Elon Musk is going back to work for Trump’s government, this time as a co-leader of Project Meridian, a new Pentagon study on what the military will need to fight the wars of the future. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced the role Wednesday during a speech at Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia.
Musk will share the job with two other co-leads. One is Palmer Luckey, 34, co-founder of the defense technology company Anduril Industries. The other is Newt Gingrich, 83, the former Republican Speaker of the House. Emil Michael, the Pentagon’s chief technology officer, will oversee the group. Hegseth said the team will also bring in people from government, private industry, universities and the policy world.
Hegseth pitched the effort as a way to get outside thinking into the building. “The best forecasters of future conflict do not solely reside inside the Pentagon,” he said. According to the Pentagon, Project Meridian will study battlefields ranging from deep underground to what officials called the cislunar frontier, meaning the stretch of space between Earth and the moon. The goal, as the Pentagon describes it, is to identify the weapons and technology troops will need to dominate in all of those places. Hegseth said the project is not about creating new military strategy or policy. He said its focus is on finding and fielding the actual tools.
The group is expected to turn in its findings in about four months. The final report is supposed to be released to the public, with a classified section, known as an annex, kept out of public view.
Musk and Luckey both run companies that make money selling to the Pentagon. SpaceX holds a long list of military contracts, including building satellite networks for Golden Dome, the missile defense shield Trump wants built over the United States. Anduril builds drones and other defense systems and has won contracts worth billions. With Project Meridian, the two men will now help tell the Pentagon what it should be buying next. When the person advising on a decision also stands to profit from it, that is a conflict of interest, and it is the main question hanging over this appointment. Investors reacted quickly. SpaceX shares rose 1.5% after the news broke.
The timing lines up with where the military is already heading. The Pentagon is planning an Autonomous Warfare Command focused on automated strike systems and cheaper drones. Autonomous weapons are systems that can find and hit targets with little or no human control. That is exactly the kind of technology Musk’s and Luckey’s companies build.
Project Meridian is Musk’s first official government role since he left the Department of Government Efficiency, known as DOGE, in May 2025. At DOGE, he led sweeping job cuts across the federal workforce. Not long after he left, he and Trump had a very public blowup over Trump’s spending bill. The two have since made up, and Musk has been a regular presence at the White House again, just with a lower profile than before.
He has also been spending millions of dollars to help Republicans hold on to Congress in the November midterms. Now the richest man in the world, who is bankrolling one party’s campaign, has an official hand in deciding what weapons the country buys next.