Cost-cutting lessons from Musk world for DOGE

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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Lessons from the Elon Musk School of Management shed light on how the billionaire will go about slashing government spending in a new Trump White House. Little is known about how exactly President-elect Donald Trump will use the world’s richest man in his coming administration beyond proposing to appoint him to a new government efficiency commission, as “secretary of cost-cutting." When it comes to finding efficiencies in his companies, Musk has a long history of taking a shock-and-awe approach, as when he worked to turn SpaceX and Tesla into industry-leading companies from startups that he often said had less than a 10% chance of success.

When he took over Twitter-turned-X in late 2022, Musk quickly slashed spending at the financially troubled social-media platform, eventually eliminating about 80% of its workforce while continuing to operate even among criticisms for how he treated workers. He has even recommended other companies run leaner, saying he thinks staffing cuts can increase productivity. “At any given company, there are people who help move things forward and people who sort of try to slam the brakes on," Musk said at a Wall Street Journal event last year.

His dramatic actions at Twitter have inspired other tech companies to become leaner and were often cited by voters as something they’d like to see Musk do for the government. In talking about his role as head of a new Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, Musk has said he thinks he can slash $2 trillion out of the federal budget—about a third of the money the government spent in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30.