Elon Musk’s shouting match with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent might have been the final nail in the coffin for the tech billionaire’s four-month stint in the White House, but it came after months of bubbling frustration at Musk’s “chain-saw” approach to dismantling the federal government.
Musk and Bessent exploded at each other in April when Musk attempted to force through his pick to lead the IRS—Gary Shapley—behind Bessent’s back. (Musk eventually lost this battle—Shapley lasted less than 72 hours before Bessent tapped Michael Faulkender to replace him.)
“Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!” a typically mild-mannered Bessent was heard shouting after Musk as they charged down the halls of the West Wing.
Failure by what metric? First off, he went in and destroyed everything he wanted to. He got the FAA to cancel their contract with Verizon and sign with Starlink for communication; He and DOGE gutted agencies that were supposed to regulate SpaceX, Neuralink, Tesla, and X; DoJ dropped a case agains SpaceX; and since he started his rampage, more than 40 agencies have taken no actions on investigations into his companies suggesting they are at least being slow walked if not dropped all together. The transportation department lowered requirements for Tesla and other companies to report incidents with self driving cars, and the FAA gave SpaceX permission to quintuple their number of launches despite the effect on the environment and air travel.
In what way was this a failure? Because Trump and his people hate him? Frankly, everyone hates Musk these days. Plus, I wear it as a badge of honor when the likes of Trump and his cronies hate me.
I agree. They’re trying to distance themselves from him because they think he is the reason their polling is sucking so hard right now. I think most everyone hates all of them, not just him.
Once you start viewing politics under the same lens as a professional wrestling match it begins to make a lot more sense. Faces and heels switch up every once in awhile to keep us entertained.
Madame education secretary coming in with the Billionaire’s elbow!!!
I think Elon himself is welcoming their performative hate as well. Thinking it will help his brand somehow by distancing himself from them. But the joke is on him because he did enough to completely taint his reputation for the rest of his life.
taint
Very much this.
Now it should be noted that Musk is, among other things, a desperately insecure wienie who really is crushed by the fact that basically everyone hates him and spends a great deal of time and effort cringily trying to compensate for it and pathetically failing. So at some level all of this certainly does hurt him.
But he’s also toxically greedy and self-absorbed and wantonly destructive, and by those measures, his government tenure was a resounding success. And that he undoubtedly throws tantrums and goes on crying jags when he’s alone, just like he’s done since middle school, doesn’t make any of the rest of it any less a success.
But he’s also toxically greedy and self-absorbed and wantonly destructive,
Which is why I really hope he turns X against the Trump regime lol God I hope he’s petty enough to attack them now
I agree that his time at the white house has been a huge success for his personal interests.
However, I don’t think it all went according to plan. I think he really did expect that he could make some government services more efficient. I also think he thought that his actions would ingratiate himself to the right, all over the world. I also don’t think he expected the backlash against Tesla.
He knew that DOGE was a joke from the start. Everyone did. You know how we know? His complete lack of research. Anyone, even an elementary school student, would ask how something works before taking a hammer to it… But only if they cared to get it right, right? And look at what DOGE didn’t touch. Military waste, dirty cops, etc.
Yeah, defense spending is something like half the discretionary budget. Obviously the place to start when cutting waste, but not politically viable for arcane reasons.
I’m not so sure him not researching or even checking with experts speaks to his lack of interest. He destroyed key components of one of Twitter’s data centers a few years back - literally went in himself over a weekend and yanked out a bunch of cables before cancelling the lease, as I recall the story. Then a bunch of Twitter admins had to spend a good deal of time rebuilding crucial infrastructure with the systems they had left.
He’s shot his own foot this way before.
(Edit) It was worse than I thought - he hired people off the street to help load rented trucks with the servers after he just yanked them out. When someone mentioned that millions of people’s sensitive data was stored on them, they picked up some padlocks and set up a spreadsheet with the lock combinations… All so he could ship them to one of their other data centers, where it had already been explained to him that they couldn’t hook them back up!
Found this article: https://medium.com/@noahkingdavis/the-unbelievable-tale-of-when-elon-musk-personally-removed-servers-from-a-sacramento-data-center-2892f21b12c3
I think he really did expect that he could make some government services more efficient.
What a grand and intoxicating innocence.
Elon left the White House an utter failure.
No, he didn’t. He killed all the government investigations into him and awarded his companies huge contracts worth $billions for the foreseeable future. He achieved everything he really set out to do. DOGE was just the distraction.
Is everyone forgetting the data access this guy has now? He accessed EVERYTHING and his script kiddies installed a ton of shit
He did exactly what he was supposed to do Got the private information of every single person we have records on. That’s a goddamn huge win for his fragile self
Most people have absolutely zero idea about the access they had and what they could have copied.
Elon left the White House an utter failure.
Socially, yes. And he hates it. He’s a narcissist, I doubt he will think of it as a success. OTOH, that’s exactly what he’s been doing for decades: failing yet still coming out richer afterwards.
Honestly it baffles me that this is enough to become the richest person in the world.
When will we learn that he actively influences these statistics to stroke his ego?Failing upward is the new norm. Probably because of all the sub-par people of generational wealth clogging the drains of society.
I think elon’s responsiveness to criticism stems more from his autism than narcissism.
I don’t think he has the mental faculties necessary to go against the influence of his peers. In many ways, he’s doing exactly what people expect him to.
He did leave as an utter failure - not because of what he accomplished or didn’t accomplish, but because he was already an utter failure of a human being the day he arrived in the White House.
Bullshit. He got pretty much everything he wanted, including gigantic government contracts for his businesses, while stopping all investigations into his criminal activity and negligent products. Also got to get high on swinging his dick around a lot, and still has trump offering him more favors for more money.
It’s never enough for these assholes. Musk wants the whole world to bend to his will because he bought the government fair and square. Some uppity government employee shouldn’t tell him he doesn’t have the authority to install more puppets in these agencies.
Yes, but -like trump- he will shout stupid shit to draw away the attention from the main cause… because people will take offense
He did everything he set out to do. Gutted every agency that got in his way of doing whatever he wanted with his companies. That’s not fair. He needs to be jailed for this sabotage of our government. Let’s not let some narrative of failure muddy the water on him actually doing those things
His companies should be seized and nationalized to repay all the damage he caused.
Agreed
Unfortunately, the only justice the Musk family will likely receive will be after his death when his offspring face guillotines.
I’m happy to give Grimes first pull of the rope
guillotines is much too generous of a Just outcome. We need something slower.
Yeah I don’t buy it. Republicans are trying to save face. They cheered him on the entire election.
Such nonsense. Musk was along for the ride on the recent Middle East trip. The staff may hate him, but HitlerPig is keeping him close. He’s going to need him to hack the next few elections.
If things are quieter, it’s only because his board threatened to replace him after that disastrous earnings call, which has to have stoked threats of a shareholder lawsuit. The stock tanked as a direct result of his irresponsible behavior, which has done irreparable damage to the company’s brand image, and the stockholders aren’t going to just accept the loss of millions of dollars.
So he’s keeping a low profile right now, until things cool off, but his presence on the Mideast trip means HitlerPig still wants him around.
He was still there in the room when Trump was talking to South Africa’s President Ramaphosa. He’s trying to keep himself out of the spotlight but he’s still there in the wings.
“Entire Trump team hated Elon Musk”…
If you’ll recall, after Trump’s first term, it was revealed that the entire Trump team hated Donald Trump.
Basically, any marginally competent person will hate working with people like Trump or Musk who make drastic changes without any reason or even any idea of what they’re doing.
He’s not gone, though. They lie constantly, and of course about this.
It’s gotta hurt bad to be rejected by the likes of Trumps cabinet. Lol
He will be back next week.
He was in the white house today during Trump’s press conference.
I know he’s not going anywhere, but we’ve all seen how fragile his ego is, so you know it’s hurt his feelings.
I’m generally very sensitive to seeing people sad or upset. But there are a select few demons out there that it gives me pleasure. Small victories
Bro is on a massive amount of ketamine right now just to cope, I’m sure.
That’s OK though. Libs were owned. Another event that will do nothing to harm the support from Trumps base.
No amount of death or self-harm matters to magas as long as libs were owned and some brown people were put in their place.
If Trump pissed his pants on live TV his MAGats would tell you that he’s a genius who invented a self dying cloth.
I think some of them are starting to wake up to the reality that their economic position will not improve under their god-emperor.
I dunno, I hope you are right, but every time I see a headline like that it turns out to be a feel-good article based on two random disgruntled twitter posters or something.
He accomplished all he set out to do, with one caveat, because he stood in the bad limelight his image and monetary value took a serious nosedive. This last part is why he now is standing in the back, yet leering around the room wherever the president is.
The one thing he was aspiring towards did receive a huge blow, he was racing to become the world’s first trillionaire. And it might just be a setback that he can catch up with, but for now he does need to focus to try and crank all his stocks back up…
How crazy to be the useful idiot’s useful idiot.
They did exactly what they wanted him to do. Now they want to make him out as the bad guy and use him as the fall guy so they look better.
I hope that some day Elon comes to realize that he is utterly alone. No one, and I mean no one likes him. Everyone in his life that is friendly or supportive to his face, is putting on a show trying to get money from him or through their association with him. The assortment of adoring losers that identify with him, are merely chasing a mirage. They don’t adore him, only the fictional character that he’s constructed for PR purposes. He has to buy friends. He has to buy sex and offspring. He even has to buy the illusion of trivial accomplishments like progress in video games. He is peak loser, everyone can see it, and only a few are willing to lie to his face in exchange for maybe getting some cash. No amount of money, or fear driven bigotry, or trolling, or descendants will ever fill the gaping hole in that fetid husk he calls a soul. If there is any justice, he will be moping, riddled with regret about all this someday whenever he gets around to dying, alone in some dusty metaphorical corner.
he knows, why do you think he does what he does
Imagine having to put up with two self-absorbed billionaire asshats at the office every day.
You don’t join the Trump team unless you are a self-absorbed asshole, so everybody there should be used to it.
I don’t doubt it, however I was thinking more about admin, IT, & support staff, housekeeping, kitchen staff, security, the Marines, and all the rest of the folks who keep the gears oiled and turning.
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