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Musk can buy Trump votes, risking the security of the 2024 election

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Musk can buy Trump votes, risking the security of the 2024 election

SpaceX has taken unpredictable actions that could affect geopolitical events, raising national security concerns that a key defense contractor could be manipulated by Musk’s impulses.

Douglas Yeung
| Opinion contributor

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SpaceX’s impressive launch capabilities, recently demonstrated by its Falcon 9 rocket, Europa Clipper and the recovery of the Starship rocket booster, have become an integral part of supporting the US military’s key objectives.

The Pentagon hopes Starshield satellites launched by SpaceX can dramatically improve connectivity in remote environments. Networked satellites from Starlink, a subsidiary of SpaceX, could help the military detect targets anywhere in the world. Falcon rockets have launched several US Space Force missions.

But SpaceX’s growing ambitions and successes supplying both the US military and intelligence agencies raise a vital question about SpaceX and its CEO: the mercurial leadership of a company so embedded in US interests Does United present a risk to national security?

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Under Elon Musk, SpaceX has taken unpredictable actions that could affect geopolitical events, raising national security concerns that a key defense contractor could be manipulated by the impulses of its leadership.

For example, SpaceX initially made its Starlink communications available to Ukrainian forces fighting Russia, but later tried to deny them access, with Musk first demanding that the Pentagon foot the bill and then claiming that restoring functionality could escalate the conflict into a world war.

Musk himself has tried to influence U.S. politics with a voter-payoff scheme that former Republican administration officials are asking the Justice Department to investigate.

This unpredictability runs counter to how the government and key allies tend to like their contractors: boring and reliable.

An unreliable vendor threatens agencies’ ability to deploy technology to deliver critical services such as benefit distribution, disaster response, or military supply.

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In an effort to make its vendors reliable, the US government must continually evaluate how to rapidly adopt emerging technologies while ensuring predictability, consistency, and sustainability among these contractors.

The Space Force, for example, has sought a “clean sheet” approach that weighs the speed of deployment of new technologies against evolving threats, with the need to ensure those technologies are reliable and secure.

Nor is it as simple as focusing on the top of an organization. National security concerns about unreliable technology providers not only involve external impact, such as whether the actions of leaders destabilize allies, but should also look internally: how leadership can negatively affect a company’s workforce. organization

Former SpaceX employees sue over ‘Elon’s behavior’

In June, eight former SpaceX employees sued the company and its CEO, alleging that Musk personally ordered them fired after they raised concerns about sexual harassment in the workplace. Their lawsuit specifically noted “Elon’s behavior in the public sphere (as) a frequent source of distraction and embarrassment.”

Data from the federal regulator suggests that SpaceX’s workplace injury rates exceed the industry average, which employees have attributed to Musk’s insistence on prioritizing speed over safety.

His other adventures tell a similar story.

Shortly after Musk bought Twitter in 2022, his demand for staff with an “extremely tough” work ethic hammered staff morale. This month, just before Tesla’s long-awaited robotaxi announcement, several senior leaders left, continuing what appears to be a pattern of executive turnover directly under Musk.

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Undoubtedly, their companies have achieved plenty of dazzling technical feats.

Last week, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang marveled that another Musk startup, xAI, built a data center with 100,000 of Nvidia’s GPUs, the chips that power today’s artificial intelligence. in just 19 days, a process Huang estimated would normally take four years. .

And SpaceX has established launch capabilities like the Falcon and Falcon Heavy that have so far suffered no apparent drop in reliability.

In the long run, however, disgruntled and unstable workforces matter in the long run. If a technology vendor can’t retain talent, it likely won’t be able to provide the stability that governments need. Departing employees take with them hard-earned knowledge that makes it difficult for organizations to maintain the security and reliability of technical systems and can jeopardize their continued ability to innovate.

The good news is that much can still be done to ensure productive partnerships between government and industry that deliver innovative and reliable technologies:

  • Leaders in both government and industry should recognize that what is good for workers is also good for organizations and act accordingly, ensuring a productive and safe environment that fosters engagement and helps workers produce their best work
  • Avoid over-reliance on a single supplier. The federal government could incentivize productivity and reliability by continuing to invest in innovation engines like the Defense Innovation Unit, or AFWERX, that accelerate the development of innovative technologies. Encouraging competition between existing vendors and new ones like Blue Origin and Anduril would allow the government to select from those that could deliver reliably, not be saddled with a single vendor.
  • Employers, both public and private, should continue to explore how psychological safety and other aspects of well-being drive job satisfaction, retention and team performance. Being good to workers improves organizational performance and makes employers more attractive to talented candidates.
  • Organizations would do well to better advertise ways to invest in a productive and safe workforce as well. This, after all, is good publicity for the people who want to work there.

Having proven they can build ingenious technologies, SpaceX and other companies have become critical government partners. If these partnerships are to remain sustainable, both industry and government need to better understand what makes partners trustworthy. For any organization, this means prioritizing the health, skills and needs of your workforce.

After all, devaluing or even ignoring people’s basic needs comes at a cost, not just to tech company employees, but to society as a whole.

Douglas Yeung is a senior behavioral scientist at RAND and professor of policy analysis at the Pardee RAND Graduate School.

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