Texas Gov. Greg Abbott listens as President Donald Trump speaks during a roundtable discussion with first responders and local officials at Hill Country Youth Event Center in Kerrville, Texas, during a tour to observe flood damage, Friday, July 11, 2025. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) is hiding months of emailed communications between his office and tech multi-billionaire Elon Musk.

According to a joint report from ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, the Texas Newsroom’s Lauren McGaughy asked Abbott’s office for months of email exchanges dating back to the fall.

The governor’s office initially agreed upon the estimated cost of $244.64 to review the records. After the Texas Newsroom paid the check, the governor’s office said the records were confidential and requested that Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) allow them to be sealed from the public.

In a letter responding to the open records request, Abbott’s spokesperson Matthew Taylor argued that the information in the emails was confidential under the “common-law privacy” due to the information being “highly intimate or embarrassing, the publication of which would be highly objectionable to a reasonable person and not of legitimate concern to the public.”

He also wrote that making the exchanges public “would have a chilling effect on the frank and open discussion necessary for the decision-making process.”

In an interview with the Texas Newsroom, Bill Aleshire, a public records attorney in Texas, said he was shocked by the governor’s behavior.

“Right now, it appears they’ve charged you $244 for records they have no intention of giving you,” Aleshire said. “That is shocking.”

Aleshire also reportedly told the Texas Tribune that government agencies usually use the common-law privacy exception to withhold sensitive information involving, children, medical data or highly personal information. Personal emails between an elected official and a businessman are typically not one of these cases.

The attorney general’s office, which oversees disputes over public records and requests, has 45 days to decide if Abbott’s emails can be kept away from the public.

After moving the headquarters of electric vehicle company Tesla to Austin, Texas, Musk has cultivated a lot of power in the Lone Star State. Musk’s lobbying in the Texas Legislature has led to multiple bills being passed that benefit his companies, including laxing regulations, rewriting the state’s corporate laws and making it more difficult to sue aerospace companies like Musk’s SpaceX.