The Rise of Elon Musk

Could he be MAGA's kryptonite?

In a few short months, Elon Musk has become an almost omnipresent force in our lives. The world’s richest man, with a net worth of more than $400 billion earned from Tesla, SpaceX, Starlink, X, and other investments, is the head of the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, a completely made-up “department” created ostensibly to reduce government waste. Instead, it appears to be the vehicle by which Musk is quite literally taking over the federal government before our eyes.

After helping Trump win reelection, Musk wasted no time establishing his dominance in Washington, using his social media platform to manipulate public opinion and bully public officials. Because DOGE is set up outside the federal government, Musk isn’t subject to conflict of interest laws or to oversight by anyone besides Donald Trump, who has given him wide latitude to do whatever he wants as a “special government employee”. It’s been a remarkably effective strategy, which may be why Musk is getting away with what he’s been doing since the inauguration.

Make no mistake, under normal rules, this is all illegal: commandeering the federal payment system by force, installing a team of neo-Nazi GenZ hackers, and unilaterally shutting down the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). He also reportedly has big plans for the Treasury—namely, tanking the dollar to convert us to a blockchain system. It would make a hell of a movie script, but it’s our reality. It’s also a constitutional emergency.

Maybe in the long run this is a good thing. Hear me out. Everyone in anti-Trump world has war stories from trying to converse with a MAGA loved one about Trump. These discussions tend to go off the rails quickly. But Elon Musk? He’s a potential chink in the armor, the Achilles heel that reveals MAGA for what it always has been: an anti-American movement led by a conman.

Has there ever been a bigger comic book villain in our times than Musk, short of Trump himself? The one-time Democrat turned “dark gothic MAGA”, QAnon promoter, neo-Nazi supporter, and now junta leader has been called “evil” by everyone from Steve Bannon to the EU’s rule-of-law chief. That’s quite a range. I would argue that Musk’s ubiquitous presence in MAGA opens up new, persuasive avenues of debate that can help us build resistance to this administration among Americans, even those who are otherwise inclined to support Trump.

He’s really, really weird.

Donald Trump is weird, but Elon Musk is weird weird. He’s part of a Big Tech cabal attempting to recreate the very notion of the state. I really wish I was joking. This isn’t conservatism—it’s something far more dystopian. A Big Tech mogul playing kingmaker, reshaping the very idea of the state? That’s not small government. That’s not accountability. That’s not reform. It’s the opposite. It’s an outright violation of the rule of law, bypassing democratically established institutions and undermining congressional authority.

Instead of operating within the framework of government oversight, this is an unelected billionaire making unilateral decisions that affect national security, governance, and global stability—without accountability or checks and balances. As Ruth Ben-Ghiat warns, “Musk seems fully invested in enabling a new world order favorable to autocracy.” If this is the future some “conservatives” are championing, they’ve abandoned the principles they once claimed to stand for.

He thinks MAGA voters are fools.

Musk nearly started a full-scale MAGA civil war when he blasted some Trump supporters as "contemptible fools" for their disdain of H-1B visas back in December. His support for the highly-skilled immigration program came into clear conflict with Trump supporters’ favored America First philosophy, which prioritizes nativism and protectionism—and they weren’t shy about saying so. While Elon shares some of their nativist tendencies, those interests are secondary to his primary concerns: profit and power. He has global aspirations, even galactic ones, not mere national ones. That puts him at odds with the base.

He has our data.

Americans tend to care about issues most when we are directly affected by them, so this is where the rubber really meets the road. Musk and his team, which includes recent high school graduates with little vetting or experience known as the ‘DOGE kids’, have taken control of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) and General Services Administration (GSA), and have gained access to the Treasury Department’s payment system. This gives them access to a wide range of sensitive information, including Social Security data, for all 330 million of us. They’ve also gained access to classified information and security systems at USAID. What could possibly go wrong?

He’s interrupting our services.

Trump supporters, and the right wing more generally, have been programmed to deeply distrust the federal government that Musk is furiously dismantling. But his interference may inadvertently shine a light on the number of services the federal workforce provides. Many would be surprised to hear the number of full-time federal employees has remained virtually unchanged since the moon landing. According to economist Francis Fukuyama, you could make a case that the government is actually understaffed, as disbursements over the last 55 years have increased five-fold.

Fukuyama adds: “The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, for example, oversees the spending of $1.4 trillion, or one fifth of the entire federal budget, with a staff of only 6,400 full-time employees. These workers have to check for Medicare fraud, evaluate and certify tens of thousands of health providers, and make sure that payments to tens of millions of Americans are made in a timely manner. If you cut this staff, the amount of fraud and waste in the Medicare system is likely to go up, not down.” That doesn’t sound like it will make America great again, does it?

He’s hurting the little guy.

I still believe most average Americans look out for each other, and don’t want to screw over their fellow Americans. Locking people out of their offices and computer systems, forcing them to resign…the mistreatment of regular people with regular jobs making regular salaries is breaking into mainstream consciousness. Even the MAGA faithful may start to wonder what the value is of tossing out experience and institutional memory. Maybe they’ll start to realize that we can’t elect every single government worker, so their jobs are protected, not only out of fairness to the workers, but to ensure they are apolitical.

If they don’t gain a newfound respect for civil servants, they should consider the plight of government contractors—private businesses and individuals hired by the government to do a job. They’re getting stiffed too. Musk doesn’t care. He’s richer than anyone who ever lived. Regular people and the day-to-day problems we face don’t matter much him—not even those who helped empower him by voting for Trump.

Civil servants who’ve been “forked” by Musk are fighting back, even as Congress has mostly left them high and dry. For example, two top security chiefs at USAID refused to turn over classified material in restricted areas to Musk’s team. They have since been put on leave, but their display of individual courage should hearten and inspire us in this hour. There are other inspiring examples of resistance that should encourage us as well.

Trump’s intensely loyal following is inclined to trust whomever Trump trusts. However, I believe that trust has a limit, and Elon Musk is riding perilously close to it. It’s possible Trump is intentionally trying to create a bigger villain than he is in Musk, to deflect the outrage that would normally be reserved for him. Trump is famously fond of creating a problem only to “solve” it and look like the hero. Perhaps once Musk is finished stripping the government of whatever he wants, Trump plans to have a public falling-out with him, kick him to the curb, and be applauded for it. It wouldn’t surprise me. Two megalomaniacs can only play nice for so long.

We’re in a whole new world now, my friends. One day at a time.

All my best,
Olivia