Opinion | What Elon Musk Wants

This is an edited transcript of an episode of “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the conversation by following or subscribing to the show on the NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.At the beginning, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency seemed to have a fairly narrow mandate.The Trump executive order creating it says that the purpose of D.O.G.E.

is “modernizing federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity.”But in the last couple of weeks, it has become clear that Musk’s role is a whole lot larger than that.He has gained access to information technology systems, dismantled the U.S.

Agency for International Development and unleashed a fire hose of attacks on his platform, X, accusing the bureaucracy of various conspiratorial crimes.And so far, at least, Musk’s patron, Donald Trump, seems to be on board.Archived clip of Donald Trump: I think he’s doing a great job.He’s a smart guy, very smart, and he’s very much into cutting the budget of our federal government.As I’ve watched all this unfold, I’ve been wondering how Elon Musk has evolved: How did he go from a conventional Obama-era liberal who worried about climate change and wanted to go to Mars to a right-wing conspiratorial meme lord, working to elect the far-right in Germany and shred the federal government in the United States?What led to this evolution for Elon Musk? And what actual strategies is he bringing to the government that he now seems to have quite a lot of control over?To talk about all this, I wanted to invite Kara Swisher on the show.

Kara is one of the great tech reporters of this age.She’s been covering Musk for many years, along with many of the other tech chief executives who have become such key political figures now.

She’s, of course, a host of the great podcasts “On With Kara Swisher” and “Pivot,” which she co-hosts with Scott Galloway,...