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What is Musk up to? [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2025-02-04

Originally published here.

If you read the news I read right now – substacks written by legit people and also some by cranks like me, some friends on other social media who share things, and following my own curiosity, using sources like AP and other not-really-popular-but-otherwise-credible sources–I’m beginning to understand that I see a different story than legacy or mainstream media followers. For the record, I canceled my subscription to the WaPo for the first time in my adult life after its lack of endorsement of Kamala. I will read an occasional NYT article, sure, but I don’t surf it and read multiple articles at a time anymore—y’know, like how we used to read newspapers. I don’t watch TV news, except for the occasional late night local news. What I’m reading is telling me a different story than what the MSM is telling. Regardless of the source, it’s all a lot, and it can easily come to the point where one has gone too deep. I hope I’m not there—and I hope someone will call me out if I am.

If you are in the mainstream media silo, you’re seeing a lot of political intrigue and outrage. You’re seeing a lot of the culture war actions – against immigrants, against transgender people (“First they came for….” – Martin Niemöller) – and those are horrible. The reporting of what is going on is a lot of play-by-play. Yes, there are lots of crazy Executive Orders doing crazy things well outside what is traditionally thought of as within presidential powers. Many of those are already bogged down in the courts, will be for some time, and many will, even with the federal court system being slanted to, if not captured by, MAGA, fail. I don’t think Trump or anyone around him cares. What they care about is creating a mess, and a confusing one at that, and pushing the envelope. Something, some part of their hatefulness, will inevitably stick. But that’s about where the MSM coverages ends.

Meanwhile, Musk is running around. Compared to Musk…ok, compared to a headless chicken, Trump is a blockhead whose vision extends to nothing more than money and power. I’m almost willing to concede Trump that, because at the end of the day, he’s a political animal and unless he declares martial law and suspends habeus corpus, there is little he can do that can’t be undone. Sure, the mad king will sit in his tower continuing to sign Executive Orders and throwing them out the window for the masses to deal with. After a while, however, most of those will fade to relative banality. To be clear, what he is doing with immigrants, transgender people, and other marginalized communities is awful. It may have, in fact, a direct impact on my family before too long. So I’m not ignoring that. What Musk is doing, however, is no less significant.

A rogue’s gallery, perhaps soon to include Musk.

A friend described Musk as a James Bond villain. That seems about right. The issue is to figure out is what he is up to—what is his bigger plan, because Bond villains always have a bigger plan. Maybe he wants more money—to be the first trillionaire—but even if he does, that’s not a big lift for him anymore. Money is basically finding him. In terms of power, he now has about as much as anyone in the country. He is cloaked in direct presidential authority to go along with security clearances. He has no accountability, except to Trump. So what is motivating him?

What he and his whiz kids are doing as they run from agency to agency has everything to do with collecting massive amounts of data. Data is what feeds artificial intelligence and machine learning. Musk already has an AI company, “xAI,” and multiple large data farms around the country, and others coming online. With the amount of data that Musk has and is collecting, maybe he’ll be able to tell Trump exactly who to fire within the federal government in order to shrink it to a skeleton crew—just enough to keep the lights on. To be honest, I worked in the federal government, and there were definitely people whose job description was, “I’m not sure what they do.” So maybe some editing wouldn’t be bad. What is happening, however, is more than trimming at the edges.

Let’s not forget that the U.S. government is the largest employer in the country, at 3 million people. Back of the envelope calculations tell that a 50% cutdown in federal staffing—a goal the has been thrown around—will raise overall unemployment in the country from about 4% to 5%, a significant increase over what may only be a few weeks. With that, Trump will claim victory for draining the swamp whiles taxes keep coming in. This will allow him to pay for tax cuts for the rich. Maybe he’ll even be able to feed his new sovereign slush, er, sovereign wealth, I meant wealth, fund.

On the other hand, Musk gets his data. While what he does with it is unclear, one answer is that it has something to do with his obsession of getting to Mars. This is a man who has said, inter alia: “I would like to die on Mars, just not on impact;” that “a maniacal sense of urgency is our operating principle;” and that “we’re going straight to Mars. The moon is a distraction.” Or perhaps he wants to become an authoritarian ruler in some fashion, installing elements of techno-fascism across the globe. Perhaps reaching Mars and techno-fascism are two sides of the same coin. Who knows.

So here we sit, hoping and waiting for something, someone, to truly understand and stop Musk. But it won’t be easy. He has clearly been planning this for some time. He is obviously someone who likes to make big plans; for example, nothing less than planet-to-planet travel. That Trump is now saying with greater ease things to the effect of, “Yes, people are going to feel some pain because of the tariffs that are coming, but it will be worth it,” doesn’t sound like the populist manipulator that Trump has always been. That sounds more like Musk, convincing Trump of a cost-benefit analysis, always the easy calculus of those who want to rationalize hurting people. It may be that, in Musk, Trump has met someone who is a better manipulator that he.

Whatever is happening, we don’t know the plan yet, but it’s not good. And it’s doubtful there will be the scene of the movie where the villain stands there and stupidly reveals the plan followed by a maniacal laugh. So it will be left to the rest of us to figure it out in order to be able to counter it to the greatest degree possible. This is just one person’s speculation, someone who is no longer following the mainstream media. I’m curious if this sounds completely far-fetched. I wonder if I should come back to the MSM fold. I’m curious if there are other ideas of what might be the complete plan in all this.

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[1] Url: https://dailykos.com/stories/2025/2/4/2301351/-What-is-Musk-up-to?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=more_community&pm_medium=web

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