Elon Musk is pushing to privatize Amtrak, calling the service "embarrassing," especially when compared with train services in other countries.

"If you're coming from another country, please don’t use our national rail. It can leave you with a very bad impression of America," Musk said at a Morgan Stanley technology conference, NBC News reports. He discussed riding bullet trains abroad and coming back to Amtrak's "sad situation."

Amtrak operates 15 lines across the US, with 32.8 million riders in 2024. The Biden administration invested billions in improving the service, which led to the opening of new lines, including the "Floridian" between Chicago and Miami. But there is a lot of work to do; much of the country is still unreachable by train, and the service often faces delays.

The Obama administration also made a big push for high-speed rail, but it faced Republican pushback, funding shortfalls, and other challenges.

Musk argued that these systems won't get attention until there's "some chance of going bankrupt," adding, "We should try to privatize everything we possibly can."

The Boring Company founder said the same for the US Postal Service, adding that the country should move quickly to privatize "anything that can be privatized." (President Trump recently floated the idea of putting the USPS under the control of the Commerce Department.)

'Business Performance Is Strong'

Funding models for high-speed trains vary by country. Japan's train system is largely privatized. France's system was public until 2022, when the country's first high-speed private train company, Le Train, began operating. (In 2015, one PCMag writer even advocated for selling Amtrak to Elon Musk.)

In a statement, Amtrak tells us its "business performance is strong."

"Ridership and revenue are at all-time highs, and transformative projects are underway that will greatly improve the customer experience," Amtrak says. It calls for "maintaining momentum," presumably from the Biden administration, and keeping "the train service we operate across our nationwide network, as mandated by law...on-track to reach operational profitability—for the first time in history—during [the Trump] administration."

The Trump administration is expected to cut rail budgets and has ordered a review of California's high-speed rail spending, the Los Angeles Times reports.

In an August chat with Musk on X Spaces, Trump said Japan's high-speed trains "go unbelievably fast, [are] unbelievably comfortable with no problems, and we don't have anything like that in this country," according to Newsweek. "Not even close. And it doesn't make sense that we don't, doesn't make sense."

In a 2023 interview, Amtrak’s SVP for High-Speed Rail Development Programs Andy Byford said Japanese-style trains in the US would require the support of Congress and more funding.

"In a country where car is king, you need that political support," Byford told us at the time. "One thing that drives me crazy is people who rail against rail. The US spends trillions on highways and pours billions into airports, so why shouldn't we do the same with rail?"

In January, the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) sent Congress a plan to improve Amtrak's rail service, advocating for more routes that would reach 39 million more Americans, 75 natural recreation areas, and over 3,000 higher education institutions. A study on the plan took two years to complete, with "over 50,000 stakeholder and public comments that indicated overwhelming support for long-distance services or passenger rail in general."

"We look forward to working with President Trump, his Administration, and Congress to build a world-class passenger rail system featuring incredible new bridges, tunnels, and trains," Amtrak says. "A new era of rail is on the way as we serve more Americans than ever, from rural towns to big cities across the great United States."

By: DocMemory
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