Musk Returns to Trump Orbit, Tapped to Help Pentagon Plan Future Weapons

Project Meridian

Elon Musk is heading back into government work, this time at the Pentagon. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth announced Wednesday that Musk will help lead a new initiative called Project Meridian, built to study how the United States should fight future wars, according to the Daily Wire.

Musk won't be doing it alone. Anduril Industries founder Palmer Luckey and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich are leading the study with him.

"We are leveraging a unique source of American advantage, one our adversaries do not have: our innovators, our senior leaders and our technologists, big thinkers and doers who will forecast the creative solution for tomorrow's conflicts," Hegseth said, per the Daily Wire.

Hegseth said the group's job is "discovering, developing and fielding the weapons and systems that our children and our grandchildren will need in their lifetimes."

Musk has been saying for years that the next wars will be won in the air with machines, not pilots. In 2024 he predicted the future of combat would be "all about drones and hypersonic missiles," adding that "fighter jets piloted by humans will be destroyed very quickly."

Back in Trump's Good Graces

This isn't Musk's first tour through the Trump administration. He previously ran the Department of Government Efficiency, DOGE, before leaving the White House and publicly feuding with President Trump.

The two have clearly patched things up. They sat next to each other at a memorial service for Turning Point USA CEO Charlie Kirk, and Trump has been openly complimentary since.

"I've always liked Elon," Trump said, according to the Daily Wire. "He had a bad spell, he had a bad period, he had a bad moment. But I like Elon, and I suspect I'll always like him."

Musk and other tech executives also met with Trump at the White House this week to talk artificial intelligence. That same day, Trump signed an executive order directing federal agencies to use the terms "Super Intelligence" and "SI" instead of "Artificial Intelligence" and "AI." At an event launching the government's new America.gov chatbot site, Trump thanked Musk directly: "I also have to thank the man who initially envisioned the transformation of government through technology and brought us the talent to get the job done, and that's Elon Musk."

The Conflict-of-Interest Question Nobody's Answered Yet

Here's the obvious concern, and it's a fair one. Musk's companies, SpaceX and Starlink, already hold billions of dollars in Pentagon contracts. Putting him in a seat helping shape what "tomorrow's weapons" look like raises a real question about whether he's advising the government or steering business toward himself.

That's a legitimate worry for anyone who cares about taxpayer money going to the best bidder, not the best-connected one. No investigation has been announced, no ethics complaint has been filed, and nothing in Hegseth's announcement or the reporting around it lays out recusal rules or conflict-of-interest safeguards for Project Meridian. Whether those exist, and whether they're enforced, is an open question the Pentagon hasn't addressed publicly.

A Fortune That Swings Like a Roller Coaster

While Musk steps back into Washington, his net worth has been doing something wild. SpaceX's IPO raised $75 billion in cash and set an initial valuation of $1.77 trillion, the largest IPO ever, according to the Daily Economy, blowing past Saudi Aramco's $29.4 billion raise and tripling SK Hynix's $26.5 billion.

At SpaceX's June 26 peak of $225 a share, Musk's roughly 42 percent stake, about five billion shares, pushed his net worth past $1.4 trillion, briefly making him the world's first paper trillionaire, the Daily Economy reported. By July 23, the share price had fallen to roughly $118, cutting that stake's value to about $590 billion. A weak Tesla earnings report around the same time knocked the stock down nearly 57 points, wiping out another $25 billion to $35 billion on paper.

The Daily Economy makes an important point here: Musk's wealth is almost entirely unrealized paper value, not cash in a bank account. Only 4 to 5 percent of SpaceX shares actually trade publicly, so a handful of transactions at a given price gets multiplied across billions of untraded shares to produce headline net-worth numbers. Dump even a fraction more of those shares onto the market and the price would likely fall further. Musk is still, by a wide margin, the richest person alive. He just isn't nearly as rich on paper as he was in late June.

What's unresolved is how Project Meridian will actually operate: what access Musk, Luckey, and Gingrich will have to classified program details, how long the study runs, and whether the Pentagon will publish any findings or dollar figures tied to recommendations that could benefit companies the three men are connected to.