Musk and Trump’s relationship was cemented on July 13, 2024, when a would-be murderer got here inside inches of killing the previous president in Butler, Pennsylvania. Musk was impressed by the photograph of Trump, blood streaming down his face, elevating his fist within the air and shouting “Combat, struggle, struggle,” for the cameras. The picture shortly grew to become a meme—Musk’s love language. He endorsed Trump that day and pivoted his lately launched tremendous PAC to get the previous president reelected.
The next month, throughout a dwell dialogue on X, Musk floated the concept of working for Trump on a “authorities effectivity fee.” Trump’s response was enthusiastic. “You are the best cutter,” he stated admiringly.
Two years earlier, after Musk bought Twitter in a chaotic blitz of last-minute paperwork and hundred-million-dollar cash transfers, he had lower roughly 80 % of the corporate’s employees, closed at the least a dozen worldwide places of work, and rolled again Twitter’s content material moderation insurance policies within the title of free speech. He demanded change at such velocity that certainly one of his lieutenants, Steve Davis, took to sleeping at Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters together with his accomplice and their new child child.
In Washington, Musk estimated that his workforce might lower “practically $2 trillion” from the federal finances. After you put aside politically sacrosanct navy spending, nondiscretionary spending akin to Medicare and Social Safety advantages, and curiosity funds on the nationwide debt, that quantity, $2 trillion, was somewhat greater than what you had left over. In different phrases, Musk was functionally proposing to chop the whole lot else, from overseas help to housing subsidies, from the upkeep of nationwide parks to the gathering of fundamental climate knowledge, from investigations into predatory lenders to the operation of air visitors management programs.
After Trump received, he introduced that Musk, together with former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, would co-lead DOGE. The announcement kicked off a stealthy recruiting course of, led by Davis, the identical govt who’d slept at Twitter HQ. Musk pictured a workforce of super-high-IQ people becoming a member of him in Washington for an 80-hour-a-week, 18-month hackathon on the US authorities.
The DOGE mind belief camped out on the eighth flooring of the SpaceX workplace in Washington, DC, commandeering a number of convention rooms and conducting conferences and interviews with DOGE hopefuls, in line with an individual with data of the occasions. One query for candidates: Who did you vote for in 2024?
Amongst Davis’ early recruits was Zsombor (Anthony) Jancso, a San Francisco–primarily based engineer and former Palantir worker in his mid-20s. After Palantir, Jancso had labored on a challenge referred to as Speed up X, which purported to supply “a contemporary OS for presidency” with options “delivered in days.” His cofounder, an MIT-educated engineer named Jordan Wick, joined DOGE too.
A couple of weeks after the 2024 election, an internet deal with related to Jancso reached out to a bunch of people that had participated in an AI problem placed on by the US Area Drive. The individual stated they had been on the lookout for “hardcore engineers” and instructed candidates to ship their GitHub or LinkedIn to @DOGE on X and reply privately with their X deal with. (To do all this, they’d have to pay for X premium.) Not lengthy after that, the identical deal with posted in a bunch for Palantir alums: “This can be a historic alternative to construct an environment friendly authorities, and to chop the federal finances by 1/3.”
