A Times Square billboard shows Elon Musk wearing a crown in New York on Thursday.
A Times Square billboard shows Elon Musk wearing a crown in New York on Thursday.
The Pentagon was scheduled to brief Elon Musk on the US military’s plan for any war that might break out with China, two US officials said on Thursday.
Another official said the briefing would be China focused, without providing additional details. A fourth official confirmed Musk was to be at the Pentagon on Friday, but offered no details.
Hours after news of the planned meeting was published by The New York Times, Pentagon officials and President Donald Trump denied that the session would be about military plans involving China. “China will not even be mentioned or discussed,” Trump said in a late-night social media post.
It was not clear if the briefing for Musk would go ahead as originally planned. But providing Musk access to some of the nation’s most closely guarded military secrets would be a dramatic expansion of his already extensive role as an adviser to Trump and leader of his effort to slash spending and purge the government of people and policies they oppose.
It would also bring into sharp relief the questions about Musk’s conflicts of interest as he ranges widely across the federal bureaucracy while continuing to run businesses that are major government contractors. In this case, Musk, the billionaire chief executive of SpaceX and Tesla, is a supplier to the Pentagon and has extensive financial interests in China.
Pentagon war plans, known in military jargon as O-plans or operational plans, are among the military’s most closely guarded secrets. If a foreign country were to learn how the US planned to fight a war against them, it could reinforce its defenses and address its weaknesses, making the plans far less likely to succeed.
The top-secret briefing that exists for the China war plan has about 20 to 30 slides that lay out how the US would fight such a conflict. It covers the plan beginning with the indications and warning of a threat from China to various options on what Chinese targets to hit, over what time period, that would be presented to Trump for decisions, according to officials with knowledge of the plan.
A White House spokesman did not respond to an email seeking comment about the purpose of the visit, how it came about, whether Trump was aware of it, and whether the visit raises questions of conflicts of interest. The White House has not said whether Trump signed a conflicts of interest waiver for Musk.
The chief Pentagon spokesman, Sean Parnell, initially did not respond to a similar email seeking comment about why Musk was to receive a briefing on the China war plan. Soon after The Times published this article on Thursday evening, Parnell gave a short statement: “The Defence Department is excited to welcome Elon Musk to the Pentagon on Friday. He was invited by secretary Hegseth and is just visiting.”
New York Times News Service