Elon Musk Had a Big Year in 2024. 2025 Could Be Bigger.

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[00:00:20] Welcome to Tech News Briefing. It's Tuesday, December the 24th. I'm James Rundle for The Wall Street Journal.

[00:00:27] We're hearing from our reporters and columnists about some of the biggest companies, trends and people in tech, and what could be in store for 2025.

[00:00:35] Elon Musk has been everywhere this year, in business and in politics. The world's richest man now has a new gig in 2025, in President-elect Donald Trump's administration, as co-lead of the newly created Department of Government Efficiency.

[00:00:49] Musk has said he thinks he can slash $2 trillion out of the federal budget, but how will he accomplish this task?

[00:00:55] And what will happen to his companies while he's tackling the bureaucracy of the beltway? Our columnist Tim Higgins joins us to discuss.

[00:01:05] Tim, a big year for Elon Musk, a man who can't seem to keep out of the headlines for personal, professional or political reasons.

[00:01:13] What were some of the key developments around him that you were following this year?

[00:01:16] Yeah, even into the last days of the year, he's been getting headlines as he inserts himself into Congress's efforts to pass legislation that would extend government spending into the new year, showing just how involved in politics and how involved he seems like he's going to be when it comes to his new role as co-chair of DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency.

[00:01:43] One of the prizes he won by helping Donald Trump win a second term.

[00:01:48] It has been a year of politics for Elon Musk, not somebody who we would have seen as being very political if we were talking, say, three or four years ago.

[00:01:59] We've seen this kind of evolution occur in real time.

[00:02:03] And of course, on X, his social media platform, where he's become increasingly more political, taking on more conservative points of view, or at least what some people might see as conservative.

[00:02:17] Musk would say that he has remained centrist and that the world around him has moved.

[00:02:22] As the world's richest man, he has a lot of money, and he spent some of that in 2024 helping Trump win the White House, roughly $250 million into pro-Trump political movements.

[00:02:37] This was very unlike Elon in past years, where he wasn't known as a very big giver to political causes.

[00:02:44] This injected him into the Trump campaign.

[00:02:48] He was out on the campaign trail, if you can imagine this, almost like he was a candidate moving around Pennsylvania, trying to rally support for Trump, really speaking to young men who found him to be inspiring.

[00:03:03] So really the year of politics for Elon Musk.

[00:03:06] As you say, a vast amount of money invested in Donald Trump's campaign, he became one of the largest political donors in America.

[00:03:13] And from our reporting, has now become a close part of the president-elect's inner circle.

[00:03:18] What does the next year hold for him at the White House and the new Department of Government Efficiency that he's co-leading with Vivek Ramaswamy?

[00:03:25] He has talked at great length about how he wants to cut government spending.

[00:03:29] But in a lot of ways, probably more important to Elon is the idea of cutting government regulations that he thinks are burdensome or cumbersome or overreaching.

[00:03:40] He's not the first CEO to complain about Washington overreaching.

[00:03:46] The unique thing here is the potential of him getting in there and being able to identify things to actually be cut.

[00:03:52] Now, the question will be, is he actually able to do it?

[00:03:55] DOGE, or the Department of Government Efficiency, is not an actual department.

[00:03:59] He's not going to be an employee of the government.

[00:04:02] His power, in a lot of ways, will come from the bully pulpit, his ex-platform, where he's followed by the most amount of people, more than 200 million followers.

[00:04:12] His ability to command attention on topics that on any other given day maybe people wouldn't even care about, he can rally that interest.

[00:04:21] So that's very important.

[00:04:22] And also his relationship with Donald Trump will be very interesting the first few months to see where they target, what they suggest for cutting, and the reaction on Capitol Hill where they'll need support most likely for some of their plans.

[00:04:38] Yeah, I think that's really interesting.

[00:04:40] He has a reputation for being a demanding boss and sometimes a mercurial figure in business.

[00:04:45] What challenges do you see for him operating inside a government role as opposed to the private sector when he meets that immovable force of federal bureaucracy?

[00:04:53] Well, Elon Musk is accustomed to being the boss.

[00:04:56] And, you know, it's not a democracy.

[00:04:59] His word is the way.

[00:05:00] And he accomplished this in a couple of ways.

[00:05:03] He inspires people, gets them to do things they didn't think was possible.

[00:05:07] But also he doesn't suffer fools.

[00:05:09] He doesn't have a lot of patience.

[00:05:11] And he is very confident in what he thinks is the way to go.

[00:05:16] If the idea isn't working out, he'll pivot to try to figure out a way to make it work.

[00:05:20] So that works in business.

[00:05:22] If somebody doesn't want to go along, they can leave or he'll quickly get rid of them.

[00:05:28] These sorts of things.

[00:05:28] Government is a little bit different.

[00:05:30] There are protections for people.

[00:05:31] There's also a lot of, let's say, stakeholders, if you will, in a lot of the government spending.

[00:05:37] It's likely that they would not want that government spending to go away and will be pushing back.

[00:05:43] Elon has acknowledged this.

[00:05:44] He expects there's going to be a lot of pushback to what he's doing.

[00:05:47] But one of the things that he has that he's shown in business is the ability to inspire people.

[00:05:54] And so we've already seen kind of efforts by him to inspire support for what he is proposing.

[00:06:01] And so what's going to be interesting is can he build a groundswell of support for these proposals that overcome the natural entrenchment of Washington, D.C., regulatory issues, spending, these sorts of things.

[00:06:17] People have talked about cutting government spending for generations.

[00:06:20] It is easier to talk about it and get people rallying about it than it actually is to do it.

[00:06:26] It's interesting how you describe him.

[00:06:28] He likes being the boss.

[00:06:29] He doesn't like challenges to his authority.

[00:06:31] He likes big ideas.

[00:06:33] He likes to move fast and take on established norms.

[00:06:36] All of those things could also be applied to Donald Trump as well.

[00:06:40] So we now have these two big personalities in government, both of their own way of doing things, both of strong commercial interests.

[00:06:47] How do you see that relationship between Musk and Trump evolving?

[00:06:50] It's interesting.

[00:06:51] They have a little bit of a history in their relationship.

[00:06:55] The first Trump administration, Elon Musk was involved in some ancillary roles and ultimately pulled out very publicly because of disagreements with the Trump administration.

[00:07:06] During the election season, Trump wasn't Elon's first pick.

[00:07:10] And it seems as if in the last few months they had grown very close.

[00:07:14] And it might be an example of the pragmatic nature of Elon Musk in that a close relationship with Trump will be beneficial, not just for him, but also for kind of the policies that he's been supporting, some of the political goals he's been supporting.

[00:07:28] How long they stay close?

[00:07:30] That is one of the parlor games in Washington, D.C.

[00:07:32] That's definitely one of the parlor games here in Silicon Valley where I am.

[00:07:36] People are curious.

[00:07:37] Can these two titans make nice and continue their partnership, which has so far been very successful for at least Trump?

[00:07:46] And you can see the potential success for Elon.

[00:07:49] His company's valuations in the last few weeks have gone up in part by investor enthusiasm for the excitement they see ahead in a world where Elon has support from the U.S. government.

[00:08:02] Coming up, what's on the agenda for Elon Musk's business empire in 2025 while he's running Doge?

[00:08:09] That's after the break.

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[00:08:51] Elon Musk is obviously a man with many commercial interests.

[00:08:54] Does his proximity now to the nerve center of power in the U.S. government benefit his various enterprises?

[00:08:59] It could.

[00:09:00] It doesn't hurt to have somebody in the White House who is your friend when you're a big contractor with the government.

[00:09:07] That's for sure.

[00:09:08] There are some questions about some of the policies in the Trump administration, how they might affect Tesla.

[00:09:14] For example, there's a conventional wisdom that the $7,500 federal tax credits for the purchase of electric vehicles could be diminished in a Trump administration.

[00:09:25] Tesla has definitely benefited from that.

[00:09:27] It helps make its vehicles more affordable.

[00:09:30] Elon has said he's okay with these kinds of government subsidies going away.

[00:09:36] He wants them to go away for all kind of programs, not just electric cars, but oil and these other things.

[00:09:42] He wants the market to decide.

[00:09:44] And in some ways, he can say that because Tesla has become so successful at making electric cars profitably.

[00:09:51] It is making vehicles that are increasingly affordable in comparison to some of its U.S. rivals, which are really struggling.

[00:09:59] The investors are definitely thinking that a close Musk-Trump relationship will benefit its companies.

[00:10:05] Yes.

[00:10:05] I was going to ask, what's going to happen to his various projects and companies while he's doing this role with Doge?

[00:10:10] They continue.

[00:10:11] Even before Doge, he was a very busy person running Tesla, SpaceX.

[00:10:18] He has the social media platform X.

[00:10:20] He has an AI company called XAI.

[00:10:23] Don't forget about his brain computer.

[00:10:25] He has a tunneling company.

[00:10:27] All of these companies are fueled in part by growth and the belief in the future of growth for these companies.

[00:10:34] Tesla, the electric car company, is expected to bring out some cheaper vehicles.

[00:10:39] SpaceX has a lot on its agenda.

[00:10:42] Not only is it working very quickly and very feverishly to develop that giant spacecraft that NASA is hoping can reach the moon and Musk wants to go to Mars with.

[00:10:56] The Starship has lots of work ahead there.

[00:10:59] There's XAI, Elon's AI startup, which has been growing rapidly.

[00:11:06] It recently raised just a ton of money.

[00:11:09] And we at the Wall Street Journal have reported that they're probably going to use some of that money to continue that growth.

[00:11:16] They've been building what they call the Colossus in Memphis, Tennessee, which is a giant hub of GPUs used for developing AI technology.

[00:11:26] It's expected that money will go into double the number of chips in the Colossus, which would just be a Colossus in itself.

[00:11:34] And so we're expecting to see kind of that movement as well.

[00:11:37] So lots ahead in his business world.

[00:11:40] That was our columnist, Tim Higgins.

[00:11:43] And that's it for Tech News Briefing.

[00:11:45] Today's show was produced by Judy Chang with supervising producer Catherine Millsop.

[00:11:50] I'm James Rundle for the Wall Street Journal.

[00:11:52] Thanks for listening.

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