What Trump Means for Tech: Elon Musk Enters the White House
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Welcome to Tech News Briefing. It's Thursday, January 30th. I'm Belle Lin for The Wall Street Journal. All this week, we are exploring what President Trump's second term could mean for the tech industry over the next four years and beyond. Elon Musk is in the Trump White House as lead of the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, which has been tasked with trimming costs, including even government employees.

But Musk is no ordinary member of Trump's orbit. He's also a tech executive who leads six companies, including Tesla, SpaceX and XAI, all of which could be impacted by the president's policies. Today, we are looking at how Musk has made his mark on D.C. in the early days of Trump's presidency.

WSJ columnist Tim Higgins tells us how Trump has dispatched Musk to various areas of government and outside of government and what that could mean over the next four years. All right, Tim, let's start with something that's front and center for some people. DeepSeek, the Chinese AI company that said it's released a revolutionary AI model with some pretty broad implications for the American company OpenAI.

So sticking with the topic of open AI and its CEO, Sam Altman, what's going on between Elon Musk and Sam Altman? And how does their dynamic potentially affect how Trump is thinking about AI and his relationships with big tech?

It's a feud that goes way back, Elon Musk versus Sam Altman. Remember, these two created OpenAI. There was some disagreements over how it was going to go into the future, and Elon left. And he has been on the sidelines for a while now, critical of that company. He started his own AI company called XAI. So that's a little bit of the backstory. So then when you see Sam Altman

at the White House next to President Trump on day two of his second term. And Donald Trump is very, let's just say, verbose and very complimentary of Sam Walton calling him an expert, essentially an AI. You can imagine that Elon Musk was not happy. And he is not one who's shy. And he took to X, the social media platform, and just let it all out.

Nothing was off limits, it seemed, when it was coming to Sam Altman, called him a swindler, suggesting maybe they didn't have the money for this massive project that they announced at the White House, a project of $500 billion to build the infrastructure needed for that AI future that Sam Altman is predicting is possible.

So really sending the message, the White House sending a message, Donald Trump sending a message that just because Elon Musk is the first buddy, just because he's a guy who donated more than $250 million to help get him elected, just because he's essentially living on the floor of the White House complex.

just because he is out there constantly on the X platform touting Trump doesn't mean this is an exclusive relationship. That if Sam Maltman or another one of these tech bro billionaires comes forward with announcements of jobs and massive American spending, Donald Trump clearly wants to be part of that. It's one of the things you go back to the first term that was so clear about the way he interacted with American business.

He likes those headlines. He wants to put forth the message that America is growing and that there are jobs and there's investments. And it seems that Sam Altman picked up on that and was a very savvy play to get himself into the White House next to Trump to try to have that relationship.

So the relationship between President Trump and Musk may not be exclusive, but one way in which this relationship might be going steady is that the Office of Personnel Management posted an email just earlier this week with the headline Fork in the Road. And that was aimed at pushing out federal employees through a buyout offer. This subject was the same one used by Elon Musk in November 2022 after he purchased Twitter, which is now known as X.

So is this one way in which we are already seeing Musk have a pretty significant impact on the federal government? And what else might happen from here? Absolutely. His fingerprints all over it.

I was on the campaign trail this past fall as Elon Musk was out there campaigning for Donald Trump. And this is the kind of thing that he was talking about on a regular basis, that he saw the ability for the government to offer buyouts, to reduce headcount, almost like a business. And at the time, I don't think people thought he was serious or he knew what he was talking about or if this was really something that was going to be done.

And among the potential voters, among the supporters of Donald Trump that I talked to who were so excited about the idea of Elon Musk being involved in administration, they talked about this perception of Elon Musk as a cost cutter and a guy who went into Twitter after buying it and just slashing costs and right sizing the ship.

And they were excited about this idea of him taking that playbook, if you will, to Washington. And one of the first things, as you noted, he did when he acquired Twitter was essentially send the same kind of email, almost a loyalty test, if you will. Hey, if you're on board, then you got to stay here. And if not, get out of here because he doesn't have the patience or the time to be dealing with a deep state at Twitter who wants to go in a different direction than him.

Right. And now Donald Trump and Elon Musk are looking at the federal government and saying there's a lot of people we want to get rid of. There's savings here. And they also have this perception that there are people within the government who are maybe working at odds against them, rightly or wrongly. That is the perception they talk about.

So we've been talking all this week about how the Trump administration could impact the tech industry and policy over the next four years and beyond. And now we have Musk, a tech executive who is still overseeing his companies as a key advisor to the president. How could Musk's own business interests intersect with his role in the White House? And have they already?

The very week Musk was working out of the West Wing, he was also on his social media platform, X, blasting a deal announced by the president involving Sam Altman and commitments for spending half a trillion dollars on AI infrastructure. To me, it is a great example of how, on one hand, Musk is a very high-profile Trump advisor, while on the other, he is...

Also, the rival to companies that seek attention from President Trump. Musk has his fingers in a lot of key U.S. industries, from AI and social media to autos and aerospace. Coming up, we know President Trump is a fan of breaking tradition. So is Elon Musk. How have the two joined forces in areas outside of Capitol Hill? That's after the break.

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So, Tim, looking at Musk's influence outside the White House, President Trump recently posted on his Truth Social platform asking Musk to, quote, go get the two astronauts who he claims were abandoned by the Biden administration. What do you expect might happen here? And what's the significance of Trump asking Elon Musk to intervene? Well, they weren't abandoned.

SpaceX had already been tapped to go get these astronauts under the Biden administration after Boeing's vehicle, the Starliner, had issues. What Trump is doing is putting attention on that, seemingly adding some urgency to it. It's an example of...

In a lot of ways, the US space program is just closer and closer to Elon Musk and needing SpaceX. And it's this kind of interesting dynamic where Elon Musk and his companies are just everywhere in this kind of Trump orbit going forward. And so it will allow perhaps a moment of victory, some probably stunning videos when this thing comes to fruition. But, you know, kind of a great example of how

Elon Musk is just so much more involved with NASA and these things going forward. And Tim, all told, how would you describe the impact that Elon Musk has had on Trump and on D.C. just about two weeks in so far? It's hard to say where this ultimately ends, right? The big question in Washington is how long does Donald Trump and Elon Musk, that bromance, last?

It seems that in the immediate future, both sides are trying to get as much out of it as possible. So if we continue to see more of that, you know, it's likely to be a wild ride for the next few weeks and months. That was our columnist, Tim Higgins. And that's it for Tech News Briefing.

Today's show was produced by Julie Chang with supervising producer Catherine Milsop. Logging off, I'm Belle Lin for The Wall Street Journal. We will sign back in this afternoon with TNB Tech Minute. Thanks for listening.