Skip to main content

An Open Letter to Elon Musk

I have little doubt that ProPublica will write stories in the coming years that will enrage people you know. Some of our work may even focus on you or your companies. With immense power comes immense scrutiny. But here are some ideas you should like.

"Elon Musk - Caricature", by DonkeyHotey (CC BY 2.0)

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. This story was originally published in our Dispatches newsletter; sign up to receive notes from our journalists.

Elon,

I know your relationship with ProPublica got off to a rocky start when we contacted you about a story we were writing about your federal taxes. You replied with a lone punctuation mark — “?” — and subsequently called the story that mentioned you “a bunch of misleading stuff.”

We can agree to disagree on that story and a lot of other things. But we thought it might be useful to reach out again in light of your role, along with Vivek Ramaswamy, as co-head of the Department of Government Efficiency.

Simply put: If you’re trying to identify wasteful practices and spending by federal agencies, you’ll find a wealth of actionable issues that our reporting has surfaced over the past 16 years. You and Vivek noted in your recent Wall Street Journal op-ed on your plans for DOGE that “the federal government’s procurement process is also badly broken.”

Our reporting over the years provides some powerful illustrations of that point. ProPublica’s work on the Navy’s cost overruns and design flaws in its ships is second to none. We recently disclosed how Microsoft boxed its competitors out of providing cybersecurity software to the biggest government agencies, including the Pentagon. (Microsoft defended its conduct, saying in a statement that its “sole goal during this period was to support an urgent request by the Administration to enhance the security posture of federal agencies who were continuously being targeted by sophisticated nation-state threat actors.”)