A month after his chaotic term of office as a special government employee and a right hand for President Trump, Elon Musk cherished himself in the cheers of an admiring audience in CPAC.
The episode is best known for the chainsaw He used on stage, a gift from President Javier Milei of Argentina. But Musk did it different Just as bizarre and revealing that day.
He accessorized himself with a leather jacket, square glasses and a golden necklace, which reflected his storage in an image generated by AI that was shocked around social media last year. To ensure that nobody missed the point, he expressed a sentence inspired by a J. Robert Oppenheimer quote loved on the internet: “I became a meme.”
Musk has described* Memes as an advanced form of communication, a way to accelerate understanding by compressing ideas in images that can be understood faster than words.
For the Trump government that is exactly what he was.
Since January 20, Musk has served as a handy steno for Trump’s war against federal bloat and bureaucracy. Here was a cartoon villain or a folk hero, depending on your position, whose appearance generated images that told a clear story about the government that was built by a group of young techno systems. There he was in the Oval Office, with an overcoat and a child. There he gave the cabinet confirmed by the Senate during the first meeting. There he was sitting Next to Trump in a Tesla in the driveway of the White House.
This was useful for the White House, even when those images sailed in Democratic campaign advertisements. They have distracted negative attention that could otherwise be aimed at the president or to someone like Russell VoughtAn architect of the more systematic attempts of the administration to strip expenses. And every Musk-Goes-To-Washington-MEME was the proof of the president who would live up to his promise to break and rule the system like no one had before. Who gave it Coupons have not occurred When the images told the story?
Even Musk himself thought it was a bit surreal, as he posted it on Wednesday when he spoke with a small group of reporters, including my colleague Jonathan Swan.
“It is funny that we have Doge,” said Musk, referring to the team he sent about the government, which he named after a cryptocurrency based on a dog ever took over the internet. “I mean, this is the absurdity of that. Like, are we here in the simulation, or what’s going on? It was at some point a meme coin. How did we get here?”
The decision of Musk to step away from his full -time work means that the administration loses its easy Avatar for a plank of his agenda. (This may not happen immediately; Between that pen-en-pad session and a FOX News interview, Musk has been more visible in traditional media in the past week than at any other point of his term of office.) But the Doge era cannot only end because the meme fades.
The Doge Agencies has had a hand in dismantling that does not return quickly. Musk estimates that he took around 100 employees to the Ministry of Government Efficiency, many of whom are now embedded in agencies such as the Social Security Administrationthe Ministry of Foreign Affairsthe Ministry of Interior and the Securities and Exchange Commission. Those people have one enormous amount of data with the intention of referring and putting it together-an attempt that has already led them refer Non -citizens for prosecution on accusation that they have voted illegally and to put certain immigrants on social security “deadl“To put them under pressure to” deport yourself. “
While those companies can lose teeth without a musk as an ever -present enforcer, the team may be more agile and calmer without a lightning rod at the helm.
With Musk a step back, I will broaden the focus of this newsletter, and I will soon have to say more about it. But we will not take his project. We continue to follow the story behind the meme.
*Yes, that is a podcast of eight and half an hour. Memes arrive for six minutes.
Citizen lesson
The political education of Elon Musk
President Trump was pleased to have the help of Elon Musk, a tech billionaire without government experience. But that meant that Musk had to follow an emergency course of the subject. Here are a few things he has learned.
1. It is really difficult to reduce government spending. Which of us did not casually believe that we could save a few trillion dollars? That was the first goal of Musk for Doge, before he brought it back to $ 1 trillion. But by this week, as Jonathan Swan reportedThe reality had begun.
“It’s really difficult,” he said about the trillion-dollar goal. “It’s a bit, how much pain is, you know, is the cabinet and is the congress prepared? Because it can be done, but it requires dealing with many complaints.”
2. Money cannot buy everything. Musk’s millions may have helped to raise Trump to victory in November, but his decision to spend $ 20 million to help a conservative candidate for the Wisconsin Supreme Court, gave him the First major setback From his Gop MegaDonor era.
Meanwhile on X
In case you missed me on TV
Musk usually shuns traditional media in favor of his X account. But in the last 24 hours he uses the last to strengthen the first. My colleague Eli Tan explains.
Elon Musk may withdraw from his work in the federal government, but he does not withdraw from the air waves. And the last day or so he is brought to X to ensure that nobody missed his TV appearances.
This week he participated in a Fox News segment that went within a “board meeting” for the Ministry of Efficiency of the Government. His lieutenants took turns, as if they were in a classroom and sharing anecdotes about their time in the cost -saving company.
From Friday afternoon, Musk had replaced parts of the video 14 times, another attempt to clean up the affected image of Doge and his.
Many of the claims that Musk’s employees have made about wasteful government spending that they have again achieved from earlier interviews, such as on subsidies for alpaca farmers in Peru or transgender operations in Guatemala.
Some reposts from Musk were aimed at a part of the interview in particular, when an official called Ethan Shaotran spoke about losing friendships after he left Harvard to join Doge.
“Most of the campus hate me now,” said Shaotran. “I hope that people realize that reform is really needed through conversations.”
Another remarkable post:
– Eli Tan
You shouldn’t miss it
What Musk wanted
On our last day to cover all Musk, I noticed myself Looking back on a story A group of my colleagues wrote on November 6, the day after the elections.
At that time it was not yet no-not-channel Ministry of Government Efficiency a sparkle in the eye of Trump. But it was clear that Musk had a long wish list of the incoming president, regardless of his role in the government.
The team reported that he is already thinking about how a second Trump administration could benefit him. He wanted to install SpaceX employees at the Ministry of Defense, they thought. And his companies with which they were confronted At least 20 recent federal investigationsWas greatly benefiting from a relaxing regulatory environment.
“The effect,” of the influence of Musk, they wrote, “could be to remove or weaken one of the greatest controls on the power of Mr. Musk: the federal government.”
I would say that the report lasted.
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