As Musk halts ‘wasteful’ contracts, government money hasn’t stopped flowing to SpaceX
As Elon Musk attempts to uncover what he believes is fraud and excess spending in the federal bureaucracy, procurement records show his company SpaceX has received millions of dollars in government contracts since President Donald Trump took office.
Critics of Musk are pointing to the money as proof of his hypocrisy.
In Musk’s latest haul, NASA exercised an option to give SpaceX an additional $7.6 million on Monday, according to an entry in the Federal Procurement Data System. The new award is part of a contract SpaceX notched back in 2020 to support NASA’s development of a “Human Landing System (HLS) Integrated Lander.”
That initial agreement was supposed to end this month, worth up to $2.3 billion. But the estimated completion date is now December 2027. The size of the obligation ballooned to at least $4 billion and potentially as much as $4.4 billion if all options are exercised.
Details of the supplemental award were first reported by the Lever.
This latest funding follows $21 million SpaceX appears to have received on Jan. 21, the day after Trump’s inauguration.
Musk and his new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) have scrutinized spending across the federal bureaucracy, leading the Trump administration to rescind contracts with hundreds of outside vendors. SpaceX does not appear to be one of those vendors.
On Tuesday, Musk was asked in a bizarre White House press conference about his SpaceX contracts with the Department of Defense. With his son balancing on his shoulders, the tech mogul said he would investigate waste at the Pentagon and denied any conflict of interest.
“First of all, I’m not the one, you know, filing the contract,” he claimed. “It’s people at SpaceX.”
Musk reportedly has a 79% voting share in the privately held company and holds 42% of its financial equity, making him the largest shareholder.
Commenters were quick to jump on the executive’s supposed hypocrisy.
“In his Oval Office press conference, Elon Musk basically says that since he's not the one who is filing the contracts with the government for SpaceX, there's no conflict of interest,” one popular liberal account wrote on X. “What a joke.”
“So let me get this straight, he wants contracts for cancer research canceled but says let's keep contracts for his company SpaceX to do research,” asked Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) in a post that accumulated 1.2 million views. “Greedy billionaire trying to rip off the American people pretending to be altruistic is all I see.”
“Elon loves corporate welfare for himself, rugged individualism for the poor,” a Democratic congressional staffer commented.
Musk doubled down, however.
“If you see any contract where it was awarded to SpaceX and it wasn’t by far the best value for money for the taxpayer, let me know,” Musk added during the White House press conference. “Because every one of them was.”
And the SpaceX founder’s online supporters backed him up.
“One [NASA] launch costs billions. One SpaceX launch costs less than $75M,” wrote one self-professed Tesla investor on X. “The people complaining that SpaceX's gov contracts were ‘wasteful’ really have no clue what they are talking about.”
At the very least, Musk and his acolytes at DOGE don’t appear likely to deem those contracts “wasteful” any time soon.
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