When Elon Musk has a really tough job, he turns to Steve Davis. DOGE might do the same.

IT WAS THE FALL OF 2022 when employees at Elon Musk's Boring Company began to notice Steve Davis wasn't around.

- JESSICA MATHEWS

COST-CUTTERS

Steve Davis (left) with DOGE co-heads Elon Musk (center) and Vivek Ramaswamy.

Davis, the president of the tunnel-digging startup, had stopped showing up at the R&D facility in Bastrop, Texas, and at the project sites in Las Vegas he was known to frequent. It's not as if you could miss him when he was around: Davis was a hard-driving and seemingly tireless boss.

But Davis had temporarily shifted gears to another Musk passion project. After Musk closed the deal to buy Twitter for $44 billion, Davis made his way to San Francisco. There, he was seen pacing the halls of the 10th floor of the company's headquarters—peppering people over the phone with questions about what parts of the organization he could cut, with seemingly little regard to who might overhear him.

Davis—Musk's 22nd hire at SpaceX—has earned a reputation as a tenacious cost-cutter and as one of the few confidants Musk relies on to get something done. People who have worked closely with Davis say they think he'd be able to carry out any task Musk gave him—no matter how unrealistic it might seem, and regardless of whose jobs might be erased.

So in the run-up to President Trump's inauguration, it was no surprise when Davis's name popped up in stories by Bloomberg and the New York Times as a key player in Musk's new preoccupation: the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, the cost-cutting endeavor that Trump asked Musk to co-lead with venture capitalist Vivek Ramaswamy.

DOGE is mostly an advisory body; it can't make big changes without help from Congress. (See our accompanying story.) But Musk's stated plans for the department are as lofty as the ones he publicizes for his space travel and satellite company SpaceX or electric-vehicle juggernaut Tesla. In this case: to cut $2 trillion in government spending—about 30% of the federal budget—in a few years' time.