Reddit is getting a lot of upvotes on Wall Street. From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech. I'm Megan McCarty Carrino.

It's been almost eight months since Reddit went public.

And since then, the platform known as the front page of the internet has been going gangbusters.

We'll get into why on this week's Marketplace Techbytes week in review.

Plus, crypto surges to new highs in the wake of the election. But first, Silicon Valley goes to Washington. This week, President-elect Donald Trump tapped his favorite tech CEO, Elon Musk, as the co-lead of a new Department of Government Efficiency, along with Vivek Ramoswamy, the former biotech entrepreneur and GOP candidate.

For more on this, we're joined by Anita Ramoswamy. No relation to Vivek, by the way.

She's a financial analysis columnist for the information.

Basically what we know is that this Department of Government Efficiency, known as Doge,

which is supposed to be a reference to a cryptocurrency that Elon Musk is a really big fan of, is going to be advising the Trump administration, as Trump said, outside of the government.

So they may not directly be making decisions, but the whole goal of the agency is to basically cut spending from different areas within the federal budget.

And so I suppose they're going to be

making recommendations to the Trump administration of where to make those cuts. And I think the

interesting part is that Elon Musk has been such an influential figure in this election. He donated

$120 million to the Trump campaign. He's really helped amplify Trump's message on Twitter or on

X, the social media platform that he bought.

And he's just been a really central figure.

So it's interesting to see him get this sort of, you know, prestigious appointment within the administration.

Right. Elon Musk has said that he wants to cut about $2 trillion from the federal budget.

That's like 30% of the federal budget. Of course,

he kind of, you know, was known at the time, Twitter, now X, for kind of going in and making

major cuts more than 50% of the staff. But Elon Musk has some quite big entanglements with the federal budget in terms of his companies.

SpaceX being the biggest in terms of government contracts, but Tesla also has kind of been a beneficiary of federal incentive programs, loan programs, subsidies.

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