Elon Musk's mass government cuts could make private companies millions

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Source: The Guardian

Elon Musk’s mass government cuts could make private companies millions

Defense and tech firms – including Musk’s own – await potential contracts as Doge decimates US agencies

Nick Robins-Early
Sun 16 Feb 2025 12.00 GMT
Last modified on Sun 16 Feb 2025 12.02 GMT

The world’s richest man, Elon Musk, has vowed to oversee a radical hollowing out of government agencies, asserting this week that some should be “deleted entirely” as he defunds public programs and lays off federal workers. While the immense cuts are framed as a means of removing waste, they may also become a boon to private companies – including Musk’s own businesses – that the government increasingly relies on for many of its key initiatives.

Musk and his allies in the “department of government efficiency” (Doge), the unofficial committee acting as the operations arm of his cost-cutting efforts, have targeted a range of major government departments. They have moved to close the United States Agency for International Development, slashed the Department of Education and taken over the General Services Administration that controls federal IT structures. Doge staffers have also gained access to the treasury department, as well as set their sights on the Department of Defense, energy department, Environmental Protection Agency and at least a dozen others.

While Doge begins to make deep cuts throughout the government, Musk and those acting on his behalf have called for implementing new artificial intelligence systems in federal agencies and completely overhauling American weapons programs. As humanitarian aid groups reel from Musk’s cuts, tech and defense firms are seeing a chance to integrate themselves deeper into the new Trump administration’s agenda.

Musk’s plans have already excited Silicon Valley mainstays such as Palantir, whose executives praised Doge on an earnings call last week and talked about how the disruption by the billionaire’s strike squad was good for the company. Palantir already has won hundreds of millions of dollars in US military contracts in recent years for AI-related projects.

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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/feb/16/elon-musk-doge-government-privatization