Inside Elon Musk’s ‘Digital Coup’

Musk and Trump’s relationship was cemented on July 13, 2024, when a would-be assassin came within inches of killing the former president in Butler, Pennsylvania. Musk was impressed by the photo of Trump, blood streaming down his face, raising his fist in the air and shouting “Fight, fight, fight” for the cameras. The image quickly became a meme—Musk’s love language. He endorsed Trump that day and pivoted his recently launched super PAC to get the former president reelected.

The following month, during a live discussion on X, Musk floated the idea of working for Trump on a “government efficiency commission.” Trump’s response was enthusiastic. “You’re the greatest cutter,” he said admiringly.

Two years earlier, after Musk purchased Twitter in a chaotic blitz of last-minute paperwork and hundred-million-dollar money transfers, he had cut roughly 80 percent of the company’s staff, closed at least a dozen international offices, and rolled back Twitter’s content moderation policies in the name of free speech. He demanded change at such speed that one of his lieutenants, Steve Davis, took to sleeping at Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters with his partner and their newborn baby.

In Washington, Musk estimated that his team could cut “nearly $2 trillion” from the federal budget. After you set aside politically sacrosanct military spending, nondiscretionary spending such as Medicare and Social Security benefits, and interest payments on the national debt, that number, $2 trillion, was a little more than what you had left over. In other words, Musk was functionally proposing to cut everything else, from foreign aid to housing subsidies, from the maintenance of national parks to the collection of basic weather data, from investigations into predatory lenders to the operation of air traffic control systems.

After Trump won, he announced that Musk, along with former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, would colead DOGE. The announcement kicked off a stealthy recruiting process, led by Davis, the same executive who’d slept at Twitter HQ. Musk pictured a team of super-high-IQ individuals joining him in Washington for an 80-hour-a-week, 18-month hackathon on the US government.

The DOGE brain trust camped out on the eighth floor of the SpaceX office in Washington, DC, commandeering multiple conference rooms and conducting meetings and interviews with DOGE hopefuls, according to a person with knowledge of the events. One question for applicants: Who did you vote for in 2024?

Among Davis’ early recruits was Zsombor (Anthony) Jancso, a San Francisco–based engineer and former Palantir employee in his mid-twenties. After Palantir, Jancso had worked on a project called Accelerate X, which purported to offer “a modern OS for government” with solutions “delivered in days.” His cofounder, an MIT-educated engineer named Jordan Wick, joined DOGE too.

A few weeks after the 2024 election, an online handle associated with Jancso reached out to a group of people who had participated in an AI challenge put on by the US Space Force. The person said they were looking for “hardcore engineers” and instructed applicants to send their GitHub or LinkedIn to @DOGE on X and reply privately with their X handle. (To do all this, they’d need to pay for X premium.) Not long after that, the same handle posted in a group for Palantir alums: “This is a historic opportunity to build an efficient government, and to cut the federal budget by 1/3.”