Almost two weeks after The New York Times reported that Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia had joined Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency,” Gebbia clarified his role on Thursday, announcing on X that as a starting point, he’ll be leveraging his design expertise as part of an effort to overhaul the government’s notoriously slow, paper-heavy retirement process.
The system could certainly use the help. Chuck Ezell, acting director of OPM, said in a video testimonial released today — and republished by Gebbia — that one week ago, the administration “challenged” the agency to “process a retiree, end to end, digitally, without printing anything to paper.” The deadline? Just one week.
In the same video, an agency employee tells the cameraman that they’ve already managed to shrink the process to two days.
Whether that process is scalable or sustainable or even repeatable remains to be seen, but OPM has been under pressure for years to modernize its systems. Last summer, the agency launched a pilot program for a new online retirement application platform in response to ongoing concerns about delayed benefit processing; the issue had drawn attention in 2023, when several lawmakers issued a press release, urging the OPM to address the sluggish processing of retirees, some of whom were waiting more than 90 days to receive their benefits.
Gebbia — a billionaire many times over thanks to his Airbnb holdings — still serves on the board of the short-term rental giant. Since September 2022, he has also been a board member at Tesla.
In his X post about his next steps, Gebbia wrote: “Since leaving my operating role at Airbnb in 2022, I’ve been looking for the next digital design challenge. And I can think of few more important ones than volunteering to improve the user experience within our government.”
In addition to co-founding Airbnb, Gebbia is the co-founder of Samara, a spin-out of Airbnb that builds pre-fabricated homes that customers can customize, choosing layouts, colors, windows, doors, and decks, with Samara saying it handles the rest, including obtaining the associated permits.
Last week, Samara announced it would donate $15 million worth of the dwellings to support Los Angelenos who lost their homes in the January fires that caused an estimated $30 billion in lost real estate.
