CTRL+ALT+ELON
He moved fast and broke things – other people’s things.
Like a lot of rich people — Donald Trump, for one — Elon Musk wasn’t happy just piling up money. He needed something more out of life, specifically the personal validation and appearance of gravitas that only high-level political power provides. He was never going to win an election, so he obtained power the easy way: He paid for it. For a low low $300 million, he got to add Serious Government Official to his resume.
Judging from the tweet below, it’s ended badly. Elon seems to have learned what any competent public administrator could have told him, that government is not a private fief to be right-sized with a chainsaw, and that it’s the plutocratic tail that wags the policy dog, not the other way ‘round.
Elon is right about the tax bill, which you can think of as Trump’s latest rape. But he knew this was coming. And what, exactly, did Elon achieve?
DOGE claims to have cut $180 billion in federal spending, or $1,118 per taxpayer, about 9% of what Elon once foolishly projected he’d cut. Even if that claim is accurate, the cuts evaporate next to the additional federal debt that the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimates Trump’s Big Beautiful budget bill will generate: $4.5 trillion over 10 years and $37 trillion by 2054. That would bring publicly held federal debt (the part that really counts) to as high as 133% of GDP in 2034 from around 98% now. That 2034 figure would far exceed the 106% peak reached — for reasons far more justifiable than billionaire tax cuts — just after World War II.
So kudos to Elon for this titillating act of MAGA heresy, keeping in mind that it might owe something to Ketamine and to a Big Beautiful threat to EV tax credits. But set it against the lethality DOGE’s reckless hacking.
A study by Boston University’s Brooke Nichols concludes that at least 315,000 people — two-thirds of them children — have died as a result of cuts in foreign aid and the dismantling of the US Agency for International Development. David Brooks cited the study on the PBS NewsHour last week, noting that if you extrapolate that death rate for the duration of Trump’s term, we’re talking millions of deaths attributable to Elon’s pet project.
Then Brooks found himself saying this:
“There are mass murderers in the world — Pol Pot, Mao Zedong, Stalin — we don't have anybody on the list from America. And I don’t think it’s the same as committing the kind of genocide they did. But by taking away that agency and being at least semi-responsible for the deaths of, probably by the end of this, hundreds of thousands if not millions of people — that’s Elon Musk’s legacy.”
Yes, that’s right. Elon’s not guilty of intentional, industrialized, Final Solution-scale genocide, but something more palatable. We need another term for this sort of murder. Maybe “the soft genocide of low expectations.”
Devastating.