In the event you’ve been questioning why Elon Musk, who’s now the top of DOGE, the Division of Authorities Effectivity, has been holed up in an old government building in Washington, DC, spending nights and weekends surrounded by tech bros from Silicon Valley as he systematically dismantles elements of the federal authorities, particularly USAID, and is now setting his sights on different authorities businesses, you’re not alone.
That is the query I’ve been asking individuals who know and have labored with Musk in a single type or one other. The solutions I’ve heard are surprisingly fairly easy, but in addition totally terrifying.
“Elon believes he must be emperor of the world, and that is his manner of displaying individuals what he’s able to as emperor,” a detailed affiliate of Musk’s, who has labored with him for years and nonetheless speaks to him usually, tells me. “He really believes his manner of dealing with the world is the absolute best final result for everybody in it.” In Musk’s thoughts, this individual says, all the pieces he’s achieved in his profession up to now has confirmed that thesis to be true—from Tesla’s electrical vehicles lowering emissions and accelerating the transition to sustainable power, to Neuralink’s efforts to assist individuals with neurological problems regain misplaced capabilities, to his perception that he single-handedly saved Twitter from collapse and turned it right into a bastion of free speech, rescuing it from what he noticed because the censorial grip of Jack Dorsey’s management.
We are able to argue how a lot Musk has made the world a greater place till he lands on Mars, however the debate about his influence on the world, whether or not optimistic or detrimental, nonetheless doesn’t reply the query of why a person who could possibly be luxuriating on a non-public island or floating in a zero-gravity chamber of his personal making, or may actually purchase something he desires on planet Earth—or off planet Earth, for that matter—as an alternative chooses to have interaction in a bureaucratic purge of historic proportions. And on prime of that, why is he delighting in pulling funding from essential authorities applications, working to shutter total businesses, and slashing 1000’s of federal jobs with the informal ease of a CEO tweeting a doge meme?
“He’s doing it as a result of he likes wielding energy greater than anything. It’s extra enjoyable to damage a whole lot of 1000’s of individuals’s lives than to damage simply a whole lot of individuals’s lives,” a widely known Silicon Valley investor tells me.
The primary order of enterprise upon establishing DOGE was to intestine total authorities businesses that had existed for many years, together with these answerable for diplomacy, international support, and financial stabilization. Take the US Company for Worldwide Growth, for instance, the company answerable for offering overseas help and catastrophe aid. In Musk’s view, it’s been a bloated forms losing taxpayer {dollars}. And so by 11:59 p.m. tonight, 1000’s of USAID workers are set to be placed on administrative leave, most of whom work abroad. Some have reportedly already obtained termination notices. Musk noted this week that he had “spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wooden chipper. Might gone to some nice events. Did that as an alternative.” The day earlier than, on Sunday, he posted, “USAID is a legal group. Time for it to die.”
The Silicon Valley investor tells me that even when Musk is true—that USAID is bloated and wastes taxpayer cash—there are additionally clearly facets of the company which can be doing good issues all over the world. The issue is that Musk approaches all the pieces in a binary manner. “Both it’s good or it’s unhealthy, there may be nothing in between,” the investor says.
From Musk’s and Donald Trump’s perspective, USAID was nothing however a waste of cash. On X, the DOGE account has been reporting on the so-called authorities inefficiencies Musk and his staff have uncovered, which he’s claiming proves how wasteful the company has been. “Right now, 78 contracts had been terminated for comfort throughout DEI, Non-Performing, Media, and Consulting classes, together with one for ‘groundwater exploration and evaluation within the Islamic Republic of Mauritania.’ Roughly $110mm of whole financial savings,” Musk triumphantly announced on X. In one other sequence of posts from the DOGE account and his personal private X account, Musk noted that some information shops, together with Politico, had been receiving money from USAID, which appeared to have helped justify Musk’s actions for his boss, President Trump. “LOOKS LIKE BILLIONS OF DOLLARS HAVE BEEN STOLLEN [sic] AT USAID, AND OTHER AGENCIES, MUCH OF IT GOING TO THE FAKE NEWS MEDIA AS A ‘PAYOFF’ FOR CREATING GOOD STORIES ABOUT THE DEMOCRATS,” Trump wrote, or shouted, on Truth Social. (The Washington Put up reported Thursday that information websites like Politico weren’t receiving subsidies from USAID, however quite that authorities officers on the company had been expensing paid subscriptions to the shops.)
