Mr. Musk Goes to Washington

By Bryan McMahon | September 18, 2024 | 7:50am

Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Billionaires Elon Musk

Elon Musk is a man of many talents—the richest man in the world, a fantastic dancer, and a habitual appropriator of classic science fiction for his business needs. Now, he’s preparing to add “politician” to his resume. Last month, following their conversation on X, the social media site formerly known as Twitter, former President Trump supposedly offered Elon a Cabinet-level position leading a commission that would be “tasked with conducting a complete financial and performance audit of the entire federal government.” Musk quickly agreed, saying he “can’t wait” and that “a lot of waste and needless regulation in government that needs to go.”

The evolving relationship between Musk and Trump, still in its honeymoon phase, is burning surprisingly hot given that Elon claimed in March he did not plan to endorse or support either presidential candidate. That didn’t last. As the Wall Street Journal reported in July, Musk set up the America PAC and planned to spend $150 million trying to convince undecided voters to vote for Trump in swing states. That same week, following the assassination attempt of former President Trump at his rally in Pennsylvania, Elon endorsed Trump for president, breaking his earlier pledge. Since then, Musk has used his position as the owner of X as a pro-Trump bully pulpit, tweeting anti-Kamala memes, fake Kamala campaign videos, and utterly false far-right conspiracy theories about illegal immigrants voting in federal elections to his millions of followers.

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Musk hosted a streamed discussion on X with Trump that, after a 45-minute delay due to the platform’s servers crashing, functioned as an hour-and-a-half-long campaign ad for Trump. Recently, he tweeted a video that has been viewed 38.5 million times claiming the Democratic Party supports open borders as a plot to “import voters,” even though undocumented people cannot vote in federal elections (something even the rightwing Cato Institute admits); next he retweeted a clip of Peter Thiel, the OG Silicon Valley MAGAnaut who killed Gawker and supported Trump in 2016, claiming without evidence that, if the election is close, Kamala plans to “steal it.” It’s a toxic brew of conspiracy and anti-immigration that any MAGA initiate must drink. Elon has already drained his cup and is asking for another.

What is Mr. Musk getting in return for spending $150 million of his own money (a dubious pledge, to be sure), turning X into a pro-Trump social media stream?

The proposed government efficiency czar position gives us a clue. Indeed, given the chance, many business leaders would buy themselves a cabinet-level position in any administration. But few people have $150 million lying around that they’re willing to risk being wasted.

The role, of course, would benefit Musk and his businesses immensely. This supposed audit from hell, a chance to cut the government down to size by forcing agencies to cut millions in spending, serves three of his goals. First, his businesses materially depend on a government that is too weak to accomplish desired projects on its own. A weakened state—one, say, unable to collect a capital gains tax on a man whose entire worth is tied up in unrealized capital gains—can do no more than hand out money. Tesla, for example, not only needed a $465 million loan from the Department of Energy to survive, but it derived a large share of its revenue from selling carbon credits run by the federal government. SpaceX derives a significant portion of its revenue from government contracts, including $1.8 billion from a single deal signed in 2021.

Given that all his wealth depends on those two companies, the last thing Musk wants to see is a NASA capable of building rockets again.

The second reason Elon would love to helm a Department of Government Efficiency—or, as Elon has called it in his epic memes, D.O.G.E.—is, like Trump and the rest of the GOP, he wants to dismantle the regulatory state. Elon’s businesses are currently battling regulators in 11 different cases, involving everything from employment discrimination to environmental violations. A government audit has been a longtime dream of the GOP, and, for Trump and Musk, it’s another weapon to wield in his total war against a functioning state.

Elon would love to shed these current legal issues and act even more recklessly with his startups like Neuralink should the regulatory state be unwound. And he is already reckless enough, like the ongoing situation in Memphis, where NPR reported that he spun up a computing supercluster of more than 100,000 GPUs in Memphis to power his GrokAI chatbot. The facility skirted environmental laws and is using 18 methane-burning turbines to help power the data center and pollute nearby predominantly Black neighborhoods.

A government small enough to “drown in a bathtub,” as Grover Norquist memorably put it, has been the animating impulse for the GOP since the success of the New Deal in the 1930s. Earlier this year, the Heritage Foundation released a detailed attack plan the GOP will carry out to dismantle the regulatory state if it wins in November. Called Project 2025, It is, in short, a dictator’s playbook.

It lays out in over 1,000 pages a plan to subordinate the entire federal bureaucracy to the president, fire any civil servant not deemed loyal and replace them from a pre-approved list of “patriots,” and destroy the independence of federal agencies, putting the Department of Justice and Federal Bureau of Investigations under partisan control of the president. Elon, head of the commission responsible for cutting agency spending, would be the hand of the King carrying out this fascist project.

Trump’s promises — for healthcare plans, for “fixing” anything and everything, for specific jobs to specific people — of course cannot be trusted. But if he wins in November, the richest, most petulant, least funny, and probably most dangerous man in America may well be headed to Washington right along with him.