Elon Musk’s plans to add payment services to X, his social media platform, are looming large over the Trump administration’s push to dismantle the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB),
The tech billionaire has long voiced his hopes of turning X into an “everything app” that would also function as a payment platform, a vision brought one step closer to reality last month after X struck a deal with Visa to launch a digital wallet.
As Musk draws nearer to his goal of making X a payment platform, he has also become a leading force behind the Trump administration’s cost-cutting efforts, which have effectively gutted CFPB. As Musk zeroes in on the agency that oversees digital payment platforms, questions are swirling about how he could personally benefit from rolling back the CFPB’s oversight capabilities.
“It’s important to raise the question of why the new administration is going after a tiny agency that is smaller than some high schools that does very important consumer protection work,” a former CFPB official said.
“The writing has been on the wall for a while in terms of Musk’s animosity for the CFPB — someone who has also been very clear about wanting to turn X into the everything app, the payments app, [and] the CFPB is the primary payments regulator at the federal level.”
In a statement to The Hill, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said “President Trump is the chief executive of the executive branch and reserves the right to fire anyone he wants. As for concerns regarding conflicts of interest between Elon Musk and DOGE, President Trump has stated he will not allow conflicts, and Elon himself has committed to recusing himself from potential conflicts. DOGE has been incredibly transparent about what they’re doing, posting daily updates on X and updating their website.”
Under Biden-era Director Rohit Chopra, the CFPB finalized a rule in November that brought nonbanks offering digital payment apps under its supervision, giving the agency greater authority to oversee companies like Apple, Google, PayPal and Venmo.
It also opened up comments on a proposed rule in early January about implementing the Electronic Fund Transfer Act, which aims to protect consumers against errors and fraud from digital payment mechanisms. The rule sought to apply the law to cryptocurrencies and stablecoins.
President Trump fired Chopra upon taking office, giving Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) room to begin its overhaul of the CFPB. Musk’s DOGE officials directed the agency to freeze all work and fired about a hundred people from the 1,700-person workforce.
While Trump also moved to weaken the consumer watchdog during his first term in office, his allies have gone further this time to sideline the agency that has long been a source of frustration among conservatives.
A federal judge barred the administration from firing CFPB staff en masse or deleting the agency’s data earlier this month amid concerns such steps were imminent. However, government lawyers denied in a court filing Monday that the administration seeks to eliminate the agency.
“It is dramatically more extreme than last time around with Trump. It’s sort of hard to overstate how much different this is. There was a hiring freeze last time and I think everyone would agree they had a different attitude towards enforcement. But this is like 1,000 million times more dramatic than that,” a CFPB employee told The Hill.
Musk has floated the idea of building an “everything app” for years, even before he acquired X, then known as Twitter, for $44 billion in 2022. With the social media platform now under his ownership, he has set his sights on transforming X into an app with functions from messaging to video chats to payments.
X Money, the platform’s payment arm, has come closer to reality in recent months. X has obtained money transmitter licenses in 41 states and struck a deal with Visa in January to launch a digital wallet and peer-to-peer payment services.
Musk’s payment app ambitions come as financial technology has become an increasingly popular space, particularly among tech giants.
A source familiar with the current CFPB teams’ work suggested halting regulations could make Musk more successful than his competitors in the financial technology space.
“There has been this rush of tech into consumer finance and certainly there has been discussion from Musk about how he wants to turn X into a payment company. [Meta CEO Mark] Zuckerberg had tried to do that with Facebook Libra five or six years ago, and backed away from that because of regulations,” the source said.
Facebook, which is owned by Meta, announced its plans to launch a cryptocurrency called Libra in 2019 but ultimately gave up after three years of difficulties getting the project off the ground.
The CFPB in December sued the operator of Zelle and three of its owner banks, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo, for “failing to protect consumers from widespread fraud,” arguing that the big banks “rushed the network to market to compete against growing payment apps such as Venmo and CashApp.”
During the Biden administration, a group of technologists were hired at the CFPB to focus in part on regulating payments systems. They since have been fired by the Trump team, the former CFPB official noted.
“That was a group of people who came to the CFPB, many of whom had significant tech, payments, other private sector experience, and were at the CFPB to help the agency understand what is going on at the intersection of financial services and technology … that entire team has now been wiped out,” the former official said.
While Trump has consistently defended Musk, he has also insisted he would not let there be a conflict of interest with his work on overhauling the federal government.
“I told Elon, any conflicts you can’t have anything to do with that. So, anything to do with possibly even space, we won’t let Elon partake in that,” Trump said last week.
Musk could have avoided the appearance of conflicts if he had filed a financial disclosure report and divested from his businesses as other special government employees have in the past, said Alex Jacquez, chief of policy and advocacy at progressive think tank Groundwork Collaborative.
The White House said earlier this month that Musk plans to file a financial disclosure report, but it would not be made public, according to The New York Times.
“There was hypothetically a way that a rich, successful businessman could, for the good of the country, put his business interests aside and come in and try to make some meaningful and positive change. That does not appear to be what he is doing,” said Jacquez, who served as special assistant to former President Biden for economic development and industrial strategy.
“He is intertwining his business interests with the federal government I think in a way that we have never seen before in the United States,” he added.
Trump’s social media company, Trump Media & Technology Group, could also benefit from fewer regulations after it has moved toward entering the payment space.
Trump Media filed a trademark application in November, weeks after the president won the 2024 election, for Truth.Fi, which is described as “cryptocurrency payment processing” and “credit and cash card payment processing services” in the application. Trump Media officially launched Truth.Fi in January, days after Trump’s inauguration and just before he fired Chopra.
The watchdog group, Accountable.US, argued in a report obtained by The Hill that the CFPB’s January rule on the Electronic Fund Transfer Act would have impacted Trump Media’s Truth.Fi and that both Trump and Musk can dodge scrutiny of their payments systems with a CFPB takeover.
X and Trump Media did not respond to requests for comment.
The president is the largest shareholder of Trump Media, which is the parent company of Truth Social, and he historically works in the real estate space, marking a shift that he is involved in the financial service space through the company.
Trump’s shares in Trump Media were estimated at $3.7 billion as of earlier this month. However, he transferred all of his shares into a revocable trust in December before taking office.
“Together, Trump and Musk seem to be uncaring about any conflict of interest and are just blatantly acting in ways that are out to serve their own private financial interest,” said John Pelissero, director of government ethics at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University.
