Inside Elon Musk’s ‘Digital Coup’

Muschus and Trump The relationship was determined on July 13, 2024 when a potential assassin came within centimeters to kill the former president in Butler, Pennsylvania. Musk was impressed by the photo of Trump, blood that flowed down his face, raised his fist in the air and called “fight, fight, fight for the cameras. The picture quickly became a meme Musk Liebess language. He supported Trump that day and turned his recently opened Super Pac to re -select the former president.

In the following month, during a live discussion via X, Musk appeared the idea of ​​working for Trump on a “Commission for Government Efficiency”. Trump’s answer was thrilled. “You are the biggest cutter,” he said admiringly.

Two years earlier after Musk Twitter bought a chaotic flash of last-minute paper stuff and a hundred million dollar money transfer, he had completed around 80 percent of the company’s employees, attributed at least a dozen international offices and rolled back the guidelines for the moderation of Twitter on behalf of the Free Language. He called for a change at such a speed that one of his lieutenants, Steve Davis, was able to fall asleep with his partner and newborn in Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco in Twitter.

In Washington, Musk estimated that his team could reduce “almost 2 trillion US dollars” from the federal budget. After they did not put discretionary expenses such as medical and social security benefits and interest payments for state debt, this number was a little more than what they had left. In other words, Musk suggested to cutting everything Otherwise from foreign help to apartment subsidies, from maintaining national parks to the recording of basic weather data, from investigations to predatory lenders to the operation of air traffic control systems.

After winning Trump, he announced that Musk together with the former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy Colead Doge. The announcement started a secret recruitment process, which was led by Davis, the same manager who had slept in the Twitter headquarters. Musk introduced himself to a team of Super-High-IQ people who joined him in Washington for an 80-hour hackathon of the US government in the US government.

The Doge Brain Trust camped on the eighth floor of the SpaceX office in Washington, DC, and ordered several conference rooms and, according to a person with knowledge of the events, carried out and interviews with Doge hopefuls. A question for applicants: Who did you vote for in 2024?

The early recruits of Davis included Zsombor (Anthony) Jancso, an engineer based in San Francisco and former Palantir employee in his mid-twenties. According to Palantir, Jancso had worked on a project called Accelerate X, which was supposed to offer “a modern operating system for the government” with solutions that were “delivered in days”. His co-founder, a co-trained engineer named Jordan Wick, also joined Doge.

A few weeks after the 2024 election, an online handle, which is connected to Jancso, turned to a group of people who had participated in an AI challenge that was carried out by the US world space force. The person said she was looking for “hardcore engineers” and instructed applicants to send their github or LinkedIn to @doge to X and to answer privately with their X -Handle. (To do all of this, you would have to pay for it X Premium.) Not long afterwards, the same grip published in a group for Palantir -Saune: “This is a historical opportunity to build an efficient government and reduce the federal budget by 1/3.”