What happens if Elon Musk treats the government like he did Twitter?https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/12/04/elon-musk-twitter-doge-andrew-cuomo-mayor-smartphones-required/Why would you hand the reins of government efficiency to a guy who recently tanked a social media company he bought, in part by getting rid of 80 percent of staff? “Asking Musk to do for the federal government what he has done to Twitter is a recipe for disaster,” writes Adam Lashinsky.
Let Adam enumerate the ways. “Through careless cost-cutting, Musk has managed to wipe out much of the value of Twitter, causing massive losses for his financial backers and himself. His antics have caused the company’s revenue to decline. And he has taken an overwhelmingly useful platform for discussion of everything from politics to entertainment and turned it into a megaphone for his recently embraced right-wing ideas.”
Of course, even if Musk’s stewardship of Twitter has been bad for most users, employees and investors, it arguably bought him a role advising an administration likely to favor him on taxes, regulations and culture-war issues. If his DOGE work follows that model, as Adam suggests, it might be a disaster for us — but by Musk’s stars, it could be another glorious win.
Why DOGE might be the Department of Good-for-Elon EfficiencyMusk’s record at Twitter suggests ‘efficiency’ is not his best useThere has been little focus on the havoc Musk wreaked at Twitter.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/12/03/elon-musk-twitter-doge-trump-x/
Elon Musk has an enviable record as an innovator and a canny entrepreneur. Just consider the accomplishments of SpaceX and Tesla.
His record at cutting down to size the one large organization where he wielded his fiscal machete, however, tells a different story. Musk bought Twitter, now X, in 2022 and promptly cut 80 percent of its staff. That Twitter survived presumably constitutes the bona fides he brings to his role as co-head of Donald Trump’s vision for the advisory panel dubbed the Department of Government Efficiency, already shorthanded as DOGE.
Yet for all the talk of how difficult it will be for Musk and his DOGE co-director, Vivek Ramaswamy, to wring their promised $2 trillion from the federal budget, there has been little focus on the havoc Musk wreaked at Twitter. If the solid functioning of the critical tasks of the federal government is at all important to the American public, it is worth pausing to consider how ill-prepared Musk and his coterie of libertarian cost-cutters are to accomplish much more than more chaos should they be entrusted with imposing efficiency on the federal bureaucracy.
At Twitter, Musk proved himself to be anything but a genius. Using plenty of other people’s money, he agreed to pay $44 billion for the social media company, then tried backing out of the deal, only to consummate the transaction when a judge told him he’d face trial otherwise. Through careless cost-cutting, Musk has managed to wipe out much of the value of Twitter, causing massive losses for his financial backers and himself. His antics have caused the company’s revenue to decline. And he has taken an overwhelmingly useful platform for discussion of everything from politics to entertainment and turned it into a megaphone for his recently embraced right-wing ideas.
Asking Musk to do for the federal government what he has done to Twitter is a recipe for disaster.
Musk’s fans, and these include Trump, like the way he shoots from the hip. But this tendency served Musk poorly at the business where his cost-cutting was supposed to save the day. He fired most of Twitter’s executive team and frayed his relations with his company’s primary source of revenue: its advertisers. A year after he bought the company, he unleashed an unprintable expletive at his customers, who were displeased with what Twitter was becoming, further zapping the firm’s sales. All the while, Musk claimed a $56 billion stock-based compensation package for himself from Tesla, the highest in U.S. history for any executive until a Delaware court tossed that element of the deal earlier this week.
In a capitalist system, all this can happen at any company. That’s a risk all investors take. But government is another matter. Musk’s impulse-driven leadership may backfire in a world where “promote the general welfare” is the constitutional order of every day. It may prove unsuited to a leader who decides to pull a Twitter at, say, the Food and Drug Administration or the Federal Aviation Administration.
Because Musk has been so successful in his many endeavors, he has created a narrative around himself that he has skill and experience at successfully cutting large organizations. The same goes for the fellow tech bros he promises to tap for their supposed expertise. According to The Post’s reporting, these include the investor Marc Andreessen, whose techno-optimism is becoming harder to follow, and Travis Kalanick, the Uber co-founder who knows plenty about growing companies but little about making them more efficient. As I learned researching a book about Uber’s rise, Kalanick admired the pragmatism of the Chinese government leadership — right up to the point Beijing nudged Uber out of China.
There also is a side to Musk that makes him a horrible fit for conducting the people’s business. When he didn’t like the size of Twitter’s office-lease payments, he stopped making them. (The landlord made moves to litigate, and suddenly Twitter paid up.) Musk had a similar distaste for the severance packages contractually promised to top executives, even though he bought the company with knowledge of the agreements. Those payments remain subject to litigation.
It’s almost inconceivable to imagine the government of the United States reneging on its contracts. But can we be certain Musk won’t follow the Twitter playbook in his crusade to make Uncle Sam more efficient? Trump also has a long record of stiffing the people he works with. I suppose that is one way to cut costs.
Nor does Musk demonstrate the temperament for something as important as streamlining the federal bureaucracy, itself of a worthy cause. Shortly after taking over Twitter, he instructed workers to cover up the “W” on a sign at its San Francisco headquarters building so it read “Titter.” He erected a giant “X” after removing the Twitter name altogether, in violation of the city’s building code. Like a scolded child, Musk took down the signage when the city pushed back.
Indeed, the very name of his federal efficiency project — DOGE — suggests this is all one big sophomoric joke to Musk. “Doge” also is the name of the cryptocurrency Musk created to amuse himself. The word supposedly comes from the misspelling of “dog.” That he would apply a brand name to a government undertaking is outrageous enough. But it won’t be amusing if Musk meddles with government only to make it worse.
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