… courtesy of the Guardian. Many mentioned in the article… the sky is the limit - some quotes:
Musk’s plans have already excited Silicon Valley mainstays such as Palantir, whose executives praised Doge on an earnings call last week and talked about how the disruption by the billionaire’s strike squad was good for the company. Palantir already has won hundreds of millions of dollars in US military contracts in recent years for AI-related projects. “This is a revolution, some people are gonna get their heads cut off,” Palantir’s CEO, Alex Karp, added. “We’re expecting to see unexpected things and to win.”
Brian Armstrong, CEO of the multibillion-dollar cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, lauded Doge last week for its “great progress” and suggested putting government expenditures on blockchain technology. Defense contractors like Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman spoke favorably of the effort on recent earnings calls, while the Predator drone-maker General Atomics Aeronautical Systems wrote a letter directly to Musk last month asking him to speed up the way the Pentagon handles defense contracts. As companies seek to benefit from Doge’s reshaping of the government, Musk also has extensive contracts worth billions of dollars through his own companies like SpaceX that are potentially set to expand under the new administration.
As Nasa increasingly outsourced its needs to private companies in the late 2000s, SpaceX continued to partner with the agency on about $15bn worth of contracts in the years since. The Pentagon awarded the firm hundreds of millions of dollars in satellite contracts, expanding its influence and creating a crisis at the agency when Musk refused to let Ukraine use Starlink to launch an attack on Russia.