As Elon Musk set out to upend the federal bureaucracy on behalf of Donald Trump, he reached out to Trump’s team with an unusual request: U.S. law generally prohibits noncitizens from working for the federal government, but Musk was hoping to make an exception for Baris Akis, a Turkish-born venture capitalist with a green card who had become a close ally.
The answer, delivered privately by Trump’s advisers, was an unequivocal no, two people familiar with the decision told us.
Trump’s White House is in the business of deporting people, and bringing in a foreign national to help shrink the government’s American workforce would send a confusing message, one of these people said. (Neither Akis nor the White House responded to a request for comment.)
[A] longtime Trump confidant told us… that Trump had learned about how to work within the government during his first term, but “that’s not true of Elon.” Inside the West Wing, [Musk] has found many allies, having ingratiated himself with mid-tier Trump aides early in the transition, when he moved down to Trump’s private Mar-a-Lago club and established himself as an accessible, if quirky, presence. He regularly shared his cellphone number, including with younger staff, and spent his days sending around memes and ideas about overhauling the government, according to a person who saw the texts but who was not authorized to speak publicly.
Trump has made a point in recent days of making clear his supremacy over Musk, and Musk, for all his influence, has found himself bending to the strictures of the White House. Musk’s private security team, for instance, must wait in the parking lot at the 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue campus when he goes to work in a conference room at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building because of the building’s own security protocols, one of the people familiar with the arrangement told us.
Musk has a group of loyalists he often brings with him to each of his various government projects—a cadre Trump today praised as “smart people.” But, unlike many people with his net worth and renown, Musk “travels pretty light,” one person told us. Two people told us that, during the time he spent at Mar-a-Lago, they most regularly saw him with his young son X—“just that kid on his shoulders,” one of the people said—and sometimes X’s nanny.
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