Lutnick currently serves as chair of Trump’s White House transition team. His most notable moment in recent memory was his declaration on CNN that Robert F Kennedy Jr, the vaccine conspiracist and Covid lockdown critic, would not be Trump’s pick for head of Health and Human Services. Trump nominated Kennedy to that very post last week.

Mr. Musk dug into his companies’ budgets, preferring to cut too much rather than too little and to deal with the fallout later. Under Donald Trump, he is set to apply those tactics to the U.S. government.