How Musk and Ramaswamy Plan to Cut Trillions With DOGE
13:54 Share

The Capital Ideas Podcast now has a new monthly edition hosted by Capital Group CEO, Mike Gitlin. Investment professionals reveal their best mentors, how they find their next great idea, and a few funny stories. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. American Funds Distributors, Inc. ♪

Police are searching for a person of interest in the shooting death of UnitedHealth executive Brian Thompson. The murder has sent shockwaves across corporate boardrooms. A lot of executives, they've told us that they really have tried to travel without a big security detail. And so that's one of the questions here is, are they willing to give up some of their privacy to have more people around them if it might keep them safer? And how Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy plan to cut $2 trillion from the federal government.

Plus, a judge rejects Boeing's guilty plea related to two deadly 737 MAX crashes over the prosecutor's diversity requirements for an outside monitor. It's Thursday, December 5th. I'm Tracy Hunt for The Wall Street Journal. This is the PM edition of What's News, the top headlines and business stories that move the world today.

The search for a man who shot and killed UnitedHealth executive Brian Thompson is in its second day. The New York City Police Department today released new photos of a person of interest wanted for questioning in connection with the shooting. The photos show a man in a gray hood smiling and leaning against a counter. Police searched an Upper West Side hostel they believe is where the suspect was staying.

Police also revealed today that the suspect used a sharpie to write words like defend on the bullets shot at Thompson. The NYPD hasn't publicly identified the man who ambushed the executive early Wednesday morning. He shot Thompson, 50, in the back and leg and fled the scene. The murder outside of an investor meeting at a midtown Manhattan Hilton has prompted an immediate reevaluation of longstanding security practices across corporate America.

WSJ reporter Chip Cutter covers workplace management and leadership issues.

Chip, what has been the reaction from the corporate security industry? Well, there's been a real scramble to figure out how do we best protect executives now and do we need to rethink how we operate? So there was a meeting among dozens of security chiefs on Wednesday to talk about protocols, to talk about what happened here. We've seen a number of security consultants have told us that they've been getting calls from companies asking if they can send armed guards to accompany executives to conferences in New York or other places this week.

I talked to some CEOs who said that they were hearing from their heads of security saying, do you want some additional help? Do you want some additional security support this week? So right

So right now, there's a lot of questions about what needs to change. Does security need to go deeper inside organizations, a couple layers farther down, that sort of thing? A lot of people are just shocked by what happened. Are security companies seeing this as a period of increased threats for executives? Yeah, many say they do see this as a more violent, extreme time. And I think that's driven by a couple of factors. One is just sort of the plagiarism.

political divide that exists in this country. There's a lot of frustration with big business and with executives. And so all of that can lead to more threats. And so companies have actually been spending a little bit more on security. They've been –

concerned about what might happen, for example, if their executives speak out on topics ranging from diversity and inclusion topics to the ongoing conflict in the Middle East. All of that companies say they've seen. They've seen threats pick up when their executives speak out. That's one reason why a lot of these security advisors say they're seeing an uptick in calls and work. That was our reporter Chip Cutter.

There's fresh uncertainty in Boeing's years-long legal battle against the Justice Department over two deadly crashes of the company's 737 MAX planes. A federal judge in Texas rejected Boeing's guilty plea because of the diversity requirements on an outside monitor who would oversee Boeing's future legal compliance. A Justice Department spokeswoman declined to comment. Boeing didn't immediately comment.

Families of the crash victims had asked the judge to reject the deal, saying it was too lenient on Boeing. In U.S. markets, all three major indexes were down. The Dow lost about half a percent, and the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq were down about 0.2 percent.

As we reported this morning, Bitcoin crossed the $100,000 mark for the first time. The world's largest digital currency has staged an extraordinary rally since Election Day, surging more than 40% in just four weeks and setting one record after another. It surged as high as $103,853 after Trump picked Paul Atkins, a crypto-friendly former regulator, to lead the Securities and Exchange Commission.

It's a striking reversal for Bitcoin, which was originally envisioned as a cypherpunk rebellion against the establishment. I'm joined now by Alexander Osipovich, who covers cryptocurrencies for The Wall Street Journal.

Alex, Bitcoin and the crypto industry are now mainstream. How did that happen? Over the years, there's been kind of a groundswell of investor interest in Bitcoin coming from sort of the margins of the financial establishment. Younger people, people who kind of associate themselves with hackers and libertarianism. And gradually, it's won over some chunks of the financial industry. And

The problem for it has always been resistance from governments and regulators. The big catalyst for this rally that we've seen that just sent Bitcoin north of $100,000 is the U.S. presidential election.

Donald Trump, who had previously been a Bitcoin skeptic, suddenly came out as a fan of crypto during the election campaign. After he won, Bitcoin shot higher. There was hope among a lot of people in the crypto industry that he would implement crypto-friendly policies and drop some of the hostility toward crypto that we'd seen from the Biden administration and earlier administrations. Bitcoin does have a history of volatility, right?

Bitcoin is tremendously volatile. For instance, in 2021, it reached as high as about $69,000. And then the next year, it took a major tumble and fell to around $16,000 after the collapse of

of FTX, Sam Bankman Freed's crypto exchange. So if you're looking at Bitcoin right now, there's a lot of bulls arguing that it will keep on rising because of limited supply and Trump. But the history suggests that it might not last. That was our reporter, Alexander Osipovich. Coming up, how the Department of Government Efficiency plans to slash the federal government. That's after the break.

Think scaling AI is hard? Think again. With Watson X, you can deploy AI across any environment. Above the clouds, helping pilots navigate flights, and on lots of clouds, helping employees automate tasks. On-prem, so designers can access proprietary data, and on the edge, so remote bank tellers can assist customers. Watson X works anywhere, so you can scale AI everywhere.

Learn more at IBM.com slash WatsonX. IBM, let's create. The Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, began its work in earnest today. Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk and biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy met with House and Senate Republicans to discuss the incoming Trump administration's effort to cut federal spending and regulations.

WSJ White House reporter Ken Thomas says Musk has said he could cut $2 trillion from the federal budget, but hasn't been specific yet on how he would do it or in what time frame. It would be a very audacious goal, would represent potentially 30% of the amount of money the federal government spent during the fiscal year that ended in September. And any types of reductions in spending would need to be done through Congress and

It would require them to make a number of politically challenging moves, touching potentially defense spending, reductions to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

Those are things that Trump has said he would not cut. The other area that you're going to see a lot of focus on is cutting regulations. Musk and Ramaswamy wrote in an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal last month that they felt like these regulations are put forth by unelected bureaucrats. And they have cited two recent Supreme Court rulings that they believe could help quiet

quickly reduce some of these regulations and cut them in large parts. Our reporter says federal employees are also on their target list, including a proposal to end remote work. DOGE has said that they really want to try to shrink the federal workforce of more than 2 million federal employees. Many of them are civilians working in the Defense Department.

There is a thinking that they may be able to reduce the necessary staffs on some of these federal agencies.

And that really just this approach might encourage many of these civil service workers to leave the federal government as well. So there are a number of issues on their to-do list. They are just starting to consult with members of Congress, and they want to get all of this accomplished by July of 2026. So it's a very ambitious set of goals that

Ramaswamy and Musk have laid out on this doge effort. Ken says Musk and Ramaswamy are also focused on the Biden administration's spending priorities, like a $400 billion clean energy lending program and manufacturing grants aimed at reviving U.S. trip production. You'll see a lot of scrutiny of the spending that we're seeing from the Biden administration,

For some of these clean energy projects and some of the semiconductor funding that was approved during Biden's administration, Musk and Ramaswamy have been critical of a number of these clean energy programs, just saying that this is an attempt by the Biden administration to rush out money in the final months of the administration program.

There was one clean energy loan that they approved to help EV startup Rivian Automotive to fund a plant in Georgia. And Ramaswamy recently said on X that the loan appeared to be a, quote, political shot across the bow at Musk and Tesla. You're going to see a lot of scrutiny of some of the expenditures that we saw from the Biden administration in these final months. That was our reporter, Ken Thomas.

Thank you.

The Syrian government says it is pulling its military forces from the city of Hama, a major strategic and symbolic prize. The move follows fierce fighting with rebels who launched a dramatic assault last week where they seized large swaths of Syrian territory. The rebels said earlier today that they had entered the city. Capturing Hama would leave only one major city, Homs, in government hands on the road from the rebel-held northern Syria to its capital, Damascus.

And the U.S. is the billionaire capital of the world. According to estimates from an annual UBS report, the combined wealth of U.S. billionaires has grown by about 28 percent since last year to $5.8 trillion. That was the greatest rate of increase in the world. The fortunes of those 835 people account for about 40 percent of worldwide billionaire wealth.

And that's what's news for this Thursday afternoon. Today's show was produced by Pierre Bien-Aimé, Anthony Bansi, and Alex Osola, with supervising producer Michael Cosmitas. I'm Tracy Hunt for The Wall Street Journal. We'll be back with a new show tomorrow morning. Thanks for listening. Amazon Q Business is the new generative AI assistant from AWS because many tasks can make business slow, as if wading through mud.

Help? Luckily, there's a faster, easier, less messy choice. Amazon Q can securely understand your business data and use that knowledge to streamline tasks. Now you can summarize quarterly results or do complex analysis in no time. Q got this. Learn what Amazon Q business can do for you at aws.com slash learn more.