Elon Musk’s Digital Coup: Inside the ‘Digital Coup ‘
Musk and Trump’s relationship
was cemented in 2024 when a would be assassin narrowly missed killing the former President at Butler, Pennsylvania. Musk was moved by the picture of Trump with blood running down his face and raising his fist to the sky while shouting, “Fight, Fight, Fight!” for the cameras. Musk’s love-language was the image. It quickly became a meme. 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. Musk demanded changes so quickly that Steve Davis and his partner slept at Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters. This number was $2 trillion after you removed politically sacred military spending and nondiscretionary expenditures such as Medicare, Social Security, and interest on the national debt. It was just a bit more than you had. 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 co-lead DOGE. Davis, who had slept in Twitter’s HQ, was the executive behind this stealthy recruitment process. 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 to ask applicants: who did you vote in 2024? Jancso, a former Palantir employee, had also worked on a project named Accelerate X that purported to provide “a modern operating system for government,” with solutions “delivered within days.” His cofounder Jordan Wick, a MIT-educated engineering, joined DOGE. The person stated that they were searching for “hardcore” engineers and asked applicants to send their GitHub and LinkedIn to @DOGE and reply privately using their X handle. To do this, the applicants would need to purchase X premium. The same handle then posted the following in a Palantir alumni group: “This historic opportunity is to build an efficient federal government and to reduce the federal budget by a third.”
