Ramaswamy suggests he would want Musk as advisor if he wins election

Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy suggested on Friday that he would like to bring Elon Musk on as an advisor if elected president.

The conservative entrepreneur said at a town hall in Iowa that he would bring in people with “a blank fresh impression” to provide guidance in his administration, including Musk, the billionaire owner of SpaceX, Tesla and X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, NBC News reported.

“I’ve enjoyed getting to know better Elon Musk recently,” Ramaswamy said, according to NBC News. “I expect him to be an interesting adviser of mine because he laid off 75 percent of the employees at Twitter.”

Ramaswamy has previously complimented Musk’s management of the social media company, now called X, saying he would run the government the way that Musk runs the company.

“What he did at Twitter is a good example of what I want to do to the administrative state,” Ramaswamy said in an interview on Fox News last week. “Take out the 75 percent of the dead weight cost, improve the actual experience of what it’s supposed to do.”

“He put an X through Twitter, I’ll put a big X through the administrative state,” he added. “So, that’s where I’m at on common tactics with Elon.”

Musk said in an interview with the BBC earlier this year that he had cut down the company’s workforce from just under 8,000 to about 1,500 since he bought Twitter for $44 billion last fall.

The billionaire — who previously pledged his support for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ White House bid and co-hosted DeSantis’ chaotic campaign launch on Twitter Spaces — said last week that he found Ramaswamy to be a “very promising candidate.”

While DeSantis has struggled to gain traction in the polls, Ramaswamy has seen his support tick upward. A Yahoo News/YouGov poll released Tuesday showed DeSantis in second place in the GOP race with 12 percent support, just four points ahead of Ramaswamy.

In July, the Florida governor sat 20 points ahead of the conservative entrepreneur. However, no candidate has come close to touching former President Trump, who led the pack with 52 percent in Tuesday’s poll.