As DOGE Brings Chaos, What is Elon Musk's Endgame? | Pivot
Kara Swisher (host), Katie Drummond (guest), Narrator, Donald Trump (guest), Steve Bannon (guest)
In this episode of Pivot, featuring Kara Swisher and Katie Drummond, As DOGE Brings Chaos, What is Elon Musk's Endgame? | Pivot explores elon’s Doge Takeover: Wired Exposes Chaos, Power, And Impunity Kara Swisher and Wired’s global editorial director Katy Drummond discuss Wired’s aggressive reporting on “Doge,” Elon Musk’s parallel power structure embedded inside the Trump administration and the federal bureaucracy.
Elon’s Doge Takeover: Wired Exposes Chaos, Power, And Impunity
Kara Swisher and Wired’s global editorial director Katy Drummond discuss Wired’s aggressive reporting on “Doge,” Elon Musk’s parallel power structure embedded inside the Trump administration and the federal bureaucracy.
Drummond explains how Wired built a politics team to cover the intersection of tech, AI, and government, then pivoted hard into uncovering Musk’s influence over agencies, data access, and mass federal layoffs.
They detail legal and ethical concerns around Musk-aligned operatives placed in sensitive roles (including FAA and OPM), conflicts of interest with his companies, and the broader climate of chaos favored by both Musk and Trump.
The conversation also examines tech’s opportunistic alignment with Trump, the Democrats’ weak, uncoordinated response, and the systemic risks of oligarchic capture of U.S. institutions.
Key Takeaways
Beat reporting and iteration are essential to exposing complex power structures.
Wired invested early in a politics team and assigned dedicated Musk-in-government and Trump beats, publishing incremental scoops that accumulated into a comprehensive picture of Doge’s reach.
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Musk’s power in Washington is being laundered through legal technicalities.
The White House’s sworn statement that Musk is merely a “senior advisor–like” employee, not the Doge administrator, appears designed to shield his actions from legal challenges requiring Senate-confirmed authority.
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Existing privacy and oversight laws are ill-equipped for Musk’s data ambitions.
Watergate-era statutes like the Privacy Act are being used piecemeal against Doge’s access to Americans’ data, but they create fragmented, agency-by-agency challenges rather than a holistic constraint on Musk’s influence.
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Doge’s layoffs are blunt, chaotic, and fiscally misleading.
Young, often under-vetted tech operatives are mass-firing civil servants using personnel data, but the purported trillion-dollar deficit reduction is mathematically implausible and frequently based on inflated or misreported savings.
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Placing Musk-aligned engineers inside regulatory agencies creates profound conflicts of interest.
SpaceX engineers being onboarded at the FAA—an agency that regulates and has fined SpaceX—illustrate how Musk is embedding his people in watchdog roles, compromising safety and regulatory independence.
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Corporate America is capitulating to coercion and proximity to power.
Advertisers and investors are reportedly facing direct and veiled threats from Musk’s camp to support X, with many deciding it is “prudent business” to comply, normalizing oligarchic leverage over markets and speech.
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Democrats lack a coherent, high-energy strategy to counter tech-backed authoritarianism.
Beyond protests and statements, there is little organized pushback; a handful of figures like AOC and Buttigieg show how digital-native, forceful communication could work, but the party overall appears slow, elderly, and reactive.
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Notable Quotes
“You can't separate technology from politics anymore.”
— Katy Drummond
“This is the job. I get paid to do this. I have not thought for a second that we should soften anything that we're doing.”
— Katy Drummond
“It is chaos across the board... Doge being one pocket of chaos that sits within the larger chaos umbrella.”
— Katy Drummond
“The idea that you would have engineers from a company that is regulated by the agency that they now work for going in to try to ‘fix’ that agency is one enormous and very stressful conflict of interest.”
— Katy Drummond
“When the dust settles, don't forget that they were all there.”
— Katy Drummond
Questions Answered in This Episode
If existing laws like the Privacy Act are inadequate, what new legal frameworks are needed to constrain a figure like Musk from capturing state data and infrastructure?
Kara Swisher and Wired’s global editorial director Katy Drummond discuss Wired’s aggressive reporting on “Doge,” Elon Musk’s parallel power structure embedded inside the Trump administration and the federal bureaucracy.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
How should regulators, journalists, and civil society respond when key watchdog agencies themselves become infiltrated by the entities they’re supposed to oversee?
Drummond explains how Wired built a politics team to cover the intersection of tech, AI, and government, then pivoted hard into uncovering Musk’s influence over agencies, data access, and mass federal layoffs.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
What would an effective, modern Democratic strategy against tech-enabled authoritarianism actually look like in practice over the next four years?
They detail legal and ethical concerns around Musk-aligned operatives placed in sensitive roles (including FAA and OPM), conflicts of interest with his companies, and the broader climate of chaos favored by both Musk and Trump.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
At what point does advertisers’ and investors’ willingness to bend to Musk’s threats cross from ‘prudent business’ into active complicity in undermining democratic norms?
The conversation also examines tech’s opportunistic alignment with Trump, the Democrats’ weak, uncoordinated response, and the systemic risks of oligarchic capture of U. ...
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
Is there a realistic scenario under which Musk genuinely pivots back toward more progressive positions, and if so, should institutions trust or engage with that pivot?
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
Transcript Preview
Keep going for big balls.
Tesla.sexy, LLC and-
I know.
... big balls. Two things I am very sorry that I have to keep saying on TV-
Yeah.
... interviews and podcasts.
(instrumental music)
Hi, everyone. This is Pivot from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network. I'm Kara Swisher. Scott is off today, who knows where he is. But in his place, we have someone so much better. Katy Drummond, the global editorial director of Wired. Wired has always been a powerhouse, but particularly in the era of Trump, Elon, and Doge, which I'm calling Dog-e now, and its coverage, uh, has become required reading. Katy, welcome. You've had a busy couple weeks with all these scoops on Doge, which, uh, led to a record-breaking increase in subscriptions. We'll get to that in a second, but welcome. Thank you for coming.
Thank you so much for having me. I am also in a mysterious location, but I'm not gonna tell you where I am either.
O- okay, all right. Well, you're here at least-
I'm here.
... as opposed to whatever the hell Scott's doing, taking edibles and-
(laughs)
... not skiing, wherever he is. Um, so I want to talk a little bit, because you guys have really come on strong here. Now, I'd like... Tell me about your approach to covering this administration. Now, you became global editorial director relatively recently, right? Is that correct?
Uh, yes. Time is a funny thing these days, but it was about a year and a half ago. It was September 2023, um, I got the job, I started, and, and actually, the second, my second day on the job, I emailed my boss. My boss is Anna Wintour, um-
Mm-hmm. That must be fun.
It's, it's actually delightful. She's amazing.
(laughs) Yeah.
Um, and I said, "I need to hire a politics team, and here's why, and here's what I want to do." So it was... I, I'm happy to talk more about it, but it was sort of from i- f- from inception, I think looking ahead at 2024, which is obviously a critical election year for the United States and for so many other countries around the world. At the time, in my head, it was much more about, uh, generative AI, mis- and disinformation, um, you know, hacking, um, and those sort of tech-adjacent adjacencies to politics. I wasn't, I wasn't thinking, "Well, obviously Elon Musk is gonna jump in, um, and end up, like, sleeping at the White House." Like, that wasn't on my radar at the time, um, but (laughs) but certainly our coverage has evolved, uh, a great deal since then.
And why did you have that instinct? Because of AI around the world, regulatory issues, you know, the, the... That was the, the focus, was that everybody's gonna be focused in on what AI means and the governments, including-
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