Elon Musk reportedly tried to have Vivek Ramaswamy appointed to the Senate just so that he wouldn’t have to work alongside him at the DOGE.
The Tesla CEO initially placed a secret call to Ohio Governor Mike DeWine earlier this year, per a new report from Politico, to suggest Ramaswamy become the cost-cutting initiative’s point-of-contact in the Senate by taking up the seat soon due to be vacated by then Vice President-elect J.D. Vance.
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But just minutes into the call, Musk apparently dropped the pretense and admitted it was actually just that he couldn’t stand being around Ramaswamy any longer, the outlet writes citing a person familiar with the call to DeWine.
Trump announced the creation of the DOGE cost-cutting initiative within a week of winning last year’s presidential election in November, but it wasn’t long before his appointed heads of the drive began butting heads.
Insiders previously told Politico Ramaswamy’s demise had been accelerated later in December, after the biotech entrepreneur stirred divisions within the MAGA base by ranting on X about tech companies being right to hire foreign workers because the U.S. has historically “venerated mediocrity over excellence.”
“He just burned through the bridges and he finally burned Elon,” as an anonymous Republican strategist told the outlet then. “Everyone wants him out of Mar-a-Lago, out of D.C.”
Ramaswamy did eventually step down from his position as co-chief of the initiative, just hours after Donald Trump assumed the presidency for the second time at the end of January. It was a fitting first result for the federal cost-cutting drive, which was initially ridiculed for appointing two people to do one job.
The former presidential hopeful has since set his sights on running for 78-year-old Dewine’s post as governor, for which he appears to have earned mounting support from the local party chapter despite the incumbent’s best efforts to line up an alternative candidate.
