Elon gets a whole post to himself. Not because he said something racist, but because he said something so massively dumb.
🚨ELON MUSK: "I think we can rip out at least 2T out of the wasted 6.5T Harris/Biden budget. All government spending is taxation. Your money is being wasted and the DEPARTMENT OF GOVERNMENT EFFICIENCY is going to FIX that. We're going to get the Government off of your back, and… pic.twitter.com/uDx6jyFN1k
— Autism Capital 🧩 (@AutismCapital) October 27, 2024
Elon used to be smart enough to do simple addition, but he thinks we can cut "at least" $2 trillion from federal spending—which amounted to $6.7 trillion in FY2024, not $6.5 trillion.
The arithmetic here is simple. If you add up Social Security + Medicare¹ + defense² + veterans pensions + interest on the debt³ you get $4.4 trillion. There's only $2.3 trillion left.
So Elon is claiming we should literally zero out the entire rest of the federal budget. Everything. The FBI, national parks, food stamps, Medicaid, education, NASA, the EPA, farm support, the NIH, all federal R&D grants, embassies worldwide, the FAA, the Department of Justice, the VA, the weather service, the border patrol, etc. etc. Everything.
What is it that didn't just move Musk to the right, but turned him into into a screaming, drooling lunatic with the effective IQ of a squirrel? I won't say I've never seen anything like it, but I've never seen it quite so unhinged from a basically sane and brilliant starting point.
¹Trump has promised not to cut either one.
²Trump has promised to increase defense spending.
³Both are legally obligated.
UPDATE: I originally wrote this post using 2023 spending numbers. I've updated it to 2024. Nothing changed about the conclusion, though.
People who support Trump don't care if the things he or his surrogates say are true, feasible, moral, or even possible. They just like to have their ignorance, hatred, and bigotry massaged.
It’s all bullshit and lies coming from every Republican. Either they’re too stupid to know what they’re talking about, or they’re too evil to not lie about everything. Either way: there are no good Republicans. At all.
"I won't say I've never seen anything like it, but I've never seen it quite so unhinged from a basically sane and brilliant starting point."
Calls into question the assumption of a basically sane and brilliant starting point. Or, the Trump virus is stronger than we care to admit.
I've believed for years that the entire private equity industry is basically a slots casino. When someone wins big everyone around them thinks they must be smart (or "have alpha") but, no, they just won at slots. Elmo won big a couple times in a row. It doesn't prove anything.
Yes and no. Yes, it is basically slots, but no, the companies he led needed some smarts to work.
Dude, he's shitposting.
For attention.
To be fair, something like $50b of the mandatory budget is administrative and could, in theory, be cut without reducing benefits, but that’s very small beans even if you could actually do it.
Thanks for this super meaningful contribution to the conversation. $50b in a $6.1t budget is so significant. It’s on the order of “I can balance my roughly $80k household budget if I just unsubscribe to the $15 per month HBO package.”
I just like to be complete and accurate, even with respect to the little things.
But why?
Because I don’t want to be like a conservative.
Ugh! This thinking is so wide-spread yet so bogus: All administration and management is a waste of money.
I have worked in environments where management had been eliminated to "simplify" operations. Too much bureaucracy is a barrier to effectiveness but the lack of management and administration is chaos. In fact, in the absence of administration every department grows its own, ad hoc and directionless processes that dimmish effectiveness on their own.
If you think that government could be managed better, then reform it by all means. If you think administration can be eliminated and the money pocketed, you are in for a rude awakening.
You start where you can. And I cust our budget in half by doing that.
But uhh... that doesn't work if you want to get anything done.
I think it's paranoia, because with that much money he no longer knows who he can trust or how he can trust them, so he defaults to siding with the most menacing creeps and psychotics because it's better to have them inside the tent pissing out and think of the sheer scale of piss that is. Who would want to get near that?
My answer to Musk - never going to buy your car. Period. Never. Thought about it but now - never.
Avoid Xitter?
I avoided Twitter, I can avoid its shittier version too.
Not his car. He just bought in to an enterprise that was modifying cars to run on batteries so they could have the money to start an EV design from scratch. The ugly as fuck pickup is his car. As they say, even a blind hog can find two acorns.
This is not true.
Tesla had no facilities, no cars, no customers, no employees before Musk joined the executives.
There were two guys who'd done electric modifications before, but they'd never manufactured a car.
What makes you think Trump 2 will follow legal obligations?
I can kind of get a working class guy in a dying Midwest town - who (correctly) sees the neoliberal model as failing millions like him - being willing to burn it all down.
But what is harder to understand is how people who are successful are so willing to break the system that made them rich. People say “oh, they’re greedy for tax cuts so they can make another 5%”. I’ve said that myself, but given the obvious stakes I don’t really believe it.
No, there’s something about the “woke mind virus” that drives people like musk and lots of other successful people absolutely out of their minds. 5% more won’t do that.
I think they have come to expect veneration from the multitudes. Their wallets are fat but their egos are fragile. They can’t stand criticism and almost never hear it. The idea that someone might call them racist or sexist for doing and saying stuff that seemed normal for their entire lives somehow kicks the legs out from under that fancy chair they sit in.
It seems weird to me that this strikes such a nerve - why they can’t just laugh it off - but it does.
"people who are successful are so willing to break the system that made them rich."
It's because they've already got theirs.
Exactly. Government? The Environment? Civil Society? They all think they are such Winners that they can ride out anything and still come out on top. Human beings judge their success relative to those around them. As long as Musk is doing better than (and has more power than) you and I, he'll be content to roast marshmallows over the fire.
Except that dying Midwest town will continue to die no matter who is president. It might even die a bit faster with Trump.
They always die faster under Republicans. The stats say so.
Yeah, totally.
What turned Elon into a "screaming, drooling lunatic with the effective IQ of a squirrel?" Can't say with any degree of certainty, but the smart way to bet may be due to his use of ketamine:
"adverse psychiatric reactions" include "hallucinations and emergence delirium."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ketamine#Adverse_effects
Just speculation. But seems consistent with the observed behavior.
He has a well documented ketamine problem.
+3 to the ketamine hypothesis.
It's the end here. Lying with complete abandon is the norm now.
How long has Musk been saying that his cars have full self-driving? His budget claims are the same thing: a marketing lie.
Ha ha. If he were - God forbid - put in charge of Government Efficiency, Musk would return a box of WhiteOut to Office Depot, get bored, and declare that the other $1,999,992.50 would be saved over the next 18 months
Haha, yes. But I must offer this correction: the other $1,999,999,999,992.50 is left for the next 18 months. Or is WhiteOut much, much more expensive than I thought??
He hasn't, ever, said they have it - just that they will have it next year.
Of course, it's one of those problems which every time you try to get more and more automated it gets more complex.
The Kool aid has slid down his throat. After the disaster of his Twitter purchase and the continuing hollowing of his other interests, he's following Trump's business plan: grift.
"All government spending is taxation." Wow, what a revelation. Elon Musk the genius at work.
Elmo has always been purely a bullshit artist. Sometimes his bullshit has enabled people who know what they're doing, so they could keep on doing it and do it well-- early Tesla and Space-X, say-- and sometimes his bullshit artistry has given them cover to take more time when they've needed it.
Often enough his bullshit artistry has created problems for the capable people, most pointedly in insisting that full self-driving has to happen with only optical input. Oh, also firing almost everybody at Twitter who had any idea how to run a social-media platform that can function usefully for responsible actors.
His claim about cutting 2 bills off spending is just more bullshit. Although he'd actually be fine with cutting the 2 bills as long as his companies got their sweet, sweet funding from Uncle Sugar. Actually that would be the dream, ketamine-fueled or not.
But that number is as real as vacuum-tube transport between the Bay and LA. He pulled it out of the same place.
My grand theory, ketamine aside, is that he's capitulating to someone he recognizes he can never hold a candle to in the realm of bullshit artistry. It's at the same time both a humiliation and a relief-- somebody is better at a core life skill than he is, and also he no longer has to keep striving so hard to out-bullshit the world.
It's an awkward combination of feelings that he expresses as the dancing dipshit.
"His claim about cutting 2 bills off spending is just more bullshit."
Not 2 billion, 2 trillion.
Good catch, my bad-- too reality-based, I guess, for the really big leagues.
You drive with only optical input, don't you?
Actually no, and neither do you. We both also rely at least on feedback from the road surface through the steering wheel and pedals, and probably on auditory input like horns and revving engines (though the latter one might not be so possible as time goes on). I've also been driving for 55 or so years so even the merely optical input is interpreted through experience of what to watch for and what kinds of situations call for caution, extra attention, crossing a lane line, etc. You do too, though I'm guessing your experience isn't quite as lengthy. Of course I'm aware that comprehensive programming and AI can likely duplicate or surpass whatever our experience brings us.
But if we had infrared sensors or radar or lidar built into our heads we could react a lot faster to things like kids suddenly jumping out from between parked cars, or deer jumping onto a country road in front of us at dusk, or a truck tire shredding itself a few car-lengths ahead on a freeway, or verify that a trailer stopped across the roadway in front of us is in fact there. So could a self-driving car. And that's why no other car maker that I know of is trying to make a pure optical-only system work.
Of course, these others are are operating with the salutary discipline of major liability lawsuits in mind, and it seems that Musk must have the luxury of not caring about that.
The defence budget could be cut in half without jeopardizing national security or military aid to allies.
The military industrial complex is a jobs program with investors taking their cut.
Exactly. On our shores it's a jobs program. Worldwide it's an asset protection program for our corporations and investors.
If you're going through all the whack things from this despicable rally, you forgot to mention the part where Musk says, if Trump wins, we'll go through "temporary hardship," and how he will need added security after taking away programs that help the poor and middle class, who "are going to be upset about that." (So maybe not so temporary for those groups.)
From what I’ve been reading Musk came here illegally and obtained citizenship fraudulently. Not saying he isn’t a depraved lunatic anyway, but has anyone considered that Trump could easily call for his denaturalization and deportation? Perhaps Trump’s people let him know they expected his cooperation.
Given Melania's record, he might think that Musk's similar behavior just shows how smart he is to get away with it. But then he might still use the strategy you suggested. He's anything but consistent.
Well, trump isn't the only player who can use this. Just the threat would be nice leverage for somebody like the little gauleiter, Stephen Miller, whatever he might want from Musk.
Kevin, Musk was never "brilliant." The Guardian summed it up pretty well in just a few words, have a refresher! =)
Trump’s claim that Musk is a genius is undermined slightly by his business record. Several of Musk’s enterprises, including Tesla and SpaceX, have relied on US subsidies and government contracts.
Musk’s stewardship of Tesla has been marked by over-promising and under-delivering on a range of products, including fully self-driving vehicles; the so-called Hyperloop, which was intended to revolutionise transport, ended up being scrapped to build a parking lot; two million Tesla cars had to be recalled due to safety concerns, and the Tesla Roadster, a car promised to consumers in 2017, was delayed again this year.
Since purchasing Twitter (now X) for $44bn, the value of the social media platform has been reduced by over half.
Musk has also faced criticism after reports that he has spoken privately with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
How is having the government for a customer mean your business isn't brilliant?
I knew a drug dealer back in Boston in the 1970s who started out brilliant (friends told me) but by the time I met him was a raging freak.
It was acid and way too much coke that done it.
+1
Maybe the inevitable death haunts the rich. They beat poverty and insignificance but they can't beat death.
Musk personally does need Medicaid or SNAP and is actively opposed to anything government does that protects workers or the environment, so of course he thinks it is all "waste". Of course those government subsidies for space flight and tariffs on Chinese EVs are absolutely critical.
Aside from the fact that Musk has gone bonkers and lies like a rug, there IS a case to be made that we can cut government sending considerably. As someone who has worked for various parts of the Federal Government for near 40 years now, there is a LOT of wasteful spending in the Government.
If we had some sort of bipartisan consensus, we probably could cut out some of it, but it would require changing incentives in Congress (no porkbarrels) and changing the incentives for federal workers. Which is not going to happen
In general, until you fix Congress everything else in the federal level will be broken.
Transferable vote is the best way of fixing Congress.
We haven't had 'pork' for decades.
The US government is a VERY large enterprise; current budget is $6.5 trillion. That's 6.5 million million dollars. Any one person working for the government gets a worm's eye view, unless they're very near the top of the heap, in which case they get "the view from 40,000 feet". Such a huge enterprise is never going to be 100% efficient; there will always be some waste. If the government is 99% efficient (I don't think it's quite that good, but lets assume it for the sake of this discussion) then there is 1% or $65 billion a year waste.
That one percent is sixty-five thousand million dollars. If you see a million dollars wasted, which a federal employee might well in many jobs, it's meaningless in the overall budget.
The other issue with reducing government waste is that it costs money. Economic efficiency says that if you have to spend more than a dollar to reduce waste by a dollar then you should just tolerate the waste. I get the impression that in many places that is already happening; the bureaucracy is so focused on, specifically, anti-corruption measures that the cost of compliance is more than the amount saved by those measures.
What is it that didn't just move Musk to the right, but turned him into into a screaming, drooling lunatic with the effective IQ of a squirrel?
Kevin as usual assumes simple, good-faith ignorance when the reality is more likely that Musk is gaslighting to help Trump win.
Exactly: Musk is a salesman, a very talented if not particularly ethical salesman but a salesman. This is how he got the money together for his various companies. And if you d the scorecard: Two of his companies stand out for success: Tesla and the rocket company. The rest is limping along--how long ago did you hear anything about Boring?
My hypothesis is this: Both electric cars and rockets attract a type of idealistic engineer who is willing to put up even with Musk just to get a job in their preferred field. And it would be these people who are responsible for the success of those tow enterprises. Elon was just hovering around creating extra problems that the engineers had to work around. (Remember the chaotic roll out of model 3?) And such employees are hard to find for tunnel construction.
I have long believed that the success of a company rests on the quality of middle management (plus the willingness of top managers to let them do their job without constant interference). The recent history of Boeing is only one example that points in that direction.
Too much management is a real issue. Especially when their only concern is avoiding accountability.
The department of government efficiency sounds a lot like The House Committee on Un-American Activities. What's next? the Department of Truth? Of course when he says efficiency he means low to no taxes for him and pain and misery for the rest of us.
Elon Musk craves adulation over all else. He is worshipped by the right. That's all you need to know.
Frankly, I think the only sense in which he ever cared about climate change was if he gets to go down in history as the one who solved it single handedly. Barring that, he doesn't care at all.
I, for one, have never thought he was smart nor even particularly sane. Of all his companies, the only ones that have done well are the two that have or had a market all to themselves.
And before anyone says he created Tesla, no he didn't. Tesla was created by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tappenning. Musk used his Paypal money to buy a lot of shares and force the founders out. Here's a hint: if a billionaire has to sue non-billionaires for the right to call himself a founder, he isn't.
He's not a screaming, drooling lunatic with the effective IQ of a squirrel. He's speaking to a crowd full of them.