Elon Musk Finds Time to Attend a Ceremony for Space Force

Elon Musk, who’s been busy taking over Twitter Inc., took a break Wednesday to attend a Pentagon ceremony.

The event was a change-of-command ceremony at Andrews Air Force Base outside of Washington. It marked the retirement of General John Raymond, the first head of US Space Force, who singled out Musk by name for showing up.

It reflects one of the billionaire’s other interests as co-founder and chief executive of Space Exploration Technologies Corp. which he turned into a major contractor for the Defense Department’s national security satellite launches.

Raymond invited Musk and other executives of companies involved in space programs to the event, according to a Pentagon official, and General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, also name-checked Musk in his remarks.

“What he symbolizes, in reality, is the combination of the civil and military cooperation and teamwork that makes the United States the most powerful country in space,” Milley said during the ceremony.

Musk won a substantial share of the Pentagon’s space launches after campaigning to break into what he called a monopoly held previously by a joint venture of defense giants Boeing Co. and Lockheed Martin Corp. On Tuesday, SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket launched from Kennedy Space Center carrying classified payloads for Space Force. It was the first Falcon Heavy flight after a three-year hiatus and marked the first use of the rocket on the U.S.’s most sensitive National Security Space Launch missions.

The SpaceX launch and Musk’s attendance at the Defense Department ceremony highlighted the contradictory role he’s come to play as both a Pentagon contractor and a critic of the US government. He once compared President Joe Biden to a damp sock puppet “in human form,” and last month he threatened to cut financial support for SpaceX’s Starlink satellite Internet service in Ukraine -- a plan he later reversed.

The White House hasn’t yet decided if it would pay $8 a month that Musk has said he’ll require to maintain blue-check verification of Twitter accounts, a spokesperson said, while sidestepping a question about Musk’s purchase of the platform.

“I don’t believe it’s an issue that made it to the president’s desk yet, not a conversation that the president is aware of,” Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Wednesday. “That’s something for the president that we need to talk to the president about.”