Since Donald Trump won the presidency on November 5, we have begun to see what Elon Musk’s $277 million investment in Trump has gotten him.

He is a permanent fixture at Mar-a-Lago, reportedly dining with Trump when he entertained Washington Post owner and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. Musk joined Trump in his first phone call with Volodymyr Zelenskyy after Trump won. Musk was with Trump when he joined French President Emmanuel Macron for the ceremonial reopening of Notre Dame. Musk and Trump had a private meeting with Italian Prime Minister Georgia Meloni at the Élysée Palace after a black-tie dinner held by Macron to celebrate the reopening of Notre Dame. In Germany, Musk has endorsed the far-right party, Alternative for Germany, or AfD, saying on Friday, “Only the AfD can save Germany.” Musk recently wrote on X that in Great Britain, “civil war is inevitable,” and is reportedly considering financing far-right Nigel Farage and his Reform UK Party.

Musk refuses to answer questions about how many times he has spoken with Vladimir Putin since Russia invaded Ukraine in February of 2022, and he has not been forthcoming about his private communications with Chinese President Xi Jinping. Musk does billions in business in China through his ownership of Tesla. He builds fully half his Tesla automobiles in China, some for the Chinese market, others for export to the U.S.

And of course, in recent weeks we have seen Musk’s influence over U.S. politics. He fired off more than 150 lie-filled posts on X to get the bipartisan deal for funding the government shut down. Trump and Vice President Vance ran behind Musk, following his lead in the collapse of that deal.

Musk and Trump unsuccessfully combined their energies trying to get Speaker MikeJohnson’s “Plan B” deal to pass, and got together again to finally push the House to pass “Plan C,” essentially the same deal as “Plan B” but without the suspension of the debt limit.

There has been a lot of noise from Democrats about “President Musk," as it was unclear just who was pushing who. Musk at one point even advocated shutting down the government completely until Trump is inaugurated on January 20, saying that “no law” should be passed until he takes office.

During Musk’s frantic display of his political power this week, he reminded wavering Republicans that he could fund primary challengers against them if they didn’t vote the way Musk and Trump told them to. Melanie Zanona of Punchbowl News, appearing on Alex Witt’s show on MSNBC, pointed out that “it was something like 170 Republicans who voted for the final [budget] bill," quoting one Republican who voted against it saying, “Well, guess what? Trump can't primary all of us.”

That particular Republican missed the point entirely. It was not Trump but Musk threatening to primary Republicans who didn’t follow orders. And therein lies the tale of our country’s political life, folks. Elon Musk is worth, at last count, 431 billion dollars. The first story speculating that Musk could surpass $1 trillion in net worth within the next few years was published after Trump won the election in November.

Musk’s $277 million in the last few months of Trump’s campaign was like a pizza order for him. He could have easily put a billion dollars behind Trump through Trump’s Save America Pac and various other campaign funding scams. According to Opensecrets.org, a non-profit that tracks campaign spending, in 2024, about $16 billion was spent in total for all federal campaigns for office, including the presidential campaign and those for Senate and all the seats in the House.

There is no “average” for the amounts spent for seats in the Senate and the House, but suffice to say that running for Senate is one hell of a lot more expensive. The most expensive races for the Senate in 2024 were in Ohio and Pennsylvania, where the totals spent by both parties were $308 million in Ohio and $240 million in Pennsylvania. The most expensive House races in New York, Nebraska, Nevada, North Carolina, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Arizona averaged around $25 to $27 million total spent by both parties in each state. Further down in federal campaign spending, about $2.3 million total between the parties was spent in New Jersey and New Mexico Senate races; the spending for House races in Michigan and Wisconsin was about $1 million in each race by both parties.

You can see that the spending totals are all over the place, but just taking the House races in Michigan and Wisconsin as an example, Elon Musk wouldn’t have any problem at all going into a Republican’s primary campaign for the House in either state and putting his finger on the scale.

Musk has enough money to buy the House and the Senate paying retail prices. He’s already shown what he can do for a Republican running for president, and he wasn’t even trying, coming into the Trump campaign late in the game and spending most of his money in just two states. Imagine what he could do if he decided to fund entire campaigns, including primary and general elections.

A million here, a couple hundred million there…Musk probably spends more in a year on his fleet of private planes than a half-dozen seats in the House and a few in the Senate would cost him, because remember, he would only be supporting candidates for one party: the Republican Party.

The privatization of our national defense has been going on for years, and with Elon Musk, in some areas, it is almost complete. Musk already owns most of NASA’s space launches and an incredibly important part of the Department of Defense satellite communications capability with his more than 4,000 satellites in his Starlink network,. He is in the process of deploying what could be the largest satellite surveillance network in the world. He has shown that he can put his finger on the scale of a war, too, when he shut down Ukraine’s access to Starlink over Crimea early in the war.

Russia and China became allies in May of this year, signing a joint statement in opposition to the U.S. and pledging a “new era” of cooperation on nuclear and financial matters. And we have no idea what Musk has talked about with either Putin or Xi Jinping. He won’t tell us, but I think it’s safe to conclude that he has told his friend Donald Trump.

Musk has shown that he is friendly with one-party rule countries like China and Russia, and his political interests in this country involve just one party, the Republicans. I think it may be time to ask ourselves if the United States government is in danger of becoming a wholly owned subsidiary of Elon Inc.

What do you think?

Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.

Reprinted with permission from Lucian Truscott Newsletter.