Elon Musk wants this man to be Donald Trump’s Treasury secretary
One candidate has near-constant access to the president-elect. Will that give him the edge he needs?
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Your support makes all the difference.Donald Trump’s search for someone to lead the Treasury Department continued over the weekend while one of his new close allies placed his thumb on the scale.
Elon Musk, the Twitter/X/Tesla/SpaceX CEO and top Trump booster, has been increasingly hanging around Mar-a-Lago and the president-elect himself in the days since Trump’s victory in the 2024 presidential election. Having put a considerable sum behind backing Republicans this cycle, Musk seems eager for a return on his investment — he is now publicly urging the incoming president towards one of the two men seen as finalists for the job of Treasury secretary.
On Saturday — the same day he appeared alongside the president-elect at the UFC championship at Madison Square Garden — Musk made his appeal public.
“Would be interesting to hear more people weigh in on this for @realDonaldTrump to consider feedback,” tweeted the Twitter/X CEO. “My view [for what it’s worth] is that [Scott] Bessent is a business-as-usual choice, whereas [Howard Lutnick] will actually enact change. Business-as-usual is driving America bankrupt, so we need change one way or another.”
Would be interesting to hear more people weigh in on this for @realDonaldTrump to consider feedback.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 16, 2024
My view fwiw is that Bessent is a business-as-usual choice, whereas @howardlutnick will actually enact change.
Business-as-usual is driving America bankrupt, so we need change… https://t.co/igGLZOJ8wz
Bessent and Lutnick have emerged as the two main candidates for the role as Trump has pushed out an increasingly controversial slate of nominees for other Cabinet posts in the past week. Whichever one Trump nominates will likely have a much cleaner path to confirmation than Matt Gaetz, Trump’s pick for attorney general, who is already facing vocal Republican skepticism given that he was investigated for allegedly having sex with a minor by the agency as well as the House Ethics Committee. Gaetz denies the claim.
Lutnick currently serves as chair of Trump’s White House transition team. His most notable moment in recent memory was his declaration on CNN that Robert F Kennedy Jr, the vaccine conspiracist and Covid lockdown critic, would not be Trump’s pick for head of Health and Human Services. Trump nominated Kennedy to that very post last week.
He’s also the CEO and primary owner of a securities firm, Cantor Fitzgerald, putting his net worth in the billions. Lutnick’s support of Bitcoin and the possibility of his pick has also won him over the support of Kennedy.
But that’s where the ideological lines cease making sense. MAGAworld architect Steve Bannon, newly released from prison, is backing Scott Bessent, Lutnick’s rival for the job. It’s an endorsement which pairs him with Lindsey Graham, an establishment conservative-turned-MAGA convert who still more often than not finds himself pushing Trump towards more mainstream picks.
Jason Furman, deputy director of Barack Obama’s National Economic Council, described Bessent as “well within the mainstream of past Treasury secretaries” in an interview with The Washington Post. Bessent previously worked at Soros Fund Management (SFM), George Soros’s group, before splitting off to found his own company: Key Square Group, with another SFM alum.
Bessent’s connections to Soros, seen as a boogeyman (in no small part due to antisemetic conspiracies) among some in the hyper-MAGA core of the GOP base, have worked against him, as has Lutnick’s proximity to Trump as transition chair. He was interviewed for the post on Friday, according to the Post, while Lutnick reportedly made his appeal directly to the president-elect some time ago.
Some GOP senators have already publicly fretted that Trump is gambling valuable political capital he’ll need to push legislation through Congress — even under unified Republican control — to get wobbly picks like Gaetz and his pick for director of national intelligence (DNI), Tulsi Gabbard, across the finish line with minimal party defections.
“I have concerns that he can’t get across the finish line, and we’re going to spend a lot of political capital,” a Republican senator, Kevin Cramer of North Dakota, told reporters on the Hill on Thursday. “A lot of people will spend a lot of political capital on something that, [and] even if they got done, you’d have to wonder if it was worth it.”
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