Theodore Schleifer
Appearances
Fresh Air
How Did Elon Musk Become So Powerful In The Trump Administration?
No. Elon Musk, a couple of years ago, couldn't care less about this stuff. He was like lots of wealthy tech executives who probably voted for Democrats. We know he voted for Obama. He voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016. And over the last couple of years, as Elon Musk moved to Texas and surrounded himself with a more conservative social circle,
Fresh Air
How Did Elon Musk Become So Powerful In The Trump Administration?
And frankly, got kind of radicalized by the stuff that he was seeing on the platform he bought, Twitter, or now X. He started caring about this. But this has all been such a fast burn that your question is a good one because no one really anticipated this happening.
Fresh Air
How Did Elon Musk Become So Powerful In The Trump Administration?
I think the timeline starts during COVID. Elon Musk at this time, let's say pre-COVID in 2019, is somebody who is a center-left Democrat, doesn't really care about politics. But what happens is Musk begins to feel targeted, fairly or not, by legislators in California.
Fresh Air
How Did Elon Musk Become So Powerful In The Trump Administration?
As you may recall, there were work stoppages put into place by California government and Tesla's factories were sort of defying or threatening to defy California about that. Around this time in 2021, like lots of wealthy people in tech, Elon leaves the state, he moves to Texas, he moves to Austin.
Fresh Air
How Did Elon Musk Become So Powerful In The Trump Administration?
And he becomes very, very convinced that COVID and the lockdowns and what he calls the quote unquote, woke mind virus has taken over America. And also around this time, Elon Musk has a child who begins to identify as trans and there's a personal dimension to this that we probably haven't fully appreciated.
Fresh Air
How Did Elon Musk Become So Powerful In The Trump Administration?
And suddenly you wake up four years later and Elon Musk is the chair of the Department of Government Efficiency and is sort of leading this takeover of government. But I think the timeline we're talking about here is really the last four years. It's really the Biden years, which has produced the Elon Musk of the Trump years.
Fresh Air
How Did Elon Musk Become So Powerful In The Trump Administration?
Sure. Elon Musk has a lot of kids. Elon has had a lot of marriages or had kids with women who are not his wife. And one of his children began to identify as trans. And Elon has said publicly that this issue, trans issues, is really what kind of pushed him away from the Democratic Party. And he's talked a little bit about it publicly. He doesn't always want to go into the personal stuff.
Fresh Air
How Did Elon Musk Become So Powerful In The Trump Administration?
I find in some of his public commentary, he's not eager to talk about this. But we know that it played some role in kind of him becoming Right. Right. Right. Crime, immigration, the woke mind virus that is infecting American kids. He is motivated, like all of us are, frankly, by our personal experiences.
Fresh Air
How Did Elon Musk Become So Powerful In The Trump Administration?
And clearly, Elon's family life has played a role as well in sort of getting him to be more conservative.
Fresh Air
How Did Elon Musk Become So Powerful In The Trump Administration?
I think he's basically said as much. Yes.
Fresh Air
How Did Elon Musk Become So Powerful In The Trump Administration?
This is just the culmination of everything that came during the Biden era. When I went to Silicon Valley in 2017, it was impossible to be an outspoken Republican because you would be allying yourself with Trump.
Fresh Air
How Did Elon Musk Become So Powerful In The Trump Administration?
And even if you were a believer that there should be tougher border enforcement or that the government spends too much money or anything that Elon Musk says today, you would also have to defend all of these positions that were absolutely reviled in the tech industry. So most Republicans in tech, frankly, just shut up. They didn't talk about politics at all. They talked about their companies.
Fresh Air
How Did Elon Musk Become So Powerful In The Trump Administration?
They were not eager to get involved. Meanwhile, Silicon Valley liberal billionaires are sort of the war chest of the resistance, and they're leading the effort to push back on Trump. Now, fast forward to 2020. Joe Biden wins. Trump leaves office. Jan 6 happens. Now there is the ability, developing slowly, you know, at the time I'm there, 2021, 2022, to be anti-Biden.
Fresh Air
How Did Elon Musk Become So Powerful In The Trump Administration?
Even if you are not really vocally pro-Trump, you know, you could argue that we should have a different Republican nominee. People like Ron DeSantis were getting a lot of currency among Silicon Valley Republican billionaires. Elon Musk was not that involved right at this point, but plenty of kind of Musk acolytes, someone like David Sachs, who is now the White House AI czar.
Fresh Air
How Did Elon Musk Become So Powerful In The Trump Administration?
At the time, David Sachs helps launch this podcast called All In, which becomes very popular among the tech right now. And you see anecdotally, you know, I'm there talking with, you know, kind of people I think of a center left kind of rich liberals who are beginning to, you know, wonder why is Joe Biden so anti-business?
Fresh Air
How Did Elon Musk Become So Powerful In The Trump Administration?
You know, why didn't he invite Tesla to, you know, an EV summit that he held at the White House? You sort of see this visceral reaction to kind of the Biden positions on tech policy. And, you know, why is he stifling innovation, stifling artificial intelligence? Why is he being so mean to all these crypto industry people? priorities.
Fresh Air
How Did Elon Musk Become So Powerful In The Trump Administration?
That is kind of the climate that Elon Musk begins to emerge from. Elon in 2023 was supporting Ron DeSantis somewhat covertly for president. And it wasn't until, you know, the assassination attempt in mid 2024, that Elon was publicly pro Trump, but a lot in building up between 2021 and 2024. That is now we're only seeing publicly in the Trump White House in 2025. But
Fresh Air
How Did Elon Musk Become So Powerful In The Trump Administration?
This was a long time coming, I guess.
Fresh Air
How Did Elon Musk Become So Powerful In The Trump Administration?
Yeah, I mean, look, Elon is an interesting person on AI, where he has all those beliefs, you know, personally about the world and culture and politics. And he also has beliefs that I think would be contradictory to some of kind of the right word shifts of the artificial intelligence industry, where Elon Musk is actually very concerned about AI. You know, he's signed a lot of public letters,
Fresh Air
How Did Elon Musk Become So Powerful In The Trump Administration?
urging there to be AI safety. And he's concerned about the company OpenAI being too commercialized. And sort of he's concerned about this jump from a nonprofit to a for-profit company. So he does not have conventional beliefs of kind of the right here, which is in general, you know, more pro-technology development and pro, frankly, just profit motive.
Fresh Air
How Did Elon Musk Become So Powerful In The Trump Administration?
Musk has some deeply concerned and, frankly, pretty long-held beliefs that AI could be a problem. So he does not fit neatly into a box on this issue.
Fresh Air
How Did Elon Musk Become So Powerful In The Trump Administration?
Liberal billionaires have really been MIA, Terry. I mean, it's been very hard to see sort of any leadership from wealthy Democrats about what exactly their plan is to take on Trump. They're not really saying much of anything. I mean, some wealthy Harris donors have... have adopted some of that kind of kumbaya messaging where they're trying to support the new president.
Fresh Air
How Did Elon Musk Become So Powerful In The Trump Administration?
Other people have been kind of in a daze. You know, Reid Hoffman, for instance, who's kind of one of the leading liberal donors, I reported a few months ago, was telling friends that he was considering leaving the United States entirely. I think lots of these wealthy Democrats legitimately feel they could be targets of persecution or, you know, from a Trump perspective.
Fresh Air
How Did Elon Musk Become So Powerful In The Trump Administration?
led FBI or that their businesses could get special attention. And the sense from from wealthy Democrats is they should just lay low. So that's sort of happening right now. You know, we've seen the beginnings of kind of conversations or the concepts of conversations about how exactly they should spend their money to resist Trump.
Fresh Air
How Did Elon Musk Become So Powerful In The Trump Administration?
But right now, it is not a time for a wealthy Democrat to feel like they can speak out about Trump. And, you know, that's why you're not really seeing much publicly. Privately, you know, wealthy Democratic donors I talk to are... are still sort of in blame game mode a little bit. Like they're still trying to understand how Harris lost exactly.
Fresh Air
How Did Elon Musk Become So Powerful In The Trump Administration?
They're still, you know, facing questions about should they have been more vocal about Joe Biden in 2024. And 2028 is, of course, a really, really long time away. So we're not really seeing much leadership from them.
Fresh Air
How Did Elon Musk Become So Powerful In The Trump Administration?
Sure. I mean, this is a war, in Elon Musk's view, a war on the bureaucracy. And there's no Geneva Convention for this war. There are no beliefs from the Musk team that they have to be fair or believe that, you know, they're required to disclose the names of their generals, even as they kind of go after the other generals.
Fresh Air
How Did Elon Musk Become So Powerful In The Trump Administration?
I mean, we've seen the Musk team—I'm exaggerating for dramatic effect there a little bit— but, you know, they genuinely believe that they are in hand-to-hand combat with— a bureaucracy that wants to kill them, right?
Fresh Air
How Did Elon Musk Become So Powerful In The Trump Administration?
I mean, for instance, there's at these agencies right now, there's an intense resistance to kind of giving the Musk team what they want because they think the Musk team wants to, you know, attack them. And so we just have right now, you know, a very, very, very intense personal fight between
Fresh Air
How Did Elon Musk Become So Powerful In The Trump Administration?
rank and file bureaucrats and these kind of 23 year old Elon Musk acolytes who are fighting over, you know, whether or not they get access to this Medicaid system or this HR payroll or yada, yada, yada.
Fresh Air
How Did Elon Musk Become So Powerful In The Trump Administration?
Pretty far. The Musk team has been sort of fighting the bureaucracy of the Treasury Department over what sort of access they could get to the payment system. But as of now, the Elon team and the Treasury team are sort of trying to find a middle ground and the courts are trying to kind of enforce a middle ground to make sure that everyone is peachy with the arrangement.
Fresh Air
How Did Elon Musk Become So Powerful In The Trump Administration?
You know, I think at first the Musk team, which is led by this guy named Tom Krause, who's an executive from Silicon Valley, who recently was appointed to a top position at the Treasury Department, they're trying to have what's called read-only access to that $5 trillion in payments, essentially what that would mean
Fresh Air
How Did Elon Musk Become So Powerful In The Trump Administration?
would be that the Musk team and Krauss could read kind of all payments that go out to make sure that they're complying with Trump's executive orders. You know, Elon has said publicly he wants to make sure that we're reading things like to make sure that no money is going out to terrorists from Treasury.
Fresh Air
How Did Elon Musk Become So Powerful In The Trump Administration?
But the concern, especially for people who believe in the separation of powers, is that this could be a way for Musk— to essentially unilaterally decide to stop payments and things that have been authorized by Congress.
Fresh Air
How Did Elon Musk Become So Powerful In The Trump Administration?
That if you suddenly have the ability to read Treasury payments as they're going out the door, couldn't Musk somehow find a way to, eh, we shouldn't spend the money on, you know, this thing or that thing. Let's cut 20 trillion right here to 30 trillion right there. And suddenly that makes Elon Musk more powerful than Congress. And that sort of is the concern.
Fresh Air
How Did Elon Musk Become So Powerful In The Trump Administration?
And that's why this pretty technical approach distinction over read-only access versus kind of a more expansive power when it comes to Treasury's code. That's why that matters is because it tells you whether or not Elon Musk can just kind of read the book or write the book.
Fresh Air
How Did Elon Musk Become So Powerful In The Trump Administration?
So the U.S. Digital Service was started during the second Obama term as a way to get more technologists into government. And it largely was doing things like, you know, pushing for making it easier to file your tax returns online or, you know, updating government websites, things that were pretty non-controversial.
Fresh Air
How Did Elon Musk Become So Powerful In The Trump Administration?
But it was established and it was an existing department, and I think they had somewhere around 200 employees all around government, sort of being detailed to various tasks there. Doge, which originally was sort of conceived of as an outside entity, sort of jujitsu-ed its way into working as a successor organization sort of to the USDS, to the US Digital Service.
Fresh Air
How Did Elon Musk Become So Powerful In The Trump Administration?
They just kept it called the United States Doge Service now instead. And essentially what that enables the Doge team to do is they don't need to create a new office. They're just kind of taking over the existing office. And they have now put all of their detail ease in into Doge and into the USDS.
Fresh Air
How Did Elon Musk Become So Powerful In The Trump Administration?
And they're now farmed out across various agencies, you know, including the Office of Personnel Management, which oversees kind of the civil service or the General Services Administration, the GSA, which kind of manages government real estate. But all these people technically work for the USDS. And it was it was a pretty clever way to get in the front door
Fresh Air
How Did Elon Musk Become So Powerful In The Trump Administration?
of the bureaucracy by sort of taking a similar-ish institution that already existed and repurposing it for Musk's purposes.
Fresh Air
How Did Elon Musk Become So Powerful In The Trump Administration?
There is about 40 of these people, we think, who are working for Doge. That's funny.
Fresh Air
How Did Elon Musk Become So Powerful In The Trump Administration?
Yeah, but you can be working at 26 different agencies before breakfast. You know, a lot of these folks have multiple jobs simultaneously, multiple detail assignments simultaneously, and they sort of jump from, you know, DHS to, you know, the education department, depending on how the mood strikes them.
Fresh Air
How Did Elon Musk Become So Powerful In The Trump Administration?
You know, I think we're focusing a lot on the kind of the kids, as we call them, even though there are like official normal Washington types who are involved in this. I don't want to overstate it. There are also a good amount of people who are involved who are sort of just Elon friends who are maybe in unofficial capacities. Various people from Musk's social network are sort of involved.
Fresh Air
How Did Elon Musk Become So Powerful In The Trump Administration?
You know, Mark Andreessen has called himself an unpaid intern to Doge, the billionaire venture capitalist. You know, I think what their work is, what they're doing is pretty novel, obviously. And they're getting into lots of fights with the bureaucracy in a way that befits sort of the Silicon Valley mindset of disruption, right? That's the nice way to put it.
Fresh Air
How Did Elon Musk Become So Powerful In The Trump Administration?
They are not believing that they need to go through the standard bureaucratic process of establishing a commission to investigate a task force to blah, blah, blah. They just want to go in and do it. A lot of the people involved share Musk's distaste and disdain for the status quo. I think we're seeing a lot of these people who have come in who have worked for Elon Musk in some capacity.
Fresh Air
How Did Elon Musk Become So Powerful In The Trump Administration?
They're all kind of in Musk's image. And he's a, you know, he's a very, very divisive, polarizing leader. But there are people that surround Elon Musk have kind of a cultish devotion to him. And I think that we're seeing the reason these people are getting involved in Doge is because they love Elon Musk and they will do what Elon Musk tells them to do.
Fresh Air
How Did Elon Musk Become So Powerful In The Trump Administration?
And that's why they followed him to Washington, D.C.
Fresh Air
How Did Elon Musk Become So Powerful In The Trump Administration?
Certainly post-Citizens United, you know, there's been this ability of individuals to spend unlimited money on political campaigns and that has empowered wealthy people as opposed to wealthy corporations, which, you know, have always been very, very influential in Washington, right? I mean, they have trade groups, they have lobbyists, they...
Fresh Air
How Did Elon Musk Become So Powerful In The Trump Administration?
you know, have donated money to campaigns and they still can, obviously. But the ability of private individuals, I find just such an interesting story because they're peculiar, right? They're human beings. They have their own beliefs and their ability to act on them.
Fresh Air
How Did Elon Musk Become So Powerful In The Trump Administration?
And they have agency in a way that some ways corporations do not because they're risk averse and, you know, ruled by committee and, you As philanthropists and as donors and as political givers and as billionaires, these people are empowered in a way that corporations can feel kind of defanged. They can feel slow. Certainly not true of Musk's corporations, but I love the stories about the people.
Fresh Air
How Did Elon Musk Become So Powerful In The Trump Administration?
Yeah, I feel like I'm tempted to offer a contrarian opinion that I just believe it's not going to blow up immediately. Look, the Dirties are clearly two larger-than-life personalities, to put it mildly. The possibilities of this blowing up need no explanation. I think the reasons why it could not blow up is... These are people who are enjoying each other's company genuinely.
Fresh Air
How Did Elon Musk Become So Powerful In The Trump Administration?
You know, I think that they actually do have a good personal relationship at this point. And also there's PR reasons to not have a blow up. I think they're both enjoying the perception of access and the perception of power because both ways. I think Trump likes having power. surrounding himself with someone who knows a lot about things and is able to teach him about certain things.
Fresh Air
How Did Elon Musk Become So Powerful In The Trump Administration?
Trump obviously also respects wealth and respects Elon's abilities in the business world. I find myself thinking it's going to last longer than most people do. I'll tell you that.