Elon Musk: agent of chaos

It’s hard to think of a time when a single figure has been so central to seemingly everything in the way that Elon Musk is right now. Musk is overseeing and overhauling the federal government, while bending it toward his own financial gain. He’s also ubiquitous in the artificial intelligence world, where this week he offered to buy part of OpenAI, adding more pressure and chaos to an already complicated company in an already complicated spot.

On this episode of The Vergecast, we talk a lot about Elon Musk. (For what it’s worth: we hear those of you who would like us to talk less about Musk on the show. Frankly, we’d also like to talk less about Musk on the show! And we’re working on ways to do that. But what’s happening with DOGE in particular is so urgent and important and central to all the things The Verge cares about that we feel we have to keep talking about it. We want outlets too, though, and we’ll find them together.) We talk about the latest with DOGE, look through some deeply silly government websites, and dig into all the ways the Trump administration is using boring government information to its benefit.

If you want to know more about everything we discuss in this episode, here are some links to get you started, first on all things OpenAI:

And in DOGE and the Trump administration:

And in the lightning round: