Good riddance, former President Musk
Hope you had the time of your life—because it will all be downhill from here.
Finally, Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX, Tesla, xAI Holdings, The Boring Company, Neuralink, and father to now 15 children he calls “his Legion,” has been kicked to the curb by his co-President Donald Trump, who he suggested in 2016 “doesn’t seem to have the sort of character that reflects well on the United States” and told in 2022 to “hang up his hat.” He will not be missed.
At a “farewell” press conference in the Oval Office, Mr. Musk was sent off with a novelty “Golden Key” to the White House (available on eBay here, so not as special as suggested), a low mood, and a black eye. The New York Times suggests “the list of possible suspects [for who beat his ass] seem[s] long.” He claims he was punched in the face by his five-year-old child, and some recent blind items speculated he might have come afoul of White House Goebbels Stephen Miller and impregnated his wife. I believe both are untrue and that “Sloppy Steve” Bannon’s reporting he got a walloping from Scott Bessent is accurate.
To my chagrin, at the beginning of this administration, when I was looking for silver linings, I thought that, faithless as he was, Mr. Musk could be convinced to betray the Republicans, redeem himself, and rededicate his efforts to the environmental and scientific causes that made him wealthy. It was not impossible. “No man can walk so long in the Shadow that he cannot come again to the Light,” as they say on Amazon’s recently-canceled show and Robert Jordan’s overlong book series, The Wheel of Time. Except, apparently, Mr. Musk, who will be remembered as Bill Gates described him: “The world’s richest man [who] kill[ed] the world’s poorest children.”
I had hoped during his time in Washington I might have the opportunity to bump into Mr. Musk, take him to the side, smoke some of his reefer, and set him straight. Perhaps he was confused, and what he needed was a friend to teach him the subtext he missed in his favorite anime, Neon Genesis Evangelion, “[not to] make others suffer for your personal hatred, which,” unfortunately, Mr. Musk did at scale.
But it was hopeless. He did not come to the city as a friend, not even a reformer, but as a villain. On Inauguration Day, he opened the second Trump administration with a Sieg Heil, then denied it, which is definitionally cryptofascism. He did not buy a house in a neighborhood, as human members of the administration did. He instead chose to sleep inside the White House, siloed from the sun. The teenage employees of his fake Department of Government Efficiency, more often called the “DOGE (pronounced ‘doggy’) boys” emulated that and slept on locked floors of federal office buildings (I was not successful in my attempts to lobby DC Mayor Muriel Bowser’s office to enforce the law against this).
Mr. Musk has said, with wobbly eyes, “I’ve never physically hurt anyone. So why the hate and violence against me?” This is a lie. Whatever the fuck DOGE was doing was meant to be intimidating. Those teenagers were riding around in black SUVs and stretch vans escorted by armed agents. They “refused to identify themselves, asked [federal employees] questions about political loyalty, attempted to pit colleagues against each other,” and worst of all, loomed behind staff trying to work. Mr. Musk took to Twitter to call those being laid off “parasites.” His DOGE teams forced their way into buildings and computer systems without authorization. They locked employees out of their job sites and made them line up outside to reclaim their possessions. The intention and effect were to terrorize the workforce. So, Mr. Musk’s make-believe that he has no idea why the public’s response to him has been harsh is not only disingenuous but beyond credulity.
One thing could explain the dissociation from reality: the former co-president was on drugs. According to NYT: “He told people he was taking so much ketamine, a powerful anesthetic, that it was affecting his bladder, a known effect of chronic use. He took Ecstasy and psychedelic mushrooms. And he traveled with a daily medication box that held about 20 pills, including… stimulant[s].” Much has been said about how badly he must have been abusing ketamine to end up experiencing bladder pain or urinary incontinence, but I am sure, after reading “trip reports” about the drug on Erowid, that he had fun.
I thought this was a telling line from the Times article: “according to a photo of the box and people who have seen it.” In other words, Mr. Musk is so reckless with his “stash” that multiple people have seen it, photographed it, and snitched to a newspaper. He ought to be embarrassed as a drug fiend, and it would be fair to call for his security clearance to be revoked on this alone. A man who cannot even keep his shoebox of pills hidden—in a drawer, or the bottom of a duffel bag, or a safe shaped like the Constitution—should not be trusted with the nation’s sensitive intelligence.
Most Americans, I think, know what it looks like to see a guy zonked on drugs pretending to be sober, and as such, Mr. Musk fooled nobody during benders at the Inauguration, his chainsaw episode at CPAC, the Joint Session of Congress, his fork-palace-building playdate at Mar-a-Lago, and all-night Twitter binges.
When asked in the Oval Office about his drug use, Mr. Musk lamely deflected: “A judge just ruled against New York Times for their lies about the Russiagate hoax and that they might have to give back their Pulitzer Prizes.” This did not happen; the court only declined to stay the suit. Nobody who could read, except someone intending to deceive, would try to imply victory from a ruling that a lawsuit is allowed to begin. I will be looking forward to this fight. Any examination of the facts around the Russia investigation will remind the public just how sketchy was the president and his servants’ enmeshment with the Kremlin’s active measures. Perhaps we may even see the pee tape.
Still, Mr. Musk does his drugs a disservice by not taking the opportunity to defend them. If he believes that he should be free to take ketamine, MDMA, psilocybin mushrooms, and amphetamines in the White House, he ought to defend all our rights to do the same. I would even join him, in the spirit of charity, if he were to plant his feet on the ground and ask that his privileges be extended to all Americans. But “giving” has not been in his nature. He has seemed more excited to take food from the hungry, medicine from the sick, and support from the struggling.
Mr. Musk has claimed he uses narcotics to “k-hole” his way through depression, and he is right to be miserable. He has, functionally, ruined the life to which he is returning. America knows too much about his creepy child colony to look at him the same way. He has been confidently wrong so often that how could he be seen as the smartest man in the world again? Too many people have reveled in Cybertrucks burning; he will forever be an object of derision.
Mr. Musk, who once said he voted Democrat because they were “the kindness party,” told Joe Rogan in April: “We’ve got civilizational suicidal empathy going on. And it’s like, I believe in empathy. Like, I think you should care about other people, but you need to have empathy for civilization as a whole and not commit to a civilizational suicide... The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy…. The empathy exploit. They’re exploiting a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response.”
At the press conference, he said, “The fundamental moral flaw of the left is empathy for the criminals and not empathy for the victims.” It seems to me that a man who used to sign his Usenet posts as “The Marquis DeSade,” a famous sadist, might enjoy the pain of others. Which explains, again, how he became known as the “the world’s richest man [who] kill[ed] the world’s poorest children.”
As I have previously noted: De Sade was jailed as a violent rapist and a pedophile, and, while imprisoned, wrote graphic pornography promoting those characteristics in others. Mr. Musk’s cosplay of that evil pervert connotates he must feel affinity.
Mr. Musk’s statement, “empathy for the criminals and not empathy for the victims,” was designed to be provocative and irritating—he undoubtedly has put in his 10,000 hours for that—but this is untrue.
I grant some merit to the idea that the left “empathizes with criminals,” in that progressives seek to avoid dehumanizing broad groups of humans. Philosophically, Democrats believe (1) reducing recidivism is more valuable to public safety than making the guilty suffer; (2) conditions that correlate with increased criminality should be understood and repaired; and (3) the enforcement of the law should not unfairly harm people who were not involved in criminal activity, or cause harm for harm’s sake. That can be misconstrued as empathy for the individual criminal, if you are an asshole, but I would think, of all people, someone like Mr. Musk would understand grand problem-solving that seeks to cure the human condition.
Meanwhile, to insinuate that the GOP has this overflowing amount of empathy for the victims of crime is facetious. The tragic events of September 11, 2001, were nearly 24 years ago, and 9/11 is coming up on its 25th anniversary next year. For decades years, the Republican Party has blocked victims’ compensation for 9/11 first responders. Conservatives are notoriously unempathetic toward victims of sexual assault (see: former Rep. Todd Aikin’s “legitimate rape” comments), and have voted on party lines against the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act. And why on Earth did the Trump administration lobby to have human trafficker Andrew Tate returned to the United States for no fucking reason?
If your John Deere disappears and you say, “I’m so fucking sick of those methheads down by the tracks taking our farm equipment,” and someone replies, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, buddy. First of all, those are people suffering from addiction and should be treated with sensitivity,” that does not expedite the return of your lawnmower, even if on the long tail, it results in net fewer purloined mowers. The left could message about this better, but the way Mr. Musk frames it is untrue and manipulative. If he truly believes his Republican Party is the crime victim’s best friend, then he has a less accurate understanding of the world than I considered.
The mission of DOGE, “government efficiency,” sounds positive. I do not want to insinuate that anyone was wrong to feel optimistic about its potential. But voters failed to pay adequate attention to Mr. Musk’s spoken and written promises; Mr. Musk ranted often that he wanted to cut so much of the federal budget, “to the bone,” that it would put the cause “pain and hardship.” There may be some temptation to treat his work in Washington as something that merely failed, we should remember that the metrics he would have called “success” would have been catastrophic.
I do think, when we analyze the end result of the failed DOGE efforts, it will turn out that he ultimately reduced efficiency, created more waste, fraud, and abuse, and made the government function worse than before—less responsive, less effective, less capable.
What I found most interesting about this “goodbye” press conference was that the CEO, famous for never shutting the fuck up, had little to say. But we have seen him elsewhere in recent weeks shrinking: sadly telling Bloomberg he would be cutting back his political spending because he had “done enough,” disparaging the Republican budget he expected to be his capstone, suggesting to another interviewer that “DOGE was a way of life” (“the friends we made along the way”), and bragging, with wist, that he would eat tubs of Haagen Daz at “epic” sleepovers with Mr. Trump.
He is exiting without the drug-amplified joie de vivre he came in with, and returning to Tesla, which is, by all accounts, in fucking shambles. Sales of the Cybertruck have tanked so far that it is not uncommon to stumble across a parking lot where excess vehicles are being stored. The brand, synonymous with him, has become toxic to the liberals who buy electric cars. The long-promised autonomous cabs, years late, still cannot drive themselves. He leaves my city tangible worse, too—the U.S. Institute of Peace, which DOGE illegally broke into, is in “disarray, full of water damage,” and infested with “rats[] and roaches.” Every place he controls is as such—I have previously compared what is left of Twitter to a “rotting building… attract[ing] vagrants, vermin, and present[ing] a [digital] health hazard.”
Well, I do not feel sorry for him. Even Mr. Trump admitted, in his rambling farewell to Mr. Musk: “Nobody liked him.”
Postscript: It was repeated several times that Mr. Musk may pop in and out of DC any time, that the electric brownshirt agency DOGE was “his baby,” and that its work will continue. So, too, shall the FUCK DOGE t-shirt, hat, and bag sales, available now at the Partisan Hex webstore.
