Hello and welcome to TechScape. I’m Blake Montgomery, US technology editor at The Guardian. In this week’s newsletter: Elon Musk and Donald Trump want to create a “Department of Government Efficiency,” crypto is making big gains across the board, and a modern equivalent of Lysistrata is taking hold of TikTok. Thank you for joining me.
Trump, the newly elected US president, said he wants to appoint Musk, the richest man in the world, as the country’s “secretary of cost savings” to cut red tape in the federal government by $2 trillion, roughly a third , to reduce. Trump announced in September that he would create a Department of Government Efficiency. Musk had pushed for the idea and has promoted it relentlessly ever since, highlighting the acronym for the agency: Doge, a reference to a meme of an expressive Shiba Inu. Trump said the agency will conduct a “full financial and performance audit of the entire federal government and make recommendations for dramatic reforms.”
In a video posted to He wants to “clean up the deep state.” His promises echo his catchphrase on The Apprentice: “You’re fired!” Project 2025, an influential and controversial blueprint for Trump’s second term, outlines ways to make bureaucrats fireable.
The billionaire appears to have no illusions about what will happen after his proposed cuts.
Musk has extensive experience cutting corporate spending and has pledged to cut federal payrolls in much the same way. He cut staff at Turnover is falling sharply and advertisers have disappeared, making a comeback seem unlikely. However, as CEO of SpaceX, he has built a reputation for being able to launch rockets cheaper than the competition by negotiating with suppliers and keeping operations streamlined.
The billionaire appears to be under no illusions about what will happen after his proposed cuts, admitting that cutting spending “will necessarily entail some temporary hardship.” Americans want to spend less – of their own money. Do they want cuts and less financial support from the federal government? Do they want the richest person in the world to urge them to cut their expenses?
Musk has already asked Trump to appoint SpaceX employees to top government positions, the New York Times reports. The president-elect pledged to ban bureaucrats from taking jobs at the companies they control. Such a rule would seem to keep SpaceX’s lieutenants from the Pentagon’s door. But the president-elect has never shied away from cronyism. The two are not trying to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest: Musk’s role in government will be structured in such a way that he can maintain control over his companies, the Financial Times reports.
During his first term, Trump and his team struggled to fill the thousands of government appointments needed to run the federal government. Former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie said the government never fully recovered from its inability to find these appointees. Perhaps adding Musk to the equation is intended to prevent a recurrence of such inertia. In an extreme version of the new administration, Trump and Musk simply eliminate any position for which they cannot find a friendly appointee. In John Kennedy Toole’s Pulitzer-winning 1980 novel, A Confederacy of Dunces, the idiot hero, tasked with organizing a stubborn pile of files in his new job, cleans out the company’s mess. However, Ignatius J. Reilly is not an organizational genius; he just throws away cabinets full of records. It’s easy to imagine Trump and Musk following suit.
What will stand in Musk’s way, however, is one of his sworn enemies: labor law. Tesla is the only major American automaker that does not employ a unionized workforce. The billionaire CEO wants to keep it that way. Federal government employees, on the other hand, enjoy strong labor protections that would hinder and possibly make Musk’s slash-and-burn approach to cost cutting impossible. For all the different companies he leads, Musk has little experience managing public sector employees. Perhaps he finds them less pliable lions than he is used to taming.
• Read about the remarkable four months that saw Elon Musk go from refusing to endorse a candidate to perhaps the most powerful man in American politics after Donald Trump. And read more about how a second Trump term could enrich Musk.
Crypto companies poured $135 million into the US election – what did they get in return?
A lot, it seems. In 48 races involving donations from cryptocurrency’s largest Pac, Fairshake, every industry-backed candidate has won, Bloomberg reports. More than 60% of that money supported Republicans or anti-Democrats, according to Bloomberg.
The industry made its biggest bet in Ohio, where Republican Bernie Moreno ran against popular Democratic incumbent Senator Sherrod Brown. Moreno received $40 million from cryptocurrency companies. Brown chaired the Senate Banking Committee and wanted stricter regulations on digital currencies. Earlier this year, crypto companies spent $10 million to attack Katie Porter, a supporter of stricter cryptocurrency laws, during California’s Senate primaries. Lost doorman. Protect Progress, another pro-crypto Pac, spent $10 million each on Senate races in Arizona and Michigan, where crypto wasn’t much of an issue. However, both favored candidates had voted pro-industry on major bills.
In addition to the long-term benefits of a friendly, less restrictive regulatory environment, the crypto industry has seen immediate financial gains. Bitcoin is trading at record highs, breaking $75,000 late Tuesday night.
Fairshake did not contribute to the presidential race, but could benefit from its outcome anyway. Trump is now selling his own cryptocurrency and backing the industry with full force, reversing his stance on crypto from his first term. Musk served as the hype man for cryptocurrency, especially Dogecoin, years before it became popular. (Harris has neither embraced nor rejected crypto.)
Musk seems especially receptive to one of crypto’s top priorities: firing Gary Gensler, the chairman of the securities and brokerage industry.
Coinbase, the world’s second largest cryptocurrency exchange, gave Fairshake $25 million. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong wrote the day after the US election: “DC received a clear message that being anti-crypto is a good way to end your career.” Maybe he’s right. According to the nonprofit Public Citizen, the industry ranks second in political contributions, behind fossil fuel companies.
This week on my iPhone
I watch a dystopian coffee shop comedy on Instagram and read why the South Korean 4B movement – a modern, real-life Lysistrata – is going viral on TikTok. My colleague Alaina Demopoulos writes:
The basic idea: women renounce heterosexual marriage, dating, sex and childbirth in protest against institutionalized misogyny and abuse. (It’s called 4B, referring to these four specific no-nos.) The mostly online movement started around 2018 with protests against revenge porn and grew into the #MeToo-like feminist wave in South Korea.
In the wake of Trump’s victory, she writes, 4B is on the minds of American women.
Read the full story here.
