Elon Musk is using his position within the Trump administration to funnel lucrative federal contracts to his companies. The president’s family is reportedly cashing in, too.
According to a Monday report from Bloomberg, Donald Trump Jr. — the president’s eldest son — has invested $50 million into SpaceX and xAI through his investment firm 1789 Capital.
1789 was founded alongside former Bank of America Corp. executive Omeed Malik in 2022. Trump Jr. joined the firm on November 11, 2024 — days after his father won the election. Trump Jr. seems to have leveraged his father’s government connections into a potentially lucrative deal with Musk’s companies for the venture capital firm, one that would normally be out of their reach in an industry where investment floors usually start in the billions.
Since Trump joined the firm in November, 1789 has raised over $500 million in funding, over double what they’d amassed since its founding in 2022. The firm focuses on backing companies in what they call the “parallel” economy of conservative brands and companies operating as the MAGA movement flourishes. According to Bloomberg, it is also hoping to land “endowments and public pensions in Republican-controlled states” as clients.
It’s hard to see how the deal between 1789 and Musk’s billion-dollar companies isn’t naked political cronyism. Musk is working to have SpaceX take over at least one major government contract from the Federal Aviation Administration, which will likely benefit investors. As reported by Rolling Stone earlier this month, officials at the FAA have — under the auspices of Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and SpaceX employees installed in the agency — begun to order staff to find tens of millions of dollars to fund a deal with SpaceX for the use of its Starlink satellite system. Last month, a State Department spreadsheet showed that the Trump administration was weighing a $400 million deal to buy “armored” Tesla vehicles.
Musk has also used his influence in the administration to shred regulatory standards and oversight programs at the agencies that work with his companies. At the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), several pollution-monitoring and climate justice tools were taken down amid the Trump administration’s purge of government agencies and federally funded programs — largely under Musk’s supervision. It’s definitely just a coincidence that the programs had been used to track excessively high pollution levels around xAI’s facility in South Memphis, Tennessee.
Trump and his family don’t seem to have any problem leveraging the office of the presidency and its powers to bolster their side hustles. During Trump’s political career, his hotels, resorts, and properties have raked in tens of millions in payments from foreign governments and influential conservatives. The Trump family has launched a media company, several crypto ventures, NFTs, and even a cologne branded around the assassination attempt against Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania.
The president, previously a staunch critic of Bitcoin, earlier this month bragged to guests at his Mar-a-Lago resort that he was making a ton of money off his own cryptocurrency meme coin, $TRUMP, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Trump and his family spent the last four years accusing the Bidens of dishonoring the office of the presidency by surreptitiously using it for financial gain, but the evidence of their own profiteering is written in bold, gold-plated font for all to see.
