Elon Musk won’t receive secret China briefings, Trump says

President Donald Trump on Friday said Elon Musk would not receive a briefing on secret plans for a potential war against China, given his substantial conflicts of interest in Beijing, following Musk’s high-level meeting at the Pentagon.

Musk met with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in his office for more than an hour Friday morning. It had been anticipated they would discuss a range of defense topics, including the threat posed by China and the billionaire’s work to slash the U.S. government bureaucracy, according to people familiar with the matter.

The New York Times, which first reported plans for the meeting, said Musk would receive a “top-secret” briefing that would include plans on how the United States would fight China in a potential war. The report was forcefully denied by Trump and Hegseth, who stood alongside the president in the Oval Office as they unveiled a new fighter jet under development.

The meeting with Musk focused on his work under the U.S. DOGE Service to slash the U.S. government bureaucracy and unspecified innovation efforts, Hegseth said. Trump said he would not allow anyone to be privy to such plans, especially Musk, who is enmeshed in dealings with Washington’s top adversary.

“Certainly you wouldn’t show that to a businessman,” Trump told reporters. “Elon has businesses in China, and he would be susceptible perhaps to that.”

The meeting at the Pentagon was initiated by Hegseth, and was intended to be unclassified, a U.S. official said. A person familiar with the issue told The Post on Thursday night that China would be the main focus of the discussion. The people spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters.

There were conflicting interpretations inside the Pentagon of what Musk was to have been briefed on. Defense Department lawyers were grappling Thursday with how to brief Musk on highly classified material, said a second person familiar with the matter.

“If there’s anything I can do to be helpful, I’d just really like us to have a good outcome here,” Musk told Hegseth as he departed the Pentagon after the roughly hourlong meeting, according to video from CNN.

Military officials held a separate meeting Friday morning in the so-called Tank, a secure meeting room on the Pentagon’s high-level E-ring suite of offices, related to issues in the Indo-Pacific region, where U.S. planning has been dominated by China’s military rise, according to one official.

Musk is already privy to some insider national security information as the head of SpaceX, one of his companies that has earned billions in taxpayer dollars in contracts, including from the Defense Department.

His unusual closeness to the administration and the top-level Pentagon meeting bring the mercurial billionaire in closer proximity to secretive work and puts the Defense Department in an awkward position. In seeking friendly governments for his business interests, Musk has cozied up to Beijing to broaden the market and production for his Tesla electric vehicles.

That relationship poses a problem for the Pentagon, which under Trump in 2018 established China as its primary adversary. The Defense Department describes China as the only nation that can keep pace with the U.S. military in a fight, and it has reoriented its budget and forces to prepare accordingly.

Rep. Gregory W. Meeks (New York), the ranking Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, reacted forcefully to the Times’s report about the meeting’s expected agenda.

“Handing Musk our military plans for China goes far beyond the usual kleptocracy of this admin. Musk has a significant financial stake in China,” Meeks said on X. “Trump’s gone from stashing national security secrets in a Mar-a-Lago bathroom to selling them to his biggest donor.”

Changes and cuts by Musk’s DOGE — which stands for Department of Government Efficiency, though it is not a Cabinet-level agency — are beginning to hit the Defense Department. The Pentagon has laid out a goal of reducing the ranks of nonmilitary personnel by up to 8%, which could amount to nearly 60,000 people, as part of the administration’s attempt to reduce the size of the federal government. Nearly 21,000 people were approved for deferred resignation, officials said this week.

Hegseth has exempted some commands and priorities from cuts and budget reductions, including Indo-Pacific Command, which is focused on countering China in the region.

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• Missy Ryan contributed.