By Kevin Liptak and Jeff Zeleny, CNN

(CNN) — If anyone was still in doubt where the power lies in President Donald Trump’s new administration, Wednesday’s first Cabinet meeting made clear it wasn’t in the actual Cabinet.

Most of the Senate-confirmed, top-ranking agency heads sat around the table mostly silent during the more than an hourlong meeting, even though some of them had come prepared to make brief remarks.

Instead, it was the man in the dark coat, sitting in the shadow along the side of the room, whom Trump ceded the meeting to in its opening minutes.

Elon Musk, the billionaire tasked with reforming the government, is now without question Trump’s most powerful adviser. His efforts to dramatically reshape the federal bureaucracy have been met with outcry, confusion and — in the last few days — quiet grumbling even from some Trump allies about his brash tactics.

But if Wednesday’s meeting was any indication, Trump himself has never felt better about empowering his top campaign booster to slash through his government with a proverbial chainsaw.

“Is anybody unhappy with Elon?” he asked Cabinet members at one point, looking around his table.

In elevating Musk and daring Cabinet members to speak up with concerns, in full view of the television cameras, Trump put his team on notice about the power dynamics within his administration. Instead of participating themselves, the members of the Cabinet — those confirmed by the Senate and a handful of nominees still awaiting their votes — served as far more of a backdrop.

Trump spoke for the vast majority of his meeting. But Musk spoke three times as long as anyone else. It wasn’t until 56 minutes into the meeting that Trump invited Vice President JD Vance to speak, and he only offered 36 seconds of remarks. The housing secretary was invited to speak — but only to offer an opening prayer.

The visuals of the midday conference could hardly have been more apt.

Musk spoke in half-shadow, out of the television lights that had been directed toward Trump and those tasked with leading the departments of Defense, Treasury, State and other agencies of the government.

Those Cabinet officials each get their own assigned chair in the room, with a gold plaque affixed to the seat (most take the chair with them when they depart the administration). Musk sat outside the circle of Senate-confirmed government officials, sandwiched between two mid-level aides.

Even his attire seemed to suggest he wasn’t playing by the normal Washington rules. Unlike Trump’s other male associates in the room, who all wore dark suits and neckties, Musk wore what is now his standard work-wear: a black wool overcoat, a black-on-black “Make America Great Again” hat and a T-shirt underneath with the words “Tech Support.”

That was the description he gave of the job he is doing within Trump’s government.

“As crazy as it sounds, that is almost a literal description of the work that the DOGE team is doing, is helping fix the government computer systems,” he said.

DOGE’s remit extends well beyond tinkering with some software. Young engineers working for Musk have embedded themselves across the federal government, seeking access to sensitive databases, demanding career staffers justify their employment and canceling programs they see as fraudulent.

That had all seemed fine to most of Trump’s Cabinet members, who largely share his objective to reduce the size of the federal government.

“I obviously fully support DOGE. In fact, I turned in the five things I’d done this last week,” Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said ahead of the meeting. “I’m very proud of that. I’m proud of the employees at USDA.”

It was Musk’s directive over the weekend that all federal employees — from janitors to judges — send an accounting of their work week or risk termination that led to consternation among some secretaries and Cabinet officials, CNN reported Tuesday.

In the federal bureaucracy, chains of command are a way of life — and typically favor those atop the departments and agencies that make up the executive branch. Circumventing that governance structure rubbed some officials the wrong way.

“What we are trying to get to the bottom of is we think there are a number of people on the government payroll who are dead, which is probably why they can’t respond,” Musk said, calling Saturday’s Office of Personnel Management email to the entire federal workforce “a pulse check” not a performance review.

While Trump acknowledged Wednesday that some members of his Cabinet may “disagree a little bit” with Musk’s tactics, the entire meeting sent an unmistakable signal that Musk was operating with the president’s full blessing and there was little room for open dissent.

“They have a lot of respect for Elon and that he’s doing this,” Trump said. “And some disagree a little bit. But I will tell you for the most part, I think everyone’s not only happy, they’re thrilled.”

For a president who takes optics as seriously as Trump does, calling on Musk before any member of his Cabinet – and nearly an hour before Vance – highlighted how Musk has already become a first among equals in the White House and across the government.

Trump’s chief of staff Susie Wiles, who the president has described before as the “most powerful woman in the world,” had a seat at the table during Wednesday’s meeting but did not speak. She departed the meeting early for a luncheon with Senate Republicans, many of whom have questions about Musk’s role.

Wiles laid out the “nuts and bolts” of Musk’s job and said he reports directly to Trump — not to Cabinet secretaries.

“Musk is working directly with the president, and the president then works with the Cabinet secretaries,” Wiles told the group, according to Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley.

Sen. Tommy Tuberville, an Alabama Republican, said Wiles explained Musk’s “procedure, what they do and how they do it … how Elon runs it, how he’s hired people, put them together, where they go, what they’re doing next.”

The lion’s share of the Cabinet meeting took place in front of cameras. When Trump sent reporters out of the room after a little more than an hour, the rest of the meeting lasted only about 20 more minutes, hardly much time to discuss the vast challenges facing the administration.

But the president held court on many of those topics himself.

He vowed that his administration would make no cuts to Medicare, Medicaid or Social Security, despite House Republicans passing a budget blueprint that includes a plan to cut $880 billion over a decade from federal health and energy programs. Trump urged GOP lawmakers to support the measure.

“This will not be ‘read my lips,” Trump said, referring to a pledge former President George H.W. Bush once made to not raise taxes by declaring at the 1988 Republican convention: “Read my lips: No new taxes.” Four years later, taxes went up and Bush lost his reelection.

The conversation began with Musk, but quickly devolved into one of Trump’s near-daily question-and-answer sessions. He confirmed that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky will visit Washington on Friday; his Environmental Protection Agency administrator will cut about 65% of the agency’s workforce and declined to say if he would move to prevent China from taking Taiwan by force.

While some presidents convene their Cabinets during times of crisis or to deliver a unified message, the session on Wednesday signaled the meeting was used for something else: The Trump-Musk show.

CNN’s Manu Raju contributed to this report.

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