A non-public fairness investor who’s certainly one of Elon Musk’s closest confidants has taken a brand new position within the Social Safety Administration, a improvement that could possibly be politically flamable given this system’s recognition with voters and Mr. Musk’s obvious intent to make main adjustments on the company.
The investor, Antonio Gracias, who has served on the boards of Mr. Musk’s companies Tesla and SpaceX, has began a job on the administration as a part of the Musk-led cost-cutting effort referred to as the Division of Authorities Effectivity, in response to paperwork seen by The New York Occasions and two folks knowledgeable about his appointment.
Of the greater than 50 folks who’ve joined Mr. Musk in Washington, virtually none have as intensive a historical past with him as Mr. Gracias. The boys met round 20 years in the past and in that point, Mr. Gracias has change into certainly one of Mr. Musk’s most trusted advisers.
The involvement of such an in depth ally with the Social Safety Administration means that Mr. Musk has made overhauling the company a precedence; in current weeks, the tech billionaire has usually talked about supposed fraud contained in the system. Two weeks in the past, he referred to Social Safety as “the most important Ponzi scheme of all time,” and this week he claimed that fraud in this system and different main entitlement spending was “the large one to remove.”
Republicans have lengthy eyed privatization or cuts to Social Safety, however have averted following via out of concern of political blowback. Whilst prime Republicans argue that they merely wish to strengthen this system’s funds, Democrats have spied a political alternative in Mr. Musk’s potential shake-up on the company.
9 DOGE members have arrived on the Social Safety Administration in current days. They embody Mr. Gracias and two different males who work at his funding agency, Valor Fairness Companions — Jon Koval, a vp on the funding workforce, and Payton Rehling, a knowledge engineer — in response to paperwork seen by The Occasions.
In early February, whereas talking with allies of Mr. Musk on an episode of the podcast “All-In,” Mr. Gracias minimized his position with the cost-cutting activity power. “I’m in-and-out a little bit bit and attempting to assist the place I can, however I’m not there full time,” he mentioned.
However he mentioned that he and his workforce at Valor had been scrutinizing audits of the Social Safety Administration and that he had been alarmed by the dimensions of its so-called belief funds, authorities accounts created to ensure People obtain their full advantages. Mr. Gracias mentioned he believed this confirmed there have been “materials weaknesses” within the system.
Some Republicans have prompt that the federal government may repurpose money from the Social Safety belief funds, which grew over many years as People paid extra taxes into this system than they took out in advantages. However now, as People now take out extra in advantages than they pay in taxes, Social Safety has been depleting the belief funds — which encompass bonds earmarked for funding advantages. In brief, the funds haven’t any such money obtainable to repurpose.
The exact contours of Mr. Gracias’s position, which was earlier reported by Bloomberg Information, should not identified. Neither Mr. Gracias nor the Social Safety Administration responded to requests for remark.
Mr. Gracias met Mr. Musk via David Sacks, a enterprise capitalist who’s now himself a prime Trump administration official. He was an early believer in Tesla, and personally lent Mr. Musk $1 million within the firm’s early days, in response to testimony from Mr. Gracias in a current court docket case. The boys and their households have vacationed collectively within the Bahamas and gone snowboarding in Jackson Gap, Wyo.
As Mr. Musk’s profession and wealth flourished, so did that of Mr. Gracias, who has tied his private model to the world-famous entrepreneur. Valor has invested in at the very least 5 of Mr. Musk’s firms. In 2022 when Mr. Musk purchased the social media platform X, then referred to as Twitter, for $44 billion, he tapped Mr. Gracias to handle the funds of the transaction.
Mr. Gracias, who moved to Miami from Chicago in 2021, hung out at Donald J. Trump’s non-public Mar-a-Lago membership in the course of the presidential transition and was certainly one of a number of of Mr. Musk’s associates who interviewed personnel in search of to hitch the Trump administration. Mr. Gracias mentioned on “All-In” that he and Mr. Musk had marveled on the authorities’s supposed incapacity to trace its spending.
“I used to be at Mar-a-Lago with Elon attempting to trace via: How does the cash really stream?” he mentioned. “Nobody may inform us the way it really flows. The place is it going out? Folks didn’t know.”
Mr. Gracias, who graduated from Georgetown’s overseas service faculty, was within the nation’s capital in January to accompany Mr. Musk to a dinner on the elite Alfalfa Membership, the place he and Mr. Musk mingled with members of the political institution.
Mr. Gracias has undergone a political reinvention. He attended the September 2016 presidential debate as a supporter of Hillary Clinton, and gave a whole lot of hundreds of {dollars} to Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s marketing campaign in 2020. Now, he largely backs Republicans: He gave hundreds of thousands to David McCormick throughout his 2022 and 2024 Senate runs in Pennsylvania and donated $1 million to Mr. Musk’s pro-Trump tremendous PAC.
At occasions, Mr. Gracias’s language has been bolder than Mr. Musk’s. Within the February podcast episode, he mentioned Mr. Musk’s declaration that 10 % of the federal price range was most likely fraud “could be low.” He has additionally claimed that the nation was flirting with changing into a “kleptocracy” and a “Latin American-style autocracy.”
He has described himself as a loyal supporter of the billionaire, regardless of the pursuit. “I’m 100% with you Elon,” Mr. Gracias wrote to Mr. Musk in a March 2022 textual content message as he waged his battle to purchase Twitter, as revealed in authorized filings.
Andrew Duehren contributed reporting.
