Elon Musk surfaced once more in a round of phone calls US President-elect Donald Trump is making with world leaders, driving home the billionaire’s outsized influence in the next administration.
Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic said the world’s richest man was present during his phone call with Trump on Sunday. The Balkan leader stressed that he was among the “first 10 or 15 world leaders” to speak to Trump following his Nov 5 election victory, calling it a “great honour.”
The exchange took place after Musk, who runs SpaceX and Tesla Inc., sat in on a call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy last week, in a display of the status of an executive who threw his wealth and influence behind Trump’s campaign. This week Argentine President Javier Milei will make his way to Mar-a-Lago to see Trump — and likely
Musk — at his resort in Florida as leaders far and wide scramble to get close to the winner of the US election.
It is unusual for an incoming administration to be giving a private citizen access to calls with world leaders given national security risks and the confidential nature of those talks. In the case of Vucic, the lines were even further blurred by the presence of Chris Ruddy, chief executive officer of the Newsmax TV network, a Trump-supporting cable news channel.
“President Trump knows Serbia very well, and Elon Musk, who was with him, as well as Chris Ruddy, also know it particularly well, maybe even the best,” Vucic told reporters at the COP29 climate talks in Azerbaijan. The conversations, he added, were partly about sports.
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It was unclear what in particular drew Musk and Ruddy to an exchange with a leader in the western Balkans. Vucic, who has maintained a careful balancing act as he maintains ties to both the Kremlin and the West, spoke by phone with Russian President Vladimir Putin early last month — and told Bloomberg in an interview that the next US president must push through a truce between Moscow and Kyiv.
Serbia has also emerged as a potentially important player in a supply chain of critical raw materials for electric-vehicle production with a plan to develop Europe’s biggest lithium mine.
Musk’s participation last week in the call with Zelenskiy hadn’t been planned in advance — and Trump put the phone on speaker as Musk sat in the room, according to a person familiar with the discussion.
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Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr, took the Republican campaign to the Balkan region in September, reinforcing the former president’s aim to end Russia’s war in Ukraine. A second Trump presidency would be a “great benefit” to eastern Europe, Trump Jr. told a group of business leaders in the Serbian capital Belgrade.
The president-elect’s family and allies have other ties to the region. Son-in-law Jared Kushner is investing in luxury hotels in Serbia and Albania, while his former special envoy to the region, Richard Grenell — who was a contender for Trump’s secretary of state — maintained ties with Balkan governments after the former president left office in 2021.
