The New York Times recently reported that tech billionaire Elon Musk had a secret meeting earlier this week with Iran's Ambassador to the United Nations Amir Saeid Iravani to discuss ways to reduce tensions between the US and Iran.
Mr. Trump and Mr. Musk at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania in October.
Photo: AFP
If confirmed, the information would be a sign of Elon Musk's large role in the incoming Trump administration.
Musk met Trump early in his first term, but the relationship only blossomed into a close alliance in the final months of the campaign. The world’s richest man donated more than $119 million to a pro-Trump political action committee and announced his support for the Republican candidate after he was shot in Pennsylvania in July. Since then, Musk has appeared regularly at Trump events.
US media said that Mr. Musk has become the most powerful person in Mr. Trump's upcoming "team", present at the president-elect's Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida "almost every day" recently. "Elon is not coming home. I can't get rid of him, at least until I don't like him anymore," Mr. Trump joked during a meeting with Republican congressmen in the House of Representatives on November 13. According to Axios, billionaire Musk is one of the few confidants attending the sessions to select members of Mr. Trump's upcoming administration.
Mr. Musk has been tapped by Mr. Trump to lead the Office of Government Efficiency (DOGE), an unofficial agency charged with reforming government bureaucracy. It is unclear how the agency will operate, but Mr. Musk is confident that it can save $2 trillion, nearly a third of the federal government’s annual spending. He also wants to reduce the number of federal agencies from more than 400 to 99.
Observers say Musk’s meeting with the Iranian ambassador (if true) suggests the Trump administration is preparing to go beyond traditional diplomacy. That means Trump doesn’t need real diplomats or government officials to communicate with allies and adversaries like Iran, Russia, or China. Instead, he can rely on confidants like Musk to act as unofficial channels of communication.
In addition to the meeting with the Iranian ambassador, Mr. Musk is also said to have had multiple contacts with Russian President Vladimir Putin since 2022 as well as other Russian officials. Mr. Musk and the Kremlin have denied this information, but Democratic senators recently asked the Department of Defense and the Department of Justice to investigate on national security grounds, as the billionaire's SpaceX Company participates in many important projects of the Pentagon and NASA, according to Reuters.
On the other hand, CNBC quoted experts as saying that there has been much curiosity in China in recent months about whether Mr. Musk, who has large business interests in China, could be a "version" of the late US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to mediate a deal to reduce tensions between the two countries. However, there are also opinions that the above statement is "exaggerated".
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