What was Doge? How Elon Musk tried to gamify government

Steeped in gaming and rightwing culture wars, Musk and his team of teenage coders set out to defeat the enemy of the United States: its people In 2025, when Elon Musk joined the government as the de facto head of something called the “department of government efficiency”, he declared that governments were poorly configured “big dumb machines”. To the senator Ted Cruz, he explained that “the only way to reconcile the databases and get rid of waste and fraud is to actually look at the computers...

By Ben Tarnoff and Quinn Slobodian