NYT Reports Airbnb Co-Founder and Tesla Director Joe Gebbia Is Joining DOGE; He Later Confirms an OPM Retirement-Process Project

Date kind. February 13, 2025 is the press-report date: Reuters, relaying a New York Times report, wrote that the Times “said on Thursday” that Gebbia was joining DOGE. It is not an appointment, start or swearing-in date. TechCrunch embeds a Gebbia X post on his role time-stamped 8:06 PM PST, February 27, 2025.

What happened. The New York Times reported, citing a person with knowledge of the matter, that Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia was joining the Department of Government Efficiency alongside Elon Musk. Reuters adds that the paper “did not say what role he would have in Musk’s team”. TechCrunch dates Gebbia’s own clarification “Almost two weeks after” the Times report: he said on X that his starting point was an effort to overhaul the government’s slow, paper-heavy retirement process, and wrote that he could think of few more important design challenges than “volunteering to improve the user experience within our government”. Nextgov/FCW, writing in August 2025, reports that he “joined DOGE in February” and worked on federal retirement processes at the Office of Personnel Management.

Volunteering, scoped. FedScoop (August 2025) says of Gebbia’s February post: “That post indicated he was volunteering his time.” That describes the February DOGE phase. It is not a statement about his later role heading the National Design Studio, whose federal employment classification is undocumented in the public record (see the research note on that gap).

Why it matters. This entry is the documented start of the path from DOGE to the National Design Studio: 2025-08-21–eo-14338-creates-nds-ndstudio-gov-pre-registered-day-prior creates the studio, and 2025-11-24–doge-disbanded-eight-months-early-musk-departure records DOGE’s end. Reuters describes him as a Tesla board member and close friend of Musk at the time of the Times report. The conflict-of-interest posture is covered at 2026-09-29–national-design-studio-hello-america-event-launches-america-gov-trump-names-coristine-lead-engineer-thanks-arnell-musk.

Unconfirmed. The Times article itself was not retrieved; Reuters’ account is used. The date Gebbia began work, and in what capacity, is not established by these sources.