Fez, you've covered Elon Musk for a long time. You are now our Washington Post Doge reporter. Is it Doge or the Doge? Doge. I've heard you say the Doge. I know I have. I'm sure I said it at one point. I think in tech, they kind of hate articles. They like to say that, you know, here's iPhone. The CIA. The CIA. Remember, obviously, that famous scene in Social Network where it's like, instead of the Facebook, try Facebook. So in the interest of efficiency, Doge. Look what happened. This is crazy.
We stand on the verge of the four greatest years in the history of make America great victory. How can you be against them? The no regrets slash and burn of the government continues as Elon Musk gets cozy with Trump's cabinet and takes center stage. Welcome to Sidebar from the Washington Post. I'm your host, Libby Casey, and I'm joined today by Rhonda Colvin, senior political correspondent, James Holman, columnist and editorial writer, and our special guest, Fez Siddiqui, who covers Doge and many other things in tech. Long history covering a guy named Elon Musk, which has well prepared you for this segment. And you even have a book coming out about Musk on April.
22nd. Hubris Maximus, the shattering of Elon Musk. We're all going to be reading it next month. Thanks, guys, for making time to talk with us. Before we jump into the cabinet meeting yesterday and what it says about Elon Musk's power, The Washington Post has been breaking so many stories related to this theme and this beat. Rhonda, what's standing out to you? One of the things is a story out today that Doge is writing for large-scale firings throughout the federal government. Of course, we've reported on the buyout email, the Forkner Road email, some of the maneuvering with Doge and these federal agencies. But this is sort of confirmation of large-scale firings that are on the way. Some of the top lines from the story that I found interesting, the federal government's HR agency has asked agencies to set up their plans for significant job cuts.
by March 13th. So we're only, what, days, weeks away from that. Some of the examples that are used and on the record in this story of places looking at cuts, Social Security has been asked to cut its staff by half. The Labor Department's office handling equal employment is said to be preparing a cut around 90 percent of staff. So that's pretty much everyone on that team. A lot of these firings are going to target certain job titles and teams. But this is really, this story is a really good look at sort of the restructuring of government and, you know, what happens next. So it's a really great story to read and get a little bit more information about what Doge is doing with these firings. At a time when there's so much focus on Elon Musk trying to cut the government, The Post has also been doing remarkable reports.
about Elon Musk taking money from the government, James. Right. Everyone sort of knows that Musk has benefited a lot from government contracts and loans and subsidies. And our team actually added it all up. And it is pretty remarkable. Over the years, Musk and his businesses have received at least $38 billion in government contracts, loans, subsidies, and tax credits, often at critical moments for the business's survival. This is over the last 20 years. And we have a story on our homepage that really documents how at certain points, Musk was really desperate for that.
money. So if that's a story that you were part of filing is about the FAA, a Federal Aviation Administration, looking at this Verizon contract and considering using Starlink, which of course is Elon Musk's. Tell us more. So there are SpaceX employees in recent days who've been working within the Federal Aviation Administration. How do they just jump in to work in the FAA? So they have FAA email addresses. The transportation secretary has allowed them to come in to look at modernizing federal aviation infrastructure. As part of that effort, the FAA is also reviewing this contract that it has established with Verizon to handle aviation-related communications. Instead of Verizon, we've reported they are now looking at Starlink, which is a part of Elon Musk's company, SpaceX. If we take all this together, Fez, what does this say in your eyes, as someone who's reported on Musk for a long time, about his relationship with the federal government?
So the government, and I don't want to be ahistorical here, but the government, at least in recent history, has not known a business figure like Musk who is so willing to skirt and sort of run afoul of the existing guardrails, especially with regard to conflicts of interest. I mean, this seems quite overt to have people who work for one of Musk's companies navigating a large federal agency and working on a contract related to the work that Musk's own company does. In addition, I mean, they're... There are people working for the Doge who have long had affiliations with Musk or his companies. So it just says that Musk is not as sort of risk averse as somebody who might traditionally have been in this position. I mean, that's consistent. I mean, he has been like this throughout his business career. It's just probably relatively new to the federal government. And that's why it's so jarring to so many people and raising data privacy concerns, conflict of interest concerns, all manner of legal and ethical concerns as well. Let's talk about the cabinet meeting that happened on Wednesday. This was such an unusual optic because, OK, the cabinet meeting, Rhonda, is like.
the chance for all these people who've been put into place by the president, gotten through the confirmation gauntlet, they're in the room together, the president holds forth and has a chat. But there was a special guest here. Elon Musk was literally like lording over, standing over this group. Let's talk just about the body language of it all first. Yeah, and also just looking at some of the still photos and just the visual, because I noticed when I was watching this in real time, Elon Musk was actually out of the lighting of the room. Did you all notice that? And he was sort of darker. And it gave this sense that he was sort of looming over this large conference table and an entire government of cabinet officials. Like you said, usually this is a photo op, really, a first cabinet meeting. There's a few minutes to get some photographers in there, some poll reporters to shout some questions, and then that's it. But this really almost felt like I was watching a show.
And it sort of goes with Donald Trump kind of being that TV producer president who knows the moments, how to amplify certain moments. He knows Musk is right now being criticized by a lot of people in the opposite party as well as Americans who don't like the fact that he is able to do this. But the body language, too, was stunning, too, because you can see how some cabinet officials, you know, I'm no body language expert, but. It seemed as if they you could read their faces and they were wondering, OK, what's going on here? Don't diminish your body language interpretation. I haven't taken any classes on it yet. Maybe I will. But as a journalist, just knowing how to observe and look at the room, it did seem like there was some tension in the beginning when Musk stood up and started talking. But I'm having to crane around and crane around. At least if I had to turn on completely to hear him speak. I think of you as an excellent observer of human nature and people. So, yeah, I mean, there is this funky thing happening where who's got the power? Yes, exactly. Who has the power? And I will also say that you can sense from some of the other.
cabinet officials, that they were also wanting time with Trump. I noticed that the Commerce Secretary was trying to talk about tariffs when Trump brought that up. The Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegstead, also tried to interject and give praise to the president. So it felt almost like The Apprentice, remember that, where they're all trying to be in front of Donald Trump and state their reasons why they should be there. And I think Musk adds to that. They all need a reason to be there because Musk is now kind of this de facto government official. But yeah, it was very interesting to watch. I'm getting this real sense of whether formal or informal, just hierarchy. And I noticed it when I was seeing some of the footage from the Oval. I think it was one of the press.
where was it the Commerce Secretary who said when the president says something, say yes. And that just felt like the perfect precursor to then what happens in this meeting. It's like, you know, people have to sort of nod and fall in line. I want to play a clip of Elon Musk praising the cabinet. And I want to share it for a couple of reasons. So he's groveling in a way and Trump loves that when people are like, it's the best, you're the best. But also when you have the power to say, I decided that you are the best, it actually means you're kind of powerful and able to make that judgment call. So let's listen to it. President Trump has put together, I think, the best cabinet ever.
Literally. And I do not give false praise. This is an incredible group of people. I don't think such a talented team has actually ever been assembled. I think it's literally the best cabinet that the country's ever had.
And I think the company should be incredibly appreciative of the people in this room. The company should be appreciative. It's amazing because Rhonda team us up with the job cuts that all of these agencies are being instructed. We talked in our previous episode on Tuesday about, you know, the tension emerging in response to that five points. What did you do over the weekend email? And so I think this very public cabinet meeting is an effort to project. One, Elon is in charge. Elon has the confidence of the president. And two, the cabinet secretaries are sort of dutifully going along. It does feel like performance art, even, you know, the dark MAGA hat, everything about it.
This feels like Trump was trying to send the message that he isn't going to stop Elon from forging ahead. What do you make of his tech support t-shirt that he's been wearing? So I think as we're going to see soon, Elon loves props and he loves to trust the part. So when he moved to Texas, relocated Tesla to Texas, he wore a Tesla belt buckle. I believe it said, like, don't mess with Tesla. And so he loves this kind of thing, the ability to. And you can see how that dovetails with Trump's interests, right? Like he wants people who, what have I read, out of central casting. And Elon is that for this.
tech support role he's established for himself, but also this dark MAGA appearance he's adopting. With like the dark MAGA hat, literally like the black MAGA hat that he's wearing. I mean, and I also think it's interesting that, you know, saying that he is merely tech support, diminishing his own role feels interesting to me. I don't know quite what to make of it other than there's sort of a discomfort with declaring openly how much power he has. We're also excited to read your book and you have this sense of him and his rhythms. What is his life in DC?
like day to day. I mean, we kind of know he has an office in the EOB that used to be the secretary of wars. But what is what is Elon's day like? So we've reported that he's working, as you said, out of the EEOB, out of the Secretary of War suite, using a powerful gaming computer that is hooked into a power strip in the middle of the office. So let's all pause for a minute and envision that. I think what he is trying to do is reestablish sort of the workflow that he has for himself in Austin previously in California within D.C. So that means sleeping in the office if that's what it comes to or being, you know, he says it's tech support. It's like responding to fires, like being available to respond to any fire at any hour.
He also has sort of betrayed his own lack of sleep. You can see it in his Twitter feed. He tweets it every hour from like, because sometimes I'm like, oh, you can tell that maybe there was some sleep in here because he tweeted at like 11 and he didn't tweet again until six. But right now he's tweeting at like 1 a.m. and 3 a.m. So then you're like, where is the sleep happening actually? And I also would point out that like the criticism of that is that it's performative. I mean, it's not, you're not necessarily 100% on your game if you're never sleeping. As my mother taught me at a young age and I now teach other young people, yeah. You know, Elon has this.
in the private sector i mean he's obviously we had that fork in the road email it was like identical to what he sent on twitter and then he sent it to the federal workers there was this tweet uh a few hours ago today where uh he wrote there's a shortage of top-notch air traffic controllers if you've retired but are open to returning to work please consider doing so and that to me felt so emblematic of how he has this pattern of you know deep extreme cuts cut first ask questions later that may work in silicon valley where you've spent so much time the last couple of years but uh it doesn't work in government to just go sort of rehire And I believe you mentioned this at the cabinet meeting where he was talking about USAID and cutting funding for Ebola prevention. We actually have that clip. Why don't we listen to it? Yeah, because it's significant because, first of all, it's like this aw shucks, but also Ebola, folks, like not something you want to be screwing up. Let's listen. And I should say, also, we will make mistakes. We won't be perfect. But when we make a mistake, we'll fix it very quickly. So, for example, with USAID, one of the things we accidentally canceled very briefly was Ebola, Ebola prevention. I think we all want Ebola prevention. So we restored the Ebola prevention immediately.
And there was no interruption. So that's Elon Musk talking at the cabinet meeting yesterday. We're going to do some fact checking on that, but first, please do continue. So, I mean, yes, like the idea that this approach is new to government and potentially ineffective or even, you know, dangerous for government because so many of these programs are so much more crucial than, you know, the bottom line of a mega corporation. You know, that is sort of a new idea, a new dynamic that we're dealing with here in Washington. So our colleagues Dan Diamond and John Hudson reported actually that officials say.
Doge restoring Ebola prevention is not true. USAID initiatives to fight Ebola and other diseases have been gutted and are still gutted. That's according to current and former USAID officials, James. Yeah, and this is like happening all over the government. Ebola is the example that Elon Musk volunteered in this public setting, but they also fired the head of...
the safety for our nuclear weapons stockpile and had to rush to get them back uh you know they because it was easy because they don't have job protections they got rid of like every probationary employee and then realized that in some cases they were considered probationary employees because they had gotten a new job classification but it actually been veterans of these agencies who were performing vital roles uh you know the last week the jfk library in boston had to close down for an afternoon because they got rid of all the probationary employees and they didn't have anyone to work the desk and then you know the next day the head of the museum was doing it and so there's there's almost too many illustrations of this sort of cut first ask questions later uh then we can possibly capture in our daily news report. Yeah, one thing I was thinking of when you were talking about how he's sleeping and working, has this high-powered computer saying he's not sleeping. I was thinking about yesterday when I heard Speaker Johnson on the Hill. He was asked by a reporter, what did you think about the cabinet meeting? Musk led it. And he said he did not see it, so he couldn't comment. But he said, well, I know Elon's working around the clock. I talked to him late last night at 10 p.m., and he was busy working. And I was thinking, what Elon Musk is trying to project to people is that he's there for them. He's this outsider trying to make cuts.
But how much is that, since you know you have studied the mind of Elon Musk, how much is this something that is a concerted effort? Like he is trying to frame himself as this person who doesn't sleep and is working for the American people. And, you know, we know how well it works for Trump where he's become this folk hero to a lot of the people who he appeals to. Does that also work for Musk and actually give him some longevity that he's this character outside of government who's working for you? Yeah, that's why I say it's sort of putting out fires is what he's doing around the clock, because he's obviously involved in so many different areas, not only of government now, but also like of American life that he cannot possibly devote enough attention to any one of these areas to be directing the work solely. So within his companies, he really like delegates. And I've reported on and people will see in the book that like there are examples of these really cutthroat.
times that are crucial for his companies. And the person who's saving the company might, the leader is Elon, but the people who are doing the dirty work are often those who he's delegated it to. So picture him in that role of, you know, even the one he gave himself, he is responding to technical problems, and he is making himself available. And he is guiding it from a philosophical standpoint. But surely, you know, it's something other than I think what people envision of somebody who is...
awake at all hours and methodically attacking problems. He is sort of guiding it from above. And I would even give, you know, I believe the White House has said this, like he is overseeing Doge. He's not the administrator. So the question is, will he then get the blame if the American public does truly turn against this? We're hearing more town halls across the country of people who are concerned about losing federal jobs because it's happening all over the country, not just in Washington. People concerned about services getting cut off. Is Elon Musk kind of disposable to President Trump as a fall guy if things go badly in terms of the optics? Elon is absolutely like if the buck stops with Trump on Doge, the buck stops with Elon, right? And so if this is a wildly unpopular program and we know the history of turnover, at least in the first Trump administration, it's hard to imagine this playing out differently. The only major...
difference I feel like is at play here is that, you know, Elon gave more than $275 million to this election effort. I mean, he is so much, he has been so much more crucial, surely than anyone else that Trump has had a falling out with. And Rhonda has pointed out to us that he's also contributed mightily to the House Republicans and getting them elected. Moreover, I mean, if you didn't go back to that, you're reporting on the FAA and Starlink. I mean, that's already like a 10x return on investment. So Trump is getting this guy who's sort of a heat shield, but Musk is getting billions of dollars off of his large investment.
Since Elon Musk has, you know, so many business interests, is he concerned at all about how his role in government and how he's experiencing a lot of backlash may hurt him and his businesses? I was reading yesterday that Tesla actually experienced its first annual decrease in vehicle deliveries. And of course, Tesla is probably just a small part of his portfolio financially. But still, it does speak to perhaps the backlash against him working in government may hurt him in the business world. Do you think he's concerned? Aren't you pointing out that there were like protests outside of Tesla dealerships? Yeah, I was driving past one over the weekend and there were a lot of federal workers there with signs saying, honk if you love federal workers. And, you know, they were really at a Tesla dealership.
And I imagine that's happening in other places, too. And even at the Capitol. On Tuesday, I was there and saw signs against Elon Musk, more so than I saw signs against Trump. So I feel he is someone that may be experiencing a backlash and a turn and wondering, is he thinking about that when it comes to his business? And will he ever just say, OK, I'm done with the federal government stuff. Let me go back to the things that I know.
So you've touched on something that's very important to me, which is that Tesla is the engine that has made this possible for Elon. I mean, it is key to his wealth, his stake in Tesla. The other businesses, if we look at SpaceX, which is a privately held corporation, or X, which is privately held, we don't have as much insight into how valuable they are to Elon, but we know that Tesla at times has been as much as half of his net worth, if not more. So it is crucial. And the same way as I was reading earlier, Amazon is so important to Bezos, but then he has this side venture of Blue Origin, right? Space is not the driver of these folks' wealth, or at least the vast majority of it. So getting back to your question, it has to, at some point, there has to be a point where the financial pain starts to raise questions for Elon. But Elon has rarely, and in this period, I don't know that he has expressed concern over the state of Tesla because he believes that he's saving the country and he believes that that's more important than money. And he believes that, you know, for all the criticism that...
and backlash that Tesla has faced. He believes that something else, the woke mind virus, as he has called it, is an existential threat to humanity. So he gave an interview in 2023 where he said, offer me power, offer me money, I don't care. And I think about that a lot because he's in this place where he has money, he has power. Is he cognizant of the fact that he could lose it? Yeah, it's easier to say that when you have power and money. You go to someone who lacks both. I mean, you see the power in them when you don't have them.
Musk is officially this SGE, this special government employee that are only allowed to work, what is like 130 days a year, basically out of a year. So the clock's ticking because otherwise he had to divulge and go through all this financial disclosure stuff, right? So is this term limited, so to speak? As someone who's been watching this play out, I just find it hard to believe that Elon would see it as, oh, it's day 1.30, I'm done here. The president, when he announced the formation of Doge, said it had a deadline of July 4th, 2026.
Doge, which is now officially the U.S. Doge service, is this temporary organization within the government, which I believe is aiming for the same target date. So it's just hard to see Elon stepping aside after that 130 days. And the fact is, you know, one of the big news kind of kerfuffles this week is who's in charge of Doge, because obviously it was Elon Musk who orchestrated this email that went on Saturday. Musk tweeted and talked about how he had it sent out. But then the government has said in court that Elon Musk is not in charge of Doge. And so after days of questions.
Caroline Levitt, the press secretary of the White House, announced that Amy Gleason is actually the administrator of Doge. And that was sort of news to her. Reporters reached her. She's on vacation in Mexico. But they're doing that because they're trying to legally maneuver things. You could envision a scenario where Trump makes up some exception to the rules. You could envision a scenario where Musk has no formal role but is still doing things. Squatting at the EOB? Can you do that if you're not a government employee? And it also raises the question of the watchdogs. We know inspectors generals have been let go. We know that all of these cuts are, you know.
ushering people out of the door who may be watching these things. So you do wonder who will be watching in July if Elon, you know, has turned in his time sheet and it's filled up and he hasn't more hours. You know, that's another question too. Right. Who's going to enforce it? Who's going to even monitor it? Journalists will try. We'll try. And we have Fez here to help us work our way through it. Everything related to Elon Musk. Hey, thank you so much for coming and talking with us. Let's mention the book one more time because it's got such a great title. Hubris Maximus, April 22nd. Thanks, Fez. Thanks so much, Fez. And for everybody else, and you can tune in too to this Fez Breaking News for your...
media consumption. Our team of James, Rhonda, myself, and James Rieger will be live on Tuesday night. Tuesday is when President Trump delivers his joint address to Congress, the first one of this term. And you know the optics of that. Everybody gathers into the House floor and the gallery to watch him deliver what's basically kind of like a State of the Union. We will be watching as well. Starting at 8 o'clock Eastern time, we'll be broadcasting all of those opening visuals of who's sitting next to whom and which Supreme Court justices showed up. And then Rhonda, James, Jam, and I will watch the speech along with you in real time. We'll be commenting on it, dissecting it, doing a little bit of fact-checking and going over things. And we look forward to sharing that with you. It'll be...
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