Steve Davis was Elon Musk’s chief cost-cutter at X and the Boring Company. DOGE might be his next big project

Jessica Mathews

It was the fall of 2022 when employees at Elon Musk’s Boring Company began to notice Steve Davis wasn’t around.<div class="paywall-selector"></div><div class="paywall">



Davis, the president of the tunnel-digging startup, had stopped showing up at <a href="https://fortune.com/2024/11/18/elon-musk-texas-spacex-starlink/">the R&amp;D facility in Bastrop, Texas</a>, and at the project sites in Las Vegas he was known to frequent. It’s not as if you could miss him when he was around: Davis was a hard-driving and seemingly tireless boss.



But Davis had temporarily shifted gears to another Musk passion project. After Musk closed the deal to buy <a href="https://fortune.com/company/twitter/" target="_blank">Twitter</a> for $44 billion, Davis made his way to San Francisco. There, he was seen pacing the halls of the 10th floor of the company’s headquarters—peppering people over the phone with questions about what parts of the organization he could cut, with seemingly little regard to who might overhear him.



Davis—Musk’s 22nd hire at SpaceX—has earned a reputation as a tenacious cost-cutter and as one of the few confidants Musk relies on to get something done. People who have worked closely with Davis say they think he’d be able to carry out any task Musk gave him—no matter how unrealistic it might seem, and regardless of whose jobs might be erased.



So in the run-up to <a href="https://fortune.com/2025/01/20/president-donald-trump-inauguration-speech-address-full-text/">President Trump’s inauguration</a>, it was no surprise when Davis’s name popped up in stories by Bloomberg and the New York Times as a key player in Musk’s new preoccupation: the Department of Government Efficiency, or <a href="https://fortune.com/2025/01/09/elon-musk-doge-hiring-software-engineers-x/">DOGE</a>, the cost-cutting endeavor that Trump asked Musk to co-lead with venture capitalist Vivek Ramaswamy. (A White House spokesperson said on Monday that Ramaswamy was leaving DOGE; a source close to Ramaswamy <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/20/us/politics/ramaswamy-doge-ohio-governor.html">told the New York Times</a> that he planned to run for governor of Ohio.)



DOGE is mostly an advisory body; it can’t make big changes without help from Congress. (See <a href="https://fortune.com/2025/01/21/doge-musk-ramaswamy-trump-us/">&#8220;Is DOGE even doable? Elon Musk&#8217;s&nbsp;plan&nbsp;to cut as much as $2 trillion in federal spending will be harder than it sounds&#8221;</a>.) But Musk’s stated plans for the department are as lofty as the ones he publicizes for his space travel and satellite company SpaceX or electric-vehicle juggernaut <a href="https://fortune.com/company/tesla/" target="_blank">Tesla</a>. In this case: to cut $2 trillion in government spending—about 30% of the federal budget—in a few years’ time.



If there were one Musk allegiant who could be up for such a titanic task and able to see it to fruition, it would be Davis.



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Davis has run the Boring Company for the past eight years, ever since Musk got the idea of speedy underground travel while sitting in Los Angeles traffic. He first oversaw an effort to build a high-speed tunnel system between Baltimore and Washington, D.C. When that project failed—shortly after the federal highway regulator didn’t approve the company’s environmental assessment—he pivoted to a tunnel network below the Las Vegas Convention Center, where drivers now chauffeur passengers in Teslas. Davis has shuttled between Nevada and Texas as the company builds new iterations of its proprietary tunnel-boring machine, the Prufrock, then uses them to dig earth in Vegas.



Typically seen in jeans and a ball cap, Davis has managed the company with a demanding hand and a relentless focus on efficiency—expecting long hours and a high work ethic, two former Boring employees said. Fortune granted them anonymity because they feared retaliation from the company for speaking publicly about it. Davis, Boring Company, and X did not respond to requests for comment about multiple points in this story.



Ex-employees’ accounts make Davis sound like an apt hire for anyone aiming to cut government bloat. “He hates waste,” one says, adding, “He wants to be involved in all decision-making.” Another noted that every expense—no matter how small—had to cross Davis’s desk, which made it difficult to get things approved but kept budgets tight. Boring employees had to use free tools like <a href="https://fortune.com/company/alphabet/" target="_blank">Google</a> Suite for spreadsheets or documents, and even small outlays were challenged.



Davis’s cost-cutting ethos carried over to X. “He was the one in charge of finding everything we were spending money on, who we don’t need, what offices we can close,” says a former X employee who worked at the company when Davis joined, and who spoke on condition of anonymity because they feared retaliation.



Davis has been in Musk’s orbit for more than 20 years. As a Stanford aerospace engineering student, he was handpicked by Musk to join SpaceX back when it was far from clear whether building reusable launch vehicles was possible. Musk had called Davis’s teaching assistant and asked for hardworking grad students who didn’t have families, according to Elon Musk, Ashlee Vance’s 2015 biography. Davis fit the bill. He started out working on the Falcon 1 in the Marshall Islands, sometimes sleeping under a tent shelter next to the rocket. He later labored on the Falcon 9, SpaceX’s workhorse rocket, and the Dragon Capsule. When Musk asked him to buy a part, an “electro-mechanical actuator” quoted at $120,000, with a budget of $5,000, Davis did the impossible— designing a new actuator in nine months that cost $3,900.



“One thing he has proven through all of his endeavors is he can do a lot more with a lot less,” one of the former Boring employees says.



But the three people who have worked with Davis describe someone who was sometimes “ruthless” or insensitive. One former Boring employee recalled an incident when Davis scheduled a meeting for the same day as the employee’s 13th wedding anniversary. Davis refused to reschedule, the person asserts, then never showed at the meeting. The former X employee said that Davis would call at any hour of the day, mentioning one Friday evening where Davis called at 11 p.m. with pointed questions about their division within the company.



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It remains to be seen whether Davis’s cost cuts pay off for the organizations where he wields them. In eight years, the Boring Company has completed just a short stretch of tunneling in Las Vegas, and former employees say turnover has been high. Davis served only briefly at X, but according to an estimate by Fidelity, an investor in the now privately held company, its value as of the end of 2024 had declined 72% since Musk bought it.



At X, Davis and Musk’s lightning-strike cost-cutting also had unintended consequences. Their rapid layoffs and team reductions preceded glitches and a major outage. In government, “the stakes are a little bit higher than a social media platform,” notes the former Twitter employee (who has no specific knowledge of DOGE). “Cut too many engineers at a platform, services may degrade. Features might not work. But, generally speaking, people aren’t going to die.” Take an ax to the ranks of, say, the veterans’ health care system, and the results might be more dire.



Employees at the Boring Company have seen some of these risks first-hand. As <a href="https://fortune.com/2024/02/27/flirted-death-elon-musk-boring-company-employees-injuries-osha-citations/">Fortune reported in an investigation last year</a>, pressure to meet management’s ambitious goals led to dangerous episodes for workers as well as tussles with regulators.



So, how will Musk and Davis’s high-risk, high-reward approach pair with the government’s historically risk-averse culture? “These guys are incompatible with the way government works,” one of the former Boring employees says. “People want to cut things in the abstract, but not in reality.” Then again, Davis has shown that he can help make abstract ideas very real, very quickly.



This article appears in the <a href="https://fortune.com/packages/february-march-2025/?sLDNlasn24213214124">February/March 2025 issue</a> of Fortune with the headline &#8220;When Elon Musk. has a really tough job, he turns to Steve Davis. DOGE might do the same.&#8221;</div>

Former coworkers describe Davis's ruthless focus on efficiency, which could be perfect for cutting government bloat.

Steve Davis was Elon Musk's chief cost-cutter at X and the Boring Company. DOGE might be his next big project

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