These are Elon Musk’s top lieutenants—including at DOGE

Fortune
07 Mar

Morning! This is Luisa Beltran, finance reporter, subbing for Allie.

Everyone likes a list. In 2023, Fortune created organizational charts showing the top executives at Elon Musk's companies. This year, we updated those charts, and even added a fresh one for the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, the federal cost-cutting office that Musk is unofficially leading.

One theme became clear in building our charts. Musk, who has six companies, including Tesla, relies on several highly valued executives to help manage them. One of Musk’s top lieutenants is Steve Davis, an aerospace engineer who spent several years working at Musk’s space cargo business SpaceX before joining Musk’s tunneling startup The Boring Company in 2016. People who have worked with Davis think he can get any job done, no matter how seemingly unrealistic. After Musk closed his $44 billion Twitter acquisition in 2022, Davis, who is president of Boring, helped reorganize the social media company that is now known as X. (Nicole Hollander, Davis’s wife, also worked at Twitter.) See Fortune’s Boring chart here.

Davis, along with Hollander, are now helping with Musk’s latest initiative: DOGE. The mandate is to reduce the size of government and cut federal spending by $2 trillion. Like many things Musk, DOGE has gotten off to a quick start, playing a large role in laying off thousands of government workers, canceling contracts, and allegedly cutting billions of dollars in government spending.

As usual, several employees from Musk companies are helping with the governmental work including Jennifer Balajadia, operations coordinator at Boring Company; Riccardo Biasini, a former Tesla engineer who also worked at Boring; Ryan Riedel, a SpaceX engineer; and Brian Bjelde, a former NASA engineer who has spent 22 years at SpaceX.

Even an internship at a Musk company can help secure a job at DOGE. Two current members of the so-called “nerd squad”—Luke Farritor and Edward Coristine—interned at SpaceX or brain chip startup Neuralink. See the DOGE chart here.

SpaceX also has execs working elsewhere with Musk. There’s Riedel and Bjelde, who are at DOGE, while Charles Kuehmann also works at Tesla. Check out the SpaceX chart here.

But what of Tesla, Musk’s biggest company? Tesla’s fortunes have dimmed a little since late 2023 when Fortune first published its Musk charts. Tesla is no longer the world’s largest pure EV maker and the company in January said fourth-quarter automotive revenue had dropped 8% from the year before while operating income fell 23%, CNBC reported. Tesla’s shares in late 2024 had benefited from the “Trump Bump,” soaring to an all-time closing high of $479.86 in December. The stock has since plunged 45%, ending Thursday at $263.45. (Still, Tesla stock is up about 12% from November 2023 when we first ran the org charts.) 

According to our chart, few if any Tesla execs appear to be moonlighting at other Musk companies. One of the exceptions is Omead Afshar, a top Tesla exec, who did work at SpaceX in late 2022. See the Tesla chart here.

With politics seeming to consume much of his time, Musk appears to have pulled back from directly leading X. (Musk is still very actively posting on it, however.) Linda Yaccarino remains X’s CEO, and last year the company announced several notable hires, including Mahmoud Reza Banki, as X’s CFO. Like Tesla, it doesn’t look like many X execs are working at other Musk companies—but maybe you know better? See our X chart here.

Fortune spent several weeks working on the org charts, relying on news reports, government documents and filings, as well as social media posts including on LinkedIn and X, to compile its list of executives. We attempted to contact everyone.

So, the motto of the story is that working in a leadership job for Musk can lead to exciting new roles at a different company or even an advisory body looking to make the government more efficient. 

Check out who are the power players at Neuralink and xAI here.

Tech’s big shift. A political revolution has taken place in Silicon Valley. Technology executives who supported Donald Trump were once shunned, but that’s now changed, and many are openly taking the “red pill.” My colleague, Jessica Mathews, has written about tech’s new embrace of Trump and the move—by some—away from Democrats. It has set off a major realignment in the industry and forced many into a state of shock and retrospection.

See you Monday,   

Luisa Beltran
Twitter:
@luisarbeltran
Email: luisa.beltran@fortune.com
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This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

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