Elon Musk hates the weekend. For well over a decade, the world’s richest man has proclaimed the necessity of working at least 80 hours a week — “peaking above 100 at times,” as he said in 2018 — in order “to change the world.” Now he and his subordinates at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency are supposedly toiling up to 120 hours a week, which is why, in Mr. Musk’s view, their “bureaucratic opponents” stand no chance. “It’s like the opposing team just leaves the field for two days!” Mr. Musk recently remarked. “Working the weekend is a superpower.”
This association between incessant work and entrepreneurial success is pervasive in American business culture today. Jeff Bezos reports working 12 hours every day of the week in the early years of Amazon. The Apple chief executive Tim Cook is famous for sending emails at 4:30 a.m. Mr. Musk’s ostensible boss, despite his well-known fondness for TV news and social media, also insists that “no president ever worked harder than me.”
These boasts, plausible or not, reveal something important about the American valorization of work, and help explain why this class of supposedly busy billionaires has come to believe they’re entitled to dominate our national life. For Mr. Musk and his associates, a herculean enthusiasm for work isn’t merely a way to get things done; it’s also a mark of innate superiority, a “superpower” that confers the right to impose their vision on the world. Mr. Musk’s decades in the highest echelons of the tech industry, surrounded by other executives who justified their lordship over their private empires by trumpeting their inexhaustible work ethic, have taught him that if you work harder than everyone else, you should be rewarded with unquestioned rule over your dominion. Now he is seeking to extend this logic into our government, transforming it, like one of his companies, into another personal fief.
While the scope of Mr. Musk’s project may be novel, the archetype he embodies has a long history. The Austrian-born economist Joseph Schumpeter, who taught at Harvard from 1932 until his death in 1950, helped popularize the idea that entrepreneurs possessed a special set of personality traits that set them apart from lesser businessmen and managers. Entrepreneurship, according to Schumpeter, smashed economic routines. That took “will and personality.” True entrepreneurs generated “gales of creative destruction,” in his famous phrase, a notion he adapted from the German economist Werner Sombart, who maintained in 1909 that entrepreneurs were “men (not women!) equipped for everything with an extraordinary vitality, from which pours forth an unusual drive to act, a passionate joy in work and an irrepressible desire for power.” They were superheroes.
It didn’t take long for American business leaders to embrace this way of thinking. It enabled them to rationalize their success as the natural outgrowth of their own productivity, and to cast heavier workloads as a way of empowering employees rather than grinding them down. When Georges F. Doriot, a co-founder of one of the first major American venture capital firms, was asked in 1960 whether he planned to hire new staffers to keep up with his company’s rapid growth, he replied, “No, we will all just work later into the night.” This mind-set spread into the tech firms Doriot invested in and shaped the worldview of Silicon Valley executives. In the early 1980s, employees working under Steve Jobs in Apple’s Macintosh division made T-shirts that read “90 hours a week and loving it!”
In recent decades, two trends in American life have supercharged the spread of this entrepreneurial work ethic, helping to push busy billionaires to the center of our politics. First, more and more ordinary Americans learned to think of work as something scarce. As deindustrialization ravaged wide swaths of the country and unionization declined, they got accustomed to cycles of layoffs and the need to retrain in new occupations or new industries. Now, in an era when over 70 percent of Americans worry about the availability of good jobs with good pay, the bosses atop our class pyramid correctly perceive how such jobs have become a status symbol: If the rich of the Gilded Age had conspicuous consumption, flaunting their freedom from toil, the rich of our new Gilded Age have conspicuous work. We see them working constantly while we hunt for extra shifts or struggle to string part-time jobs together, and we marvel at how special they must be.
Then there is the looming threat of a seismic technological breakthrough. Many tech leaders today believe that the development of artificial intelligence is poised to automate most jobs into oblivion. Tech companies including Google, Dropbox and Meta have already invoked A.I. advancements to justify recent layoffs, and over 40 percent of companies worldwide anticipate following suit in the next five years, according to a World Economic Forum survey. For those driving the A.I. boom, this is a prospect to look forward to. In the automated world to come, billionaires seem to expect to be some of the last workers standing, charged with much of the only work they imagine humans will have left to do: calling the shots for everyone else.
For Mr. Musk, culling the work forces of firms he acquires seems to be a way of bringing this future one step closer. After he took over Twitter, he fired half its employees and informed those who remained that he would be imposing an “extremely hard-core” management style; many of them took his offer to resign in exchange for three months of severance. Now Mr. Musk is applying the same playbook to the federal government, seeking to replace career officials with DOGE shock troops and machine learning algorithms. “Everything that can be machine-automated will be,” one official observing Mr. Musk’s blitz recently told The Washington Post. “And the technocrats will replace the bureaucrats.”
Common sense would seem to suggest obstacles to this vision. As Mr. Musk is proving before our eyes, working 120 hours a week is not the same thing as doing a good job. Mr. Musk and his DOGE henchmen are making the kinds of sloppy mistakes one might expect from people toiling around the clock, subsisting, as they reportedly are, on “a steady stream of delivery pizzas, Red Bull and Doritos” and resting only intermittently in office “sleep pods.” They put up a website attempting to document their cost savings that was riddled with glaring accounting errors. They fired hundreds of workers responsible for nuclear weapons safety, then scrambled to rehire them.
Mr. Musk knows how much an executive can get away with when he is believed to possess extraordinary productive powers. He made Twitter a worse, less valuable company, dismantling its verification and moderation systems and suppressing links to other websites, and yet he profited from turning it into a MAGA megaphone. His cars catch fire, and yet they keep coming off the assembly line at his hyper-automated factories, their appeal buoyed by his cultlike fan base. And now, it seems, if anything ever stops DOGE’s wrecking ball, it will be the courts, or perhaps the president’s jealousy, not the discovery that Mr. Musk and his team don’t know what they are doing.
As Peter Thiel once observed, “A startup is basically structured as a monarchy.” And as in a monarchy, the core purpose of many startups is to flatter the egos of their leaders rather than to make ordinary people’s lives better. If the United States feels increasingly like a country ruled by two petulant kings, perhaps it’s because the government is finally being run like a business.
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