Elizabeth Dwoskin

Elizabeth Dwoskin is a Silicon Valley correspondent at The Washington Post whose reporting follows how technology executives and investors translate their wealth into political power, policy influence and new markets, especially around defense, health care and artificial intelligence. She has covered the tech world for more than a decade, building a beat that treats Silicon Valley as a central player in government and geopolitics rather than a standalone business story. Her work combines long-form investigations, exclusives and analysis that trace decisions in boardrooms and venture funds through to consequences for public institutions and ordinary people.

Silicon Valley, Washington and the Trump-tech alliance

Dwoskin’s signature focus is the evolving alliance between major tech figures and political leaders, particularly the Trump administrations, and how that alliance reshapes government spending and policy. She has reported on Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, including an exclusive interview with a former insider who details the culture clash surrounding DOGE’s mission and the backlash that followed.

In a separate DOGE investigation, she shows how a department that was supposed to shut down instead left remnants embedded across the U.S. government, mapping the lingering footprint of Musk’s cost-cutting venture. Her coverage of the Hill and Valley conference, described as the place to be for the “tech-right” crowd seeking business with the administration, examines how Silicon Valley venture capitalists position themselves to benefit from a surge in war-related spending. In another investigation, she documents how startups backed by the president’s sons have secured billions of dollars in defense contracts, investments and loans, prompting lawmakers to call for a Pentagon inquiry into the arrangement.

Across these stories, she treats tech leaders, investors and political appointees as a single ecosystem, following money, influence and ideology between Silicon Valley and Washington.

Billionaires, health care and the pursuit of longevity

Dwoskin reports extensively on how tech billionaires and high-growth health companies push into medicine and longevity, often ahead of clear regulation or consensus on safety. Her work on AI doctors explores how the Trump administration lays groundwork for chatbots that can diagnose illness and prescribe medicine, while physicians warn that such systems can introduce new risks and inequities into care. She profiles the chief executive of Hims & Hers as he plots new ways to upend traditional health care, showing how telehealth, weight-loss drugs and peptides are woven into a broader shift toward wellness and longevity as a consumer business.

In a feature on a young woman who lost her sight and whose billionaire father backed a daring new treatment, she frames the story as a test case for how private wealth, experimental procedures and regulatory oversight intersect. Her reporting on tech billionaires’ secret use of performance and longevity drugs, and their move to commercialize those regimes, fits this same pattern: close attention to the science and marketing, and equal attention to the power imbalance between elite users and the broader public that may later be sold a “revolution.”

Dwoskin’s health and longevity stories often use individual narratives to illustrate structural questions about who sets the terms for future medicine.

Elon Musk, platforms and influence campaigns

Dwoskin tracks Elon Musk as a recurring figure in her beat, not only as a business leader but as a political and cultural actor whose platforms, departments and ventures influence public discourse. In DOGE coverage, she details Musk’s role in government efficiency schemes that ripple across federal agencies and contracting. Her reporting on an anonymous X user known as XFreeze shows how a little-known account rises to prominence by courting Musk directly, then amplifies his ideas and attacks his perceived enemies, turning a social media relationship into an influence campaign. She has co-authored pieces on SpaceX’s ambition to put data centers in orbit, unpacking the business logic and strategic implications of placing core internet infrastructure in space. Through these stories, she treats Musk’s companies and online presence as instruments of power, examining the feedback loop between his personal brand, platform design and public policy debates.

Economic fallout, new media experiments and the scrutiny of power

Beyond individual billionaires, Dwoskin reports on how technological change and corporate strategy reshape work, media and government systems. In a feature on tech workers, she documents how waves of layoffs and pressure to automate jobs create existential panic even among high earners, arguing that the dynamics already disrupting the tech sector are poised to spread to other white-collar professions.

She has covered a Peter Thiel-backed startup that places reporters in statehouses, using the story to explore tensions between venture-backed media experiments and traditional journalism, and what that means for public information in state politics. Her contributions to an Impact Report series include scrutiny of whistleblower claims and internal documents around DOGE’s access to Social Security data, including plans that would have wrongly marked millions of living people as dead and upended their financial lives. Earlier in her career, she reported on big data, machine learning and privacy, as well as politics and urban life, giving her a foundation in both technical systems and public policy that now underpins her current coverage.

Throughout, her work is framed explicitly as stories that scrutinize power, whether that power is held by government departments, tech platforms, billionaires or emerging media ventures.

Dwoskin joined The Washington Post in 2016 as the masthead’s first Silicon Valley correspondent, after more than a decade reporting on technology, data, politics and cities for other national and local outlets. She continues to file exclusives and investigations that sit at the intersection of technology, money and governance, and her beat now spans corporate strategy, political movements, defense spending, health innovation and the lived experience of workers inside the tech economy. Her coverage is unified by a consistent question: how concentrated technology wealth and expertise are reshaping public institutions and everyday life, often in ways that are hard to reverse once the systems are in place.