What Elon Musk Wants
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What role does Elon Musk play in the federal government?
From New York Times Opinion, this is The Ezra Klein Show. So at the beginning, Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency seemed to have ended up with a fairly narrow mandate. You can look at the Trump executive order creating it, and it says, the purpose is modernizing federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity. In the last couple weeks, it's become clear that Musk's role is a whole lot larger than that.
Elon Musk, right now, involved in almost every agency and corner of the United States government. Offering all federal employees a buyout to resign. Musk and his team have accessed at least 11 agencies, and the count is growing every day. His team has gained access to something extraordinarily sensitive. The Treasury Department's payment system. Which handles trillions of dollars in payments. And the private information of every single American in this country. Elon Musk seized control of USAID. People getting fired, people getting furloughed in droves. Posting on X, quote, we spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper. They are raiding the government.
What's the plan?
What's the plan? What's the plan?
And so far, at least, Musk's patron, Donald Trump, seems to be on board.
I think he's doing a great job. He's a smart guy, very smart. And he's very much into cutting the budget of our federal government.
And as I've watched all this unfold, I've been wondering how Elon Musk has evolved in the way he has. How did he go from conventional Obama-era liberal worried about climate change and who wanted to go to Mars to right-wing conspiratorial meme lord working to elect the far right in Germany and shred the federal government in the United States? What led to this transition, this evolution for Elon Musk? And what actual strategies is he bringing to the government that he now seems to have quite a lot of control over? To talk about all this, I want to invite Kara Swisher on the show. Kara is one of the great tech reporters of the age. She's been covering Musk for many, many years, along with many of the other tech CEOs who become such key political figures now. She's, of course, a host of the great podcast On with Kara Swisher and Pivot, which she co-hosts with Scott Galloway. As always, my email, ezraklanshow at mytimes.com. Kara Swisher, welcome back to the show.
Thank you.
I've never been here, but... You've been on my show before.
I have not.
Yes, you have. I'm going to go back and show you receipts. You were like my second ever episode.
Oh, that's because I suggested you do podcasting. You've done rather well.
Mastercast and interviewing from Kara Swisher, it was called.
Wow. I must have forgotten it. I can't.
It was such a seminal moment. Well, it's good to see you.
Good to see you.
How do you describe the role Elon Musk has been playing in the federal government in the first weeks of Donald Trump's second term?
Well, a little more strongly than the New York Times did. You know, they're sort of treating it like it's an interesting person walking through. I think he's a one-man wrecking ball, really. And he's being used by Trump for that purpose. You know, there's lots of ways you could use metaphors. You could say junkyard dog. He's the one sort of taking all the flack, going in and breaking things. But... And you could be funny and call it Wreck-It Ralph. I don't think it's particularly funny or the right way to do it or constitutionally sound. But that's the kind of thing. He's going in there like he does with his companies and doing the exact same thing. He's got a series of moves that he makes every single time, and he's doing them writ large on the federal government.
Walk me through the moves. What is his playbook?
Well, it's changed and morphed over the years, but always drama, always a massive amount of drama centered on him. That tends to be the thing he does. He can be very dramatic in a very, like, poignant way. There was a period where he was very worried about the fate of Tesla, if you remember, and he was sleeping on the floor there, and he gave a really... He actually gave an interview to the New York Times where... He seemed to cry. He seemed very emotional.
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