I once took refuge from my political day job by attending laugh-filled game nights at the home of a person now firing tens of thousands of federal workers.
For Steve Davis, Elon Musk’s right-hand man at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), life has always been a game. A puzzle to be solved regardless of a larger vision or set of values.
But sadly, as I told The New York Times, my friend who was once a fun outside-the-box thinker is now a drone — blindly subservient to a corrupt billionaire on a self-enriching power trip.
Even worse for millions of Americans, Steve’s current tunnel vision doesn’t allow him to challenge the obvious flaw in the game handed to him by Musk. This game only gives points for cutting dollars in the federal budget, even if greater financial costs — plus the cost of human pain — are transferred to American families and businesses.
Most Americans have never heard of the guy hurting their lives. Here is what Americans should know about Steve Davis, especially Republican members of Congress caught between the ideal of “government efficiency” and the enormous pushback that their constituents are expressing every day.
Steve is eccentric. His former Washington, D.C. apartment looked like a start-up, with a ping pong table and beverage machine to delight guests. He once threw a dinner party that included a squire announcing people at the door, a magician, and playful Justin Bieber plates.
Courtesy of Adam Green
I passed on the opportunity to invest what Steve described as “fun money” in his bar, called Thomas Foolery. Customers could shoot each other with squirt guns and drink prices were left to a game of chance. Shockingly, the bar failed quickly.
Steve would shun political talk, saying, “I know nothing about politics.”
He was more interested in playing games with friends long into the night. He often created new rules, respecting those who were quick enough to keep up and throwing barbs at those who stumbled.
He was the lone Washington staffer for Elon Musk’s SpaceX for years. In order to get his first engineering job, Musk reportedly required Steve to reduce the cost of a $120,000 item. Steve got it down to $3,900. (Whether that new part ultimately transferred costs to customers is unreported.)
Friends were barely ever reminded of Steve’s employment — an exception being at a yearly scavenger hunt he threw at Mr. Yogato, his yogurt shop where people won discounts by doing dances, knowing song lyrics, and answering Seinfeld trivia. Winning scavenger teams received items that had been launched into space or won Tesla test drives.
I last heard from Steve in 2023 and don’t remember seeing him in person since 2018, when he departed Washington for Texas to be closer to SpaceX’s rocket launch site. The few times I engaged Steve about Musk a decade ago, their relationship seemed distant. But that changed, as did his innocent gamesmanship.
A recent book called Character Limit reports that Musk worked with many sycophants, but Steve “took it even a tad further” and “idolized” Musk.
He eventually became Musk’s loyal fixer. Steve described his relationship with Musk as “Look here, Davis, get this done!”
When Steve ran into regulatory roadblocks, Musk reportedly berated Steve and threatened to fire him — traumatic game rules that Steve would clearly carry with him. When asked about his vision of colonizing space, Steve said that vision question “is for the Elons of the world. I just want to see [the rocket] go up” — a scary automaton attitude when applied to the current Trump administration.
After Musk bought Twitter, Steve reportedly slept in Twitter headquarters with his newborn baby. According to court filings, as Twitter fired thousands of workers and refused to pay them money they were owed, Steve pushed workers to violate rent contracts and demanded they violate local permitting laws — all to meet Musk’s cost-cutting goal.
When Musk turned to investing hundreds of millions in Donald Trump’s candidacy, Davis moved to Pennsylvania. The games quickly began with an arguably illegal million-dollar daily giveaway to swing-state voters and handouts of $47 for signers of a petition.
A tragedy in this moment is that Steve’s loyalty to Musk is blinding him from seeing what’s before his eyes: The rules of the DOGE game are ridiculous. They increase inefficiency, and they make people’s lives worse.
Suppose it costs $10 to fill a giant pothole. This fix could prevent thousands of dollars in damage for family cars and business delivery trucks. That’s the definition of efficiency and a great use of government money for the common good. But in Musk’s DOGE game, the only thing that counts is reducing costs on the government’s balance sheet — not actually saving money for Americans.
Similarly, DOGE is firing thousands of Social Security employees, closing Social Security phone support lines, and shutting down many Social Security offices.
For millions of grandparents, this likely means checks get delayed, new applicants have trouble registering, and seniors with walkers have to physically travel long distances for the chance to get help securing their earned benefits.
Those who depend on their retirement checks to survive will suffer from increased medical bills when they cannot afford to eat or buy their medicine. Taxpayers will pay these bills via Medicare.
Adding further absurdity to the “efficiency” game, DOGE is neutering the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which stops banks and credit card companies from ripping off Americans. The CFPB has already saved Americans over $20 billion, not one iota of which gets counted in the rules of the DOGE game. (This move conveniently shoots the financial watchdog just as Elon Musk enters the financial services industry — certainly efficient for at least one billionaire.)
Add in cuts to aviation safety, food inspection, nutrition assistance for kids, veterans health care, Medicaid, and clean water. As author Ezra Klein said recently, “Efficiency of what?… I want efficiency towards an end. Towards a vision of the future that isn’t terrible.”
But Steve is focused on the game, the puzzle of it all — not the vision.
I’ve received messages of genuine sadness from those who knew Steve during more innocent times. What’s truly heartbreaking to us is that the old Steve Davis — the brilliant, creative Steve Davis — could be doing inspiring work if he had the self-assuredness to question Musk’s rules.
Picture the games that giant corporations and the ultra-wealthy play to avoid taxes, leaving the rest of us paying more. Picture congressional insider stock trading, the bloated military budget, and the corporate welfare that flows when government insiders turn into lobbyists. Picture the price gouging by credit card companies, banks, health insurance companies, and at the grocery store. Heck, even picture the millions of hours Americans lose at red traffic lights with bad timers.
Much of this could be solved by a smart engineer leveraging technology, including artificial intelligence. If solving these problems were the game, Steve’s mind could raise quality of life for millions.
But instead, we have artificial intelligence of the worst kind. Brilliance blinded by loyalty. A game out of control. And every day Donald Trump turns the keys over to Elon Musk, who then hands them to my once friend, Americans are the losers.
Adam Green is Co-Founder of the Progressive Change Institute.
