Mr. Musk dug into his companies’ budgets, preferring to cut too much rather than too little and to deal with the fallout later. Under Donald Trump, he is set to apply those tactics to the U.S. government.

Lutnick currently serves as chair of Trump’s White House transition team. His most notable moment in recent memory was his declaration on CNN that Robert F Kennedy Jr, the vaccine conspiracist and Covid lockdown critic, would not be Trump’s pick for head of Health and Human Services. Trump nominated Kennedy to that very post last week.

The mass exodus includes stars like Oscar-winning actress Jamie Lee Curtis and The Guardian newspaper, which announced that it would no longer be posting on its official X accounts

SpaceX is on a trajectory to remain the most dominant player in space launches for years to come as it makes strides with its heavy-duty Starship rocket program.

On a Saturday morning in December 2022, Elon Musk summoned finance executives at Twitter, which he had bought six weeks earlier, to a conference call. Then he drilled into a spreadsheet that contained the social media company’s expenditures.

SpaceX’s Starship rocket will be launched for a sixth test flight next week, the latest experiment by the Elon Musk-owned aerospace firm to create reusable spacecraft after a previous test resulted in a “seminal moment” for the company.

Elon Musk launches most powerful rocket in the world for first time – before it disappears - Spacecraft’s signal lost after it reached an altitude of almost 150km