On a Saturday morning in December 2022, Elon Musk summoned finance executives at Twitter, which he had bought six weeks earlier, to a conference call. Then he drilled into a spreadsheet that contained the social media company’s expenditures.

Lutnick currently serves as chair of Trump’s White House transition team. His most notable moment in recent memory was his declaration on CNN that Robert F Kennedy Jr, the vaccine conspiracist and Covid lockdown critic, would not be Trump’s pick for head of Health and Human Services. Trump nominated Kennedy to that very post last week.