Elon Musk’s shouting match with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent might have been the final nail in the coffin for the tech billionaire’s four-month stint in the White House, but it came after months of bubbling frustration at Musk’s “chain-saw” approach to dismantling the federal government.
Musk and Bessent exploded at each other in April when Musk attempted to force through his pick to lead the IRS—Gary Shapley—behind Bessent’s back. (Musk eventually lost this battle—Shapley lasted less than 72 hours before Bessent tapped Michael Faulkender to replace him.)
“Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!” a typically mild-mannered Bessent was heard shouting after Musk as they charged down the halls of the West Wing.
I agree that his time at the white house has been a huge success for his personal interests.
However, I don’t think it all went according to plan. I think he really did expect that he could make some government services more efficient. I also think he thought that his actions would ingratiate himself to the right, all over the world. I also don’t think he expected the backlash against Tesla.
He knew that DOGE was a joke from the start. Everyone did. You know how we know? His complete lack of research. Anyone, even an elementary school student, would ask how something works before taking a hammer to it… But only if they cared to get it right, right? And look at what DOGE didn’t touch. Military waste, dirty cops, etc.
I’m not so sure him not researching or even checking with experts speaks to his lack of interest. He destroyed key components of one of Twitter’s data centers a few years back - literally went in himself over a weekend and yanked out a bunch of cables before cancelling the lease, as I recall the story. Then a bunch of Twitter admins had to spend a good deal of time rebuilding crucial infrastructure with the systems they had left.
He’s shot his own foot this way before.
(Edit) It was worse than I thought - he hired people off the street to help load rented trucks with the servers after he just yanked them out. When someone mentioned that millions of people’s sensitive data was stored on them, they picked up some padlocks and set up a spreadsheet with the lock combinations… All so he could ship them to one of their other data centers, where it had already been explained to him that they couldn’t hook them back up!
Found this article: https://medium.com/@noahkingdavis/the-unbelievable-tale-of-when-elon-musk-personally-removed-servers-from-a-sacramento-data-center-2892f21b12c3
Yeah, defense spending is something like half the discretionary budget. Obviously the place to start when cutting waste, but not politically viable for arcane reasons.
What a grand and intoxicating innocence.