Elon Musk calls for “deleting” the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau

Billionaire Elon Musk, a key adviser to the new Trump administration, called for the abolition of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, turning his attention to a regulator that has often clashed with Silicon Valley investors as they sought to enter the banking sector to penetrate.

“Delete CFPB. “There are too many duplicate regulators,” Tesla’s CEO posted on his social media platform X shortly after midnight on Wednesday.

The comment followed an appearance by prominent venture capitalist and Trump supporter Marc Andreessen on Joe Rogan’s podcast, in which he accused the agency of trying to “terrorize financial institutions” and “prevent new startups that want to compete with the big banks.”

Under current Director Rohit Chopra, the CFPB has sued and fined a number of financial technology firms and other startups that it accuses of deceiving customers, including at least one backed by Andreessen’s own firm.

In 2021, the regulator shut down online payday lender LendUp “for repeatedly lying and illegally defrauding its customers.” The press release announcing the move specifically noted that the company was backed by “some of the biggest names in venture capital,” including Andreessen Horowitz, Kleiner Perkins and Google Ventures.

In his Rogan appearance, Andreessen also appeared to accuse the CFPB of conspiring to “unburden” startup founders in disadvantaged industries like crypto by pressuring financial institutions to fire them as customers. The comments echoed allegations about federal regulators like the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation that have been circulating among crypto industry executives and conservatives, including among lawmakers on Capitol Hill.

“It is a privatized sanctions regime that allows bureaucrats to do to American citizens the same thing we do to Iran – simply kick them out of the financial system,” Andreessen said. “This has happened to all crypto entrepreneurs in the last four years, this has happened to fintech entrepreneurs, everyone who is trying to start any kind of new banking services because they are trying to protect the big banks.”

However, the CFPB recently took a legal and public stand against debanking – the forced closure of an organization’s bank account that is viewed as a legal or financial threat. In an appeals court argument in August, for example, the agency warned that a federal judge’s decision in Texas limiting its ability to monitor discrimination by financial institutions would prevent it from investigating banks for cutting off conservative Christian groups have.

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