GOP Lawmakers Want Elon Musk to Be Speaker of the House

Within 24 hours of centibillionaire Elon Musk using his X platform to upend a congressional funding bill and push the federal government to the brink of a shutdown, three GOP lawmakers are now calling for him to be named Speaker of the House.

On Thursday, Senator Rand Paul, a Kentucky Republican, was the first to float the idea, in a post on Musk’s own X platform. “The Speaker of the House need not be a member of Congress,” Paul wrote. “Nothing would disrupt the swamp more than electing Elon Musk.”

Senator Mike Lee from Utah also endorsed Musk as Speaker, though he added that he would also be happy with Vivek Ramaswamy taking up the role, he told right-wing talk show host Benny Johnson, “Let them choose one of them, I don’t care which one, to be their Speaker,” Lee said. “That would revolutionize everything, it would break up the firm.”

Paul’s suggestion was quickly picked up by another far-right elected official when Marjorie Taylor Greene, a representative from Georgia, wrote on X, “I’d be open to supporting @elonmusk for Speaker of the House. DOGE can only truly be accomplished by reigning [sic] in Congress to enact real government efficiency. The establishment needs to be shattered just like it was yesterday. This could be the way.”

Greene was referring to Musk’s role in killing a bipartisan government funding deal that current Speaker of the House Mike Johnson spent months negotiating with Republicans and Democrats. Despite president-elect Trump and his team not objecting to the deal, according to Politico, Musk began a campaign on X on Wednesday to blow the deal out of the water, posting about it more than 100 times.

Ultimately, Trump and vice president–elect JD Vance issued a lengthy statement on X calling the deal a “betrayal of our country” and urging Republican lawmakers to reject the deal—which they did.

What comes next is unclear. If a deal isn’t reached by Friday, federal workers will stop receiving paychecks, and large parts of the government will temporarily stop operating. But with Democrats saying they have little interest in returning to the negotiating table, and Johnson having already ruled out raising the debt ceiling, which Trump is demanding, there is no obvious path to a viable bill, much less one Musk approves of.

Following what looks to be the failure of the bill, Democratic senator Jeff Merkley wrote on X, “Speaker Johnson: Maybe it’s easier to just hand your gavel over to Musk.”

Johnson and Trump’s transition team did not respond to requests for comment. Musk did not respond to a request for comment. On X, Musk responded to one post referencing Paul and Greene’s suggestion and Democratic criticism of his influence, writing, “They are just upset that, for once in a long while, their attempt to pillage taxpayers failed!”

As Paul wrote, there is no explicit Constitutional requirement for the Speaker of the House to be an elected member of Congress, though every one in US history has been. Just over a year ago, Trump’s supporters floated the idea that he could be installed as Speaker after Kevin McCarthy, a California Republican, was ousted from the position.

Musk’s ascent within American politics has been rapid, from donating (along with his PAC) hundreds of millions of dollars to Trump in the final months of the campaign to being installed as cochair of the nonexistent “Department of Government Efficiency,” an advisory group tasked with coming up with proposals to slash government spending and, presumably, fire huge numbers of federal employees.

The scale of his influence over Trump and his policies is unclear, but it’s obvious that many lawmakers believe he holds a significant amount of sway. On Wednesday, Senator Marsha Blackburn from Tennessee posted on X about the Kids Online Safety Act. Rather than tagging Johnson, she tagged Musk.

Becoming Speaker of the House would put Musk in a position of actual power, but one of the key roles of the position—being second in line for the presidency—would presumably be stripped from him given that Musk, a US citizen since 2002, is not a natural-born US citizen and is therefore unable to serve as president.