The Stanford University graduate helping lead Elon Musk’s incursions into federal agencies is, like his billionaire boss, no stranger to pushing the legal and regulatory envelope, a lawsuit brought by Bay Area employees of the company formerly known as Twitter asserts.
Steve Davis, who earned a master’s degree in aerospace engineering from Stanford, led advanced projects at Musk’s rocket company SpaceX before taking over as president of Musk’s tunnel startup The Boring Company, according to the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration. He’s Musk’s key lieutenant in his so-called Department of Government Efficiency, also known as DOGE, the Wall Street Journal reported this week.
Created via executive order from Republican President Donald Trump last month, DOGE, a temporary organization in the U.S. Digital Service, has sparked fury among Democrats, alarm among scientists and humanitarian groups, and mounting lawsuits by Democrat-led states and others against its work inside a number of federal agencies, including the U.S. Treasury. Musk’s team is seeking to dramatically slash federal spending, government staff, foreign aid and initiatives and programs related to diversity and climate. Democrats have described DOGE’s work as illegal and a violation of the U.S. Constitution.
Davis played a key role carrying out Musk’s dictates after Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, bought San Francisco social media platform Twitter in 2022, according to a lawsuit filed by former employees against the company. Davis went so far as to live at the San Francisco headquarters with his girlfriend and their one-month-old child, the lawsuit said.
Soon after the purchase went through, Davis told Tracy Hawkins, former vice-president of real estate for Twitter — which Musk renamed X — that the company needed to “find” $500 million in savings, the lawsuit filed in federal court in Delaware said.
When Davis was told fees might arise from lease terminations, he said, “We just won’t pay those” and also told Hawkins, “We just won’t pay rent,” the lawsuit claimed. Twitter at the time was spending $130 million a year on rent, the lawsuit said.
Hawkins, the lawsuit said, resigned the next day to avoid being party to what he described as “theft.”
According to an FAA announcement, Davis also has bachelor’s degrees in finance and mechanical engineering from the University of Pennsylvania and a Ph.D. in economics from George Mason University. He could not be reached for comment Tuesday.
Davis told another plaintiff in the case, Joseph Killian, a former Twitter project manager for design and construction, that Musk wanted a bathroom next to Musk’s office, the lawsuit said.
“Killian explained that it would take time to get the necessary permits, but promised to begin that process right away,” the lawsuit said. But Davis told him not to bother with permits, the lawsuit alleged, because “We don’t do that, we don’t have to follow those rules.”
Musk’s team has accessed numerous federal agencies, putting a spotlight on members of DOGE, including a handful of young technology workers with Bay Area connections. One of those, 25-year-old Marko Elez, who, according to the Wall Street Journal, worked in artificial intelligence at X, resigned after the paper reported on racist statements posted on social media in recent months. Musk pledged to rehire Elez, but it’s unclear if that happened. Elez could not immediately be reached Tuesday.
Another DOGE member, UC Berkeley computer science and electrical engineering graduate Gavin Kliger, has shared social media content from white supremacist Nick Fuentes and virulent misogynist Andrew Tate, Reuters reported. Kliger could not be reached Tuesday for comment.
The moves into government agencies by Musk, with Trump’s blessing, have led to charges by Democrats that the White House is usurping Congress’s power to allocate government spending. The DOGE team has regularly trumpeted cuts to programs it claims are wasteful, tied to diversity goals or inappropriate uses of taxpayers’ money.
Musk has a long history of pushing back against laws and regulations affecting his companies.
On Monday, DOGE said it had killed $881 million in Education Department contracts. Washington state Democratic U.S. Sen. Patty Murray said the move gutted the department’s Institute of Education Sciences, “taking a wrecking ball to high-quality research and basic data we need to improve our public schools.”
Musk, at a news conference Tuesday while standing beside a seated Trump, defended the work of his DOGE team, saying, “The people voted for major government reform, and that’s what people are going to get. … That’s what democracy’s all about.”
On Friday, California Attorney General Rob Bonta and his counterparts from other states filed a lawsuit to stop Musk’s group from accessing federal payment systems in the Treasury Department that contain Americans’ sensitive personal information. A judge on Saturday granted the request.
However, also on Friday, a federal court judge shot down a bid in a lawsuit by labor unions to stop Musk’s group from accessing Labor Department systems.
As legal actions continue to pile up over the work of DOGE, Trump, Musk and Vice President JD Vance have begun attacking the court system, seen by Democrats as the only obstacle to Trump, because the House and Senate are under Republican control. On Saturday, Trump called the judge’s decision to block DOGE’s access to Treasury data a “disgrace” and added that “no judge should, frankly, be allowed to make that kind of a decision.”