Most Americans know very little about Elon Musk’s team of brainiacs at the Department of Government Efficiency, and may have misconceptions about who they are.
However, Bret Baier’s interview with Musk and seven of his lieutenants at DOGE last week shed a welcome light on these unfamiliar names.
For starters, they look nothing like the image that has taken hold in the public imagination, driven by a story in Wired about a group of pimply teenage nerds with online nicknames like “Big Balls” running riot through government systems.
Instead, we saw seven highly accomplished, respectable adults, all but one in a suit and tie. They are friends of Musk that he has tapped as “tech support” for the federal government, at least for the 130 days he has committed himself to.
Some work in his companies. At least one is a self-made billionaire in his own right. The last thing they need is a federal government job. They don’t speak like partisan activists but like the successful engineers and businesspeople they are. They may well be Democrats, like Musk once was, but you wouldn’t know it, and nor should it matter.
They have volunteered to fix the antiquated computer systems and operations of the federal government and safeguard them from fraud and waste because, like Musk, they believe America is in dire need of their expertise and can-do energy.
‘Best of Silicon Valley’
These are the seven Musketeers:
Joe Gebbia, the billionaire co-founder of Airbnb and a close friend of Musk, has volunteered at DOGE to modernize the retirement process for federal government employees, contributing what he calls his “designer brain and start-up spirit.”
“I loved the challenge, so I jumped on board,” he told Baier. “We’re taking the best of Silicon Valley and the business world and bringing it into the government . . . I’m here because it’s an interesting problem. We can use design and good engineering to solve it and really create a better experience for everybody.”
He described an underground mine in Pennsylvania that “houses every paper document for the retirement process in the government” and hasn’t changed in 70 years. He plans to digitize the mess of 400 million pieces of paper in 22,000 filing cabinets and create an “Apple Store–like experience” for government services.
Steve Davis, an aerospace engineer, is Musk’s top lieutenant from Space X and most recently ran Musk’s Boring Company, the tunnel-digging startup. He is the head of operations for DOGE.
“To have the country going bankrupt would be a very bad thing,” he says. He and the others have “put our lives on hold [because] we believe there is a chance to succeed.”
Among DOGE’s discoveries are 15 million people aged over 120 marked as “alive” in the Social Security system. “Social Security numbers that were clearly fraudulent were floating around that can be used only for bad intentions.” There also are 4.6 million credit cards in the federal government for some 2.4 million employees.
Tom Krause, a Silicon Valley CEO who has been in Musk’s orbit for 15 years, joined DOGE in January to apply “public company standards to the federal government.”
Full op-ed over at The New York Post:
Meet DOGE’S patriotic Musketeers — led by Elon and the belief that America needs their expertise, now https://t.co/eoTBGfHV5l pic.twitter.com/PpuXRQWytK
— NY Post Opinion (@NYPostOpinion) March 31, 2025
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