Why Musk doesn’t have access to SpaceX’s biggest government secrets

The payloads SpaceX launches into the heavens for the U.S. military and spy agencies are usually treated as a government secret, shared only with select employees at the rocket company who hold special security clearances.

Elon Musk, its founder and chief executive, isn’t one of them.

As SpaceX deepened its ties with the national-security agencies in recent years, the company’s lawyers advised senior executives not to seek a higher security clearance for Musk that would give him access to details about sensitive programs SpaceX is involved in, according to people familiar with the matter.

The reason, these people said, was that Musk would have had to answer questions from the government about his contacts with foreign nationals and drug use previously reported by The Wall Street Journal. In internal discussions, the lawyers and executives posited scenarios in which Musk might inadvertently disclose secrets to foreign officials with whom he regularly speaks, the people said. The Journal reported in October that Musk has been in regular contact with Russian President Vladimir Putin since late 2022.

His current “top-secret” clearance took years for him to obtain following his public use of marijuana on a 2018 podcast. SpaceX’s national-security business was rapidly growing at the time.

The SpaceX lawyers began analyzing the risks of seeking a higher security clearance for Musk after the Journal reported in June of last year about Musk’s use of ketamine, according to one person familiar with the review. The lawyers and executives concluded that if SpaceX sought a higher security clearance, it would risk Musk being turned down, or worse, losing the top-secret clearance he already has.

Those concerns could soon become irrelevant. President-elect Donald Trump appointed Musk, who spent about $200 million in support of his presidential run, to lead a new Department of Government Efficiency, which will advise the incoming administration on cutting spending and regulations. As president, Trump will have the power to give Musk and others working for DOGE broad access to classified information as they search for cuts.

Although Trump hasn’t indicated publicly whether he intends to do that, SpaceX already has been scouting locations for a secure facility where Musk and other DOGE staffers could review highly classified information.

Representatives for Musk, SpaceX and the Trump transition team didn’t respond to requests for comment. A spokeswoman for the Pentagon’s Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency said a federal privacy law prevented her from commenting on the details or status of an individual’s security clearance.

Hundreds of thousands of private defense contractors have access to government secrets as part of their jobs. Their security clearances are the same as those held by government employees and generally have three levels: confidential, secret and top secret.

Musk’s current top-secret clearance gives him access to some national-security secrets, but he lacks special authorizations that the government requires of most SpaceX employees who work on classified programs, according to the people familiar with the matter. Those employees—more than 400—have permissions for what is known as “sensitive compartmented information,” the government’s term for need-to-know secrets about how intelligence is collected and where it comes from, one of the people said. A smaller number of SpaceX employees have access to secrets the government deems even more sensitive called special access programs.

Musk’s top-secret clearance, without those authorizations, doesn’t entitle him to access certain information about SpaceX’s spy satellite program, called Starshield, which offers satellite hardware and services to national-security agencies, the people said. He isn’t allowed to enter most SpaceX facilities where classified work is done and discussed, and he rarely is privy to classified elements of cargo that his rockets blast into space, such as sensors and other hardware attached to spy satellites.

The CEOs of Boeing, Lockheed Martin and their rocket joint venture, United Launch Alliance, have authorizations for sensitive compartmented information, according to people familiar with their clearances.

Musk had a secret-level clearance before he secured the top-secret clearance in 2022, a process that took years, according to people familiar with his clearance. The unusually long government review of his application was believed within SpaceX to have been the result of Musk’s 2018 podcast interview with Joe Rogan in which he smoked marijuana, which is illegal under federal law, the people said.

“Most of the stuff that I’m aware of…the reason to keep it top secret is it’s so boring,” Musk said in October at a town hall meeting in Pennsylvania in which he disclosed that he had a top-secret clearance. “We don’t want to give exact instructions on how to make a nuclear bomb or something like that, but unless there’s a genuine risk to the country, all the information in the government should be public.”

SpaceX, which Musk founded in 2002, has worked with national-security agencies since its early days. It won a launch contract in 2005 with an unnamed U.S. intelligence agency. Later, the company began handling regular launches for military and spy agencies. More recently, it entered into a $1.8 billion classified contract with the National Reconnaissance Office, a spy agency that operates satellites, according to people familiar with the matter and company documents viewed by the Journal.

The company’s Starshield unit is the military outgrowth of its better-known Starlink business, which uses thousands of satellites in low-Earth-orbit to power high-speed internet connections for consumers and businesses. Employees who work on Starshield generally have the kind of enhanced clearances that Musk doesn’t.

Starshield won an initial $70 million order from the military in August 2023 to provide communications services to the Pentagon.

Around that time, SpaceX lawyers and executives were discussing whether Musk should have greater access to the company’s classified work. It couldn’t be determined Musk was aware of the discussions, prompted by the Journal’s June 2023 story that highlighted his ketamine use, or whether he had expressed an interest in having a higher clearance.

After that 2023 article, Musk said in an X post that ketamine is a better way to deal with depression than more widely prescribed antidepressants, and he later posted that he had a prescription for it.

In January of this year, the Journal reported that Musk used illegal drugs including LSD, cocaine, ecstasy and psychedelic mushrooms. His lawyer said there were unspecified “false facts” in the article, and that Musk is “regularly and randomly drug tested at SpaceX and has never failed a test.”

Were Musk denied a higher clearance, SpaceX lawyers told company executives, it could have had broader implications for SpaceX, according to the people familiar with his clearance.

The government could have revoked Musk’s existing top-secret clearance if he failed the security vetting, and SpaceX might have needed to seek a waiver from the government to continue to do some of its national security work because Musk is SpaceX’s senior management official. The company also might have had to create extra layers of security to wall Musk off from a growing part of its business.

SpaceX was prepared to answer questions from government officials about Musk’s drug use after the Journal reported on it, but the Pentagon didn’t ask, and SpaceX executives decided the company didn’t need to self-report to the government based solely on news accounts, said the people familiar with his clearance.

The federal questionnaire for contractors and employees seeking a security clearance instructs applicants to disclose whether in the past seven years they have used any of a variety of listed drugs, including ketamine. Government contractors can lose their security clearances over drug abuse, a term broadly defined in federal regulations as the use of an illegal drug or of a prescribed drug “in a manner that deviates from approved medical direction.”

The questionnaire also requires applicants to report “close and/or continuing contact with a foreign national.”

Musk would have had to fill out a new questionnaire and likely undergo a polygraph examination to receive a higher clearance through traditional channels.

As president, Trump will have the power to authorize access to government secrets and could waive security requirements. The Supreme Court has ruled that the president’s authority to control the flow of national-security information stems from his role as commander in chief.

Trump has said DOGE will exist outside the government and serve in an advisory rather than a decision-making role. Already, Musk and his co-head, biotech company founder Vivek Ramaswamy, have identified the Pentagon as a potential target for spending cuts.

They likely will need special clearances to view sensitive information as they pick through military spending on classified programs, looking for efficiencies. Trump will be in a position to provide them.

Sharon Terlep contributed to this article.

Write to Joe Palazzolo at Joe.Palazzolo@wsj.com, Emily Glazer at Emily.Glazer@wsj.com and Micah Maidenberg at micah.maidenberg@wsj.com