Elon Musk is on a crusade against government spending. Unless, apparently, it’s going to him.
“If action is not taken to curb the deficit, America is in deep trouble. No different than a person who gets into too much debt,” said the DOGE boss on his social network X in December.
“The corruption and waste is being rooted out in real-time,” he added on February 2, as he took a sledgehammer to federal agencies and all but dismantled the U.S. Agency of International Development with no authorization from Congress.
Yet according to federal data analyzed by The Independent, Musk’s own companies have been promised or awarded nearly $21 billion by the U.S. government since 2008.
The cash was still flowing as of Feb 17, with another $76.7 million promised since Donald Trump’s inauguration.
So how much of money is the American taxpayer forking over to each of Musk’s companies, and what is it all for?
The vast majority of this funding comes from federal contracts with SpaceX, the private space company Musk founded back in 2002.
According to USASpending.gov, a legally-mandated public database of federal contracts, the most common way to measure such contracts is to look at the total amount the U.S. government is contractually obliged to pay out. So that is what we’ll do.
Since records began, SpaceX has been promised nearly $20.7 billion in government contracts, research grants, and other forms of public assistance, with roughly $8.7 billion actually paid out so far.
Of that promised money, $14.6 billion came from contracts with NASA, covering everything from supply runs to the International Space Station to the design and testing of a new moon lander.
One contract covers launch services for various NASA satellites, while another covers cargo flights to the agency’s planned Lunar Gateway space station, which will be put in orbit around the moon to support future visits.
Perhaps the most exciting is a contract to safely destroy the International Space Station when it is abandoned some time after 2030. The company is building a souped-up version of its Dragon crew capsule, which will use its powerful engine to push the station into a declining orbit that will ultimately cause it to burn up in Earth’s atmosphere.
And while $14.6 billion might seem like a nice payday, that’s nothing to the maximum payout that SpaceX could get in future if NASA chooses to exercise all options in every contract: a whopping $56.4 billion.
The bulk of the rest of SpaceX’s contracts are with the Department of Defense, which has promised $5.6 billion and offered a maximum future payout of $32.8 billion.
