CONTEXT: Musk Isn't Doing Efficiency. He's Destroying Our Financial System For Personal Gain.
Mainstream and right-wing media aren't giving us the real story. Meanwhile, social media accounts that are 'stoked' about Musk's destruction are ubiquitous online.
CONTEXT is a series from Public Enlightenment that gives us all - right, left, center - the context we need to understand the news. Use this post to help provide context to others so that we can all understand the moment and respond accordingly. The links are meant to be clicked. The articles are meant to be read. We’ve got to eat our vegetables when it comes to healthy information.
Doomscroll your social media these days and you might see hot takes like this one, in which a young lady with 108,000 followers asks liberals to try and be “stoked” about all the efficiency that’s going on:
But all of us—left, right, center—need to understand immediately that Elon Musk couldn’t care less about government efficiency. Elon Musk is in it for himself.
As one of my colleague’s put it on the Media and Democracy Project’s Bluesky account:
Last week Parker Molloy filled us in on how mainstream media is missing the moment, writing “As the world's richest man seizes control of government agencies, mainstream outlets are treating it like standard political news.” More below:
And if you are like the lady in the Instagram post above, you are definitely dismissing such appraisals as liberal nonsense. Hear me now and believe me later, it’s not nonsense. Elon Musk is out to destroy your country in a way that you will definitely not be stoked about and your sources of information are failing to warn you about it. Put down the influencers, pick up some context.
The Context
For years Musk has talked about wanting “your entire financial life” to take place on X.
When Musk announced his vision to turn X into an "everything app" where users go to text, call, pay, shop, bank, and post online, financial services experts told Ars that the hurdles Musk would face were "pretty high." X would need to earn trust from both users and regulators, with the former already having plenty of banking solutions to choose from and the latter becoming increasingly critical of novel digital payment entities. - Ars Technica Elon Musk wants your “entire financial life” on X by 2024 10-27-2023
So what did Musk do to move his unlikely project forward? He bought the presidency of the United States of America and shut down the regulator who might stand in his way.
The Trump administration's work to shut down the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau could hit American consumers in the wallet. It could also spare Elon Musk's business interests from unwanted federal attention. - The Week Why Trump and Musk are shutting down the CFPB 2-12-2025
Musk is pretending to do government efficiency to get you to think that deleting government departments like the CFPB is a good thing when these are really just moves in his own personal interest. He and Trump are cherry-picking random examples of wasteful spending, often lying about even those examples, to distract from a project of destroying the government’s ability to protect us from them. The CFPB is something all Americans want unless those Americans are oligarchs looking to screw us. It saves us money and protects us from shitty corporations.
One of the CFPB's "biggest wins over industry players" has been its work to limit bank overdraft fees, said NBC News. The revenue that American banks earned from such fees dropped by $6 billion over four years ending in 2023. That number was poised to rise even more: The bureau in December issued a rule capping the penalty at $5, "but its fate is now uncertain." A separate rule, which would have slashed credit card late maximum fees from $32 to $8, now appears dead. The Week Why Trump and Musk are shutting down the CFPB 2-12-2025
Musk is a member of the Paypal Mafia, a collection of South African oligarchs that includes Palantir owner Peter Thiel, who have a dark vision for a future where they have all the control. Thiel is on record as saying, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”
Together, Thiel and Musk are shaping a future where power rests in the hands of a few tech elites, raising concerns about the erosion of democratic principles. Their wealth, combined with their technological assets, gives them unparalleled influence over both public opinion and government operations….If Thiel, Musk, and their associates succeed in embedding their vision within the political system, American governance could shift toward a technocratic model where corporate interests outweigh public input. In this model, algorithms and data analytics would drive policy decisions, leaving little room for traditional democratic debate. Technocracy News The Silent Coup: Trump Reelection, The PayPal Mafia and the Future of American Democracy 11-7-2024
The anti-democratic beliefs of the Paypal Mafia run in the family.
Musk’s grandfather…had been the head of the Canadian branch of a political movement in the 1930s called Technocracy Incorporated, which, in essence, wanted to scrap democracy in the United States and Canada and have technocrats rule the country, which might sound familiar. Democracy Now! The PayPal Mafia”: Meet the South African Oligarchs Surrounding Trump, from Elon Musk to Peter Thiel
The Paypal Mafia is taking over our government according to their long held beliefs and plans. They fired all the Inspector Generals, non-partisan officials who police corruption, and replaced them with CIOs who can surveil the activities of every employee to make sure they are doing their bidding.
"Federal agency CIOs have authority over all agency asset management, which includes software used to monitor civil servant laptops and phones,” a former Biden official with firsthand knowledge of a CIO’s capabilities tells WIRED. “CIO shops manage and control IT access to all agency databases and systems, and have oversight over all the IT contracts per FITARA [the Federal Information Technology Acquisition Reform Act]. They have lots of IT budget and head count that Musk might want to take over. In agencies, CIOs are functionally as powerful as OIGs [the Office of Inspectors General].” Wired Former Palantir and Elon Musk Associates Are Taking Over Key Government IT Roles 2-12-2025
Our media is calmly repeating Musk and Trump’s assurances that Elon, who holds billions of dollars in government contracts, will self-monitor conflicts of interest, but it is obvious on its face that this is a self-enrichment scheme.
He’s taken over the government, written code into our most sensitive systems, and fired the people who would keep him in check.
Here’s the Executive Order Josh Marshall references.
But wait, there’s more.
On the potential chopping block: crash investigations into Tesla’s partially automated vehicles; a Justice Department criminal probe examining whether Musk and Tesla have overstated their cars’ self-driving capabilities; and a government mandate to report crash data on vehicles using technology like Tesla’s Autopilot. Time How Elon Musk’s Anti-Government Crusade Could Benefit Tesla and His Other Businesses 2-11-2025
Many of the people defending Elon claim that he is just a good guy who cares deeply about humanity’s future (MARS!), but the reality is that Musk is an over-leveraged greed machine who saw buying the US presidency as his best chance to rescue failing business ventures.
There’s no logical scenario where Elon Musk, a man with multiple legal woes, billions in debt, a man who had been slapped on the hand multiple times by different US government agencies, woke up one day and thought, “You know what? I don’t care about money any more. I’m going to volunteer my time and energy and make it my life’s mission to help find hidden stolen money for the good people of the United States, where I was neither born nor raised.”
It’s not impossible, but highly improbable to overnight go from routine run-ins with the federal government to a dutiful civil servant with absolutely no agenda. Travel With Bev Is Elon Musk the Richest Man on Earth or Most Leveraged? 2-8-2025
The above piece is from an unlikely outlet. But the article is deeply sourced and finds Musk to have desperately needed to take over the government if his money-making schemes were to survive.
Like most things with Trump and Musk, it’s all just a big scam. Even the website Musk stood up to track all the “waste” is just one big fraud:
A government website created by the Trump administration to “track government waste” has been left unupdated with a default WordPress sample page that includes language about an imaginary architecture firm.
“Waste.gov: Tracking government waste,” the tagline for the website, archived here, says. The rest of the webpage, however, is about an imaginary architecture firm called Études, pulled from a sample webpage for a default WordPress theme called Twenty Twenty-Four.
This remains the case a day after Elon Musk, in the Oval Office, told reporters that all of DOGE’s supposed waste-cutting actions are transparent and are available on government websites. Musk is currently in charge of finding and eliminating "waste." 404 Media Elon Musk's Waste.gov Is Just a WordPress Theme Placeholder Page 2-12-2025
No one should be stoked about this. It’s one of the most bizarre things any of us has ever seen. And it’s coming straight for your pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness, whether you are MAGA or not.
Please be sure to leave a comment with any more great reporting that will help add context to what’s going on.
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fyi… and that photograph of the woman asking us to get Stoked…Her hand is in a position on her clothing to signify white power.
The three fingers under the lapel …are a W.
I’m not a conspiracy person at all… And we know that Musk is supporting the AfD Nazi party in Germany .
Thank you for this article .