Steve Davis didn’t just stumble into the job of running DOGE, he’d paid his dues. A former friend called Davis a “blind servant” of Elon Musk, keen to do whatever the boss desired. For Musk’s part, he compared Davis to chemotherapy, saying “A lot of chemo could kill you.” He meant that as a compliment.
Davis served Musk as an engineer at SpaceX, where he established his bona fides as a cost cutter. When Musk bought Twitter and directed staff, now including Davis, to be “extremely hardcore” in cutting costs, Davis’s eyes lit up. But he had a problem: His partner had just given birth. So he did the Solomonic thing: Davis, mom, and newborn moved into a makeshift bedroom at the Twitter (aka X) office.
True, a former employee says Davis's cost-cutting at X led to “major outages.” But, you know, shit happens.
Davis was on the rise: As president of Musk’s $800 million underground transportation firm, The Boring Company, Davis approved every purchase—even if just for a few hundred dollars.
Musk was so proud of his acolyte that he named Davis the head of DOGE, that weird, not really-an-agency chainsaw putatively targeting waste and inefficiency in the federal government. Davis was fast at work, gutting nearly $420 million in contracts, mainly for diversity programs. He also axed federal agencies and fired hundreds of employees. Still, Davis fell a bit short of Musk’s promised two trillion dollars in cuts to the budget. Federal spending actually increased during the reign of DOGE.
But Davis is nothing if not persistent: When the White House ousted him from DOGE, he still led a meeting the following week, acting as if nothing had ever happened. And in a way, nothing did. He’s back as president of The Boring Company.
