As a trained finance person, I am admittedly very much in my Cassandra Era, because I agree with Wired Editor Tim Marchman when he wrote, “what I’m inferring from the reporting our reporters are doing is that in a very literal, not take-having sense, Elon Musk is the head of government while Donald Trump is the head of state.” Dave Levitan is doing terrific work bringing Splinter readers the inside scoop on what is going down in this shitshow of a government, as he succinctly summarized our current predicament today: Racist, Too-Online Children Are Running the Country.
The most racist, too-online child of them all, Elon “I pay people to be good at video games for me so I can brag about my prowess while simultaneously proving to be a total fraud” Musk clearly has a directive from the “president” to do what he wants with the federal bureaucracy so long as Trump and his guys get paid. Elon’s influence is the subtext of the chaos that Dave and others have been documenting inside all the parts of the government that advance society forward and literally save lives. Elon Musk is coming for their funding because like Zoë Schiffer of Wired pointed out, what is unfolding at the federal level right now is similar to how Musk barnstormed his way into Twitter with massive cuts and phony ultimatums (he’s also doing it to cut all the regulations of his government-contracted businesses he has long fought to destroy). It’s just who this broken husk of a human is. He can’t be anything else but the worst, most annoyingly pathetic collection of atoms to ever exist.
While Twitter has survived these staggering cuts, by Musk’s own admission this week, the business is “barely breaking even” and Wall Street is selling its albatross of debt at a loss just to get it off their books. Anyone who paid attention to Europe earlier this century knows how disastrous austerity policies can be, because the classic “you have to risk money to make money” phrase is a core truth of how economic growth works.
Speaking of core economic truths, the Washington Post reported today that the “highest-ranking career official at the Treasury Department is departing after a clash with allies of billionaire Elon Musk over access to sensitive payment systems, according to three people with knowledge of the matter.” David A. Lebryk served in the Treasury for decades in non-political roles, and he announced his retirement today in an e-mail obtained by the Post.
Fed source to me: “It’s like a bank heist and the bank is America. Not really being hyperbolic to say control of those systems would allow an extremely fast collapse of the economy. Imagine it’s a plumbing system and someone takes a sledgehammer to the central pipe.”
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— Marisa Kabas (@marisakabas.bsky.social) January 31, 2025 at 6:41 AM
Elon wants control over a highly sensitive payment system that distributes over $6 trillion to households, business and other services the government supports. This isn’t just money, this is liquid money that goes into the consumption-based cycle in our economy that I detailed how Elon and Trump are trying to crash earlier this week. Investment in the future is great, sure, but as Trump has proven through multiple bankruptcies, liquidity is King. Republicans like Musk, probably due to their familiarity with it, think you can just divorce the government from the economy without any kind of knock-on effects, and if they get their way, will learn a harsh lesson in the basic economics they pretend to understand. U.S. annual GDP is $27 trillion, and if the equivalent of a little under a quarter of that is taken from these services that help keep that $27 trillion machine humming, things will break.
Move fast and break things works in a Silicon Valley run by people constantly high on drugs with inflated and broken egos driven by the rise and fall of zero percent interest rates making them think they were wealthier and smarter and more innovative than they really are. Elon Musk is taking the worst aspects of that reckless Silicon Valley mantra that did things like help cause a genocide in Myanmar and elect Donald Trump president twice, and combining it with his unfathomably fragile ego to obliterate the basic functions of the federal government that are tied into our everyday lives.
If he gets what he wants, Elon will crush the economy. There are signals that smart money is worried, like gold currently sitting at all-time highs and Treasury Bond rates diverging from the Fed Funds Rate. The Fed source’s analogy of the plumbing system is apt. Various kinds of government investment like transportation have an exponential growth effect on the economy, and the Treasury provides vital structural economic support to keeping things moving. Elon Musk is determined to break how all this works in the midst of the most destructive midlife crisis mankind has ever seen.
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