« Chemotherapist » – will this be Musk’s heir to Doge

Steve Davis, a longtime loyal supporter of Ilon Musk, is practically the leader of the Government Efficiency Division (Doge). Musk is simply an employee and presidential envoy to the agency.

After several publications reminded this week that he would leave his position in the coming weeks, the question arose who would inherit him there. Davis seems to be a logical favorite.

When Musk accused in February – this is evidence – that the federal government was involved in a « completely insane » activity, allocating $ 100 billion to people without social security numbers, Steve Davis, began. to put pressure on the Social Security Administration to provide him with access to extremely sensitive information about Americans.

As a lawsuit is being held whether a young engineer is admitted to the database, he became more and more eager and persistent, the New York Times says.

At 45, Davis is practically the leader of Doge operations. He has more power than Amy Glieson, who is formally the Doge leader, two people told the newspaper, adding that she was sometimes ignorant of Davis’ decisions.

For more than 20 years, the engineer has dedicated himself to fulfilling Musk’s wishes, following the billionaire in his various companies, including the SpaceX missile manufacturer and the social media platform.

For Musk, he is the ideal employee – an engineer who will throw himself at any task, even if he has no experience in the area, two former colleagues said. When he was told to cut Twitter staff, he hugged working with such a flame that he had been sleeping in a company with his partner and their newborn baby for some time.

« Steve is like chemotherapy. A little chemotherapy can save your life, many chemotherapy can kill you, » he tells him before Trump enters the White House.

At Spacex, Davis came up with ways to make a cheaper rocket construction, runs on Twitter cuts, and at Doge coordinates engineers and lawyers to find 2 trillion. The dollars that Mr. Musk has promised to eliminate from the federal budget. Doge has created a « base for operations » under heavy security, said three agency officials.

Adam Green, who was friends with Davis about a decade ago in Washington, now said he was once a « funny non -standard thinker », but now he has become Musk’s « blind servant ».

Davis is President of Boring, the startup company for tunnels (« resolving the problem of traffic through underground transit) of Musk, where there is a reputation as a frugal leader, perhaps even too frugal for a company that raised about $ 800 million in capital. His favorite instructions for the staff who negotiate with suppliers is: « Come back and try again. »

But Doge is a problem to repetition some of the aggressively frugal and at times chaotic transformation efforts that have become a hallmark of Musk leadership in the private sector, commented Los Angeles Times.

Davis started working for Musk in 2003, when he joined SpaceX, at that time a new company. He had just received a master’s degree in aerospace engineering from Stanford University and was distinguished when starting with difficult engineering problems. But it is also annoyed by government rules and regulations – like Musk – because of the failure to make tunnel projects in several places.

At one point, Musk instructs the engineer to find a cheaper alternative to a part that costs $ 120,000. Davis spent weeks in the challenge and figured out how to do it for $ 3900, according to Musk’s biography.

Davis, an avid reader who can quote Ain Rand, has brought austere and a little bizarreness to the enterprise, say people who have worked with him. He gave literary names to several of the company’s massive drilling machines, such as Prufrock, a reference to Thomas Elliott’s poem.