He has been privy to phone conversations with world leaders, consulted with Trump on his cabinet picks and even hosted him at Space X for the launch of the Starship rocket.
But how might the entrepreneur’s other views affect Trump policy?
Image: Elon Musk secured the confidence of Donald Trump during his election campaign. Pic: Reuters
The cause closest to Musk’s heart is pronatalism, a pro-birth political and personal ideology in which reproduction is the key goal of humanity.
Musk regularly posts on social media with fears about population decline, sometimes bordering on obsession.
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“Population collapse is coming… Earth is almost empty of humans,” he wrote recently.
“Instead of teaching fear of pregnancy we should teach fear of childlessness,” he added.
The frequency of these posts has increased in recent months.
Musk has at least 11 children, by three different women. Some of them have spent time with him in recent weeks at Donald Trump’s home.
Few understand the origin of Musk’s pro-birth views better than his own father, Errol Musk – an engineer and businessman from South Africa, who has a strained relationship with his son.
I speak to Errol on a video call from his home near Cape Town.
Image: Errol Musk
“Elon doesn’t try to push his opinion across, but he will have an opinion,” he says.
Errol has seven children himself, ranging in age from Elon at 53 to his youngest daughter, who is five. He’s also a pronatalist.
“We’re not here to enjoy boating or flying or skiing or kite surfing, or something,” he says.
“We are here to continue being here. We should all be worried about declining populations, any country with any industry should be worried.”
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Certain countries – like the United States, United Kingdom and Japan – do have ageing populations. But my conversation with Errol also reveals views which veer toward selective breeding.
I ask him about a comment Elon reportedly made to a biographer several years ago. Musk Jr apparently said: “If each successive generation of smart people has fewer kids, then that’s probably bad.”
I ask Errol Musk if that viewpoint is bordering on eugenics.
“I wouldn’t call it eugenics as such, but every nation has practiced a certain form of survival of the fittest.
“One need only go to England and go to the Cheltenham area, the horse breeding area, and say, ‘Look, we’re not going to breed the horses anymore by any form of standard. I’ve got a few old horses I’ve found in Nigeria and we’re going to just mix them with your race horses…’
“They’ll say, no, no, no, no, no,” he added.
Image: Elon Musk and his children
A more sanitised version of pro-family politics took centre stage on the campaign trail.
At a rally, Donald Trump declared himself “the father of fertilisation” and vowed to make in-vitro fertilisation (IVF) free for anyone who needs it.
Sky News has been invited inside an IVF clinic in California, the world capital for fertility.
The fertility institute is in the Encino area of Los Angeles and allows patients to choose the eye colour of their baby as well as its gender.
Dr Jeffrey Steinberg was among the first fertility doctors to offer gender selection. He is taking future President Trump’s pledge to offer free IVF at face value.
“Donald Trump for better or for worse, tends to keep his word. And the sort of the pooh-poohing of what he was saying… I think it’s vanished because they’re realising that it’s probably going to happen. So all the fertility centres are gearing up for a huge surge.”
Elon Musk has donated millions of dollars to fertility research.
“Musk is a technocrat,” Dr Steinberg says. “He’s an intellectual genius in multiple areas. And everything he touches seems to turn to gold.
“There’s not much that evolves as quickly as Musk’s technology. But IVF has done that, and I think he’s going to find that very attractive.”
Not all agree that encouraging people to have as many children as possible is the way forward when it comes to population decline.
“There’s some catastrophic thinking that goes on in the tech bro space of Silicon Valley and so on, and it’s usually not very practically oriented,” says Philip Cohen, professor of sociology at Maryland University.
“If you really tried to promote pronatalism, inevitably what you end up doing is promoting a retrograde sort of anti-feminism,” he says.
“So it ends up being how can we convince women to have more children, which ends up being how can we have women out of the workforce, at home more, married younger, all the things that are sort of rolling back the progress that we made with regard to women’s equality in the last 100 years. And so that’s my primary concern.
“The other is that it goes along with sort of a virulent nationalism that usually is not very far from racism and white supremacy.
“The idea of not just more births, but a certain kind of births, a certain kind of family. And it has not led to good outcomes in modern society when right-wing governments try to promote higher birth rates.”
While espousing his pronatalist views, Musk is navigating his own complicated family dynamic.
In the hills outside Austin, Texas, there are rumours he’s bought a multi-million-dollar compound to house some of his children and their mothers together, with his own property 10 minutes away.
Musk denies this is true.
But soon he could be helping to design family policy across the country.
The IDF has admitted to mistakenly identifying a convoy of aid workers as a threat – following the emergence of a video which proved their ambulances were clearly marked when Israeli troops opened fire on them.
The bodies of 15 aid workers – including eight medics working for the Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS) – were found in a “mass grave” after the incident, according to the head of the UN Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs Jonathan Whittall.
The Israeli military originally claimed an investigation found the vehicles did not have any headlights or emergency signals and were therefore targeted as they looked “suspicious”.
But video footage obtained by the PRCS, and verified by Sky News, showed the ambulances and a fire vehicle clearly marked with flashing red lights.
In a briefing from the IDF, they said the ambulances arrived in the Tel Sultan neighbourhood in Rafah shortly after a Hamas police vehicle drove through.
Image: Palestinians mourning the medics after their bodies were recovered. Pic: Reuters
An IDF surveillance aircraft was watching the movement of the ambulances and notified troops on the ground. The IDF said it will not be releasing that footage.
When the ambulances arrived, the soldiers opened fire, thinking the medics were a threat, according to the IDF.
The soldiers were surprised by the convoy stopping on the road and several people getting out quickly and running, the IDF claimed, adding the soldiers were unaware the suspects were in fact unarmed medics.
An Israeli military official would not say how far away troops were when they fired on the vehicles.
The IDF acknowledged that its statement claiming that the ambulances had their lights off was incorrect, and was based on the testimony from the soldiers in the incident.
The newly emerged video footage showed that the ambulances were clearly identifiable and had their lights on, the IDF said.
The IDF added that there will be a re-investigation to look into this discrepancy.
Image: The clip is filmed through a vehicle windscreen – with three red light vehicles visible in front
Addressing the fact the aid workers’ bodies were buried in a mass grave, the IDF said in its briefing this is an approved and regular practice to prevent wild dogs and other animals from eating the corpses.
The IDF could not explain why the ambulances were also buried.
The IDF said six of the 15 people killed were linked to Hamas, but revealed no detail to support the claim.
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1:22
Bodies of aid workers found in Gaza
The newly emerged footage of the incident was discovered on a phone belonging to one of the workers who was killed, PRCS president Dr Younis Al Khatib said.
“His phone was found with his body and he recorded the whole event,” he said. “His last words before being shot, ‘Forgive me, mom. I just wanted to help people. I wanted to save lives’.”
Sky News used an aftermath video and satellite imagery to verify the location and timing of the newly emerged footage of the incident.
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2:43
Aid worker attacks increasing
It was filmed on 23 March north of Rafah and shows a convoy of marked ambulances and a fire-fighting vehicle travelling south along a road towards the city centre. All the vehicles visible in the convoy have their flashing lights on.
The footage was filmed early in the morning, with a satellite image seen by Sky News taken at 9.48am local time on the same day showing a group of vehicles bunched together off the road.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has hit out at the US over its “weak” response to lethal Russian attacks on his hometown on Friday.
President Zelenskyy posted a lengthy and emotional statement on X about Russia’s strikes on Kryvyi Rih, which killed 19 people.
Meanwhile Ukrainian drones hit an explosives factory in Russia’s Samara region in an overnight strike, a member of Ukraine’s SBU security service told Reuters.
In his post, President Zelenskyy accused the United States of being “afraid” to name-check Russia in its comment on the attack.
“Unfortunately, the reaction of the American Embassy is unpleasantly surprising: such a strong country, such a strong people – and such a weak reaction,” he wrote on X.
“They are even afraid to say the word “Russian” when talking about the missile that killed children.”
America’s ambassador to Ukraine Bridget Brink had written on X: “Horrified that tonight a ballistic missile struck near a playground and restaurant in Kryvyi Rih.
“More than 50 people injured and 16 killed, including 6 children. This is why the war must end.”
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5:49
Strike on Zelenskyy’s home city
President Zelenskyy went on in his post to say: “Yes, the war must end. But in order to end it, we must not be afraid to call a spade a spade.
“We must not be afraid to put pressure on the only one who continues this war and ignores all the world’s proposals to end it. We must put pressure on Russia, which chooses to kill children instead of a ceasefire.”
Grandmother ‘burned to death in her home’
Oleksandr Vilkul, head of the city’s defense council, said the missile attack, followed by a drone attack, had killed 19 people, including nine children.
“The Iskander-M missile strike with cluster munitions at the children’s playground in the residential area, to make the shrapnel fly further apart, killed 18 people.
“One grandmother was burnt to death in her house after Shahed’s direct hit.”
Russia’s defence ministry said it had struck a military gathering in a restaurant – an assertion rebutted by the Ukrainian military as misinformation.
“The missile hit right on the street – around ordinary houses, a playground, shops, a restaurant,” President Zelenskyy wrote.
Mr Zelenskyy also detailed the child victims of the attack including “Konstantin, who will be 16 forever” and “Arina, who will also be 7 forever”.
The UK’s chief of the defence staff Sir Tony Radakin said he had met the Ukrainian leader on Friday, along with French armed forces leader General Thierry Burkhard.
“Britain and France are coming together & Europe is stepping up in a way that is real & substantial, with 200 planners from 30 nations working to strengthen Ukraine’s long term security,” Sir Tony wrote.
Global financial markets gave a clear vote of no-confidence in President Trump’s economic policy.
The damage it will do is obvious: costs for companies will rise, hitting their earnings.
The consequences will ripple throughout the global economy, with economists now raising their expectations for a recession, not only in the US, but across the world.