Elon Musk’s presence in the Trump administration has already delivered bizarre and brazen episodes of shamelessly corrupt self promotion. The White House was used as a staging ground for a Tesla sales pitch led by President Trump, and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick went on Fox News recently to tell viewers, “Buy Tesla. It’s unbelievable that this guy’s stock is this cheap. It’ll never be this cheap again.”

The comment would appear to be a blatant violation of federal ethics rules, but it’s also totally unsurprising at this point. And while much of the attention on Musk’s business interests is focused on Tesla, there is another play that could be extremely lucrative for him.

Part of the infrastructure law passed during the Biden administration was a $42 billion grant program –  Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment, or BEAD – to expand internet service, particularly in underserved rural areas. In early March, the Commerce Department said it was seeking to change the terms of the program to potentially increase the participation of Starlink, a division of Musk’s SpaceX company that sells satellite-based broadband internet service.

This change could have enormous implications for Musk. The Wall Street Journal reported that under the existing rules, Starlink would probably get about $4 billion. However, the proposed changes could see Starlink getting between $10 billion and $20 billion.

Critics point to several problems with this shift – satellite internet is expensive and tends not to be as reliable as conventional broadband. And, of course, it would grant more power over internet access to someone who is deeply embedded in the current administration and the Republican party more broadly. The political alignment of these interests is certainly no coincidence. As Vox noted, Trump’s new FCC chair Brendan Carr has been supportive of Musk’s company and even authored a Project 2025 chapter where he “argues against terrestrial broadband expansion and in favor of accelerating the development of satellite technology, like Starlink.”

Evan Feinman, the outgoing Commerce Department official who was in charge of the BEAD program blasted the decision to change the rules to favor Musk: “Stranding all or part of rural America with worse internet so that we can make the world’s richest man even richer is yet another in a long line of betrayals by Washington.”