NASA Administrator Bill Nelson Calls For Investigation Of Elon Musk’s Reported Secret Calls With Vladimir Putin

Russian President Vladimir Putin has been in regular contact with U.S. tech mogul Elon Musk since 2022.

Musk’s relationships with the US military and NASA through SpaceX could have granted Musk access to coveted government information.

NASA administrator Bill Nelson called for an investigation into a Wall Street Journal report that Musk and Putin had discussed “personal topics, business and geopolitical tensions.” 

“I don’t know that that story is true,” Nelson said. “I think it should be investigated…If the story is true that there have been multiple conversations between Elon Musk and the president of Russia, then I think that would be concerning, particularly for NASA, for the Department of Defense, for some of the intelligence agencies.”

The Journal was told by several White House officials that they had not been informed of Musk’s contact with Putin and that the discussions appeared to be “a closely held secret in government.” The Journal also cited a request from Putin to Musk not to activate his Starlink satellite internet service over Taiwan “as a favor to Chinese leader Xi Jinping.”

A spokesman for the Pentagon told The Journal that the Defense Department will not comment on “any individual’s security clearance, review or status, or about personnel security policy matters in the contact of reports about an individual’s actions.”

Musk has emerged to play a sizable role in this year’s presidential election, as he has donated a total of almost $119 million to the former president’s campaign. Last week in Pennsylvania, Musk held his own town hall in which he propagated famously false conspiracy theories that the 2020 election was stolen.

Musk is under fire from the Department of Justice after he publicized a petition that promised randomly chosen $1 million prizes to voters in support of  First and Second Amendment freedoms, so long as the voters were registered in specific states.