The Pentagon is scheduled to brief Elon Musk on Friday on any possible war plans for the U.S. military that could break out with China, two U.S. officials said Thursday.
Another official said the briefing would be the focus of China without providing additional details. The fourth official confirmed that Mr Musk will be in the Pentagon on Friday, but did not provide any details.
Providing Mr. Musk’s entry into some of the closest protection of military secrets in the United States will be his broad role as an adviser to President Trump and his efforts to cut spending and clear the people and policies they oppose.
As Mr. Musk continues to operate a business that is a major government contractor in a wide range of federal bureaucracy, this will also dramatically ease his conflict of interest against Musk. In this case, SpaceX and Tesla’s billionaire CEO Mr. Musk is a major supplier to the Pentagon, with extensive financial interests in China.
The Pentagon’s plan of war (called in military terms O-Plans or Operational Programs) is one of the military’s most rigorous secrets. If foreign countries want to understand how the U.S. plans to fight them, they can strengthen their defense capabilities and address their weaknesses, making the program much less likely to succeed.
The top secret brief for China’s war plan has about 20 to 30 slides, illuminating how the United States will fight this conflict. According to officials who know the plan, it covers the plan, starting with signs and warnings of China’s various choices for Chinese goals.
A White House spokesman did not respond to an email asking questions about the purpose of the visit, how it was achieved, Mr. Trump was aware of this and whether the visit caused a conflict of interest. The White House has not said whether Mr. Trump has signed a conflict of interest against Mr. Musk.
Pentagon chief spokesman Sean Parnell also did not respond to a similar email, seeking comments on why Musk received briefings on China’s war plans. Shortly after the Times published the article Thursday night, Mr. Parnell made a brief statement: “The Ministry of Defense is pleased to welcome Elon Musk to the Pentagon on Friday.
About an hour later, Mr. Parnell posted a message on his X account: “This is 100% fake news. Just a bold and malicious mistake. Elon Musk is a patriot. We are honored to have brought him to the Pentagon.”
Mr. Heggs also commented on X late Thursday, saying: “This is not a meeting about the ‘highest secret Chinese war plan’. It is an informal meeting on innovation, efficiency and smart production.
The meeting reflected the extraordinary dual role played by Mr. Musk, who is both the richest man in the world and is widely authoritative by Mr. Trump.
Mr. Musk has security clearances and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth can determine who needs to know about the plan. But choosing to share many technical details with Mr. Musk is another matter.
Mr. Heggs; crew member of Christopher W. Grady, acting chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff; officials said Samuel J. Paparo, head of the military’s Indo-Pacific Command, the military.
The meeting was scheduled for Mr. Hegses’s office, but was held in the Pentagon’s security conference room, often used for senior meetings of the United Emirates, senior staff and visiting combat commanders.
For those without extensive military planning experience, the operational planning of major accidents is very difficult. The nature of technology is why presidents often present a broad outline of plans rather than the actual details of the document. It is unclear how much details Mr. Musk wants or needs to hear.
Mr. Heggs received a portion of a briefing on China’s war plan last week and received another section on Wednesday, according to officials familiar with the plan.
It is not clear how motivating the promotion to Mr. Musk would be to provide such a sensitive briefing. He is not in the military chain, nor is Mr. Trump’s official adviser in military affairs involving China.
But Mr. Musk may need to know the reasons for all aspects of the war plan. If Mr. Musk and his team of cost cutters from the government’s efficiency ministry (or do anything) want to trim the Pentagon budget responsibly, they may need to know which weapon systems the Pentagon plans to use in a fight with China.
For example, a crew aircraft carrier. Cutting down future aircraft carriers will save billions of dollars and can be spent on drones or other weapons. But if the U.S. strategy relies on using aircraft carriers in innovative ways, it would surprise China, and sealing existing ships or stolen future production on boards could undermine the plan.
For decades, plans to fight against China have dominated the Pentagon’s mind before the confrontation with Beijing became a more traditional wisdom on Capitol Hill. The United States has established Air Force, Navy and Space Forces, and even the most recent Marines and Army – which may keep in mind the fight against China.
Critics say the military has invested too much in large and expensive systems such as fighter jets or aircraft carriers, and too much in medium-sized drones and coastal defense agencies. But for Mr. Musk, he was going to evaluate how the Pentagon spending was repositioned, and he wanted to know what the military was going to use and for what purpose.
Mr. Musk has called on the Pentagon to stop buying certain high-priced items, such as the F-35 fighter jets, made by one of his space launch rivals, Lockheed Martin, which plans to cost the Pentagon more than $12 billion a year.
However, Musk’s broad commercial interests allowed him to obtain strategic secrets about China was a serious problem for ethics experts. Officials said the revisions to China’s war plan will focus on upgrading plans to defend against space warfare. China has developed a set of weapons that can attack American satellites.
Mr. Musk’s low-Earth orbit star-striped satellite constellations (providing data and communication services from space) are considered more resilient than traditional satellites. But he may be interested in learning whether the United States can defend its satellites in a war with China.
Joining some of the most important Pentagon and U.S. military officials in confidential briefs on China’s threat will be a valuable opportunity for any defense contractor seeking to sell services to the military.
Mr. Musk can dig deep into the new tools the Pentagon may need, and he remains SpaceX that the CEO can sell.
Todd Harrison, a senior fellow at the American College of Enterprise, said contractors working on related Pentagon projects do usually have access to certain limited war plan documents, but only once war plan is approved. Mr Harrison said that if there had been a briefing from officials who had exclusive access to the Pentagon, individual executives rarely gain exclusive access.
“Musk in the War Planning Brief?” he said. “Give a unique visit to a CEO of a defense company seems to be a reason for contract protests, and it is a real conflict of interest.”
The Pentagon and federal spy agencies have paid billions of dollars to Mr. Musk’s SpaceX to help the United States build a new military satellite network in an attempt to face the Chinese military threat. SpaceX launched most of these types of military satellites for the Pentagon on its Falcon 9 rockets, which took off from Launchpads SpaceX, were built at military bases in Florida and California.
The Pentagon has made hundreds of millions of dollars in payments respectively, and the company now relies heavily on SpaceX’s Starlink Satellite Communications network for data transfers by military personnel around the world.
In 2024, SpaceX received an Air Force contract of approximately $1.6 billion. This does not include confidential spending from the National Reconnaissance Office with SpaceX, which has hired the company to build a new low-Earth orbit satellite for it to monitor China, Russia and other threats.
Mr. Trump has proposed that the United States has established a new system, and the military calls the Golden Dome a space-based missile defense system, recalling what President Ronald Reagan was trying to deliver. (The so-called Star Wars system that Mr. Reagan thought of was never fully developed.)
The missile threat from China, whether it is IT nuclear weapons or treble missiles or cruise missiles, was a major factor, which led to Mr. Trump’s recent signing of an executive order recently directing the Pentagon to start working on Golden Dome.
Even if the first component of the system is started planning and building, it will cost tens of billions of dollars and will likely create huge business opportunities for SpaceX, which already offers rocket launches, satellite structures and space-based data communication systems, all of which will provide Golden Dome.
Additionally, Mr. Musk has been the focus of the Pentagon inspector general’s concern about his compliance with the highest secret security permit.
The survey began last year after some SpaceX employees complained to government agencies about Musk and others at SpaceX not properly reporting contacts or conversations with foreign leaders.
Before the Biden administration ended, Air Force officials began their own review, asking questions about Mr. Musk in Senate Democrats and asserting that he did not comply with safety permit requirements.
In fact, the Air Force denied Mr. Musk’s request for a higher level of security permit, known as the Special Access Program, which was reserved for very sensitive confidential programs, citing potential security risks associated with billionaires.
In fact, SpaceX has become so valuable to the Pentagon that the Chinese government says it believes the company is an extension of the U.S. military.
According to the translation of the paper prepared by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, “The Militarization of Stars and Stripes and Its Impact on Global Strategic Stability” was the title of a publication last year at the National Defense University of China.
The electric car companies he controlled, Musk and Mr. Tesla, rely heavily on China, which owns one of the flagship factories of the automaker in Shanghai. The state-of-the-art facility, unveiled in 2019, was built under special permission from the Chinese government and now accounts for more than half of Tesla’s global delivery. The company said in its financial filing that it had reached a $2.8 billion loan agreement with Chinese lenders to make production expenditures.
In public, Mr. Musk avoided criticizing Beijing and said he was willing to cooperate with the Communist Party of China. In 2022, he wrote a column for China Cyberspace Management Magazine (the country’s censorship agency, touting his company and its mission to improve humanity).
That same year, the billionaire told the Financial Times that it should be irritated by the establishment of a “special administrative region of Taiwan, which is quite delicious”, which angered the claims of politicians on independent islands, and that China should put some control over Taiwan. In the same interview, he also noted that Beijing sought assurance that he would not sell Starlink in China.
The following year, at a technical meeting, Mr. Musk called Democratic Island “an integral part of China, not part of China” and compared the situation in Taiwan-China with Hawaii and the United States.
On the social platform X he owns, Mr. Musk has long used his account to praise China. He said the country is the world leader in electric vehicles and solar energy “so far” and praised its “space program” for being “much higher than people realize.” He encouraged more people to visit the country and openly discussed the “inevitable” Russian-China alliance.
Aaron Kessler Contribution report.
