Joe Gebbia, Tesla Board
After graduating from Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), Gebbia began his career in the mid-aughts unable to hold down a job or found a company that took off. In 2008, desperate for cash, Gebbia and a former RISD classmate hatched a business plan that finally stuck. In a few short years, and after Silicon Valley investments, their initial scheme of illegally renting inflatable mattresses out of living rooms had grown into the Airbnb you no longer use today.
By 2017, Airbnb had already made Gebbia one of the world’s youngest billionaires. This left him financially secure enough to pursue his dream of founding a modular furniture company with a design sensibility ripped straight from a Corporate Memphis mural. But by 2020, Gebbia’s interest in furniture design had waned and Airbnb’s IPO had made him even more obscenely wealthy, so he pivoted to the investor era of his career. An obscure documentary, tiny homes, a calendar app, even the San Antonio Spurs—each of these got funding. With his money now doing most of his work for him, Gebbia was finally free to spend more time on the important things in life: partying at Burning Man with other billionaires like Elon Musk. Thrilled to have someone hanging out with him, Musk invited Gebbia to join Tesla’s Board of Directors in late 2022, filling a seat left vacant by Oracle co-founder (and recent TikTok buyer) Larry Ellison.
Firmly in Musk’s orbit by 2025, Gebbia joined the DOGE initiative, appointed by executive order to the National Design Studio (NDS) as the country’s first “Chief Design Officer.” Seeking to bring an “Apple Store-like experience,” to government sites. Aided by his chief of staff, Edward “Big Balls” Corstine, the terminally online groyper best known for publicly getting his ass kicked, Gebbia again gets to LARP as a designer. This time, however, he’s overhauling the nation’s retirement system and designing the page where suckers can buy the $1,000,000 Trump Gold Card rather than making corporate plaza couches and bootleg Eames chairs.
That same year, Gebbia was forced to step down from the Airbnb.org board, and the company’s non-profit arm that temporarily houses refugees, over his anti-immigrant remarks. Soon after, he faced accusations of insider trading for purchasing $1.02 million worth of Tesla stock right ahead of a company announcement. “Joe Rocks,” tweeted Musk, following the criminal allegations.
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