Captain Jared Isaacman of the private manned spaceflight mission “Polaris Dawn” speaks at a press conference at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, United States, on August 19, 2024.
Joe Skipper | Reuters
President Donald Trump met with Jared Isaacman to discuss the next top choice for NASA, a person familiar with the meeting confirmed to CNBC’s Morgan Brennan.
Isaacman has close ties to SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, and visited the White House in September to attend President Trump’s dinner with tech giants. Mr. Musk did not attend.
Mr. Trump and Mr. Isaacman have met in person multiple times in recent weeks to discuss the issue. shift 4 That was the founder’s vision for the space program, Bloomberg reported, citing people familiar with the meeting.
After a heated exchange between Musk and Trump over government spending, the president withdrew his nomination, saying Isaacman was a “blue-blooded Democrat who has never served the Republican Party.”
“I also thought it would be inappropriate for a very close friend of Elon’s who was in the space business to run NASA when NASA is such a big part of Elon’s corporate life,” Trump wrote in a June 6 Truth Social post.
President Trump appointed Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy as NASA’s interim administrator in July.
Isaacman, who declined to comment, was originally named to head the space agency in December.
Isaacman is an experienced space traveler who led two commercial spaceflights with SpaceX in 2021 and 2024. Shift4 invested $27.5 million in SpaceX, according to a 2021 filing.
Isaacman resigned as CEO of Shift4, the payments company he founded in 1999 when he was 16 years old, and currently serves as executive chairman.
In a letter to investors announcing the Shift4 changes, Isaacman wrote of NASA’s nomination process: “Even knowing the outcome, I would do it all over again.”
Now it looks like he’ll be doing it all over again.
Tensions between Mr. Musk and Mr. Trump have since subsided in the months since, but the U.S. space program faces major challenges.
President Trump has proposed cutting more than $6 billion from NASA’s budget.
As a result of President Trump’s government efficiency plan, which Musk spearheaded in the first half of 2025, about 4,000 NASA employees were offered deferred retirement programs, and the space agency’s workforce of 18,000 was cut by about a fifth.
During the government shutdown in October, NASA made an exception to allow employees to continue working on missions involving Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin.
