Will Musk be the next Trump?

[Brian Peacock]

If at first you don't succeed you obviously didn't spend enough.

[Svartalf]

it's not about spending much (though that shouldn't hurt), it's about spending smart, like being smart enough to choose the right engineers, materials and construction plan for it to work and resist the stresses of the thing.

[pErvinalia]

It was Biden's fault.

[Svartalf]

yeah, biden is actually the evil genius behind every bad thing happening to frump and musk, a shame he won't be a good excuse for every long anymore.

[Brian Peacock]

They'll still try and hang him after he's died though

[Brian Peacock]

Musk is off on his trotters. DOGE has lost its doge.

[Svartalf]

bhah, they don't really need him to do their damage

[Woodbutcher]

One picks the dumbest people for control jobs like that. They love to be in control of those who are smarter, which is practically everybody else.

[Svartalf]

if the people who were under musk were that smart themselves, they'd have done more useful stuff and less overall damage.

[L'Emmerdeur]

The article below is just about Musk crushing USAID, but the title is appropriate on a wider basis given what Musk & crew did to important efforts to assist the needy internationally and within the US. In the end they didn't even save much (if any) money.

'Elon Musk’s Legacy Is Disease, Starvation and Death'

There is an Elon Musk post on X, his social media platform, that should define his legacy. “We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper,” he wrote on Feb. 3. He could have “gone to some great parties. Did that instead.”

Musk’s absurd scheme to save the government a trillion dollars by slashing “waste, fraud and abuse” has been a failure. DOGE claims it’s saved $175 billion, but experts believe the real number is significantly lower. Meanwhile, according to the Partnership for Public Service, which studies the federal work force, DOGE’s attacks on government personnel — its firings, re-hirings, use of paid administrative leave and all the associated lack of productivity — could cost the government upward of $135 billion this fiscal year, even before the price of defending DOGE’s actions in court. Musk’s rampage through the bureaucracy may not have created any savings at all, and if it did, they were negligible.

Now, Musk’s Washington adventure is coming to an end, with the disillusioned billionaire announcing that he’s leaving government behind. “It sure is an uphill battle trying to improve things in D.C., to say the least,” he told The Washington Post.

There is one place, however, where Musk, with the help of his minions, achieved his goals. He did indeed shred U.S.A.I.D. Though a rump operation is now operating inside the State Department, the administration says that it has terminated more than 80 percent of U.S.A.I.D. grants. Brooke Nichols, an associate professor of global health at Boston University, has estimated that these cuts have already resulted in about 300,000 deaths, most of them of children, and will most likely lead to significantly more by the end of the year. That is what Musk’s foray into politics accomplished.

White House officials deny that their decimation of U.S.A.I.D. has had fatal consequences. At a hearing in the House last week, Democrats confronted Secretary of State Marco Rubio with my colleague Nick Kristof’s reporting from East Africa, documenting suffering and death caused by the withdrawal of aid. Rubio insisted no such deaths have happened, but people who’ve been in the field say he’s either lying or misinformed.

Atul Gawande, an assistant administrator for global health at U.S.A.I.D. in Joe Biden’s administration, told me that during a trip to Kenya last week, he visited the national referral hospital. There’s been a major increase in the number of patients with advanced H.I.V. symptoms, a result of losing access to antiretroviral medication. At refugee camps on the border of South Sudan, food aid has been cut so severely that people are getting less than 30 percent of the calories they need. “It is not enough to survive on, and that has caused skyrocketing levels of severe malnutrition and deaths associated with it,” said Gawande.

Musk apparently did not anticipate that it would be bad PR for the world’s richest man to take food and medicine from the world’s poorest children. The Post reported that he hadn’t foreseen “the intensity of the blowback to his role in politics over the past year.” He’s been doing a series of interviews that Axios called an “image rehab tour.”

If there were justice in the world, Musk would never be able to repair his reputation, at least not without devoting the bulk of his fortune to easing the misery he’s engendered. Musk’s sojourn in government has revealed severe flaws in his character — a blithe, dehumanizing cruelty, and a deadly incuriosity. This should shape how he’s seen for the rest of his public life.

[Tero]

Musk was in the Oval Office with Trump. You could mage a gif of "person on drugs" from it.
https://www.threads.com/@beyondbettygir ... AJaYjBixFg

[Tero]

Poor Elon, he is never happy. He has everything. But then there are monents of joy, as when Little X puches him.
https://www.threads.com/@tero55jarvi/po ... 0Gy13Xar-w

[Brian Peacock]

.

[L'Emmerdeur]

All the best people ...

Elon Musk’s DOGE goons left a huge mess at the office of a nonprofit they illegally tried to take over, with staff allegedly finding drugs and evidence of cockroaches in the building.

The chief executive of the United States Institute of Peace (USIP) said the organization’s Washington, D.C., headquarters became infested with vermin on DOGE’s watch. And after a federal judge ruled against DOGE’s takeover and Musk’s lackeys vacated the building, cleaning staff also found discarded marijuana, according to The Economist.

...

Although the USIP is an independent, non-executive branch agency with its own assets and endowment, Musk’s team declared the institute “unnecessary” and tried to fire all of its employees in mid-March.

When the employees—who maintained DOGE’s actions were illegal—refused to leave, DOGE brought in armed agents from the FBI, the D.C. Metropolitan Police, the U.S. District Attorney’s Office, and a private security firm to force them out.

Having gained access to the building, DOGE then proceeded to wipe out USIP’s IT systems, shred its documents, seize its funding, and take down the USIP website—including all of the research the agency had conducted over the past 40 years, one of its employees told MSNBC host Rachel Maddow.

After the takeover, Musk’s 28-year-old minion Nate Cavanaugh—a college dropout with no experience in government or international affairs—was put in charge of the agency.

[T]he newly reinstated USIP now has to clean up the mess created by DOGE—an office that was ostensibly tasked with rooting out abuse, waste, and fraud in the federal government, Maddow said on her show Monday night.

“Because all of that was totally illegal, the folks at the U.S. Institute of Peace will have to repair everything and stand everything back up in order to even start to get back to where they were before this whole thing started,” she said. “It’s just pure pointlessness and waste.”

[source]

[Tero]

Screen shot of Musk going against Trump.
https://www.threads.com/@keithedwards/p ... LZUl2hS8bQ