Before we get into the blood and the body counts and the 9.5 million people—2.5 million of those children—who, according to The Lancet, are now slated to die by 2030, you need to understand something about Joe Gebbia . You need to understand that Gebbia is a man who has spent his entire professional life being told he can’t do something, and then doing it anyway, for better or worse. You need to understand this is a man who has forever wanted the bohemian life of a designer respected by his artistic peers but, failing to scrounge up the creative chops to make that happen, pivoted to the path of a cutthroat capitalist with the hopes of finding a backdoor access point to that initial dream.
Gebbia’s artistic aspirations began as a Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) student. “I had this idea in my mind of being a painter and having my work exhibited in New York City,” Gebbia said in a 2018 interview with Artsy. He went on to regale the interviewer with the tale of how, when asked by a professor to build a 12-inch scale model for a crit project, he instead built sixteen full-sized Eames chair knockoffs. Somehow, according to Gebbia, the nameless professor didn’t penalize his grade for failing to follow the assignment, but instead praised the work and admitted he’s been wrong about Gebbia—real “then everyone clapped” copypasta fare.
After graduation, when Gebbia and his fellow RISD alum roommate Brian Chesky couldn’t afford their San Francisco rent in 2007, they simply decided to break the law and rent out air mattresses in their living room to strangers and call it a business—i.e. Airbnb. This is, of course, all according to unverifiable claims made by Gebbia himself that were credulously parroted by business trades until the lore stuck as fact—a tale as old as time in the self-mythologizing founder space. And when his nascent business was circling the drain in 2008 with no investors, he bought a bunch of Cheerios and Chex, stuffed them into custom cereal boxes he designed called “Obama O’s” and “Cap‘n McCain’s,” sold them for $40 a pop at the Democratic National Convention, and kept his startup alive long enough to get funding from Y Combinator. The difference between “disruptor” and criminal is all in the eye of the beholder, and in late aughts SF, Gebbia’s scofflaw nature was all too appreciated by the other tech world criminals climbing to power in the Bay Area, ultimately leading to the success of their hotel competitor company.
The point being: Joe Gebbia has never once let the gap between “this is a stupid and/or illegal idea” and “this is what I want to do” stop him from crossing it. While that might be charming when we’re talking about art school cushions called “Crit Buns” or the genitalia themed college basketball team he helped design, it’s far more consequential when that same energy gets applied to dismantling the United States Agency for International Development.
Now in 2026, the design wizard who launched a vanity project furniture company after Airbnb’s IPO brought him overnight generational wealth, has been appointed U.S. Chief Design Officer. This appointment came around the same time of him joining Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) as a key player in the new administration’s mission to “cut federal spending.” His first project—“Improving the slow and paper-based retirement process,” he cheerfully announced on X. Could aspects of the American government’s online presence use an update? Absolutely. That’s why the pre-DOGE United States Digital Service team was already hard at work on those issues before a bunch of conmen swooped in. Furthermore, why does accessing one’s retirement plan need to be an “Apple Store-like experience,” as Gebbia insists? Even at the pinnacle of his career, Gebbia is patently unable to come up with a novel design concept.
In DOGE’s first few months of existence, it had already become synonymous with cavalier brutality after overseeing the dissolution of USAID. The cuts effectively terminated the agency that, for decades, has been the primary vehicle for American humanitarian assistance around the world. In just a year, the DOGE cuts have directly resulted in Malaria death spikes in Cameroon, the closure of HIV clinics across sub-Saharan Africa, and ended food assistance to 2.4 million Yemenis. And that’s just a few bullet points of carnage.
It’s no wonder that, when Musk exited DOGE after only a few months amidst his public feud with Trump, Gebbia balked at the offer to lead the mission in his place. Having already taken well-deserved heat for his participation in the new department—including Airbnb distancing itself from its own co-founder—Gebbia agreed to continue his design work as part of DOGE, but only run it as part of a broader committee.
You might be thinking: “Okay, but Gebbia is a designer. He ostensibly makes things pretty. He sits on the Tesla board. He bought a stake in the San Antonio Spurs. What does he have to do with any of this?” And that’s exactly the question, isn’t it?
Because Gebbia’s role in DOGE isn’t about policy expertise. It’s not about foreign aid knowledge or an understanding of what happens when you strip 94% of sexual and reproductive health funding and maternal and child health funding from the world’s most vulnerable populations. He certainly doesn’t have those.
With DOGE, Gebbia delivers the exact same thing he’s always brought to the table: the critical eye of one who can’t actually conceive of anything original. All that’s there is the ability to look at something that exists and decide if it’s ugly or tolerable. And once something’s deemed ugly, all that’s left to do is make that ugly thing go away, regardless of what function it may have served. That’s exactly what the DOGE cuts to USAID did: made people this administration found cheap and aesthetically unappealing just disappear.
It’s abundantly clear that all Gebbia has ever wanted to do is cosplay as a creative and rub elbows with the legitimately talented in the hopes of winning their approval. Though he’s had brief tastes of that life, like when he was added as a Style Council member for Mr. Porter, the men’s luxury fashion company that “creates unique experiences for its EIPs (Extremely Important People),” and got an intimate, celeb-filled welcome party. But it seems that Mr. Porter, like Airbnb, may be wishing to distance themselves after Gebbia’s right-wing turn as a few pages featuring Gebbia on the style council seem to have recently been scrubbed from their website.
All of Gebbia’s derivative furniture, lawbreaking, and adding Arial fonts to government websites almost paid off in the end, granting him access to swanky parties attended by real artists and celebrities. But it was impossible for those tastemakers to ignore the soulless, sellout monster mingling among them. Because as much as Gebbia may try to distance his design work from the parts of DOGE directly responsible for millions of deaths around the world, he’s actively choosing to stay affiliated with such a deeply evil operation. And yet again, he’s fingerpainting his way through another uninspired project, this time with the blood of the innocent.
Democracy is not dying—it's being killed. And those who are killing it have names and addresses...
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