He is the most cumbersome character in Donald Trump’s inner circle but the tycoon at least for now does not seem to suffer from it, indeed, after the victory, he said that Elon Musk is a genius to be protected. Together with another rich entrepreneur, Vivek Ramaswamy, Musk will direct the Department of Government Efficiency (Doge), the Department of efficiency that will not be part of the administration but will be an external consultancy body with broad influence: “It will indicate waste and where to cut, it will fight against the bureaucracy of Washington, it will say how to restructure the federal agencies, it will fight against excessive regulation” said Trump.
Musk is the richest man in the world and owns several companies ranging from electric cars (Tesla), to space (SpaceX), to the human brain connected to microchips (Neuralink), to social networks (X, formerly Twitter). X itself, the subject of a traumatic restructuring with the arrival of Musk (layoffs, cuts, avalanche resignations), is indicated as the example that the entrepreneur will follow in his mission at the helm of the Doge.
Musk, born in South Africa, has 12 children, voted for Obama, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden. As a young man, he dropped out of a physics degree at Stanford to found two tech startups during the “dotcom boom” of the 1990s: a web software company and an online banking company that eventually became PayPal, which was sold to eBay in 2002 for $1.5 billion. This was the beginning of his immense fortune. He often repeats that making money is not just business but has to do with the good of society and humanity. Philanthropic business, an example is Tesla: electric cars are the answer to climate change, he said. How this fits in with the denier Trump is one of the contradictions of the powerful duo now leading America