Wall Street Journal reporter Vivian Salama said Elon Musk is “definitely playing a risky game” by getting ahead of Donald Trump to tank a government funding bill.
Democrats and other critics started calling Musk Trump’s “shadow president” on Wednesday after the billionaire Tesla CEO railed repeatedly against the bill in a social media spree, before the president-elect ultimately weighed in, likely delivering a fatal blow to the bipartisan deal negotiated by House Speaker Mike Johnson (Republican, Louisiana).
“It’s incredibly risky,” Salama, a national politics reporter who covered the White House during Trump’s first administration, said of Musk’s manoeuvring on CNN’s OutFront on Wednesday.
“And amazingly, his advisors have been remarkably silent on why it took Donald Trump, or even Vice President-elect JD Vance, so long to weigh in on this issue,” she continued. “Whereas Elon Musk … was tweeting all day long about this, as was Vivek Ramaswamy.”
Musk reportedly spent more than a quarter of a billion dollars to help elect Trump. The president-elect subsequently tapped Musk, along with entrepreneur and former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, to lead a new non-government advisory group, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
“It is very unusual to see close advisors to Donald Trump getting ahead of him on critical issues like this,” Salama said.
She said it wasn’t clear if Musk and Ramaswamy had coordinated in advance with Trump before speaking out so vocally against the funding bill.
“Advisers told us that they did kind of receive Trump’s blessing, that they were on the same page, but they really couldn’t give much more of an explanation as to why Elon Musk was just kind of going full-throated, you know, rejection of the bill so early on, without us hearing from Trump,” she said.
“And so he is definitely playing a risky game. Donald Trump typically likes to kind of be his own spokesman,” she added. “We know that. I happened to cover his first White House, and so we saw that play out.”
CNN’s Erin Burnett likened Musk’s situation to “when Icarus flew too close to the sun.”
Many have speculated that Musk is hogging the spotlight in a way that is sure to irritate Trump, and that is already reportedly rankling some of Trump’s advisers.
