As Donald Trump’s victory in the US election became clear, Elon Musk shared a meme of himself carrying a large porcelain sink into the Oval Office. The image referred back to when he bought Twitter and carried the same piece of bathroom furniture into its headquarters. Then, as now, the stunt was intended as a cumbersome visual pun: Let that sink in!
Soon after his little jest, the self-styled Chief Twit laid off most of the staff at Twitter. Later, he even went as far as to change its name. It may be some time before the full implications of Trump’s second coming sink in, but there are signs that the president-elect wants his favourite tech billionaire to be as ruthless with the institutions of the American state as he was with Twitter.
That said, Musk might not go as far as Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation and mastermind of Project 2025. His book, Dawn’s Early Light, was only published after the election announcement. Like Trump, who professed ignorance of the ‘Project’ at his rallies, Roberts may have been wary of scaring the voters. Even now that he has dared to publish, the original subtitle of ‘Burning Down Washington to Save America’ has been altered to ‘Taking Back Washington to Save America.’ The fuel for this bonfire was to include the FBI, the New York Times and, bizarrely, the Boy Scouts. Birth control was another target, and in a heavily-armed, frontier-like society, public prayer was to be a key tool in the competition with China.
All of this makes Musk’s proposed job title sound rather tame, not to say mundane, in comparison. ‘Secretary of cost-cutting’ just doesn’t have the glamour of, say, Chief Arsonist to the MAGA Movement. In a similarly unglamorous way, Steve Scalise, the House majority leader, confirmed that Musk would be charged with ‘rightsizing’ government.
Musk, for his part, has expressed great interest in serving as head of a Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) with a stated goal of reducing government spending by $2tn. Practically speaking, those cost cuts would probably result in deregulation and policy changes that would directly benefit Musk’s companies, particularly Tesla, SpaceX, X and Neuralink.
Though he hasn’t fully outlined how he would achieve such a goal, the billionaire has suggested eliminating what he sees as redundant government workers and reducing overly burdensome regulations. But Musk is likely to face opposition if he tries to apply the “move fast and break things” mantra to US government positions. In the view of Matt Mittelstead, a research fellow at George Mason University Mercatus Center, “The type of cost-cutting, slash-and-burn approach that he brought to Twitter is not possible in the public sector.”
The other, perhaps bigger question is how long a pact between two egos of cosmic dimensions can outlast the euphoria of victory. So far, the appreciation seems mutual, as do the benefits. While Musk’s algorithms bombarded his two million followers with pro-Trump content, the former president praised the world’s richest man as a star and a genius, adding, “We have to protect our geniuses. We don’t have that many of them.”
Whether such infatuation results in a government role may not even matter to Musk. The election has already earned him an extra $26bn to make up for the relatively paltry sums he invested in Trump’s campaign. As for those, the estimates vary. The Guardian reported that his America Pac injected $120mn into the Trump campaign. CNN’s figures have ranged from $75 to $119mn.
The role of unelected cost-cutter aside, Musk may already have achieved his main goal: his alliance with the Republican demagogue is the surest way to protect himself and his fellow tech bosses from the ravages of state regulation.
All of this seems so obvious now. For weeks, we have seen Musk courting controversy in a manner other rich individuals might consider unseemly. He has alerted the world to a civil war in Britain resulting from the election of ‘two-tier Keir.’ He has given away millions of dollars in raffles. Weirdest of all, he has bounced around on stage with unconfined joy enough to make Mick Jagger’s antics look dignified.
It can be hard to recall, therefore, that as recently as March, Musk was refusing to endorse Trump. Indeed, like the Washington Post at the behest of Jeff Bezos, Musk was telling people he wouldn’t endorse anyone. By May, he was still weighing his options. It was only in July, immediately after the attempted assassination in Butler, Pennsylvania, that Musk saw the light. “I fully endorse President Trump and hope for his rapid recovery,” he tweeted.
This looked like a Damascene conversion. Musk even posted an image of his new hero with his fist in the air, defiant after his brush with death, as if this gesture alone had inspired the change of heart. No more kicking against the pricks. From this day forth, the Donald would have no further reason to ask, “Elon, Elon, why persecutest thou me?” – which is just as well, as only someone who’d actually read the Bible stood any chance with such syntax.
It comes as some surprise, therefore, to discover that when Trump was last in the White House and invited all the luminaries of Silicon Valley to his American Technology Council, Musk himself was absent.
This is how James Naughton described the scene back in 2017: ‘Some attendees looked pretty sheepish, as well they might. Many, if not most of them, abhor everything the president stands for. The meeting, as with many of Trump’s other round-table assemblies, brought to mind footage of Saddam Hussein’s cabinet in session. But while it was clear that many of those present would have preferred to have been elsewhere, they were also chary of being seen to snub a populist hero’,
That didn’t prevent Musk from snubbing him.
However, the strange word in this account is ‘sheepish’. Those in attendance included Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Safra Catz of Oracle, Tim Cook of Apple, John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins (the venture-capital firm), Brian Krzanich of Intel, Tom Leighton of Akamai, Satya Nadella of Microsoft, Ginni Rometty of IBM, Eric Schmidt of Alphabet (Google’s parent company) and Steve Mollenkopf of Qualcomm.
Back then, they had two possible reasons for looking sheepish. First, there was their well-known disposition towards progressive politics. Greg Ferenstein’s survey of attitudes in Silicon Valley had concluded that they were very liberal on social issues. They were opposed to the death penalty and in favour of a woman’s right to choose, gun-control laws and gay rights. They were also overwhelmingly in favour of policies that redistributed wealth, including taxing rich individuals and providing universal healthcare for the poor. They even wanted more permissive immigration rules.
In short, they appeared to be well to the left of the mainstream Democratic party. However, there were two areas where they parted company with the Democrats: on trade unions – they were generally against them – and on government regulation.
Around that time, when it came to regulating, Trump was the more obvious menace. By 2018, the right had decided that firms like Google, in designing features like search engine results pages and the algorithms that powered them, had perpetuated a bias against the conservative media in the US. Although hard to verify, the perception was that most companies in the Valley continued to employ far more liberals than conservatives within their ranks, so much so that at certain companies, conservatism itself felt taboo.
Trump, it seems, had good reason to feel persecuted. In the end, though, his complaints had little to do with the change in the relationship between the tech bros and the American state. That can probably be traced back to March 2019 when Elizabeth Warren made her unsuccessful bid to lead the Democratic Party. “Today’s big tech companies have too much power – too much power over our economy, our society, and our democracy,” the Massachusetts senator said in a blog post: “They’ve bulldozed competition, used our private information for profit, and tilted the playing field against everyone else.”
As an antitrust advocate, Warren had clobbered the big banks following the 2007-2009 financial crisis. Now, she said she would select regulators who would seek to break up what she called “anti-competitive mergers,” such as Facebook’s recent buyout of Instagram and Amazon’s purchase of Whole Foods.
The following November, the Democrats proposed a bill to “provide consumers with foundational data privacy rights, create strong oversight mechanisms, and establish meaningful enforcement.”
The proposal resembled Europe’s sweeping General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) legislation, passed in 2016. It forced tech companies to disclose the personal information they had collected, deleting or correcting inaccurate or incomplete information and allowed consumers to block the sale of their data. If passed, the act was bound to make it easier for US authorities to levy large fines on tech companies and for individuals to bring legal action against companies that breached the privacy rules.
The relationship with the Democrats soured even further when Biden appointed Lina Khan as the youngest person in history, and the most progressive in more than a decade, to chair the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). Khan’s reputation had gone before her. She was already the bête noire of Silicon Valley.
In 2017, during her third year at Yale Law School, the Yale Law Journal published Khan's student essay, Amazon's Antitrust Paradox. The piece made a significant impact in American legal and business circles, and The New York Times described it as ‘reframing decades of monopoly law.’ A few sentences give one a sense of her cool, lucid tone, about as far from an Elon Musk tweet as English can get:
‘Under this regime, Facebook’s purchases of WhatsApp and Instagram, for instance, would have received greater scrutiny from the antitrust agencies in recognition of how acquiring data can deeply implicate competition. International transactions granting foreign corporations access to data on US users would also require close review.'
Khan argued that the current American antitrust law framework focused on keeping consumer prices down and could not account for the anticompetitive effects of platform-based business models such as Amazon’s. The title of Khan's piece was a reference to Robert Bork’s 1978 book, The Antitrust Paradox, which established the consumer-welfare standard that Khan criticised.
In the old days, antitrust regulators had been captured by Bork’s legalistic doctrine that there was little wrong with corporate dominance unless it was harming consumers. The test for that harm was price-gouging. Since Google’s and Facebook’s services were “free”, where was the harm?
Khan’s adaptation of antitrust rules to the digital age threatened to end the tech firms’ monopolies. Despite a string of setbacks in the courts, it was obvious that she was ready to pursue the tech moguls who had benefited thus far from the fact that they were not charging their customers.
The appointment marked a break from the revolving door between the FTC and the private sector, in which people with years of experience defending companies in Silicon Valley became regulators. Elizabeth Warren said Khan’s leadership of the FTC was “a huge opportunity to make big, structural change” to fight monopolies, and Senator Amy Klobuchar praised Khan as “a pioneer in competition policy” who “will bring a critical perspective to the FTC.”
