Warren: Musk can ‘knock his competitors out’ with CFPB data

 
WASHINGTON — Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., the ranking member of the Senate Banking Committee, told reporters Tuesday that Elon Musk might be able to access banks’ confidential information and use that information to form his own X Money product. 

Ever since Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency and acting Director Russell Vought descended on the CFPB, which President Donald Trump has said he wants to eliminate, Warren has vowed to fight for the bureau that she helped create. 

At a rally Monday evening outside the CFPB headquarters in Washington, Warren focused on Musk’s conflicts of interest between his group’s role in halting the CFPB’s work and his business interests in X Money, which Musk envisions as an “everything app” that would touch consumers’ financial lives in many ways. X announced a partnership with Visa just days before DOGE gained access to the CFPB. 

Warren, in response to a question from American Banker after a Senate Banking Committee hearing, said that there’s little to stop Musk from using the information that the CFPB holds to advance X’s financial industry ambitions. 

“No one has been able to independently verify what information they’ve got and what they’ve done with that information,” Warren said of DOGE’s access to the CFPB’s data.

At that hearing, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell said that the CFPB’s pause in work leaves regulation gaps, especially for the largest banks. 

“We do have some residual enforcement authorities,” Powell said in response to a question from Warren. “But what we don’t have is examination authority for the banks that the CFPB supervises.” 

It’s not clear exactly what kind of information DOGE has accessed at the CFPB, and to what extent Musk himself would have access to that data. At the Treasury Department, Musk’s DOGE aides accessed the payment and data systems, a move that a federal court has paused after a lawsuit from state attorneys general argued violated the Constitution’s separation of powers. 

A U.S. district judge ordered the officials who had been granted access to the systems to “immediately destroy any and all copies of material downloaded from the Treasury Department’s records and systems.”

Specifically at the CFPB, Warren said that Musk could find out what his competitors, including banks, are doing, how he might market a product in a way that takes advantage of his competitors and what kind of contracts they have in a way that would “knock his competitors out.

“This is a kind of conflict that we have literally never seen at the federal government level,” she said. “This is a bank robber who is firing the cops before he strolls into the bank lobby, and also someone who’s playing the puppet master of checking out what every single competitor is doing so that Elon Musk can then figure out where the business opportunities lie.”