Republican governor criticized for saying Musk is too rich to be corrupted

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.

“Why? Because, according to Sununu, ‘everyone’ has conflicts of interest, and the world’s wealthiest person isn’t overly concerned about making money?”

Benen said Sununu, who was excoriated repeatedly by Trump for backing Nikki Haley during the Republican presidential primary, and who had previously described Trump as “fucking crazy” in a 2022 Washington roast, had “tried and failed” to address the potential conflicts of interest surrounding Musk ahead of the president-elect’s 20 January inauguration.

“Sununu found himself in the unenviable role of trying to defend the indefensible in order to bolster the man who’d spent the year mocking and scolding him,” he wrote.

Richard Painter, the chief White House ethics lawyer during the administration of George W Bush, called Sununu’s comments “bull” in a post to X, the social media platform owned by Musk.

“Is this the new normal? Billionaires are too rich to have conflicts of interest?” he also wrote.

David Meuse, a Democratic New Hampshire state representative, also criticized Sununu’s position. “According to [the governor], if you happen to be the world’s wealthiest biological organism, your motives can no longer be questioned – even if you donated $277m in campaign contributions to Trump and other GOP pols to secure your seat at the table,” he said in an X post.

Jeff Timmer, a Republican strategist and advisor to the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, said in his own post: “Sununu has learned that once you jettison all honor and integrity by digging a hole of relativism you might as well keep digging.”

An analysis by the Guardian earlier in December revealed that Musk has a wider and deeper range of potential conflicts of interest with the federal government than perhaps any person before him.

With his various companies already benefiting from tens of billions of dollars in federal funding, Musk stands to enrich himself and his interests even further as head of the “department of government efficiency” (Doge) advisory committee. Those companies could also benefit from looser government regulations while Musk oversees a financial clampdown on spending elsewhere.

Trump has utilized Musk as one of his closest advisers since the election, claiming in a Time interview that “Elon puts the country long before his company”. He sided with Musk again at the weekend in an immigration dispute with conservative hardliners over visas for foreign tech workers.

Economic analysts have criticized Musk’s appointment – and say the incoming Trump administration’s plans for sweeping tax cuts combined with massive federal job losses suggest “they have no idea what they are doing”.