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WASHINGTON, DC — An unearthed episode of a podcast hosted by Trump loyalist and FBI-director nominee Kash Patel reveals a pre-existing tension underlying the already-rocky marriage between the MAGAworld populists and the Elon Musk–led Silicon Valley elites who powered Donald’s Trump’s campaign.

Following a chaotic 15-month run working for the first Trump administration, Patel, a staunch Trump loyalist, launched Kash’s Corner, a podcast in which he offered his MAGAfied take on the news alongside his co-host, Epoch Times senior editor Jan Jekielek.

In an episode from October 2022, Patel warned not only of Musk’s financial motives, but of his monopolistic ambitions and hunger for consumer data and defense contracts—the very things that concern the economist-populist wing of Trump world.

Kash Patel testifies during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on his nomination to be FBI Director on January 30, 2025 / Mandel Ngan / AFP via Getty Images

At the time, Musk had recently decided he didn’t want to buy Twitter after all because the social-media platform’s exorbitant cost would force him to take on billions of dollars of debt with no obvious path to profitability. The billionaire and eventual Trump backer later moved forward with the purchase anyway because Twitter sued him when he tried to back out of buying it at the previously agreed upon price.

But Patel didn’t fully buy his rationale. In fact, his diatribe against Musk revealed a deep skepticism over his monopolistic intentions, a cornerstone concern of the economist populists of the MAGAverse.

Patel sounded almost perturbed as he decried Musk’s intentions in attempting to buy the social-media platform. “At the end of the day,” Patel said, “I spent some time thinking about it, and it's money.”

“Even if you're worth $250 billion and you buy a $50 billion company… that's a fifth of your wealth—especially if you need to use liquid capital, which you do in these deals to buy a large portion of it,” Patel said. “So I think he realized that his payment penalty, if he withdrew, was going to be huge, a billion dollars in cash. And I think he realized that he wants to continue building the Elon behemoth, and he put out a statement. It basically says all roads lead to the one app for everything, the X app. Cute from SpaceX founder—I'm not really sure what he means by the one app for everything.”

While Patel played coy, the point was clear: Musk’s acquisitive appetites were alarming.

“It makes me think of the One Ring,” Jekielek said, making a reference to The Lord of the Rings. Patel burst out laughing, briefly cutting off his co-host. “Which doesn’t bode well.”

Patel, along with a faction of the president’s inner circle and a cadre of other Trumpworld figures including Steve Bannon, have been at odds with Musk and the Silicon Valley titans who injected themselves into the president’s orbit over the home stretch of his campaign. “As soon as I can turn Elon Musk from a techno-feudalist to a populist nationalist, we’ll start making real progress,” Bannon recently said.

But Trump has welcomed the Silicon Valley billionaires with open arms, starting on the fundraising circuit and intensifying once Musk publicly endorsed Trump immediately following the July assassination attempt.

“President Trump likes titans,” a Trumpworld operative told Drop Site News when asked what’s stopping other MAGA stars from taking Musk on publicly.

Patel appeared to have put some serious thought into his critique of Musk, raising questions about his dependence on U.S. taxpayer money for his companies as well as the good will of Beijing.

“And that's the other thing,” Patel said after Jekielek’s Lord of the Rings quip. “This guy's already got Starlink, so he's providing internet to the world, supposedly. He's already got Tesla. He's already got the SpaceX program, and the government DOD contracts — which I believe to be the largest portion of his income — and now he'll have Twitter?”

The largest share of Musk’s net worth comes from his Tesla stock shares, which he can borrow against and spend at a far greater level than a traditional salary. At Tesla, his compensation is tied to the company’s valuation and stock price. SpaceX alone has raked in more than $20 billion in federal contracts to date.

“So, what scares me is, like,” Patel continued, “you wanna talk about a monopoly? It is the ultimate monopoly. Is he going to execute the businesses and allow others to compete? On free speech platforms, that is? Is he just going to buy everything up, and then become one ginormous trust—for lack of a better word, a monopoly—which is supposedly illegal under antitrust laws?” MAGA stalwarts such as Vice President J.D. Vance have been vehemently against monopolistic behavior and Trump even ran on a quasi-anti-trust platform.

Patel did not return a request for comment.

In the October 2022 episode of Kash’s Corner, Patel lobbed an even more incendiary suggestion, this one about Musk’s use of consumer data.

“What's he going to do with all the data? That's my concern,” Patel said. “The data collection — he's got a global wifi satellite system, in space, for the world: Starlink. He has Tesla, he has, as I said, the SpaceX program, and now he'll have Twitter.”

Patel found himself asking a version of the question many Musk critics have been asking themselves amid the DOGE takeover, in which the billionaire and his associates have seized control of government databases, frozen payments, accessed federal employee, vendor and taxpayer data in a deluge of changes with questionable authority, at best.

“What do you do with everyone's personal information?” Patel asked.

Then they turned to China, where Musk has substantial business interests, including Tesla’s access to the Chinese electric vehicle market and, now, plans for a data center. (Patel also has a stake in Shein, it turns out.)

“Do you allow the CCP to have backdoors? Like other companies, like TikTok, has done in the past, and sell Americans’ data? Or provide Americans data directly to the CCP for future use against American and American interests? Those are questions that people should be asking, I think, rather than fixating on the ups or downs of Elon buying Twitter,” Patel said.

Musk’s hurricane of activity since arriving in the new administration as a special government employee has major implications for data security. The billionaire’s team of young staffers, part of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), seek access to internal systems and servers containing information including social security numbers and payments, tax returns, and other private data belonging to American citizens.

While Patel’s current views on Musk remain unclear, his analysis of his business interests and motivations appear to speak directly to the current fears surrounding his intentions with DOGE.

At various points, Patel has taken to Truth Social to blast Musk.

In one post from July 2023, Patel accused Musk of being “big tech colluding with our government to censor our elections,” adding: “Your cheap Titter [sic] posts and your Mickey Mouse clown droppings do not absolve you,” as first reported by The Daily Beast. “You are as bad as FBI/DOJ n you and are making millions from the disinformation campaigns. You are a complete and total fake who cares only about $.”

Since Trump nominated Patel to serve as his FBI in late November, he has not appeared to post anything about Musk on his Truth Social account. Overall, he has quieted his online activity during the confirmation process. While the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday delayed consideration of Patel’s nomination, it is expected to move along shortly.

Despite trying to keep a lower profile, Patel’s own financial dealings are now likely to face further scrutiny. Independent journalist Roger Sollenberger posted financial disclosure forms showing Patel is in for a seven-figure payment for eight months of work as a “consultant” for a Cayman Islands-based holding company that is the controlling entity of Shein, the Chinese fast fashion conglomerate. (The exact amount is unclear.)

The stock arrangement went into effect in November, according to the disclosure, months after Patel joined the holding company as a consultant and the same month Trump nominated him for FBI Director. Patel has not publicly disclosed what he did for the holding company.

Several members of the board of directors for that holding company are top-level executives with Shein. According to reporting by independent campaign finance reporter Roger Sollenberger, Patel has no intentions to divest once in office, and began vesting his shares on February 1, two days after his first confirmation hearing.

During inauguration week, Patel posed for photos with other MAGA figures, but notably, not Musk. In one photo, Patel appeared with longtime Trump aide Boris Epshteyn, who reportedly had a public blow up with Musk at Mar-a-Lago during the transition.

Toward the end of Patel’s diatribe against Musk on Kash’s Corner in 2022, he also swore to never join Twitter.

“Never,” he told his co-host. “Truth Social all the way.”

By the time he’d been nominated to serve as Trump’s FBI director, Patel joined X.

Musk congratulated him in a reply to Patel’s first ever tweet: “Congratulations on being nominated to run the @FBI!”

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