Can Elon Musk Become Speaker of the House?

During a December fight over a government funding bill, several Republican members of Congress suggested that Elon Musk, a close Trump ally and billionaire businessman who was recently named co-director of the new Department for Government Efficiency (DOGE), should be elected as Speaker of the House. While the suggestion seemed bizarre to some, given that Musk has never held elected office and is not a member of the House, the Constitution does not expressly prohibit it.

What does the Constitution say about the position of speaker?

The Speaker of the House is traditionally elected by an internal vote of the party holding the majority in the chamber at the beginning of each new Congress. But there’s a “unique footnote” that most Americans probably aren’t aware of, which is that “the job candidate does not have to be a member of the House of Representatives,” said National Center of the Constitution. Even so, every speaker in American history has been one.

Republicans have a very recent history of flirting with the idea of choosing a non-member as speaker. In January 2023, when needed 15 ballots for Republicans to pick Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) as speaker, there was a brief effort to give former President Donald Trump the gavel. Trump, who was not a member of the House, received a vote for speaker from Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) during McCarthy’s tumultuous bid for the post. Trump, who has not publicly sought the position, reportedly believed Republicans “would have overwhelmingly voted for him” if the caucus had been “aware of his interest in the position,” Jonathan Karl said at ABC News.

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In October 2023, Trump was once again the subject of speculation after McCarthy was banished as a speaker through a backbencher revolt. Trump ‘will make the House great again,’ says Rep. Troy Nehls (R-Texas) to reporterspromising to nominate the former president for speaker. Leading Republicans, especially those who have looked at the position themselves, have never warmed to the idea, in part because Trump has already launched his 2024 bid for the presidency. The episode was a “sober reminder of the extent to which elected Republicans have sacrificed their own judgment to the cult of Trumpism,” John Nichols said at nation.

The idea to do Elon Muskthe world’s richest man, the speaker of the House comes from another round of GOP difficulties navigating the party’s narrow majority. Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) drafted a bipartisan compromise to fund the government until after Trump’s inauguration in January 2025 for a second term, but Musk appeared to blow up the deal with a torrent of X posts that were “filled with misinformation and false claims that revealed his lack of understanding of the elements of basis of the budget, “said Charles Sykes at Atlantic.

Trump himself then JOINED the chorus of the people calling for House Republicans rejected the compromise and demanded that Johnson include a two-year suspension the debt ceiling in any budget legislation. Johnson did so, but the new bill failed due to a revolt by fiscal conservatives in the House, who insisted on deep spending cuts in exchange for raising the debt ceiling again. As Republicans faced a self-inflicted budget impasse, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) was the first elected Republican to propose that Musk be the speaker. “Nothing would disrupt the swamp more than the election of Elon Musk,” Paul said in a Dec. 19 statement. post on Musk’s X social media platform. “The Constitution must be destroyed just as it was yesterday,” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) said as she retweeted Paul’s idea at X. Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), too APPROVED the idea. Johnson and his allies eventually it passed a continuing resolution that passed the Senate and funded the government until March 14, 2025, which ended speculation about Musk serving as speaker.