The U.S. Department of Defense is scheduled on Friday to briefly explain Elon Musk about the US military's plans for a war with China, two U.S. officials said Thursday.
Another source said the briefing would focus on China without providing additional details. A fourth official confirmed that Musk was in the Pentagon on Friday, but did not provide details.
Musk's access to some of the country's closest military secrets will be his already extensive role as an advisor to President Trump, and his dramatic expansion as a leader in efforts to cut and clean up those they oppose and policies.
It also sharply saves Musk's questions about conflicts of interest as he is widely present in federal officials while continuing to run the leading government contractor. In this case, Musk, the billionaire chief executive of both SpaceX and Tesla, is a major supplier of the Pentagon, bringing extensive economic benefits in China.
Known in military jargon as O-Plans or operational plans, the Pentagon War Plan is one of the military's most closely guarded secrets. If foreign countries learn how the US planned to fight wars against them, it can strengthen defenses and address their weaknesses, and there is a much less chance of successful planning.
The finest briefings of the Chinese War Plans have around 20-30 slides explaining how the US will fight such conflicts. According to officials with knowledge of the plan, it covers the plans that begin with a variety of options from China, different options regarding China's targets, and threats and warnings about being presented to Trump for decisions over the period.
A White House spokesman did not respond to an email seeking comment on the purpose of the visit, how it did, whether Trump knew it, and whether the visit would raise a conflict of interest issue. The White House has not said whether Trump has signed a waiver of Musk's conflict of interest. A Pentagon spokesman did not respond to similar emails.
The conference reflects the extraordinary dual role played by Musk, the richest man in the world and given broad authority by Trump.
Musk has security clearance and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegses can decide who needs to know about the plan. But the choice to share many technical details with Musk is another matter.
Mr. Hegses. Vice-General Christopher W. Grady, acting chairman of Co-Staff. Lt. Gen. Samuel J. Papalo, the military's Indo-Pacific commander, will present Musk with details on the US plan to counter China in the event of a military conflict between the two countries, officials said.
Operational planning for major contingencies such as the war with China is extremely difficult for those who cannot understand a wide range of military plans. The technical nature is why the president is usually presented with a broad outline of the plan rather than the actual details of the document. The details that Musk needs to hear or need to hear are unknown.
Hegses received a briefing and another part of the Chinese War Planning Program last week on Wednesday, according to officials familiar with the plan.
It was unclear what the driving force would be to provide Musk with such a delicate briefing. He is not a cycle of military orders, nor is Trump's official adviser on military issues involving China.
But there is a reason why Musk may need to know about the war plan. If Musk and his government's efficiency, or the Doge cost-cutter team want to cut the Pentagon's budget in a responsible way, they may need to know what weapons systems the Pentagon is planning to use in the fight against China.
For example, consider an aircraft carrier. Cutting down on future aircraft carriers will save billions of dollars, money that can be spent on drones and other weapons. However, if the US strategy relies on using aircraft carriers in innovative ways that will surprise China, avoiding existing vessels or halting production on future vessels could potentially crippling their plans.
Planning for a war with China has dominated Pentagon thinking for decades before the possibility of conflict with Beijing became more common wisdom in Capitol Hill. With the fight against China in mind, the US built the Air Force, Navy, Space Force and more recently the Marines and Army.
Critics say the military has invested too much in big, expensive systems, such as fighter jets and aircraft carriers, too little for mid-range drones and coastal defense. But to assess how Musk reorients Pentagon spending, he would want to know what the military intends to use and what purposes it intends for.
Musk has already asked the Pentagon to stop purchasing certain expensive items, such as the F-35 Fighter Jet, which was manufactured under a program that costs more than $12 billion a year by Lockheed Martin, one of the space launch competitors.
But Musk's broad business interests make access to strategic secrets about China a serious issue in the views of ethics experts. Authorities said the revision of the war plan against China focuses on upgrading its defense plan against the war on the worlds. China has developed weapons that can attack US satellites.
Musk's constellations of Starlink satellites in low Earth orbit, providing broadband data and communication services from space, are considered to be more resilient than traditional satellites. However, he may be interested in learning whether the US can defend his satellite in the war with China.
Participating in a classified briefing on China's threat, the threat with the most senior Pentagon and some of the US military officials will be an invaluable opportunity for defense contractors seeking to sell services to the military.
Musk has gained the new tools the Pentagon may need and insights that SpaceX, where he remains the CEO, can sell.
Contractors working on related Pentagon projects generally have access to certain limited war planning documents, but said Todd Harrison, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, who focuses on defense strategies only after war planning is approved. Harrison said individual executives rarely exist when exclusive access to top Pentagon staff is available for such briefings.
“Musk at the war planning briefing?” he said. “Providing unique access to CEOs of one defense company seems to be a real conflict of interest, which could be the basis for contract protests.”
Musk's SpaceX has already been paid billions of dollars from the Pentagon and federal spy agencies to help the US build new military satellite networks to combat rising military threats from China. SpaceX will launch most of these military satellites in the pentagonal shapes of the Falcon 9 Rockets. This will take off from the LaunchPads SpaceX has installed at military bases in Florida and California.
The company is paid hundreds of millions of dollars separately from the Pentagon, and is currently sending data for servicemen who rely on SpaceX's Starlink Satellite Communications Network to send data around the world.
In 2024, SpaceX was granted with an air force contract of approximately $1.6 billion. This does not include classification expenditures by the National Reconnaissance Agency through SpaceX. It hired the company to build new constellations for low-Earth orbit satellites to spy on threats from China, Russia and other countries.
Trump has already proposed to build a new system that the United States calls the Golden Dome, a space-based missile defense system that reminds us of what President Ronald Reagan was trying to deliver. (The so-called Star Wars system that Reagan had in mind was never fully developed.)
The threat of missiles from China, whether nuclear weapons, hypersensitivity missiles or cruise missiles, is the key factor that led Trump to sign an executive order recently instructing the Pentagon to begin work on the Golden Dome.
According to Pentagon officials, starting to plan and build the first components of the system will cost tens of millions of dollars, and will likely create a massive business opportunity for SpaceX. SpaceX already offers rocket launches, satellite structures, and space-based data communication systems. All of these are required at the Golden Dome.
Separately, Musk has been the focus of an investigation by the Pentagon Inspector General on questions about his compliance with the highest security clearance.
The investigation began last year after SpaceX employees complained to government agencies that Musk and other SpaceX employees were not properly reporting contact information and conversations with foreign leaders.
Air Force officials began their own review before the Biden administration ended after Senate Democrats questioned Musk and claimed they were not complying with security clearance requirements.
In fact, the Air Force had rejected a request for even higher levels of security clearance, known as a special access program reserved for highly sensitive classification programs, citing potential security risks associated with billionaires.
In fact, SpaceX has become so valuable to pentagons that the Chinese government says it considers the company an extension of the US military.
“Starlink's militarization and its impact on global strategic stability” was the headline of one publication published last year by China's National University of Defense Technology, according to a translation of a paper produced by the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Musk and Tesla, the electric car companies he manages, rely heavily on China, which houses one of the carmaker's flagship factories in Shanghai. The cutting-edge facility, unveiled in 2019, was built with special permission from the Chinese government and now accounts for more than half of Tesla's global delivery. Last year, the company said in its financial application it had a $2.8 billion loan agreement with a Chinese lender for production costs.
In public, Musk has shown his willingness to shun Beijing's criticism and work with the Chinese Communist Party. In 2022 he wrote a column to trumpet the mission of improving humanity to China's cyberspace management magazine, the national censorship agency, and his company.
That same year, the billionaire told the Financial Times that China should have some control over Taiwan by creating a “special administrative area of Taiwan that is reasonably tasty,” an allegation that angered independent island politicians. In the same interview, he also noted that he assured Beijing that he would not sell Starlinks in China.
The following year, at the Technology Conference, Musk called the Democratic Island a “essential part of China that is not part of China,” comparing the situation in Taiwan and China with Hawaii and the United States.
On his social platform X, Musk has long used his account to praise China. He said the country is a global leader in electric vehicles and solar power, and praised the space program for “a lot more progress than people realize.” He encouraged more people to visit the country, and made open assumptions about the “inevitable” Russian-China alliance.
Aaron Kessler contributed the report.
