Musk Connections: Advised Musk’s Twitter purchase
Other Corporate Affiliations: Morgan Stanley; Credit Suisse; Qatar Holding
DOGE Deployment: Senior Advisor, Office of Personnel Management (OPM)
- OPM has said that Armstrong is a senior advisor to the agency. In late January, the New York Times reported that he was “the most empowered of Mr. Musk’s allies” at OPM.
- It is not exactly clear what Armstrong’s specific duties are at OPM, though his employment at the agency is part of a broader takeover of the agency by Musk’s allies. According to CNN, Armstrong told OPM employees that DOGE is looking to OPM as a sort of proving ground, saying “OPM is looked at as a model. The goal is to reduce the footprint of the federal workforce.”
ARMSTRONG IS A TOP MORGAN STANLEY M&A INVESTMENT BANKER, RECENTLY ADVISING ON A NUMBER OF DEALS THAT THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT CLOSELY SCRUTINIZED
- In 2022, Elon Musk hired Armstrong via Morgan Stanley to advise him on his purchase of Twitter. In March, about a month before Musk sent his formal offer letter, Musk had acquired a greater than 5% stake in the company. Musk failed to disclose his stake in an appropriately timely manner, in what at first glance appears to be a violation of securities law. In January 2025, the SEC sued Musk for this failure to disclose. (See more about Musk’s history of law-breaking here.)
- Armstrong also advised Activision Blizzard when it was being acquired by Microsoft. The FTC sued to block the merger, but the FTC was ultimately unsuccessful. In January 2024, shortly after a judge denied the FTC’s request for a preliminary injunction blocking the merger, Microsoft laid off 1,900 employees, which the FTC said contradicted the company’s previous assurances.
- Armstrong advised on the acquisition of VMware by Broadcom, in which DOGE’s man at Treasury, Tom Krause, was also a key figure. The merger was large enough to earn a “second request” investigation from the FTC. The acquisition eventually went through, and it led to astronomical price increases for VMware customers—as Krause had seemingly planned.
WHILE WORKING FOR QATAR’S SOVEREIGN WEALTH FUND, ARMSTRONG SPEARHEADED THE COUNTRY’S PURCHASE OF HARRODS. HE AND HIS TEAM “MISSED OR DISMISSED” CREDIBLE ALLEGATIONS OF SEXUAL ASSAULT AGAINST HARRODS OWNER MOHAMED AL-FAYED.
- In 2010, Armstrong left Credit Suisse to join Qatar Holding, handling mergers and acquisitions for the Qatari sovereign wealth fund. Mere months after joining the state-owned investment firm, Armstrong led its $2.3 billion buyout of Harrods and was named “the Gulf’s most influential expat” by the magazine Arabian Business.
- In 2024, dozens of women came forward with allegations that former Harrods owner Mohamed Al-Fayed—from whom Qatar had bought the luxury department store—had sexually abused them. The youngest victim may have been as young as 13 years old.
- The allegations against Al-Fayed were not new. It was public knowledge at the time of the deal that Al-Fayed had been investigated in 2008 over allegations that he sexually assaulted a 15-year-old girl in a Harrods boardroom. The BBC reported on allegations against Al-Fayed as early as 1999, while Vanity Fair reported on them in a bombshell 1995 story.
- A 2024 BBC report on “the red flags that were missed or dismissed” by Qatar Holding quotes one expert as saying that it appears Qatar’s due diligence for the deal was “not adequate.” Another said that it was possible that Qatar knew about the allegations but chose to look the other way: “It seems to me that it wasn’t a complete secret. It was probably a calculated risk.”
As Elon Musk’s DOGE continues to tear through agencies with little oversight or transparency, the Revolving Door Project is publishing profiles of reported DOGE employees: who they are, where they came from, and any conflicts of interest that might make their unfettered access to the federal government dangerous to the public. Read them all here.