A private equity investor who is one of Elon Musk’s closest confidants has taken a new role in the Social Security Administration, a development that could be politically combustible given the program’s popularity with voters and Mr. Musk’s apparent intent to make major changes at the agency.
The investor, Antonio Gracias, who has served on the boards of Mr. Musk’s businesses Tesla and SpaceX, has started a job at the administration as part of the Musk-led cost-cutting effort known as the Department of Government Efficiency, according to documents seen by The New York Times and two people informed about his appointment.
Of the more than 50 people who have joined Mr. Musk in Washington, almost none have as extensive a history with him as Mr. Gracias. The men met around two decades ago and in that time, Mr. Gracias has become one of Mr. Musk’s most trusted advisers.
The involvement of such a close ally with the Social Security Administration suggests that Mr. Musk has made overhauling the agency a priority; in recent weeks, the tech billionaire has regularly talked about supposed fraud inside the system. Two weeks ago, he referred to Social Security as “the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time,” and this week he claimed that fraud in the program and other major entitlement spending was “the big one to eliminate.”
Republicans have long eyed privatization or cuts to Social Security, but have avoided following through out of fear of political blowback. Even as top Republicans argue that they simply want to strengthen the program’s finances, Democrats have spied a political opportunity in Mr. Musk’s potential shake-up at the agency.
Nine DOGE members have arrived at the Social Security Administration in recent days. They include Mr. Gracias and two other men who work at his investment firm, Valor Equity Partners — Jon Koval, a vice president on the investment team, and Payton Rehling, a data engineer — according to documents seen by The Times.
In early February, while speaking with allies of Mr. Musk on an episode of the podcast “All-In,” Mr. Gracias minimized his role with the cost-cutting task force. “I’m in-and-out a little bit and trying to help where I can, but I’m not there full time,” he said.
The precise contours of Mr. Gracias’s role, which was earlier reported by Bloomberg News, are not known. Neither Mr. Gracias nor the Social Security Administration responded to requests for comment.
Mr. Gracias met Mr. Musk through David Sacks, a venture capitalist who is now himself a top Trump administration official. He was an early believer in Tesla, and personally lent Mr. Musk $1 million in the company’s early days, according to testimony from Mr. Gracias in a recent court case. The men and their families have vacationed together in the Bahamas and gone skiing in Jackson Hole, Wyo.
As Mr. Musk’s career and wealth flourished, so did that of Mr. Gracias, who has tied his personal brand to the world-famous entrepreneur. Valor has invested in at least five of Mr. Musk’s companies. In 2022 when Mr. Musk bought the social media platform X, then known as Twitter, for $44 billion, he tapped Mr. Gracias to manage the finances of the transaction.
Mr. Gracias, who moved to Miami from Chicago in 2021, spent time at Donald J. Trump’s private Mar-a-Lago club during the presidential transition and was one of several of Mr. Musk’s friends who interviewed personnel seeking to join the Trump administration. Mr. Gracias said on “All-In” that he and Mr. Musk had marveled at the government’s supposed inability to track its spending.
“I was at Mar-a-Lago with Elon trying to track through: How does the money actually flow?” he said. “No one could tell us how it actually flows. Where is it going out? People didn’t know.”
Mr. Gracias, who graduated from Georgetown’s foreign service school, was in the nation’s capital in January to accompany Mr. Musk to a dinner at the elite Alfalfa Club, where he and Mr. Musk mingled with members of the political establishment.
Mr. Gracias has undergone a political reinvention. He attended the September 2016 presidential debate as a supporter of Hillary Clinton, and gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s campaign in 2020. Now, he largely backs Republicans: He gave millions to David McCormick during his 2022 and 2024 Senate runs in Pennsylvania and donated $1 million to Mr. Musk’s pro-Trump super PAC.
At times, Mr. Gracias’s language has been bolder than Mr. Musk’s. In the February podcast episode, he said Mr. Musk’s declaration that 10 percent of the federal budget was probably fraud “might be low.” He has also claimed that the country was flirting with becoming a “kleptocracy” and a “Latin American-style autocracy.”
He has described himself as a loyal supporter of the billionaire, whatever the pursuit. “I am 100% with you Elon,” Mr. Gracias wrote to Mr. Musk in a March 2022 text message as he waged his fight to buy Twitter, as revealed in legal filings.