Inside Elon Musk’s ‘Digital Coup’

Musk and Trump’s narration was cemented connected July 13, 2024, erstwhile a would-be assassin came wrong inches of sidesplitting the erstwhile president successful Butler, Pennsylvania. Musk was impressed by the photograph of Trump, humor streaming down his face, raising his fist successful the aerial and shouting “Fight, fight, fight,” for the cameras. The representation rapidly became a meme—Musk’s emotion language. He endorsed Trump that time and pivoted his precocious launched ace PAC to get the erstwhile president reelected.

The pursuing month, during a unrecorded treatment connected X, Musk floated the thought of moving for Trump connected a “government ratio commission.” Trump’s effect was enthusiastic. “You're the top cutter,” helium said admiringly.

Two years earlier, aft Musk purchased Twitter successful a chaotic blitz of last-minute paperwork and hundred-million-dollar wealth transfers, helium had chopped astir 80 percent of the company’s staff, closed astatine slightest a twelve planetary offices, and rolled backmost Twitter’s contented moderation policies successful the sanction of escaped speech. He demanded alteration astatine specified velocity that 1 of his lieutenants, Steve Davis, took to sleeping astatine Twitter’s San Francisco office with his spouse and their newborn baby.

In Washington, Musk estimated that his squad could chopped “nearly $2 trillion” from the national budget. After you acceptable speech politically sacrosanct subject spending, nondiscretionary spending specified arsenic Medicare and Social Security benefits, and involvement payments connected the nationalist debt, that number, $2 trillion, was a small much than what you had near over. In different words, Musk was functionally proposing to chopped everything else, from overseas assistance to lodging subsidies, from the attraction of nationalist parks to the postulation of basal upwind data, from investigations into predatory lenders to the cognition of aerial postulation power systems.

After Trump won, helium announced that Musk, on with erstwhile Republican statesmanlike campaigner Vivek Ramaswamy, would co-lead DOGE. The announcement kicked disconnected a stealthy recruiting process, led by Davis, the aforesaid enforcement who’d slept astatine Twitter HQ. Musk pictured a squad of super-high-IQ individuals joining him successful Washington for an 80-hour-a-week, 18-month hackathon connected the US government.

The DOGE encephalon spot camped retired connected the eighth level of the SpaceX bureau successful Washington, DC, commandeering aggregate league rooms and conducting meetings and interviews with DOGE hopefuls, according to a idiosyncratic with cognition of the events. One question for applicants: Who did you ballot for successful 2024?

Among Davis’ aboriginal recruits was Zsombor (Anthony) Jancso, a San Francisco–based technologist and erstwhile Palantir worker successful his mid-20s. After Palantir, Jancso had worked connected a task called Accelerate X, which purported to connection “a modern OS for government” with solutions “delivered successful days.” His cofounder, an MIT-educated technologist named Jordan Wick, joined DOGE too.

A fewer weeks aft the 2024 election, an online grip associated with Jancso reached retired to a radical of radical who had participated successful an AI situation enactment connected by the US Space Force. The idiosyncratic said they were looking for “hardcore engineers” and instructed applicants to nonstop their GitHub oregon LinkedIn to @DOGE connected X and reply privately with their X handle. (To bash each this, they’d request to wage for X premium.) Not agelong aft that, the aforesaid grip posted successful a radical for Palantir alums: “This is simply a historical accidental to physique an businesslike government, and to chopped the national fund by 1/3.”