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

Masters of Scale

WaitWhat

Entrepreneurship, Business, Management, Reid Hoffman, Mindset, Diversity & Inclusion, Jeff Berman, Bob Safian, Startups

4.6 • 4.4K Ratings

🗓️ 6 May 2025

⏱️ 43 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

When Elon Musk stepped into the White House spotlight and brought his DOGE chainsaw, no one was better poised to cover the fallout than WIRED. The tech journalism outlet knew Musk’s playbook from the get-go, from years of covering his companies and his takeover of Twitter. WIRED’s Global Editorial Director Katie Drummond joins Rapid Response to take us inside Musk’s transformative, head-spinning time at President Trump’s side thus far. Drummond weighs the lasting impact of DOGE’s efforts 100 days in, and says that even as Musk announces plans to step back from politics, we can still expect plenty more to come.

Visit the Rapid Response website here: https://www.rapidresponseshow.com/

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Transcript

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1:04.3	turring.com. Is it true that the federal government is bloated, can be inefficient?
1:13.7	I think that is probably true.
1:15.7	Is doing it over an eight-week timeline with a machete the most effective way to get the change that you want?
1:23.1	Probably not.
1:24.0	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?
1:46.1	Doge is already here.
1:47.9	It is entrenched in the federal government.
1:50.5	And that is not going anywhere, wherever Elon Musk is.
2:10.2	Thank you. That's Katie Drummond, Global Editorial Director of Wired, the tech and business news outlet.
2:15.1	Wired has done incredible coverage of Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency or Doge.
2:17.0	Doge's purported goal is to eliminate waste
2:19.3	from the federal government. It's fired thousands of people, gutted agencies, generated a slew
2:24.8	of controversy. I wanted to talk to Katie to better understand Musk's head spinning activity,
	...

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