In the bitter fallout of the breakup of the year, President Donald Trump threatened to cancel government contracts held with Elon Musk and his SpaceX operations. Now that he’s in the “find out” stage, he’s discovering that is much harder than anticipated.
Trump administration staffers tasked with reviewing SpaceX’s government contracts discovered that terminating them would have a serious impact on both NASA and the Defense Department, according to a new report from The Wall Street Journal.
Following the review, only a few of SpaceX’s existing contracts could face further scrutiny. None of them, however, have been cancelled, as there simply isn’t anyone who can do the job cheaper or more reliably.
This is unsurprising, given that SpaceX is by far the biggest company in the world when it comes to putting stuff into space. Last year, they accounted for 83 percent of global satellite launches.
The U.S. government has contracted with the company for years and its technology remains instrumental in upholding Ukrainian military communications in the ongoing Russian conflict. For its services, Musk’s company has received at least $21 billion in taxpayer funding, with an additional $13 billion still to come.
Musk is not the only billionaire in the space game though, and the government has long been concerned about the monopoly Musk’s company holds on the industry. Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin won seven contracts in the last round of Trump administration awards, however SpaceX nabbed 28, a little over half.
“There’s no replacing SpaceX,” defense and space analyst Todd Harrison told Forbes. “You just do not have the capacity in our other launch options.”
Still, SpaceX is not the only Musk-affiliated company that the U.S. government has ties to. Earlier this week, the government announced a $200 million deal between the Pentagon and the Musk-owned xAI company to develop government’s artificial intelligence capabilities in the “warfighting domain.” The news came not long after the xAI-built chatbot Grok described itself as “MechaHitler” on the platform formerly known as Twitter.
In total, the man who was once the head of the DOGE department tasked with slashing government waste has cleaned up in the government contract hustle to the tune of $38 billion.
Many of these contracts, $15.7 billion of which were awarded to Tesla, were signed under former President Joe Biden. Despite the new administration’s fervor for tarnishing the reputation of the prior, it seems this is one area they simply find themselves stuck.
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