Seems to me that it’s mostly revenge; dismantling any government agency that has ever thwarted him, or that the right wing does not like. But, I certainly don’t trust his motives…
Now, don’t get me wrong, fuck Trump and fuck Musk.
That being said, It’s most likely more simple than a master plan for world domination. He’s removing protections for workers and consumers so he can cut corners, pay less, and make more money. Plain and simple.
He’s also stealing our tax dollars through government contracts. Trump does the same thing.
I once heard a talk by Bill Gates about his charity work through the Gates foundation. He described how he and Melinda had dedicated tens or hundreds of millions to causes. But the best money he could spend was in petitioning the government to join the cause. Because for all the wealth and power and notoriety held by the billionaire class, it was still a drop in the bucket compared to what world states could do. It’s a difference of orders of magnitude. The difference between a thousand dollars and a million dollars? That’s the same as the difference between a million and a billion. World governments operate in the trillions.
This is a coup.
Musk the Billionaire is small potatoes compared to Musk at the levers of government finance. It’s like a leaky faucet compared to a firehose. The one holding that firehose controls where it goes.
This is a coup. It is establishing an unelected oligarchy at the core of the Federal Government with the power to influence and manipulate policy, and execute unofficial policy through financial pressure. It’s not anything new to history, and it’s not 5-D chess. It is just people in power grabbing more power for themselves at the expense of all others including elected officials. In other words, a coup.
If you believe the technocrat mumbo jumbo he’s fracturing central government into tons of little fifedoms that his billionaire buddies can rule. And hopefully while killing bazillions of people as some kind of a ‘market reset’ to drive up shareholder value.
Fucking terrifying.
Setting things up to allow him to become the world’s first trillionaire.
The important stuff is about crippling regulatory mechanisms, opening up huge government contracts, and dismantling workers rights. Everything else is just smoke and mirrors.
Also crashing the economy so he can buy companies at bargain bin prices.
^ This answer. He wants the US Treasury for his own. But also, he knows money is just a way of keeping score. If he wants to accomplish great things, he needs a slave race working blindly for him. (Musk having been raised in South Africa, apartheid was a real thing. Small white ruling class with all the money over the black native population who were treated like dogs). His goal is to bring that here and D.T. will help him.
They are both broken people inside. Something is very wrong in there and I pray it gets fixed/better.
This
Apparently, at both SpaceX and Tesla, he had a habit of going around demanding random changes because he was convinced he was the smartest person on the planet and whatever he came up with 2 seconds ago was far better than what the seasoned engineer who had spent months designing it had come up with. They had to make a team of people to try to keep him away from useful work because it was so destructive to what they were trying to do. There is no plausible explanation for that, to me, other than that he genuinely believes his own hype.
He could literally have the best and most qualified people in the room with him to explain virtually anything he wanted, for unlimited time, any time he wanted. He doesn’t want that. He just wants to take some random bullshit he found on Twitter combined with his own prejudice about how things work, and act on it, taking pleasure in people getting upset about him not being supposed to do that.
I am sure there is more complex stuff at work than is obvious, but I think probably, a pretty huge chunk of it is just that he genuinely believes that the whole US government is fucking up because it’s staffed with morons, and he’s such a genius that he can fix it, and that’s what he’s currently doing. I do think there’s some pathology at work in why he’s so motivated to do it: He has insecurity about whether he is actually the smartest man on the planet, it creates unsettledness, and so he has to go out and take some drastic action to prove to himself that he is. Because would anyone but the smartest person do all this stuff? It’s unprecedented. And therefore, he is smart on an unprecedented level, as he always knew, and he doesn’t need to be unsettled. And then, the next day, the unsettledness returns.
I think most of it pretty simple. It’s just “never been told no” syndrome coupled with societal reward to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars, an army of fans, a record of “success” on his resume, and so on.