This is going to sound a little dumb after everything that's gone down, but ..... what is actually the point of DOGE? That is, what does Elon Musk think is the point of DOGE?
By now it's obvious that Musk has no actual efficiency agenda on tap. He just waltzes into agencies, targets a few percent of the workforce for termination, and then moves along to another agency. This is not serious stuff.
What else? He's got his list of canceled contracts, which is also little more than a joke. The numbers are minuscule and he's never explained why some contracts are bad while others are OK.
Then there's his mysterious cadre of DOGE bros, who do mysterious programming work that Musk refuses to explain. But one thing we do know is that they aren't making anything more efficient. A few weeks of coding simply can't do that, no matter how smart the coders are. Whatever they're up to, it's something fairly simplistic that can be implemented without deep knowledge of the underlying system.
Finally there are Musk's periodic spectacles, like his chainsaw-wielding production number this weekend. He's a great showman, but that doesn't hide the fact that he never says anything substantive and is startlingly non-transparent.
None of this is meant to explain why I think DOGE is pointless. It's meant to question what Musk thinks about it. If he's not taking DOGE seriously—and he doesn't seem to be—then what game is he playing? Is he just bluffing Trump and hoping he can keep it up for a while like a Ponzi scheme? Or what?
He is very, very stupid, but believes he is very, very smart, and he actually thinks this is what management looks like. It’s what he did at Twitter but on a grand scale. There’s no plan, any more than Trump has a plan. They both have the same comprehension of cause and effect as a schnauzer.
Except that you can housebreak a schnauzer.
On top of that, his goal is to break government - not fix it. He's just going to say he's fixing it, but by fixing it he means he's going to make it work for his personal interests and nobody else's.
Why is this not obvious to our pundits?
Suppose he does break the government. Then what? Does the richest man on earth destroy the system that made him so rich?
See above: stupid
I don't really buy that he/they are stupid. I think they are ecstatic that Trump's tactics have worked so well in the last eight years, and they want to move the Overton window even further for even greater benefits. And they want to do it in a hurry before the forces of justice and equity can reorganize and react.
"I don't really buy that he/they are stupid."
+1 for that.
Trump clearly wants to break the government because he wants to be the government (i.e. a dictator).
Not obvious wehere Musk believes he fits in. Maybe he thinks that once Trump dies, whoever come afterwards will not have the hordes or cultists supporters, and he (Musk) will be able to manipulate them more than he can manipulate Trump.
Well given that he's so super duper rich (and in their worldview, wealth makes right), he knows he'll be fine as long as nobody Luigi's him. But that's what he's got all that money for.
And for his allies, it's a revolt against any sort of social contract, even if they benefited from it. They've convinced themselves that the common welfare means they suffer because they've forgotten the benefits of a civil society.
If you know or have been around any affluent/rich people, the fact that there are a lot of people who think this way isn't really a surprise. It's depressingly common.
This was interesting along those lines.
https://www.notesfromthecircus.com/p/the-plot-against-america
yes, break governance incidental to an ultra right takeover. also muzzle the press, politicize the courts and rig elections. musk is Coyote.
Don't think of being smart/dumb as a single dimension. Haven't you known people who are extremely smart in some things and dumber than dirt in other areas? This is Musk. People like him make the mistake of hubris. They think because they're smart in some things they're smarter than everyone in everything. You see the same thing in top people in all sorts of areas.
I have known people like that. He is not one of them. He’s a deadbeat dad drug addict who cheats at video games to seem cool online. Like Trump, he inherited money, and our society is structured so that the rich only fail up, but he is as dumb as a brick and mean as a snake.
If you are an internet company, most of your costs are payroll. This is not the case for the government. He may be ignorant of that.
OR, he may think government workers are lazy if not outright incompetent. After all, lots of people think that. He may think civil service protections harm productivity, because they remove fear as a motivator.
He may think that the government is organized in a foolish way, and incremental change doesn't work because there is always another administration who comes along.
To be sure, there's some legacy garbage in the governments computer systems. Stuff that is still there precisely because government isn't business, and businesses have mostly rid themselves of, due to having a consistent, long-term effort which isn't really possible in light of constant budget fights and shifting priorities.
For the complaints about how he trashed Twitter, I will note that Twitter still operates. It still draws pixels on the screen. It still performs all the functions it is supposed to. If it is losing users and advertisers, it is because of the editorial policies of Twitter, which I see as almost completely disconnected to the job cuts.
So, if the big job cuts worked there, they must work everywhere, right?
Musk said his mind is like a storm. I believe him. I don't think he's dumb. I think he's arrogant. If he spends 10 seconds thinking about something, he believes that his thoughts are more important, more correct, and more valuable than someone who has spent a lifetime with those issues. I have seen this attitude, I know it well. So much of this stuff is just mistakes that come from shooting from the hip.
He is a fool, first and foremost. And if it gets bad enough, Trump will throw him under the bus, while enjoying the chaos he's sown and is not easily undone.
I think it's more likely that he sees government employees (i.e., regulators) as the enemy of his interests. Which is true! He's a rapacious, unrepentant capitalist who is hellbent on getting ever more money and going to Mars (but not personally because he's not that brave). Government employees who are working for the common welfare ARE the enemy of his interests.
So he's doing his level best to axe them all or scare them all into submission.
He wants the data, for leverage against his competitors and to feed his AI models. Anything else is a long shot, but I'm sure that's his primary imperative.
Spot on.
> A few weeks of coding simply can't do that, no matter how smart the coders are. Whatever they're up to, it's something fairly simplistic that can be implemented without deep knowledge of the underlying system.
So you're saying that "expertise" is actually a thing? Who knew?
Data mining seems to be certain. These kids are hackers. If Josh Marshall's reporting is true, they're getting root access. So installing backdoors for future use would seem an additional imperative.
This is one of my biggest fears. We have no idea where those data are going, or will go. And not just for commercial purposes (you think Facebook and Google are wired into your life? just wait!) but for foreign intelligence. Imagine what an intelligence service would pay for (or do to steal) databases of every American working for the government (including in defense and intelligence) AND of every American with tax troubles. I just can't even ...
This was one of the first things that came to my mind when the extent of these droogies' access started to become clear and I'm honestly surprised you're the only other person I've seen mention it. When he isn't feeding off Uncle Sugar, Musk depends a great deal on China and needs to maintain his access there. India too, I believe. The felon is deep inside Putin's pocket for mysterious reasons. None of this is secret.
I've tried to think what would look different about this whole dogie operation if they'd set out to loot our most sensitive information, both national and personal, to sell or pass on to other entities, and I don't come up with much. Instead I get an image from the line about a patient etherized upon a table.
Beyond that nightmare fuel, there's very recently been talk about what competition means to most of us-- relatively stable short-run balance among firms with creative destruction over longer terms-- as opposed to what it means in Silicon Valley. Which is more like total annihilation of the opponent. Elmo is one of the people who had a hand in defining competition in SV. Wouldn't this kind of access be the ultimate competitive edge?
+10! And to totally disorganized government so the convicted felon can take total advantage of everything while folks are trying to focus. It’s a huge distraction.
DOGE is two things.
First, it is spectacle. It's kayfabe for the rubes (whose taxes are TOO DAMN HIGH, who HATE all that Big Gummint Spending on those dusky Others, but who DESERVE everything THEY get), and it's grist for entertainment-hungry media (it's BIG, it's BOLD, it's CONTROVERSIAL!). It's very useful politically.
And second, it's cover. Because despite its undeniable stupidity as management -- see also Elmo's "management" of Twitter and Tesla -- there IS a pattern of getting rid of anyone who might get in the way of (1) obedience to the Orange Guy's whims (eg, the bloodbaths at DOJ and the Joint Chiefs) or (2) his or Elmo's personal enrichment (eg, the firings of Inspectors General pretty much everywhere, the plundering of probably the world's most valuable databases, and also Elmo's vendetta against USAID, which was investigating Starlink). That is, it's useful personally for them.
It's a shame no Democratic politicians seem to be interested in pointing any of this out, but, well, priorities you know ...
Kayfabe for the rubes and right wing bros is an absolutely apt analogy.
He needs the FBI to cut the power so he can open the vault and steal the bearer bonds.
He doesn't think he's Hans Gruber. He thinks he's Adrian Veidt from Watchmen. In his mind he's a super-powered genius who needs to destroy half the world to save the other half.
I think he's sincere about his "woke mind virus" jabber, and wants to force the opposite on the world. Nazis are about as anti-woke as it gets, and there we are.
I am not a fan of "sins-of-the-father" thinking, but family does matter. So it is worth mentioning that his grandparents fled Canada for South Africa for ideological reasons, and multiple generations of his family have a history of supporting Nazis and then Apartheid.
The grifting, destruction of the US's dominance and cruelty are probably just bonuses.
His twit bros love this.
Can't overlook the most obvious possibility....that the world's richest man isn't actually as smart or competent as his self-created myths, numerous sycophants and worshipers have led us to believe.
+10 The rich seem to think they are brilliant. Most have simply been fortunate.
I believe that Musk IS smart. I also believe that he's mentally ill and getting worse.
It seems pretty obvious to me that he's like... somewhere around the 65th percentile of intellect. He appears to be a little smarter than average, but he's only just smart enough to think he's fucking more clever than everybody else. In actuality, he just had emerald mine money.
There are lots of people (cough, Trump) who inherited substantial fortunes and did very little with them. Elon inherited a nice fortune and turned it into the world's biggest fortune. He definitely made some right choices on where to invest that inherited money.
Lately, however, he seems determined to piss it away, starting with the purchase of Twitter. That, plus his periodically bizarre public behavior, is what leads me to believe he's mentally ill and deteriorating.
I don't think you can discount that he lives in his own little world and doesn't pay attention to much else.
I mean, in the H1B controversy of only a few weeks go, he posted something along the lines of "that was eye opening". Meaning, he was surprised to learn that Trump and MAGA are anti-immigration. That was the point at which I realized this was not a serious person.
Musk is an excellent example of how some people in our society just have so much money they are no longer really living in the society with the rest of us.
More to your point, my experience of this personality type is that they tend to think everything they do is perfect and will be applauded by everyone around them. It doesn't much matter to them if the behavior has a point.
I wonder if he is going to take the info he gets and give it to Putin (another buddy of his) or to the Chinese in return for concessions he wants from China. He could also use it to trade for something with Saudi Arabia.
And we will all be left holding the bag, so to speak.
+10. He doesn't have to give it, he just opens the taps his DOGGIE boys are installing. Trump, Musk, and Putin (each with different talents) will eventually fight over who's capo di capo. Musk would win by virtue of youth, but he should stay away fron windows.
AGENDA: Destroy the existing government and replace it with a libertarian-tech-bro paradise. AI will replace everyone!
There is a good essay about this over at Vanity Fair:
Why Is Elon Musk So Hell-Bent on Bulldozing the Government?
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/elon-musk-doge-donald-trump-silicon-valley
1,400 words
also
The Plot Against America - How a Dangerous Ideology Born From the Libertarian Movement Stands Ready to Seize America
https://www.notesfromthecircus.com/p/the-plot-against-america
6,000 words: includes how Curtis Yarvin and Zero Hedge are shaping minds (for the worse). It's a heavy read, but worth your time.
Hah, if I’d read further down before posting that same link… great minds and all that.
He's smacking the bureaucracy (and academia) so that it will bend the knee. I also think they might be chumming for Republicans who say 'no', and then will bury them in a primary.
What they are doing is making Trump the center of the systems. They used to be segmented and you had to go through procedures. The goal here is to give Trump a big red button he can push and stop payments across any part of government so no one can go around him.
One possible motive is simply to destroy the ability of the federal government to do anything, which would be one way of destroying its ability to resist handing lots of tax dollars over to SpaceX and other Musk businesses in the future. Conveniently this would also destroy the government's ability to make Musk businesses like Neuralink or Tesla comply with federal laws.
What he wants to end up with, I think, is a government that will not regulate (i.e. enforce the law against) his businesses but _will_ just hand over lots of tax dollars no strings attached to oligarchs like himself.
That's my best guess. On the other hand he might believe some more of the crazy lines he's feeding the rubes--it's hard to know!
If the federal government loses the ability to do anything, wouldn't that include losing the ability to hand lots of tax dollars over to SpaceX and other Musk businesses?
what is actually the point of DOGE?
From Musk's perspective, that purpose is to eviscerate the state capacity of the United States, ie, break the government. It's certainly not about the country's fiscal situation.
I'm revisiting the miniseries I, Claudius, which shows Tiberius and Claudius handing Rome to the worst successors they can find (namely, Caligula and Nero). In both cases, it's sort of revenge against Rome for not living up to their expectations.
Musk enjoys firing people and ruining people’s lives. Maybe that is reward enough.
He may also be assigning himself money, as the switcheroo to Starlink from Verizon for an FAA contract suggests.
"Musk enjoys firing people and ruining people’s lives. "
The cruelty is the point.
"Waste" is any mission you don't like--that is, anything Democrats got as their end of some long-ago bargain. So their aim is to cut all of that.
Another angle is--if you cut tons of stuff, everyone will come begging to have the bits they care about restored. There are a lot of kickbacks to be harvested from an effort like that. Every program you cancel is a gift that it's in your power to give.
For EM, there's also the benefits of exercising power over a bunch of federal agencies that used to themselves exercise oversight power at his various contractor companies. It's tremendously valuable to Elon the shareholder to have the dozen-or-so agencies to whom he used to report instead reporting to him. He and his companies will collect a vast windfall.
As his appearance at CPAC makes clear, his neurons are fried and he has no attention span or ability to track. Watch:
https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:4llrhdclvdlmmynkwsmg5tdc/post/3lindcsnmy42h
I'm reminded of Dustin Hoffman in Rainman.
Leon may be brilliant with some things, but otherwise he is retarded.
And no, I am not calling him a retard.
"Affected with impaired intellectual development."
"Socially inappropriate or foolish."
What baffles me is that his very first act was to destroy USAID. This was wildly illegal, and so a real risk to him. He seemed too serious about it to be doing it as a prank. It was harmful to the US farmers who supply food aid. It harms literally millions of people around the world. Is he pro-AIDS? Pro-starvation?
The main thing that wrecking USAID did was to harm the US's reputation abroad. So both Russia and China approved! I can't see why he should care what Russia thinks (although Trump certainly does), but he definitely values the Chinese Communist Party's opinion. Like a lot. Is this just straight up treason?
No. We are not currently at war so you can't commit treason.
🙄
Really getting tired of the parsing and lawyering of words among political pundits and commenters.
“We don’t know truly what’s going on in his kind, so we can’t say his false statements are lies.”
“Unless we can prove his penis was in her vagina, anything else he stuck in there like his fingers wasn’t rape.”
“We’re not at war so acting against the interests of the country and its national security isn’t treason.”
All statements like these do is make decent honest people throw up their hands and give up on having a decent honest society.
*mind. Fuck autocorrect on iPhone.
Musk's agenda is to create sufficient chaos that the oligarchy can take over and make the world safe for billionaires. Either that or he gets a kick out of destroying things and wrecking the lives of not-billionaires.
You think he's a great showman? I think he looks like a geek high on ketamine who is giving his best impression of what he thinks a great showman looks like.
Right now? He's training his AI using federal data, then using it to weed out whatever he deems as "waste" and "fraud". But lacking an understanding of what each section of different departments within each of the bureaus does, they're getting false hits and unintentionally breaking critical parts/functions of government. Other times they're just doing stupid simple queries in databases and, because they're all either young, inexperienced, or have a narrow knowledge base, they can't understand what they're cutting/blocking.
In-between those tasks, he's protecting his companies.
But he probably wanted to initially get into the code and either rewrite entire applications or at least insert code sections to build in automated screening to find and report "waste" and "fraud".
He's playing Trump for influence, wealth and laughs.
X will be the new UI for the Federal Government. X is Elon. Elon will be the government in the sense that he can focus it, the nation, to get to Mars.
It seems outlandish...but I remind you to look around...
Good plausibility to this. It fits in with the Visa deal to make X a payment platform, and parallels getting all manufacturers' EV charging components to be Tesla-based, so he gets a cut from everybody. Like the Bezos tactic of not only skimming every transaction he can but also owning the infrastructure almost everybody runs on. "One app to rule them all," eh? That's the interoperability play, and a pretty good bet now that you mention it. I think it leaves open what he wants with the data itself, though.
Some of the above is probably right. And it's clear he genuinely believes a lot of this right-wing conspiracy theory stuff, so however intelligent he may be, he's beginning all his calculations with garbage data.
And clearly, the bits of government he wants to disrupt are carefully segmented away from the pieces he cares about. USAID may halt and the NIH may not be unfreezing grants despite a court order, but you can bet every payment to one of Musk's companies (or other major corporations) is being made on-time. Destroying the capacity of government to regulate private industry while preserving government subsidies of private industry sounds right up Musk's alley.
But here's the other bit I suspect: even people like Musk who are evidently ignorant of a lot of how the federal government functions know about the ways in which certain systems are operating on outdated tech. Musk 100% knows where all the COBOL-trained people go to work and why people are still getting training in COBOL.
So here's the calculation: if you and your company installed the "next generation" of COBOL for the government, then you're burrowed in. If Musk's people designed the AI that runs federal systems, Musk has leverage on the government. He can shut that AI down and government goes with it. That's real power. Even if you never use it, the threat to do so is usually going to be enough; we see Musk deploying that kind of threat all the time (failure to response is resignation).
At the least, his people already got root-level admin access to systems and likely read-access to data. Musk can claim in future to have sensitive information about competing corporations, CEOs he doesn't like, etc, etc, and it's at least plausible he's telling the truth.
OT: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c5ymvjjqzmeo
"Apple AI tool transcribed the word 'racist' as 'Trump"
My hare-brained theory is that he wants to use the data to set up bank accounts at X for every American, thus de facto making X into the payments platform he has wanted it to be for 20 years