NASA via Getty Images)
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying the company’s Dragon spacecraft for the Crew-10 mission to the International Space Station takes off at Nasa’s Kennedy Space Centre (Photo: Aubrey Gemigani/Nasa)
A few weeks later, a senior engineer at SpaceX, Ted Malaska, seconded to DOGE and given the status of a special government employee, complete with an “ethics waiver,” turned up at FAA headquarters and told staff to immediately start deploying 4,000 of SpaceX’s Starlink satellite terminals to support the national airspace and air traffic control systems. Anyone who “impeded” this would be reported to Musk and risked losing their jobs, Malaska said.
It has been widely reported in the US that the FAA is now close to cancelling a $2.4bn (£1.9bn) contract it signed with the telecoms company Verizon for a new fibre-optic cable network and giving it to Musk’s Starlink instead.
Experts say Starlink’s satellites, while useful in connecting remote sites hard to serve with physical cables, and as backup elsewhere, do not have the bandwidth or reliability to serve as the backbone of the air traffic control system. SpaceX has denied there is any “intent to ‘take over’ any existing contract,” and claimed it was providing the 4,000 terminals free of charge. The new transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, said Starlink would be part of the solution, but not the whole solution.
Sometimes, it may work the other way round. During Trump’s first term, the principal deputy director of the National Reconnaissance Office, Troy Meink, was investigated for changing a contract for spy satellites in a way that made SpaceX the best-placed company to fill it. In the new administration, on Musk’s recommendation, Meink has been nominated as Trump’s secretary of the US Air Force.
Musk may have seen his $280m (£216m) donation to Trump as an investment, effectively buying the government for returns many times greater. But it’s so blatant that it’s starting to backfire, and not just with Tesla consumer boycotts. “It’s an easy story: Elon Musk and the billionaires have taken over government to steal from the American people to enrich themselves,” said Chris Murphy, the Democratic senator. “That’s the message. It’s true, it’s persuasive, and if we repeat it over and over again, they won’t win.”
Musk’s products are actually pretty good, and were used by US governments of both parties for more than 15 years before he became a Trump supporter. The risk for him now is that products which might have been chosen on merit, and in the past often were, end up getting discredited.
Musk has a point about regulation, too. Under previous governments, as in Britain, what the political scientist Nicholas Bagley calls liberal “procedure fetish” did go too far. But because of the Trump regime’s extraordinary behaviour, it looks increasingly possible in the future that regulatory excess may end up getting switched back on, even worse than before.
‘Idi Amin-level corruption’
Yet if Musk is conflict of interest’s showbiz wing, perhaps even more serious, if harder to understand, is what’s happening around crypto. Earlier this month, there was another deeply dubious White House summit, a gathering of the president and the crypto industry’s biggest cheeses to celebrate his complete reversal of previous government policy on the subject.
Since Trump took office, the SEC, acting with astonishing speed, has issued new legal guidance to help crypto companies and ended investigations and lawsuits against major crypto firms. At the meeting, Trump announced the creation of a new US strategic crypto reserve.
But the president himself profits from crypto trading. One of those present at the White House summit was Zach Witkoff, the son of Trump’s Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff. The younger Witkoff founded World Liberty Financial, a crypto business 60 per cent owned by Trump and his family and from which the US President profits directly. He is World Liberty Financial’s “chief crypto advocate” and his sons Eric, Don Junior and Barron are company officers.
A few days before taking office the president-elect created a personal meme coin, $Trump, promoting it on his social media. It soared in value as fans bought it, making him serious money, then plummeted as Trump-linked companies sold it, leading some to describe it as a pump-and-dump scheme, a scam where a vendor artificially inflates the price then dumps the overvalued securities, losing most investors their money. Anthony Scaramucci, Trump’s former spokesman, calls it “Idi Amin-level corruption.”
With this President, the cliche appears to be true. Everything really is a transaction.