Jonathan SwanTheodore SchleiferMaggie HabermanRyan MacKate CongerNicholas Nehamas and Madeleine Ngo
It started as Elon Musk’s musings at a 2023 dinner party about how he would gut the federal bureaucracy. It evolved into an operation that has given him a singular position of influence over the government.
The plan for his Department of Government Efficiency was mapped out in a series of closely held meetings in Palm Beach, Fla., and through early intelligence-gathering efforts in Washington.
Without ceding control of his companies, the richest man in the world has embedded his engineers and aides inside the government’s critical digital infrastructure, moving with a swiftness that has stunned civil servants.
On the last Friday of September 2023, Elon Musk dropped in about an hour late to a dinner party at the Silicon Valley mansion of the technology investor Chamath Palihapitiya.
Mr. Musk’s visit was meant to be discreet. Still skittish about getting involved publicly in politics, he told the guests he had to be careful about supporting anyone in the Republican nomination fight. And yet here he was — joined by Claire Boucher, the singer known as Grimes and the mother of three of his children — at a $50,000-a-head dinner in honor of the presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who was running as an entrepreneur who would shake up the status quo.
As the night wore on, Mr. Musk held forth on the patio on a variety of topics, according to four people with knowledge of the conversation: his visit that week to the U.S.-Mexico border; the war in Ukraine; his frustrations with government regulations hindering his rocket company, SpaceX; and Mr. Ramaswamy’s highest priority, the dismantling of the federal bureaucracy.
Mr. Musk made clear that he saw the gutting of that bureaucracy as primarily a technology challenge. He told the party of around 20 that when he overhauled Twitter, the social media company that he bought in 2022 and later renamed X, the key was gaining access to the company’s servers.
Wouldn’t it be great, Mr. Musk offered, if he could have access to the computers of the federal government?
Just give him the passwords, he said jocularly, and he would make the government fit and trim.
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