A month after the start of his chaotic mandate as an employee of the special government and a man straight to President Trump, Elon Musk presumed in the applause of an adorable audience at the CPAC.
The episode is best known for the chainsaw He worked on stage, a gift from President Javier Milei from Argentina. But Musk did something else Just as bizarre and revealing that day.
He has accessorized with a leather jacket, square glasses and a gold chain, echoing his outfit in an image generated by AI that had exploded on social networks last year. To ensure that no one missed the point, he pronounced a sentence inspired by a quote from J. Robert Oppenheimer beloved on the Internet: “I have become even.”
Musque has describe* Memes as an advanced form of communication, a way to accelerate understanding by compressing ideas in pictures that can be understood more quickly than words.
For the Trump administration, that’s exactly what it was.
Since January 20, Musk has served as practical stenography for Trump’s war against federal bloating and bureaucracy. Here is a cartoon villain or a folk hero, from your point of view, each appearance of which has generated images that told a clear story about the government upset by a group of young techno-solutionists. There he was in the oval office, bearing a overcoat and a child. There he gave lectures to the cabinet confirmed by the Senate at his first meeting. He was there sat Next to Trump in a Tesla on the alley of the White House.
For the White House, it was useful, even if these images sailed in democratic advertisements. They diverted negative attention which could otherwise have been directed against the president or someone as Russell VoughtAn architect of more systematic administration attempts to remove expenses. And each meme of Mousque-Goes-Washington was proof that the president is promising to break the system and to govern like no one had done before. Who cared that the The receipts did not add up When did the images tell the story?
Even Musk himself found him a little surreal because he said it Wednesday when he spoke to a small group of journalists, including my colleague Jonathan Swan.
“It is funny that we have Doge,” said Musk, referring to the team he sent through the government, which he appointed according to a cryptocurrency based on a A dog that has taken up the internet. “I mean, it’s the absurdity of that. Like, are we in the simulation here, or what is going on? It was a piece of meme at some point. How did we get here? “
Musk’s decision to move away from his full -time work means that the administration should lose its easy avatar for a board of its program. (This might not happen right away; between this pen and Pad session and an interview with Fox News, Musk was more visible in the traditional media last week than any other moment.) But the Doge era might not end simply because the same fades.
The Doge agencies contributed to dismantling will not come back anytime soon. Musk believes that he has introduced a hundred staff members to the government’s Ministry of Efficiency, many of whom are now anchored in agencies such as the Social Security AdministrationTHE State departmentTHE Interior department and the Commission of securities. These people picked up a Huge amount of data in order to reference it and fusion – an effort that has already led them to refer Non-citizens to continue the charges they voted illegally and to put some immigrants on social security “death list“To put them pressure on” self-repair “.
While these companies could lose teeth without musk as an omnipresent Appagçon, the team could be able to move more agile and quietly, without a lightning rod at the helm.
With Musk who stepped back, I will expand this newsletter, and I will have more to say about this. But we will not turn away from his project. We will continue to follow the story behind the meme.
* Yes, it’s a half -hour podcast. The memes arrive six minutes.
Civic lesson
Elon Musk’s political education
President Trump was delighted to have the help of Elon Musk, a technological billionaire without experience in government. But that meant that Musk had to take an intensive course on the subject. Here are some things he learned.
1. It is really difficult to reduce public spending. Who among us did not believe with casualness that we could save some billions of dollars? This was Musk’s initial goal for Doge, before reducing it to 1 dollars. By this week, however, like Jonathan Swan reportedThe reality had settled.
“It’s really difficult,” he said about the objective of billions of dollars. “It is in a way, how much pain is, you know, is the cabinet and the congress ready to take? Because it can be done, but it requires facing many complaints.”
2. The money cannot buy everything. The millions of musk may have helped to raise Trump to victory in November, but his decision to spend $ 20 million to help a conservative candidate at the Supreme Wisconsin Court gave him the First big backhand From his Gop Megadonor era.
While waiting on x
In case I miss you on television
Musk generally avoids traditional media in favor of his X account. But in the last 24 hours, he used the latter to amplify the first. My colleague Eli Tan explains.
Elon Musk could withdraw from his work in the federal government, but he does not withdraw from the waves. And in about the last day, he was taken to X to make sure that no one missed his appearances on television.
This week, he participated in a Fox News segment that entered a “council meeting” for the government’s ministry of efficiency. His lieutenants took turns, as in a classroom, sharing anecdotes on their time in the cost reduction company.
Friday afternoon, Musk had republished games of the video 14 times, another attempt to clean the tarnished image of Doge and his.
Many statements that Musk workers have made unnecessary public spending that they have reworked during previous interviews, such as subsidies to Alpaca farmers in Peru or transgender surgeries in Guatemala.
Some of Musk’s republication focused on part of the interview in particular, when an official named Ethan Shaotran spoke of losing friendships after abandoning Harvard to join Doge.
“Most of the campus now hates me,” said Shaotran. “I hope people realize through conversations like this, this reform is really necessary.”
Another notable article:
– Eli Tan
You shouldn’t miss
What musk wanted
During our last day to cover all the musk all the time, I found myself Looking at a story A group of my colleagues wrote on November 6, the day after the elections.
At that time, the government’s ministry of efficiency, still, was a glow in Trump’s eyes. But it was clear that Musk had a long list of wishes of the incoming president, whatever his role in the 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 Ministry of Defense, they found. And its companies, which were confronted At least 20 recent federal surveyswanted to benefit a lot from a relaxed regulatory environment.
“The effect”, of Musk’s influence, have written, “could be to withdraw or weaken one of the greatest controls of Mr. Musk’s power: the federal government”.
I would say that the reports resisted.