Though not directly related to the IRS story, I have to mention that the "spend more time with his families" joke has gotten much more relevant recently

Remember a couple of weeks ago when everyone assured us that Musk was phasing out his role in government? (discussed here Is Elon stepping back to spend more time with his families?)

Not so much...

From the Guardian via LGM:

 
    Donald Trump is replacing the acting commissioner of the US Internal Revenue Service after treasury secretary Scott Bessent reportedly complained to the president that the agency head had been appointed without his knowledge and under the instruction of Doge leader Elon Musk.

    According to a report from the New York Times published on Friday, Bessent believed that the Doge head “had done an end-run around him” to get Gary Shapley installed as the interim head of the IRS, despite the fact that the IRS reports to Bessent. The report cited five anonymous sources with knowledge of the situation.

 ...

On social media, the conflict between Bessent and Musk was visible as Musk elevated a post from far-right conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer in which she accuses Bessent of collaborating with a “pro-impeachment and pro-censorship Trump hater”, referring to the businessman John Hope Bryant. Musk agreed with Loomer, calling the collaboration “troubling”, on X, the platform he owns.  

Here's a longer quote from Loomer on Bryant:

This DEI hire by Scott Bessent just wants to, you know, proclaim that Donald Trump should resign or that he should be impeached because he was fighting for election integrity and fighting against the stolen election of 2020. I thought that we were getting rid of DEI, and then we get to have these uppity Blacks just walk into the Trump administration and start making demands and acting like they run the Treasury department, and that they should have, like, an active role in the Trump administration while they sit around and try to undermine every initiative that Donald Trump has worked on.

Yes, she did just unironically use the U-word.

For a bit of context...

 While we can debate whether his influence is waxing or waning, Elon Musk clearly still exercises unprecedented power for someone in his position. Even as broadly and badly defined as his duties with DOGE are—picking the head of the IRS still manages to go well beyond them. In at least this one sense, Elon Musk’s role is larger than we realized.

Furthermore, he appears to be trying to entrench—or even expand—that power by taking out rivals within the administration. For anyone familiar with the history of Tesla or the company eventually known as PayPal, this is the exact opposite of surprising.

With the Cybertruck on its way to becoming perhaps the most disastrous vehicle launch in history, and with new stories of corruption involving him and the rest of the so-called PayPal Mafia continuing to break, he may have decided that the only way to maintain his fortune—which currently rests on a precariously overvalued Tesla and SpaceX—is to put himself in a position where he can divert billions upon billions of dollars of government money into his enterprises.

While it sometimes seems like the markets, instead of hating * uncertainty, have come around to seeing it as an excuse for optimism—as when they responded with a surge of enthusiasm to the indefinite and often contradictory claims about the tariff pause—at some point, investors are going to have to face reality and start pricing in the cost of palace intrigue, policy turmoil, and an increasingly dysfunctional government. The possibility of Musk forcing out the Treasury Secretary might not lead to the level of uncertainty you’d get from Trump firing Jerome Powell, but it’s still a reminder that, as incoherent and chaotic as our fiscal policies have been over the past few months, they can still get worse.

* I had ChatGPT proofread this and I didn't notice it had changed "hating" to "heeding" for some unfathomable reason. Always double check the LLM.

UPDATE: Eight hours after we posted "at some point, investors are going to have to face reality and start pricing in the cost of palace intrigue, policy turmoil, and an increasingly dysfunctional government."