The bond between Musk and Trump solidified on July 13, 2024, when a would-be assassin nearly succeeded in taking the former president’s life in Butler, Pennsylvania. Musk was captivated by a photograph of Trump, with blood flowing from his face, defiantly raising his fist and declaring “Fight, fight, fight” for the cameras. This striking image swiftly morphed into a meme, which resonated with Musk’s affinity for viral content. On that day, he publicly endorsed Trump and shifted his newly formed super PAC’s focus toward securing the former president’s reelection.
In the following month, during a live conversation on X, Musk proposed collaborating with Trump on a “government efficiency commission.” Trump’s reaction was fervent. “You’re the greatest cutter,” he praised Musk, clearly impressed.
Two years prior, after a whirlwind acquisition of Twitter that involved last-minute logistics and colossal financial transactions, Musk had slashed approximately 80 percent of the company’s workforce, shut down numerous international offices, and eased Twitter’s content moderation standards under the banner of free speech. His demand for rapid transformation was so intense that one of his top aides, Steve Davis, resorted to sleeping at Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco with his partner and their baby.
In Washington, Musk estimated that his team could eliminate “nearly $2 trillion” from the federal budget. When excluding politically inviolable military expenditures, essential spending like Medicare and Social Security, and interest payments on the national debt, that $2 trillion figure loosely represented the remaining budget. Essentially, Musk was suggesting the elimination of everything else — from foreign aid to housing assistance, from the upkeep of national parks to basic weather data collection, and from investigations into exploitative lenders to air traffic control operations.
Following Trump’s victory, he revealed that Musk, along with former Republican presidential contender Vivek Ramaswamy, would co-lead a newly formed initiative called DOGE. This announcement initiated a covert recruitment campaign, managed by Davis, the very executive who had spent nights at Twitter HQ. Musk envisioned a group of exceptionally brilliant individuals converging in Washington for an intense, 80-hour-a-week, 18-month long hackathon targeting the US government.
The DOGE elite convened on the eighth floor of the SpaceX office in Washington, DC, taking over several conference rooms for meetings and interviews with prospective members of DOGE, as reported by a source familiar with the developments. One specific question posed to applicants was: Who did you vote for in 2024?
Among the initial recruits by Davis was Zsombor (Anthony) Jancso, a young engineer based in San Francisco and a former Palantir employee. After his time at Palantir, Jancso participated in a project called Accelerate X, which claimed to provide “a modern OS for government” with solutions “delivered in days.” His cofounder, an MIT-trained engineer named Jordan Wick, also joined the DOGE initiative.
A few weeks following the 2024 election, an online handle linked to Jancso reached out to a group of individuals who had taken part in an AI competition organized by the US Space Force. The outreach indicated they were in search of “hardcore engineers” and instructed candidates to send their GitHub or LinkedIn profiles to @DOGE on X and to respond privately with their X handle. (Engaging in this process would require them to purchase X premium.) Shortly after that, the same handle posted in a Palantir alumni group: “This is a historic opportunity to create an efficient government and to reduce the federal budget by one-third.”
