Elon's Endgame
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Back in 1912, a group of churchgoers in Columbus, Ohio, started a charity. It was part of the settlement movement of the early 20th century, where members of a community came together to offer free services to the poor. More than 100 years later, Lutheran Social Services of Central Ohio still exists.

And they do things like operate homeless shelters, daycares, assisted living for seniors. Basically, there's a huge part of our social safety net in this country that, you know, that the history is that they started with a bunch of people at a church somewhere.

That's Max Chafkin, a reporter for Bloomberg Businessweek and co-host of the Elon Inc. podcast. Now, Lutheran Social Services works in 21 counties across Ohio. Like a lot of faith-based and social services groups, it gets a lot of its funding from the federal government.

Earlier this month, the group ended up in Elon Musk's crosshairs. It's a little complicated, so let me walk you through it.

Staffers from Musk's so-called Department of Government Efficiency, DOGE, were deep inside the guts of the Treasury Department's payment system, the part of the government that sends money out the door. Musk was, of course, online. And he sees a tweet from Michael Flynn, the former Trump National Security Advisor, who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI.

Flynn had this spreadsheet showing that federal money went to Lutheran social services, and he wanted Musk and the Doge team to cut that off. And Flynn basically tweets something to the effect that says that these quote unquote Lutheran groups, he uses scare quotes, that they are doing money laundering and that we need to cut this out. And Elon Musk says,

that amplifies it and says, yes, these illegal payments are being stopped. The Doge team is rapidly shutting down these illegal payments. Exactly. Now, and if like...

On some level, number one, no one knows exactly what that means. But if you're sitting in Ohio or in like Sioux Falls, South Dakota, or one of these other groups was where you're there's a huge part of what you do. It's like dropping a bomb in their in their organizations. They don't know if they're going to get the federal money, if they can pay their staff, if they can run their food pantries or shelters or housing for seniors.

Elon Musk and the Doge team control their fates. All of these charities are just in this kind of place where they're waiting sort of to see what happens and hoping that maybe Musk was just spouting off. Maybe he doesn't. What he does does not have the force of law. And the crazy thing is, is that nobody really seems to know at the moment.

In Elon Musk's vision of the country, would a place like Lutheran Social Services get any federal dollars? What about universities or any part of the social safety net? Today on the show, Elon Musk's endgame and what a Silicon Valley version of America might look like. I'm Lizzie O'Leary and you're listening to What Next TBD, a show about technology, power, and how the future will be determined. Stick around. ♪

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Visit Progressive.com to see if you could save on car insurance. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states or situations. Even before he became a special government employee, Elon Musk was no stranger to the workings of the federal government. Last year, his companies were promised $3 billion in federal contracts. Even so, Musk often seems to view government as an inconvenience.

He has just sort of a generalized sense that the government is slow and that it doesn't do, you know, what he Elon Musk wants it to do. And then it's mostly getting in the way of people like him. Now, that's pretty weird when you think about it, given how much money Elon Musk has managed to collect from the federal government over the years for all of his companies, primarily, you know, SpaceX being the largest beneficiary, but Tesla being also a significant beneficiary of kind of taxpayer funds. Yeah.

But I think it just comes from this kind of perspective of he doesn't really think about the costs or whatever. He just sees this giant institution that's mostly trying to slow him down, doesn't understand or hasn't enough time or enough curiosity to look at the reasons why, for instance, the FAA or somebody else might be trying to deny him a permit or why the SEC is mad at him for one reason or another and just has this kind of generalized thing.

Musk has made no secret of his plans to cut wide swaths of the federal workforce. In the past few weeks, roughly 77,000 government employees have accepted the resignation deal conceived by Doge. Beyond that, Doge targeted another 200,000 probationary employees with layoffs.

Cuts have been spread across agencies. The Education Department, Veterans Affairs, Homeland Security, Health and Human Services, and Energy. Doge appears to have also mistakenly fired employees responsible for overseeing nuclear weapons and bird flu response before trying to hire them back.

His general idea, which he's said many times, is like, hey, if we accidentally cut a contract or fire somebody that we're not supposed to, then who cares? We just rehire them. You know, well, it's sort of like the community notes approach to government community notes being the government.

the pseudo fact-checking, the crowdsourced fact-checking program that exists on Twitter. Like, if he cancels a contract that it turns out we needed, like some important, you know, water inspector or a charitable group that many people are relying on, then they will complain and we can always put it back.

According to documents seen by The Washington Post, Doge will soon enter, quote, phase three of its activities, which includes more wide scale firings. So I think the goal is much, much broader layoffs than we've seen. I don't know. We'll see if that actually can happen, because, again, it's not the same as with the private sector. Like if the Twitter takeover is the kind of prototype, first of all,

he controlled, he owned the majority of the equity, and although they were outside investors, it's a private company, he could basically do what he wants. But ultimately, you know, what happens to Twitter is not...

like that big a deal. And the number of constituents are much, much fewer. And here, you have a lot of constituents, political constituents, a much larger workforce, unions, you know, the U.S. Army, like just giant institutions that could be potentially affected by this stuff that will have something to say about it. I want to talk about conflicts and potential strategies that Elon Musk might be pursuing.

Elon's companies had nearly 100 different contracts last year with 17 federal agencies. Doge is inside of some of those agencies already. How is he using that information and how could he? Well, there are a bunch of different ways. And I mean, you know, the most like basic thing is he could, you know,

influence one of these agencies to like give him some more money like he's already getting a lot of money from from the government and in the course of you know under the sort of auspices of cutting spending he could redirect some of that to to his own companies but like

Musk has this giant rocket, Starship, and it is basically a Mars rocket. He does not have a contract to send that rocket to Mars. There's not a Mars program. And even the big sort of NASA exploration program, Artemis, is a moon. It's a moon rocket. And it uses a different launch vehicle, not Elon Musk's. And you could imagine, you know, billions of dollars or even more to SpaceX as part of some

new Mars program that, that like Trump has talked about and teased and that Musk talks about all the time. And that he sometimes talks about as if is connected to Doge. Like he did this Twitter spaces is like a live, sort of like a live call-in show on X. And it was called Doge and Mars. Like as if those two things have anything to do with one another, but of course they don't like one of them is about cutting spending. And the other one is about exploring the red planet or whatever. But Elon Musk's mind, it's all, it's all, you know, one in the same.

Maybe it feels too blatant to use Doge as a segue into a Mars program where Elon Musk gets paid. But there are more subtle ways that Doge can tip the playing field to Elon's advantage.

So there's this rural broadband program that was created under Biden. It's a $42 billion program. And the way it was written is that the money goes to basically to dig fiber, to lay fiber in rural areas. Musk and many people who are close to him hate this program. They say it's inefficient. And one of the reasons they hate it is because they think satellite internet is better. Musk, as you may know...

SpaceX, Musk's rocket company, has a big satellite internet subsidiary. And so you could imagine, right, some change to that program that would make it less expensive and that would allow Musk to get a piece of that.

We've seen rumblings about changing the way that authorization has been written to allow satellite players to bid for the right to provide some of this internet, which would be really good for SpaceX.

But I think, like all of these things, giving Musk a big contract is going to be politically hard. You know, we saw this the other day where somebody found a State Department spreadsheet for planned expenses,

for the next year. And there was a line that said, armored Tesla vehicles, $400 million. And, uh, and like, that's a little bit embarrassing if you're Elon Musk and you're like trying to cut expenses and, and there's, uh, there's a planned $400 million armed, uh, armored, uh,

Tesla expense. But very quickly, the State Department like changes the website and and now it just says armored vehicles. And they're saying, you know, it's not they're not going to spend this money on Tesla. Musk has said he doesn't believe they're spending. But you just see like that. And that's a relatively small thing. I mean, not small by a normal person standard, but maybe small by an Elon Musk standard. So I think like politically, that stuff is going to be hard.

But there are things that might be politically easier, like Musk's defenestration of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the part of the government that would have overseen his new payment service on X.

Okay, but then there's the question of data. Doge has been gaining access to the data of various government agencies. It does not escape me that that might be the kind of data one would need in order to train an AI if one had an AI company.

Yeah, I mean, this gets you into some really, I don't know, kind of scary possibilities, I guess, where you're talking about just the combination of Musk's

access and his desire and ability, apparently, to access very secure databases that the government has or to at least have some access to them. And the fact that he runs this large language model AI company, XAI, it's competing with OpenAI. And the fact that, you know, historically, Elon Musk is not really a compliance guy. You know, like he's... Not a big fan of rules. No. Not only a big fan of not...

like, following the enforcers and, like, you know, giving a big middle finger to various regulators, but just, like, in general, not following the rules at all and viewing them as that they should be optional. So when you combine, like, those three things, like the access, the sort of way these large language models work, and the track record, yeah, I mean, it could, I mean, he could definitely have, like,

access to things that he shouldn't. You could imagine data we've seen like large language models can sometimes leak data in weird ways because they're sort of regurgitating things that they've already that they've like chewed up. And so like if you ask them to like spew out a hypothetical number, you know, do they spit out somebody's social security number, like a real person's name and number and so on?

You could also imagine this stuff like without worry, without necessarily talking about sort of this like doomsday scenario where Elon Musk accidentally like either like either just hoovers up all of our data and then accidentally exposes it or whatever. We're like this just gives him a competitive advantage. I mean, and and it's kind of like, how could it not give him a competitive advantage?

Even if they put all the appropriate firewalls in place, like he definitely is going to have a better sense of a lot of this stuff than any of his competitors. I do wonder, like every time we read one of these kind of like crazy stories about D.

the Doge kids doing something that seems in retrospect not to be very smart, like, you know, firing the bird flu researchers or whatever. The nuclear weapon scientists. Yeah. Did they just like put this, did they just ask ChatGPT or Grok and did Grok tell them to do this? Like it just feels like some of this is just like bad

very it's it's very enthusiastic there's a lot of energy but it feels amateurish in the way that you know that it's amateurish to try if you like got a job that you weren't supposed to have to just have chat gpt try to do it for you or like having if you're like a college student you try to have chat gpt like do your homework or something like you're sometimes gonna you you

you're making them maybe be pretty productive, but you're going to make these big mistakes. And every one of these mistakes, you know, has potential consequences. When we come back, what does Musk really think America should look like?

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But then there are the Doge kids, young engineers with seemingly little work experience, including a 19-year-old who goes by Big Balls online, and another who posted, just for the record, I was racist before it was cool. He was briefly fired when that came to light, and then rehired. One might read all of this as an extension of Elon's contempt for government. Max sees it simply as what he's always done.

I think this is, honestly, though, like, this is just how Silicon Valley does everything, right? Like, startups will, startups try to hire quickly. They hire who's available. People are willing to, you know, put in a lot of hours. And as I said, like, a lot of these people

people like they are impressive. They're just not necessarily the person you want or that I'd say most people would think would be qualified to decide like which parts of the Department of Energy need to go. And, you know, I think Elon Musk's belief, right, is that like

Hey, startups are really efficient. And if you just had like a bunch of startup kids, if you just like set them loose in a federal agency, they would make things better. And that's what we're putting to the test. And I don't know what the end result of that's going to be. And I think the success or lack thereof really depends on just like just how much leeway there is.

He is given and they are given. But we're I mean, like we're going to find out and maybe we arguably are finding out that there are there are problems here. Well, that's one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you, because you've done a lot of reporting on Silicon Valley over the years. And a lot of what Elon Musk is doing seems to be echoing political philosophy in Silicon Valley that envisions.

dismantling democracy or at least bureaucracy in favor of putting technology in charge. Where does that come from? Where does that school of thought originate?

I think, I mean, this is a school of thought that, you know, maybe has been brewing in the tech industry forever. But, you know, my answer to this question is going to start with Peter Thiel. Who you wrote a book about. Yeah, yeah. Sorry, not to plug my own book here. But yeah, I wrote a book about this. It's called The Contrarian. And basically, Thiel...

started, was a co-founder of PayPal. Musk came into PayPal, is effectively a co-founder of the company, although he technically started like a different payments company that merged. But Teal has, and really over the years, developed a really, this ideology around how innovation happens and how it should happen and what's holding it back. And

I mean, you know, to make a long story short, it basically says that, you know, startups should be able to do and tech guys should be able to do whatever they want. And that, you know, breaking things, disrupting is a social good. It's something that is how progress is achieved. And to the extent that we hold that back, we are holding ourselves back. And there are other strains of thought. You know, this guy, Curtis Yarvin, who is...

He's connected to Thiel, but he's sort of a right-wing philosopher or whatever. He's developed his own theories that sort of build on this and make it more political. He also was an entrepreneur, but essentially he's...

His ideas involve basically replacing the federal government with like a CEO. Yeah, he calls it RAGE, Replace All Government Employees. Yeah. And so and like his ideas are very much connected to and amplify or in conversation with the Teal ideas. Now, I don't think Elon Musk...

is like a big follower of Curtis Yarvin or something like that. But you look at what Musk is doing, and it's really like a much more extreme version of

Of what Peter Thiel advocated for and what he, in fact, tried to do during the first Trump administration, where he also gave a bunch of money. He also was involved in the transition. Elon Musk has just like way more juice than Peter Thiel ever did because he spent way more money. He said he's going to continue spending money. And he is just, you know, allied himself totally with Trump and is pushing things in.

in that are more extreme and attempting things more quickly and at a greater pace than I think anyone who was involved in that original effort back in 2016 could have imagined. So if you were to spin out some of these threads, where does that lead? What does a vision of government look like for someone who is not worth billions of dollars? Is there anything left?

I mean, yeah, I hinted at this and I think I think what would like these guys would say is we're just going to be like by by giving ourselves over to this kind of like techno libertarian worldview, just like, you know, get rid of as much government as possible and let the Elon Musk's of the world run the show or whatever. What they would say, right, is that, you know.

there's going to be so much prosperity. It's going to be great. Like you, like you, you might be a little uncomfortable with certain things, but like overall, you know, the, the pace of integration is going to grow so quickly and we're going to cure cancer. And, you know, just like a bunch of, uh, fanciful process, uh, promises about, about, uh,

future technology gains that are very hard to predict, you know, not totally clear that any of that would really happen and just sort of leaves out a lot of pain along the way. The way Peter Thiel sees it, and he goes way back with Musk, is that regulation, safety and societal guardrails for everyday people are, in fact, impediments to technological advancement.

His view of progress is like a very peculiar view. He talks all the time about how air travel has stagnated. And his main argument is that the speed of airplanes has not gone up since the 1970s or whatever. Like, you know, we had the Concorde and we haven't gone any faster and the Concorde's out of business.

And that's some kind of like therefore that just shows you that progress has gone down. And you hear that version, that point is made over and over again by followers of this point of view. And it just like totally leaves out any normal person's experience. Because a normal person's experience, air travel has gotten so much better. And like these guys act as if the Concorde failed because some bureaucrat, some like woke bureaucrat in Washington like wanted it to fail. But it failed because it went out of business. Right.

It crashed. Well, yeah, and people didn't want to ride it. And one of the reasons they didn't have a good business was because you couldn't fly over residential areas. And that's really annoying to Peter Thiel because he's thinking about it from the point of view of somebody who's in the Concorde. But if you're not in a Concorde, if you live near an airport, I live near an airport, right? You immediately understand why that was significant because people don't want sonic booms going over their head every five minutes. That's a thing that...

that everyone sort of agreed to, not something that was imposed. But again, it's a really, it's a very like narrow story of like progress and regulation. And it's one that like completely leaves out everybody else. And I think we're seeing a version of that, you know, play out right now.

But what we're seeing now with Elon Musk and with this, you know, huge amount of money that he spent and the way that like Trump has constructed his his like political operation today, like Musk's voice maybe is indistinguishable from Trump's voice. I mean, he has a lot of power and he's doing things that, again, are going to be really hard to undo.

Do people who do not look like Elon Musk count in Elon Musk's view of the world? I mean, I don't know what's going on inside of Elon Musk's head, and I'm not sure that anybody really does. When you say that, I mean, it's like impossible not to point out that as he's kind of like drifted rightward, he has pretty consistently drifted

trafficked in racist, sexist, you know, content. And he has indulged or, you know, whatever, seems to believe in, you know, like, has bought into these, some ideas that I think that are, you know, racist and has amplified them. And, you know,

I don't know, like blaming an airplane crash on DEI or, you know, looking to see if, you know, there's like a person of color or a woman somehow involved in like some supply chain that goes wrong and acting like that is – that's the reason it went wrong, which he's done a handful of times now. I mean, you know, it just –

It, yeah, I mean, it doesn't seem like, it seems like somebody who, um, I mean, I don't know what to say. It, it, it, it kind of supports the point you're making. Um, and I also, but I also think like there's a, there's a broader sense where, um, it's not just, it's not, we're not just talking about issues of race and, and, and gender. We're also just talking about this, like view, this very rarefied view of the world that doesn't take in, take, um,

you know, other people and, and, and experiences into account that, that have nothing to do with, with like race or gender or anything like that, where it's just like these, these like charitable groups that are, you know, just like providing like an important service in a given community and, and acting like that stuff just doesn't matter. And like the only thing that matters is,

I don't know, like whether it's like putting numbers on this website or something like that. Like that also seems to support a point where he has like a very narrow view of like what progress is or what it should constitute. Which makes me think about what Doge has done in many ways most recently, going into the IRS, Social Security offices,

Do Americans want that? Because Trump voters have been broadly approving of Musk. And yet the idea of cutting Social Security, cutting Medicaid, those suddenly become much more real issues. And I wonder why.

Are we all just at the mercy of Elon Musk? I think like the version there's like a version of Doge and what Musk is doing that I think is popular probably. And like a version of, oh, we're just going to, you know, put some of the best and brightest people on, you know, finding places where the government is being inefficient and making it more efficient.

Or like finding fraud or something and cutting it out or something like that. Sure. Though I have to point out that the inspectors general for multiple agencies whose job is that have been fired. Right. Well, and the other thing is, it's just the problem with that is that the money, like he's promised these crazy savings and doing those things is not going to lead to those crazy savings. The only reason, the only way you get there

is by doing stuff that's very unpopular. And so, no, I mean, I don't think that this stuff is going to be super popular, at least not in the kind of like maximalist form that Elon Musk has suggested. And I think you're going to start to see that. I mean, we're already seeing little kind of bits and pieces of this

even from Republicans, right? Like a lot of these things that Musk has said he wants to cut, they help people in, you know, Republican-leaning states and districts. And, you know, whether it's like NIH grants or these like charities where like, you know, you're not talking about stuff that is explicitly partisan or even partisan at all. And so I think like there is going to be a

I mean, there's going to be a political reckoning. I mean, I think the real thing is like how long before this stuff starts to have political consequences for Donald Trump and Republicans. And then what does that do to to their relationship? Like at what point does it become more of a pain for Trump to keep Elon around than than to than to cut him loose or basically to like wash his hands of it? Max Chavkin, thank you so much for talking with me. Thanks for having me.

Max Chafkin is a tech reporter at Bloomberg Businessweek. He's also the co-host of the podcast Elon Inc. You should check it out.

And that is it for our show today. What Next TBD is produced by Evan Campbell and Patrick Ford. Our show is edited by Elena Schwartz. TBD is part of the larger What Next family. And if you like what you heard, the number one best way to support us is to join Slate Plus. You get all your Slate shows ad-free, as well as bonus content like The Discourse, which is our bonus show that covers one big thing in the online conversation—

This week, we're going to talk to Slate's Luke Winkie about his profile on Twitch star Hasan Piker. And if you want even more great Slate shows to listen to, I have to recommend you listen to tomorrow's Amicus, which is all about how much Trump can expand his power. Is he really going to go full monarch? Will the courts let him? We'll be back on Sunday with another episode about meme coins in the Trump administration. I'm Lizzie O'Leary. Thanks for listening.

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