On the way to a friends’ house last December, I hitched a ride with our mutual friend and her mom. With Donald Trump’s White House takeover looming, the conversation swiftly turned political.
I confessed that I was deeply concerned about Elon Musk’s potential role in the federal government. His plan to roll out the Department of Government Efficiency, a task force created to dismantle government bureaucracy and slash federal spending, had been announced just one month prior.
Hoping for commiseration, I was shocked when my friend’s mom defended the tech billionaire.
She said “despite his jerk tendencies, he’s a very smart man,” praising his companies, SpaceX and Tesla.
Musk’s presence in our socio-political stratosphere is multifold. Some dub him a master innovator, at the helm of SpaceX and Tesla. He’s also a billionaire social media CEO, steering X to the ground through monetizing verification and removing content moderation.
Many also know him as a bigoted troll, stoking controversy by performing a Nazi salute at Trump’s inauguration and then gaslighting the public by mocking the allegations. He’s also a raging transphobe, allowing X users to freely misgender one-another without recourse. His own transgender daughter accused him of bullying her for being queer. Yikes.
The bully that I and many others have come to know and loathe has amassed sweeping power in our political system.
Musk’s facade as a bold and innovative intellectual is over. He is a bully in the plainest sense of the word.
His antics do not diminish the number of Teslas my Bay Area friends’ parents own (sometimes three at once!) or the oversaturation of Cybertrucks, despite their hulking design and reports indicating a lack of safety.
The tide may be turning, though. When I visited my San Francisco home during Spring Break, I was comforted by the anti-Tesla protests that have abounded throughout the Bay.
As the country contends with Musk’s outsized influence on the federal government, it’s worth taking a step back to unpack the outrage many Americans have unleashed at Musk.
One trend is Musk’s violation of precedent, outlined by the questionable legality of DOGE.
The quasi-governmental department faced instant backlash after Trump’s inauguration. Within minutes of the president taking office, the public interest law firm National Security Counselors filed a lawsuit alleging that DOGE was in breach of federal transparency rules.
On the same day, a group of veterans, public health professionals, teachers and consumer advocates filed a federal lawsuit in protest of DOGE’s proposed cuts to federal services.
These legal challenges have done little to curb DOGE’s momentum. In three short months, DOGE has widely impacted the federal government, slashing jobs and intimidating workers by demanding weekly summaries of their productivity.
Under DOGE, an estimated 280,000 workers have been laid off across 27 agencies since February, according to CBS News.
Among those fired are workers in essential government organizations such as The Department of Education, which lost nearly half of its workforce in March, and The Department of Health and Human Services, which fired roughly 10,000 workers and is now asking many to return. DOGE also plans to enact sweeping cuts to The Department of Veterans Affairs, threatening the safety nets in place for our veterans.
At the helm of these cuts is an unelected billionaire who is swiftly destroying our government safety nets.
In an interview with NPR, Harvard Public Policy Prof. Elizabeth Linos warned that DOGE is causing “harms that are not going to be easily undone.”
Musk is a bully who pounces on his opponents and uses his wealth as a weapon to enforce an authoritarian agenda.
Consider his pro-Trump donations. Financial records collected in December by CBS News indicated that Musk poured over a quarter-billion dollars into electing Trump and other Republican candidates in the 2024 election cycle, cementing himself among the largest donors in either party.
He also used cash giveaways to incentivize voters to support Trump in key battleground states. He repeated this gross initiative in the race for last week’s Wisconsin Supreme Court seat, spending more than $20 million between him and his affiliated groups toward electing conservative Brad Schimel. Despite his hefty donations, Democratic nominee Susan Crawford won by nearly 10 percentage points on April 1. Musk blamed billionaire donations for her win.
Musk epitomizes the perils of big money in politics. The world is watching as a billionaire with the temperament of a toddler flexes more power in government than our elected officials.
Though Trump indicated earlier this week that Musk’s role would be expiring in the coming weeks, the damage has been done.
It remains to be seen whether Trump will backtrack on his promise to roll back Musk’s power — after all, he’s a pathological liar — but it is high time a bully like Musk be dethroned.
Gabe Hawkins is a Medill freshman. He can be contacted at [email protected]. If you would like to respond publicly to this op-ed, send a Letter to the Editor to [email protected]. The views expressed in this piece do not necessarily reflect the views of all staff members of The Daily Northwestern.
