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So it’s now official: Elon Musk is leaving Washington and returning to his businesses, running Tesla, SpaceX, Starlink, and the other technology companies he founded. The parting was not, evidently, entirely amicable. Predictably, Donald Trump used Musk to do his dirty work, and when he became more of a liability than an asset, he discarded him.
Elon Musk is Exhibit A in what’s wrong with our oligarch-dominated society. The accolades that were piled on him before he ventured into politics were well-deserved. Tesla created a new category of industrial product and out of nowhere became a serious car company; SpaceX is the backbone of the American launch industry; and Starlink has proven its worth on the battlefields of Ukraine. As Noah Smith once observed, Musk’s real talent is not as an engineer or technologist, but as a master of industrial organization on a par with pioneers like Henry Ford.
But Musk illustrates perfectly our oligarch problem. The United States has produced an impressive group of tech entrepreneurs who have created world-beating companies. But a number of them don’t know how to stay in their lane. They think that because they have become rich and successful in one line of work, they will be good at anything, and stray into areas where they are way out of their depth.
It is hard to imagine someone whose instincts for politics are worse than Elon Musk’s. His family inheritance was not promising: his grandfather was blocked from establishing a neo-Nazi organization in Canada, which induced him to move the family to South Africa. This happened as apartheid was being established in the 1950s (just as things were getting good from his perspective). Musk himself had genuine reasons for being unhappy with the liberal establishment: any entrepreneur is going to collide with the wall of regulations imposed by Washington. One of his own children underwent a gender transition, which seems to be related to the complaints he started voicing after 2021 over the “woke mind virus.”
But it was here that technology itself intervened. The New York Times recently sought to re-create the online world that Musk lives in by following the thousand or so X accounts that he follows. This is not the same world that I, or I suspect most of the people reading this post, live in. It is a world of conspiracy theories, dark forebodings, and harsh attacks on the “Marxist maniacs” that reportedly inhabit the other side of the political spectrum.
In this alternative world, the U.S. government is a deep state run by said Marxist maniacs who operate entirely outside the control of democratically-elected leaders. Borrowing a trope from Silicon Valley, Musk felt empowered by being made head of DOGE to dismantle as much of the U.S. government as he could. Neither he nor the engineers he hired (many of them in their twenties) had the faintest idea what the government actually did; all they saw were budget lines for unfamiliar activities that they could characterize as “waste, fraud and abuse.” Trump permitted Musk to destroy the U.S. Agency for International Development because foreign aid is generally unpopular with voters, who themselves don’t understand USAID’s role in humanitarian assistance or the bolstering of American soft power.
The fact of the matter is that the federal government does suffer from inefficiency. But the source of that inefficiency is the opposite of what Musk and other conservatives allege. We do not have a bureaucracy that has escaped the control of democratically-elected officials; rather, our bureaucracy is over-controlled. Americans’ longstanding distrust of government has led to the layering on of rules to control the behavior of bureaucrats, who are rewarded for rule-compliance rather than concrete results achieved for citizens. If you want to make government more efficient, you have to free bureaucrats to be able to use their own good judgement and common sense to solve problems. They need to be freed, for example, from the duty to file literally thousands and thousands of annual reports to Congress on their activities, 99% of which go unread by the bureaucracy’s masters.
Musk’s lack of political awareness was painfully evident in some of the interviews he gave as he was being pushed out of power. He went from being the darling of almost everybody, including the pro-environmentalist left who loved his electric cars, to being one of the most hated men in America. He couldn’t understand why anyone would dislike him for donating a quarter of a billion dollars to Trump’s campaign, or giving Nazi salutes, or promoting the far-right AfD in Germany; he opined that his opponents must have been paid by the Democrats.
The tragedy for U.S. politics is that Musk may have destroyed his one outstanding creation, Tesla, by his misguided foray into politics. The first thing they will teach you in business school is not to politicize the products you want to sell to the general public. Blue-leaning voters were his company’s biggest fans; every other car in my very liberal neighborhood in Palo Alto is a Tesla. Trump’s MAGA base is unlikely to shell out big bucks for an electric vehicle, a product category that Trump himself has trashed. The Chinese are building very competitive models far more advanced than Tesla’s aging product line, and legacy car companies are catching up. Musk has lately implied that robotaxis and humanoid robots will take up the slack from Tesla’s falling sales in the United States and Europe, but he has made repeated promises along these lines for many years now.
Musk’s poor political judgement has led to a doubly terrible outcome: he and DOGE have done great damage to the U.S. government, and his neglect of Tesla while he detoured into politics make its very survival as a company questionable. If Tesla fails, the country as a whole will suffer. The United States needs to show that it can still innovate in industries that require bending metal, something that hasn’t happened much in recent years. Tesla was leading the transition to a low-carbon future, and making money off of it. That future may now belong to China, whose EVs by all accounts are world-beating.
Francis Fukuyama is the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at Stanford University. His latest book is Liberalism and Its Discontents. He is also the author of the “Frankly Fukuyama” column, carried forward from American Purpose, at Persuasion.
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