If you’ve been wondering why Elon Musk, who is now the head of DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency, has been holed up in an old government building in Washington, DC, spending nights and weekends surrounded by tech bros from Silicon Valley as he systematically dismantles parts of the federal government, specifically USAID, and is now setting his sights on other government agencies, you’re not alone.
This is the question I’ve been asking people who know and have worked with Musk in one form or another. The answers I’ve heard are surprisingly quite simple, but also utterly terrifying.
“Elon believes he should be emperor of the world, and this is his way of showing people what he’s capable of as emperor,” a close associate of Musk’s, who has worked with him for years and still speaks to him regularly, tells me. “He truly believes his way of handling the world is the best possible outcome for everyone in it.” In Musk’s mind, this person says, everything he’s done in his career to date has proven that thesis to be true—from Tesla’s electric cars reducing emissions and accelerating the transition to sustainable energy, to Neuralink’s efforts to help people with neurological disorders regain lost functions, to his belief that he single-handedly saved Twitter from collapse and turned it into a bastion of free speech, rescuing it from what he saw as the censorial grip of Jack Dorsey’s leadership.
We can argue how much Musk has made the world a better place until he lands on Mars, but the debate about his impact on the world, whether positive or negative, still doesn’t answer the question of why a man who could be luxuriating on a private island or floating in a zero-gravity chamber of his own making, or could literally buy anything he wants on planet Earth—or off planet Earth, for that matter—instead chooses to engage in a bureaucratic purge of historic proportions. And on top of that, why is he delighting in pulling funding from crucial government programs, working to shutter entire agencies, and slashing thousands of federal jobs with the casual ease of a CEO tweeting a doge meme?
“He is doing it because he likes wielding power more than anything else. It’s more fun to ruin hundreds of thousands of people’s lives than to ruin just hundreds of people’s lives,” a well-known Silicon Valley investor tells me.
The first order of business upon establishing DOGE was to gut entire government agencies that had existed for decades, including those responsible for diplomacy, global aid, and economic stabilization. Take the United States Agency for International Development, for example, the agency responsible for providing foreign assistance and disaster relief. In Musk’s view, it’s been a bloated bureaucracy wasting taxpayer dollars. And so by 11:59 p.m. tonight, thousands of USAID employees are set to be put on administrative leave, most of whom work overseas. Some have reportedly already received termination notices. Musk noted this week that he had “spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper. Could gone to some great parties. Did that instead.” The day before, on Sunday, he posted, “USAID is a criminal organization. Time for it to die.”
The Silicon Valley investor tells me that even if Musk is right—that USAID is bloated and wastes taxpayer money—there are also clearly aspects of the agency that are doing good things around the world. The problem is that Musk approaches everything in a binary way. “Either it’s good or it’s bad, there is nothing in between,” the investor says.
From Musk’s and Donald Trump’s perspective, USAID was nothing but a waste of money. On X, the DOGE account has been reporting on the so-called government inefficiencies Musk and his team have uncovered, which he is claiming proves how wasteful the agency has been. “Today, 78 contracts were terminated for convenience across DEI, Non-Performing, Media, and Consulting categories, including one for ‘groundwater exploration and assessment in the Islamic Republic of Mauritania.’ Approximately $110mm of total savings,” Musk triumphantly announced on X. In another series of posts from the DOGE account and his own personal X account, Musk noted that some news outlets, including Politico, were receiving money from USAID, which seemed to have helped justify Musk’s actions for his boss, President Trump. “LOOKS LIKE BILLIONS OF DOLLARS HAVE BEEN STOLLEN [sic] AT USAID, AND OTHER AGENCIES, MUCH OF IT GOING TO THE FAKE NEWS MEDIA AS A ‘PAYOFF’ FOR CREATING GOOD STORIES ABOUT THE DEMOCRATS,” Trump wrote, or shouted, on Truth Social. (The Washington Post reported Thursday that news sites like Politico were not receiving subsidies from USAID, but rather that government officials at the agency were expensing paid subscriptions to the outlets.)
