What Will Elon Musk and His Tech Bros Do With Your Personal Data?
By Patrick Woodall
Last week, newly confirmed Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent granted billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) team access to all of the federal government payments data. Musk’s team of tech bros are currently upending and disrupting the entire federal government without clear statutory authority or congressional approval. Allowing this wrecking crew access to all the federal data is not about rightsizing government or improving efficiency.
It is about giving the unelected Musk extraordinary power over the functions and mechanism of democratic governance.
In this case, Musk has seized payments data from the Treasury Department’s Bureau of Fiscal Service, which essentially operates the government’s checkbook and disburses and controls all payments from all federal agencies. It relies on a massive pool of data to administer $6 trillion in annual payments to individuals, companies, organizations, local governments, and more.
What will he do with all of this data? Musk contends he needs this data to cut federal spending and root out fraud. But, by seizing this data Musk now has access to the sensitive personal information, like Social Security numbers and bank account numbers, of the millions upon millions of people that receive federal payments including Social Security recipients, Medicare enrollees, federal workers, veterans receiving benefits, people that receive tax refunds, people getting food or heating or rent or other assistance, federal grant recipients, and more. The risks to people’s privacy and security are immense.
And this trove of personal and sensitive data would be very, very valuable to Musk’s business empire that is built on exploiting personal data. The X social media platform generates advertising revenue by targeting user information.
And the company has a “history of missteps” according to USA Today in failing to protect users’ privacy, harvesting personal information, data breaches, and a $150 million fine from the Federal Trade Commission for deceptively asking for personal information that was used for ad targeting. The X privacy policy allows the company to collect information beyond what you post, including biometric, biographical and employment history, payment information, location information and device information, and even share this data to test artificial intelligence models. And it can share this information with third parties, unless you opt out, and can combine it with other data from other sources to create an even more granular profile of you.
That is a lot of personal data and it isn’t always secure. Last summer, Cyber Security News reported that 200 million X records were exposed online including email addresses, names, and account details.
But wait, there’s more. Since Musk acquired X, he has promoted turning the social media platform into a financial services “everything app” including banking services and virtual payment platform that would encompass your “entire financial life.” This business model is not unlike the massive and dominant financial services payment apps in China like WeChat and AliPay that blur the lines between banking and commerce.
Former Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) Director Rohit Chopra, whom Trump fired on Saturday, has warned that these apps have become state surveillance tools that closely monitor the lives of Chinese people. Musk has developed this plan for years, acquiring money service transmitter licenses in multiple states. And, just a week a ago, X signed a deal to partner with Visa to provide peer-to-peer payments for tasks like splitting bills with friends or buying a coffee by connecting to people’s debit cards and bank accounts, which represents the first step in actually creating Musk’s long-sought, Chinese-inspired platform.
And what might give Musk’s newly muscular social media-payments platform a critical edge in a market filled with other powerful banks and financial services companies? Well, access to the federal payment data and sensitive personal information of tens of millions of Americans just might do the trick. Combining that data with what X already extracts and Musk’s Starlink satellite internet usage data would then create a powerful, textured, database of private information on all of us.
The CFPB has been a critical bulwark standing up to techbro data harvesting and fintech flim-flammery, but it is under unrelenting assault by Republicans in Congress and Musk.
The CFPB recently proposed a data broker rule that would prevent companies like X from collecting unnecessary personal financial information and would ban the sale of personal information by data brokers, which receive personal information from companies like X, to protect people from criminals and scammers. And a new CFPB rule would protect people’s privacy, remedy errors, combat fraud, and stop arbitrary or unfair freezes or closures on digital payment platforms like the one X is launching.
Musk has already demanded to “delete CFPB,” and it’s no wonder. CFPB stopped one of his babies, PayPal, from ripping people off and it shuttered another company owned by fellow techbro Marc Andreessen after it repeatedly defrauded customers. Musk has no interest in a CFPB that protects people’s privacy and pocketbooks from X.
Why should the world’s richest person have his hands on government payments authorized by law, and why should he get everyone’s personal data? What will he do with it, who will protect our personal data, and who will make sure he does not take it and use it for the private interests of his businesses?
No one voted for Elon Musk. The Senate did not advise, consent or confirm him to root around in everyone’s personal sensitive information. Trump is bestowing a vast, unprecedented, and still growing amount of power on this billionaire, with no limits and no accountability. The danger and potential for harm for the rest of us is staggering. Where is the Treasury Inspector General? A handful of members of Congress have spoken up, including Senators Ron Wyden Jack Reed, and Elizabeth Warren. It’s time for the rest of Congress — especially Republican leadership that purportedly cares about privacy — to stop this unprecedented and unauthorized data harvesting.
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