Musk and DOGE: Inside 100 days of chaos

Note: Transcripts are automatically generated from episode audio, and are not fully corrected for spelling, grammar, and formatting.

KATIE DRUMMOND: Is it true that the federal government is bloated, can be inefficient? I think that is probably true. Is doing it over an eight-week timeline with a machete the most effective way to get the change that you want? Probably not. You have people who have given over their entire careers to work for a given federal agency who are now getting marching orders from 21 year-olds, former SpaceX interns who have never worked for the government in their entire lives. But DOGE is not going anywhere. Whether Elon Musk is spending more time sleeping on the factory floor at Tesla or not, DOGE is already here. It is entrenched in the federal government, and that is not going anywhere, wherever Elon Musk is.

BOB SAFIAN: That’s Katie Drummond, global editorial director of Wired, the tech and business news outlet. Wired has done incredible coverage of Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. DOGE’s purported goal is to eliminate waste from the federal government. It’s fired thousands of people, gutted agencies, generated a slew of controversy. I wanted to talk to Katie to better understand Musk’s head-spinning activity, even as Musk himself claims to be trimming back his DOGE commitment. We discussed the evolving relationship between politics and business, the role of journalists and business leaders amid disruption, and more. If like me you’ve been a bit overwhelmed by the flurry of moves coming out of the White House, Katie offers valuable context for a chaotic time that shows no signs of slowing down. I’m Bob Safian, and this is Rapid Response.

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I’m Bob Safian. I’m here with Katie Drummond, Wired’s global editorial director and co-host of the terrific podcast, “Uncanny Valley.” Katie, thanks for joining us.

DRUMMOND: Thank you so much for having me. It’s so nice to be here.

Copy LinkThe implications of Trump’s cuts to NPR & PBS

SAFIAN: So my producers got all over me to have you on the show because they love everything that Wired has been covering around Elon Musk and Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, DOGE, and I’m eager to talk about that. But first I have something I wanted to ask you about some recent media news, that Trump’s executive orders to cut funding from NPR and PBS. It’s not a surprise at this point, but it’s still kind of a big moment.

DRUMMOND: It’s not a surprise. He has obviously been signaling and messaging this in no uncertain terms for some time now, which is that he just doesn’t think these organizations should be funded by the government, doesn’t seem to think they should exist. These are scary times for journalism, and I think that that executive order, we can talk all day about how binding an executive order actually is, or whether this executive order actually carries any water and allows him to do what he’s trying to do here, which as far as I’m aware, it doesn’t really, but to me, what’s more important — and often, unfortunately, what’s more important with President Trump — is not so much what he’s actually able to do, it’s what he signals he wants to do. It’s about intention. It’s about the message that he’s putting out into the country, into the public sphere, out into the world that he doesn’t think these journalistic entities should exist. That is a very chilling message, whether you are a journalist or just someone who believes that journalism should be uninterferred with by government entities. If you think that, then this executive order should be very scary for you.

SAFIAN: From a journalist perspective, it’s not so bad to separate media organizations from government funding. In theory, journalists shouldn’t be beholden to anyone. It’s more the message that any journalist who disagrees with him should be somehow penalized.

DRUMMOND: Yeah, I always think about what is the intention behind what he’s doing, and sometimes it’s, frankly, very difficult to decipher what Trump’s intentions are, but I think the idea is just to put journalists on notice that you do not have a fan in the White House. The reality with government funding of journalistic entities is, one, I do not think that NPR and PBS are beholden to the government in their coverage. They publish plenty of critical coverage of administrations, and they have for a very long time, but the idea of pulling funding from organizations like those, that provide free access to media and to news and to entertainment for millions and millions of Americans is really disturbing. It’s not like there’s a bunch of cash lying around for these organizations to go get somewhere else. There is no cash. Ultimately, there is no tried and true business model unless you were smart enough to acquire Wordle several years ago and you’re the New York Times. So it’s a scary prospect to think about the idea of government funding being pulled from organizations like PBS and NPR, which are really, really vital to dialogue in this country, in my opinion.

SAFIAN: Unless you’re backed by a billionaire like Jeff Bezos, right? That’s worked out so well for the Washington Post.

DRUMMOND: What is happening there? There are so many talented journalists and editorial minds at the Washington Post, and every subscriber they lose is another drop in the hat that will ultimately add up to more layoffs for that organization, unless he decides to sell. To divest himself of this asset that seems to be nothing but a burden on the rest of his businesses. I have no idea why he continues to operate this newspaper if it doesn’t really seem like he wants to participate in that kind of rigorous editorial work or even dialogue on its opinion pages.

SAFIAN: Unless the reason you own it is because you want to support that kind of journalism as opposed to owning it because you think it’s going to make money for you the way Amazon does. It’s not that kind of a business.

DRUMMOND: It’s not that kind of a business. I wish him luck trying to steer the newsroom of the Washington Post in the direction that he wants. That is just not how journalism works.

Copy LinkUnpacking Elon Musk’s motives with DOGE

SAFIAN: Well, so let’s talk about DOGE. You made a big journalistic commitment to cover DOGE from the beginning. I mean, one article alone I saw had nine writers on it. Why DOGE? What made you want to focus there? Was it because your reporters had covered Musk for years at Tesla and SpaceX, and so you had background that other newsrooms might not, or was there another reason?

DRUMMOND: So when I started here in late 2023, we did not have a politics team. We were not regularly in the business of covering politics, and that was something I decided to do very early on in my time, was to hire a politics editor to staff up on reporters who could really own that intersection of politics and technology. I was not thinking about Elon Musk very much in the context of politics. I was thinking about politics and technology in the context of artificial intelligence, in the context of hacking, in the context of online influencers and how they were changing presidential campaigns, or electoral campaigns around the world.

Now, it just so happened that in the summer of 2024, we had our politics team, we were up and running, Trump was shot in the ear. Grazed by a bullet. Elon Musk jumped in headfirst, endorsed Donald Trump, started fundraising for him. Oh, this is about to be a big story. Elon Musk, the most influential technologist and technology CEO of our lifetimes arguably, is jumping into politics. This game just changed in a really interesting way, and that’s when we started pulling reporters not just from the politics team, but from our business desk, from other teams that we have in our newsroom, to really start to lean in and start to try to own this intersection of Trump and Musk, Trump and Musk, Trump and Musk, and then they announced the Department of Government Efficiency. Is this a joke? We’re seriously naming a new part of government after a meme? This is ridiculous. What is happening? And then the coverage obviously spirals from there.

SAFIAN: The goal of DOGE is purportedly to cut fraud and waste and abuse from the federal government, which seems like a good thing.

DRUMMOND: Sure.

SAFIAN: How pure do you think Musk’s intentions are? Obviously there are claims of other objectives.

DRUMMOND: I never try to get inside Elon Musk’s head. I think that sounds like a very dangerous place to spend time, and not necessarily a rational place to spend time. I think that one thing that’s so interesting about him and the people who are working for DOGE and this sort of ecosystem that they inhabit is that if you ask them, if you asked Elon Musk what his intentions are, I think that they think they are doing really good things. I think that his intentions, at a superficial level are “No, this is a wasteful, corrupt, fraudulent bureaucracy, and it needs to be disrupted in a very extreme and very aggressive way.” I think that he genuinely thinks that, and I think that they see themselves as the good guys in this fight.

But as we have seen DOGE and DOGE’s actions play out, it’s very obvious that there are other ideas here. There are other designs here on what exactly it means to overhaul every federal agency in the U.S. governmental apparatus, and a lot of that appears to have to do with data, and it has to do with artificial intelligence. So it’s become very obvious that DOGE is trying to amass as much data from within every federal agency as they possibly can. They want their hands on all kinds of sensitive data, data about Americans, data about people applying to be U.S. citizens, and they want that data to be accessible from one central place. So they want to be able to have the Department of Homeland Security access data from the IRS. They are really trying to create some kind of central resource of data about Americans and about non-U.S. citizens, and obviously that data could be used for all kinds of things, including deportations.

Copy LinkThe risks of AI and data collection in government agencies

And then there is the AI piece of it all, and the data piece of it to me really feels pernicious, scary, malevolent. That data is extremely sensitive. This is the most personal information we have about every single person living in this country.

The AI piece of it now, you have DOGE going into different agencies and trying to introduce artificial intelligence. So we published a story about a DOGE recruiter trying to recruit Palantir alums to go build and deploy AI agents inside the federal government with specific language saying, “We think there are about 70,000 jobs that could be automated with AI agents.” Which to be clear from my point of view and the point of view of the Wired newsroom, AI agents are still very early in their development. There is no world in which AI agents should or could or can be deployed across federal agencies in an effective, error-free manner. But there appears to be this idea that what’s more efficient than having no people working for the federal government, but just letting AI do it instead.

SAFIAN: Right. Well, and that vision is part of what is driving a lot of tech businesses thinking it’ll happen down the road.

DRUMMOND: Right.

SAFIAN: What you’re saying is the state of the technology right now is not at a place where it can effectively do that.

DRUMMOND: Not even close. AI agents, we came into this year at Wired thinking, okay, this will be a year where a lot of really interesting work happens around agentic AI. Around this idea of AI that can actually perform like end-to-end tasks for you independently without you having to be closely involved. That is still very, very early in its development, and the idea that even for private businesses, that they would start deploying those tools, it’s very early to be having those conversations, let alone saying, “Let’s see how this does with the very sensitive tasks of various federal agencies.” It is absolutely ridiculous to even suggest that that’s a viable idea.

SAFIAN: So I want to ask about data. It’s become a staple of business, of technology businesses, certainly, that aligning data across different parts of an organization is tremendously valuable. If DOGE is merging data from across government agencies, why is that risky in a different way than what Google is already doing?

DRUMMOND: Sure. Well first of all, I would say yes, it is very common outside of the government for companies to collect all kinds of data, including data on users, to put that all in one place. That’s not necessarily a good thing. It is something that happens. It often happens so that they can serve more effective advertising to different users. There are all kinds, of course, of horror stories about that data leaking or sort of that data being used in ways that users of these services would certainly prefer that the data was not. When it comes to federal agencies, I think what’s particularly ridiculous or wild to me is, as if no one ever thought of this before, the data that is held by different federal agencies is compartmentalized and contained within those agencies for a reason. It’s not like a bunch of idiots have been running these agencies for decades, and they just didn’t think that maybe they could all compare notes. And undocumented immigrants are actually encouraged to file taxes because it could help them potentially down the road apply for and obtain U.S. citizenship. That data cannot then be shared with other federal agencies who are looking to deport people. That is one very specific example of why it’s important for this data to be siloed, not for all of this data to be aggregated and put in one place.

I would also say that the more data from across all of these agencies you compile and you aggregate, the more specific and holistic and well-rounded a picture you’re able to get of any given individual living in this country. The U.S. government doesn’t want to serve ads to us. This is not Meta. We’re not talking about Facebook. You don’t want one person within the federal government to have access to every single bit of information about you from across every single agency of government. That is a very dangerous proposition, and that effectively is a very effective way to build a very powerful surveillance state.

SAFIAN: Another area of concern on DOGE is the potential conflict of interest for Musk and other DOGE employees who still hold positions at private companies, including ones with active government contracts. The Trump administration doesn’t really seem to care about that.

DRUMMOND: Well, the Trump administration loves a conflict of interest. This is sort of their whole deal. If you look at even just the Trump family and their entanglements with crypto, as the New York Times reported Donald Trump himself is awash with conflicts of interest, and that seems to be how he wants to run his administration. Obviously, when it comes to Elon Musk himself, again, just one giant conflict of interest. SpaceX. Okay? SpaceX is regulated by the FAA. Elon Musk and DOGE now have operatives, workers, inside the FAA helping decide how the FAA should be run. Helping to decide which contracts to cancel, which contracts to uphold, how to move forward with that agency with aviation safety, with everything that the FAA oversees. SpaceX is a massive beneficiary of government contracts, and SpaceX is regulated by those same agencies. All of those agencies are now beholden, to some extent, to DOGE and to Musk and to an administration, at the end of the day, to an administration that supports the work that those individuals are doing.

Copy LinkThe role of journalism amid political chaos

SAFIAN: You are not shy about expressing your concerns about the Trump administration. I’m curious, do you think of yourself as being part of the resistance? There’s that phrase that’s used sometimes. How much do you worry about political repercussions of Wired’s coverage for you? For Wired’s business?

DRUMMOND: I am not an activist. I am not part of a #resistance movement. I am a journalist. Wired, our newsroom, we go out, we seek out information, we call sources, we get expert opinions. We’re able to sort of synthesize that information and help our audience understand what it means, what the potential benefits are. Often in the case of DOGE, what the potential risks are. That information is reviewed by lawyers and fact-checkers. It is then published. So I am in the business of providing our audience information, but I think it would be ridiculous to say, “Well, I’m just providing the information. You come to your own conclusions.” No, I have a point of view on all of this, and so does Wired. As a newsroom, we have an institutional point of view about what’s happening right now, and we are very well positioned to have that point of view. We employ subject matter experts on AI. We employ subject matter experts on data and how data is stored and safeguarded and what the potential risks are of pulling disparate data sources together into one place. We have experts in politics and policy and how federal agencies ought to best be run, and when we don’t have expertise on staff, we outsource it. We call experts. That is the job of journalism.

So I’m not shy about sharing my point of view, particularly because I don’t think this is a great time in history to be shy. Whatever your role, if you’re a journalist, you’re an academic, whatever your profession, whatever your walk of life, I think it’s important to use your platform and use your expertise to say something about what is happening right now. I think I would really regret in 50 years on my deathbed, looking at my grandchildren and them asking me what I did during the Trump administration and me telling them, “Oh, I just kept my head down, and I stayed really, really quiet.”

Now, in terms of safety, look, you would be crazy to work in journalism right now and not be concerned about your safety. It’s something that we talk about a lot internally. We talk about it a lot at Wired. At Conde Nast, my parent company, obviously I can’t speak for them. What I can say is that they have been incredibly supportive of this work, and it’s something that we are taking one day at a time, but with, ultimately, a commitment to continuing to do this work for as long as we possibly can. Whether I’m doing the work from New York or from a bunker in Europe, TBD, but I will be doing the work from somewhere.

SAFIAN: Katie’s emphasis on covering the intersection of politics and technology was spot on, and her insights about the risks from even well-meaning efforts by Trump and his cohort are bracing. So how should businesses react and how will DOGE impact Musk’s own long-term business reputation at Tesla and beyond? We talk about that and more after the break. Stay with us.

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Before the break, Wired’s Katie Drummond explained what Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency is after and some of the risks involved. Now, we talk about DOGE’s emerging impact on Musk’s private businesses, whether he’s really likely to step away from his government work, and more. Let’s jump back in.

Copy LinkThe legality and reception of DOGE’s cuts

One of the intriguing elements of DOGE has been the limited checks and balances in restraining Musk’s efforts. We’ve seen some legal cases, but the Trump administration hasn’t been shy about rejecting certain court orders. There’s been muted congressional response. Is DOGE potentially part of a constitutional crisis?

DRUMMOND: Well, I think that there’s no question about the very real potential for that to be the case. Anytime a judge says, “Do this,” or, “Don’t do this,” and the Trump administration waves its hands around and says, “Yeah, no. We’re not going to listen,” we are in a constitutional crisis. That is what that looks like. When the rule of law is not the rule, we have a serious problem on our hands. Obviously, there has been a great deal of litigation — more than, frankly, we can even keep up with, and I think than most journalists can. Sometimes we’ll find a legal filing, and it’s like a week old, and nobody’s published a story about it, and it’s newsworthy. There is so much happening right now, but there is no question that a lot of what DOGE appears to be doing is not to the letter of the law. It is being challenged in court, and we will have to wait and see as more of these cases wind their way through the courts and end up with a judge making a decision. Whether or not the administration decides to abide those decisions, obviously, we have already seen very real examples of the administration deciding not to, and that is a very scary situation of course, for this country to be in.

SAFIAN: It seems like Musk himself has been surprised by how much his reputation has taken a hit since DOGE. We’ve seen protests against Tesla and setting fire to cars and dealerships and the stock price down and revenue down. Do you think Musk regrets at all getting involved in this?

DRUMMOND: I don’t know that he’s someone who lives with a lot of regret. I think that what’s so interesting about his surprise and his sort of… You can see when he talks about it in press appearances, he is very sad. He is saddened by the acts of violence against Tesla cars, or the impact this is having on his companies, and he is very surprised at the fact that not everybody is thrilled by the idea of slashing one to two trillion dollars from the federal bureaucracy. I think that what that speaks to ultimately is what I said earlier, which is that he thinks that he is the good guy here. So if you think that what you are doing is really smart, is really strategic, is really just a revolutionary thing in a positive way to be doing within the federal government, wouldn’t you be shocked when thousands or millions of people come out and say, “Actually, we hate your guts for this?” That would be shocking.

SAFIAN: We’re not close to the $2 trillion savings target that was set up.

DRUMMOND: Oh well, he walked that back. Then it was one trillion, and I think we’re at a fraction of that, if even.

SAFIAN: But the goal is to sort of chip away at the core infrastructure of the federal government because there’s kind of this assumption. I understand the idea of there being waste and the government could be faster, but there is this sort of feeling, as you mentioned, these words like fraud. That people are doing this on purpose, are somehow stealing government money by working there and not doing their jobs.

DRUMMOND: Is it true that the federal government is bloated, can be inefficient, that we could probably take a lot of money out of the federal government? Is that true? Yes. I think that is probably true. Is doing it over an eight-week timeline with a machete the most effective way to get the change that you want? Probably not, no. I’m going to say that there are probably better ways to assess the workings of every federal agency. Those mechanisms exist. I don’t know that DOGE and Elon Musk are spending very much time looking at what they actually have already done.

Copy LinkIs Wired reaching Trump supporters?

SAFIAN: As a communicator, how much do you think about trying to reach the people who agree with what Trump and the administration and Musk are doing and getting them to sort of see things the way you do and the way your reporting team does?

DRUMMOND: I think that is a question that any journalist has been thinking about since at least 2016, if not earlier. I think that my best answer to that question is that when we publish our journalism, we focus on the facts, we are transparent with our audience about what our point of view is, I’m not trying to hide what we think, and then we put it out on every platform we possibly can. We’re not focused exclusively on parts of the internet that we think lean a certain way. We’re trying to get this information in front of as many people as possible.

The reality of that though, if I’m being just very candid about our shortcomings and my shortcoming and the limits of our abilities here, are that we can put that information out there, but if someone is not even within the Venn diagram of platforms that we participate in on the internet, if they’re spending all their time on Truth Social, they’re watching Fox News or whatever it is, it is very difficult, if not impossible to reach those audiences, and it’s not for lack of trying. And I would say even in my personal life, there are relationships that I have with people who disagree with me tremendously about what’s happening right now, and there are limits to what those conversations can involve because people are living in different versions of reality, and it is very difficult to have conversations when your version of the truth is different from someone else’s.

Copy LinkMusk’s fallout from DOGE involvement

SAFIAN: So back to Musk. So Musk is now supposedly spending less time with DOGE.

DRUMMOND: Yes.

SAFIAN: Stripping back to one to two days a week. Do you expect him to actually peel off?

DRUMMOND: This is such an interesting moment that we are in with this. Obviously he has announced, and President Trump has sort of shared that sentiment, that he will be spending more time with his companies. Obviously he has a pretty big problem to fix at Tesla, so he will be paring back his time with the administration, paring back his time with DOGE. He did a bunch of interviews with media outlets, Wired unfortunately was not included, that effectively amounted to some kind of exit interview for him.

That said, I would say a few things about this. One, from an optics point of view, this is a very smart moment for Musk and Trump to say, “Hey, this guy’s stepping back.” That is helpful for Tesla, for Tesla shareholders, for the Tesla board. That is very helpful for President Trump. Given how many Republicans and how many Trump voters across the country are outraged about what Elon Musk and DOGE are doing. Optically, this is a very smart thing to do. Two days a week and every other week in Washington D.C. That is what Elon Musk has said he will be doing. That is not an insignificant amount of time. “I’m pulling way back other than the two days a week that I will spend working on this project.” It’s still a significant investment of time, and I think regardless, and even Elon Musk himself in these interviews that he did has acknowledged this, that the so-called Department of Government Efficiency is already operational. There are already people leading the charge for that group within these agencies and across the administration. DOGE is not going anywhere, whether Elon Musk is spending more time sleeping on the factory floor at Tesla or not, DOGE is already here. It is entrenched in the federal government, and that is not going anywhere, wherever Elon Musk is.

SAFIAN: And the folks who work for DOGE full-time, not just two days a week, compared to the other folks in government, this is sort of an internal war that’s going on inside the government then, right?

DRUMMOND: From everything we can tell and from all the reporting we’ve done, and of course other news organizations have done as well, you have lifetime civil servants, you have people who have given over their entire careers to work for a given federal agency, who are now getting marching orders from 21 year-old former SpaceX interns who have never worked for the government in their entire lives. I think that there is so much chaos and uncertainty spread out across these agencies that I think federal workers are really scared. They’re alarmed, they’re very stressed out, they don’t know if they’re going to get fired tomorrow, and all of a sudden they’re answering to someone they’ve never met, they’ve never heard of before in their lives who has laptops in his backpack. That’s a very alarming workplace environment to be spending your time. So I would certainly say that a culture clash, for sure, combustible situation, to say the least.

Copy LinkLessons from the first few months of DOGE

SAFIAN: So Musk’s crew has infiltrated the U.S. Treasury, gutted USAID, targeted the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, laid off that thousands of federal workers. As you said, it’s hard to keep track of all the changes through all of this. Are there lessons from these first few months of DOGE that have surprised you?

DRUMMOND: Every hour of every day since January has surprised me. I think that if this moment and everything we’ve seen has taught me anything, if I’m being totally honest, it is that the federal government and the federal agencies that encompass it is much bigger and more complicated than I think anybody, average day-to-day American, including DOGE workers, really realizes as you start to go through just the number of agencies and how they all work and all of the different systems that they use and where this data is stored and where that data is stored. I think for me, it has really helped me understand why it is such a massive bureaucracy, why it is the largest single employer in the country. It takes a lot of government to run the government, which again is not to say that there is not efficiency to be found within that bureaucracy, but that government moves slowly because government needs to move deliberately. And I think where we have seen the most significant culture clashes or the biggest issues, the biggest problems, the biggest risks with DOGE is that they are moving incredibly quickly, and they are rubbing up against a system that works slowly by design.

Copy LinkThe delicate balance for business leaders in political waters

SAFIAN: It’s interesting. I mean, part of the reason I became and stayed a business journalist was because I felt like the progress and change in our culture was being driven as much or more by business than it was by government. Government was so big and slow that the changes were happening at business levels. Now it feels a little bit like that turned around, and I’m curious from your point of view, is there a role that business and business leaders play in, I don’t know, modulating or impacting how the administration changes the government?

DRUMMOND: Well, there absolutely is. And I think that it would be very easy to make a joke here about business leaders bending a knee, spending a million dollars to go have dinner with Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago, showing up at the inauguration with smiles on their faces. That was all pretty specific behavior, but I suspect, and in some cases I know, that as much as they are not saying anything publicly, they are trying to work with this administration and they are trying, behind the scenes, to create some sense and some strategy out of what is, again, just pure unadulterated chaos.

Now, whether they are lobbying and pulling strings behind the scenes for their own ends, to get tariff exemptions for their own products, but who cares what Google gets? It’s Meta all the way over here. Whether they are doing it for their own ends and for the well-being of their company, or whether they are really thinking about the bigger picture, the well-being of the country, the well-being of the planet I don’t have an answer to that question. I would unfortunately suspect we’re talking more about the former than the latter, but I think the role that they are playing right now is much more behind the scenes. They know that they need to work with this administration. They’re trying to figure out the best way to do that, the most strategic way to do that. I think what that has meant is that this is a very different version of business leadership in the United States than we saw in the 2016 administration.

I always remember Airbnb and Brian Chesky in particular coming out swinging at the Trump administration during his 2016 term over really offensive comments that the president had made about people from garbage countries. Airbnb spun up an entire marketing campaign around that comment. Brian Chesky came out and had a lot to say about Trump at that time. We are not seeing those kinds of comments from business leaders this time around, and I think it’s because they know that it is in the best interests of their company in an existential way, to play ball. And so they’re playing ball, but they’re doing it behind the scenes, and I think they are doing it very delicately.

SAFIAN: Because they run the risk of Trump coming after them directly.

DRUMMOND: And he has been explicit. He said that Mark Zuckerberg should be in prison. He could not be more clear this time around. I think everybody recognizes that he really means business, and this is a lot more serious, and so I think they are treating it with that very much top of mind.

SAFIAN: Well, Katie, this has been great. Thank you so much for doing it.

DRUMMOND: Oh, thank you for having me.

SAFIAN: Listening to Katie, I just kept thinking, what’s a business leader to do in this environment? When she says this isn’t the time to be shy and that everyone should use their platform to try to shape our future, I totally agree. At the same time, when she talks about the explicit risks that a leader faces in disagreeing with the Trump administration, that’s also hard to ignore. Musk’s experience is in some ways a metaphor for both sides of this. He’s definitely been using his platform to impact the future, and he’s definitely faced some blowback. Not from Trump, but from the public.

So what lessons do I draw from Musk’s DOGE and from this moment of chaos? I’ve wanted government to act in a more business-like way for a long time, but I’ve come to appreciate that we need to be careful in equating what works best in one realm of society with the challenges of another. I want the U.S. government to be able to move faster, but that doesn’t mean we should exercise that speed in every area, every day, all the time. As for what motivates us as leaders, I think we need to look beyond our own self-interest if we want to get to a better world. The paradox is that what’s broadly good for others is usually better for us too in the long run. We’ll talk more about that in the episodes to come. I’m Bob Safian. Thanks for listening.