Musk brings his business playbook to Washington: Move fast and claim victory

He wants to create momentum. Don’t stop, just keep moving forward. Winning builds on winning—even if it isn’t clear if he is actually winning.

“There’s already been really tremendous progress," Musk said this past week during a late-night briefing on X about his efforts in leading the government-efficiency efforts called DOGE.

Since Inauguration Day, Musk has helped gut USAID. Members of his DOGE squad—one of whom reportedly goes by the online nom de plume of “Big Balls"—are diving into records at the Treasury Department and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. And his team is swooping in to upgrade the Federal Aviation Administration’s air-traffic control system after the airplane crash over the Potomac River.

In business, Musk has benefited from the move-fast strategy to combat the risk of a negative sentiment taking hold, something that can be hard to turn around once a downward spiral begins.

Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D., Mich.) spoke in Washington at a rally for federal workers and supporters on Friday.

Politics, where power and influence often come from perception, can be very similar. Instead of falling stock prices and impatient shareholders, there are polling numbers and the risk of angering the new boss, President Trump.

What Musk is proposing in Washington is controversial. He is taking on so many sacred cows that he needs momentum to try to keep ahead of the growing list of enemies and to move past headlines like a recent one on the Drudge Report that screamed: “Poll: Musk Crashes to Earth."

He is going about things—with a certain shock and awe—in a way that looks similar to when he took over Twitter in late 2022, and laid off thousands of workers, shut down offices and slashed spending.

He has even gone about changing the name as he did at Twitter, which became X. This time around, the U.S. Digital Service has become the U.S. DOGE Service. Late Thursday, he shared on X a meme of the White House with a sign out front that reads: “Beware of DOGE."

The biggest difference today from back then: He owned Twitter. He doesn’t own the federal government. And critics of his roughshod approach—Democrats and those protesting in Washington, D.C., with signs that call for Musk’s deportation—don’t see winning. They see chaos, or “a hostile takeover," as Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has called Musk’s actions.

Rep. Ro Khanna, a Democrat representing Silicon Valley, posted that he believed Musk’s “attacks on our institutions are unconstitutional" and that Congress should subpoena him.

Musk responded: “Don’t be a dick."

“Elon we have known each other a long time," the congressman replied. “You can’t stop payments that Congress has authorized and appropriated."

Some of Musk’s actions are already facing court challenges. In an interview, Khanna told me he expects Musk’s efforts will become part of ongoing spending and debt-ceiling negotiations, with Democrats pushing for commitments from the White House to carry through with spending Congress authorizes.

While Democrats and some lawyers see the administration as overstepping, Musk has framed his fight as one against a bureaucracy run amok, some sort of deep state that has taken the power away from elected officials in Congress.

Republicans, such as Sens. Joni Ernst of Iowa and Mike Lee of Utah, are cheering on his work.

“I’m hopeful that some of this creates momentum," Vivek Ramaswamy, former co-head of DOGE, told Musk during this past week’s X event, which attracted more than one million listeners.

In the business world, Musk is known for decimating departments of his companies—even ones that seem critical. Almost a year ago, he gutted Tesla’s Supercharger team, which was gearing up to expand to serve rival automakers. The cuts were part of broader company cutbacks that Musk framed as preparing the company for an AI future of driverless cars.

His changes came as sales of cars were sluggish and profits were under pressure. Musk needed to keep Wall Street happy with a plan for Tesla that justified its sky-high market valuation. Or put another way, Tesla needed to show momentum.

His selective attention this past week on government spending on routine subscriptions, such as for Politico, appeared no different from when he raided the Twitter supply closet to make fun of the “#staywoke hoodies."

His efforts to highlight government workers’ subscriptions to Politico and other news outlets felt especially self-serving for a guy who tried to remake X into a subscription service and got all huffy when media organizations didn’t fall all over themselves to pay for blue check marks for their reporters.

Still, the Politico tempest made it to the White House press room lectern, where press secretary Karoline Leavitt announced: “The DOGE team is working on canceling those payments now."

And as controversial as Musk’s tactics are, they got a huge endorsement this past week on Wall Street when investors gobbled up the debt of X and internal figures showed improved adjusted earnings—results seemingly helped by the interconnected financial dealings between the social-media company and Musk’s xAI startup.

Momentum.

Musk has suggested that he wanted to pitch government-debt investors because DOGE’s momentum isn’t being reflected in the bond market.

“If you’re short bonds, I think you’re on the wrong side of the bet," Musk said this past week.

Musk’s approach to showing momentum has to appeal to Trump—even if at times Musk seems to overstep his welcome and risks overshadowing a PR-sensitive president, as with a recent Time magazine cover showing Musk behind the president’s desk. That race for momentum fits with Trump’s own approach, aligning with one of Roy Cohn’s rules for success: always claim victory.

Winning, after all, was the promise that fueled the dream of a Trump presidency from the get-go, as indicated by the 2016 campaign line: “We are going to win so much, you may even get tired of winning."

Asked about Musk on Friday, Trump praised his work: “Elon is doing a great job."

Or, put another way, for now, Musk has the momentum.

Write to Tim Higgins at tim.higgins@wsj.com