Silicon Valley’s veteran venture capitalist Timothy ‘Tim’ Draper praised Tesla co-founder Elon Musk calling him “a gift from the gods.” He also hailed the US government’s move to create a Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which Musk has been appointed to co-head.
Draper had known Musk from his early days having invested in Tesla and SpaceX. He has also been an early backer of some of the biggest tech startups including Baidu, Coinbase, Twitter, Skype, Robinhood, Hotmail among others.
The DOGE, a pun on Musk’s favourite meme crypto token DOGE coin, was formed to advise the US government to cut back on spending and become more efficient.
“Look at what he did with Twitter. He cut Twitter by 75% (workforce) and the service has improved and grown. Elon is a gift from the gods. Elon's extraordinary. We're just so lucky he's on the planet. I think the idea of a government efficiency expert is really great because if they cut one government job, that will create three jobs in the private sector. And if they roll back regulations, that will create more jobs,” Draper, founder and managing partner at Draper Associates told Moneycontrol during an ongoing India tour for his startup pitching show Meet the Drapers in partnership with TiE Mumbai.
He added, “I do think that there is a major opportunity, the US has right now economically to really bring back freedom and trust into the country.”
Musk had acquired the microblogging site Twitter in a $44-billion deal in 2022, renaming it to X later. Following the acquisition, he had laid off about 3,700 jobs at Twitter Inc., or half of the social media company’s workforce, in a bid to drive down costs.
Musk is a multi-tasker
Musk is a prominent co-founder and investor in several companies including Tesla, SpaceX, OpenAI, xAI, Neuralink, The Boring Co, and X, among others. He will now be juggling his roles of heading these tech companies and co-lead DOGE with entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy in President Donald Trump’s cabinet.
When asked how he manages to oversee all of these at once, Draper said, “He's got extraordinary people around him because he has that vision. So he doesn't have to do all of it. He can just hire great people and they do it, but he guides them and he comes up with those little things that make the Tesla really great. The twist in the rocket business where you can kind of land it exactly where it took off from.”
“He has that way of tweaking it,” Draper added.
He shared that the greatest scientists and engineers are dying to work with Musk for ideas like travelling to the Mars. And Musk is going to have job roles for everything from a person who is going figure out how people would live on Mars, how to reach there faster to how to bio-create plants on Mars, to name a few.
Read the full interview: China will flatline, India to cross China pretty quickly: Legendary investor Tim Draper on Trump, Elon Musk, Bitcoin
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