Elon Musk: Sean Duffy’s Move Could Derail NASA’s Return to the Moon

Elon Musk said about Sean Duffy, ‘The indi­vid­ual in charge of Amer­i­ca’s space pro­gram can’t have a 2 dig­it IQ

Per­son respon­si­ble for America’s space pro­gram can’t have a 2 dig­it IQ’: Musk (Theo Wargo/Getty Images for TIME,Spencer Platt/Getty Images

WASHINGTON, DC: SpaceX and Tes­la CEO Elon Musk attacked NASA Admin­is­tra­tor Sean Duffy on Tues­day, Octo­ber 21 after the lat­ter implied that SpaceX’s lunar sched­ule was behind sched­ule and threat­ened to com­pet­i­tive­ly open the Artemis moon land­ing con­tract.

Musk’s attack cen­tered large­ly on Duffy’s intel­li­gence and qual­i­fi­ca­tions, “The indi­vid­ual in charge of Amer­i­ca’s space pro­gram can’t have a 2 dig­it IQ.”

Elon Musk calls Trans­porta­tion Sec­re­tary ‘Sean Dum­my’

He also called the Trans­porta­tion Sec­re­tary “Sean Dum­my” and charged him with “try­ing to kill NASA!”

Musk even ridiculed Duffy’s pre­vi­ous career as a com­pet­i­tive speed climber with a sur­vey seek­ing respons­es as to whether a per­son whose “biggest claim to fame is climb­ing trees” should head the US space pro­gram

The pub­lic feud was sparked by Duffy’s remarks to the media on Mon­day, 20 Octo­ber that SpaceX was “behind” in work­ing on the lunar land­ing sys­tem for the Artemis III mis­sion.

Duffy dropped a veiled threat that the agency would go after oth­er bid­ders, like Jeff Bezos’ Blue Ori­gin, to get back to the Moon ahead of Chi­na.

Battle for NASA’s top spot begins

A bat­tle is rag­ing with­in MAGA ranks over who will be con­firmed as the next NASA chief, accord­ing to The Wall Street Jour­nal. Inter­im boss Duffy is cam­paign­ing hard to hold on to the job. 

Elon Musk prefers Jared Isaacman over Sean Duffy 

Duffy’s desire con­fronts head-on Elon Musk, who is advo­cat­ing for his bud­dy, busi­ness tech entre­pre­neur and one-time SpaceX civil­ian astro­naut, Jared Isaac­man, for the posi­tion

Isaac­man was orig­i­nal­ly put for­ward for the role in Decem­ber 2024 but had his name tak­en out of con­sid­er­a­tion ear­ly this year after a pub­lic bat­tle of words between Pres­i­dent Trump and Musk over the Jef­frey Epstein doc­u­ments. 

Isaac­man, alleged­ly assist­ed by lob­by­ists and social media influ­encers (some­thing he denies), is now attempt­ing to rein­state him­self in the admin­is­tra­tion’s good books

Nego­ti­a­tions between Duffy and Isaac­man regard­ing a renom­i­na­tion have been described as “con­tentious.” A deter­mi­na­tion regard­ing the NASA lead­er­ship posi­tion is forth­com­ing, which adds pres­sure to these efforts. 

Duffy’s tem­po­rary act­ing role with­in the agency is to end lat­er this year. The White House has indi­cat­ed that any news will come direct­ly from the pres­i­dent, but no dead­line has been pro­vid­ed as yet.