Many people have wished for decades that someone would run the government more like a business. Is this what they meant? Or are Elon Musk and his group of 25-year-old coders doing something different?

Probably the most salient difference is that they’re going to be tech, data and speed first.

The focus on these guys being young misses the point. It’s like a McKinsey team. The fundamental concept is just that you throw them at the problem, they gather as much data as possible about where the money is going or who’s doing what, very simple, straightforward questions. Arguably difficult answers, but straightforward questions — and then you use that information to create some sort of ranking, saying this is good, this is bad, and then you try to solve the bad. So the playbook, in some sense, is extremely simple.

The difference here is that they’re applying it to areas like the government, where maybe it has never been applied, or it’s really hard to apply because the downstream implications are extremely complex. It could cut off cancer research, or genomics departments are getting axed, or AIDS assistance elsewhere in the world.