How Elon Musk Divided a SpaceX Employee From a Close Friend

I’m doing something a little different with the newsletter today: delving into some reporting left over in my notebook that shows how Elon Musk — and the strong feelings that working for him can engender — can come between even the closest of friends.

Last month, my colleagues and I published a story about Steve Davis, a longtime Musk lieutenant who has worked for the billionaire for more than two decades, at three different companies, and is now one of the most powerful people leading his cost-cutting effort in Washington.

When Davis moved to Washington as a SpaceX employee more than 15 years ago, he developed a busy extracurricular life, running a popular frozen yogurt shop and bar; organizing kickball and competitive karaoke teams; and hosting game nights and Shabbat dinners. Much of that he did side by side with a close friend and roommate named Stephen Richer. (Here they are performing together in a flash mob for Davis’s Mr. Yogato yogurt shop. Richer is the tall redhead.)

Friends called the two inseparable. Richer sang the praises of SpaceX and the Boring Company, the Musk-founded tunneling startup that Davis would go on to lead.

And a few years later, after Richer had gone back to law school in Chicago and then moved to Arizona, Davis backed his buddy when, of all things, Richer — a Republican — ran for and won the 2020 election for Maricopa County recorder, which oversees voting in the state’s largest county.

If you’ve been reading the On Politics newsletter for awhile, you may already guess where this is going.

In his new role, Richer battled against allegations of voter fraud, as conspiracy theorists on X pushed misleading information about undocumented immigrants registering to vote.

Among the biggest spreaders of that misinformation was none other than Musk.

Perusing Richer’s posts on X over time shows a man struggling to maintain — and demonstrate — his admiration for the billionaire.

“So proud of all my @SpaceX friends,” Richer tweeted in 2021, with a photo of himself at a SpaceX facility. The next year, he credited Musk with having revolutionized digital finance, the space industry, electric vehicles and battery technology.

Then, last April, Musk promoted the idea that hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants had registered to vote in Arizona. And in September, Musk accused Arizona of “refusing to remove illegals from voter rolls,” in a post that has been viewed 38 million times.

At first, Richer tried to strike a conciliatory tone, even as he said there was “0 validity” to the idea that so many undocumented people had registered to vote. “We loved the recent rocket launch that we could see in the Arizona sky,” he wrote as part of an eight-point post last April rebutting Musk’s misinformation. He added that he was the “owner of many, many Musk-related products.”

Yet, as Musk has leaned into conspiracy and posted more about supposed voter fraud in Arizona, Richer has become less fawning and firmer in his pushback. He lost a Republican primary in his bid to retain his seat last August, after he denied that the 2020 election had been stolen from Donald Trump. In September, Richer posted that Musk had been wrong in every one of his posts about Arizona elections, but “never corrected any of them.”

And in an interview on MSNBC a few days later, Richer spoke more sharply. “When people like Musk post on Twitter or speak to news outlets, and it’s just filled with innuendo, or filled with lies, or filled with inaccurate information, then it’s offices like mine and the 150 full-time employees that are in my office who see the downstream effects of that,” he said.

Richer, who did not comment for this piece and is now a senior fellow at Harvard Kennedy School, has now become a regular critic of the Trump administration and the Department of Government Efficiency, the agency that his old roommate helps lead. On X, Richer has expressed concerns that Trump’s actions have undercut the power of the legislative branch, and cracked jokes about DOGE’s elimination of unnecessary positions when its co-head, Vivek Ramaswamy, left to run for governor of Ohio.

Davis also did not respond to a request for comment. But he has asserted himself in his DOGE role, which at first was kept under wraps, and sat for his first public interview a week after we published our story. On Fox News, with more than a dozen other people who are taking part in the cost-cutting effort, Davis defended the team’s slashing overhaul of the federal government.

He sat directly next to Musk.

MEANWHILE on X

A continued fixation on Social Security

Musk is using his X account as a megaphone. My colleague Kate Conger looks at how he is fixating on Social Security recently.

Elon Musk has repeatedly claimed of late that Social Security has been a target of enormous fraud, without providing much evidence. At the same time, he has pushed the unfounded theory that Democrats have allowed immigrants into the United States as part of a scheme to shift voter demographics, echoing a white-nationalist conspiracy theory known as the Great Replacement.

On Wednesday, Musk seemed to try to combine these two threads, taking to X to revive his concerns about Social Security and sharing data from his Department of Government Efficiency team that he said showed immigrants had increasingly been issued Social Security numbers while they waited for their asylum cases to be heard.

“Insane,” Musk wrote, sharing a Fox News clip that discussed the findings. He also shared several posts from other X users who amplified the same Fox News video. After one user suggested that members of the Biden administration should be arrested, Musk replied, “Absolutely.”

Immigrants who are authorized to work in the United States are given Social Security numbers because they need to pay taxes, though they are not automatically eligible to receive benefits.

Proposals to cut Social Security have been some of the most contentious ideas from Musk’s team. The program is widely popular, and many Republicans fear that Musk-backed cuts could upset their constituents. But Musk has continued to focus on Social Security, sending one of his oldest and most trusted investors, Antonio Gracias, to the agency to oversee DOGE’s work there.

Other notable posts:

• Musk criticized Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, for condemning the federal cuts pushed by DOGE while refusing to comment on protests against Musk’s electric-vehicle manufacturer, Tesla. “Terrible,” Musk wrote.

• The billionaire also re-shared a post of his from earlier this week, in which he said anyone who “financed attacks against Tesla” should face prison time.

— Kate Conger

BY THE NUMBERS

314

That’s how many separate fields of data about people living in the United States are contained in information systems to which Musk’s associates at the Department of Government Efficiency are seeking access, according to a New York Times analysis.

That data could include a citizen’s mother’s maiden name, bank account number or amount of student debt — and a whole lot more. The categories of information in the analysis come from 23 data systems holding personal information about the public across eight agencies.

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A pilot sues an X influencer for defamation

Jo Ellis, a 35-year-old transgender pilot in the Virginia Army National Guard, became the center of a conspiracy theory after popular accounts on X spread the false rumor that she had been at the helm of a helicopter that collided with a passenger jet in Washington in January. To the online mob, her suspected involvement in the incident was evidence that diversity initiatives in the federal government had played a role in the crash.

None of it was true. On Wednesday, she filed a defamation lawsuit on Wednesday against Matt Wallace, an influencer on X with more than two million followers who helped spread the falsehood.

“My life was turned upside-down at that point,” Ms. Ellis said in an interview with my colleague Stuart A. Thompson. “Forever on, I’m known as ‘that trans terrorist.’”

Read more here.