Pentagon Set Up Briefing for Musk on Potential War With China
The access would be a major expansion of Elon Musk’s government role and
highlight his conflicts of interest.
Eric SchmittEric LiptonJulian E. BarnesRyan MacMaggie Haberman
By Eric SchmittEric LiptonJulian E. BarnesRyan Mac and Maggie Haberman
March 20, 2025
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The Pentagon was scheduled on Friday to brief Elon Musk on the U.S. military’s
plan for any war that might break out with China, two U.S. officials said on
Thursday.
Another official said the briefing would be China focused, without providing
additional details. A fourth official confirmed Mr. Musk was to be at the
Pentagon on Friday, but offered no details.
Hours after news of the planned meeting was published by The New York
Times, Pentagon officials and President Trump denied that the session would
be about military plans involving China. “China will not even be mentioned or
discussed,” Mr. Trump said in a late-night social media post.
It was not clear if the briefing for Mr. Musk would go ahead as originally
planned. But providing Mr. Musk access to some of the nation’s most closely
guarded military secrets would be a dramatic expansion of his already
extensive role as an adviser to Mr. Trump and leader of his effort to slash
spending and purge the government of people and policies they oppose.
It would also bring into sharp relief the questions about Mr. Musk’s conflicts of
interest as he ranges widely across the federal bureaucracy while continuing to
run businesses that are major government contractors. In this case, Mr. Musk,
the billionaire chief executive of both SpaceX and Tesla, is a leading supplier to
the Pentagon and has extensive financial interests in China.
Pentagon war plans, known in military jargon as O-plans or operational plans,
are among the military’s most closely guarded secrets. If a foreign country were
to learn how the United States planned to fight a war against them, it could
reinforce its defenses and address its weaknesses, making the plans far less
likely to succeed.
The top-secret briefing that exists for the China war plan has about 20 to 30
slides that lay out how the United States would fight such a conflict. It covers
the plan beginning with the indications and warning of a threat from China to
various options on what Chinese targets to hit, over what time period, that
would be presented to Mr. Trump for decisions, according to officials with
knowledge of the plan.
A White House spokesman did not respond to an email seeking comment
about the purpose of the visit, how it came about, whether Mr. Trump was
aware of it, and whether the visit raises questions of conflicts of interest. The
White House has not said whether Mr. Trump signed a conflicts of interest
waiver for Mr. Musk.
The chief Pentagon spokesman, Sean Parnell, initially did not respond to a
similar email seeking comment about why Mr. Musk was to receive a briefing on
the China war plan. Soon after The Times published this article on Thursday
evening, Mr. Parnell gave a short statement: “The Defense Department is
excited to welcome Elon Musk to the Pentagon on Friday. He was invited by
Secretary Hegseth and is just visiting.”
About an hour later, Mr. Parnell posted a message on his X account: “This is
100% Fake News. Just brazenly & maliciously wrong. Elon Musk is a patriot. We
are proud to have him at the Pentagon.”
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth also commented on X late on Thursday,
saying: “This is NOT a meeting about ‘top secret China war plans.’ It’s an
informal meeting about innovation, efficiencies & smarter production. Gonna be
great!”
Roughly 30 minutes after that social media post, The Wall Street Journal
confirmed that Mr. Musk had been scheduled to be briefed on the war planning
for China.
Whatever the meeting will now be about, the planning reflected the
extraordinary dual role played by Mr. Musk, who is both the world’s wealthiest
man and has been given broad authority by Mr. Trump.
Mr. Musk has a security clearance, and Mr. Hegseth can determine who has a
need to know about the plan.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has already received part of the China war
plan and is expected to present the information to Mr. Musk alongside top U.S.
government and military officials.Credit...Kenny Holston/The New York Times
Mr. Hegseth; Adm. Christopher W. Grady, the acting chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff; and Adm. Samuel J. Paparo, the head of the military’s Indo-
Pacific Command, were set to present Mr. Musk with details on the U.S. plan to
counter China in the event of military conflict between the two countries, the
officials said.
The meeting had been set to be held not in Mr. Hegseth’s office — where an
informal discussion about innovation would most likely take place — but in the
Tank, a secure conference room in the Pentagon, typically used for high-level
meetings of members of the Joint Chiefs, their senior staff and visiting
combatant commanders.
Operational plans for major contingencies, like a war with China, are extremely
difficult for people without extensive military planning experience to
understand. The technical nature is why presidents are typically presented with
the broad contours of a plan, rather than the actual details of documents. How
many details Mr. Musk had wanted or expected to hear was unclear.
Mr. Hegseth received part of the China war plan briefing last week and another
part on Wednesday, according to officials familiar with the plan.
It was unclear what the impetus was for providing Mr. Musk such a sensitive
briefing. He is not in the military chain of command, nor is he an official adviser
to Mr. Trump on military matters involving China.
But there is a possible reason Mr. Musk might have needed to know aspects of
the war plan. If Mr. Musk and his team of cost cutters from the Department of
Government Efficiency, or DOGE, want to trim the Pentagon budget in a
responsible way, they may need to know what weapons systems the Pentagon
plans to use in a fight with China.
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Take aircraft carriers, for example. Cutting back on future aircraft carriers would
save billions of dollars, money that could be spent on drones or other
weaponry. But if the U.S. war strategy relies on using aircraft carriers in
innovative ways that would surprise China, mothballing existing ships or
stopping production on future ships could cripple that plan.
Planning for a war with China has dominated Pentagon thinking for decades,
well before a possible confrontation with Beijing became more conventional
wisdom on Capitol Hill. The United States has built its Air Forces, Navy and
Space Forces — and even more recently its Marines and Army forces — with a
possible fight against China in mind.
Critics have said the military has invested too much in big expensive systems
like fighter jets or aircraft carriers and too little in midrange drones and coastal
defenses. But for Mr. Musk to evaluate how to reorient Pentagon spending, he
would want to know what the military intends to use and for what purpose.
Mr. Musk has already called for the Pentagon to stop buying certain high-
priced items like F-35 fighter jets, manufactured by one of his space-launch
competitors, Lockheed Martin, in a program that costs the Pentagon more than
$12 billion a year.
Mr. Musk’s company SpaceX has become so valuable to the Pentagon that the
Chinese government has suggested that it might target SpaceX assets if a war
with China were to break out.Credit...Valerie Plesch for The New York Times
Yet Mr. Musk’s extensive business interests make any access to strategic
secrets about China a serious problem in the view of ethics experts. Officials
have said revisions to the war plans against China have focused on upgrading
the plans for defending against space warfare. China has developed a suite of
weapons that can attack U.S. satellites.
Mr. Musk’s constellations of low-earth orbit Starlink satellites, which provide
data and communications services from space, are considered more resilient
than traditional satellites. But he could have an interest in learning about
whether or not the United States could defend his satellites in a war with China.
Participating in a classified briefing on the China threat with some of the most
senior Pentagon and U.S. military officials would be a tremendously valuable
opportunity for any defense contractor seeking to sell services to the military.
Mr. Musk could gain insight into new tools that the Pentagon might need and
that SpaceX, where he remains the chief executive, could sell.
Contractors working on relevant Pentagon projects generally do have access to
certain limited war planning documents, but only once war plans are approved,
said Todd Harrison, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where
he focuses on defense strategy. Individual executives rarely if ever get exclusive
access to top Pentagon officials for such a sensitive briefing, Mr. Harrison said.
“Musk at a war-planning briefing?” he said. “Giving the CEO of one defense
company unique access seems like this could be grounds for a contract protest
and is a real conflict of interest.”
Mr. Musk’s SpaceX is already being paid billions of dollars by the Pentagon and
federal spy agencies to help the United States build new military satellite
networks to try to confront rising military threats from China. SpaceX launches
most of these military satellites for the Pentagon on its Falcon 9 rockets, which
take off from launchpads SpaceX has set up at military bases in Florida and
California.
The company separately has been paid hundreds of millions of dollars by the
Pentagon that now relies heavily on SpaceX’s Starlink satellite communications
network for military personnel to transmit data worldwide.
In 2024, SpaceX was granted about $1.6 billion in Air Force contracts. That
does not include classified spending with SpaceX by the National
Reconnaissance Office, which has hired the company to build it a new
constellation of low-earth orbit satellites to spy on China, Russia and other
threats.
Mr. Trump has already proposed that the United States build a new system the
military is calling Golden Dome, a space-based missile defense system that
recalls what President Ronald Reagan tried to deliver. (The so-called Star Wars
system Mr. Reagan had in mind was never fully developed.)
Perceived missile threats from China — be it nuclear weapons or hypersonic
missiles or cruise missiles — are a major factor that led Mr. Trump to sign an
executive order recently instructing the Pentagon to start work on Golden
Dome.
The site of SpaceX Starbase in Boca Chica, Texas. The Pentagon briefing could
help Elon Musk gain insight into new tools that the Pentagon might need and
that SpaceX, where he remains the chief executive, could sell.Credit...Callaghan
O'Hare for The New York Times
Even starting to plan and build the first components of the system will cost tens
of billions of dollars, according to Pentagon officials, and most likely create
large business opportunities for SpaceX, which already provides rocket
launches, satellite structures, and space-based data communications systems,
all of which will be required for Golden Dome.
Separately, Mr. Musk has been the focus of an investigation by the Pentagon’s
inspector general over questions about his compliance with his top-secret
security clearance.
The investigations started last year after some SpaceX employees complained
to government agencies that Mr. Musk and others at SpaceX were not properly
reporting contacts or conversations with foreign leaders.
Air Force officials, before the end of the Biden administration, started their own
review, after Senate Democrats asked questions about Mr. Musk and asserted
that he was not complying with security clearance requirements.
The Air Force, in fact, had denied a request by Mr. Musk for an even higher level
of security clearance, known as Special Access Program, which is reserved for
extremely sensitive classified programs, citing potential security risks
associated with the billionaire.
In fact, SpaceX has become so valuable to the Pentagon that the Chinese
government has said it considers the company to be an extension of the U.S.
military.
“Starlink Militarization and Its Impact on Global Strategic Stability” was the
headline of one publication released last year from China’s National University
of Defense Technology, according to a translation of the paper prepared by the
Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Mr. Musk and Tesla, an electric vehicle company he controls, are heavily reliant
on China, which houses one of the auto maker’s flagship factories in Shanghai.
Unveiled in 2019, the state-of-the-art facility was built with special permission
from the Chinese government, and now accounts for more than half of Tesla’s
global deliveries. Last year, the company said in financial filings that it had a
$2.8 billion loan agreement with lenders in China for production expenditures.
In public, Mr. Musk has avoided criticizing Beijing and signaled his willingness
to work with the Chinese Communist Party. In 2022, he wrote a column for the
magazine of the Cyberspace Administration of China, the country’s censorship
agency, trumpeting his companies and their missions of improving humanity.
That same year, the billionaire told The Financial Times that China should be
given some control over Taiwan by making a “special administrative zone for
Taiwan that is reasonably palatable,” an assertion that angered politicians of the
independent island. In that same interview, he also noted that Beijing sought
assurances that he would not sell Starlink in China.
The following year at a tech conference, Mr. Musk called the democratic island
“an integral part of China that is arbitrarily not part of China,” and compared the
Taiwan-China situation to Hawaii and the United States.
On X, the social platform he owns, Mr. Musk has long used his account to
praise China. He has said the country is “by far” the world leader in electric
vehicles and solar power, and has commended its space program for being “far
more advanced than people realize.” He has encouraged more people to visit
the country, and posited openly about an “inevitable” Russia-China alliance.
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