Megyn Kelly isn’t bothered by Donald Trump’s random cabinet picks. He told hedge fund manager Bill Ackman on Wednesday: “It’s fun to see Trump naming these names in the Cabinet,” he told hedge fund manager Bill Ackman on Wednesday. “I think it’s very creative to go full Trumpian and keep people on your heels.”
There is “absolutely nothing wrong” with Trump’s choice of those loyal to him, even if “the term continues to be used as if it’s a bad thing.”
Ackman agreed. “Actually, I think I call it a dream team. I’m really very impressed. We have Elon Musk. We have a dear friend of mine, Vivek Ramaswamy, who is incredibly talented. I would love all of this actually, I’ve been very impressed with all the selections that have been made so far.”
Kelly also criticized the New York Times for expressing concern about Elon’s “elevation to the president-elect’s right-hand man.” She continued: “They don’t seem happy. “I feel like you have to look at someone like Elon, who is willing to work in any capacity for our government, and just say thank you. But they’re worried.”
Again, Ackman agreed with and built on Kelly’s assessment of Musk. “I think he’s a great American. I think he’s a great global citizen. You know, if you had to think of a guy who has had a greater impact on society. “He is, I would say, the most important figure of our time in the non-political sphere, and we are now benefiting from all of his talents working in tandem with the president.”
The duo also discussed Musk and Ramaswamy’s recently proposed Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. Ackman compared the creation of the department to a company choosing to bring in “great new management and asking them to fix the business.” He pointed to Musk’s history with Company X, formerly Twitter, as an example of how he would approach reshaping America’s efficiency.
Ackman said: “X was a quasi-governmental agency the way it operated in San Francisco, and it stepped in, laid off 80 or 90 percent of the staff, and became a much more efficient software development platform,” Ackman said. “The functionality of the different features was able to happen much more quickly under the new leadership, and I think that’s what we have here.”
Widely criticized for having 54% of adults get at least some of their news from social media, Musk has been accused of creating an environment where misinformation, racism and misogyny run rampant, with little recourse for the perpetrators.
After taking the helm of Twitter in October 2022, Musk was quick to lay off more than half of the company’s employees, most of whom were trust, security and political staff – the same people tasked with managing Twitter against the same issues as now. Plague X. The layoffs seemed to have a domino effect; a month later, Meta included many more trust and security employees when it laid off 11,000 people, as well as Google laying off 12,000 people in early 2023.
Musk also carried the banner of free speech on X and allowed hate speech and similarly disturbing content to proliferate on the platform. In August, he sued the Center Against Digital Hate for publishing research unfavorable to the social media platform; a judge dismissed the suit in March of this year.
You can watch the interview between Megyn Kelly and Bill Ackman in the video above.