Musk and DOGE: Inside 100 days of chaos, with WIRED’s Global Editorial Director Katie Drummond

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/b5214f2d6b337e0e

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Is it true that the Federal Government
Is bloated, can be inefficient.
I think that is probably true.
Is
Doing it over a an eight week timeline with a machete, the most effective way to get the change that you want.
Probably not.
You have people who have given over their entire careers to work for a given federal agency.
Who are now getting marching orders from 21 year old, you know, former SpaceX interns who have never worked for the government in their entire lives. But
Doge is not going anywhere. Whether Elon Musk is spending more time sleeping on the factory floor at Tesla or not, right?
Doge is already here. It is entrenched in the federal government.
And that is not going anywhere, wherever Elon Musk is.
That's Katie Drummond, Global Editorial Director of Wired, the tech and business news outlet. Wired has done incredible coverage of Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency, or Doge.
Doge's purported goal is to eliminate waste from the federal government. It's fired thousands of people, gutted agencies, generated a slew of controversy. I wanted to talk to Katie to better understand Musk's head spinning activity, even as Musk himself claims to be trimming back his Doge commitment.
We discuss the evolving relationship between politics and business, the role of journalists and business leaders amid disruption, and more. If like me you've been a bit overwhelmed by the flurry of moves coming out of the White House, Katie offers valuable context for a chaotic time that shows no signs of slowing down.
I'm Bob Safian, and this
is rapid response.
I'm Bob Safian. I'm here with Katie Drummond. Wires
Global editorial director and co-host of the terrific podcast Uncanny Valley. Katie, thanks for joining us.
Thank you so much for having me. It's so nice to be here.
So you know, my producers got all over me to have you on the show because they love everything that Wired has been covering around Elon Musk and Trump's department of uh government efficiency doge. And I'm eager to talk about that. But but first I have something I I wanted to ask you about some recent media news that
Trump's executive orders to cut funding from NPR and PBS. I mean, it's it's not a surprise at this point.
But
It it's still kind of a big moment.
It's not a surprise. I mean, he has obviously been signaling and messaging this in no uncertain terms for some time now, right? Which is that he just doesn't think these organizations should be funded by the government, doesn't seem to think they should exist.
These are scary times for journalism, and I think that that executive order.
You know
We can talk all day about how uh binding an executive order actually is, or whether
this executive order actually carries any water and allows him to do what he's trying to do here, which as far as I'm aware, it doesn't really. But
To me, what's more important, and and often unfortunately, what's more important with President Trump.
Is not so much what he's actually able to do.
It's what he signals he wants to do, right? It's about intention. It's about the message that he's putting out into the country, into the public sphere, out into the world.
That
He doesn't think these journalistic entities should exist, like
That is a very chilling message, whether you are a journalist or just someone who believes that journalism should be uninterfered with by government entities, if you think that.
Then this executive order should be very scary for you.
From a journalist perspective,

media organizations from government funding, right? Like in theory, journalists shouldn't be beholden to anyone.
It's more the message that like
Any journalists.
Who disagrees with him should be somehow
Panelized.
Uh yeah, I mean, I always think about sort of what is the intention behind what he's doing. And sometimes it's very, frankly, very difficult to decipher what Trump's intentions are.
But I think the idea is just to put journalists on notice that, you know, you do not have a fan in the White House. The reality with sort of government funding of of journalistic entities is one, you know, I do not think that NPR and PBS are beholden to the government in their coverage. They publish plenty of of critical coverage.
um of of administrations and they have for a very long time. But the idea of pulling funding from
Organizations like those that provide
You know, free
Access to media and to news and to entertainment for millions and millions of Americans is is really disturbing. It's not like there's a bunch of cash lying around for these organizations to go get somewhere else.
There is no cash.
Ultimately there is no
tried and true business model unless you were smart enough to acquire Wordle several years ago and you're the New York Times. Like
So it it's a scary prospect to think about the idea of of government funding, you know, being being pulled from organizations like PBS and NPR, which are really, really vital to
Dialogue in this country, in my opinion.
Unless you're you're backed by a billionaire like Jeff Bezos, right? I mean that's worked out so well for the Washington Post.
What is happening there? I mean all I can like
There are so many talented journalists and and editorial minds at the Washington Post, and every subscriber they lose.
is, you know, another drop in the hat that will ultimately add up to more layoffs for that organization unless he decides
To sell, right, to divest himself of this asset that seems to be
Nothing but a burden on the rest of his businesses. I have no idea why he continues to operate this newspaper if it doesn't really seem like he wants to participate in that kind of rigorous editorial work or even dialogue on on its opinion pages.
Unless the reason you own it is because you want to support that kind of journalism as opposed to
Owning it because you think it's gonna make money for you the way Amazon does.
It's not that kind of a business, right? It's not that kind of a business. I I wish him luck um trying to steer the newsroom of the Washington Post in the direction that he wants. That is just not how journalism works.
Well, so let's talk about Doge. You made a big journalistic commitment to cover Doge from the beginning. I mean one article alone I saw had nine writers on it.
Why Doge? What made you wanna focus there? Was it because your reporters had
covered Musk for years at Tesla and SpaceX and so
You had background that other newsrooms might not, or was there another reason?
So when I started here
In late twenty twenty three, we did not have a politics team. We were not regularly in the business of covering politics.
Um, and that was something I decided to do very early on in my time was to hire a politics editor to staff up uh on reporters who could really own that intersection of politics and technology.
I was not thinking about Elon Musk very much in the context of politics. I was thinking about politics and technology in the context of artificial intelligence, in the context of hacking, uh, in the context of online influencers and how they were changing, you know, presidential campaigns or electoral campaigns around the world. Now
It just so happened that in the summer of twenty twenty four, right, we had our politics team, we were up and running, Trump was shot in the ear.
Grazed.
Buy a bullet.
Elon Musk jumped in, you know, head first.
Endorsed.
Uh Donald Trump.
You know, started fundraising for him.
Oh.
This is about to be a big story. Elon Musk
Like the most influential technologist and sort of technology CEO of our lifetimes, arguably.
is jumping into politics, this game just changed in a really interesting way.
And that's when we started pulling reporters, not just from the politics team, but from our business desk, right? From other teams that we have in our newsroom.
to really start to lean in and start to try to own this intersection of
Trump and маск Трамп<unk>Мск, Трамп<unk> Маск.
And then they announce the Department of Government efficiency.
Is this a joke? Like what
We're seriously naming a new a new part of government after a meme like this is ridiculous, what is happening.
And then the coverage obviously spirals from there.
The goal of Doge is
purportedly to cut fraud and waste and abuse from the federal government, which seems like a good thing. Sure.
Yeah.
How pure do you think Musk's intentions are? I mean, obviously they're their claims of
You know, other objectives.
I never try to get inside Elon Musk's head. I think that sounds like a very dangerous place to spend time. Um and not necessarily a rational place to spend time. I think that one thing that's so interesting about him and the people who are working for Doge and this sort of
ecosystem that they inhabit is that
If you ask them, right, if you asked Elon Musk what his intentions are
I think that they think they are doing really good things. Like I think that his intentions, sort of at a superficial level, are
No, like this is a wasteful
Corrupt.
fraudulent
bureaucracy.
And it needs to be disrupted in a very extreme and very aggressive way. I think that he genuinely thinks that. And I think that that they see themselves as the good guys in this fight, right?
But
But as we have seen Doge and Doge's actions play out.
It's it's very obvious that there are other ideas here, right? There are other designs here on what exactly it means to overhaul.
you know, every federal agency in in the US governmental apparatus, and a lot of that appears to have to do with data, right? And it has to do with artificial intelligence. So it's become very obvious
Um that Doge is trying to
A mass as much data.
from within every federal agency as they possibly can, right? They want their hands on
All kinds of sensitive data, data about Americans, data about people applying to be US citizens, and they want that data to be accessible.
from one central place, right? So they want to be able to have
The Department of Homeland Security
access data from the IRS, right? They are really trying to create some kind of
central resource
Of data.
About Americans and about non US citizens.
And obviously that data could be used for all kinds of things, including deportations. Um, and then there is the AI piece of it all. And that to me,
You know, the the data piece of it to me really feels um
pernicious, scary, malevolent, right? Like that could that that data
Um is extremely sensitive. This is the most
personal information we have about every single person living in this country.
Um the AI piece of it now, you have Doge
um you know going into different agencies and trying to introduce artificial intelligence. So we published a story
About
A Doge recruiter trying to recruit Palantir alums.
To go build and deploy AI agents inside the federal government, uh, with specific language saying we think there are about 70,000 jobs.
That could be automated.
with AI agents
Which to be clear from my point of view and the point of view of the Wire Newsroom
AI agents are are still very early in their development. There is no world in which AI agents should or could or can be deploy across federal agencies in an effective
Error free.
uh manner um but there appears to be this idea that
what's more efficient than having no people working for the federal government, but just letting AI do it instead.
Right. Well and and that vision is part of what is driving a a lot of tech businesses.
thinking it'll happen down the road. Right. What you're saying is
The state of the technology right now
is not at a place where it can effectively do that.
Not even close. I mean AI agents, like we we came into this year at Wired thinking, okay, this will be a year where a lot of really interesting
work happens around agentic AI, right? Around this idea of AI that can actually perform like end to end tasks for you independently without you having to be
You know, closely involved.
That is still very, very
early in its development and the idea that
you know, even for for private businesses that they would start deploying those tools. It's very early to be having those conversations, let alone saying, let's see how this does with, you know, the very sensitive tasks of various federal agencies. It is absolutely ridiculous to even suggest that that's a viable idea.
Hm. So I I I wanna ask uh about data, like it's become a staple of
of business of technology businesses certainly that sort of aligning data across different parts of an organization is tremendously valuable. If Doge is merging data from across government agencies, why is that risk in a different way?
then you know what Google is already doing.
Sure.
I mean, first of all, I would say yes, it is very common um outside of the government for
Companies to collect all kinds of data, including data on users, to to put that all in one place.
That's not necessarily a good thing. It is something that happens. It often happens so that they can serve, you know, more effective advertising to different users. There are all kinds, of course, of horror stories about that data leaking or sort of that data being used in ways that that users of these services would certainly prefer that the data was not.
When it comes to federal agencies, I think what's particularly
Like ridiculous or wild to me is like
As if no one ever thought of this before, right? The data that is held by different federal agencies.
Is compartmentalized and contained within those agencies for a reason.
It's not like a bunch of idiots have been have been running these agencies for decades and they just didn't think that maybe they could they could all compare notes, right?
They hold that data in compartmentalized ways.
Биз фор
They want and and you know, undocumented immigrants are actually encouraged to file taxes because it could help them potentially down the road apply for and obtain US citizenship, right?
That data cannot then be shared with
other federal agencies who are looking to deport people. Like that that is one very specific example of why it's important
For this data to be silos, not for all of this data to be.
I would also say that, you know
The more data from across all of these agencies.
You compile and you aggregate
The more specific and and holistic and well rounded a picture you're able to get.
of any given individual living in this country.
The US government doesn't want to serve ads to us. This is not meta. We're not talking about Facebook, right?
You you don't want
You know,
one person within the federal government to have access to every single bit of information about you from across every single agency of government. That that is a very dangerous um proposition and that effectively is
A very effective way to build
a very powerful surveillance state. Another area of concern on Doge is the sort of potential.
Conflict of interest for Musk and other Doge employees who still hold positions at private companies, including ones with active government contracts. The the Trump administration administration
Doesn't really seem to care about that.
Well, the Trump administration loves a conflict of interest. I mean, this is this is sort of their whole deal. I mean, if you look at even just the the Trump family and their entanglements with crypto, as the New York Times reported, I mean
Donald Trump himself is
Awash with conflicts of interest, and that seems to be how he wants to run h his administration.
Obviously when it comes to to Elon Musk himself.
Again, just one giant conflict of interest. I mean space X, okay. SpaceX is regulated by the FAA.
Elon Musk.
And Doge now have operatives, workers.
Inside the FAA.
Helping decide how the FAA should be run, helping to decide which contracts to cancel, which contracts to uphold.
how to move forward with that agency with with aviation safety, with everything that the FAA oversees.
You know, SpaceX is a massive beneficiary of government contracts.
And SpaceX is regulated by those same agencies, you know, all of those agencies are now.
you know, beholden to some extent to Doge and to Musk and to an administration at the end of the day, to an administration that
supports the work that those individuals are doing.
You are not shy about expressing your um concerns about the Trump administration? I'm curious, do you think of yourself as being part of
The resistance. There's that phrase that's used sometimes. Like how much do you worry about
political repercussions of wire's coverage for you, for wired's business.
I am not an activist. I am not part of a hashtag resistance movement.
I am a journalist.
wired our newsroom
We go out.
We seek out information.
We call sources, we get expert opinions. We're able to sort of synthesize that information and help our audience understand.
What it means.
What the potential benefits are.
Often in the case of Doge, what the potential risks are, that information is reviewed by lawyers and fact checkers, it is then published, right? So I am in the business of providing our audience information.
But I think it would be ridiculous to say
Well, I'm just providing the information. You come to your own conclusions. No, I have a point of view on all of this, and so does Wired. As a newsroom, we have an institutional point of view about what's happening right now. Uh, and we are very well positioned to have that point of view. We employ subject matter experts on AI.
We employ subject matter experts on data and how data is stored and safeguarded and what the potential risks are of you know pulling disparate data sources together into one place.
We have experts in politics and policy and how federal agencies ought to best be run. And when we don't have expertise on staff, we outsource it, right? We call experts. That is the job of journalism. So
You know, I'm I'm not shy about sharing my point of view.
Uh, particularly because I don't think this is a great time in history to be shy. Whatever your role, if you're a journalist, you're an academic, whatever your profession, whatever your walk of life.
I think it's important to use
Your platform and use your expertise.
To say something about what is happening right now. I think I would really regret
in fifty years on my deathbed, um, you know, looking at my grandchildren and them asking me what I did during the Trump administration and and me telling them, um
Oh, I just kept my head down and I stayed really, really quiet. Now, in terms of safety, I mean, look, you would be crazy to work in journalism right now and not be concerned about your safety. It's something that we
We talk about a lot internally. We talk about it a lot at Wired, um, at Condé Nast. My parent company, obviously I can't speak for them. What I can say is that they have been
Incredibly supportive of this work.
Um, and it's something that we are taking one day at a time.
But with
Ultimately a commitment to continuing to do this work for as long as we possibly can.
Whether I'm doing the work from New York or from a bunker in Europe.
Uh T V D, but I will be doing the work from somewhere.
Katie's emphasis on covering the intersection of politics and technology was spot on, and her insights about the risks from even well-meaning efforts by Trump and his cohort are bracing.
So how should businesses react?
And how will Doge impact Musk's own long-term business reputation at Tesla and beyond?
We talk about that and more after the break.
Stay with us.
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Before the break, Wired's Katie Drummond explained what Musk's Department of Government efficiency is after and some of the risks involved. Now we talk about Doge's emerging impact on Musk's private businesses, whether he's really likely to step away from his government work, and more.
Let's jump back in.
One of the intriguing elements of Doge has been this sort of limited checks and balances in restraining Musk's efforts. I mean, we've seen some legal cases, but the Trump administration hasn't been shy about
Rejecting certain court orders. There's been muted congressional response. Is Doge potentially part of a constitutional crisis?
Well, I mean I think that there's
No question about the the very real potential for that to be the case, right? I mean
Any time.
A judge says
Do this or don't do this.
And the Trump administration
waves its hands around and says, Yeah, no, we're not gonna we're not gonna listen like that is a con we that we are in a constitutional crisis. Like that is what that looks like. When the rule of law
Is not the rule.
We have a serious problem on our hands. Obviously, there has been a great deal of litigation.
I mean m more more than frankly we can even keep up with, and I think than than most journalists can. I mean, sometimes we'll find a legal filing.
And it's like a week old.
And nobody's published a story about it, and it's newsworthy, right? I mean, there is so much happening right now.
But there is no question that
A lot of what Doge appears to be doing.
Is not to the letter of the law. It is being challenged in court.
And we will have to wait and see as more of these cases wind their way through the courts and and end up with a judge making a decision.
Um, whether or not the administration decides to to abide those decisions, obviously we have already seen
Um, very real examples of the administration deciding
Not to
Um, and that is a very scary situation, I of course, um, for the for this country to be in.
It seems like
Musk himself has been surprised by how much his reputation has taken a hit since Doge. You know, we've seen
protests against Tesla and setting fire to cars and dealerships and the stock price down and revenue down.
Uh do you think Musk
regrets at all getting involved in this I don't know that he's someone who who lives with a lot of regret
I I think that what's so interesting about his surprise and his sort of you can see when he talks about it in press appearances, like he is very s sad. He is saddened by
by the the sort of acts of violence against Tesla Cars or the impact this is having on his companies.
And he he is very surprised at the fact that not everybody is thrilled.
By the idea of slashing one to two trillion dollars from the federal bureaucracy.
I think that what that speaks to ultimately
is what I said earlier, which is that he thinks that he is the good guy here. So if you think that what you are doing
Is really smart.
is really strategic.
is really
Just
like a revolutionary thing in a in a positive way to be doing within the federal government.
Wouldn't you be shocked?
When thousands or millions of people come out and say, Actually, we hate your guts for this, I mean, that would be shocking.
I mean, we're not close to the two trillion dollar savings target that we'll set up although we just swap that back it was then it was one trillion and I think we're, you know
At a fraction, a fraction of that, if even.
But the goal is to sort of chip away at the core infrastructure of the federal government, right? Because there's
Kind of this assumption. I mean,
I I I understand sort of the idea of there being waste and the government could be faster, but there there is this sort of feeling
As you mentioned these words like fraud
You know, that that people are doing this on purpose are being somehow stealing
government money right by working there and not doing their jobs.
Is it true that the federal government
Is bloated, can be inefficient.
Uh
That we could probably take
A lot of money out of the federal government. Is that true? Like, yes, I think that is probably true.
Is
Doing it over a an eight week timeline with a machete, the most effective way to get the change that you want.
Probably not. No, I'm gonna say that there are probably better ways to assess the workings of every federal agency. Those mechanisms exist.
I don't know that Doge and Elon Musk are spending very much time
looking at what they actually have already done.
Yeah.
You know
As a
communicator
How how much do you think about like trying to reach
The people who
Agree with
What Trump
And the administration and Musk are doing.
Um, and getting them to sort of see things the way you do and the way your your reporting team does. I think that is a question that
any journalist has been thinking about since at least twenty sixteen, right? If not earlier.
I think that my my best answer to that question is that
When we publish our journalism, right, we focus on the facts, we are transparent with our audience about what our point of view is. I'm not trying to hide sort of what we think. And then we put it out on every platform we possibly can, right? We're not focused exclusively on, you know, parts of the internet that we think lean a certain way.
We're trying to get this information.
In front of as many people as possible.
The reality of that, though, if I'm being just very candid about sort of our shortcomings and my shortcoming and sort of the limits of our abilities here.
Or that we can put that information out there.
But if someone is not even like within the then diagram
of platforms that that we participate in on the internet, right? If they're spending all their time on truth social.
They're watching Fox News.
Or whatever it is.
it is very difficult, if not impossible, to reach those audiences. And it's not for lack of trying. And I would say even in my personal life, you know, there are relationships that I have with people who
disagree with me tremendously about what's happening right now. And there are limits to
What those conversations
Can involve.
Because people are living in different versions of reality. And it is very difficult to have conversations when
Your version of the truth is different from someone else's.
Mm.
So um
So uh back to Musk. So Musk is now supposedly spending less time with Doge, stripping back to one to two days a week.
D do you expect him to actually peel off?
This is such an interesting moment that we are in with this. Um, you know, obviously he has announced, and President Trump has has sort of shared that sentiment that he will be spending more time with his companies, right? Obviously, he has a pretty big problem uh to fix at Tesla. So he will be, you know, pairing back his time uh with the administration, pairing back his time with Doge.
He did, you know.
A bunch of interviews with media outlets, Wired, unfortunately, was not included, uh, that that effectively amounted to like some kind of exit interview for him.
That said.
I would say a few things about this. One
From an optics point of view.
This is a very smart moment for Musk and Trump to say.
Hey, this guy's stepping back, right?
That is helpful for
Tesla.
For Tesla shareholders, right? For the Tesla board.
That is very helpful for President Trump, given how many Republicans and how many Trump voters across the country are
outraged about what Elon Musk and Doge are doing, right?
Optically, this is a very smart thing to do.
Two days a week.
And every other week in Washington, DC. That is what Elon Musk has said he will be doing.
That is not an insignificant amount of time. Like I'm I'm pulling way back other than the two days a week that I will spend working on this project.
It's still a significant investment of time, and I think regardless, and even Elon Musk himself.
In these interviews that he did has acknowledged this that
The so-called department of government efficiency is already operational. There are already people leading the charge for that group within these agencies and across the administration.
Doge is not going anywhere. Whether Elon Musk is spending more time sleeping on the factory floor at Tesla or not, right?
Doge is already here.
It is entrenched in the federal government.
And that is not going anywhere, wherever Elon Musk is.
And the folks who work
For Doge.
Full time, not just two days a week, compared to the other folks in government. Like is this this is sort of an internal war that's going on inside.
I mean from everything we can tell and from all the reporting we've done and of course other news organizations have done as well, right? You have
lifetime civil servants. You have people who have given over their entire careers to work for a given federal agency.
who are now getting marching orders from twenty-one year old, you know, former SpaceX interns who have never worked for the government in their entire lives.
I think that
There is so much chaos and uncertainty sp spread out across these agencies that I think federal workers are really scared. They're alarmed, they're very stressed out.
They don't know if they're gonna get fired tomorrow. And all of a sudden they're answering to someone
they've never met, they've never heard of before in their lives, who has seven laptops in his backpack. I mean, that's a very alarming
workplace environment to be to be spending your time. So I would certainly say that
Іноше клаш фор.
combustible situation, to say the least.
Yeah.
So Most Crew has a
Infiltrated the US Treasury, gutted USAID, targeted the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
Laying off th thousands of federal workers in the back. It's hard to as you said, it's hard to keep track of of all the changes through all this. Are are there lessons from these first few months of Doge that have
Surprised you?
I mine every every hour of every day.
since January.
Has surprised me.
I think that if this
moment and everything we've seen has has taught me anything. If I'm being totally honest.
It is that the federal government
And the federal agencies
That encompass it.
Is much bigger
And more complicated.
then I think anybody sort of the average day to day American including doge workers
really realizes as you start to go through just the number of agencies and how they all work and all of the different systems that they use and where this data is stored and where that data is stored. I think for me, it has really helped me understand
Why
It is such a massive bureaucracy. Why it is the largest single employer in the country.
It takes a lot of government to run the government, which again is not to say that there is not efficiency to be found within that bureaucracy, but that
government moves slowly.
Because government needs to move deliberately. And I think where we have seen
The most significant culture clashes or the the biggest issues, the biggest problems, the biggest risks with Doge.
Is that they are moving incredibly quickly.
And they are rubbing up against a system that works slowly by design.
Interesting. I mean, I think it's a
Part of the reason I became and stayed a business journalist was because I felt like the sort of the progress and change in our culture was being driven
As much or more by business than it was by government.
Government was so big and slow that the the changes were happening at at business levels.
Now it feels a little bit like that sort of turned around.
And and I I'm I'm curious from from your point of view, like, is there a role that
business and business leaders play in
I don't know, m modulating or impacting how the administration changes the government? Well
There absolutely is, right? And I think that that it would be very easy to make
A joke here about
You know, business leaders bending a knee.
Spending a million dollars to go have dinner with Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago, you know, showing up at the inauguration with smiles on their faces, right? That was all
Pretty specific behavior.
But I I suspect and and in some cases I know that as much as they are not saying anything publicly
They are trying
to work with this administration
And they are trying behind the scenes.
To create some sense and some strategy out of what is, again, just pure unadulterated chaos. Now
Whether they are lobbying
And pulling strings behind the scen for their own ends, right? To get, you know, tariff exemptions for their own products, but
Who cares what what Google gets, right? It's it's meta all the way over here, right? Whether they are doing it for their own ends and for the well being of their company or whether they are really thinking about sort of
the bigger picture, right? The well being of the country, the well being of of the planet. Um, I don't have an answer to that question. I would unfortunately suspect we're talking more about the former than the latter, but
You know, I think the role that they are playing right now is much more behind the scenes, right? They know that they need to work with this administration. They are trying to figure out the best way to do that, the most strategic way to do that. I think what that has meant is that this is a very different version.
Of business leadership in the United States than we saw in the twenty sixteen administration. I always remember.
Airbnb and Brian Shevsky in particular
Coming out swinging at the Trump administration during his his twenty sixteen term.
over you know really offensive comments that the president had made about people from garbage countries. I mean Airbnb spun up an entire marketing campaign around that comment. Brian Chesky came out and
You know had a lot to say about Trump at that time.
We are not seeing those kinds of comments from business leaders this time around, and I think it's because they know.
That
You know, it is in the best interests of their company in an existential way, right?
to play ball.
And so they are playing ball, but they are doing it behind the scenes and I think they are doing it very delicately.
Mm because
They run the risk of Trump
Coming after them. And he has been explicit. He c I mean he could not have been did he s he said that Mark Zuckerberg should be in prison. I mean he could not be more clear.
This time around, I think everybody recognizes that he really means business and this is a lot more serious. And so I think they are treating it um
You know, with that very much top of mind.
Well,
Katie, this has been great. Thank you so much for doing it.
Oh, thank you for having me.
Ha ha ha.
Listening to Katie, I just kept thinking, what's a business leader to do in this environment? When she says this isn't the time to be shy and that everyone should use their platform to try to shape our future, I totally agree.
At the same time, when she talks about the explicit risks that a leader faces in disagreeing with the Trump administration, that's also hard to ignore.
Musk's experience is in some ways a metaphor for both sides of this. He's definitely been using his platform to impact the future, and he's definitely faced some blowback, not from Trump, but from the public.
So what lessons do I draw from Musk's Doge and from this moment of chaos?
I've wanted to act in a more business like way for a long time.
But I've come to appreciate that we need to be careful in equating what works best in one realm of society with the challenges of another. I want the US government to be able to move faster, but that doesn't mean we should exercise that speed in every area, every day, all the time.
As for what motivates us as leaders, I think we need to look beyond our own self-interest if we want to get to a better world.
The paradox is that what's broadly good for others is usually better for us too in the long run.
We'll talk more about that in the episodes to come.
I'm Bob Safian.
Thanks for listening.
Rapid response is a wait what original.
I'm Bob Safian. Our executive producer is Eve Tro. Our producer is Alex Morris. Associate producer is Mashumaku Tonina.
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