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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,” cryptocurrencies win big across the board, and a modern equivalent of Lysistrata takes hold on TikTok. Thanks for joining me.
Trump, the president-elect of the United States, said he wants to appoint Musk, the richest man in the world, as the country’s “cost-cutting secretary” to reduce bureaucracy in the federal government by about $2 trillion, about a third . Trump announced in September that he would create a “Department of Government Efficiency.” Musk had pushed the idea and has since promoted it relentlessly, emphasizing the agency’s acronym: Doge, a reference to a meme of an expressive Shiba Inu. Trump said the agency will conduct a “comprehensive financial and performance audit of the entire federal government and make recommendations for dramatic reforms.”
in a video posted on X Two days after the election, Trump said he would “immediately reissue my 2020 executive order, restoring the president’s authority to remove rogue bureaucrats.” 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 project for Trump’s second term, lays out ways to get bureaucrats fired.
The billionaire appears to have no illusions about what will happen after the proposed cuts.
Musk has extensive experience cutting corporate spending and has promised to reduce federal payrolls in the same way. He cut staff at X, formerly Twitter, by 80% after buying it in 2022, a move he said avoided a deficit of 3 billion dollarsbut otherwise it has not borne fruit. Revenues are in sharp decline and the advertisers have fled, so a return seems unlikely. However, as CEO of SpaceX, he has earned a reputation for launching rockets at cheaper prices than his competitors by negotiating with suppliers and keeping operations efficient.
The billionaire appears to have no illusions about what will happen after the proposed cuts, admitting that cutting spending “necessarily involves some temporary difficulties.” Americans want to spend less, of their own money. Do they want austerity and less financial assistance from the federal government? Do you want the richest person in the world to admonish you to reduce your spending?
Musk has already asked Trump to appoint SpaceX employees to senior government positions. the New York Times reports. The president-elect promised to ban bureaucrats from taking jobs at the companies they regulate. Such a rule would appear to prevent SpaceX lieutenants from accessing the Pentagon 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 the government will be structured so that he can maintain control of his companies. reports the Financial Times.
In 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 administration never fully recovered from his inability to find those designated people. Perhaps adding Musk to the equation is aimed at preventing such a lag from happening again. In an extreme version of the new administration, Trump and Musk simply eliminate any position for which they cannot find an amicable appointee. In John Kennedy Toole’s 1980 Pulitzer-winning novel, A Confederacy of Dummies, the idiot hero, tasked with organizing an intractable stack of files at his new job, eradicates corporate disarray. However, Ignatius J. Reilly is no organizational genius; he’s just throwing out cabinets full of records. It’s easy to imagine Trump and Musk following suit.
However, what will stand in Musk’s way is one of his sworn enemies: labor law. Tesla is the only major U.S. automaker that does not employ union labor. The billionaire CEO wants to keep it that way. Federal government employees, by contrast, enjoy strong labor protections that would hinder Musk’s slash-and-burn approach to cutting costs and possibly make it impossible. For all the different companies he runs, Musk has little experience managing public sector employees. You may find lions less docile than what you are used to taming.
Read more about him four remarkable months That made Elon Musk go from refusing to endorse a candidate to becoming perhaps the most powerful man in American politics after Donald Trump. And read more about how a second Trump term could enrich Musk.
Cryptocurrency companies invested $135 million in the US elections: what did they get in return?
Quite a bit, it seems. In 48 races that featured donations from the largest cryptocurrency Pac, Fairshake, all industry-backed candidates won. Bloomberg information. More than 60% of that cash supported Republicans or opposed Democrats, according to Bloomberg.
The industry made its biggest bet in Ohio, where Republican Bernie Moreno faced off against popular incumbent Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown. Moreno received $40 million from cryptocurrency companies. Brown chaired the Senate banking committee and wanted stricter regulation on digital currency. Earlier this year, cryptocurrency companies spent $10 million attacking Katie Porter, an advocate for stricter cryptocurrency laws, in the California Senate primary. Goalkeeper lost. Protect Progress, another pro-crypto Pact, spent $10 million each on Senate races in Arizona and Michigan, where crypto was not a big issue. However, his two favorite candidates had voted for the industry on key bills.
In addition to the long-term benefits of a friendly and less restrictive regulatory environment, the crypto industry has seen immediate financial gains. Bitcoin is trading at record levels, topping $75,000 on Tuesday night.
Fairshake did not contribute to the presidential race, but will still benefit from its outcome. Trump is selling his own cryptocurrency now and supporting the industry with full force, reversing his position on cryptocurrencies from his first term. Musk has acted as a hypeman for cryptocurrencies, particularly Dogecoin, years before it was popular. (Harris neither accepted nor rejected cryptography.)
Musk seems especially receptive to one of cryptocurrency’s top priorities: the firing of Gary Gensler, the president of securities and exchanges.
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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.” You may be right. The industry ranks second only to fossil fuel companies in political contributions, according to Public Citizen, a nonprofit consumer advocacy organization.
This week on my iPhone
I’m seeing a Dystopian coffee shop comedy. on Instagram and reading about why South Korea’s 4B movement, a real modern Lysistrata, is going viral on TikTok. My colleague Alaina Demopoulos writes:
The basic idea: Women give up heterosexual marriage, dating, sex, and childbirth in protest against institutionalized misogyny and abuse. (It is called 4B in reference to these four specific prohibitions.) The largely online movement began around 2018 with protests against revenge porn and grew into South Korea’s #MeToo-style feminist wave.
After Trump’s victory, she writes, 4B is on the minds of American women.
Read the full story here.
