Elon Musk epitomises a new generation of tech leaders who often have a right-wing ideology and favour fewer constraints on entrepreneurship. Photo / Hiroko Masuike, The New York Times
The involvement of wealthy investors has made this presidential transition one of the most potentially conflict-ridden in modern history.
The week after the November election, President-elect Donald Trump gathered his top advisers in the tearoom at his Florida resort, Mar-a-Lago, to plan the transition to his second-term Government.
Trump had brought two of his most valued houseguests to the meeting: billionaire Tesla boss Elon Musk and billionaire Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison. Trump looked around the conference table and issued a joking-not-joking challenge.
“I brought the two richest people in the world today,” Trump told his advisers, according to a person who was in the room. “What did you bring?”
Trump has delighted in a critical addition to his transition team: the Silicon Valley billionaires and millionaires who have been all over the transition, shaping hiring decisions and even conducting interviews for senior-level jobs. Many of those who are not formally involved, such as Ellison, have been happy to sit in on the meetings.
Their involvement, to a degree far deeper than previously reported, has made this one of the most potentially conflict-ridden presidential transitions in modern history. It also carries what could be vast implications for the Trump administration’s policies on issues including taxes and the regulation of artificial intelligence, not to mention clashing mightily with the notion that Trump’s brand of populism is all about helping the working man.
The presence of the Silicon Valley crew during critical moments also reflects something larger. Silicon Valley was once seen as a Democratic stronghold, but the new generation of tech leaders – epitomised by Musk – often has a right-wing ideology and a sense that they have an opportunity now to shift the balance of power in favour of less-fettered entrepreneurship.
Brian Hughes, a spokesperson for the presidential transition, said Trump and Musk are “great friends and brilliant leaders”.
“Elon Musk is a once-in-a-generation business leader, and our federal bureaucracy will certainly benefit from his ideas and efficiency,” he said.
This article is based on interviews with more than a dozen people with insight into the transition, including people who have participated in the process. Most spoke on condition of anonymity to preserve their relationships with Trump.
The tech leaders in Trump’s orbit are pushing for deregulation of their industries and more innovative use of private sector technologies in the federal Government, especially the defence industry. About a dozen Musk allies took breaks from their businesses to serve as unofficial advisers to the Trump transition effort.
Broadly, the group is pushing for less-onerous regulation of industries such as cryptocurrency and AI, a weaker Federal Trade Commission to allow for more deal-making and the privatisation of some government services to make Government more efficient. Musk himself has called some executives at major public companies and asked how the Government is thwarting their business – and what he can do to help.
These tech leaders have played a far broader role than simply contributing to the nascent Department of Government Efficiency – the Musk-led effort, abbreviated as DOGE, that is intended to effectively audit the entire Government and cut US$2 trillion out of federal spending. Musk’s friends are also influencing hiring decisions at some of the most important government agencies.
Inside the Trump transition team’s headquarters, in West Palm Beach, Florida, billionaire Marc Andreessen, a tech investor who decades ago founded one of the first popular internet browsers, has interviewed candidates for senior roles at the State Department, the Pentagon, and the Department of Health and Human Services.
Jared Birchall, head of Musk’s family office with no experience in foreign affairs, has interviewed a few candidates for jobs at the State Department. Birchall has been involved in advising the Trump transition team on space policy and AI, helping to put together councils for AI development and crypto policy.
Shaun Maguire, another Musk friend, is now advising Trump on picks for the intelligence community. Maguire, a brash Caltech graduate with a doctorate in physics and who is an investor at Sequoia Capital, has been a staple of the Trump transition over the past month, including interviewing potential candidates for senior Defence Department jobs.
“The incoming Trump admin is working ~16 hour days 6 days per week,” Maguire tweeted last week. Musk replied simply with a correction: “7 days a week.” “Was trying to underestimate, but you’re obviously right,” Maguire replied.
Those are just three of the friends and lieutenants of Musk’s – venture capitalists, tech CEOs and other allies of the world’s richest man – who have spent the past month around Trump’s home and private club and the transition offices nearby in West Palm Beach, staying at luxury hotels such as The Breakers or the Ritz-Carlton. Some of the Silicon Valley elite have been involved in interviews, technically as representatives of Musk’s government efficiency office, but their mandate, in practice, is wider as they sit in the interview rooms alongside longtime Trump aides.
The transition offices have been crawling with executives from defence tech firms with close ties to Trump’s orbit, such as Palantir, which was co-founded by Peter Thiel, and Anduril, a military technology startup led by Palmer Luckey. Several SpaceX executives have been asking questions about matters that go well beyond space policy, and interrogating federal spending across government agencies, people with direct knowledge of the talks say.
In some cases, tech executives have been toggling between conducting interviews and interviewing for jobs inside the Government. On Thursday, Trump named David Sacks to be the “White House AI and Crypto Czar”.
Other tech executives who have interviewed for jobs themselves include Scott Kupor, a managing director at Andreessen’s venture firm, who was in the running for a job overseeing the General Services Administration. Trae Stephens, a co-founder of Anduril, and Shyam Sankar, chief technology officer of Palantir, have spoken to Trump transition officials about roles at the Pentagon. And Michael Kratsios, the country’s chief technology officer in Trump’s first term who now co-leads the tech-policy transition group, has also interviewed for the head of the Office of Science and Technology Policy.
Many of the tech executives involved in the hiring process are unwilling to sacrifice earnings in the prime of their career, and so are eyeing part-time roles, such as those externally advising DOGE. Full-time roles there may require divestment.
Some of the tech executives involved described their engagement as patriotic. They peppered the descriptions of their activity in Florida with references to John F. Kennedy’s “best and the brightest,” Abraham Lincoln’s “team of rivals” or Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Manhattan Project – all examples, they say, of private-sector talent swarming into the public sector to save the country.
Musk’s friends are not the only people involved in the hiring process, which also requires candidates to meet with the prospective nominees for Cabinet posts and representatives from the incoming presidential personnel office. The process typically involves interviews with at least three different teams, taking place on three floors of the transition headquarters in West Palm Beach. Candidates are being assessed on score sheets measuring, among other qualities, their alignment with the Trump vision and their competence.
Some tech leaders involved in the transition have described their role as informally funnelling a broader list of interested business executives to the official committee for further vetting and interviewing – as a “supplement” to the official process.
These tech leaders, despite their lack of government experience, have involved themselves in almost every facet of the Trump transition effort. Even Musk’s mother, Maye, a media personality and a model, has been involved in the transition, saying in a recent television interview that “I like to sit in on meetings” with Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, the co-leaders of DOGE.
Musk has long surrounded himself with friends who invest in his businesses, party with him and increasingly serve as a crisis team that swarms into whatever mission that Musk declares critical at any given moment. Some of the same people who comprised Musk’s landing team in 2022 after buying Twitter are reprising their roles, such as Antonio Gracias, an investor in Musk’s companies, who has also been conducting interviews.
Next to Musk in recent weeks at nearly every turn has been Steve Davis, his top cost-cutter at Twitter and an executive at The Boring Co., Musk’s tunnel construction venture. Davis has conducted personnel interviews and peppered experts with questions about the federal budget and the appropriations process. Davis has told some confidants that he plans to help lead Musk’s efficiency office after Trump takes office.
The Musk ally who has been perhaps the most involved in the transition has been Andreessen, who said in an interview with podcaster Joe Rogan that he had been “down in Florida for the last couple of weeks working on some of the stuff happening down there”.
According to people in touch with him in recent weeks, Andreessen has been pushing for rolling back some of President Joe Biden’s regulations on cryptocurrency; lobbying against recent activity by the Federal Trade Commission and its current chair, Lina Khan; and calling for contracting reform in the Defence Department.
Other Silicon Valley figures who have travelled to West Palm Beach and been involved in the interviews of prospective Trump personnel have included John Hering, a tech investor who has emerged as a key player in Musk’s inner circle; David Marcus, a former top executive at Facebook who is now a leading executive in the cryptocurrency industry and has been recommended for full-time roles himself; Mark Pincus, until recently a Democratic donor who co-founded Zynga two decades ago; and Baris Akis, a tech investor.
A core goal of Musk and the Silicon Valley set has been to improve the efficiency of government services. One tech executive who has been seen at Mar-a-Lago, investor Shervin Pishevar, has called for an agenda that pushes substantial privatisation of US government functions, such as the Postal Service, Nasa and the federal prison system, and the creation of a US sovereign wealth fund.
“By leveraging the ingenuity of the private sector and creating pathways for direct citizen ownership, a new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) – spearheaded by visionaries like Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy – could lead a revolutionary restructuring of public institutions,” Pishevar wrote.
He ended his post with an AI-generated image of what Washington might look like in 2032.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Theodore Schleifer, Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan
Photographs by: Hiroko Masuike and Doug Mills
©2024 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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