THE DOGEFATHER PART II

Who will help lead the Department of Government Efficiency now that Elon Musk has left the scene? News reports have mentioned Joe Gebbia, a Tesla board member and a co-founder of Airbnb, as a possible replacement. Gebbia is forty-three. Like Musk—his close friend—he is a billionaire, a resident of Austin, Texas, and the rumored recipient of a hair transplant. Gebbia formally announced his political conversion on X in January, posting that, after years of supporting Democrats, he finally “did [his] own research” and concluded that Donald Trump “deeply cares about our

- —Charles Bethea

nation.” His feed has a MAHA flavor: Big Food exposés (“The truth about Ketchup”) alternate with digs at liberals suffering from “TDS,” or Trump Derangement Syndrome.

Unlike Musk, Gebbia was trained not as an engineer but as a designer. Upon joining DOGE, in February, he pledged to bring his “designer brain and startup spirit” to the task of cutting two trillion dollars from the federal budget. One of his early projects: digitizing the retirement process for federal workers. He mused to Fox News’ Bret Baier that, under DOGE’s influence, interacting with the government could soon resemble “an Apple Store-like experience.”

At the Rhode Island School of Design, where he earned degrees in industrial design and graphic design in the early two-thousands, Gebbia was known as a gregarious, prematurely balding student with a signature pair of machine-shop safety glasses. “Joe always had a finger in every pie,” Chris Saltzman, a former classmate, recalled. Gebbia worked in the dining room at the University Club and gave tours for the admissions office. “I was, like, ‘Whoa, this guy is so on point. He’s going places,” Loren Klein, a freelance graphic designer in Denver, said of his Gebbia-led RISD tour. Gebbia also knew how to have fun. One night, Klein found himself with Gebbia and two female students, “eating Krispy Kreme doughnuts and running into the ocean in our underwear.”

Gebbia's reformist streak showed up early. He was president of the RISD student council, which at one point formed a DOGE-like “committee to investigate the effectiveness of the faculty advisor program.” “This is not some high school council that has no real impact or influence,” Gebbia’s council announced, according to a report in a student paper. “I don't remember this investigation,” Saltzman said. He added, “The council was a nonentity.”