Ask PolitiFact: Could Elon Musk’s assassination ‘jokes’ compromise security clearance?

Minutes after former President Donald Trump survived an assassination attempt on July 13, entrepreneur and X owner Elon Musk, endorsed Trump’s presidential campaign in an X post. 

On Sept. 15, hours after news broke that Trump had survived yet another apparent attempt on his life, Musk made another attention-grabbing X post. 

Responding to another X user who’d asked, "Why they want to kill Donald Trump?" Musk wrote: "And no one is even trying to assassinate Biden/Kamala 🤔."

(Screenshot from Archive.Today)

Musk deleted the post, but based on quotes and replies on X, he shared it around 9 p.m. ET. The post prompted immediate backlash. 

Some X users shared screenshots showing they had reported Musk’s post for "coded incitement of violence" or for "glorification of violence." Several X users tagged official accounts for the U.S. Secret Service and FBI. 

"This is a dangerous and disturbing provocation," wrote Marc Lamont Hill, a podcast host and professor at the City University of New York. 

Others’ critiques focused on Musk’s role as a government contractor. 

"I had a security clearance for most of my adult life," wrote Tom Nichols, a staff writer at The Atlantic magazine. "If I had said something like this, I would’ve lost it instantly. And yet this guy is still a major government contractor."

Bloomberg News journalist Dana Hull shared Musk’s post around 11:20 p.m., saying it was, "Incredible from the man who has @NASA and national security contracts, and is also deeply worried about his own security." 

Early on Sept. 16, Musk shared two posts characterizing his earlier post as a joke: 

• "Well, one lesson I’ve learned is that just because I say something to a group and they laugh doesn’t mean it’s going to be all that hilarious as a post on 𝕏," he wrote at 2:58 a.m. ET.

• At 3 a.m. ET, Musk added: "Turns out that jokes are WAY less funny if people don’t know the context and the delivery is plain text."

By around noon Sept. 16, the hashtag "#DeportElonMusk" was trending on X, with more than 65,000 posts. Musk is an immigrant in the U.S. from South Africa.

PolitiFact set out to answer the question people posed on X: Could Musk’s assassination post — even if shared in jest — jeopardize his government contracts or potential security clearance? 

Although posting such a comment online might reflect poorly on Musk’s personal judgment —  one criteria considered when security clearance is granted — neither expert we contacted said they expected Musk would lose clearance over the post.

James Andrew Lewis, strategic technologies program director at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington, D.C., think tank, said that although some people might find Musk’s post objectionable, it probably wouldn’t meet the threshold.  

An SF-86 form — a security request form Musk has submitted before — asks primarily about whether a person has advocated for overthrowing the U.S. government; engaged in violence against the U.S. government or belonged to a group that has; or been arrested, he said. 

"So no matter how objectionable his statements have been, he hasn’t (yet) crossed the line," Lewis said.

Musk’s companies, including his commercial spaceflight company SpaceX and its subsidiary Starlink, a satellite internet provider, have about a $4 billion contract with NASA and multimillion -dollar contracts with the Defense Department.

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket with a batch of 53 Starlink internet satellites lifts off from space launch complex 40 at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, April 21, 2022. (AP)

We found multiple news reports since 2019 that say Musk has had security clearance, but his eligibility has been reviewed at least once because of drug use.

In 2019, after Musk smoked marijuana on camera when filming an episode of Joe Rogan’s podcast, the U.S. government reviewed his security clearance, Bloomberg News reported. The report said Musk then had "a secret-level clearance because of his role as founder and CEO" of SpaceX. The results of the adjudication were unknown as of 2022, Bloomberg News reported.

In January, The Wall Street Journal reported on his associates’ concerns about Musk’s illicit drug use. "In his role as CEO and founder of SpaceX, Musk has a security clearance that gives him access to classified information," said the report. Following that report, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre and White House adviser John Kirby declined to answer questions about whether Musk’s drug use might compromise his security clearance.

Defense Department spokesperson Sue Gough said the department does not "comment on any individual’s security clearance or status," citing the Privacy Act of 1974. 

John Cook, law professor at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock’s William H. Bowen School of Law, said, "The federal government uses a series of adjudicative guidelines for whether to deny or withdraw a security clearance."

Gough confirmed this, saying that security adjudications for Defense Department contractors follow established federal investigative standards. 

Adjudication involves examining a "sufficient period" of a person’s life to affirmatively determine that that person qualifies for security clearance based on factors including allegiance to the United States; personal conduct; criminal conduct; financial considerations; drug involvement; and emotional, mental and personality disorders.

Cook, who has written about obtaining national security clearance, said that any effect of Musk’s X post on his security clearance would depend on how his post was interpreted.    

Each case is "judged on its own merits," according to information from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. The Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency said "trained adjudicators" apply its "standard set of guidelines" to evaluate a person’s "loyalty, trustworthiness and reliability" and decide whether that person should have access to classified information. 

The X post could be read as Musk arguing that no one has tried to assassinate Biden or Harris because they aren’t "significant enough to bother attempting to assassinate," Cook said. 

In that case, "his post might not have been in very good taste, but it doesn't seem to rise to the level of something that would question Musk's allegiance to the United States or amount to calling for a senior government official to be assassinated, although the comment might not reflect wonderfully on his personal judgment, especially since he posted it online," Cook said. 

Alternatively, Cook said someone could read the X post as Musk arguing that it was odd someone tried to assassinate Trump "when Biden and Harris are inferior to Trump in Musk’s view," and therefore are potentially "more worthy of being assassinated in Musk’s mind."

That interpretation would be "more problematic" for an agency evaluating Musk’s allegiance to the United States, criminal conduct and personal conduct, Cook said. 

"Musk was very wise to delete his initial X post," he said. 

Cook also said the subsequent posts signaling that Musk was joking might not fully resolve clearance concerns. 

"Taking a substantially stronger approach clearly emphasizing that he was in no way calling for political violence and denouncing political violence in all forms would likely have been much more effective in mitigating the problem," he said. 

PolitiFact Researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report.

RELATED: Trump apparent assassination attempt: What we know about suspect Ryan Routh's party affiliation