Branden Spikes is one of Elon Musk’s longest-serving employees and closest confidantes, and he recently spent two months in Washington DC working with Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to help the President’s mass firings and layoffs of federal workers.
Spikes is currently the director of information technology at X (formerly known as Twitter), and he previously worked for Musk at Zip2, PayPal, and SpaceX.
He and Musk go way back: they were founding members of the same online gaming clan in the 1990s.
In 2011, Spikes married a Russian woman named Natalia, who was previously married to Reeve Haldeman, Elon Musk’s cousin.
Natalia is the current CEO of the California Russian Foundation, which works closely with the Kremlin-aligned Congress of Russian Americans (CRA), a group that has actively opposed US sanctions against Russia and called for the withdrawal of US military forces from Eastern Europe.
Spikes says his wife has good intentions and that his own family history is deeply American.