Republican governor criticized for saying Musk is too rich to be corrupted
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New Hampshire’s Chris Sununu said of Musk ‘he’s, in a way, so rich he’s removed from the potential financial influence’. The Republican New Hampshire governor Chris Sununu was caught in a riptide of criticism for a comment that Elon Musk – the world’s richest man and close ally of US president-elect Donald Trump – was too wealthy to be corrupted or influenced.
Sununu was asked on CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday if he thought Musk had a conflict of interest in owning companies, including SpaceX, that have held billions of dollars in government contracts while also leading an unofficial agency to slash public spending in Trump’s second presidency.
“I like the fact that he’s, in a way, so rich [that] he’s removed from the potential financial influence,” Sununu said of Musk, who is also the boss of electrical car maker Tesla and spent almost a quarter of a billion of his estimated $430bn fortune to help Trump defeat Kamala Harris for the White House in November.
“I don’t think he’s doing it for the money,” Sununu said. “He’s doing it for the bigger project and the bigger vision of America. He doesn’t need the dollars.”. A diverse range of critics, including a former White House ethics lawyer, a senior Republican strategist, and Democratic politicians, assailed Sununu over his comments – a backlash that continued to escalate in a scathing column by the political author and MSNBC producer Steve Benen.
“Let me see if I have this straight … Americans shouldn’t be overly concerned about the president-elect empowering a billionaire GOP megadonor with power and influence, a businessman with extensive private-sector interests here and abroad, and we should be indifferent to the potential for the megadonor’s conflicts of interest?” Benen wrote.
