Musk's Right-Hand Man Ensures The Boss Pays Less Taxes

Jared Birchall, who for the past six years has served as the right-hand man for Elon Musk, has largely operated in the background.

Photo Insert: Jared Birchall (leftmost) has been Elon Musk's right-hand man for six years.

Former classmates at Brigham Young University say they can’t recall him, nor can former co-workers at Merrill Lynch. People in the tight-knit world of ultra-high-net-worth family offices and wealth managers say only that they recognize the name, TechCentral reported.

Birchall has also embraced Musk’s view that Twitter should be an unfettered platform for free speech. “He vehemently disagrees with censoring. Especially for a sitting president. Insane,” Birchall wrote in a December message to Charles Johnson, a former right-wing political operative turned tech investor who was banned from Twitter for harassment.

He got his start at Goldman Sachs Group, joining after he graduated from Brigham Young in 1999. In 2000, he moved to work in private wealth at Merrill Lynch in Los Angeles, where he was fired for “sending correspondence to a client without management approval.”

In 2010, he joined Morgan Stanley, where he wasn’t a superstar, but good at managing the fortunes of the rich. Birchall left Morgan Stanley in 2016 to help Musk set up Excession, named after the Iain Banks science-fiction novel. The book centers on a powerful alien object, the Excession, which appears and spurs societies to fight over its control.

A great deal of managing a family office is about the cultural fit. At Excession, it’s a surprising match between Birchall, a low-key Mormon family man, and Musk, a thrice-divorced online provocateur who openly gets high and who’s recently had two children with musician Claire Boucher, better known as Grimes.

The boy and girl are called X and Y, respectively. Birchall is the same architect of the Musk scheme of using massive loans using his 16% Tesla equity as collateral and paying less taxes in the process.

At times, Birchall’s work for Musk has seemed at odds with his nice-guy persona. Back in 2018, Birchall was tasked with digging up dirt on man in the “pedo guy” lawsuit, who had criticized Musk’s suggestion of using a SpaceX submarine to rescue the trapped soccer team in Thailand.

Birchall, using the pseudonym James Brickhouse, hired a con man who claimed to be a private investigator. Birchall said in his testimony that he had used the Brickhouse alias before to do things like plan Musk’s travel and buy a web domain — justballs.com. (The deal for the website never went through.) Musk ultimately won the case.

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