Will Elon Musk in the White House Mirror His Twitter Takeover?

Today's Big Take, we look at how the world's richest man is about to treat the U.S. government as if it were a money-losing social network. Now, let's get more from Bloomberg's Craig Trudell. Craig, thank you so much for joining us. You understand Elon Musk's thinking more than most reporters out there. So Trump just formally announced the setting up of this Department of Government Efficiency. He said that Elon Musk and Viva Ramaswamy will co-lead it. How should we expect this to go based on how Musk has run previous companies? I think in one word, we can expect chaos. I mean, just thinking back to just the last few years and how Tesla and Twitter have been run, we see him, you know, go into his own companies, decide he wants to get rid of tons of people. He often overdoes it in both Tesla and Twitter's case. He's, you know, gotten rid of people only to, you know, go back a couple weeks later and say, you know what, actually, could you please come back? I need you. You know, how exactly that's going to go over in Washington and, you know, especially with the amount of attention that's going to be on him because of just how unusual all of this is, is going to be really fascinating to watch, especially since Trump, as we know, is not particularly, you know, one to tolerate negative headlines that sort of blow back on him. Craig, what are you going to be watching very closely then in the next couple of, you know, three months, six months and then a year? I mean, I think, you know, it's kind of an obvious answer, but, you know, specifically how this ends up benefiting Musk's companies, right? He has so many enterprises, you know, that he's overseeing. Therefore, he has an awful lot of rules to have to follow and regulators to have to answer to. He doesn't particularly like having to answer to anyone else or follow rules or tolerate bureaucracy. And, you know, what potential there is for, you know, this to kind of blow up in his face. I think there's a lot of, you know, attention being paid to the ways in which this could very much reap rewards for him and hopes, you know, for example, that, you know, Tesla will have an easier path now to getting driverless cars on the road. But, you know, what are the risks here? And, you know, how tolerant is Trump going to be if and when, you know, there's blowback over unintended consequences of doing away with all these rules, regulations and bureaucracy? So, Craig, what does it mean in terms of, you know, also his appointments on who he's put in place and how he's run everything? Again, is there a danger that they cut too much? Or is there a danger that they just cut the wrong things in government? Yeah, I think that's a very fair question. And when we think about, you know, the future of, say, the EPA, right? There are regulators who actually have set policies that are very beneficial to Tesla. When you think about fuel economy rules that the Biden administration has made more difficult after the Trump administration weakened them significantly, Tesla was very critical of the moves that the Trump administration made and was supportive of making these standards more difficult for its competitors, in part because Tesla is able to sell regulatory credits to manufacturers who can't meet those standards. And so that's been a source of quite a bit of money for Tesla over the years and really important revenue for them, particularly in their early days. But it's only going up as these standards get more difficult. And so, you know, if some of these rules and regulations go away, it does have unintended negative consequences potentially for Tesla as well.