Vanity Fair: Why Is Elon Musk So Hell-Bent on Bulldozing the Government? [View all]

[Dennis Donovan]

Vanity Fair - Why Is Elon Musk So Hell-Bent on Bulldozing the Government? (Gift link)

Silicon Valley insiders tell Vanity Fair what they think is behind the mega-billionaire’s DOGE crusade. “Elon believes he should be emperor of the world,” one close associate says.

By Nick Bilton
February 7, 2025

If you’ve been wondering why Elon Musk, who is now the head of DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency, has been holed up in an old government building in Washington, DC, spending nights and weekends surrounded by tech bros from Silicon Valley as he systematically dismantles parts of the federal government, specifically USAID, and is now setting his sights on other government agencies, you’re not alone.

This is the question I’ve been asking people who know and have worked with Musk in one form or another. The answers I’ve heard are surprisingly quite simple, but also utterly terrifying.

“Elon believes he should be emperor of the world, and this is his way of showing people what he’s capable of as emperor,” a close associate of Musk’s, who has worked with him for years and still speaks to him regularly, tells me. “He truly believes his way of handling the world is the best possible outcome for everyone in it.” In Musk’s mind, this person says, everything he’s done in his career to date has proven that thesis to be true—from Tesla’s electric cars reducing emissions and accelerating the transition to sustainable energy, to Neuralink’s efforts to help people with neurological disorders regain lost functions, to his belief that he single-handedly saved Twitter from collapse and turned it into a bastion of free speech, rescuing it from what he saw as the censorial grip of Jack Dorsey’s leadership.

We can argue how much Musk has made the world a better place until he lands on Mars, but the debate about his impact on the world, whether positive or negative, still doesn’t answer the question of why a man who could be luxuriating on a private island or floating in a zero-gravity chamber of his own making, or could literally buy anything he wants on planet Earth—or off planet Earth, for that matter—instead chooses to engage in a bureaucratic purge of historic proportions. And on top of that, why is he delighting in pulling funding from crucial government programs, working to shutter entire agencies, and slashing thousands of federal jobs with the casual ease of a CEO tweeting a doge meme?

“He is doing it because he likes wielding power more than anything else. It’s more fun to ruin hundreds of thousands of people’s lives than to ruin just hundreds of people’s lives,” a well-known Silicon Valley investor tells me.

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