Inside the Role Musk Could Play in a Presidential Cabinet

With being less than a week away from the U.S. general election determining who will be the next President of the United States, I figured now is as good of time as ever to explore one aspect of a potential Donald Trump presidency that hasn’t existed before. What would a Trump presidency look like if Elon Musk was given a cabinet-level position.

Trump has said that we wants to make Musk the “Secretary of Cost-Cutting,” and even though that’s not a real cabinet position, Trump has made cabinet positions in the pasts (I’m looking at you, Space Force).

Trump also didn’t divest from any of his business interests during his first presidency, so it’s safe to assume he wouldn’t a second time around. That means it’s also unlikely that he’d force anyone working for him to do so. That means that Elon Musk could be put into a position of running an office tasked with regulating his own businesses. That’d be a huge conflict of interest, but in 2024 it seems like people don’t care about that.

But what does that mean for the rest of the automotive industry? Tesla isn’t the only automaker in the United States, and if Musk is in any position to exert his control on the competitors, that can’t be good. Can it?

One of the first things you can expect to happen is all of the pending investigations into Musk’s businesses will go away. That whole NHTSA investigation into “Full Self Driving?” Gone. What about violating labor law by working against unionization efforts? Not without the NLRB, which will be gone. This doesn’t even begin to cover the EPA violations SpaceX is currently under investigation for or the fact SpaceX is trashing the environment on its way to Mars.

It’s likely why Musk is flouting election laws by trying to help get Trump elected. If so, he won’t have the government breathing down his neck. He’s already said that if Kamala Harris wins, he’ll likely be in jail.

While Tesla’s “Full Self Driving” software continues to improve, I don’t have a Tesla referral code in my signature so I can tell you that we all know that it’s not as safe as a human driver. There’s one disengagement for every 13 miles of driving according to independent testing from AMCI. AMCI cites development of “Autoland” functionality on aircraft that was being developed in the 1970s. There couldn’t be a failure rate worse than one in 150,000 in blind situations.

It doesn’t take a mathematician to figure out that one in 13 is far worse than one in 150,000. While each of those disengagements – failures of the system, mind you – didn’t result in death or serious injury, some have.

As an aside, I recently drove a Tesla Model 3 with “Full Self Driving” and the latest software and I can see how some people would look at it as being brilliant. When it works, it works pretty well. It’s easy to lull the driver into a false sense of security. But you have to stay diligent, because the system might fail and you need to be able to take over immediately (just like any other level 2 based driver’s assist system).

Also as an aside to the aside, what are you supposed to do with your hands when you’re using a hands-off system but you still have to pay attention and be able to grab the wheel at a moment’s notice? I digress.

Ed Niedermeyer, an industry expert on Elon Musk and author of the book Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors, explains in more detail about how the Autopilot misinformation goes off the rails.