MOVE FAST AND BREAK THINGS

What did Elon Musk accomplish at the Department of Government Efficiency?

- BY BENJAMIN WALLACE-WELLS

"Elon goes on these destiny quests," a prominent conservative said. "And then a lot of the government is on a destiny quest."

On March 27th, Sahil Lavingia walked into the Secretary of War Suite, in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, to attend an all-hands meeting of the Department of Government Efficiency. Lavingia had been a DOGE employee for two weeks, part of a small team embedded at the Department of Veterans Affairs. So far, it had been an unexpectedly isolating experience. Lavingia communicated over the messaging app Signal with another member of the V.A.’s DOGE team, but there didn’t seem to be a Signal channel where he could interact with the rest of DOGE. Instead, Lavingia would watch Elon Musk, who led the initiative, engage with his allies on X. Lavingia told me, “You'd see where the dolphins were swimming—like, now we're looking at D.E.I. contracts—and so you'd swim there, too.”

Before coming to Washington, Lavingia lived in New York, where he worked at Gumroad, an e-commerce site that he'd founded more than a decade earlier. He wasn't really a MAGA guy, but he had always thought it would be interesting to work in government, and he admired Musk. In October, at a tech meetup at the New York offices of the venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, Lavingia talked with someone who later introduced him to a DOGE staffer. The staffer put him in touch with a DOGE engineer, who connected him with a DOGE recruiter. The calls didn’t last much longer than five minutes. “All the questions were about ‘When can you move to D.C.?’” Lavingia said. Eventually, Lavingia told me, he talked to Steve Davis, the president of Musk’s Boring Company, who asked if Lavingia could code. Yes, Lavingia said. A few weeks later, he got a text: a job had opened up at the V.A. “I felt like, O.K., finally, that’s some information,” Lavingia said. He started in mid-March, making an hourly wage of about thirteen dollars.