Why Is Elon Musk So Hell-Bent on Bulldozing the Government?

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.

The first order of business upon establishing DOGE was to gut entire government agencies that had existed for decades, including those responsible for diplomacy, global aid, and economic stabilization. Take the United States Agency for International Development, for example, the agency responsible for providing foreign assistance and disaster relief. In Musk’s view, it’s been a bloated bureaucracy wasting taxpayer dollars. And so by 11:59 p.m. tonight, thousands of USAID employees are set to be put on administrative leave, most of whom work overseas. Some have reportedly already received termination notices. Musk noted this week that he had “spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper. Could gone to some great parties. Did that instead.” The day before, on Sunday, he posted, “USAID is a criminal organization. Time for it to die.”

The Silicon Valley investor tells me that even if Musk is right—that USAID is bloated and wastes taxpayer money—there are also clearly aspects of the agency that are doing good things around the world. The problem is that Musk approaches everything in a binary way. “Either it’s good or it’s bad, there is nothing in between,” the investor says.

From Musk’s and Donald Trump’s perspective, USAID was nothing but a waste of money. On X, the DOGE account has been reporting on the so-called government inefficiencies Musk and his team have uncovered, which he is claiming proves how wasteful the agency has been. “Today, 78 contracts were terminated for convenience across DEI, Non-Performing, Media, and Consulting categories, including one for ‘groundwater exploration and assessment in the Islamic Republic of Mauritania.’ Approximately $110mm of total savings,” Musk triumphantly announced on X. In another series of posts from the DOGE account and his own personal X account, Musk noted that some news outlets, including Politico, were receiving money from USAID, which seemed to have helped justify Musk’s actions for his boss, President Trump. “LOOKS LIKE BILLIONS OF DOLLARS HAVE BEEN STOLLEN [sic] AT USAID, AND OTHER AGENCIES, MUCH OF IT GOING TO THE FAKE NEWS MEDIA AS A ‘PAYOFF’ FOR CREATING GOOD STORIES ABOUT THE DEMOCRATS,” Trump wrote, or shouted, on Truth Social. (The Washington Post reported Thursday that news sites like Politico were not receiving subsidies from USAID, but rather that government officials at the agency were expensing paid subscriptions to the outlets.)

Over the last decade, I’ve spent time with Musk and spoken to dozens of people close to him for countless stories I’ve written about him. And the thing everyone seems to agree on is that Musk doesn’t just believe in efficiency, he believes in efficiency on a catastrophic scale.

Everyone I speak to in Silicon Valley points out that his approach to what he’s doing now with the US government is modeled after what he did at Twitter—now a shell of its former self where he fired nearly 90% of employees in the first few weeks of acquiring it, and then did a victory lap of “I told you so!” when the company still functioned fine without those thousands of engineers, designers, and managers.

Now he’s attempting the same experiment on the federal government, and is already doing the “I told you so!” victory lap while still hacking away at the United States budget. The goal according to the person who has known Elon personally for years? Partially to satiate his ego, partially to prove that the United States, a nation of more than 330 million people, can run leaner. That it doesn’t need so many employees. That it can be handled the way he handles his companies: through sheer force of will, unquestioned authority, and, crucially, not thinking too much about how it affects the people in his crosshairs.

Of course, the problem with this approach is that the US government is not Twitter and the gutting of an entire nation’s infrastructure could have far graver consequences. There are reports that Musk is also looking to dismantle other key elements of government that both he and President Trump dislike; employees from almost every agency, from the Department of Education to the Department of Justice to the IRS, are worried that they might be next. “Would you like DOGE to audit the IRS?” he posted as a poll this week on X. (Only about 8% of the 1.9 million people who engaged in the poll said “no,” the rest were either a “yes” or an “F yes.”)

And yet, despite the chaos, Musk is thriving. He is, after all, a man who has never been particularly concerned with expertise, bureaucracy, or consequences. And this is where the theory of what Musk is doing—that this is all just a game—makes the most sense. “Elon is the richest man on the planet. He can have whatever he wants, and there is nothing that he can buy or own or do that excites him anymore,” a programmer in Silicon Valley who has interacted with Musk in the past tells me. “So now he looks at life like a video game where everything he does is pressing a button to see what happens on the screen, to see how he can affect the game. And the thing that excites him now is to be the number one player in the game.”

In this case, the game is the US government. And the question we should all be asking is: When does he stop? We are, after all, less than one month into the Trump administration. One month. And yet, Musk is already eliminating thousands of jobs and pulling funding from agencies that have operated for generations.

At what point does he either get bored of this latest toy, or worse—decide to take it even further? That’s unclear at this point, but what is clear is that he’s not even remotely close to being done yet. “The reason the government so [sic] insanely inefficient is that those in the government are spending your money on somebody else,” Musk posted on X in December, essentially forwarding what he was going to do when Trump took office. “That’s why we should minimize how much the government does. It is simply a giant version of the DMV!”