"But during the transition Ramaswamy and Musk increasingly disagreed about how to make the government more efficient."

"Ramaswamy, who had apparently come around to the fact that significant cuts would require an act of Congress, began meeting regularly with a small group of legislators. Musk mostly did not attend. A source close to doge told me that Musk seemed to regard members of Congress as irrelevant, sometimes referring to them as 'N.P.C.s,'—non-player characters—the often mute and nameless figures who populate the backgrounds of video games. Musk was more interested in cutting spending via the executive branch, and spoke often, according to the source close to doge, of a need to 'control the computers.' In meetings, Ramaswamy resorted to using metaphors from the tech world to emphasize the importance of deregulation, calling the government’s rules 'the matrix' and insisting that doge needed to rewrite its source code. Musk was unmoved...."

Writes Benjamin Wallace-Wells, in "What Did Elon Musk Accomplish at DOGE? Even before Musk fell out with Donald Trump, the agency’s projected savings had plummeted. But he nevertheless managed to inflict lasting damage to the federal government" (The New Yorker).