Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and owner of social media platform X, wants to know how in the world members of Congress managed to become “strangely wealthy,” despite having a modest government salary. A good question indeed.
The CEO of Tesla and SpaceX stated that his team at the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) are going to be launching investigations into how lawmakers in Washington are amassing wealth. Public service was never meant to be a full-time, lifelong career path or means of producing personal wealth.
Our founders envisioned something more akin to a revolving door. Private citizens get elected to office, serve for a while, then return to the work they were doing outside of the government. This would keep them from corruption and also make sure that they stayed connected to the public while also contributing to society.
via Conservative Brief:
Musk was responding to a question from an attendee who asked whether DOGE had found any evidence of money transfers from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) to Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.).
“Yeah, so,” Musk said, taking a brief moment to collect his thoughts. “There is a massive amount of corruption, but it is circuitous. So what happens is there’s money that — obviously it’s your taxpayer money — that is then sent to various government organizations who then send it to NGO’s, which an NGO is a non-governmental organization, but obviously it’s a government-funded non-governmental organization.”
“It’s just an organization. It’s just a government, and effectively there’s a giant fraud loophole which is that the government can send money to an NGO that is then no longer governed by the laws of the United States,” the Tesla CEO said.
“So they’ll send the money overseas to one NGO, then they’ll go through a bunch of them, and then, I’m highly confident that a bunch of that money then comes back to the United States and lands in the pockets of the people you just mentioned,” he added. “But it is a circuitous route. It doesn’t go directly, but let’s just say that there’s a lot of strangely wealthy members of Congress where I’m trying to connect the dots of, ‘How do they become rich?’”
Dozens of members of Congress who have served lengthy tenures in the legislative branch have ended up becoming multi-millionaires over their careers. One of the richest is former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, a California Democrat, who has a net worth of $250 million. Sen. Rick Scott, a Florida Republican, has a fortune of over $552 million.
Much of Pelosi’s wealth stems from the successful investments she and her husband, venture capitalist Paul Pelosi, have made in major tech companies such as Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Netflix. Pelosi, in particular, has come under scrutiny for her and her husband’s unusually successful stock trading. Missouri GOP Sen. Josh Hawley announced plans to reintroduce a bill that would prohibit members of Congress from trading stocks.
“By selling and buying companies that had to do with health care, had to do with vaccines, had to do with medical supplies and masks, multiple of these people were actually investigated by federal agents because it looked so bad. It looked as if it were insider trading. But in fact, it wasn’t technically insider trading. It was just that these members of Congress got briefings and information and then acted on it,” Hawley went on to explain.
Hawley then pointed out that the president is in support of his bill.
“I think President Trump’s leadership will be key,” Hawley remarked. “I can tell you, I’m not going to stop pushing on it. When I started on this, people said, ‘Oh, don’t bother. It’ll never pass.’ Well, guess what? We got it through committee for the first time ever with the support of every single Democrat and many, many Republicans. This is something that’s just very hard to vote against, because voters understand there’s no reason for members of Congress to be up here day trading.”
Back in 2023, a survey was done by the Program for Public Consultation, which found taht 86 percent of those who participated agreed that members of Congress and their family members who are in the same household with them should be banned from trading stocks in certain businesses and endeavors.
“Approximately 87% of respondents believed that the president, vice president, and Supreme Court judges should be forbidden from trading stocks,” the report said.
“Stock trading remains prevalent in Congress. According to campaign financial disclosure filings from 2023 and 2024, 61% of incoming Congress members owned stock. The Campaign Legal Center claimed that 42 of the 71 new members owned both equities and popularly held investment funds,” it concluded.
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