What Is Musk Up To?

I can't even figure out what he claims to be doing, let alone what he's really after

I have no idea what the hell Elon Musk thinks he’s doing.

Seriously, when he decided: “I’m going to help elect Donald Trump President if he agrees to then let me loose on all the governmental department systems, because I really really want to ______”; what goes into that blank? Was he motivated by a desire to prove that a drastically smaller government is possible? Or to demonstrate some other super-genius theory of government? Was it because he’d always wanted political as well as financial power? Did he want to punish all the wokeness and taste librul tears? Was he after competitive advantage, or outright fraud, for his companies?

I don’t know. I’m not sire anybody does, which seems like a flaw when you’re basically letting a guy run amok with the federal government.

Donald Trump might know, or maybe not. I suspect that they discussed it over dinner at Mar-A-Lago at some point, but I’m not sure the full truth comes out in any conversation between two massive bullshit artists. Trump’s voracious appetite for lying is no secret. Musk’s is slightly less glaring perhaps, but over the past couple of years it’s become clear to me (from the stream of obvious nonsense he shares indiscriminantly on X) that he is actively trying to participate in an assault on objective truth.

I have no idea what parts of the job Musk is doing to please Trump while he does what he really cares about, or vice versa, or whether they’re both weirdly in sync.

We frankly don’t even know the claimed purpose of this whole DOGE thing, let alone Musk’s real motivation. Trump’s January 20 authorizing Executive Order – which is the only information presented under the DOGE official web site’s “About” heading – describes the purpose as more or less a software audit process. Make sure everybody’s using good, intercompatible systems to maximize productivity and efficiency, that sort of thing.

There is an undefined reference there to implementing “the President’s DOGE Agenda,” but I can find no other reference to this supposed agenda on the White House web site, so I don’t know what this DOGE Agenda is.

Musk recently said that DOGE is just there to make sure that Trump’s Executive Orders are promulgated throughout the departments. But it’s hard to say which is the cart and which the horse. Did Trump come up with the Workforce Optimization Initiative and then tell Musk to start laying people off, or did Musk bring the initiative to Trump and say “Let me do this”? (Or did OMB Director Russell Vought bring it to both of them?) How about the one calling for elimination of regulations and enforcement? Or the one on reforming the federal hiring process, by which Trump meant a war on equity activity.

All of these, as I read them, greatly expanded the purpose of the DOGE office – which, as you’ve probably heard, the administration now denies Musk runs or works for. Despite this, they are nowhere to be found on the official DOGE web site. There might as well be a guy-shrugging emoji.

At times Musk and/or Trump crows that DOGE is saving money, or eliminating fraud, or some other justification, but then we find that it has done things that don’t meet any of those goals.

We do know that we can’t believe anything claimed by either of the two billionaire liars. They both continue to spread blatantly incorrect claims about what DOGE has done, and why. They just decide to claim things: that USAID was thoroughly corrupt, for instance. One of my favorite bits from a Temporary Restraining Order hearing was when Judge Nichols asked administration attorneys why it so desperately needed to immediately place 2,200 USAID workers on paid leave; the government “had no response,” the Judge wrote, “beyond asserting without any record support that USAID writ large was possibly engaging in corruption and fraud.”

This in fact seems to be one of the crucial lessons learned by Trump and his team for this second go-‘round in the White House: have more confidence that if you declare a door to be there, you will be able to walk right on through the wall. Like Michael Scott loudly declaring “BANKRUPTCY” in the Dunder-Mifflin office, Trump has declared a national emergency of invading criminals; the innocence of everybody prosecuted for January 6 crimes; a decrepitude of our military forces (blamed on woke policies); the proven failure of DEI; the non-existence of transgender and non-binary people; and much more.

Trump lied a lot in his first term, obviously, but usually to puff himself up or deflect blame from himself. I don’t know, maybe the team was spooked by the early “Muslim ban” missteps, or perhaps he just didn’t have the staff that would take the key step of running through the wall on his declaration that a door was actually there.

Now he’s loaded up specifically with people who will do exactly that. You say we’re not allowed to simply hold onto money rather than spending it as directed by Congress? But didn’t you hear Trump declare that we can and must?

Musk is high among the most dedicated wall-smashers in Trump’s new orbit—not entirely surprising for a financial entrepreneur I suppose. But I kind of wish I knew what the hell he thinks he’s doing – or, barring that, at least know what he in fact is doing.