Since January 2025, more than three dozen employees and associates of Musk and fellow tech titans Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen and Palmer Luckey have been tapped for roles at federal agencies critical to their businesses, a Wall Street Journal analysis found. The roles put them in departments that oversee, regulate and award business to the four men’s companies, according to personnel appointments, lawsuits, ethics disclosures and contract data, creating a web of potential conflicts that ethics experts call unprecedented.

The group includes current and former employees as well as lawyers, investors and financial advisers of the tech executives. They make up most of the identified people working for the Department of Government Efficiency, the powerful cost-cutting task force created to streamline federal bureaucracy… Others have been appointed to key roles across the government.

Companies founded, owned or invested in by Musk, Thiel, Andreessen and Luckey have won more than a dozen federal contracts totaling about $6 billion since President Trump’s inauguration, and are pursuing billions more… Their business interests are often intertwined: Musk’s SpaceX was backed by Thiel’s Founders Fund and Andreessen’s a16z; both venture funds also backed Anduril Industries, a defense-tech startup co-founded by Luckey.

Excerpt from Shane Shifflett et al., Silicon Valley’s New Hold on Washington, WSJ, May, 16, 2025