Elon Musk prompted yet another heavy backlash online after it was revealed that his rocket company SpaceX was still receiving multi-million dollar contracts from the U.S. government amid his crusade to slash trillions of federal funding.
“You’ll never believe who is still getting new government contracts while all the contracts at the Department of Education and USAID and other agencies are being nuked from orbit,” attorney and researcher Will Stancil wrote on X.
Stancil shared a screenshot that appeared to confirm that Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SpaceX) was awarded a NASA contract worth just shy of $39 million on Tuesday.
“If we can’t have cancer research he doesn’t get to play spaceships,” one user wrote in reply to the post. “You notice how cutting back government contracts with Tesla and SpaceX isn’t on the table or up for discussion? Elon Musk isn’t your friend,” wrote another.
Another user quipped: “Hey, @elonmusk, I found some corruption for DOGE to take a look at.”
It comes as Musk, the world’s wealthiest man, spoke to reporters from the Oval Office on Tuesday, where he insisted that there was no conflict of interest in his companies taking money from agencies, including the Pentagon, where he was looking to make cuts.
“You have to look at the individual contract,” Musk told reporters. “First of all, I’m not filing the contract. It’s people at SpaceX… and I like to say if you see any contract where it was awarded to SpaceX and it wasn’t by far the best value for the taxpayer, let me know – because every one of them was.”
These remarks too, caused a stir online. “This is a cartoonishly stupid answer,” wrote one X user. “My man, it’s like the textbook definition of a conflict of interest,” added another.
Democratic Congresswoman Ilhan Omar also responded to a clip of Musk’s impromptu press conference. “So let me get this straight, he wants contracts for cancer research cancelled but says let keep contracts for his company Spacex to do research,” she wrote.
“Greedy billionaire trying to ripoff the American people pretending to be altruistic is all I see.”
