President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said Turkey could cooperate with SpaceX and Tesla founder Elon Musk on technology projects if opportunities arise, as the businessman readies to assume a post in the new US government, the state-run Anadolu news agency reported.
US President-elect Donald Trump on Tuesday chose Musk and former Republican presidential candidate and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy to lead a newly created Department of Government Efficiency for his incoming administration. Musk, one of the richest businessmen in the world, donated millions of dollars to the presidential campaign of Trump.
“Musk is a businessman who works in the space and technology field. Technology isn’t a field you can advance on your own, you absolutely need some cooperation. In the event cooperation opportunities arise in this field, we can take steps with Musk,” Erdoğan told reporters on a return flight from Baku on Wednesday.
Erdoğan and Musk have held a series of meetings both in Turkey and on the sidelines of international forums, seemingly developing a friendship.
The last time they met was in September 2023, on the sidelines of the annual UN General Assembly meeting, at New York’s Turkish House, a new skyscraper located across from the UN building, with one of his sons, whom he held on his lap during the talk with Erdoğan.
Erdoğan likes to promote Turkey’s high-tech sector, which is arguably most famous for its Bayraktar combat drones.
Musk’s SpaceX has already been working with Turkey’s space industry, launching some of its communications satellites.
Musk, who is also the owner of the social media platform X, has been harshly criticized by rights groups and journalists in- and outside of Turkey for limiting their freedom of speech on X by bowing to the Turkish government’s requests to block content or the accounts of anti-government figures.
In another example of its compliance with censorship requests from the Turkish government, last month, X blocked access to more than 100 accounts belonging to Turkish journalists, activists and media organizations run by journalists living in exile.
In the run-up to the general election in May 2023, X also complied with a request from the Turkish government to censor four accounts and 409 postings that were critical of President Erdoğan and his leadership. These added to the hundreds of accounts that X had already censored at the request of the Turkish government in the past, including a ban on the platform in the country in 2014 for refusing to comply with Erdoğan’s take-down orders.