Elon Musk “would like to offer to pay the salaries” of struggling TSA workers amid the shutdown, he said on his social media site Saturday. I, too, would like to offer to pay them, as it happens. The difference is that I can’t, but Elon Musk’s net worth is a dollar amount beyond reckoning, and without any impact whatsoever on his personal wellbeing, he could easily move some assets around and scrounge up enough liquid cash to make it happen.
But, again, Musk “would like to offer” to pay them. He didn’t say “I’m offering to pay them,” or better yet, “I have now paid them.”
I would like to offer to pay the salaries of TSA personnel during this funding impasse that is negatively affecting the lives of so many Americans at airports throughout the country
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 21, 2026
Maybe he will. We at Gizmodo don’t know the future. It would be a relief if he did.
For the second time in as many years, TSA agents are being asked to work for free until congressional action unblocks their paychecks. According to Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, “A TSA agent doesn’t make the most amount of money[…] and they’re paying rent and trying to put food on the table. They can’t actually make ends meet during this time.”
Back in the fall, TSA workers held out through the longest government shutdown in the history of the U.S.—43 days—but now 376 have quit since this Homeland Security shutdown started on February 14.
This is clearly bothering the president, who wrote on Truth Social on Saturday that he will send in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to work in place of TSA this coming Monday. In a separate post, he wrote, “I will move our brilliant and patriotic ICE Agents to the Airports where they will do Security like no one has ever seen before, including the immediate arrest of all Illegal Immigrants who have come into our Country, with heavy emphasis on those from Somalia.”
Between these two imperfect plans, the one where the billionaire steps in and pays people’s salaries is easily the more pleasant one. Unfortunately there are good reasons not to trust that Elon Musk will necessarily pay the salaries of TSA agents anytime soon, just because he says he would like to offer to do so.
What appears at first to be an expression of generosity often turns out to just be Musk making some weird point. For instance, in 2018 he offered to pay for home water filtration systems for everyone in Flint who met a certain set of parameters for lead contamination. They just had to reply on Twitter or email some email address and attach their lead test results. It’s not clear that anyone qualified for a Musk filtration system, and later, he donated just under half a million dollars for water systems at Flint school drinking fountains. That’s cool and everything, but he certainly didn’t resolve the public distrust in Flint’s water that he was trying to make a point about the entire time.
Then, in 2021, he said if the World Food Program could “describe on [a] Twitter thread exactly how $6B will solve world hunger,” that he would sell Tesla stock in order to fund that plan.
If WFP can describe on this Twitter thread exactly how $6B will solve world hunger, I will sell Tesla stock right now and do it.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 31, 2021
Cindy McCain, acting in her capacity as the director of the World Food Program tweeted a 1,000-word plan at him, but that plan wasn’t up to snuff apparently. Musk wasn’t, it seems, making a genuine offer to attempt to end world hunger. Instead, he was making a point about transparency at the World Food Program. At any rate, there is still hunger in the world, and some of it was likely caused indirectly by the actions of Elon Musk, according to ProPublica.
So is Elon Musk going to pay TSA workers? Maybe and maybe not. If he is, he might want to get offline and just start writing the checks.
