The Trump administration is implementing drastic changes throughout the federal government. The man driving the changes is Elon Musk.
MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
In Washington these days, Elon Musk seems to be everywhere. In the 15 days that Donald Trump has been back in the White House, Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency have been moving to change every corner of the federal government. The billionaire entrepreneur and his team have gained access to a sensitive government payment system in the Treasury Department. They’re pushing to drastically reduce the number of federal employees. So how did the world’s richest man come to have such a big role in the federal government? And why does he want it? To help us answer those questions and more, I am joined by Zoe Schiffer of WIRED. She’s the author of “Extremely Hardcore: Inside Elon Musk’s Twitter.” Zoe Schiffer, welcome.
ZOE SCHIFFER: Thank you for having me.
KELLY: To that basic question of – why does Elon Musk want this? This is a man with plenty to keep him busy. He owns Tesla. He owns X. He owns SpaceX. What’s the allure of adding the federal government to his portfolio?
SCHIFFER: You know, I always reflect on this quote from Sam Altman, who’s the head of OpenAI and previously a friend of Elon Musk – now, possibly an enemy. And he has said Elon Musk desperately wants to save the world, but only if he can be the one to save it. And I think that that is really true. Elon Musk is very worried with global, humanity extinction-level problems, and he casts himself in a leading role in trying to solve them. At the same time, he has some practical concerns with what was going on in the United States. And he said very openly that if Vice President Kamala Harris had been elected president, that she was going to crush Tesla. And he felt like his businesses were at stake, the future of the companies, the empire that he had built.
KELLY: So how does he square his politics with this role? – because at one point he was a moderate Democrat, and now he is Donald Trump’s, arguably, strongest ally.
SCHIFFER: Yeah, the moderate Democrat piece started to really shift – I mean, it happened over the course of many years, but there were a couple key moments. The COVID-19 pandemic was one of them. He was very against the lockdowns. He thought that basically the Democrats’ reaction to the pandemic was quite overblown and was detrimental to businesses. He felt like the Biden administration had shortchanged him in giving him the credit that he felt he deserved for electric vehicles.
And, you know, he’s been going through a process that – I think we can say, a process of radicalization on the internet, becoming more right-wing, more anti kind of woke. And this was a core reason that he got involved with Twitter. He said that the company was overrun with something that he deemed the woke mind virus. And I think it’s fair to say that when he looked at the country prior to Trump getting reelected, he felt like the country was kind of teetering on the brink of getting overrun with the woke mind virus once again, and he needed to step in and save it.
KELLY: To the question of his status, the White House says Musk is a, quote, “special government employee.” Trump himself, Monday, in the Oval Office, was praising Musk’s abilities but said, look, we have to approve what he does. The bottom line is no one elected him. He has not been confirmed by the Senate. Should he have this much power?
SCHIFFER: I mean, even before he took on this role, he arguably had more power than anyone who wasn’t in control of a nuclear arsenal. This is a man who has massive wealth, and he also has a lot of political power. He has contracts with governments all over the globe through Starlink, and these countries, including the United States, are quite dependent on his work. So now he’s in an interesting position, where before the election, while he had so much power, there were also a number of investigations that were ongoing. The U.S. government was actively looking into decisions that he had made while running his companies, and, you know, there was the possibility of fines or regulations. Now he is in the position of, in some ways, regulating the regulators, and his power looks pretty unchecked.
KELLY: That moves me to ask, what does Musk stand to gain personally from his work with DOGE?
SCHIFFER: I think that to the extent that Elon Musk can continue to amass wealth and power, he will continue to do so. He now is in the position of being able to influence what companies get government contracts. He really has the ability to, like, overrun how government has historically worked in this country and change it. And while some of what’s happening, you know, looks unusual, and I think that there are legal questions, like, they will take a while to resolve. And in the meantime, Elon and his team are really running rampant.
KELLY: You said there’s a few areas that are worth actively looking at. Can you give me an example of places where you see potential questions?
SCHIFFER: Well, I mean, you know, there were a lot of investigations into Tesla and its self-driving technology prior to Trump getting reelected. I’m curious to see where those lead. Like, I think that there are big questions about how, you know, his companies will change and benefit from his new position that we all need to be aware of.
KELLY: So where does this go? How does this end for him and for the citizens of the United States?
SCHIFFER: I will be curious to see. Right now, it looks like we are watching Elon’s team kind of infiltrate one agency after another. I think that we have yet to see, like, what will come of all of this. At the same time, I want to make sure that we are all paying attention to what the larger goal is because just like when Elon took over Twitter – and he had kind of all of the goals that he talked about publicly. He wanted to rid the platform of bots and spam. He wanted to eliminate child sexual exploitation material. These were all things that most people could agree on. At the same time, a couple years – or a few years after the acquisition took place, we’re in a position of saying, well, those goals do not look like they were achieved in many cases. And the overall goal, the kind of unsaid, unspoken initiative to turn Twitter into X – into a political operation that would elevate right-wing politicians in the United States and around the globe – that goal has been very successful. And so I think we need to ask the question of what is Elon Musk’s larger goal with the federal government of the United States?
KELLY: Zoe Schiffer – she is the director of business and industry at WIRED. Thank you so much.
SCHIFFER: Thank you for having me.
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