Musk and trump The relationship was cemented on July 13, 2024, when a potential assassin came a few centimeters from the former president of Butler, Pennsylvania. Musk was impressed by Trump’s photo, blood flowing on his face, raising his fist in the air and shouting “Fight, Fight, Fight” for the cameras. The image quickly became a meme – the love language of Musk. He approved Trump that day and pivoted his recently launched Super Pac for the former president to be re-elected.
The following month, during a live discussion on X, Musk launched the idea of working for Trump on a “government’s efficiency commission”. Trump’s response was enthusiastic. “You are the biggest cutter,” he said with admiration.
Two years earlier, after Musk bought Twitter in a chaotic Blitz of last -minute documents and money transfers of a hundred million dollars, he had reduced approximately 80% of the company staff, closed at least a dozen international offices and returned the Moderation of Twitter content policies in the name of freedom of expression. He demanded a change at such a speed that one of his lieutenants, Steve Davis, began to sleep at Twitter headquarters in San Francisco with his partner and their newborn.
In Washington, Musk estimated that his team could reduce “nearly 2 dollars” by the federal budget. After putting aside the politically sacro-sacropost military expenses, non-discretionary expenses such as health insurance and social security benefits, and interest payments on national debt, this number, 2 billions of dollars, was a little more than you had left. In other words, Musk functionally proposed to cut All Otherwise, from foreign aid to housing grants, from the maintenance of national parks to the collection of basic weather data, surveys on predatory lenders to the exploitation of air traffic control systems.
After Trump won, he announced that Musk, as well as the former Republican presidential candidate, Vivek Ramaswamy, Colead Doge. The announcement launched a stealth recruitment process, led by Davis, the same manager that had slept at Twitter headquarters. Musk imagined a team of super-high people who join him in Washington for a hackathon of 80 hours per week and 18 months on the United States government.
The Doge Brain Trust camped on the eighth floor of the Spacex office in Washington, DC, commanding several conference rooms and conducting meetings and interviews with hopes of Doge, according to a person knowing the events. A question for candidates: for whom you voted in 2024?
Among the first recruits of Davis was ZSOMBOR (Anthony) Jancso, an engineer based in San Francisco and former employee of Palantir in mid-Vingta. After Palant, Jancso had worked on a project called Accelerate X, which claimed to offer “a modern operating system for the government” with solutions “delivered in days”. Its co -founder, an engineer educated by MIT named Jordan Wick, also joined Doge.
A few weeks after the 2024 elections, an online handle associated with Jancso contacted a group of people who had participated in an AI challenge set up by the American space force. The person said that he was looking for “hardcore engineers” and asked the candidates to send their github or LinkedIn to @doge on X and respond in private with their X handle. (To do all this, they should pay X Premium.) Shortly after, the same handle published in a group for the alumni of Palantir: “This is a historic opportunity to build an effective government and reduce the federal budget by 1/3.”
