One month into his chaotic tenure as a special government employee and a right-hand man to President Trump, Elon Musk basked in the cheers of an adoring public at CPAC.
The episode is best known for the chain saw he wielded onstage, a gift from President Javier Milei of Argentina. But Musk did something else just as outlandish and revealing that day.
He accessorized himself with a leather jacket, square glasses and a gold chain, echoing his get-up in an A.I.-generated image that had rocketed around social media last year. To make sure nobody missed the point, he uttered a phrase inspired by a J. Robert Oppenheimer quotation beloved on the internet: “I am become meme.”
Musk has described* memes as an advanced form of communication, a way of speeding up comprehension by compressing ideas into images that can be understood faster than words.
For the Trump administration, that’s exactly what he was.
Since Jan. 20, Musk has served as convenient shorthand for Trump’s war on federal bloat and bureaucracy. Here was a cartoon villain or a folk hero, depending on your point of view, whose every appearance generated images that told a clear story about government upended by a group of young techno-solutionists. There he was in the Oval Office, wearing an overcoat and a child. There he was lecturing the Senate-confirmed cabinet at its first meeting. There he was seated beside Trump in a Tesla on the White House driveway.
For the White House, this was useful, even as those images sailed into Democratic campaign ads. They diverted negative attention that might otherwise have been directed at the president or at someone like Russell Vought, an architect of the administration’s more systematic attempts to strip down spending. And every Musk-goes-to-Washington meme was evidence of the president making good on his promise to break the system and govern as no one had before. Who cared that the receipts didn’t add up when the images told the story?
Even Musk himself found it kind of surreal, as he put it on Wednesday when he talked to a small group of reporters, including my colleague Jonathan Swan.
“It is funny that we’ve got DOGE,” Musk said, referring to the team he has dispatched across the government, which he named after a cryptocurrency based on a dog that once took over the internet. “I mean, this is the absurdity of that. Like, are we in the simulation here, or what’s going on? It was a meme coin at one point. How did we get here?”
Musk’s decision to step away from his full-time work means the administration stands to lose its easy avatar for a plank of its agenda. (This might not happen right away; between that pen-and-pad session and a Fox News interview, Musk has been more visible in traditional media in the past week than at any other point of his tenure.) But the DOGE era might not end just because the meme fades away.
The agencies DOGE has had a hand in dismantling aren’t coming back anytime soon. Musk estimates that he has brought some 100 staff members into the Department of Government Efficiency, many of whom are now embedded in agencies like the Social Security Administration, the State Department, the Department of Interior and the Securities and Exchange Commission. Those people have scooped up an enormous amount of data with the intent of cross-referencing and merging it — an effort that has already led them to refer noncitizens for prosecution on charges that they voted illegally, and to put certain immigrants on a Social Security “death list” to pressure them to “self-deport.”
While those enterprises could lose teeth without Musk as an ever-present enforcer, the team might be able to move more nimbly, and quietly, without a lightning rod at the helm.
With Musk stepping back, I’ll be broadening the focus of this newsletter, and I’ll have more to say about that soon. But we won’t take our eye off his project. We’ll keep tracking the story behind the meme.
*Yes, that is an eight-and-a-half-hour podcast. Memes come up six minutes in.
CIVICS LESSON
The political education of Elon Musk
President Trump was delighted to have the help of Elon Musk, a tech billionaire with no experience in government. But that meant Musk had to take a crash course in the subject. Here are a few things he learned.
1. It really is hard to cut government spending. Who among us hasn’t casually believed we could save a couple trillion dollars? That was Musk’s initial goal for DOGE, before he reduced it to $1 trillion. By this week, though, as Jonathan Swan reported, reality had set in.
“It’s really difficult,” he said of the trillion-dollar goal. “It’s sort of, how much pain is, you know, are the cabinet and is Congress willing to take? Because it can be done, but it requires dealing with a lot of complaints.”
2. Money can’t buy everything. Musk’s millions may well have helped lift Trump to victory in November, but his decision to spend $20 million to help a conservative candidate for the Wisconsin Supreme Court gave him the first big setback of his G.O.P. megadonor era.
3. Government can be even more inefficient than you’d think. Early on, Musk learned of the government’s cave-archive of retirement records and told the world of his discovery from the Oval Office. (My colleague David Fahrenthold already knew about it.)
4. Constituent management is key. When Senate Republicans grew tired of trying to defend federal job cuts and explain what, exactly, DOGE was doing, they peppered Musk with questions — and he gave them his phone number as if he were a glad-handing town councilman.
5. Don’t get in front of the principal(s). Some of Musk’s biggest setbacks came when he undermined the people who were supposed to be running the show (think of his blowup with Secretary of State Marco Rubio or his failed effort to install a new leader of the I.R.S.). Trump sought to tighten the leash — but Musk has never been all that comfortable playing a supporting role.
MEANWHILE on X
In case you missed me on TV
Musk usually eschews traditional media in favor of his X account. But over the past 24 hours, he’s been using the latter to amplify the former. My colleague Eli Tan explains.
Elon Musk might be retreating from his job in the federal government, but he’s not retreating from the airwaves. And over the past day or so, he’s taken to X to make sure nobody missed his TV appearances.
This week, he participated in a Fox News segment that went inside a “board meeting” for the Department of Government Efficiency. His lieutenants took turns, as if in a classroom, sharing anecdotes about their time at the cost-cutting venture.
As of Friday afternoon, Musk had reposted parts of the video 14 times, another attempt to clean up DOGE’s tarnished image, and his own.
Many of the claims that Musk’s workers made about wasteful government spending they rehashed from earlier interviews, like about subsidies for alpaca farmers in Peru or transgender surgeries in Guatemala.
Some of Musk’s reposts focused on one part of the interview in particular, when an official named Ethan Shaotran talked about losing friendships after dropping out of Harvard to join DOGE.
“Most of campus hates me now,” Shaotran said. “I hope people realize through conversations like this that reform is genuinely needed.”
Another notable post:
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Musk called a potential ban on Germany’s far-right party “an extreme attack on democracy” after the German government classified the group as extremist.
— Eli Tan
you shouldn’t miss
What Musk wanted
On our last day of covering all Musk all the time, I found myself looking back at a story a group of my colleagues wrote on Nov. 6, the day after the election.
At that time, the as-yet-unannounced Department of Government Efficiency was a glint in Trump’s eye. But it was clear that Musk had a long wish list from the incoming president, no matter his role in government.
The team reported that he was already thinking about how a second Trump administration could benefit him. He wanted to install SpaceX employees at the Department of Defense, they found. And his companies, which were facing at least 20 recent federal investigations, stood to benefit immensely from a relaxed regulatory environment.
“The effect,” of Musk’s influence, they wrote, “could be to remove, or weaken, one of the biggest checks on Mr. Musk’s power: the federal government.”
I would say that reporting held up.
Jess Bidgood is a managing correspondent for The Times and writes the On Politics newsletter, a guide to the 2024 election and beyond.
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