{"id":71860,"date":"2025-05-03T18:49:08","date_gmt":"2025-05-03T18:49:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/71860\/"},"modified":"2025-05-03T18:49:08","modified_gmt":"2025-05-03T18:49:08","slug":"elon-musk-and-doges-antonio-gracias-cash-in-on-americans-retirement","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/71860\/","title":{"rendered":"Elon Musk and DOGE\u2019s Antonio Gracias Cash In on Americans\u2019 Retirement"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tIn the lead up to the April 1<\/a> election for the Wisconsin state Supreme Court, a little-known private equity executive by the name of Antonio Gracias joined<\/a> Tesla billionaire Elon Musk<\/a> on stage as the latter launched into a tirade clearly inspired by the white supremacist Great Replacement Theory<\/a> \u2014 the discredited canard that the Biden administration was letting in millions of \u201cillegals\u201d to engage in mass voter fraud.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tOn the dais, Gracias described how his foray into Social Security<\/a> had revealed something already widely known to immigration policymakers: that the Biden administration had substantially expanded the Temporary Protected Status program, allowing millions of immigrants<\/a> to enter and work in the country legally. These noncitizens were given Social Security numbers, as is completely standard \u2014 in fact, the process was automated during Trump\u2019s first term<\/a> \u2014 but Gracias and Musk, the world\u2019s richest man, treated it like a scandal.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWe started at the top of the system mapping the whole system of Social Security to understand where the fraud was \u2014 this is what jumped out at us,\u201d Gracias said. \u201cWhen we saw these numbers, we asked \u2018What is this?\u2019 In \u201821, you see 270,000 people, it goes all the way to 2.1 million in \u201824. These are noncitizens that are getting Social Security numbers. \u2026 This literally blew us away. We went there to find fraud, and we found this by accident.\u201d Noting that his parents and siblings, like Musk, are immigrants, Gracias added, \u201cI\u2019m pro-legal immigration \u2014 this is about America and the future of America.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThe crowd of conservatives gasped as the billionaires made it sound as if they and their team at Trump\u2019s so-called Department of Government Efficiency had finally found proof of the waste, fraud, and abuse in the Social Security Administration that Musk has repeatedly talked about \u2014 examples that might help justify the massive upheaval that DOGE<\/a> has created within the agency that manages America\u2019s core retirement program.<\/p>\n

\t\tEditor\u2019s picks<\/p>\n

\n\tUnder their watch, DOGE has moved to fire thousands<\/a> of SSA workers, shutter<\/a> dozens of field offices, and implement sweeping changes that are expected to make it more difficult for Social Security recipients to get their payments on time, if at all. The administration has reportedly declared<\/a> millions of people dead within the Social Security program, making live people fight for their payments, and has started deliberately marking<\/a> some immigrants as deceased. (A White House spokesperson says SSA\u2019s \u201cdeath data\u201d is \u201cbeing reviewed by three separate teams,\u201d and that the immigrants targeted were either \u201con the terrorist watch list\u201d or have \u201cFBI criminal records.\u201d) Meanwhile, Social Security beneficiaries may have to wait until November<\/a> to receive the higher payments they were promised in a law passed last year.<\/p>\n

\n\tDespite all of Musk and Gracias\u2019 rhetoric about rooting out waste, fraud, and abuse in Social Security, scant attention has been paid to how the pair has become phenomenally wealthy with support from Americans\u2019 retirement funds.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tIt\u2019s well-known that Musk\u2019s space company, SpaceX, has long cashed in on federal contracts \u2014 a trend turbocharged by Trump\u2019s administration. Gracias, for his part, has relied on significant investments from public retirement systems to fund his firm\u2019s deals. In the past decade, Gracias\u2019 private equity firm, Valor Equity Partners, has received at least $1.7 billion in investment commitments from state and local pension funds \u2014 which manage the retirement savings of unionized teachers, firefighters, social workers, bus drivers, and cops \u2014 according to a Rolling Stone review of public documents.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tMuch of this money has come from Democratic states and locales. For its most recent fund, Valor received $800 million in investment commitments from a range of state and local pension funds. Investors include the California Public Employees\u2019 Retirement System; the California State Teachers\u2019 Retirement System; the Illinois Municipal Retirement Fund; the New York State Teachers\u2019 Retirement System; a range of New York City pension funds; the Philadelphia Board of Pensions and Retirement; and the Hartford Municipal Employees Retirement Fund in Connecticut.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\t\tRelated Content<\/p>\n

\n\tValor disclosed<\/a> in a press release last August that this same fund has invested in Musk\u2019s SpaceX and his artificial intelligence company xAI. Musk recently used xAI to purchase his social media platform X (formerly Twitter) at a valuation of $33 billion<\/a>, a 25-percent haircut from the $44 billion he spent to buy Twitter. (The platform\u2019s ad revenues have cratered<\/a> under Musk\u2019s stewardship.)<\/p>\n

\n\tWith a typical management fee of two percent<\/a>, Gracias\u2019 firm stands to accumulate tens of millions of dollars annually from the public funds no matter how its investments perform. While Gracias complains about 1.3 million<\/a> immigrants being on Medicaid \u2014 numbers that have not been independently verified by Rolling Stone, but would mean these immigrants are getting access to preventive care and saving hospitals money on emergency room expenses \u2014 Gracias himself is accruing large profits from the management fees that his firm charges government retirement systems.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tValor and DOGE did not respond to Rolling Stone\u2019s requests for comment.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tA 54-year-old University of Chicago Law School alum who has been associated with Musk since the PayPal days<\/a>, Gracias has played a key role in helping prop up Musk\u2019s embattled<\/a> yet sprawling<\/a> business empire. He\u2019s a longtime investor in Musk\u2019s companies, a significant Tesla shareholder, and former Tesla board member.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tGracias\u2019 longstanding friendship and business dealings with Musk have been lucrative for both men. Musk is worth an estimated $386 billion<\/a>, in large part due to his Tesla holdings. Gracias has a net worth of $2.2 billion<\/a>, much of it tied to his holdings of Tesla stock. Gracias lent Musk $1 million<\/a> early in Musk\u2019s ownership of Tesla, and his firm has invested in nearly every Musk company, including SpaceX.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe Trump administration has been good to them. SpaceX, which has received billions of dollars from government contracts, has raked in billions more<\/a> under the Trump administration. Agencies across the federal government are increasingly using Starlink, SpaceX\u2019s satellite internet business.<\/p>\n

\n\tSpaceX and defense contractor Anduril, another company that Gracias\u2019 firm has invested in, are the frontrunners<\/a> to build Trump\u2019s proposed \u201cGolden Dome\u201d missile shield, a proposal that experts estimate will cost hundreds of billions<\/a> of dollars. In late April, the Wall Street<\/a> Journal reported<\/a> on Gracias\u2019 lucrative side hustle \u2014 selling stakes in Musk\u2019s private companies like SpaceX.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tA White House spokesperson says, \u201cAs for concerns regarding conflicts of interest between Elon Musk and DOGE, President Trump has stated he will not allow conflicts, and Elon himself has committed to recusing himself from potential conflicts.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tAs Trump and Musk have run roughshod<\/a> over the law to pursue drastic cuts<\/a> of the federal government through DOGE, they have been supported by an eclectic cast of characters. While 19-year olds<\/a> or those with openly racist<\/a> proclivities or nicknames like \u201cBig Balls\u201d get the bulk of media attention, arguably nobody has been more important to implementing DOGE\u2019s slash-and-burn agenda than Gracias.<\/p>\n

\n\tWith his entry into the heights of Washington policymaking, Gracias, like Musk, has brought an overall mentality to the Trump administration with well-defined origins in private equity.<\/p>\n

\n\tCore to the history of private equity is a conception that government is a vehicle for private profit, and that the point of business is to extract as much cash as possible from targets, no matter the impact. Private equity started in earnest thanks to a rule change<\/a> by Jimmy Carter in 1979 that allowed private equity to fundraise from private sector pension funds. (Public pension cash began to flow shortly thereafter.) But with the critical benefits of millions of Americans at issue<\/a>, along with basic principles like the rule of law<\/a> and a government that functions, the stakes couldn\u2019t be higher.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIt does seem like Musk and DOGE are applying private equity tactics to the government,\u201d says Brendan Ballou, a former attorney at the Department of Justice who wrote the 2023 book<\/a> Plunder: Private Equity\u2019s Plan to Pillage America. As an example, Ballou notes, \u201cThey\u2019re exploring sale leasebacks to sell underlying government property and lease it back to itself,\u201d a hallmark of the private equity model. \u201cThey\u2019re pursuing the same type of cost-cutting techniques that private equity firms pursue when they take over a company, which end up costing you vastly more money in the long run. Slashing the IRS might save you money for one year, but it\u2019s devastating in the future. It\u2019s almost comical how similar it is to the takeover of a company by a private equity firm, what they are doing to the government.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tAs Gracias is primed to reap a windfall from the Golden (no, not Teapot<\/a>) Dome, the DOGE-led Social Security cuts he has helped to oversee could send the program cratering down the road to privatization \u2014 another classic hobbyhorse<\/a> of a Wall Street eager to profit from the nearly $3 trillion in the Social Security Trust Fund that is currently invested in U.S. Treasuries. (BlackRock, whose CEO Larry Fink recently resuscitated<\/a> the long-discredited<\/a> idea of investing part of Social Security in Wall Street-controlled private accounts, did Musk a massive favor<\/a> last year when the financial firm voted its investors\u2019 proxies in favor of Musk\u2019s record-setting<\/a> $46 billion Tesla pay package.)\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tGracias began working with the Social Security Administration in early February<\/a>. By the end of the month, the SSA had announced<\/a> its intentions to cut 7,000 positions out of the agency\u2019s 57,000-person workforce. Dozens of Social Security offices are expected to close<\/a>, while DOGE pushes major technological changes that could make more people need to visit those offices.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tA White House spokesperson says SSA has only lost 2,000 workers so far, with most departing voluntarily, and adds that \u201cthe agency has not permanently closed or announced the permanent closure of any local field office.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cPresident Trump established the Department of Government Efficiency to modernize government operations and eliminate waste, fraud and abuse,\u201d the spokesperson continues. \u201cAt the Social Security Administration, the DOGE team has delivered \u2014 upgrading technology systems, implementing anti-fraud tools, improving the accuracy of death records, and stopping illegal aliens from collecting benefits. President Trump remains committed to always protecting Social Security.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tAdditionally, Gracias has reportedly led a DOGE task force working with the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Health and Human Services to integrate sensitive personal data from Social Security, with the apparent goal of aiding Trump\u2019s deportation dragnet<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tSpeaking about DOGE\u2019s efforts in the Social Security Administration, former SSA Commissioner Martin O\u2019Malley said<\/a> in March, \u201cMost of the actions necessary to create a total system collapse of the Social Security Administration have been taken.\u201d In late April, the Trump SSA pledged that they would seek to convert large swaths of SSA employees to \u201cSchedule F,\u201d which would effectively eliminate<\/a> longstanding civil service protections and serve to speed up firings at the agency.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tDOGE appears to have been able to circumvent a federal judge\u2019s March ruling<\/a> barring its access to SSA data with Trump appointing one of DOGE\u2019s own as chief information officer of the Social Security Administration. That role is currently being held by Scott Coulter<\/a>, who used to work for private equity giant Blackstone and Lone Pine Capital, a hedge fund, and has worked as a DOGE apparatchik<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tAll of this is out of the private equity playbook, says Samir Sonti, a professor at the Murphy Institute at the City University of New York.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cPrivate equity has profited immensely in recent decades off of asset stripping \u2014 using public resources to plunder businesses and communities, leaving behind carcasses of enterprises in many cases,\u201d he says. \u201cFundamentally, private equity is really about devastating the public good for private gain. DOGE is executing something very similar at the federal level. But they\u2019re gutting not just a specific enterprise or community but the entire federal government, to advance a longer-term desire among corporate interests in this country to free themselves from any public or social oversight. In many ways, what we\u2019re seeing with DOGE is the private equity asset stripping model [taken] to its logical conclusion.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tPrivate equity firms in the U.S. \u2014 anchored by big names Blackstone, Apollo, Carlyle, and KKR \u2014 manage over $3.1 trillion<\/a> in assets, and control outright major firms<\/a> like Medline<\/a>, the largest medical supply firm in the U.S., and Allied Universal<\/a>, the world\u2019s largest<\/a> private security firm. Companies owned outright by private equity firms employ over 12 million people in the U.S., according to research<\/a> by the Private Equity Stakeholder Project.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tEmployees of private equity firms spent $236 million<\/a> on campaign contributions in the 2024 election.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThe American Investment Council, a lobbying group for private equity, has estimated<\/a> that about half of private equity\u2019s capital that is invested in America comes from U.S. public pension funds.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tPrivate equity is distinguished by its lack of regulation, limited transparency, high fees, and vulnerability to misconduct. A leaked 2020 report<\/a> from the FBI found that private equity firms, along with their closely related siblings<\/a> in asset management, hedge funds, are widely used to conduct illicit money laundering operations.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cPublic pension funds are one of the biggest sources of capital for private equity firms,\u201d says Oscar Vald\u00e9s Viera, who analyzes private equity at Americans for Financial Reform. \u201cWorkers indirectly fund private equity\u2019s predatory practices through their pension funds. The private equity billionaires benefit from tax loopholes and giveaways that the rest of us do not get,\u201d he says, pointing out the carried interest tax deduction, which allows private equity managers to get much of their income taxed at the lower long-term capital gains tax rate than the ordinary income tax rate. \u201cThey charge a lot of fees, like management fees, professional fees, director and officer fees, accounting fees, transfer agent fees, and most of these fees are coming directly from pension funds and similar investors,\u201d he says. \u201cIt\u2019s just insane the amount of fees that they charge from these pension funds.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tReflecting the broad secrecy of his industry, much of what Gracias is doing at DOGE remains closed off to the public eye. On April 21, the American Civil Liberties Union sued<\/a> the Social Security Administration for failing to respond to Freedom of Information Act requests related to its handling of the personal data of millions of Americans, stating: \u201cThe American people have an urgent need to know if their private financial, medical, and personal records are being illegally accessed, analyzed, or weaponized by Trump\u2019s unaccountable team of unvetted outsiders.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\t\tTrending Stories<\/p>\n

\n\tBrett Christophers, a professor at Sweden\u2019s Uppsala University who has studied asset management, tells Rolling Stone that the actions of DOGE clearly resemble foundational principles of the private equity industry. <\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWhen private equity investors go into operating companies, the most consistent theme across all their investments is cost cutting as a way in theory to maximize their investment and make companies lean and more valuable to other potential investors,\u201d he says. \u201cIt sounds like what\u2019s going on with DOGE is that Musk and the people working with him are trying to treat the government in the same way.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In the lead up to the April 1 election for the Wisconsin state Supreme Court, a little-known private…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":71861,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3093],"tags":[51,14306,32,295,474,17767,2499,2580,16,15,2413],"class_list":{"0":"post-71860","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-personal-finance","8":"tag-business","9":"tag-doge","10":"tag-donald-trump","11":"tag-elon-musk","12":"tag-finance","13":"tag-immigrants","14":"tag-personal-finance","15":"tag-social-security","16":"tag-uk","17":"tag-united-kingdom","18":"tag-wall-street"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114445402954297235","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71860","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=71860"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71860\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/71861"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=71860"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=71860"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=71860"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}