Also note that Elon Musk is a “special government employee” and “limited to working for the government for no more than 130 days out of a 365-day period.” I believe that period would be over at the end of May, so either way, he’ll be gone by June.
For what it is worth, (according to AP), DOGE was originally intended to operate until July 4, 2026. Assuming that 130 day limit is accurate, it seems they would have had to replace him in June. Now it sounds like DOGE may not last that long either.
They’ve done enough damage as it is.
Elon has gotten what he wanted. A treasure trove of data to feed his AI, with backdoors into every government system for any further need he has. He has set himself up to get more government contracts and fuck over his competition. I don’t know if he stopped all investigations into his companies but he certainly did major damage to them continuing. Hell, since Trump is now pardoning corporations, it wouldn’t be surprising if he pardons all of Elon’s companies as a reward for a job well done.
270 million buys plenty….All thinks considered he did well , He went where no private citizen went before with doors wide open!
All of this and more. Elon doesn’t really have the attention span to pay attention to any given thing for more than three months anyway; now he’ll move onto developing robotic prostitutes, or designing a floating rave platform, or making a submersible out of unobtanium that can swim through pure lava and go to the core of the Earth because he saw a ‘documentary’ about it one night while high on psilocybin and K. And by this I mean he will have some SpaceX interns put together a Powerpoint deck based on his inchoate ramblings and then email it to a bunch of Tesla engineers along with a note saying, “I promised we would deliver this by September. Don’t make me look like an idiot.”
Stranger
Musk is a convenient scapegoat for Trump to circumvent the institutions meant to check and balance, plus take the blame.
They use each other. Musk was happy to do this for revenge, power, data, shits and giggles, attention and for obvious business reasons regarding car tariffs, contracts, taxes and having the presidential war on Mars, China and much else.
Too late, mate.
This feels like a shot across Trump’s bow:
Not an exoneration of Musk, overall, but good to see that we’re edging down to a single potential Manchurian Candidate, rather than two.
Who would have picked the open fascist for the voice of reason in this?
It’s not “voice of reason”; the tariffs are just impacting Elon’s business interests. He doesn’t give a fuck about the ‘suckers’ who are paying taxes and suffering the consequences of these tariffs; he just doesn’t want to suffer them himself. He’s just as much of a self-absorbed narcissistic asshole as he has always been, even if he is temporarily aligned against this particular action.
Stranger
It seems as though Elon is on his way out, and the reason does seem to be one of competence and not clashing with Trump personally. I mean, he’s clashing like a dumb, drug-addled nazi fuck with everyone else but Trump, which I would lay in the competence category. Oh, and even Trump must realize that Leon has done a terrible job with DOGE, and it’s been a PR nightmare for the administration.
You mean in a manner distinct from how all of the other appointees and ‘advisors’ like Pete Hegseth, Stephen Miller, and Scott Bessent have done terrible jobs and created PR nightmares for the Trump regime?
Stranger
Haha, well… I think one difference is that Leon is a troll like his master and thus went about his DOGE work in the most combative and obnoxious manner possible, whereas the others, while stupid and obnoxious people, have not made a point of flipping a neon, skyscraper tall bird to the American people with every move they’ve made.
That really depends on what you think the goal is.
Save money? Of course; terrible job.
Government efficiency? Terrible job.
Kneecap the government in all areas in order to make it more attractive to allow the private sector to come in and pick up the pieces because it’s got to be done NOW, in about a hundred and forty different departments, and the government has lost all knowledgeable and experienced employees? Excellent job.
I don’t think that Leon has any real coherent strategy, really. I’ve heard lots of speculation such as what you just said, and it makes sense in a way, but I think these guys are really too dumb to think in these terms and execute on it. Also, if such a plan were in place, I think they’d want to be quieter and more subtle about it.
It makes sense if you factor in that Musk at this point is drug addled and high on his own massively overinflated image of brilliance, combined with his gleeful embrace of adolescent edgelord trollery. Maybe he started out just planning to smash any arm of government that might interfere with his businesses but got caught up in the glee of destruction for destruction’s sake,
Right, that’s my impression.
It is an error to think that just because Musk is arrogant, overimpressed with his own technical and managerial prowess, and possibly drug-addled that he has no plan or strategy whatsoever. His team of information technogoons have definitely been ensconcing themselves into various departments, breaking critical information and payment systems and potentially scraping data and creating backdoors into their attempts to rebuild those systems. That all of this has been breaking functionality and causing disruption is the strategy, making DOGE (which is a quasi-agency mutated from the pre-existing U.S. Digital Service from which nearly all existing employees were driven out) his personal fiefdom and ensuring that agencies are totally dependent upon DOGE. Musk has aptly demonstrated how much control he has over Trump to the extent that many critics have taken to calling him the “co-president” or otherwise alluding to him pulling Trump’s strings.
Musk’s work there is essentially complete, and I’m morally certain he’s tired of spending time in D.C. while also watching a substantial portion of his net worth decline in falling Tesla stock prices (although this honestly hurts the creditors who accepted his options as collateral more than it actually does for Musk). Elon still has somewhere near half of his net worth in the (grossly overvalued) SpaceX which has become a major contractor for the Department of Defense, especially the idiotic proposed “Golden Dome” ABM system, and is poised to also take over essentially all spaceflight contracts for NASA.
Stranger
I think he thinks he has one, but I don’t think it’s coherent.
The question is whether all these people are simply, with honesty to at least themselves, engaged in a criminal conspiracy, or if they are lying to themselves that they are doing something good for the country. I don’t have an answer to that myself.
But my impression from his media appearances is that Musk is acting with some level of sincerity. His weepy-eyed umbrage at any criticism does not seem like very good acting but a genuine naive reaction.