Delete, delete, delete.
It’s the mantra Elon Musk almost chants at his companies, driving engineers to economize rocket building and electric cars in new ways – but also using it as an ax to unsparingly cut workers who don’t fit into his plans.
Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy promise they’ll take the sweeping layoffs approach at the helm of President-elect Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, an advisory group aimed at coming up with ways to trim the federal budget. The pair at DOGE, as it’s known, also pledged to ax costly regulations.
What’s the budget cut moonshot? $2 trillion, or nearly a third of the annual federal budget.
More:Before Elon Musk, Trump tapped another billionaire to cut costs. It didn’t end well
Many incoming administrations have promised to slash the budget. Experts say Musk’s goal is impossible; too much of the budget lies in either national security or entitlement programs dear to Trump supporters.
But many feel that if anyone can make the cuts, it’s the South African whiz kid who made electric cars sexy and is preparing to send people to the moon for the first time since 1972.
“There’s a lot of potential here,” said John Graham, a former senior official in the Office of Management and Budget during George W. Bush’s presidency. “I don’t think people should underestimate Musk. He’s a controversial figure but he’s a quick study and if he gets some experts to brief him – he might just gobble this up.”
Musk’s legacy of cost cutting includes everything from replacing $1,500 latches on a rocket bound for the International Space Station with modified $30 bathroom stall locks, according to biographer Walter Isaacson, to cutting thousands of jobs at Twitter.
More:Inside ‘Elon Musk’: Wild details from revealing Walter Isaacson biography
His unflinching focus on removing people and parts has led to accomplishments many assumed impossible, such as making Tesla a viable car company.
But he’s left a trail of wreckage along the the way.
For example, Tesla assembly lines are significantly more dangerous than other American car factories, according to Occupational Safety and Health Administration complaints, a disparity that goes back nearly a decade. The injury rate at Tesla’s flagship California factory in 2015 and 2016 was 30% higher than the rest of the industry. (For serious injuries, it was 80% higher.)
More:From tariffs to crypto, how Trump and Musk’s economic views compare
And Musk’s slash and burn tactics at X, formerly Twitter, prompted an exodus of users and advertisers amid growing hate speech and misinformation on the platform, costing billions of dollars, CEO Linda Yaccarino complained.
Here’s a look at the Musk Method and what it means for DOGE.
Musk bought Twitter in October 2022 and fired thousands of workers while transforming the platform into X.
He cut 50% of the staff and 80% of the contractors who verify users, according to Isaacson’s biography, “Elon Musk.”
Employees who criticized the new boss were fired and hundreds resigned when he ordered them back to the office after two years of COVID-era remote work. Musk expects a similar end to remote work for federal employees will help reduce the payroll.
Since he overhauled the platform to fit a free speech absolutist vision, firing its content moderators, X has become a toxic environment, critics say, claiming Musk himself is its most prominent booster of misinformation.
More:Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy outline plan for ‘large-scale firings’ in federal workforce under Trump
The new king of the digital town square lobbied for Trump and right-wing issues. An analysis from the Center for Countering Digital Hate found misleading or false claims Musk shared about the 2024 election were viewed nearly 1.2 billion times.
Fact checkers debunked around 50 of his posts between Jan. 1 and July 31. These included posts that received 747 million views claiming President Joe Biden was bringing migrants into the U.S. to increase the Democratic voter base; misleading posts around voter fraud that received 288 million views; and sharing an AI-generated satirical video of Vice President Kamala Harris, potentially violating the platform’s own policies against inauthentic content.
The platform suffered five major outages in Musk’s four months at the helm. A high-profile livestream of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ 2024 presidential campaign launch was a glitchy punch-line.
The result: A growing financial disaster.
Advertisers fled over Musk’s abandonment of content moderation, costing the company billions. X’s value has crashed 79%, according to investment firm Fidelity, from $44 billion when Musk bought it in October 2022, to $9.4 billion at the end of September this year.
Musk’s single-minded approach won’t be good for the government, said Hamed Qahri-Saremi, a social media researcher at Colorado State University. “You cut a lot of costs but then you went bankrupt,” Qahri-Saremi said, exaggerating. “Is that a success?”
The mercurial entrepreneur made similarly drastic cuts at Tesla Motors, according to Tim Higgins, author of “Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century.”
“He can be brutal when it comes to cutting costs,” Higgins said. “Elon’s not going to be held up by being messy, as long as it gets to the ultimate goal.”
Musk’s cutthroat decisions saved the company.
“It was always an effort to keep the lights on and the dream going,” Higgins said. “Car making is a cost eating business.”
Musk will sometimes reverse course, Higgins said, using the example of automation at Tesla factories, an approach Musk loudly touted in 2017 only to find the machines were inefficient and threatened to kill the business. He owned up to the mistake and hired factory workers instead.
“Humans are underrated,” Musk concluded.
That sentiment didn’t stop a decision to shed 10% of Tesla’s global workforce – 10,000 jobs – in April of this year.
Musk’s pledge to lay off thousands of federal workers and eliminate regulations should be taken seriously, Higgins warned: “He is a very literal person.”
Experts view the goal of cutting $2 trillion as unrealistic, but Higgins, who writes about Musk at The Wall Street Journal, says lofty goals have long been key to his success.
Whether that approach works with a federal government that’s responsible for everything from national defense to cutting tens of millions of monthly Social Security checks to inspecting a billion pounds of meat every week, remains to be seen.
“One of the things about Elon is that he tends to throw out huge, hairy, audacious goals that people don’t think are possible but by doing that he pushes the organization to achieve more than what they thought was possible,” Higgins said.
More:‘How much does it cost?’ Elon Musk riffs on buying MSNBC after Comcast spinoff news
It’s exactly that attitude that has led to successful cost-cutting improvisations at SpaceX that read like half-baked MacGyver plots.
In addition to exchanging those $1,500 rocket latches for modified bathroom locks, other improvisations detailed in Isaacson’s book include: swapping out $9 million rocket cooling systems for $6,000 home AC units; jury-rigging a factory inside a tent to deliver an impossible order of Tesla cars; and sending his engineers out with blow dryers to dry a rocket antenna that got soaked in a storm, a complication that would normally scuttle a launch.
Ambitiously, Musk has promised to bring down spending at the Department of Defense, which takes up the largest single chunk of federal discretionary spending at $805 billion a year.
Barry King, a former official at the Office of Management and Budget, said defense cuts proposed by outsiders seldom survive.
“Frankly, these ideas tend to die on the vine,” King said. “If you’re trying to build buy-in for these types of cuts, historically it has been crucial to create or foster advocacy among internal Pentagon reformers, stakeholders on Capitol Hill, and among relevant outside interest groups.”
The first challenge Musk and Ramaswamy will face is that they won’t technically have any power beyond giving Trump advice – and using the X megaphone.
“The use of the word department is a little unforgivable because they won’t have the authority to go and slash agencies,” said Graham, the former OMB official.
Federal budget staffers are used to outsiders bragging they can do better.
“These people come in high-handed, thinking they can straighten this thing out and they run into all kinds of issues they never understood,” said Scott Lilly, a former chief of staff for the House Appropriations Committee.
Many find the way to cut expenses is to cut government services, which will put the Republican majority at risk, Lilly cautioned: “They’re going to run smack dab right into these people that look to Donald Trump for hope.”
