For Musk, It's Mission Accomplished
Don’t be fooled. Elon Musk is not leaving the White House with his tail between his legs, discredited and rejected. He is leaving because he has accomplished what he set out to accomplish. His companies are no longer under investigation. He likely has access to virtually every entry of every database in the American government. He has secured government contracts and doubled his net worth. He has undermined American democracy and advanced the cause of white supremacy.
He has accomplished more of his agenda in four months than most governments do across multiple mandates. That his agenda was the social and economic destruction of his adoptive country is incidental. It was an agenda marked by self-interest and vengeance.
With the creation of the Department of Government Efficiency, blatantly sharing the name DOGE with Musk’s favourite crypto currency, he systematically invaded government departments with a view to shutting down funding for projects he did not like, investigations into businesses he was involved in, and extraction of the data they held.
The first and most visible was Musk’s systematic and comprehensive destruction of USAID, the United States Agency for International Development. The vicious and heartless attack on an organisation bringing principally medical aid to people in need around the world had nothing to do with saving money for the American government, with total aid totalling around $23 billion per year, or less than 1/3 of one percent of the total government budget. It is far more about Musk’s white supremacist tendencies. USAID was a key player in the United States’ efforts to end apartheid in South Africa under which Musk grew up.
USAID cuts are estimated to have directly killed nearly 100,000 people so far just from AIDS and tuberculosis. It goes without saying that the people killed my Musk’s policies are generally not caucasians.
The DOGE cuts alone number in the thousands, with the Center for American Progress documenting over 2,300 specific cuts, many of them targeting programs such as funding for Historically Black Colleges and Universities.
With the Trump administration’s focus on arresting and deporting non-white migrants, it is not hard to understand Musk and Trump’s shared objectives in, shall we call it, whitening the United States. If there was still any ambiguity, consider the bizarre case of the two batches of white Afrikaner refugees the Trump administration have gone to great lengths to welcome into the country, while closing down nearly all other refugee programs.
It isn’t only his longing for the days of apartheid that has driven Elon Musk.
He’s primarily a tech CEO who understands the value of big data. Tesla, his car company, is not primarily a car company — it is a data company. The more data, the easier it is to forecast demand and sell more cars to the point that the data itself is the core of the company.
It is not by accident then that as Musk’s DOGE invaded US government department after US government department, his primary focus was not on the performance of their employees or the security or integrity of their systems, or on just making the government better, but seem to have been about extracting as much data as he could as quickly as he could, while Russian IP addresses tried to log into the systems within minutes of their arrival.
Since Musk’s arrival on the scene, the Trump administration has come to understand the value of centralised data. With the American government having previously kept firewalls between departments precisely to avoid inappropriate use of the government’s data on American residents, for example shielding tax records from immigration enforcement agencies, there’s a new and dangerous data game in town.
Peter Thiel, Elon Musk’s partner at PayPal, who is the financial power behind vice president JD Vance’s political career, is also the co-founder of a data company known as Palantir. According to the New York Times, Palantir has been given a contract by the Trump administration to centralise all American government data into a single searchable database, linking for example tax, student loan, health, and immigration records and breaking down the firewalls the American government has spent years protecting.
With his racist and data interests under control, we cannot forget Musk’s primary mission in buying the presidency for Donald Trump. That is, ending the numerous investigations and regulatory challenges the racist billionaire has been having with various agencies of the United States government.
As NBC notes, “Elon Musk's regulatory troubles have begun to melt away in Trump's second term,” with investigations into SpaceX, Tesla, and Neuralink all evaporating since his arrival. Many of those government employees involved in investigating Musk have found themselves unemployed through surgical cuts by DOGE. Interesting coincidence.
Don’t be distracted by stories alleging Musk’s significant drug use, or the fact that White House chief of staff Stephen Miller’s wife Katie is also leaving the White House to work for Musk, or his black eye visible at his farewell press conference with Trump, or even rumours circulating that Trump asked his staff “was [Musk’s cuts] all bullshit?” There will be a lot of stories from people wanting to portray Musk’s departure as less than amicable. I don’t buy it.
Musk isn’t leaving the White House; even Trump says he’s welcome back. What he is doing is insulating a president he bought and paid for from the damage he has caused in the pursuit of his own agenda. He is leaving now simply because he has achieved what he set out to do. For him, it’s mission accomplished.