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Welcome to Tech News Briefing. It's Monday, November 11th. I'm Cordelia James for the Wall Street Journal.

Elon Musk could be appointed Secretary of Cost Cutting under Donald Trump's new presidency.

We'll talk about how Musk's approach to slashing spending has worked for his other businesses and what this means for the federal government.

And then, for years, online education company Chegg was the go-to source for students who wanted

help with homework.

That is, until ChatGPT came along.

WSJ's Miles Krupa tells us how artificial intelligence shook up Chegg's business and what moves the company is making now to survive.

But first, President-elect Donald Trump has proposed appointing Elon Musk to head a new Department of Government Efficiency.

Little is known about what exactly that role will involve, but our columnist Tim Higgins says that

Musk has a long history of taking a shock and awe approach to cost-cutting at his businesses

in an effort to increase productivity. Tim joins us now with more on what that could look like at the federal level.

So Tim, I want to get into that shock and awe approach, as you describe it. Can you give us an example of how Musk has done that in the past?

Well, in late 2022, when he bought Twitter, now known as X, he was very aggressive in cutting the number of employees

that worked there, eventually getting down to reducing the headcount by something around 80%.

Very aggressive, and it helped, according to him, stabilize the company.

You got to remember that when he took over, it was in not necessarily the best financial

shape. Some would argue it's still not in the best financial shape. It's lost a lot of advertisers

because of some of the drama around the company, but it's a company that's still operating.

And so it's seen as a model for what he might do in the government, at least that's according to his fans out there who feel like the federal government is just spending too much money and has gotten too big.

If you look at his other companies, he tends to slash employees every year or every other year, these sorts of things.

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