Pearl River It’s not just me. Now everyone knows that Musk made a fool of himself on the last number of months while he was hanging around the White House. Worse, despite all of his claims of success and savings, he mainly left a record of incompetence, chaos, and disaster, having inflicted almost incalculable harm.
Admittedly, I’m biased. It starts out with the fact that he’s the world’s richest man, so I don’t think he deserves a mulligan. His personal life is despicable. Birth mothers in a compound in Austin just seems “handmaiden’s tale” to me. Fourteen children may not be past his ability to pay for, but it is way, way past his ability to parent. His Twitter tweets are mean-spirited and unhinged. In business, self-dealing is like breathing air for him. As a competitor, he isn’t ruthless so much as vicious. His almost $300 million effort to buy his way into the Oval Office and as near as someone foreign born can get to the US presidency, has distorted an already corrupt level of money in politics to nightmarish portions. Top it all off, we find that his political philosophy is not just libertarian, but atavistic and vengeful. In short, I never doubted that the endgame for Musk would be that “pride cometh before the fall,” even if I never imagined we would all pay such a terrible price for his mad antics, that sucks any joy out his downfall for me.
Nonetheless, giving the devil his due, I made myself read the Washington Post’s conservative columnist Matt Bai’s evaluation of the impact of Musk goes to Washington. With a headline that promised that Musk had failed not because he tried to do too much, but that he tried to do too little, I braced myself for a whitewash, but once committed, I soldiered on to find that Bai’s evaluation surprised me.
Bai had none of my root biases. His expectations were expansive, based on what Musk had accomplished in his businesses, whose successes and failures he saw as world-changing from electric cars, to space, to the internet and more. Bai thought Musk had the ability to really fix things in the infrastructure of government, just as he had in business. We would have better and seamless abilities to access government services across platforms. We might be able to navigate a web-based federal sector that was efficient, effective, and even, lord save us, fun. Bai started out a fanboy, only to end up a disappointed stepchild.
None of what he hoped might happen under Musk and DOGE emerged, quite the opposite. First, Musk claimed savings would be $2 trillion of the $7 trillion budget, then lowered the mark to $1 trillion and finally slunk out of DC claiming doubtful savings of $175 billion, which experts estimated will cost the government $135 billion. Rather than help reorganize the government for the better, he wrought almost incalculable damage.
Bai delivers the coup de grace this way:
Whatever the reason, Musk’s only Big Idea for his brigade of former interns was to fire as many people as he could, in as humiliating a way as possible. As a reform strategy, it struck me as shockingly lightweight. I mean, really, Elon? You’re supposed to be this great, visionary, hyperloopy guy, and this is all you’ve got? A re-org plan? The Cat in the Hat arrived with more sophisticated tricks.
Musk was as vindictive as Trump in pursuing his grievances against the agencies that regulated his businesses, targeting them specifically, even while he managed to continue to increase his wealth with new deals around the US and the world because of his access. Musk can say he was undone by Washington, but it’s clear from every perspective that he was undone by himself, while the rest of us pay the price, many with worse health, more hunger, and unemployment checks.