Picking up from Joseph's post last week.
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/musk-cronies-dive-into-treasury-dept-payments-code-base
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/breaking-musk-takeover-of-federal-hr-office
As previously mentioned, no journalist has risen to the moment of the second Trump term like Josh Marshall. His take on the ramifications of Elon Musk's role as de facto co-president has been particularly sharp.
From Talking Point Memo:
This is a paywalled article at Wired. But it makes a pretty good case that the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) is now basically being run at its highest levels by people installed by and working with Elon Musk. In other words, “DOGE” seems to be calling the shots at OPM, even though it’s run by people who aren’t even federal employees. Most of these people appear to come from Musk’s various companies. Wired declined to publish the names of two of the people because of their age. One graduated from high school last summer.
Some of this is already known. The nominee to run the agency, Scott Kupor, is a partner at the Andreessen/Horowitz VC firm. They’re aligned with Musk politically. So that’s consistent with the rest of the story. But it seems the upper echelons of the agency has already been stocked with a mix of Musk’s people and Republican operatives, notwithstanding the fact that this is a federal agency which is usually made up almost entirely of career staff.
This afternoon OPM sent out an email to civilian government employees offering them “buy outs” if they resigned from their jobs in the next 10 days (by February 6th). This has been reported by the Post and I’ve also received copies of the email directly sent to me by TPM Readers. (If you’re a federal employee: send me all the information/documents you have. We can also arrange to communicate through an encrypted channel.) The legal basis of these “buy outs” is dubious at best – though we need to learn more about that. It also seems highly questionable under what authorization the administration is dramatically trimming the entire federal workforce without any congressional authority. That said, the spending freeze already takes the administration fairly brazenly outside of its constitutional authority. But the whole picture comes into clearly view if this is being run and planned by people reporting to Elon Musk. This is essentially what he did when he took over Twitter.
In many ways, Twitter was the first major company that Elon Musk actually ran. He did start and manage a couple of abortive attempts during the dot-com boom. The first was one of those non-entities that got absorbed by deep-pocketed players. The second was an ill-conceived online bank (the original X) that was fortunate enough to merge with the company that had just developed PayPal. The combined company went through several rapid leadership changes, with Musk briefly at the top, but you can’t say he truly ran the it.
He used the windfall from the sale of PayPal along with funding from other investors to establish SpaceX, but the people actually in charge were highly respected aerospace veterans. They sometimes let the money guy wear an engineer’s cap and blow the whistle, but no one, including Musk himself, really thought he was running the train.
It is important to remember that SpaceX is over 20 years old, and the man who founded it was only starting to become the Elon Musk of today, only beginning to get a taste of unprecedented fame and hype that he would increasingly come to buy into over the next couple of decades.
While Tesla does give us a sense of the man's management style, it’s still Musk with guardrails. With the takeover of the company, prompted initially by resentment over the praise and attention being lavished on one of the actual founders, Elon did expect to be in charge. However, the management structure quickly evolved to limit the damage he could do, up to and including his direct reports telling employees how to maneuver around the office without walking past the CEO in case he was in a mood to randomly fire people.
Twitter is the first time we got a chance to see how a fully formed Elon Musk, unconstrained and unwilling to compromise, would run a multi-billion dollar company. It's not surprising that DOGE should follow the same playbook.
And there's no reason to expect the outcome to be any better.
p.s. To get an idea just how badly the current combination of inexperience and incompetence may play out, take a look at this follow-up from Marshall: Musk Cronies Dive Into Treasury Dept Payments Code Base (this one's really bad).
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