Airbnb co-founder to take role in DOGE?

WASHINGTON: One of Elon Musk‘s closest friends, a billionaire co-founder of Airbnb, is taking a role in President Trump’s administration to help Musk carry out his drive to slash the federal bureaucracy, according to a person with knowledge of the matter.
Joe Gebbia, the Airbnb co-founder, is a board member at Tesla who lives in Austin, Texas, where Musk, Tesla’s CEO, keeps a large compound. He is planning to start shortly in the federal govt as part of Musk’s DOGE team, according to the person with knowledge of the matter. It is not clear what precisely Gebbia will do or how formal his role will be.
Many members of Musk’s govt-overhaul effort float among agencies depending on the day’s tasks. Many of them consider their centre of gravity to be the office of personnel management or the general services administration.
Early Friday, Gebbia arrived at OPM’s downtown Washington headquarters in a black SUV with a three-person security detail. He declined to comment as he was escorted inside by an OPM official and one of his bodyguards.
Musk and his allies have taken over the US Digital Service, now renamed the United States DOGE Service. The agency was established in 2014 to fix the federal govt’s online services. Many of his foot soldiers are young software engineers with no govt experience who have parachuted into federal agencies seeking to overhaul or even dismantle them.
Gebbia was until recently a Democratic donor, spending more than $200,000 each to boost Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden in the 2016 and 2020 general elections, and $20,000 to support Biden’s reelection run.
Gebbia has said his politics have shifted toward Republicans, in major part because of the advocacy of Robert F Kennedy Jr, whom Gebbia considers a political ally. Gebbia attended Kennedy’s confirmation hearing last month, writing on the social platform X that morning that it was a “big day ahead for the future of health in America.”
Gebbia did not immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday evening.
In a post on X the day before Trump’s inauguration, Gebbia said he had voted for Democrats dating back to Al Gore in 2000 but acknowledged supporting Trump in Nov.