Elon Musk has been a shooting star. His ambitions and his energy have been awe-inspiring to observe, from banking to electric cars to space and social media, there seemed to be nothing he couldn’t do; nothing he couldn’t transform.
Five years ago, I read Anna Crowley Redding’s brief biography of the man, Elon Musk: A Mission to Save the World, and was astonished at what he had achieved. I re-read it last week and was equally astonished.
The story of a man born in South Africa and who appeared to have bootstrapped himself from a youth of reading Marvel comics and Tolkien to the position of (on paper) the richest man in the world – worth some $US414 billion – would make anyone feel like a lazy and unimaginative under-achiever. Truly.
How thoroughly, I found myself thinking, does Musk put every whinger and grievance peddler to shame? I resolved to redouble my efforts to make my own activities and projects more successful, imaginative, wealth-generating.
I read the book a second time because Musk had been catapulted into power in Washington DC and was beginning to dismantle both the bureaucratic world and the US constitution. To be honest, I wasn’t paying attention at first. But it has become something which no responsible person can ignore.
As I have taken stock of it, my view of Musk has begun to change. It is not simply becoming, shall we say, more nuanced. Rather, I am becoming seriously alarmed by what is happening in the United States.
Let’s be clear that the Trump resurrection was possible because there is a lot in the United States in the present time that is in need of serious rectification. This begins with the chronic and spiralling budget deficits, which are running out of control and constitute an indictment of American political and economic culture.
Many other wealthy countries – Japan, China, the richest western European countries – have piled up national debt and run budget deficits. But the United States, as the pivotal state in what is still called the ‘liberal rules-based order’, has a special responsibility to govern itself well and manage its finances responsibly. It’s failing those tests.
How is this problem to be tackled, even in principle? A long-standing joke runs: the Democrats want to spend more, and the Republicans want to cut taxes. They cannot agree, so they do both. That’s a recipe for insolvency.
Now, here is where Musk, entrepreneur extraordinaire, comes into play. Appointed by Donald Trump to run a new agency, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), he is sacking civil servants and hacking government databases in a manner that beggars belief. YouTube is crammed with commentary on all this, much of it from highly reputable individuals and outlets. It has left me flabbergasted.
Musk’s worst impulses are coming out into the open, his actions are high-handed and ill-considered, and the foundations of the American republic are now being jeopardised…
The gist of it is not whether American government and finance need reform. They clearly do. Whether the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) should be abolished with no more serious audit than the whims of Musk and Trump is another thing altogether. And USAID is only one of a string of agencies which Musk has been interfering with in the most stunningly high-handed manner, without let or hindrance from the White House.
The ramifications are only beginning to surface. They are of a piece with Trump’s appointments to cabinet or agency secretary posts of a set of often patently unsuitable candidates whose avowed mission is to neuter or radically purge those departments and agencies, starting with the FBI and the Department of Health and Human Services. Where is the Commission of Audit? Where are the open and carefully explained principles and purposes of responsible reform? How can it be that whole swathes of public servants are being sacked on no other basis than Musk’s say so?
I have never been a Trump enthusiast and I do not suffer from what his supporters have long called ‘Trump Derangement Syndrome’. But I was a Musk enthusiast, and his supporters are now touting what they dub ‘Musk Derangement Syndrome’. I’m not buying it.
Musk’s worst impulses are coming out into the open, his actions are high-handed and ill-considered, and the foundations of the American republic are now being jeopardised, as concerned people talk of the Trump’s blizzard of edicts and appointments as a coup d-état and of Musk as a ‘fascist’.
One immediate consequence of Musk going stridently political is that his vast (on paper) fortune is now in jeopardy. Tesla sales have plummeted, which could well lead to a collapse in its stock price, a flow-on effect to his other businesses and the melting away of the generous line of credit on which he apparently lives. Has he even taken this development into account?
But Musk aside, the ramifications for global order, in which we in Australia have a very big stake, are profound. Trump is the Joker in Gotham City, and Musk is behaving like his comrade in arms. It falls to all those of us committed to rational and accountable politics, to checks and balances and to freedom we have long more or less taken for granted, to come to grips with all of this – as fast and as firmly as we can.
The only model or precedent I can find for what Trump/Musk are doing right now in America is the Nazi legal theory of Carl Schmitt, who articulated a political philosophy of the ‘state of emergency’, in which an authoritarian leader, embodying his people’s identity – think MAGA and Trump’s generalised xenophobia – rules by decree. It’s something alarmingly similar to this that we are witnessing right now in Washington DC.
To my dismay, Musk, who has long seen himself as on a mission to ‘save the world’ through technological innovation, is up to his eyeballs in this kind of politics. One need hardly add that Trump has long prepared the way. Worse still, other leading Silicon Valley tech moguls seem to have joined up.
Published on 14 February 2025.
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Photo by Steve Jurvetson on Flickr (CC)
