Billionaire Elon Musk, a key adviser to the incoming Trump administration, called for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to be eliminated, setting his sights on a regulator that has often clashed with Silicon Valley investors as they’ve attempted to enter the banking space.
“Delete CFPB. There are too many duplicative regulatory agencies,” the Tesla CEO on his social media platform X a little after midnight Wednesday.
The comment followed an appearance by celebrity venture capitalist and fellow Trump supporter Marc Andreessen on the Joe Rogan podcast, in which he accused the agency of attempting 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 tech firms and other startups it accused of deceiving customers, including at least one backed by Andreesen’s own firm.
In 2021, the regulator the online payday lender LendUp “for repeatedly lying and illegally cheating 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 “debank” startup founders in disfavored industries such as crypto, by pressuring financial institutions to drop them as customers. The comments echoed claims about federal regulators such as the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation that have circulated among and conservatives, .
“It’s a privatized sanctions regime that lets bureaucrats do to American citizens the same thing that we do to Iran — just kick you out of the financial system,” Andreessen said. “This has been happening to all the crypto entrepreneurs over the last four years, this has been happening to the fintech entrepreneurs, anybody trying to start any kind of new banking service, because they’re trying to protect the big banks.”
The CFPB, however, has recently taken legal and public stands against debanking — the forced closure of a bank account of an organization deemed to be a legal or financial threat. In an August appeals court argument, for instance, the agency that a federal judge’s decision in Texas limiting its ability to police discrimination by financial institutions would block it from investigating banks for cutting off conservative Christian groups.
