There has never been a figure like Elon Musk in the White House, right down to his choice in clothes.
The billionaire federal contractor showed up at President Donald Trump’s first Cabinet meeting of the year dressed like the head roadie at a heavy metal concert, a striking contrast to the sea of suits and ties around him.
Instead of the usual button-down dress shirt, Musk wore a single-breasted charcoal peacoat, which he opened wide at one point to show off the words “tech support” in large letters on a black T-shirt. His outfit was complemented by two bespoke items: a Tesla-themed Texas belt buckle and a black “Make America Great Again” baseball cap.
Musk was sending a message that he doesn’t need to conform to the dress code for White House visitors.
The effect was a kind of false humility. By dressing down, Musk seemed to be sending a message that he doesn’t need to conform to the dress code that’s long been expected of White House visitors, marking himself as separate from the Cabinet officials — and even the president — who were dressing the part.
That might have been overlooked if he were, in fact, just a tech support guy there to answer a quick question. But he’s not. He’s the richest man in the world; the largest single donor of the 2024 election cycle; the most-followed person on X, the social media platform he owns; a major federal contractor; and the putative head of a massive effort to fire tens of thousands of federal workers and override long-standing constitutional restrictions on the executive branch.
Musk’s casual clothes and jokey T-shirt were the sartorial equivalent of the shell game that White House attorneys have played with federal judges over the last few weeks, claiming that Musk is definitely not the head of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency and does not wield any actual budgetary power even as he posts triumphantly on X that he’s “deleting” programs created by Congress. Sure, his shirt says, he’s just “tech support.”
But there’s even more going on with this fit, which borrows from a lot of different sources.
The dressed-down look has its roots in Silicon Valley, where tech entrepreneurs have long embraced an extreme version of business casual. You may know this aesthetic from the scene in the movie “The Social Network” where Mark Zuckerberg, played by Jesse Eisenberg, intentionally shows up late to a meeting with venture capitalists wearing a bathrobe and pajamas as a power play.
The oversize belt buckle appears to be a nod to his recent relocation of Tesla’s headquarters from California to Texas. It feels similar to when Blue Origin owner Jeff Bezos, his space-tech competitor, began wearing a cowboy hat and boots after he went to space from a launchpad in the West Texas desert. Locked in their own personal space race, the two billionaires have created a new “space cowboy” aesthetic that borrows a lot from the freewheeling fashion of Virgin Galactic founder Richard Branson.
When he got heavily into conservative politics, Musk debuted the all-black version of Trump’s iconic hat as part of his “Dark MAGA” shtick. According to a report in Axios citing unnamed sources, the Trump team has sold $1.6 million worth of the black MAGA hats since the election, nearly twice as many as the classic red hat. At the Conservative Political Action Conference in late February, Musk debuted an even newer version, featuring a Germanic-looking black-letter font, the kind typically used by thrash metal bands that put unnecessary umlauts in their names.
And then there are the T-shirts. While the standard West Coast casual look would be a high-quality T-shirt or maybe a polo, Musk favors message shirts like you might find for sale in a boardwalk tourist shop at the beach. When he spoke at the Oval Office in mid-February, he wore one that said “Occupy Mars.” At CPAC, his shirt read, “I’m not procrastinating. I’m doing side quests,” a reference to the video games he often brags about playing. At CPAC, he also mysteriously chose to wear mirrored visor sunglasses to the indoors event. Indoor sunglasses are a particularly inscrutable accessory, something one might wear to a high-stakes poker game or to cope with a hangover. The comedian Larry David once joked that only two kinds of people wear sunglasses indoors. One is the blind. The other is a word I can’t reprint here. It’s how a 14-year-old boy imagines he would dress if he were a billionaire. I’d argue Musk’s look — appearing cobbled together from Silicon Valley bros, Texas dudes, thrash metal bands and the Hot Topic at your local mall — has two throughlines. One is that the inspirations are overwhelmingly masculine in a particularly juvenile way — almost how a 14-year-old boy imagines he would dress if he were a billionaire. The other, which is related, is the brazenness. He’s breaking the rules, whether they are ones of decorum or constitutional norms. It’s not as though Musk doesn’t know how to dress the part. This is a man who has tweeted “I love fashion,” posted an AI-created fashion show featuring himself and world leaders and gone to the Met Gala. There are plenty of photos of him wearing conventional businesswear in business settings, including one posted by Trump of their meeting in the Oval Office during his first term. In that photo, Musk is wearing the standard businessman look: a dark blazer, a white button-down shirt and a dark-colored, crisply knotted tie. When Trump posted that photo on Truth Social, he made clear who he thought was in charge: “When Elon Musk came to the White House asking me for help on all of his many subsidized projects, whether it’s electric cars that don’t drive long enough, driverless cars that crash, or rocketships to nowhere, without which subsidies he’d be worthless, and telling me how he was a big Trump fan and Republican, I could have said, ‘drop to your knees and beg,’ and he would have done it.” Musk’s new look shows how much that relationship has changed. He no longer has to dress to impress Trump — or anyone else for that matter.
Ryan Teague Beckwith is a newsletter editor for MS NOW. He has previously worked for such outlets as Time magazine and Bloomberg News. He teaches journalism at Georgetown University’s School of Continuing Studies and is the creator of Your First Byline. 
