After controversy, officials quietly edited the record to eliminate mention of Elon Musk’s electric vehicle company. Newly obtained records reportedly appear to indicate that President Donald Trump’s State Department was in fact aiming to arrange a $400 million government contract with one of Elon Musk's companies, even as it downplayed the lucrative deal when it was exposed by the media.
The State Department said after the reports earlier this month that it was abandoning plans to buy $400 million worth of "armored electric vehicles” that had earlier listed Tesla as the intended provider in its own document. The record had been quickly scrubbed to eliminate mention of Tesla following news reports of the pricey contract going to a company even as the CEO of that same company, Elon Musk, was working for the government firing people and cutting other contracts as head of the Department of Government Accountability in what appeared to be a tremendous conflict of interest.
Officials claimed that the contract had actually been mooted during Joe Biden’s administration, and that Tesla had been the only company to respond at the time to the government's requests for information about replacing some vehicles. A State Department spokesperson told The Independent that the massively higher number provided in the current administration’s document was “an estimate; as mentioned, this was a request for information, not a solicitation for a contract.”.
The request was “strictly to gather information, and the Department of State has no intentions to move forward with the solicitation,” the spokesperson insisted. Musk himself has claimed to have no knowledge of the $400 million figure, and has called accusations of self-dealing a "lie.”.
It comes as Musk continues to orchestrate massive budget cutbacks and layoffs of federal employees on behalf of Donald Trump, even though his own companies have been promised or paid nearly $21 billion in federal funding since 2008. The document was listed as having last been edited on December 13, after Donald Trump's election victory, but before he officially took office.
On February 13, however, after Drop Site's initial report, the document was quietly edited to say "armored electric vehicles" instead of "armored Teslas.”. Experts interviewed by NPR said that $400 million might be a ballpark figure to replace the State Department's entire fleet of diplomatic vehicles with Tesla Cybertrucks, but expressed doubts about the wisdom of doing so.
