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The music was booming. The ballroom was packed. And Elon Musk was onstage, waving a chain saw in the air.
I had already seen other surreal sights at the Conservative Political Action Conference — a man with a cat on his shoulder, freshly pardoned Proud Boys roaming around — but it was clear that this would be one of the indelible images of the annual MAGA confab.
Musk roared — or was he just making a chain saw noise? This, he said, was the chain saw he was taking to the bureaucracy. “Chain saw,” he repeated for effect. He did not turn it on.
It was a gift from Javier Milei, the far-right Argentine president who stormed to power in 2023 and who has drawn effusive, at times almost graphic, praise from Musk.
The episode showed how Musk doesn’t just cozy up to right-wing leaders — he also seems to copy them.
In 2022, Milei, an economist and former media personality, released a “chain saw plan” that would have cut public spending and sharply reduced the number of ministries in Argentina’s government. Milei showed up to campaign rallies with a functioning chain saw — and his supporters followed suit with replicas — that represented his demonization of a group he called “the political caste.”
Once Milei took office, Musk showered him with online compliments and talked business with him behind closed doors, as my colleagues wrote last year. He has done the same with right-wing leaders in India and Brazil, in a convenient marriage of his political beliefs and his desire to make more money for his companies.
And Musk has made a point of talking up Milei’s approach to government cuts, calling them “awesome” in a January post on X and praising Milei for “deleting entire departments.” He’s now calling for the United States government to do the same.
Musk’s embrace of the global right delighted the CPAC attendees, who welcomed him as one of their own even though it wasn’t so long ago that he was a Democrat warning the world about climate change. Everybody was on the same page about what really mattered.
“I don’t really approve of his, like, family situation, where he’s got so many kids,” said Pam Roehl, 59, referring to Musk’s 12 children with several different women.
But Ms. Roehl, a retiree who splits her time between Chicago and Nashville, loves the X platform. And she loves what Musk is doing in the government.
“Getting to the bottom of, like, government waste, I think, is phenomenal,” she said.
Agency status report
In recent years, the Food and Drug Administration scooped up experts in robotics and artificial intelligence and put them to work keeping up with advances in medical technology. My colleague Christina Jewett reports that layoffs at the agency that might have seemed small — 700 people on a staff of 18,000 — wiped away many of those efforts.
Staff cuts have taken a major toll on the Food and Drug Administration, gutting some teams that oversee the safety of medical devices that can be lifesaving, or deadly.
One such team reviews devices for people with diabetes. New products dip under the skin to read glucose levels and deliver insulin automatically. About half of the team is gone after the firings, even though the team reviews applications for new devices and field complaints when patients are hospitalized or die.
A similar level of cuts hit the team that regulates the surgical robots that operate on the heart and reproductive organs. Albert Yee was among those who were fired — but he got a call from the F.D.A. about four hours after my article ran, offering him his job back. He plans to return on Monday morning.
Some experts who have had a hand in looking at Musk’s Neuralink brain implant were fired. The device is the size of a small stack of half-dollars and is installed by a surgical robot that cuts a hole in the skull and implants it along with tiny threads meant to read brain activity. The F.D.A. is now overseeing the study of the device. It’s been implanted in three people so far, including one we profiled last May.
We’re diving into Musk’s work in Washington in this newsletter — and I want to know what you want to know.
Send me a question, and I’ll draw on our newsroom experts to get you an answer.
My colleague Kate Conger is keeping an eye on Musk’s X posts, and on how he’s blending his online persona with his new role in Washington.
On his social media site, X, Musk celebrated his CPAC appearance and shared video clips from his interview there. The images and videos lend themselves to Musk’s mythmaking project, as he tries to build an image of himself as a creature of the internet who is now raiding the federal bureaucracy.
These posts help Musk translate his work across two cultures — his chronically online fan base and his new government policy circles. By memeing his work in Washington, he makes it accessible to his followers and encourages them to keep cheering him on.
One of the first things Musk said at CPAC was “I am become meme,” which is a meme itself. The phrase refers to a quotation from J. Robert Oppenheimer — “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds” — and it has been endlessly recycled and remixed online.
But Musk was also apparently referring to an image of himself that was generated last year by artificial intelligence. It shows him shrouded in a leather jacket and square-framed black glasses, sitting behind a gold-plated sign that reads “DOGE.” Musk wore a remarkably similar outfit at CPAC, down to the thick gold chain around his neck, and when his followers noticed this, he re-shared the A.I. image and commented, “I am become meme.”
At CPAC, Musk talked about making memes a reality. “There’s living the dream and then there’s living the meme, which is pretty much what’s happening, you know?” he said. “I mean, DOGE started out as a meme — think about it.”
His so-called Department of Government Efficiency borrows its name from the Dogecoin cryptocurrency. Some of Musk’s X followers suggested the name DOGE to him last year, and Musk ran with it, turning the online joke into a transformative force in Washington.
All of this gives Musk’s followers the intoxicating feeling of being in on the joke, and a sense that they’re adjacent to power. For all they know, one of their replies to Musk on X could become the next idea for his Washington takeover.
BY THE NUMBERS
My colleagues are tracking the numbers behind Trump and Musk’s attempts to shrink the government payroll. Here are the cuts and temporary removals they confirmed as of yesterday.
the businesses
Tesla’s sales have slumped, and Musk, the company’s chief executive, has offered no concrete plan for a revival.
With his attention spread thin between multiple companies — and now his work advising Trump — investors and analysts say Musk seems to have lost interest in the grinding business of developing, producing and selling cars, Jack Ewing writes.
“The more you split your loyalties,” one corporate governance expert told Jack, “the more it’s going to be difficult to claim you had an undivided loyalty to any company.”
