https://www.wsj.com/politics/elon-musk-children-mothers-ashley-st-clair-grimes-dc7ba05c?mod=hp_lead_pos7

The Tactics Elon Musk Uses to Manage His ‘Legion’ of Babies—and Their Mothers

The world’s richest man juggles more than a dozen children and ‘harem drama’ along with running his companies and advising Trump. He recently took a paternity test in a battle with one woman over money and privacy.

Ashley St. Clair wanted to prove that Elon Musk was the father of her newborn baby.

But to ask the billionaire to take a paternity test, the right-wing social-media influencer had to go through Musk’s longtime fixer, Jared Birchall.

“I don’t want my son to feel like he’s a secret,” St. Clair told Birchall in a two-hour phone call in December.

Birchall offered St. Clair some advice. His boss was a “very big-hearted, kind and generous person,” he said. But Musk had a different side. When a mother of his child goes “the legal route” in these discussions, “that always, always leads to a worse outcome for that woman than what it would have been otherwise,” Birchall told the 26-year-old. Plus, he said, Musk wasn’t sure the child was his.

It wasn’t the first such conversation for Birchall. His public job is running Musk’s family office, and he recently helped organize Musk’s more than $250 million push in support of Donald Trump’s election.

Behind the scenes, Birchall also manages the financial and privacy deals Musk wants for the women raising the world’s richest man’s babies.

Musk has had at least 14 children with four women, including the pop musician Grimes and Shivon Zilis, an executive at his brain computer company Neuralink. Multiple sources close to the tech entrepreneur said they believe the true number of Musk’s children is much higher than publicly known.

Musk offered St. Clair $15 million and $100,000 a month in support in exchange for her silence about the child, whom they named Romulus. Similar agreements had been negotiated with other mothers of Musk’s children, Birchall told St. Clair.

The fight with St. Clair over the terms of the deal for their baby has been going on as Musk has assumed one of the most influential roles in the U.S. government.

As a top adviser to President Trump, he has been slashing staff and billions of dollars from the federal government as the head of the Department of Government Efficiency, with massive benefit programs such as Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare in the crosshairs.

Musk’s baby-making project is relevant to his ambition for NASA, which he wants to move faster to go to Mars. He said on X that making people multiplanetary is “critical to ensuring the long-term survival of humanity and all life as we know it.”

In Musk’s dark view of the world, civilization is under threat because of a declining population. He is driven to correct the historic moment by helping seed the earth with more human beings of high intelligence, according to people familiar with the matter.

His businesses are set up to serve the idea: The main objective of SpaceX is to build a rocket ship capable of getting to Mars, and his other companies, including electric-car maker Tesla, help finance the plan.

Musk refers to his offspring as a “legion,” a reference to the ancient military units that could contain thousands of soldiers and were key to extending the reach of the Roman Empire.

During St. Clair’s pregnancy, Musk suggested that they bring in other women to have even more of their children faster. “To reach legion-level before the apocalypse,” he said to St. Clair in a text message viewed by The Wall Street Journal, “we will need to use surrogates.”

He has recruited potential mothers on his social-media platform X, according to some of the people.

Musk has used his wealth to buy the silence of some women who have his kids, according to St. Clair as well as other people, text messages and documents reviewed by the Journal.

Nondisclosure clauses are part of some of the payment agreements. If the mothers push back or seek outside counsel, Musk’s advisers, including Birchall, have threatened financial retribution, according to the documents and people.

Birchall described Musk’s expectations to St. Clair: “Privacy and confidentiality is the top of the list in every aspect of his life, every aspect, and his entire world is set up to be, like, a meritocracy.” Benefits flow, he said, when “people do good work.”

During the call with Birchall, St. Clair told him she had received outreach from a woman Musk had invited to have his baby. She said she was being caught up in Musk’s “harem drama.”

The details of Musk’s baby mission are only now starting to spill into the public. Grimes begged Musk in February for help on X when one of their children was having a “medical crisis” because Musk wouldn’t engage with her. Earlier that month, after their 4-year-old son, also called X, had been on national television on his father’s shoulders as he talked about government cuts in the Oval Office, Grimes posted that “he should not be in public like this.”

A person familiar with Musk’s thinking on the agreements with the mothers of his children said that Musk believes it is better to resolve these matters behind closed doors for the safety and security of the child.

‘Make new humans’

Musk has warned that “civilization is going to crumble” if people don’t start having more children, a view popularized as pronatalism in right-wing circles. The pronatalism movement is composed of people concerned about the birthrate and eager to implement policy and cultural solutions to the problem.

Martin Varsavsky, a friend of Musk’s who founded a large chain of in vitro fertilization clinics in the U.S., said he has spoken with Musk about the risks of falling birthrates.

“Without babies there’s no future, every problem becomes secondary to the problem of not having people on the planet,” said Varsavsky. “Elon believes that a country is not the geography, a country is the people.”

Speaking to an audience at an investment conference in Saudi Arabia last year, Musk laid out the urgency of the matter. “I think for most countries, they should view the birthrate as the single biggest problem they need to solve. If you don’t make new humans, there’s no humanity, and all the policies in the world don’t matter,” Musk told the crowd over a live video.

When the interviewer joked that Musk was doing his part to address the issue, the billionaire agreed. “Yes. I am. I mean, you know, you’ve got to walk the talk. So, I do have a lot of kids, and I encourage others to have lots of kids.”

Separately, Musk has said he is concerned about what he called Third World countries having higher birthrates than the U.S. and Europe, a person familiar with the conversation said.

One of the most important ways to change these dynamics, he has repeatedly told people close to him, is for educated people to have more children.

In 2023, he had a meeting in Austin where people he described as Japanese officials asked him to be a sperm donor for a high-profile woman, according to a text message reviewed by the Journal. “They want me to be a sperm donor. No romance or anything, just sperm,” he texted St. Clair. Musk later told her he gave his sperm to the person who asked for it, without naming the woman.
Special status

Vivian Wilson, one of Musk’s older children from his first wife, Justine Musk, said recently to Teen Vogue that she doesn’t know how many half-siblings she has in her family. Musk is now estranged from Vivian because he refuses to accept her identity as transgender. Justine Musk had six children with Musk, but one child died as a baby.

Grimes, whose legal name is Claire Boucher, has three young children with Musk. She and Musk went through a custody battle but settled in August.

Musk offered his sperm to Zilis, and the two have four young children together. Zilis is viewed as a steadying force in Musk’s life and is the most prominent of Musk’s mothers.

“He really wants smart people to have kids, so he encouraged me to,” Zilis told Musk’s biographer Walter Isaacson.

The Yale University graduate was a founding member of the investment team at Bloomberg Beta, and made Forbes’s “30 Under 30” venture capital list in 2015. Zilis also was a board member at OpenAI and worked at Tesla earlier in her career.

Two people close to Musk described her as having “special status,” meaning Musk chooses to spend time at her home in Austin as well as bringing her to high-profile public events.

In January, Zilis attended a black tie pre-inauguration candlelit dinner with Musk, and was photographed speaking to Ivanka Trump, Jared Kushner, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and his fiancée, Lauren Sánchez.

Weeks later, she was alongside Musk for a meeting with India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi at Blair House, the presidential guesthouse across the street from the White House, with two of their children and another of Musk’s in tow.
‘Pick a name’

While Musk posts sometimes dozens of times a day on X about right-wing politics or his companies, among other things on his mind, he often interacts with lesser-known users. He replies to them and sometimes interacts through direct messages, some of whom he eventually solicits to have his babies, according to people who have viewed the messages.

Cryptocurrency influencer Tiffany Fong was covering disgraced crypto tycoon Sam Bankman-Fried’s downfall when Musk started liking and replying to her posts. Musk’s interactions ramped up as Fong posted more political content in support of Trump, and Musk followed her last summer.

That sort of attention from Musk on X, where he has 219 million followers, sent droves of followers to Fong, which was a financial boon. More engagement meant more earnings for her as part of a revenue-sharing program for creators on X.

Instagram post showing Elon Musk subscribed and followed Tiffany Fong's account.
Musk’s following was a financial boon for Tiffany Fong.

During the height of her interactions with the billionaire owner, Fong earned $21,000 on the platform in a two-week period in November, according to a screenshot she posted.

That was about when Musk sent her a direct message asking if she was interested in having his child, according to people familiar with the matter. The two had never met in person.

Fong didn’t move forward with Musk because she pictured having children in a more traditional nuclear family, but confided to a few friends about the approach—including St. Clair, whom she knew as another conservative social-media figure—and how she worried that turning him down could hurt her earnings.

Once Musk learned that Fong disclosed the request to others, he chided her for not using discretion, according to the people, and unfollowed her. That contributed to a fall in her engagement, and her earnings declined.

St. Clair and Musk had met earlier, in the spring of 2023, after Musk began interacting with the influencer’s posts on X and followed her account. Soon after, they were exchanging direct messages before Musk invited her to visit the social-media platform’s San Francisco office, and then the relationship turned romantic.

Musk invited St. Clair, who had been an operations manager at a conservative media company that owns The Babylon Bee, onto his private plane for a trip to Rhode Island where he was visiting one of his sons at college.

The first time they had sex, Musk joked that they should “pick a name” for their future child. He frequently talked to her about having children, she said. It was months later on a New Year’s trip to St. Barts, that she told him that she was ovulating. He asked her “what are we waiting for?” and the two conceived their son on that trip, St. Clair said.

Being in his circle brought with it access to a constant stream of texts, particularly about his growing involvement in Trump’s election.

Before Musk publicly supported Trump, he texted her, “I can’t be President, but I can help Trump defeat Biden and I will.” In one text before Trump picked a running mate, viewed by the Journal, Musk asked St. Clair what she thought about Tulsi Gabbard as a vice presidential candidate, saying that in interviews she says “the right anti-establishment words.”

While Musk was in Pennsylvania canvassing for Trump before the election, Musk sent a series of texts about the urgency of winning the state to St. Clair. “In all of history, there has never been a competitive army composed of women. Not even once,” he wrote. “Men are made for war. Real men, anyway.” He followed up with: “I am in full war mode. Going to the front lines today. Must win PA.”

Protecting Elon

In the December phone call, Birchall told St. Clair that his job was to “protect Elon.” He told her that he has been happily married to the same woman, but he has “been very involved in family law courts, very extensively” through his work for Musk. “I feel like I’ve been through, like, three divorces,” he said.

Birchall worked in finance before becoming one of the top consiglieres in Musk’s orbit. Musk recruited him from Morgan Stanley’s private wealth management group, where he was part of a small team managing the businessman’s money.

The two men couldn’t be more different on the surface: Birchall is a practicing Mormon with a large family who works hard to keep a low profile.

Birchall’s formal responsibilities are wide ranging, from disbursing funds for Musk’s super PAC to assembling the team that helped Musk take Twitter private. His role as intermediary between Musk and some of the mothers happens in the background.

Musk often has Birchall step in to handle negotiations with the women over arrangements for the pregnancy and financial support after. The arrangements play out in similar ways for the different women, according to a document and people familiar with the matter.

Birchall was involved in acquiring the property for a compound in Austin where Musk imagined the women and his growing number of babies would all live among multiple residences, according to a person familiar with the matter. He is involved in other property deals across Musk’s different businesses.

Zilis lives in the gated community with their children, and Musk comes and goes. Musk also attempted to get Grimes to move to the compound, but she refused. Similarly, he tried to get St. Clair to spend some time in Austin “with our kid legion,” according to a text he sent her.

Birchall said on the December call with St. Clair the NDAs are necessary. “We have been through way too many issues where, to not sign some agreement associated with handing over 15-plus million dollars is absolutely insane and irresponsible, and because we have dealt with some very unstable, mentally unstable, people that all of a sudden misremember things,” he said.

He added that his boss “cannot allow people to just go and share his life information. He is the biggest lightning rod on the entire planet.”

When Birchall told St. Clair that other mothers signed similar secrecy agreements, she observed that they didn’t seem happy. Zilis, Birchall said, “goes in and out of finding contentment” but Grimes wasn’t “ever going to find true happiness.”

‘I want to knock you up again’

Grimes claimed on X that her court battle with Musk over custody of their three children bankrupted her and that she had “a fraction of [Musk’s] resources (or iq/ strategy experience)” to navigate the family court system.

Musk had sued Grimes in 2023 in Texas to establish the “parent-child relationship,” and Grimes countersued in California for primary physical custody.

She alleged that Musk kept one of their children from her for five months and that, during court proceedings, Musk’s team dug up parts of her past to portray her as a bad mother. The two had dated in 2018 before having kids.

Birchall featured prominently in Musk’s fight with Grimes, acting as a go-between for various negotiations between the musician and Musk. Birchall was also present in the Austin courtroom during their court fight. The case has been resolved and is now sealed. Grimes and Musk alternate weeks with the children, according to people familiar with the matter.

St. Clair had a front-row seat to the custody battle, since she was dating Musk at the time and he updated her on the deliberations.

A year later, she was in her own fight with Musk.

After becoming pregnant with their son, St. Clair and Musk’s relationship progressed with Musk sending her flowers on her birthday and Mother’s Day. St. Clair’s toddler from a prior relationship had playdates with Musk’s young children, and she and the toddler met Musk’s mother, Maye.

At one point St. Clair had a custom-made black “Make America Great Again” hat with Gothic style font made for Musk, a twist on the bright red cap. Musk wore it everywhere, even referencing it in stump speeches for Trump during the election. In November, Musk responded to a selfie she texted him saying: “I want to knock you up again.”

While she was pregnant, Musk had urged her to deliver the baby via caesarean section and told her he didn’t want the child to be circumcised. (Musk has posted on X that vaginal births limit brain size and that C-sections allow for larger brains.) St. Clair is Jewish and circumcisions are an important ritual in the religion, and she decided against a C-section. He told her she should have 10 babies, and they debated the child’s middle name.

Once she became visibly pregnant, she mostly stayed inside her apartment so the pregnancy wouldn’t become public, she said. During her pregnancy, Musk instructed Birchall to send St. Clair $2 million for expenses, she said, with half of that amount structured as a loan, according to a text message viewed by the Journal. She used the funds in part to pay for security, which came to more than $100,000 a month, she said.

When she was in the hospital being induced for labor in September, Birchall texted her about leaving Musk’s name off the birth certificate, according to texts viewed by the Journal. Shortly before, she had hired an attorney, something Birchall had warned her not to do.

She complied with the request to not name Musk on the birth certificate. Not long after the birth, Birchall pushed St. Clair to sign documents keeping the father of the baby and details regarding her relationship with Musk secret in return for financial support. The offer was a one-time fee of $15 million for a home and living expenses, plus an additional $100,000 a month until the baby turned 21.

Musk told her by text it was dangerous to reveal his relationship to the baby, describing himself as the “#2 after Trump for assassination.” He added that “only the paranoid survive.”

But she didn’t sign. The agreement prevented her from speaking about Musk in relation to the child or disparaging him, but didn’t bar Musk from speaking negatively about her if he wanted. St. Clair would have to pay back the $15 million lump sum if she broke the agreement.

One of the main sticking points, she said, was that it would make her son feel illegitimate. The agreement didn’t provide support for their child if he became gravely ill or a trust fund or life insurance if Musk died before the child turned 21. The agreement would also not have an allotment for security expenses.

She also wanted a paternity test. Courts in New York, where St. Clair lives, require the test to sanction child-support agreements, said Karen B. Rosenthal, one of St. Clair’s attorneys.

A few times, St. Clair tried to hash things out directly with the billionaire, but she said he ignored her texts. In February, when she learned of a tabloid preparing a story about their relationship, she decided to front-run it and posted about it on X, making everything public for the first time, she said.

“Five months ago, I welcomed a new baby into the world. Elon Musk is the father,” she wrote. “I have not previously disclosed this to protect our child’s privacy and safety, but in recent days it has become clear that tabloid media intends to do so, regardless of the harm it will cause.”

Four days after the post, Musk eliminated the $15 million fee offer. Then, as they went to court to discuss paternity testing and Musk’s request for a gag order, he lowered the financial offer further, dropping her support to $40,000 a month, just as her legal fees were set to balloon in the fight.

On Thursday, the Journal contacted Musk for comment for this article. On Friday, St. Clair didn’t receive her scheduled child support payment from Musk, she said. Late on Tuesday, she said Musk’s team sent her $20,000, halving her stipend again.

“The timing of the reduction in payments from him are timed with disagreements on testing and gag orders. The only conclusion we can make is that money is being weaponized,” said Dror Bikel, another of St. Clair’s attorneys. St. Clair’s legal fees have exceeded $240,000, Rosenthal said.

The case is working its way through the New York Supreme Court, which ordered that Musk take the paternity test.

On Friday, the results came back. A report from Labcorp stated that the “Probability of Paternity” was 99.9999%.

KOUDY: the end of next year .. nejvetsi priblizeni Zeme a Marsu zase bude 20.1.2027, takze tim "end of the year" mysli cervenec - rijen 2026, cim pozdeji tim vice musi byt dotankovana. Takze tim vice startu tankeru. Takze tim "next" vlastne mysli start 2028, pokud ne rovnou dalsi dekadu.

KOUDY:
Elon Musk Says He Has Sold X to xAI
Mr. Musk said the deal valued xAI, his artificial intelligence start-up, at $80 billion, and X at $30 billion.


tenhle pribeh bude mit jednoho dne, vesely konec

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/23/us/politics/spacex-contracts-musk-doge-trump.html

Musk Is Positioned to Profit Off Billions in New Government Contracts

The boost in federal spending for SpaceX will come in part as a result of actions by President Trump and Elon Musk’s allies and employees who hold government positions. Supporters say he has the best technology.

Within the Trump administration’s Defense Department, Elon Musk’s SpaceX rocketry is being trumpeted as the nifty new way the Pentagon could move military cargo rapidly around the globe.

In the Commerce Department, SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet service will now be fully eligible for the federal government’s $42 billion rural broadband push, after being largely shut out during the Biden era.

At NASA, after repeated nudges by Mr. Musk, the agency is being squeezed to turn its focus to Mars, allowing SpaceX to pursue federal contracts to deliver the first humans to the distant planet.

And at the Federal Aviation Administration and the White House itself, Starlink satellite dishes have recently been installed, to expand federal government internet access.

Mr. Musk, as the architect of a group he called the Department of Government Efficiency, has taken a chain saw to the apparatus of governing, spurring chaos and dread by pushing out some 100,000 federal workers and shutting down various agencies, though the government has not been consistent in explaining the expanse of his power.

But in selected spots across the government, SpaceX is positioning itself to see billions of dollars in new federal contracts or other support, a dozen current and former federal officials said in interviews with The New York Times.

The boost in federal spending for SpaceX will come in part as a result of actions by President Trump and Mr. Musk’s allies and employees who now hold government positions. The company will also benefit from policies under the current Trump administration that prioritize hiring commercial space vendors for everything from communications systems to satellite fabrication, areas in which SpaceX now dominates.

Already, some SpaceX employees, temporarily working at the F.A.A., were given official permission to take actions that might steer new work to Mr. Musk’s company.

The new contracts across government will come in addition to the billions of dollars in new business that SpaceX could rake in by securing permission from the Trump administration to expand its use of federally owned property.

SpaceX has at least four pending requests with the F.A.A. and the Pentagon to build new rocket launchpads or to launch more frequently from federal spaceports in Florida and California. The F.A.A. moved this month toward approving one of those deals, more than doubling the annual number of SpaceX launches for its Falcon 9 rocket allowed at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, to 120.

And SpaceX is pushing the F.C.C. for more federal radio spectrum — its Starlink satellite service depends on radio spectrum to send signals back and forth to Earth, meaning if it gets more it can increase its profits — a move its cellular provider rivals see as a power grab. The first of those awards was approved this month, after Mr. Trump replaced the head of the F.C.C. with a new chairman, Brendan Carr, who has been supportive of Mr. Musk.

The potential new revenue stream for Mr. Musk’s company comes after he donated nearly $300 million to support the 2024 campaign of Mr. Trump as he sought a return to the White House.

Mr. Musk then persuaded President Trump to put him in charge of the cost-cutting effort. From there, as a White House employee and adviser, he can influence policy and eliminate contracts.

“The odds of Elon getting whatever Elon wants are much higher today,” said Blair Levin, a former F.C.C. official turned market analyst. “He is in the White House and Mar-a-Lago. No one ever anticipated that an industry competitor would have access to those kinds of levers of power.”

Executives at SpaceX did not respond to requests for comment.

Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said in a statement that Mr. Musk, as a so-called special government employee had received briefings on ethics limits including those related to conflicts of interest and would abide by all applicable federal laws.

SpaceX had built itself into one of the nation’s largest federal contractors before the start of the second Trump administration, securing $3.8 billion in commitments for fiscal year 2024 spread over 344 different contracts, according to a tally by The Times of a federal contracting database.

Even if Mr. Trump had never given Mr. Musk and his employees a government role — or if former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. had been elected to a second term — SpaceX would have continued to secure new government work. What has changed is the overall value of the work expected to be delivered to SpaceX.

Douglas Loverro, a former senior NASA and Pentagon official who also served as an adviser to the Trump transition team on space issues, said SpaceX deserved to win many of these additional contracts.

“He does have the best tech,” Mr. Loverro said of Mr. Musk. “All of this will lift the space industry as a whole, obviously — but it will certainly help SpaceX even more.”

Other government contracting experts say they remain concerned Mr. Musk is positioned to secure special favors, particularly after Mr. Trump fired officials charged with investigating ethics violations and potential conflicts of interest.

“We will never know if SpaceX would authentically win competitions for these awards because all of the offices in government intended to prevent corruption and conflicts of interest have been beheaded or defunded,” said Danielle Brian, the executive director of Project on Government Oversight, a nonprofit group that tracks federal contracts.

“The abuse of power and corruption that is spreading across federal agencies because of Musk’s dual roles is horrifying,” she said.

Pentagon Rising

Even before Mr. Trump’s return, SpaceX had been working behind the scenes for several years to expand its business with the Pentagon and intelligence agencies.

It would hire former military officials who then reached back into the Defense Department to nudge former associates and friends to buy more SpaceX services.

Gary Henry, a former Air Force space and missile program supervisor, was among them. He joined SpaceX as it was developing Starship, the largest and most powerful spacecraft ever constructed.

During Mr. Henry’s tenure at SpaceX, the company secured a $102 million Air Force contract to study how Starship could deliver military cargo to points around the world within 90 minutes. Currently, that task is mostly done with the Air Force’s pack mules, C-130 cargo planes, which take much of a day for the trip.

SpaceX is still having trouble getting Starship operational. The two most recent test flights resulted in explosions that sent debris raining over the Caribbean.

Nonetheless, Mr. Henry — now back working for the Pentagon as a consultant — is promoting Starship as an option for the military.

Last month, while speaking on behalf of the Pentagon at a satellite industry conference in California, he described how Starship might be used during the Trump administration to deliver a major piece of military equipment “to any point on the planet very quickly.”

A few weeks later, the Air Force disclosed plans to build a rocket landing pad on Johnston Atoll, a tiny island in the Pacific Ocean, to test these cargo ship landings. The Pentagon’s initial goal: to move 100 tons of cargo per flight, a total that only Starship, at least according to its design, has the power and size to handle.

“It’s frustrating,” said Erik Daehler, a vice president at Sierra Space, which also wants to sell cargo services to the Pentagon. “Things can’t just go to SpaceX.”

Maj. Gen. Steve Butow, the director of the space portfolio at the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit, when asked by The Times about Mr. Henry’s public comments on behalf of the agency for a project he had worked on as a SpaceX employee, said: “The optics were unfortunate.”

Mr. Henry, in an interview, said the nation would benefit from tools that SpaceX and other commercial space companies like Rocket Lab offer.

“Commercial space in general is very relevant to to the problems we need to go solve,” he said. “It just turns out that SpaceX is kind of leading — it is the pointy end of the spear.”

An even bigger boost for SpaceX is likely, current and former Pentagon officials said, through a missile defense project called the Golden Dome.

For that project, Mr. Trump has ordered the Pentagon to rapidly figure out how to shoot down nuclear missiles headed for the United States, as well as strikes from lower-flying cruise and hypersonic missiles — an effort that could cost $100 billion annually, according to one estimate.

SpaceX already is positioned to handle a large share of the Pentagon’s military launch jobs in the next several years, along with Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin and United Launch Alliance, a consortium run by Lockheed Martin and Boeing.

A space-based missile defense system would drive launch spending even higher, as the government would need to purchase more devices to track missile threats and transmit the data to target them, services that SpaceX also provides.

Ann Stefanek, an Air Force spokeswoman, said in a statement that the Space Force would adhere to all laws and regulations to ensure ethical and effective partnerships, which generally require competitive bidding for new contracts.

But industry observers said SpaceX would almost certainly secure a large share of this lucrative new work.

Laura Grego, a senior researcher at the nonprofit Union of Concerned Scientists, said: “Golden Dome is quite an apt name, as it is certainly going to cost a lot of coin.”
Mars Bound at NASA

Mr. Trump’s nominee to run NASA, Jared Isaacman, is a billionaire entrepreneur and a space enthusiast. He paid SpaceX hundreds of millions of dollars to fly — twice — into orbit aboard a rocket.

More importantly, his payment processing company, Shift4 Payments, purchased a stake in SpaceX several years ago, an investment that generated $25 million in gains in recent years, effectively making him and Mr. Musk business partners. That SpaceX stake was recently sold, a Shift4 executive said. In ethics documents released this month, Mr. Isaacman vowed to sever any remaining financial ties he had with SpaceX.

If confirmed, Mr. Isaacman will join Michael Altenhofen, who in February was named a NASA senior adviser after 15 years at SpaceX.

NASA has already paid SpaceX more money than even the Pentagon — a total $13 billion in contractual commitments over the past decade. Those deals include hiring SpaceX to deliver cargo and astronauts to orbit and to send NASA’s biggest and most expensive probes into the universe.

Just last month, NASA awarded SpaceX a contract worth an estimated $100 million to launch a new space telescope that will search for asteroids that might threaten Earth.

But that is a relatively tiny chunk of how much new money SpaceX could secure from the agency in Mr. Trump’s second term.

Former NASA officials predict that Mr. Isaacman will quickly push to revamp the space agency’s Artemis project, which intends to return American astronauts to the moon. That move could generate resistance — as the program has many allies in Congress.

Currently, Boeing has one of the main contracts to build the rockets for Artemis. But Mr. Loverro and other former agency officials said they expect the government to phase out this rocket, as it is years behind schedule and billions of dollars over budget.

This will allow NASA to turn to commercial space companies such as SpaceX or Blue Origin to lift astronauts into orbit for future missions to the moon or even Mars.

Mr. Musk boasted this month that SpaceX would launch an uncrewed Starship to Mars by the end of 2026 and then send the first humans there by perhaps 2029 — an effort that he will likely push NASA to help finance. (Mr. Musk’s timeline predictions have been wrong in the past.)

Executives at Boeing and Blue Origin each declined requests for comment.

SpaceX “will almost certainly see massive new business,” said Pamela Melroy, a retired astronaut and Air Force officer who served as NASA’s deputy administrator during the Biden administration. “All of the indicators for SpaceX are trending positive.”
Bringing Broadband to Rural America

Until recently, Starlink had mostly been on the outside looking in — unable for the most part to tap into federal incentives to provide internet access to remote areas.

Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary, vowed in his confirmation hearing in January to change that.

He promised to end the way the Commerce Department manages $42 billion in funding it is distributing to states to expand broadband access. The Biden administration chose to prioritize systems that wired homes directly to internet networks, rather than satellite-based systems like Starlink.

“Let’s use satellites, let’s use wireless and let’s use fiber,” Mr. Lutnick said at the hearing. “And let’s do it the cheapest, most efficiently we can.”

Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, who has often taken up battles with Washington on behalf of Mr. Musk, had already been pressuring the Commerce Department to ease grant rules to allow satellite-based broadband in rural areas, where the cost of running cable can be expensive.

Now, Mr. Cruz’s former Senate aide, Arielle Roth, who was helping with this push, has been nominated by Mr. Trump to lead the Commerce Department agency that will oversee the grant program.

The Federal Communications Commission has its own, smaller grant program that also provides funding to deliver broadband to underserved parts of the United States. Starlink had originally been slated to get nearly $1 billion in funding before the F.C.C. withdrew the offer in late 2023, saying that the service did not meet agency requirements.

The commission’s board chair has now been taken over by Mr. Carr, who had protested the decision to deny SpaceX these funds. Industry analysts and two former F.C.C. members interviewed by The Times said they now expect the agency to once again offer some of these grant funds to Starlink.

The commission also approved a SpaceX request this month, despite protests from Verizon and AT&T, to boost power on its Starlink satellites so they can provide smartphone service directly from orbit, ending cellphone dead zones for some customers.

A victory on each of these fights by SpaceX “could be huge — in the tens of billions of dollars,” said Drew Garner, a researcher at the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society.

But at the same time, there could be long-term costs to consumers nationwide.

Monthly satellite subscription costs for consumers are higher than wired internet, in most cases. Satellite-based systems also tend to be slower compared to cables wired to the house.

“Stranding all or part of rural America with worse internet so that we can make the world’s richest man even richer is yet another in a long line of betrayals by Washington,” Evan Feinman, who led the Commerce Department’s rural broadband program during the Biden administration, wrote in an email to his colleagues this month, on the day he left the agency.
Modernizing Aviation

After a fatal midair collision between an Army helicopter and a commercial jet in January, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy asked for Mr. Musk’s help.

The Federal Aviation Administration, which is trying to modernize its air traffic control and weather data systems, needed a boost in technical know-how, Mr. Duffy said.

Teams from SpaceX were brought into the agency to assist with this work.

Mr. Musk soon complained on social media that Verizon was moving too slowly on a multibillion dollar agency contract awarded in 2023 to deliver the new technology.

“The Verizon system is not working and so is putting air travelers at serious risk,” Mr. Musk wrote on X last month.

Theodore Malaska, one of the SpaceX employees working at F.A.A., was granted a special ethics waiver by the Trump administration to participate in “particular matters which may have a direct and predictable effect” on the financial interest of SpaceX, according to documents obtained by The Times.

Soon after, Mr. Malaska was boasting on X how the F.A.A. was now building SpaceX’s Starlink satellites into agency systems that send weather data to pilots. It is a design that could bring future federal business to SpaceX.

An F.A.A. spokesman said that as of mid-March, only eight of the Starlink terminals were in use and Mr. Musk said they had been donated. But other Starlink terminals have recently been installed at the White House and at the offices of the General Services Administration.

“I am working without biases for the safety of people that fly,” Mr. Malaska said in a social media posting.

The overlap in these roles — Mr. Musk’s employees advising agencies while SpaceX is installing its Starlink devices at agency locations — present an ethical situation that has few precedents in modern American history.

Federal rules generally prohibit awarding contracts to federal employees, including special government employees. Federal employees also are prohibited from taking actions that might benefit their own families or outside entities they have a financial relationship with.

Mr. Musk has argued he is not personally involved in pursuing SpaceX contracts. But federal contracting systems require the government to avoid not only actual conflicts of interest, but even the appearance of them.

“By any objective standard, this is inappropriate,” said Steven Schooner, a former government contracts lawyer who is now a professor studying government procurement at George Washington University.

“Given the power he wields and the access he enjoys,” Mr. Schooner added, “we just have never seen anything like this.”

KOUDY: to je uplne to nejhorsi, co muze urednik rict. PRedstav si, ze by ti "tva neoblibena strana" omylem sebrala dum a s omluvnym dopisem by ti ho vratili po ~ 7 letech sporu. Musk se snazi do skutecneho zivota lidi prinest "start up" politku, ale lidi neziji "start up" a ani to nechtej.

Nedobrovolný pobyt astronomů na ISS skončí dříve, i tak přesluhují měsíce - iDNES.cz
https://www.idnes.cz/technet/vesmir/vesmir-iss-boeing-cst-100-starliner-crew-dragon-spacex-posadka-mezinarodni-vesmirna-stanice.A250213_144804_tec_vesmir_vse

Stávající plány počítaly s tím, že astronauti Barry Wilmore a Sunita Williamsová z nevydařeného letu Starlineru se vrátí domů na konci března, kdy byl plánován let mise Crew-10. Tuto misi zajišťuje společnost SpaceX, která měla časové problémy s výrobou lodi Crew Dragon. Agentura NASA se však podle nového prohlášení rozhodla místo nově vyrobené použít loď, která již do vesmíru letěla. Díky tomu bude možné uspíšit start z 24. března na 12. března.

Po příletu Crew-10 na ISS se zpět na Zemi vydá posádka mise Crew-9, se kterou odletí i Wilmore a Williamsová.

Tak snad to nebude případ selhání "re-use" při letu s živou posádkou...

Follow the money aneb někdy to tak prostě vyje...

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/12/business/elon-musk-cfpb-x-money.html?referringSource=articleShare

Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, is widely known for amassing his fortune through Tesla, his electric car company, and SpaceX, the rocket ship company he founded.

But he started his career trying to disrupt consumer finance as a co-founder of a digital financial services company that later became PayPal. Now, he’s working to transform X.com, his social media platform, into a virtual wallet where people can send money to one another.

These types of digital payment platforms, which other tech companies like Apple and Meta also run, have come under intense scrutiny by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

But that scrutiny is likely to ease, largely because of Mr. Musk, who has been empowered by the Trump administration to reshape federal agencies like the consumer bureau.

In recent days, Mr. Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency team, which is not a formal executive-branch department, descended on the consumer bureau, gaining access to its headquarters and computer systems as part of a broader effort to dismantle it.

Last week, Mr. Musk marked the moment on X, writing, “CFPB RIP,” alongside an emoji of a gravestone.

As Mr. Musk’s deregulation team makes its way through federal agencies, he has been criticized for having numerous conflicts of interest involving his businesses.

And at X, one of the most promising ways Mr. Musk can increase profits is through a payments business, which could charge fees for transactions. Building out that business would be easier without having to contend with a regulator like the consumer bureau, which has a recent track record of bringing cases against payment companies.

“Elon Musk is working his way into the financial products marketplace right now,” said Richard Cordray, who was the bureau’s inaugural director under President Barack Obama and remained in the job through the first year of President Trump’s first term. “It’s very convenient for him to be trying to neutralize the regulator that he would have to answer to.”

“That is a blatant conflict of interest,” Mr. Cordray continued.

Mr. Trump has defended Mr. Musk, saying he is “not gaining anything” in his deregulation role. Last week, White House officials said it was up to Mr. Musk to police his own actions.

In an Oval Office appearance with Mr. Trump on Tuesday, Mr. Musk said all of his team’s actions “are fully public.”

“You can see everything that’s going on, and you can see am I doing something that benefits one of my companies or not?” Mr. Musk added. “It’s totally obvious.”

Yet the White House has designated all documents produced or received by Mr. Musk’s team as presidential records, shielding them from public access until at least 2034.

Representatives of X and the consumer bureau did not respond to requests for comment.

Digital payments apps have become a core part of how Americans transact; Apple, Google, PayPal and Block, which owns Cash App, are all big players.

And the consumer bureau has been the primary federal financial regulator for these non-bank technology companies.

Three months ago, it issued a rule — which took effect last month — giving itself supervisory authority over digital payment companies. That allows the agency’s examiners to delve deeply into the details of those companies’ payment systems and transaction data.

And lately the bureau had been aggressively pursuing enforcement actions against some of the biggest companies in the industry. Last month, it accused Block of enabling fraudulent transactions and ordered it to return $120 million to consumers. In December, it sued several banks for their operation of Zelle, a payment system that Rohit Chopra, the consumer agency’s Biden-era director, said “became a gold mine for fraudsters, while often leaving victims to fend for themselves.” (The banks denied any wrongdoing and are fighting the lawsuit.)

A trade group that represents Mr. Musk’s X and other financial technology firms sued the consumer bureau last month, challenging its authority to set rules governing the industry. The trade group’s lawyers invoked Mr. Trump, complaining that the consumer bureau had moved forward with the rule before the new administration took office.

On Friday, Mr. Trump installed Russell Vought, newly confirmed as the director of Office of Management and Budget, as the agency’s acting director. Mr. Vought ordered the agency’s staff to halt all work, including supervision and enforcement.

He also ordered them to “cease any pending investigations,” in an all-staff email reviewed by The New York Times.

In January, Mr. Musk announced a partnership with Visa to build a peer-to-peer payment system called the X Money Account. The deal was a major step for X toward becoming what Mr. Musk has called “an everything app.” Under the deal, users will be able to make peer-to-peer payments from debit cards and transfer funds into their bank accounts.

Mr. Musk sees the addition of a payment capability to X as critical to the company’s growth.

In 2022, as he was acquiring Twitter, Mr. Musk projected that within a year, the platform could generate $15 million from payments. (That revenue did not materialize, as X has sought regulatory approvals to handle transactions.) By 2028, that number could soar to roughly $1.3 billion, he claimed in a pitch book circulated to bankers who were financing the deal.

At the time, more than 90 percent of Twitter’s revenue came from ad dollars. Developing a payment feature, the pitch book said, would unshackle the app from advertisers by replacing that revenue with subscriptions and fees from the payment business.

Mr. Musk has hinted at those broader ambitions on X. In November, he posted a screenshot of Joe Rogan’s X account, which included a “$” button, prompting widespread speculation about how soon the social media platform would start offering a payment feature.

Progress had been slow, partly because X would need to secure money transmitter licenses in every state to create a nationwide system. The company now holds those licenses in more than 30 states.

The Visa deal will allow X to transfer money into and out of X Money accounts on Visa’s network.

In a post on X last month announcing the Visa deal, Linda Yaccarino, X’s chief executive, foreshowed grander plans. “First of many big announcements about X Money this year,” she wrote.

OMNIHASH: Já si vzpomněl na relevantní kapitolu z Pratchettovo Making Money:

“Well, the problem is that, considered as a labor force, the golems are capable of doing the work per day of one hundred and twenty thousand men.”

“Think of what they could do for the city!” said Mr. Cowslick of the Artificers’ Guild.

“Well, yes. To begin with, they would put one hundred and twenty thousand men out of work,” said Hubert, “but that would only be the start. They do not require food, clothing or shelter. Most people spend their money on food, shelter, clothing, entertainment, and, not least, taxes. What would these golems spend it on? The demand for many things would drop and further unemployment would result. You see, circulation is everything. The money goes around, creating wealth as it goes.”

ALMAD: Penize te nikdy samy o sobe stastnym neudelaj a u investic mit nemuzes casto ani moralku. To bys nemohl investovat treba do farmaceutickejch firem. Do automobilek. Zlata, diamantu, technologickejch firem apod. Podivej se jak se chova foxconn k zamesntnancum kteri vyrabi iphony. Podivej se jak se k nim chova Amazon, Tesla atp. Proste kdyz se bavis s dobrym investorem tak je to jen chladna hra cisel a ruznych promennych. Emoce jdou uplne stranou. Stejne jako u toho screenu doge, ktery si hazel niz. Videl jsem na grafu ze jde ten coin nahoru. Vzal na pet minut long a prodal. Az pak jsem zjistoval co se stalo a proc sel nahoru.

tady je hrozne moc lidi uz nastavenych tak, ze Elon je antikrist a jakmile do nej kvuli necemu kopou a ty nekopes s nima, tak mu hned lezes hrozne doprdele a obdivujes ho. Jakmile je ale start raketek, tak se tu ti sami lide sejdou a rikaji juuuuu..to je borec!..Je to jako nadavat na Babise jakej je to kreten a pak si jit koupit kure z kosteleckejch uzenin. Zadnej miliardar novodobejch dejin neni hodnej capek od vedle, kterej vsem pomaha, ma dobre nastavenej moralni kompas, je vsem vzorem apod. Henry Ford byl despotickej dement. Howard Hughes byl egomaniak, devkar apod..Jobs byl nemoralni egoistickej a sebestrednej idiot, ale statisice lidi pod nim chteli pracovat. Musk je proste to samy. Ma skvely napady a vize, ktery posouvaj lidstvo vpred. Dokaze inovovat. Rychle se rozhodovat atp, coz neznamena, ze to taky nemuze bejt v necem naprostej dement s idiotskejma nazorama.