The White House may condemn Musk, but the government is addicted to him

These are just the latest examples of why the federal government has no viable way to break up with Musk, at least as long as the United States decides to pursue space exploration and deter its biggest superpower rivals. It could expose him and declare that all Americans must reject his views. But the country needs him, or at least his rockets and satellites, more than ever.

And the White House and the Pentagon both know it.

Rarely has the US government been so dependent on the technology of a single, albeit petulant, technologist with views that it has declared so publicly abhorrent. And yet, according to government officials, they have no choice — and won’t be for a while. Because there are few viable alternatives at the moment.

It’s an unusual situation. If a top executive of one of the traditional publicly traded defense companies – Raytheon, Boeing or Lockheed Martin – had embraced an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory as Musk did, there would be pressure from both shareholders and customers to resign. Advertisers like IBM and Apple and Warner Bros. Discovery have announced in recent days that they will stop doing business on X, formerly known as Twitter. Mr. Musk, instead of apologizing, has threatened lawsuits.

But SpaceX is privately owned and fully controlled by Mr. Musk. (Tesla, its electric vehicle company, is publicly traded.) And so far, the Pentagon has remained silent, while the White House has been outspoken.

“It would be good to have alternatives, and the US government has tried to develop some,” Walter Isaacson, Musk’s biographer, said in an interview on Sunday. “But no other company,” he said, including United Launch Alliance, a Boeing and Lockheed Martin venture, “has been able to make reusable rockets, or put astronauts in orbit, or some of these heavy satellites into high Earth orbit. ”