Musk secretly met with Iran’s UN envoy – NYT

US President-elect Donald Trump’s close ally, tech billionaire Elon Musk, has met with the Iranian ambassador to the UN earlier this week, the New York Times reported on Thursday, citing two unnamed Iranian officials.

According to the Times, Musk meeting with Amir Saeid Iravani took place in New York on Monday and was described by the paper’s Iranian sources as an attempt to “defuse tensions” between the US and Iran. The conversation was “positive” and “good news,” Iranian sources said. 

Musk, who owns SpaceX, Tesla and the social media platform X (formerly Twitter), has not commented on the matter. Trump’s spokesman, Steven Cheung, told the Times that the president-elect would not comment on “reports of private meetings that did or did not occur.” The Iranian mission to the UN declined to comment, according to the Washington Post.

The South African-born businessman has increasingly been seen as one of the most important people in Trump’s inner circle. The incoming president recently announced that Musk would lead a newly created extragovernmental ‘department’ tasked with increasing government efficiency.

Trump picked several Iran hardliners and staunch supporters of Israel for top government positions as part of his ‘peace through strength’ doctrine, including Senator Marco Rubio for secretary of state and Congressman Mike Waltz for national security advisor.

During his first term in office, Trump tore up the 2015 Iran nuclear deal and unleashed his “maximum pressure” campaign of economic sanctions against the Islamic Republic. In January 2020, he ordered a drone strike in Iraq that killed Iran’s top commander, Qassem Soleimani, whom the US accused of orchestrating attacks on American personnel in the Middle East. Tehran denied the allegations and blasted the assassination “an act of terrorism.”

In September, the Trump campaign said that he was briefed by US intelligence officials about “specific threats from Iran to assassinate him.” No details about these claims have been released, however.

Both Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and Iran’s new president, Masoud Pezeshkian, said recently that Tehran would be open to negotiations if the US demonstrates “in practice” that it is not hostile to Iran.

Any future negotiations will likely be complicated by the ongoing war in Gaza and Washington’s military and diplomatic support of Israel. Trump enacted multiple pro-Israel policies during his first term, moving the US embassy to Jerusalem and facilitating the normalization of relations between Israel and Arab states.