A couple of hours before President Trump convened his cabinet for the first time, he used his social media platform to declare that the group was “EXTREMELY HAPPY WITH ELON.”
As the meeting began, it seemed to be the members’ job to prove it.
The secretaries sat largely in silence behind their paper name cards, the sort of thing you need when, powerful though you may be, you are not a household name. And they listened politely as the richest man in the world loomed over them, scolding them about the size of the deficit, sheepishly admitting to temporarily canceling an effort to prevent ebola and insisting they were all crucial to his mission.
“I’d like to thank everyone for your support,” Elon Musk said.
In fact, Musk has not had the support of every cabinet secretary — at least not when he tried to order their employees to account for their time over email or resign. When a reporter asked about the obvious tension, Trump kicked the question to the secretaries themselves.
“Is anybody unhappy with Elon?” Trump asked. “If you are, we’ll throw him out of here. Is anybody unhappy?”
Nobody was unhappy. Nervous laughter rippled around the table as Howard Lutnick, the secretary of commerce, grinned and led a slow clap, which Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, eventually joined before scratching her nose.
Next to her, Kelly Loeffler, the small business administrator, applauded and attended to an itch on her ear. Secretary of State Marco Rubio offered up a single clap and gazed over at Musk, a fixed smile on his face. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health secretary, shifted in his seat.
Trump’s cabinet meetings have been known for awkward displays of deference. But today’s might have been the first that was a display of deference not to a president, but to a tech executive.
Musk is not a cabinet secretary. He does not even officially run the Department of Government Efficiency, the vehicle for his government shake-up. (Read on to learn who does.) But he was the elephant in the room, my colleague Shawn McCreesh wrote, and the episode left no doubt that Trump expects his cabinet to fall in line behind Musk anyway.
“They will follow the orders,” Trump said.
Musk declared the group was the “best cabinet ever,” and then launched into an explanation about his directive to federal employees. It was Trump, he said, who had urged him to be more “aggressive.” And it was Trump, he added, who had told him he could send out the directive, which he described as a “pulse check review.”
By the end of the discussion, the message to the cabinet secretaries seemed clear: An order from Musk, who has cast himself as a kind of enforcer for Trump, should be considered an order from the president. And everybody should be happy about it.
MEANWHILE on X
Musk cheers Bezos
One of Musk’s fellow billionaires also made headlines today: Jeff Bezos, the Amazon founder and the owner of The Washington Post, announced that the paper’s opinion section would publish stories every day that support free markets and personal liberties, and not opposing viewpoints. My colleague Kate Conger explains Musk’s reaction.
“Bravo, @JeffBezos!” Musk wrote on X.
Musk’s enthusiasm isn’t a surprise. Bezos’ effort to align The Post’s opinion section with his own political ideology is similar to Musk’s project at X. When Musk bought the social media company in 2022, he was convinced that it was deeply biased against conservatives. (In fact, researchers found that the company gave more visibility to conservative news than liberal content.)
So Musk set about trying to tug the conversation back to the right. Years later, the results are clear: His account is now the most followed and influential on the platform, and conservative influencers who were once kicked off the site now have large followings there.
Musk has been able to turn X into a leading, right-leaning source of news. He regularly celebrates when its app tops the app store charts in the “news” section, and one of his staff members there recently received a seat in the White House press briefing room.
X is now a political megaphone for Musk. The question is whether Bezos wants The Post to serve the same role for him.
— Kate Conger
BY THE NUMBERS
Spending cuts fall off the ‘wall of receipts’
Musk’s government initiative deleted all five of the biggest cost “savings” the group had claimed after my colleagues and other news outlets pointed out that they were riddled with errors.
Here’s what disappeared:
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An $8 billion cut at Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The actual contract in question was worth $8 million.
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Three $655 million cuts at the U.S. Agency for International Development. This was actually a single cut erroneously counted three times, as CBS News first reported.
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A $232 million cut at the Social Security Administration. Here, Musk’s team appears to have mistakenly believed that the agency had canceled a huge information technology contract with the defense contracting giant Leidos. Instead, as The Intercept reported, it had canceled only a tiny piece of it.
More on Musk’s team
you shouldn’t miss
Have an idea for Elon Musk? Hit him up on X.
Trump’s first term ushered in an era of governance by tweet. Musk has updated that by making policy via X, my colleague Zach Montague writes.
In multiple instances, viral posts by Chaya Raichik, who is the creator of the Libs of TikTok account and who regularly attacks transgender people online, and Christopher Rufo, a writer who has worked to push conservatives further right on education issues, have prompted quick adjustments to public-facing government documents, and even to policy.
The swiftness with which proposals have jumped from prominent conservative figures online to Musk’s team and various departments has suggested a more or less direct pipeline through which outside activists can lobby for nearly instant changes, all through a handful of keystrokes.
