Start with a chainsaw starts with a whimper foot. Elon Musk's imminent Washington exit, ending early on with the weirdest chapter of Donald Trump as president. According to his own metrics, Musk’s so-called government efficiency department failed. Doge didn't realize he touted $2 in savings of $2TN, but could end up paying taxpayers. Meanwhile, Musk has caused damage to Tesla and he will return soon. Is there a hidden way to his madness?
The benefits of two musks can be found in the rubble. First of all, it is his psychological value to him and Trump who hurts his enemy. Cleverly clichés about expensive divorces that every penny is worth. Musk's net worth has fallen by about $130 billion since Trump's inauguration. However, he instilled fear into bureaucracies from the CIA to the Department of Education. The shortcomings of Doge's Tears Valley - the derogatory labor force and a bad headline about non-existent savings - can win. Musk attacked the deep state. With some help from the court, the bureaucracy fought back but was seriously injured.
Musk's second upside potential may take some time to register. Trump’s “Golden Dome” aims to replicate Israel’s “Iron Dome” for the whole of the United States, which may be one of the largest taxpayer spending, namely “Star Wars” since Ronald Reagan’s strategic defense initiative. In the US dollar terms, Trump's dome can even be compared with NASA's Apollo project, which costs $280 billion. Since missile shields need to rely on satellite constellations, Musk's SpaceX will be the biggest beneficiary. The company forms a gold dome consortium with Palantir and Anduril, run by his large tech friends.
So Musk's lasting impact on Washington could be to transfer most of the taxpayer's money to his empire. With the present, this will be very good. Whether it will enhance U.S. national security is someone else’s problem. Ibid to be eligible for a gold dome contract to become waste, fraud or abuse. If only one company can perform the maximum function of the project, there will be little prospects for the open tender process.
However, Musk has hurt himself and there is no sign of stopping now. The reasons that drove the Tesla boycott in Europe were partly in the United States, but Musk had been on his mysterious company on his X platform. The London deception campaign called Tesla "Swastla" "from zero to 1939 in three seconds", a reaction to his far-right ascensionism rather than his war on bureaucracy. Unless he can lower his ID card, Tesla's brand will remain polluted. Having Trump's Attorney General Pam Bondi calls Tesla's showroom vandals terrorism shows that Musk still has no clue about his image. Not the first time, psychology may be a better predictor of behavior that Trump manages, rather than ideology.
Trump tried to pour the balm onto Musk's hurt pride in his own way. Musk sat in the corner of last week's cabinet meeting and expressed his gratitude for the sacrifice of the room. In a soft exit interview with the president's daughter Lara Trump, he appears to be hurt by public misunderstandings about him. "Now, you're in Washington, D.C. with President Trump, trying to save our country," she said. "Did anyone say thank you?" He said many people do thank Musk. But others pointlessly interpreted the tribute of his Nazi views as a Nazi tribute: “They are really trying to catch me.”
In hindsight, it was clear that Musk's status with Trump fell in early April when his money failed to provide elections for Wisconsin's conservative Supreme Court candidates. Although Musk spent $22 million in the most expensive judicial campaign ever, another judge won, meaning the swing state's Supreme Court still has a liberal majority. Wisconsin is a touchstone test for Trump and Musk's failure. But his biggest test is whether Duge can discover large-scale corruption. Both the judiciary and Republican-controlled Congress are not hot for Musk's "receipt wall", which suggests that the US system may be better than fear.
Either way, Musk arrived at the fork on the way. His AI platform Grok told his time in Washington: "His Governor's experiments resulted in action turmoil, legal entanglement and limited achievements that obscured modest gains...musk was much less than a warning story." If there was a chainsaw, Musk invented it.
edward.luce@ft.com