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Kash Patel is set to become the latest of President Donald Trump‘s unfit and unqualified loyalists confirmed for a leadership role in Washington, with Senate Republicans ready and willing to install the QAnon promoter and 2020 election denier as the next director of the FBI. Once he becomes head of the powerful law enforcement agency, Patel is sure to go after Trump’s personal enemies, but he may have trouble targeting one of his own: tech oligarch and tightly embedded Trump whisperer Elon Musk.
During the Biden administration, Patel — a former intelligence and Defense Department official under Trump, who had considered elevating him to the top of the FBI or CIA in the closing days of his first term only to be dissuaded by Cabinet members — made plenty of media appearances and hosted a podcast, Kash’s Corner. (The show aired on EpochTV, part of the far-right Epoch Media Group, which is known to amplify conspiracy theories and misinformation.) In the course of various interviews and conversations, Patel repeatedly criticized Musk, labeling him a monopolist, accusing him of mass data collection, advocating for more aggressive government oversight of his companies, and arguing that his wealth came from federal contracts, i.e., taxpayer dollars.
“He is literally launching this thing called satlink, which almost no one knows about, but he’s been building for five years, which is free Wi-Fi for the world,” Patel said on Greg Gutfeld’s Fox News show in December 2021, referring to Starlink, the telecom subsidiary of Musk’s SpaceX. He explained, “I mean, we’re all paying for it, this is why he’s so rich,” going on to call the billionaire the “biggest” contractor for the Department of Defense. (While Musk is not quite the largest Pentagon contractor, SpaceX does have some $22 billion in government contracts.) Patel added, “I’ll never get hired from him now.”
The amount of federal funds channeled to Musk’s corporate empire is under renewed scrutiny as his so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) slashes away at the administrative state and directs the firings of tens of thousands of federal workers in what it claims is a campaign to reduce wasteful spending. Musk’s highly public role in directing and championing the cuts has also raised questions about his glaring conflicts of interest, based on his lucrative contracts, but Musk, Trump, and other White House officials have casually brushed aside concerns about transparency and corruption.
In 2022, Patel took issue with Musk’s $44 billion takeover of Twitter (now X), asserting on Kash’s Corner that the CEO had too much control over Americans’ private data and could even make it available to the Chinese Communist Party. He also took another shot at Musk’s government contracts. “He’s already got Tesla, he’s already got the SpaceX program and the government DOD contracts, which I believe to be the largest portion of his income,” Patel said. “And now he’ll have Twitter. So what scares me is, you want to talk about a monopoly, he is the ultimate monopoly.”
“Is he just going to buy everything up and then become one ginormous trust, for lack of a better word, a monopoly, which is supposedly illegal under our law, under antitrust laws?” Patel wondered. “And then what’s he going to do with all the data? That’s my concern: the data collection.” He speculated, “What do you do with everyone’s personal information? Do you allow the [Chinese Communist Party] to have backdoors like other companies, like TikTok, have done in the past, and sell Americans’ data or provide Americans’ data directly to the CCP for future use against Americans and American interest?”
That episode of Kash’s Corner found Patel urging lawmakers to take a stronger look at Musk’s access to Americans’ personal information. “I think Congress is going to have a lot of oversight to do,” he said before expressing skepticism that Musk was really committed to turning Twitter into a “free speech platform free of censorship.”
Patel was especially livid regarding the “Twitter Files,” a dud exposé series from several journalists with whom Musk shared internal company documents that supposedly showed how Democrats in government had ordered the company to censor the Hunter Biden laptop story in 2020. The materials included no evidence of this, and Patel was soon convinced that Musk was actually in on the alleged “coverup” of the involvement of the FBI and Justice Department in “rigging” the 2020 election by suppressing the story. “I’ve been blasting Elon, and it’s fine, I don’t really care,” Patel said in an appearance at Turning Point USA’s America Fest convention in December 2022. “I don’t need him as a friend. But this partial release of documents is almost a version of censorship itself.” That same month, he went on the podcast War Room with Steve Bannon, by far the most outspoken Musk hater in MAGA world, and accused Twitter’s new owner of running a “disinformation” operation by withholding company files from the public.
If Patel has lately made an effort to play nice with Musk, the most influential person in Trump’s orbit over the past several months, it hasn’t been all that visible: The nominee for FBI director isn’t posting in support of Musk or DOGE on X. Musk, however, earlier this month endorsed Patel to lead the bureau, sharing an X post that claimed his confirmation would cause many agents to quit. He wrote: “Confirm Kash now.”
With Patel expected to oversee a purge of FBI employees seen as insufficiently loyal to Trump or involved in Capitol riot prosecutions — which may already be underway — he and Musk are likely to find themselves on the same page despite any past differences. Patel has suggested that the Jan. 6 insurrection was planned by federal agents, while Musk has embraced false narratives about Trump supporters remaining peaceful as they stormed the building to halt the certification of Biden’s 2020 election victory, and is pushing for mass layoffs across federal agencies. In some cases, the Trump administration has scrambled to rehire employees deemed essential only once they were dismissed.
But outside a shared crusade against the anti-Trump “deep state,” points of friction between Patel and Musk could certainly persist. We’re just a month into the second MAGA regime, and the schisms should only multiply from here.
