Welcome to the Trump family, Uncle Elon. Now… what do you actually want?

The answer it seems is Mars. When Musk was setting up SpaceX back in 2001, he told the founding team his dream was to ‘send mice’ there

Kai Trump, the president-elect’s granddaughter, posted a photograph inevitably on X, posing with Elon Musk. “Elon achieving uncle status,” wrote Kai.
Musk, the world’s richest man, has not only delivered Donald Trump the presidency, he has become family. 
And on Tuesday night the president-elect appointed Mr Musk as the joint head of a new Department of Government Efficiency.
The big question is what does Musk want in return? The answer it seems is Mars. The planet. The giant rock, half the size of earth, and 140million miles from the White House.
When Musk was setting up SpaceX back in 2001, he told the founding team his dream was to “send mice to Mars”. His ambition has intensified since then.
Now he wants to colonise the planet. The Trump presidency may just help him to do that.
One Musk insider told The Telegraph: “Elon’s sole goal in life is to establish a colony on Mars and if you have the testicles of the US government in your hand, which he does, then you are in a much better position to make that happen.”
Musk, 53, has spent at least $119million on the super PAC he set up to get Trump elected.
In the election’s aftermath, his wealth has swelled by $70billion to $320billion with Tesla shares soaring 39 per cent on a Trump victory.
Tesla’s market capitalisation has gone past the $1trillion mark.
On election night, he had pride of place at Trump’s side in his home in Mar-a-Lago.
Musk’s son X Æ A-Xii – thankfully known as X for short – was with him on election night and there again five days later when Kai Trump, 17, daughter of Donald Jr, posted a photo of the three of them on the Palm Beach golf course her grandfather owns.
Elon achieving uncle status 😂 pic.twitter.com/vufSffziZN
“Elon joins the family,” said one supporter on X, the social media site owned by Musk. (To avoid confusion nobody posted on his son X’s head.)
Musk has been in and out of Mar-a-Lago since the election, attending meetings where senior Cabinet picks are being made while using X to push for his choice for Senate leader (Rick Scott).
Trump handed Musk the phone while on a call to the Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky and was in the room when he phoned Vladimir Putin (although Trump’s team deny that call took place).
Axios, the political website, has reported how Trump is “drinking in” the “torrent of ideas from Musk”.
There are potential major benefits of a Trump presidency to Musk. Insiders suggest he had a “visceral dislike” of Joe Biden.
A series of investigations had been launched against Musk’s companies in the Biden era and Musk will hope bringing an end to Democrat rule will help shut those down.
The US Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating whether Musk violated securities laws in early 2022 when he started accumulating Twitter stock before making an outright bid for the company.
The Biden administration was also intent on cracking down on misinformation online, leading to a flurry of legal cases such as over false Covid-19 and 2020 election claims being posted on social media.
There has also been a looming threat of an inquiry into anti-trust breaches by SpaceX which operates Starlink, which now operates 7,000 small satellites.
Musk’s job inside the Trump government will be to preside over a dramatic reduction in federal spending, knocking as much as $2 trillion off the federal budget.
Musk may not formally take any official role given that could force him to step back from his own companies for obvious, conflict of interest reasons. Insiders speculate that some of the money saved – the education department is due to be scrapped for example – could be funnelled into the Mars mission.
Friends of Musk say nothing is out of bounds. He is, they point out, an “out of the box” thinker whose vision is unlimited. Even the FBI, said one source, could fall foul of Musk’s swingeing cuts.
“Don’t be surprised if the FBI disappears. Don’t be shocked,” warned the source.
People who know Musk say his lifelong dream – call it an obsession – has been about getting man to Mars. He wears his cause proudly.
He sported a t-shirt proclaiming “Occupy Mars” when he made a surprise appearance at the huge rally at Butler, Pennsylvania, when Trump returned there months after being shot.
Jim Cantrell, a member of the founding team that launched Space X, recalled their first meeting more than two decades ago, telling the Telegraph: “When he came to me in 2001, it was all about getting to Mars. I don’t think that has changed. I will tell you that is what he wants before anything else.
“He wanted to send mice to Mars. That’s what he was looking for. He thought humanity wasn’t inspired to go to Mars. He wanted to get that inspiration going and this was his way of doing that.”
The pair decided to buy Russian rockets to get the mice to Mars but the project foundered when the Russians refused to sell.
That’s when Musk decided to build his own rockets and launch Space X. “The rest is history,” says Mr Cantrell, who has since founded the company Phantom Space Corporation, building rockets of his own.
“This is not messianic. But it is a project of his since his childhood. Elon decided early on in life that earth needed a backup plan and he decided the back up plan was Mars. This guy is way out there.
“Nobody would ever think of stuff like this. Elon is thinking about starting a colony on Mars and repopulating the Earth from Mars.”
Early on in their relationship, Musk told Mr Cantrell, a space exploration expert with three decades’ experience, that he had three goals in life. One was to “make humanity a multi planetary species” (the Mars project); to wean “humanity off its addiction to fossil fuel” (which is where Tesla cars come in); and to stop authorities “controlling free speech” (which is why he bought Twitter, now X).
Musk’s pioneering push for Mars could get the rocket boost it needs from a Trump presidency. Make no mistake Trump loves Musk.
A chunk of his victory speech, delivered in Palm Beach in the early hours after polls closed, was dedicated to his appreciation of Musk, hailing the founder of Tesla and owner of X, as a ‘super genius’. “A star is born. Elon,” declared Trump, “He is an amazing guy.”
Doug Loverro, head of Nasa’s human exploration programme up until 2020, estimated the cost of putting a man on Mars at anywhere between $100billion and $250billion.
Coincidentally, Musk’s fortune rose to $318.9billion, according to Forbes, on the back of Trump’s win, a huge sum but much of it tied up in shares in Tesla, Space X and X.
Mr Loverro, who now runs his own space consultancy, said it would be no surprise if Nasa now switched tack in the coming weeks.
Trump, in his first presidency, initiated the Artemis programme to return humans to the moon for the first time since the Apollo era in a race against the Chinese. SpaceX will provide the rockets to get them there.
But Mr Loverro told The Telegraph: “The science on Mars is more interesting. There is water on Mars; prior life on Mars. The prestige of putting man on the moon again is nothing compared to putting the first man on Mars. I think he [Musk] could get money out of the government for help doing that.
“Sure he could pay for it himself by raising cash from investors but it’s a lot better if government pays for it.”
Mr Loverro added: “It is absolutely without question he [Trump] will say we need to focus on Mars as soon as possible. Trump will escalate Mars.
“The question will be do we keep Artemis and practise a landing on the moon in preparation for Mars. Or as I say ‘you don’t learn anything from the moon’. It’s just a waste of money.”
The moon programme, estimated to cost as much as $90billion, is now expected to be refocused to Mars with suggestions that uncrewed missions to the Red Planet could take place before the end of the decade.
A manned mission, says Mr Loverro, is achievable by the mid 2030s when Musk will only be in his mid 60s and Trump in his late 80s.
A source said their “bromance” was of mutual benefit. “Musk thinks he can sway Trump,” said the source.
Trump meanwhile has got himself the presidency, in part thanks to Musk’s huge donations and his relentless backing on X and in person at rallies.
Then there was his stunt of giving away a million dollars a day to voters who signed his political action committee’s petition backing the Constitution.
A Musk insider said the billionaire had become alarmed at threats by the Biden administration to go after him over SpaceX amid claims of breaches of anti-trust laws.
The insider said the Trump family were excited about the coup of Mr Musk.
“You have to remember Elon was a liberal. He was a voting Democrat. But once he became aligned with the right – and that started after he bought Twitter [since renamed X] – the leftists went for him.”
Musk, said the source, had long been concerned that the Deep State was monitoring its citizens and was alarmed to discover alleged payments from the FBI to Twitter when he took over the company.
In 2022, shortly after he bought Twitter for $44 billion, Musk complained that the “government paid twitter millions of dollars to censor info from the public”.
It prompted a Republican congressman to declare he was in favour of halting “all funding” to the FBI.
The source said the federal government going forward “won’t look anything like it does now” and that Musk will “suck the oxygen” out of the current system. “This is very personal to him,” said the source.
The next months and years will tell if Musk, who normally succeeds at everything he does, wins out. An American flag on Mars by 2035 will suggest a Musk victory.