Steeped in gaming and rightwing culture wars, Musk and his team of teenage coders set out to defeat the enemy of the United States: its people
If the mandate of DOGE was to “[modernise] federal technology and software to maximise governmental efficiency and productivity”, in the words of the executive order that launched the initiative on 20 January 2025, the reality was a strengthening of the state’s surveillance capacities.
Over time, Musk had become convinced that the real bugs in the code were people, especially the non-white illegal immigrants whom he saw as pawns in a liberal scheme to corrupt democracy and beneficiaries of what he called “suicidal empathy”. He understood empathy itself in coding terms. It was an “exploit” or a software vulnerability against which the system architecture needed to be hardened.
Strangely, I think this article gives Musk too much credit for good intentions. It assumes he honestly wanted to make government more efficient and fucked it up.
I think he wanted to, one, eliminate the dozens of DOJ investigations into his companies and delete the evidence they’d collected; two, sabotage every government agency that might possibly interfere with his companies in future, doing so much damage that it would be decades before they could return to even their pathetic Biden-era level of effectiveness; and three, collect all the US government’s information about us in one place so he could steal it for his surveillance machines.
Musk accomplished all of that brilliantly, and then fucked off to enjoy his trillion-dollar victory lap.
I thought it was becoming well known that he did it to entrench Palantir into the government, bypassing information secrecy laws, making it irreplaceable by the government as no piece of software could ever do similar. Which will then force other governments world wide utilize it, entrenching it as a global spying apparatus for the US government.