Musk announces he will be lead engineer on Operation Warp Speed II, aka the new Air Force One
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Time is of the essence Elon!
After leaving the federal government’s operations in shambles and causing major confusion over healthcare funding, SpaceX CEO and White House advisor Elon Musk has a new priority: the delivery of a pair of luxurious Boeing 747s, so he and president Donald Trump can jet around in style.
And in an unusual twist, Musk is talking to longtime space industry competitor Boeing to speed up the delivery of the two Air Force One passenger jets.
Musk reportedly stopped by Boeing in person to chat with the company’s chief executive.
“We’ve been engaged with Elon,” Boeing CEO Kelly Ortberg told CNBC. Ortberg took over the reins in August in an effort to rescue the company’s nose-diving reputation.
It’s an eyebrow-raising collaboration, to say the least. Boeing has repeatedly made headlines for years over its passenger planes falling apart mid-air and worse.
The company has been in crisis mode for a while now, laying off around 17,000 employees in October following a disastrous year and a massive strike. Its efforts to develop an alternative to SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft have been a complete catastrophe as well.
In a move that’s become a hallmark of Boeing’s operations, the Air Force One planes are already more than $2 billion over budget and several years late.
In 2018, Trump struck a $3.9 billion deal with the aerospace company for two new Air Force One planes, asking for them to be ready by 2021. But Boeing has dragged its feet, blaming labor constraints and supply chain shortages for the four-year delay and astronomical overspending.
“The president wants those planes sooner so we’re working with Elon to see what can we do to pull up the schedule of those programs,” Ortberg told CNBC.
Needless to say, the money could be better spent on virtually anything else. Trump’s chaotic first two weeks in the White House have been filled with alleged actions to cut the federal government’s budget.
Yet a pair of lavish, multibillion-dollar planes are somehow not on the chopping block, once again showing the administration’s unwillingness to put its money where its mouth is.
And Ortberg is still preparing for failure, telling investors not long after meeting with Musk that there was “no silver bullet” for the Air Force One program, as quoted by CNN.
In a morbidly amusing side note, both Pete Hegseth and Sean Duffy asserted this morning that we’re going to get rid of airplane crashes by eliminating DEI, and hiring only “the best and the brightest.” My friend Steve notes:
That expression is most famous from Halberstam’s book on the Kennedy-Johnson brain trust who brought us into Vietnam. They were qualified and from the best schools and all. The title is meant to be ironic.
The irony only intensifies when you realize the whole idea of Trumpism is the elevation of drunks, buffoons, and rapists to power because the educated elite have screwed up. They’re supposed to be against the best and brightest.
He then told me he was going to go lie down.