Elon Musk plans to file a financial disclosure report to the White House, but it will remain confidential, a White House official said Tuesday.
There has never been a White House staffer with the vast potential for conflicts like Mr. Musk, the world’s richest person and the head of leading companies in electric vehicles, space exploration and artificial intelligence.
But Mr. Musk is serving President Trump as an unpaid “special government employee,” which means his financial disclosure is not required to be made public.
Mr. Musk received an ethics training this week, the official said, and Mr. Musk’s staff as part of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency is in the process of receiving their own training, said the White House official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the record.
Special government employees, like all federal employees except the president and vice president, are prohibited under federal criminal law from taking actions that directly benefit themselves or their families, unless they have an ethics waiver.
Mr. Musk’s companies have billions of dollars in federal contracts and are the subject of more than a dozen pending federal regulatory investigations or lawsuits, so he will almost certainly need an ethics waiver, several former White House lawyers said.
The White House has not responded to a request from The New York Times for a copy of the waiver, a document that is required under federal law to be released. Ethics waivers are typically drafted based on conflicts identified through a financial disclosure filing, so it is possible that no waiver has been prepared yet.
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