“Inside Elon Musk’s ‘Digital Coup'” details the first six weeks of Elon Musk’s government takeover, from the moment his minions infiltrated the US Office of Personnel Management to their swift land grab at the Social Security Administration.
WIRED spoke with more than 150 federal workers, policy experts, and Musk enthusiasts to understand how this takeover occurred. The reporting showed the full scope of Musk’s intentions with the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). It was not to modernize government IT, as he’d originally suggested. Instead, Musk and DOGE sought to gobble up vast swaths of government data in order to enforce Trump’s agenda—using, at times, artificial intelligence.
Drawing on years of experience covering Musk and his many companies, WIRED reporters detailed the centibillionaire’s playbook as it rolled out across the US government. By talking to people close to Musk, WIRED obtained behind-the-scenes insight into how he spoke about the DOGE mission—particularly in exclusive atmospheres like the invite-only Alfalfa Club banquet in Washington, DC. By talking to federal workers, we got an unvarnished view of how this mission was being carried out—particularly for rank-and-file federal workers who were tasked with implementing the DOGE agenda.
The result is a detailed and harrowing account of how DOGE leveraged government IT to take over dozens of federal agencies and radically reshape the US government.
