By Emily Glazer and Micah Maidenberg
After spending months and more than $250 million campaigning to elect President Trump, Elon Musk made a call late last year to help roll out his plan for humanity’s path beyond Earth.
He reached his friend Jared Isaacman with a request: Would Isaacman become the head of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration? He told Isaacman, the payments entrepreneur who has flown to orbit with SpaceX and invested in the company, that they could make NASA great again and work toward their shared ambition of getting humans to Mars, according to people briefed on the conversation.
Soon after the call, Trump announced Isaacman’s appointment.
Musk, the world’s richest man and now a top adviser to the president, has extraordinary influence on budgets, personnel and technology systems across federal agencies, including the Federal Aviation Administration, which regulates commercial spaceflights at SpaceX, Musk’s rocket and satellite-internet company.
Through the new Department of Government Efficiency, Musk has cut budgets, laid off staff and ditched programs. He also has DOGE employees reviewing the operations and personnel of agencies that have investigated Musk’s companies, including the Federal Trade Commission and Environmental Protection Agency.
It is at NASA, though, where Musk is making the biggest shift in an agency’s priorities to align them with his own—both financially and personally.
He is working to recast its programs, reallocate federal spending and install loyalists to aid his decadeslong goal of sending people to Mars.
He has also worked to win backing from Trump by telling the president that getting people to Mars would shine his legacy as a “president of firsts,” according to people briefed on the conversations.
The ambition could have a potentially huge impact on SpaceX, which has emerged as the dominant space technology and operations company globally and is already one of NASA’s biggest contractors.
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