The Silicon Valley Billionaires Steering Trump’s Transition
The
involvement of wealthy investors has made this presidential transition one of
the most potentially conflict-ridden in modern history.
Elon Musk epitomizes a new generation of tech leaders who often have a
right-wing ideology and favor fewer constraints on entrepreneurship.
By Theodore SchleiferMaggie
Haberman and Jonathan
Swan
Dec. 6, 2024
The
week after the November election, President-elect Donald J. Trump gathered his
top advisers in the tearoom at his Florida resort, Mar-a-Lago, to plan the
transition to his second-term government.
Mr.
Trump had brought two of his most valued houseguests to the meeting: the
billionaire Tesla boss Elon Musk and the billionaire co-founder of Oracle,
Larry Ellison. The president-elect looked around the conference table and
issued a joking-not-joking challenge.
“I
brought the two richest people in the world today,” Mr. Trump told his
advisers, according to a person who was in the room. “What did you bring?”
Mr. Trump has delighted in a critical addition to his
transition team: the Silicon Valley billionaires and millionaires who have been
all over the transition, shaping hiring decisions and even conducting
interviews for senior-level jobs. Many of those who are not formally involved,
like Mr. Ellison, have been happy to sit in on the meetings.
Their
involvement, to a degree far deeper than previously reported, has made this one
of the most potentially conflict-ridden presidential transitions in modern
history. It also carries what could be vast implications for the Trump
administration’s policies on issues including taxes and the regulation of
artificial intelligence, not to mention clashing mightily with the notion that
Mr. Trump’s brand of populism is all about helping the working man.
The
presence of the Silicon Valley crew during critical moments also reflects
something larger. Silicon Valley was once seen as a Democratic stronghold, but
the new generation of tech leaders — epitomized by Mr. Musk — often has a
right-wing ideology and a sense that they have an opportunity now to shift the
balance of power in favor of less-fettered entrepreneurship.
Brian
Hughes, a spokesman for the presidential transition, said that Mr. Trump and
Mr. Musk are “great friends and brilliant leaders.”
“Elon
Musk is a once-in-a-generation business leader and our federal bureaucracy will
certainly benefit from his ideas and efficiency,” he said.
This article is based on interviews with more than a dozen
people with insight into the transition, including people who have participated
in the process. Most spoke on condition of anonymity to preserve their
relationships with Mr. Trump.
Innovation and deregulation
Jared Birchall, the head of Mr. Musk’s family office, has interviewed a
few candidates for jobs at the State Department. Mr. Birchall has no experience
in foreign affairs.
The
tech leaders in Mr. Trump’s orbit are pushing for deregulation of their
industries and more innovative use of private sector technologies in the
federal government, especially the defense industry. About a dozen Musk allies
took breaks from their businesses to serve as unofficial advisers to the Trump
transition effort.
Broadly,
the group is pushing for less onerous regulation of industries like
cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence, a weaker Federal Trade Commission
to allow for more deal-making and the privatization of some government services
to make government more efficient. Mr. Musk himself has called some executives
at major public companies and asked how the government is thwarting their
business — and what he can do to help.
These
tech leaders have played a far broader role than simply contributing to the
nascent Department of Government Efficiency — the Musk-led effort, abbreviated
as DOGE, that is intended to effectively audit the entire government and cut $2
trillion out of federal spending. Mr. Musk’s friends are also influencing
hiring decisions at some of the most important government agencies.
Inside the Trump transition team’s headquarters in West
Palm Beach, Fla., the billionaire Marc Andreessen, a tech investor who decades
ago founded one of the first popular internet browsers, has interviewed
candidates for senior roles at the State Department, the Pentagon and the
Department of Health and Human Services.
Jared
Birchall, the head of Mr. Musk’s family office with no experience in foreign
affairs, has interviewed a few candidates for jobs at the State Department. Mr.
Birchall has been involved in advising the Trump transition team on space
policy and artificial intelligence, helping to put together councils for A.I.
development and crypto policy.
Shaun
Maguire, another Musk friend, is now advising Mr. Trump on picks for the
intelligence community. Mr. Maguire, a brash Caltech Ph.D. in physics who is an
investor at Sequoia Capital, has been a staple of the Trump transition over the
last month, including interviewing potential candidates for senior Defense
Department jobs.
“The
incoming Trump admin is working ~16 hour days 6 days per week,” Mr. Maguire
tweeted last week. Mr. Musk replied simply with a correction: “7 days a week.”
“Was trying to underestimate, but you’re obviously right,” Mr. Maguire said
back.
Those
are just three of the friends and lieutenants of Mr. Musk — venture
capitalists, tech C.E.O.s and other allies of the world’s richest man — who
have spent the last month around Mr. Trump’s home and private club and the
transition offices nearby in West Palm Beach, staying at luxury hotels like The
Breakers or the Ritz-Carlton. Some of the Silicon Valley elite have been
involved in interviews, technically as representatives of Mr. Musk’s government
efficiency office, but their mandate, in practice, is wider as they sit in the
interview rooms alongside longtime Trump aides.
The transition offices have been crawling with executives
from defense tech firms with close ties to Mr. Trump’s orbit, such as Palantir,
which was co-founded by Peter Thiel, and Anduril, the military technology
startup led by Palmer Luckey. Several SpaceX executives have been asking
questions about matters that go well beyond space policy, and interrogating
federal spending across government agencies, people with direct knowledge of
the talks say.
In
some cases, tech executives have been toggling between conducting interviews
and interviewing for jobs inside the government. On Thursday, Mr. Trump named
David Sacks to be the “White House A.I. and Crypto Czar.”
Other
tech executives who have interviewed for jobs themselves include Scott Kupor, a
managing director at Mr. Andreessen’s venture firm, who was in the running for
a job overseeing the General Services Administration. Trae Stephens, a
co-founder of Anduril, and Shyam Sankar, the chief technology officer of
Palantir, have both spoken to Trump transition officials about roles at the
Pentagon. And Michael Kratsios, the country’s chief technology officer in Mr.
Trump’s first term who now co-leads the tech-policy transition group, has also
interviewed for the head of the Office of Science and Technology Policy.
Keeping score
The billionaire tech investor Marc Andreessen is the Musk ally who has
been perhaps the most involved in the presidential transition.
Many
of the tech executives involved in the hiring process are unwilling to
sacrifice earnings in the prime of their career, and so are eyeing part-time
roles, such as those externally advising the Department of Government
Efficiency. Full-time roles there may require divestment.
Some of the tech executives involved described their
engagement as patriotic. They peppered the descriptions of their activity in
Florida with references to John F. Kennedy’s “best and the brightest,” Abraham
Lincoln’s “team of rivals” or Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Manhattan Project —
all examples, they say, of private-sector talent swarming into the public
sector to save the country.
Mr.
Musk’s friends are not the only people involved in the hiring process, which
also requires candidates to meet with the prospective nominees for cabinet
posts and representatives from the incoming presidential personnel office. The
process typically involves interviews with at least three different teams,
taking place on three floors of the transition headquarters in West Palm Beach.
Candidates are being assessed on score sheets measuring, among other qualities,
their alignment with the Trump vision and their competence.
Some
tech leaders involved in the transition have described their role as informally
funneling a broader list of interested business executives to the official
committee for further vetting and interviewing — as a “supplement” to the
official process.
These
tech leaders, despite their lack of government experience, have involved
themselves in almost every facet of the Trump transition effort. Even Mr.
Musk’s mother, Maye, a media personality and a model, has been involved in the
transition, saying in a recent television interview that “I like to sit in on
meetings” with Mr. Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, the co-leaders of DOGE.
Mr.
Musk has long surrounded himself with friends who invest in his businesses,
party with him and increasingly serve as a crisis team that swarms into
whatever mission Mr. Musk declares critical at any given moment. Some of the
same people who comprised Mr. Musk’s landing team in 2022 after buying Twitter
are reprising their roles, such as Antonio Gracias, an investor in Mr. Musk’s
companies, who has also been conducting interviews.
Next to Mr. Musk in recent weeks at nearly every turn has
been Steve Davis, his top cost-cutter at Twitter and an executive at
The Boring Company, Mr. Musk’s tunnel construction venture. Mr. Davis has
conducted personnel interviews and peppered experts with questions about the
federal budget and the appropriations process. Mr. Davis has told some confidants
that he plans to help lead Mr. Musk’s efficiency office after Mr.
Trump takes office.
The
Musk ally who has been perhaps the most involved in the transition has been Mr.
Andreessen, who said in an interview with the podcaster Joe Rogan that he had
been “down in Florida for the last couple of weeks working on some of the stuff
happening down there.”
According
to people in touch with him in recent weeks, Mr. Andreessen has been pushing
for rolling back some of Mr. Biden’s regulations on cryptocurrency; lobbying
against recent activity by the Federal Trade Commission and its current
chairwoman, Lina Khan; and calling for contracting reform in the Defense
Department.
Other
Silicon Valley figures who have traveled to West Palm Beach and been involved
in the interviews of prospective Trump personnel have included John Hering, a
tech investor who has emerged as a key player in Mr. Musk’s inner circle; David
Marcus, a former top executive at Facebook who is now a leading executive in
the cryptocurrency industry and has been recommended for full-time roles
himself; Mark Pincus, until recently a Democratic donor who co-founded Zynga
two decades ago; and Baris Akis, a tech investor.
A
core goal of Mr. Musk and the Silicon Valley set has been to improve the
efficiency of government services. One tech executive who has been seen at
Mar-a-Lago, the investor Shervin Pishevar, has called for an agenda that pushes substantial
privatization of American government functions, such as the Postal Service,
NASA and the federal prison system, and the creation of an American sovereign
wealth fund.
“By
leveraging the ingenuity of the private sector and creating pathways for direct
citizen ownership, a new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) —
spearheaded by visionaries like Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy — could lead a
revolutionary restructuring of public institutions,” Mr. Pishevar wrote.
He ended his post with an A.I.-generated image of what
Washington might look like in 2032.
Theodore Schleifer is a Times reporter covering campaign finance and
the influence of billionaires in American politics. More
about Theodore Schleifer
Maggie Haberman is a senior political correspondent reporting on the 2024
presidential campaign, down ballot races across the country and the
investigations into former President Donald J. Trump. More
about Maggie Haberman
Jonathan Swan is a political reporter covering the 2024 presidential election and
Donald Trump’s campaign. More
about Jonathan Swan
