David Sacks, the White House crypto czar and close friend of Elon Musk, said on the latest All-In podcast that Musk’s decision to spend less time at the White House DOGE office is indicative of his management style at his companies.
On the Friday episode, Sacks said that Musk is simply running DOGE like he typically runs his other companies, recalling the Twitter acquisition. Sacks was invited to help Musk purchase the social media platform and was a trusted confidant during the transition.
“I saw this before when I was part of the Twitter transition — is that for the first three months or so he was basically full time at Twitter HQ, learning the business down to the database level. I mean, every nook and cranny of that business, he learned about,” Sacks said. “Once he felt like he had a mental model and he had the people in place that he trusted, he could move to more of a maintenance mode.”
Musk said on Tuesday’s Tesla earnings call that he’ll scale back his time at DOGE and focus more on his EV company. The CEO said he’ll spend a day or two a week on his government work “as long as it is useful.”
The decision comes after investors and Wall Street analysts pleaded for the chief executive to re-align his priorities back to his company, as Tesla experienced sluggish sales and backlash from some of its core customer base.
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Sacks said Musk’s method is how he can simultaneously manage multiple companies, and the CEO can now step back from DOGE.
Musk “has these intense bursts where he focuses on something, gets the right people and structure in place, feels like he understands it, and then he can delegate more,” he said. “And I think that he has reached that point with DOGE.”
The venture capitalist said Musk isn’t completely stepping down from his government role but is instead rationing his time in the White House. Musk is limited to 130 days per year as a designated special government employee.
“My sense is that DOGE is going to continue, it’s just that Elon is shifting to a mode where he can manage it one day a week or two days a week as opposed to being there five days a week,” he said.
While Sacks is not known to be a member of the DOGE team, the venture capitalist has had a yearslong personal and business relationship with Musk that can be traced back to their executive roles at PayPal. The two are part of what later became known as the PayPal Mafia, which also includes Peter Thiel and Reid Hoffman.
Musk and Sacks did not respond to requests for comment.
