On a Saturday morning in December 2022, Elon Musk summoned finance executives at Twitter, which he had bought six weeks earlier, to a conference call. Then he drilled into a spreadsheet that contained the social media company’s expenditures.

Will the mercurial tech mogul put his thumb on the scale to help his own companies, or will he push for a broader deregulatory agenda?

After spending more than a hundred million dollars to help Trump get elected, Musk stands to earn a lot more. On Wednesday, during a gathering at Mar-a-Lago attended by some of Donald Trump ’s closest associates,