Megyn Kelly isn’t bothered by Donald Trump’s seemingly haphazard cabinet picks. “It’s fun to watch Trump name these names to the cabinet,” she told hedge fund manager Bill Ackman Wednesday. “I think it’s just so innovative to go completely Trumpian, just keep people on their heels.”
There’s also “absolutely nothing wrong” with Trump choosing those who have been loyal to him — even if “that term keeps getting bandied about as though it’s a bad thing.”
Ackman agreed. “Actually, I think it’s I call it the Dream Team. I’m really super impressed. We have Elon Musk. We have a good friend of mine, Vivek Ramaswamy, who’s incredibly talented. I’d love all these. I’ve actually been super impressed with all the picks so far.”
Kelly also called out the New York Times for expressing concern about “Elon’s elevation to the right hand man of the sitting President-elect.” She continued, “They don’t seem happy. I feel like you should look at somebody like Elon who’s willing to serve in any capacity for our government, and just say thank you. But they are concerned.”
Again, Ackman agreed with Kelly’s assessment of Musk and built upon it. “I think he’s a great American. I think he’s a great global citizen. You know, if you have to think of a guy who’s made more consequential impact on society,” he said of Musk. “He’s, I would say, the most important figure of our time in the non-political sphere, and now we have the benefit of all of his talents working alongside the president.”
The pair also discussed Musk and Ramaswamy’s newly proposed Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. Ackman likened the creation of the department to a company opting to bring in “great new management and have them fix the business.” He pointed to Musk’s history with X, formerly Twitter, as an example of how he will approach reshaping the efficiency of the United States.
“X was a quasi governmental agency in the way it operated in San Francisco, and he stepped in, he took out 80, 90% of the employees, and it’s become a much more effective platform software development,” Ackman said. “The various features’ functionality have been able to happen much more quickly under new leadership, and I think that’s what we have here.”
Musk has been widely criticized for his takeover of X. In a time when 54% of adults get at least some of their news from social media, Musk has been accused of providing an environment in which misinformation, racism, and misogyny run rampant, with little or no recourse for perpetrators.
After he assumed the helm of Twitter in October 2022 Musk swiftly fired over half of the company’s employees, of which the majority were from the trust and safety and policy staff — the very people who were tasked with enforcing Twitter’s rules against the very problems that now plague X. The firings appeared to have a ripple effect; a month later Meta included several trust and safety employees when it fired 11,000 people, and Google fired 12,000 people in early 2023.
Musk also took up the banner of free speech on X and allowed hate speech and similar disturbing content to proliferate on the platform. In August he sued the Center for Countering Digital Hate for publishing research that was unfavorable toward the social media platform; a judge tossed out the lawsuit in March of this year.