While President Donald Trump’s current trip to the Middle East has certainly been profitable for him, what with the promised free plane and all, it’s not just Trump who is benefiting. Though he may be the only person who will patronize the mobile McDonald's the Saudis built for his four-day visit, his family and Big Tech pals are all getting new opportunities to line their pockets. Billionaire Elon Musk is in a unique position to profit from the administration’s total disregard of conflicts of interest. Helming the so-called Department of Government Efficiency has allowed him to stack cash by steering billions of taxpayer dollars toward his private companies. Elon Musk But Musk isn’t interested in siphoning just American dollars. This swing through the Middle East gave him a chance to get Starlink, his satellite internet service, approved in Saudi Arabia for aviation and maritime use. One might think a country wouldn’t want to put its vital communications in the hands of a guy who can single-handedly turn off access to Starlink if he disagrees with them, but apparently, that’s no deterrent. To be fair, Musk didn’t need to go abroad to get countries to cut deals with him. He had reportedly already used the heavy hand of the American government to get India, Vietnam, Somalia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Bangladesh, and Pakistan to use Starlink as well, as a way to shelter themselves somewhat from the pain of Trump’s tariffs. Riding along with Trump and Musk to the Middle East was a veritable who’s who of the most overcoddled CEOs that corporations have to offer, including Sam Altman of OpenAI, Alex Karp of Palantir, and Jensen Huang of Nvidia. Also joining were executives from BlackRock, IBM, Boeing, Amazon, Google, Halliburton, Citigroup, and more. It looks to be a profitable trip for OpenAI, with a reported deal in the works to partner with a United Arab Emirates corporation to get hundreds of thousands of Nvidia’s most advanced AI chips. The Biden administration had limited the sales of those chips to largely authoritarian governments in the past, but since Trump wants to remake the U.S. as an authoritarian government too, it’s probably fine. President Donald Trump and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman pose for a photo at the Saudi-U.S. Investment Forum at the King Abdulaziz International Conference Center in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, on May 13. No matter how these deals shake out, nothing will probably look as much like a pay-for-play as the $2 billion that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman made sure to hand to Jared Kushner’s firm in 2021, not long after Trump left office. Come to think of it, though, throwing $2 billion for an investment firm is paltry compared with what Musk has managed to rake in. It’s even paltry compared with the deals other Trump family members are making by trading on the Trump name. On behalf of the Trump Organization, younger failson Eric has announced multiple construction projects in the Middle East over the past year. One of those projects, a golf course in Qatar, is worth $2 billion all by itself, and that’s before you get into the hotels and residential towers they’re going to build in the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. Trump is objectively terrible at making deals, and his haphazard tariff schemes have been nothing but an opportunity for him to show he has no idea what he’s doing in that department. On the other hand, Trump is objectively terrific at grift and corruption, at using his position as president to maximize his personal profit. When you think of it like that, who can blame all these CEOs for tagging along? They get to learn from the master. Campaign Action
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