Thoughts on President Elon Musk's pending tech takeover of US government

Donald Trump's victory in the 2024 election begins a new era for tech's political extremists. The right-wing elements of Silicon Valley have merged with the MAGA movement, at least temporarily, and the bet has paid off big. Republicans captured every branch of government. Trump will make full use of these powers to radically transform American democracy into something else.

It's not clear he will succeed, but he won't be alone in trying. Elon Musk has forsaken Mars for Mar-a-Lago, where the South African immigrant is positioning himself as Trump's co-president. Trump has tapped both Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to head something called the Department of Government Efficiency, DOGE, which caused the crypto product with the same name to surge. Musk, a major government contractor, may now wield significant power over the very government agencies formerly charged with regulating him and his friends. Expect vicious retribution, a flotilla of memes and, wherever possible, some kind of attendant crypto pumping scheme.

If there's one thing we know about these guys, it's that they have no sense of limitation. They believe they can do anything they want, even when reality proves otherwise. They mistake their success in certain areas of business for a universal kind of genius, and this creates a tendency to overreach. The Greeks called this hubris, and it usually doesn't it end well. But our would-be Silicon sovereigns don't believe in history. They believe they are bigger than history. They believe their destiny is to hoard infinite wealth, rewrite the code of civilization, establish themselves as the supreme leaders of the universe and – as crazy as this may sound – defeat even death itself. Increasingly, you will find them wrapping their tentacles around religion, trying to redefine God, spirituality and the concept of Eternal Life to reflect their own pernicious self-importance. (More on this later...)

As the saying goes: "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." We are about to witness a spectacle of corruption unlike any in the history of the Republic, and we will be very fortunate if we still have one when this dark era concludes. Corporate power has always posed a threat to democracy. But this time is different. This is not a power grab aimed only at lax regulations or low taxes. These people have made a crucial extrapolation: In a system where you can buy power and legislation, it may be possible to also buy the entire system. Their short-term goal will be to break our democracy as much as possible, maximizing polarization, sowing chaos and making it increasingly more difficult to discern fact from fiction. This will make it easier to swallow whole.

When Musk bought Twitter in 2022, I wrote:

Musk is making a serious effort to seize as much power as possible in order to help define our political future. He’s trying to spark a political communications revolution by seizing the digital public square and tilting the discourse toward ultra-conservative politics.

“This is a battle for the future of civilization,” declared Musk on Nov. 29, and he’s right about that.

His $44 billion purchase of Twitter had one key goal: to buy as much of your brain space as possible. The world’s richest man has little interest in “free speech.” What he wants is the power to control what the public hears, and to shape reality by turning the so-called “digital town square” into a privately-owned propaganda machine.

With American democracy under threat, Musk’s Twitter is giving us a clear glimpse of the world he would like to see.

It’s a world that empowers dictators, fascists, white supremacists, Nazis, disinformation and misinformation. It’s a world in which billionaires enjoy total power over everyone else, and where straight white men hold dominion. It’s a world where people can no longer distinguish truth from lies because technology has sucked us all into the manipulative babble of Twitter. Musk seeks to create a dynamic where organized misinformation shares equal billing with respected journalism, and where people can’t tell the difference between the two.

I wish I had been wrong about this. At the time, some of the big brains at the major newspapers said that Musk's politics were unclear. But as someone who studies politics on the metaphorical and moral level, Musk's politics were quite obvious to me. And I say this as someone who once admired him.

Here's the good news: President Musk will find that governing a nation is not as easy as making cars or rockets. The problems of government are infinitely more complex because they involve the lives of hundreds of millions of human beings. In addition, there's the most vexing problem of all: It is usually necessary to maintain some kind of consensus in order to maintain governing authority.

But the people can be fickle. They can change their minds. They can desire the opposite of what they voted for after they get a taste of the consequences. The pendulum of popularity has a reputation for wild swings. It will be hard course to navigate for a billionaire accustomed to dictatorial corporate authority and who, by his own admission, sees empathy as a character flaw. Musk has many things, but a winning personality is not one of them.

Another problem: The success of Musk's project apparently hinges on collapsing large parts of government and making drastic changes as swiftly as possible. This will quickly run into the buzzsaw of reality, as making deep cuts to government is not as simple as it sounds. It's easy to mock bureaucracy as useless and wasteful, but government does many things that most people don't notice until those things no longer work. Besides, Musk's appetite for quick chaos and disruption violates a key rule, Law 45 of the 48 Laws of Power: "Preach the need for reform, but never change too much at once" (because drastic changes, especially those with painful ramifications, have a tendency to spark major backlash).

Elon Musk has made himself the most visible face of tech's takeover of American government, but he has plenty of company. Other tech oligarchs in Musk's orbit made a concerted effort to jump on the Trump train. It was a full-on movement to normalize extreme right-wing politics in Silicon Valley, with the goal of taking over the nation. Now we will find out what kind of future they have in mind for us.

Some quick observations on their most immediate goals:

1. Political Purges. Musk has already been anointed by Trump to lead a government-slashing commission. If the ideas of J.D. Vance and Curtis Yarvin are any indication, the goal will not just be to cut waste or payroll. This will be a political purge to eject anyone with democratic (or Democratic) leanings from government and make sure that only Trump loyalists remain in government. Civil service rules are designed to avoid such politicalization, but these guys don't plan to play by the rules. Yarvin called it RAGE (Retire All Government Employees) and Musk calls it DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency), but they are one and the same. It's a mistake to think this about about saving taxpayer dollars – it's not. This is about cleansing political rivals from government in order to make sure Trump's authoritarian agenda has no internal resistance. It's also about weakening the US government and ridding it of any pesky obstacles to dictatorial power schemes.
2. Crypto Scams. Big Crypto made a heavy bet on Trump's Republican Party and their efforts will be rewarded. The next few years will amount to one big crypto scam, which is why Bitcoin is surging and the crypto scammers are popping champagne. Trump, who has already set up a crypto enrichment scheme for his family, will use the levers of government to pump crypto at every step of the way. Millions of Americans will be sucked into the scheme and stripped of their money, which will be funneled up to the top. Regulatory guardrails will be torn down and crypto stooges will take over any agency that might otherwise be expected to rein in the industry. At the heart of it all is a plan to replace the dollar with crypto and thus replace American political power with tech dictator power, redirecting taxpayer dollars toward the destruction of the public good.
3. Network States. Trump has already hinted at his support for network states in his plan for so-called "freedom cities," which would be built on federal land. The basic idea is to create new territories outside the jurisdiction of American laws where tech oligarchs can reign supreme and start building the corporate dictatorships that, they hope, will replace nation-states. So let's see how long it takes for the Trump Administration to express explicit support for network state projects. Land development takes a lot of time, so I would expect the support to come earlier rather than later. In the few months before the election, the Network State movement grew louder and sought to increase its public profile. Remember: Trump is a real estate guy who prides himself on the "art of the deal." He is the Network State cult's best chance for accelerating and gaining momentum in the short term.

This is far from an exhaustive list. Having captured social media (via Twitter) and American government, the tech authoritarians must also capture the monetary system (via crypto) and artificial intelligence. Control of technology (media and social media) helped them gain control of the US government. Now they must push further, persecuting journalism and boosting disinformation, using echo chambers (and AI) to further create an even more demented alternate reality designed to cement their political control of the 21st century.

I'll find a more articulate way to say it, but the basic point is that they have their eyes – and, in some cases, their hands – on the most important power centers of our time. They do not plan to ever give up this power and will do whatever they can to keep it.

But it's not up to them. It's also up to us. We have our work cut out for us over the next few years. This is going to get more dangerous and scary than we can possibly imagine.

On the bright side, we get to take part in saving democracy from the most serious threat it has ever confronted. Our opponents, being overconfident amateurs, are already making some key mistakes.

More to come.