Ask PolitiFact: Could Elon Musk’s Assassination ‘Jokes’ Violate His Security Clearance?

Minutes after former President Donald Trump survived an assassination attempt on his life on July 13, entrepreneur and X owner Elon Musk endorsed Trump’s presidential campaign in an X post.

On September 15, hours after news broke that Trump had survived another assassination attempt, Musk posted another attention-grabbing X tweet.

Responding to another X user who asked, “Why do they want to kill Donald Trump?” Musk wrote, “And no one is even trying to kill Biden/Kamala 🤔.”

(Screenshot from Archive.Today)

Musk deleted the post, but based on quotes and responses to X, he retweeted it around 9 p.m. ET. The post sparked immediate reaction.

Some X users shared screenshots showing they had reported Musk’s post for “veiled incitement to violence” or “glorification of violence.” Several X users tagged official accounts of the U.S. Secret Service and FBI.

“This is a dangerous and disturbing provocation,” wrote Marc Lamont Hill, a podcast host and professor at the City University of New York.

Other criticism focused on Musk’s role as a government contractor.

“I’ve had a security clearance for most of my adult life” he wrote Tom Nichols, staff writer at The Atlantic. “If I said something like that, I would immediately lose my shit. And yet this guy is still a major government contractor.”

Bloomberg News reporter Dana Hull shared Musk’s tweet around 11:20 p.m., saying it was “amazing coming from a man who has @NASA and national security contracts and is also deeply concerned about his own security.”

In the early morning hours of September 16, Musk shared two posts in which he described his earlier post as a joke:

• “Well, one lesson I’ve learned is that just because I say something to a group and they laugh, doesn’t mean the post on 𝕏 will be as funny,” he said. he wrote at 2:58 a.m. Eastern Time.

• At 3 a.m. EST, Musk in addition: “It turns out that jokes are A LOT less funny when people don’t know the context and it’s delivered in plain text.”

Around noon on September 16, the hashtag “#DeportElonMusk” was trending on X, with over 65,000 posts. Musk is an immigrant to the US from South Africa.

PolitiFact set out to answer a question posed by X users: Could a tweet about Musk’s murder — even if posted in jest — jeopardize his government contracts or potential security clearance?

While posting such a comment online could cast a negative light on Musk’s personal judgment — one of the criteria considered when granting security clearances — none of the experts we contacted said they expected Musk to lose his clearances because of the post.

James Andrew Lewis, director of the strategic technologies program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-based think tank, said that while some might see Musk’s tweet as inappropriate, it likely would not meet the requirements.

The SF-86 form — a security request form that Musk has filed before — asks primarily whether the individual has advocated for the overthrow of the U.S. government, committed violence against the U.S. government or been part of a group that did so, or has been arrested, he said.

“So as controversial as his statements were, he hasn’t crossed the line (yet),” Lewis said.

Musk’s companies, including his commercial spaceflight company SpaceX and its satellite internet provider Starlink subsidiary, have a contract with NASA worth about $4 billion and multimillion-dollar contracts with the Defense Department.

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying a batch of 53 Starlink internet satellites lifts off from Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, April 21, 2022. (AP)

Since 2019, we have found multiple press reports that Musk, while he had a security clearance, had his credentials reviewed at least once due to drug use.

In 2019, after Musk smoked marijuana on camera while filming an episode of Joe Rogan’s podcast, the U.S. government reviewed his security clearance, Bloomberg News reported. The report said Musk had “secret-level clearances at the time due to his role as founder and CEO” of SpaceX. The results of the ruling were not known until 2022, Bloomberg News reported.

In January, The Wall Street Journal reported on concerns from his aides about Musk’s illegal drug use. “In his role as CEO and founder of SpaceX, Musk has a security clearance that gives him access to classified information,” the report said. After the report, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre and White House counsel John Kirby declined to answer questions about whether Musk’s drug use could violate his security clearance.

Defense Department spokeswoman Sue Gough said the department “does not comment on the security status or credentials of any individual,” citing the Privacy Act of 1974.

John Cook, a law professor at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock’s William H. Bowen School of Law, said: “The federal government has a range of case law guidelines for denying or revoking a security clearance.”

Gough confirmed this, saying that Defense Department contractor security determinations are consistent with established federal investigative standards.

The determination examines a “sufficient period” of an individual’s life to determine whether he or she qualifies for a security clearance based on factors such as loyalty to the United States, personal conduct, criminal conduct, financial considerations, drug use, and emotional, mental and personality disorders.

Cook, who has written about obtaining national security clearance, said any impact Musk’s post has on his security clearance will depend on how his post is interpreted.

Each case is “judged on its own merits,” according to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. The Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency said “trained adjudicators” use its “standard set of guidelines” to assess an individual’s “loyalty, trustworthiness, and dependability” and decide whether the individual should have access to classified information.

According to Cook, X’s post could be read as Musk claiming that no one tried to assassinate Biden or Harris because “they are not significant enough to attempt assassination.”

In that case, “his post may not have been in the best of taste, but it doesn’t seem to be in a way that would question Musk’s loyalty to the United States or call for the assassination of a senior government official, although the comment may not reflect well on his personal judgment, especially since he posted it online,” Cook said.

Alternatively, Cook said someone could read X’s post as Musk arguing that it is odd that someone would try to assassinate Trump “when Biden and Harris are worse than Trump in Musk’s eyes” and therefore potentially “more deserving of assassination in Musk’s mind.”

Cook said such an interpretation would be “more problematic” for the agency assessing Musk’s loyalty to the United States, his criminal conduct and his personal conduct.

“Musk was very smart to delete his initial X post,” he said.

Cook also said subsequent posts suggesting Musk was joking may not fully resolve the permitting issues.

“Taking a much more robust approach, making it clear that it is in no way advocating political violence, and condemning political violence in all forms, would probably be much more effective in mitigating the problem,” he said.

PolitiFact researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report.

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