Musk’s United States of X.

Elon will do to the government what he did to Twitter

In early 2018, Musk’s “Not-A-Flamethrower” sold out in three days, the coveted yet destructive device remaining the best analogy for his leadership style. Tesla and SpaceX have defied the odds to revolutionize the automotive and aerospace industries, bootstrapping factories and blowing shit up at high risk, but eventually resulting in jawdropping successes.

His acrimonious acquisition of Twitter in late 2022 has proven less successful. Ostensibly having the goal of transforming the social media platform into a multipurpose resource similar to WeChat, X. revenue has been in decline, most likely the result of major brand advertisers being spooked by its paucity of content moderation and strategic blundering.

Seems Elon’s obsession with cost-cutting proved penny wise and pound foolish, as it were, his “Fork in the Road” email purging the ranks while also decimating the talent pool. Out with the fluff went much of the platform’s functionality and focus, the ensuring failure of X. revealing the bazillionaire’s strategic incompetence within non-STEM industries.

That said, the counter-argument can and should be made that profitability was not at the top of Elon’s Twitter takeover to do list. Buying the whole shabang, he bequeathed himself the world’s loudest megaphone, thereby empowering the world’s most annoying troll — arguably second only to Donald Trump. As such, their bromance seems inevitable and quaint.

Looked at through that lens, Musk’s $44B purchase of Twitter — coupled with his $250M investment in Trump’s 2024 campaign — is no doubt one of the riskiest and highest payout investments ever made, Elon’s net worth launching into the stratosphere higher than his Starship self-landing rockets, MAGA win boosted by more than a quarter trillion dollars.

But Elon has gotten more than an equity surge from hitching his many wagons to Trump — the epic political victory has opened the doors of the US government to the same management style and cost-cutting strategies he’s applied to his other ventures, but with employees in the millions and budgets in the trillions. With zero surprise, he’s set up his chop shop.

As multiple media reports try to catch up with Musk and his team’s frenetic Federal dismantling schedule, few outside that inner circle know what’s actually going on. Bubbling to the top of the DOGE cauldron of cutting is an apparently reckless, highly invasive, and unfettered non-governmental employee having free reign of the government’s most sensitive data.

Given the mayhem, I remain conflicted: the idea of cutting governmental bureaucracy is appealing, and by any stretch necessary and long overdue. Yet Emperor Trump has set his Darth Musk on an unbridled rampage, releasing a Pandora’s box of legal, ethical, and conflict of interest concerns. “Unprecedented” is the buzz word since 2016, but this stuff is really really.

To me the biggest problem is Musk’s approach, and his goals, all reminiscent less of his successful ventures, and more like his bomb, Twitter. Tesla and SpaceX went through phases of near-bankruptcy and total failure, Elon over-promising and under-delivering early on, but the Federal bureaucracy, like X., isn’t a “company” that engineers a “thing”.

Instead, the US government is more akin to a social media platform in that the output is behaviorial modification rather than service. Sure, the G is a big money-shoveling machine, and reducing the graft is Job #1 now, but the institution consists of a wide body experts and civil servants, and, much like X., is about to be decimated for the sake of “efficiency” in name only.

Musk’s real goal, analogous to the X. transformation, is expanded power and influence — all at the cost of internal employees and external stakeholders and customers alike. Twitter got crushed, and only Elon and his fellow trolls benefited, to hell with everyone else and even the bottom line. I have a feeling the same will happen with the Federal government.

So sit back, reek or freak as we metamorphize into Musk’s United States of X. Fast forward six months, a year, several, Elon and his cronies rising as Marsmonauts from the bureaucratic ashes — the rest of the planet relegated to tweet within the shitty interface of Twitter past, and the reduced quality of life of America future imperfect. Will it be worth it? That’s the question.