YouSaid · the spoken record

Katie Drummond

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2025-05-06
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2025-05-06
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  1. “And he has been explicit. He, I mean, he could not have been, he said that Mark Zuckerberg should be in prison. I mean, he could not be more clear This time around, I think everybody recognizes that he really means business, and this is a lot more serious. And so I think they are treating it with that very much top of mind.”

    2025-05-06 · Masters of Scale · Musk and DOGE: Inside 100 days of chaos, with WIRED’s Global Editorial Director Katie Drummond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  2. “Brian Chiskey came out, and had a lot to say about Trump at that time. We are not seeing those kinds of comments from business leaders this time around. And I think it's because they know that, you know, it is in the best interests of their company in an existential way, right? to play ball. And so they are playing ball, but they are doing it behind the scenes. And I think they are doing it very delicately.”

    2025-05-06 · Masters of Scale · Musk and DOGE: Inside 100 days of chaos, with WIRED’s Global Editorial Director Katie Drummond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  3. “It's meta all the way over here, right? Whether they are doing it for their own ends and for the well-being of their company or whether they are really thinking about sort of the bigger picture, right? The well-being of the country, the well-being of the planet, I don't have an answer to that question. I would unfortunately suspect we're talking more about the former than the latter. But I think the role that they are playing right now is much more behind the scenes, right? They know that they need to work with this administration. They are trying to figure out the best way to do that, the most strategic way to do that. I think what that has meant is that this is a very different version of business leadership in the United States than we saw in the 2016 administration. I always remember Airbnb and Brian Chesky in particular coming out swinging at the Trump administration during his 2016 term over really offensive comments that the president had made about people from garbage countries. I mean, Airbnb spun up an entire marketing campaign around that comment.”

    2025-05-06 · Masters of Scale · Musk and DOGE: Inside 100 days of chaos, with WIRED’s Global Editorial Director Katie Drummond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  4. “Well, there absolutely is, right? And I think that it would be very easy to make a joke here about business leaders bending a knee, spending a million dollars to go have dinner with Donald Trump at Mara Lago, showing up at the inauguration with smiles on their faces, right? That was all pretty specific behavior. But I suspect, and in some cases I know that as much as they are not saying anything publicly, they are trying to work with this administration and they are trying behind the scenes to create some sense and some strategy out of what is, again, just pure unadulterated chaos. Now, whether they are lobbying and pulling strings behind the scenes for their own ends, right, to get, you know, tariff exemptions for their own products, but who cares what Google gets, right?”

    2025-05-06 · Masters of Scale · Musk and DOGE: Inside 100 days of chaos, with WIRED’s Global Editorial Director Katie Drummond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  5. “Why is it such a massive bureaucracy? Why it is the largest single employer in the country. It takes a lot of government to run the government, which again is not to say that there is not efficiency to be found within that bureaucracy, but that government moves slowly because government needs to move deliberately. And I think where we have seen the most significant culture clashes or the biggest issues, the biggest problems, the biggest risks with Doge is that they are moving incredibly quickly and they are rubbing up against a system that works slowly by design.”

    2025-05-06 · Masters of Scale · Musk and DOGE: Inside 100 days of chaos, with WIRED’s Global Editorial Director Katie Drummond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  6. “I mean, every hour of every day since January has surprised me, I think that if this moment and everything we've seen has taught me anything, if I'm being totally honest, it is that the federal government And the federal agencies that encompass it. Is much bigger and more complicated than I think anybody sort of the average day to day American, including Doge workers, really realizes as you start to go through just the number of agencies and how they all work and all of the different systems that they use and where this data is stored and where that data is stored, I think for me it has really helped me understand”

    2025-05-06 · Masters of Scale · Musk and DOGE: Inside 100 days of chaos, with WIRED’s Global Editorial Director Katie Drummond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  7. “I mean, from everything we can tell, and from all the reporting we've done, and of course, other news organizations have done as well, right? You have lifetime civil servants. 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 former SpaceX interns who have never worked for the government in their entire lives. I think that there is so much chaos and uncertainty spread out across these agencies that I think federal workers are really scared, they're alarmed, they're very stressed out. They don't know if they're going to get fired tomorrow. And all of a sudden, they're answering to someone they've never met, they've never heard of before in their lives who has seven laptops in his backpack. I mean, that's a very alarming workplace environment to be spending your time. So I would certainly say that a culture clash for sure, combustible situation, to say the least.”

    2025-05-06 · Masters of Scale · Musk and DOGE: Inside 100 days of chaos, with WIRED’s Global Editorial Director Katie Drummond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  8. “People leading the charge for that group within these agencies and across the administration, Doge is not going anywhere. Whether Elon Musk is spending more time sleeping on the factory floor at Tesla or not, right, Doge is already here. It is entrenched in the federal government and that is not going anywhere, wherever Elon Musk is.”

    2025-05-06 · Masters of Scale · Musk and DOGE: Inside 100 days of chaos, with WIRED’s Global Editorial Director Katie Drummond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  9. “This is a very smart moment for Musk and Trump to say, hey, this guy's stepping back, right? That is helpful for Tesla, for Tesla shareholders, right, for the Tesla board. That is very helpful for President Trump given how many Republicans and how many Trump voters across the country are outraged about what Elon Musk and Doge are doing, right? Optically, this is a very smart thing to do. Two days a week and every other week in Washington, D.C., that is what Elon Musk has said he will be doing. That is not an insignificant amount of time. Like, I'm pulling way back other than the two days a week that I will spend working on this project. It's still a significant investment of time. And I think regardless, and even Elon Musk himself in these interviews that he did has acknowledged this, that the so-called Department of Government Efficiency is already operational. There are already”

    2025-05-06 · Masters of Scale · Musk and DOGE: Inside 100 days of chaos, with WIRED’s Global Editorial Director Katie Drummond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  10. “This is such an interesting moment that we are in with this. You know, obviously he has announced and President Trump has sort of shared that sentiment that he will be spending more time with his companies, right?”

    2025-05-06 · Masters of Scale · Musk and DOGE: Inside 100 days of chaos, with WIRED’s Global Editorial Director Katie Drummond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  11. “That we can put that information out there. But if someone is not even like within the Venn diagram of platforms that we participate in on the internet, right? If they're spending all their time on truth social, they're watching Fox News or whatever it is, it is very difficult, if not impossible, to reach those audiences. And it's not for lack of trying. And I would say even in my personal life, you know, there are relationships that I have with people who disagree with me tremendously about what's happening right now. And there are limits to what those conversations can involve because people are living in different versions of reality. And it is very difficult to have conversations when your version of the truth is different from someone else's.”

    2025-05-06 · Masters of Scale · Musk and DOGE: Inside 100 days of chaos, with WIRED’s Global Editorial Director Katie Drummond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  12. “Think that is a question that any journalist has been thinking about since at least 2016, right? If not earlier, I think that my best answer to that question is that when we publish our journalism, right, we focus on the facts. We are transparent with our audience about what our point of view is. I'm not trying to hide sort of what we think. And then we put it out on every platform we possibly can, right? We're not focused exclusively on, you know, parts of the internet that we think lean a certain way. We're trying to get this information in front of as many people as possible. The reality of that, though, if I'm being just very candid about sort of our shortcomings and my shortcoming and sort of the limits of our abilities here.”

    2025-05-06 · Masters of Scale · Musk and DOGE: Inside 100 days of chaos, with WIRED’s Global Editorial Director Katie Drummond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  13. “Government money Is it true that the federal government is bloated, can be inefficient, that we could probably take a lot of money out of the federal government? Is that true? Like, yes, I think that is probably true. Is doing it over an eight-week timeline with a machete, the most effective way to get the change that you want? Probably not. No, I'm going to say that there are probably better ways to assess the workings of every federal agency. Those mechanisms exist. I don't know that Doge and Elon Musk are spending very much time looking at what they actually have already done.”

    2025-05-06 · Masters of Scale · Musk and DOGE: Inside 100 days of chaos, with WIRED’s Global Editorial Director Katie Drummond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  14. “Just like a revolutionary thing in a positive way to be doing within the federal government, wouldn't you be shocked when thousands or millions of people come out and say, actually, we hate your guts for this? I mean, that would be shocking.”

    2025-05-06 · Masters of Scale · Musk and DOGE: Inside 100 days of chaos, with WIRED’s Global Editorial Director Katie Drummond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  15. “I don't know that he's someone who lives with a lot of regret. I think that what's so interesting about his surprise and his sort of, you can see when he talks about it in press appearances, like he is very sad. He is saddened by the sort of acts of violence against Tesla cars or the impact this is having on his companies. And he is very surprised at the fact that not everybody is thrilled by the idea of slashing $1 to $2 trillion from the federal bureaucracy. I think that what that speaks to ultimately is what I said earlier, which is that he thinks that he is the good guy here. So if you think that what you are doing is really smart, is really strategic, is really...”

    2025-05-06 · Masters of Scale · Musk and DOGE: Inside 100 days of chaos, with WIRED’s Global Editorial Director Katie Drummond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  16. “A lot of what Doge appears to be doing is not to the letter of the law. It is being challenged in court. And we will have to wait and see as more of these cases wind their way through the courts and end up with a judge making a decision whether or not the administration decides to abide those decisions. Obviously, we have already seen very real examples of the administration deciding not to. And that is a very scary situation, of course, for this country to be in.”

    2025-05-06 · Masters of Scale · Musk and DOGE: Inside 100 days of chaos, with WIRED’s Global Editorial Director Katie Drummond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  17. “I mean, I think that there's no question about the very real potential for that to be the case, right? I mean, anytime a judge says, Do this or don't do this. And the Trump administration waves its hands around and says, yeah, no, we're not going to listen. Like that is a constitutional crisis. Like that is what that looks like when the rule of law is not the rule. We have a serious problem on our hands. Obviously, there has been a great deal of litigation. I mean, more than frankly, we can even keep up with. And I think than most journalists can. I mean, sometimes we'll find a legal filing and it's like a week old and nobody's published a story about it and it's newsworthy, right? I mean, there is so much happening right now, but there is no question that”

    2025-05-06 · Masters of Scale · Musk and DOGE: Inside 100 days of chaos, with WIRED’s Global Editorial Director Katie Drummond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  18. “We possibly can whether I'm doing the work from New York or from a bunker in Europe, TBD, but I will be doing the work from somewhere.”

    2025-05-06 · Masters of Scale · Musk and DOGE: Inside 100 days of chaos, with WIRED’s Global Editorial Director Katie Drummond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  19. “This is a great time in history to be shy. Whatever your role, if you're a journalist, you're an academic, whatever your profession, whatever your walk of life, I think it's important to use your platform and use your expertise to say something about what is happening right now. I think I would really regret in 50 years on my deathbed, you know, looking at my grandchildren and them asking me what I did during the Trump administration and me telling them, oh, I just kept my head down and I stayed really, really quiet. Now, in terms of safety, I mean, look, you would be crazy to work in journalism right now and not be concerned about your safety. It's something that we talk about a lot internally. We talk about it a lot at Wired, at Condane Nast. My parent company, obviously I can't speak for them. What I can say is that they have been incredibly supportive of this work. And it's something that we are taking one day at a time. But with ultimately a commitment to continuing to do this work for as long as...”

    2025-05-06 · Masters of Scale · Musk and DOGE: Inside 100 days of chaos, with WIRED’s Global Editorial Director Katie Drummond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  20. “Information is reviewed by lawyers and fact checkers, it is then published, right? So I am in the business of providing our audience information. But I think it would be ridiculous to say, well, I'm just providing the information. You come to your own conclusions. No, I have a point of view on all of this, and so does Wired. As a newsroom, we have an institutional point of view about what's happening right now. And we are very well positioned to have that point of view. We employ subject matter experts on AI. We employ subject matter experts on data and how data is stored and safeguarded and what the potential risks are of pulling disparate data sources together into one place. We have experts in politics and policy and how federal agencies ought to best be run. And when we don't have expertise on staff, we outsource it, right? We call experts. That is the job of journalism. So, you know, I'm not shy about sharing my point of view, particularly because I don't.”

    2025-05-06 · Masters of Scale · Musk and DOGE: Inside 100 days of chaos, with WIRED’s Global Editorial Director Katie Drummond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  21. “I am not an activist. I am not part of a hashtag resistance movement. I am a journalist. Wired our newsroom. We go out, we seek out information. We call sources. We get expert opinions. We're able to sort of synthesize that information and help our audience understand what it means, what the potential benefits are, often in the case of Doge, what the potential risks are.”

    2025-05-06 · Masters of Scale · Musk and DOGE: Inside 100 days of chaos, with WIRED’s Global Editorial Director Katie Drummond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  22. “SpaceX is regulated by those same agencies. You know, all of those agencies are now, you know, beholden to some extent to Doge and to Musk and to an administration at the end of the day, to an administration that supports the work that those individuals are doing.”

    2025-05-06 · Masters of Scale · Musk and DOGE: Inside 100 days of chaos, with WIRED’s Global Editorial Director Katie Drummond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  23. “Well, the Trump administration loves a conflict of interest. I mean, this is sort of their whole deal. I mean, if you look at even just the Trump family and their entanglements with crypto as the New York Times reported, I mean Donald Trump himself is awash with conflicts of interest and that seems to be how he wants to run his administration. Obviously when it comes to Elon Musk himself again, just one giant conflict of interest. I mean, SpaceX, okay. SpaceX is regulated by the FAA. Elon Musk and Doge now have operatives, workers inside the FAA helping decide how the FAA should be run, helping to decide which contracts to cancel, which contracts to uphold, how to move forward with that agency with aviation safety, with everything that the FAA oversees. is a massive beneficiary of government contracts.”

    2025-05-06 · Masters of Scale · Musk and DOGE: Inside 100 days of chaos, with WIRED’s Global Editorial Director Katie Drummond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  24. “Government to have access to every single bit of information about you from across every single agency of government. That is a very dangerous proposition and that effectively is a very effective way to build a very powerful surveillance state.”

    2025-05-06 · Masters of Scale · Musk and DOGE: Inside 100 days of chaos, with WIRED’s Global Editorial Director Katie Drummond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  25. “They want, and you know, undocumented immigrants are actually encouraged to file taxes because it could help them potentially down the road apply for and obtain U.S. citizenship, right? That data cannot then be shared with other federal agencies who are looking to deport people like that is one very specific example of why it's important for this data to be siloed, not for all of this data to be aggregated and put in one place. I would also say that, you know, the more data from across all of these agencies you compile and you aggregate, the more specific and holistic and well-rounded a picture you're able to get of any given individual living in this country. This is not meta. We're not talking about Facebook, right? You don't want one person within the federal government.”

    2025-05-06 · Masters of Scale · Musk and DOGE: Inside 100 days of chaos, with WIRED’s Global Editorial Director Katie Drummond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  26. “Sure. Well, I mean, first of all, I would say yes, it is very common outside of the government for companies to collect all kinds of data, including data on users, to put that all in one place. That's not necessarily a good thing. It is something that happens. It often happens so that they can serve more effective advertising to different users. There are all kinds of course of horror stories about that data leaking or sort of that data being used in ways that users of these services would certainly prefer that the data was not. When it comes to federal agencies, I think what's particularly Ridiculous or wild to me is like as if”

    2025-05-06 · Masters of Scale · Musk and DOGE: Inside 100 days of chaos, with WIRED’s Global Editorial Director Katie Drummond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  27. “Not even close. I mean, AI agents, like we came into this year at Wired thinking, okay, this will be a year where a lot of really interesting work happens around agentic AI, right? Around this idea of AI that can actually perform like end-to-end tasks for you independently without you having to be, you know, closely involved. That is still very, very early in its development. And the idea that Know even for private businesses that they would start deploying those tools, it's very early to be having those conversations, let alone saying, let's see how this does with the very sensitive tasks of various federal agencies. It is absolutely ridiculous to even suggest that that's a viable idea.”

    2025-05-06 · Masters of Scale · Musk and DOGE: Inside 100 days of chaos, with WIRED’s Global Editorial Director Katie Drummond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  28. “There is no world in which AI agents should or could or can be deployed across federal agencies in an effective, error-free manner. But there appears to be this idea that what's more efficient than having no people working for the federal government, but just letting AI do it instead.”

    2025-05-06 · Masters of Scale · Musk and DOGE: Inside 100 days of chaos, with WIRED’s Global Editorial Director Katie Drummond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  29. “Including deportations. And then there is the AI piece of it all. And that to me, you know, the data piece of it to me really feels pernicious, scary, malevolent, right? Like that data is extremely sensitive. This is the most personal information we have about every single person living in this country. The AI piece of it now, you have Doge, going into different agencies and trying to introduce artificial intelligence. So we published a story about a Doge recruiter trying to recruit Palantir alums to go build and deploy AI agents inside the federal government with specific language saying we think there are about 70,000 jobs that could be automated with AI agents, which to be clear from my point of view and the point of view of the Wired Newsroom, AI agents are still very early in their development.”

    2025-05-06 · Masters of Scale · Musk and DOGE: Inside 100 days of chaos, with WIRED’s Global Editorial Director Katie Drummond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  30. “Right, there are other designs here on what exactly it means to overhaul, you know, every federal agency in the US governmental apparatus. And a lot of that appears to have to do with data, right? And it has to do with artificial intelligence. So it's become very obvious that Doge is trying to amass as much data from within every federal agency as they possibly can, right? They want their hands on all kinds of sensitive data, data about Americans, data about people applying to be US citizens. And they want that data to be accessible from one central place, right? So they want to be able to have the Department of Homeland Security access data from the IRS, right? They are really trying to create some kind of central resource of data about Americans and about non-US citizens. And obviously that data could be used for all kinds of things.”

    2025-05-06 · Masters of Scale · Musk and DOGE: Inside 100 days of chaos, with WIRED’s Global Editorial Director Katie Drummond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  31. “I never try to get inside Elon Musk's head. I think that sounds like a very dangerous place to spend time. And not necessarily a rational place to spend time. I think that one thing that's so interesting about him and the people who are working for Doge and this sort of ecosystem that they inhabit is that if you ask them, right, if you asked Elon Musk what his intentions are, I think that they think they are doing really good things. Like I think that his intentions sort of at a superficial level are No, like this is a wasteful corrupt fraudulent bureaucracy and it needs to be disrupted in a very extreme and very aggressive way. I think that he genuinely thinks that and I think that they see themselves as the good guys in this fight, right? But as we have seen Doge and Doge's actions play out, it's very obvious that there are other ideas here.”

    2025-05-06 · Masters of Scale · Musk and DOGE: Inside 100 days of chaos, with WIRED’s Global Editorial Director Katie Drummond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  32. “Seriously naming a new part of government after a meme. Like, this is ridiculous what is happening. And then the coverage obviously spiraled from there”

    2025-05-06 · Masters of Scale · Musk and DOGE: Inside 100 days of chaos, with WIRED’s Global Editorial Director Katie Drummond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  33. “It just so happened that in the summer of 2024, right, we had our politics team, we were up and running, Trump was shot in the ear, grazed by a bullet, Elon Musk jumped in, you know, head first, endorsed Donald Trump, you know, started fundraising for him. Oh, this is about to be a big story. Elon Musk, like the most influential technologist and sort of technology CEO of our lifetimes, arguably, is jumping into politics. This game just changed in a really interesting way. And that's when we started pulling reporters, not just from the politics team, but from our business desk, right? From other teams that we have in our newsroom to really start to lean in and start to try to own this intersection of Trump and Musk, Trump and Musk, Trump and Musk. And then they announce the Department of Government Efficiency. Is this a joke? Like what we're...”

    2025-05-06 · Masters of Scale · Musk and DOGE: Inside 100 days of chaos, with WIRED’s Global Editorial Director Katie Drummond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  34. “So, when I started here in late 2023, we did not have a politics team. We were not regularly in the business of covering politics. And that was something I decided to do very early on in my time was to hire a politics editor to staff up on reporters who could really own that intersection of politics and technology. I was not thinking about Elon Musk very much in the context of politics. I was thinking about politics and technology in the context of artificial intelligence, in the context of hacking, in the context of online influencers and how they were changing presidential campaigns or electoral campaigns around the world.”

    2025-05-06 · Masters of Scale · Musk and DOGE: Inside 100 days of chaos, with WIRED’s Global Editorial Director Katie Drummond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  35. “It's not that kind of a business. I wish him luck trying to steer the newsroom of the Washington Post in the direction that he wants. That is just not how journalism works”

    2025-05-06 · Masters of Scale · Musk and DOGE: Inside 100 days of chaos, with WIRED’s Global Editorial Director Katie Drummond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  36. “What is happening there? I mean, all I can, like, there are so many talented journalists and editorial minds at the Washington Post and every subscriber they lose is, you know, another drop in the hat that will ultimately add up to more layoffs for that organization unless he decides to sell, right? To divest himself of this asset that seems to be nothing but a burden on the rest of his businesses. I have no idea why he continues to operate this newspaper if it doesn't really seem like he wants to participate in that kind of rigorous editorial work or even dialogue on its opinion pages.”

    2025-05-06 · Masters of Scale · Musk and DOGE: Inside 100 days of chaos, with WIRED’s Global Editorial Director Katie Drummond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  37. “So it's a scary prospect to think about the idea of government funding being pulled from organizations like PBS and NPR, which are really, really vital to dialogue in this country, in my opinion.”

    2025-05-06 · Masters of Scale · Musk and DOGE: Inside 100 days of chaos, with WIRED’s Global Editorial Director Katie Drummond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  38. “There is no tried and true business model unless you were smart enough to acquire Wordle several years ago and you're the New York Times.”

    2025-05-06 · Masters of Scale · Musk and DOGE: Inside 100 days of chaos, with WIRED’s Global Editorial Director Katie Drummond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  39. “Yeah, I mean, I always think about sort of what is the intention behind what he's doing. And sometimes it's very frankly very difficult to decipher what Trump's intentions are. But I think the idea is just to put journalists on notice that, you know, you do not have a fan in the White House. The reality with sort of government funding of journalistic entities is one, you know, I do not think that NPR and PBS are beholden to the government in their coverage. They publish plenty of critical coverage of administrations and they have for a very long time. But the idea of pulling funding from organizations like those that provide free access to media and to news and to entertainment for millions and millions of Americans is really disturbing. It's not like there's a bunch of cash lying around for these organizations to go get somewhere else. There is no cash ultimately.”

    2025-05-06 · Masters of Scale · Musk and DOGE: Inside 100 days of chaos, with WIRED’s Global Editorial Director Katie Drummond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  40. “He doesn't think these journalistic entities should exist. Like, that is a very chilling message, whether you are a journalist or just someone who believes that journalism should be uninterfered with by government entities. If you think that, then this executive order should be very scary for you.”

    2025-05-06 · Masters of Scale · Musk and DOGE: Inside 100 days of chaos, with WIRED’s Global Editorial Director Katie Drummond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  41. “It's not a surprise. I mean, he has obviously been signaling and messaging this in no uncertain terms for some time now, right? Which is that he just doesn't think these organizations should be funded by the government, doesn't seem to think they should exist. These are scary times for journalism. And I think that that executive order, you know, we can talk all day about how binding an executive order actually is or whether this executive order actually carries any water and allows him to do what he's trying to do here, which as far as I'm aware, it doesn't really. But to me, what's more important and often unfortunately what's more important with President Trump is not so much what he's actually able to do. It's what he signals he wants to do, right? It's about intention. It's about the message that he's putting out into the country, into the public sphere. Out into the world that”

    2025-05-06 · Masters of Scale · Musk and DOGE: Inside 100 days of chaos, with WIRED’s Global Editorial Director Katie Drummond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  42. “Is it true that the federal government is bloated, can be inefficient? I think that is probably true, is doing it over an eight-week timeline with a machete, the most effective way to get the change that you want? Probably not. 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 former SpaceX interns who have never worked for the government in their entire lives. Doge is not going anywhere. Whether Elon Musk is spending more time sleeping on the factory floor at Tesla or not, right? Doge is already here. It is entrenched in the federal government. And that is not going anywhere, wherever Elon Musk is.”

    2025-05-06 · Masters of Scale · Musk and DOGE: Inside 100 days of chaos, with WIRED’s Global Editorial Director Katie Drummond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT