Elon Musk’s social media posts helped The New York Times win its fight to secure a list detailing the billionaire’s top-secret security clearances after a US agency tried to block the disclosures by claiming that Musk had a right to privacy.
In an opinion issued Wednesday, US District Judge Denise Cote said that Musk publicly discussing his security clearances on X—as well as his drug use and foreign contacts—tipped the balance so that the public’s substantial interest in the list the NYT sought clearly outweighed “any privacy interest” Musk may have.
“To the extent Musk has a privacy interest in the fact that he holds a security clearance, he has waived it,” Cote wrote. Meanwhile, “the public has an interest in knowing whether the leader of SpaceX and Starlink holds the appropriate security clearances,” as those companies “continue to provide the federal government with critical national security services and handle sensitive government information.”
