On a Saturday morning in December 2022, Elon Musk summoned finance executives at Twitter, which he had bought six weeks earlier, to a conference call. Then he drilled into a spreadsheet that contained the social media company’s expenditures.

Will the mercurial tech mogul put his thumb on the scale to help his own companies, or will he push for a broader deregulatory agenda?

Campaign mega-donor Elon Musk and former Republican candidate Vivek Ramaswamy will lead the new department, nicknamed “DOGE.”