This Christmas, spare a thought for the world’s richest man

For disruptors like Elon Musk, the statement of intent is all. What happens next – such as running a new US government department – is distressingly boring.

By Armando Iannucci

Photo by Christian Marquardt – Pool / Getty Images

It won’t be a typical Christmas Day for Elon Musk this year. It may start as normal, Musk waking from his nightly four-hour suspension in an employee’s plasma and moving quickly into his daily routine. This starts with 400 posts on X before breakfast.

For Christmas, a special post will show an AI version of Musk as Father Christmas, saying, “Have you been good, or do you still use legacy media?” while a sleigh powered by 30 SpaceX Raptor Engines blasts him across the sky as he scatters million-dollar bills onto the crowds below. The image shows the bills igniting as soon as they touch human flesh, burning into everyone’s palms the message “You should be using crypto. Ha ha!” Musk also posts that he’s looking forward to the Christmas Day when he can do all this for real, with maybe his satellites dropping the money. In a subsequent post, he says this will definitely be next year.

Then on to breakfast itself, which will be mostly granular, consisting of chemical pellets fed to and then expelled from a living turkey, and diluted in chilled water droned in from Lapland. Customarily it’s then time for the family gathering on X Spaces, with all the kids signing in from their various time zones. The call usually takes only a minute, since it’s mostly Musk showing his extended family a draft of his will to scare them. Then it’s work for the rest of the day, which is a further 500 X posts and, for a laugh, an upload of a fart noise into all the Teslas in the world.

So far, so normal. But alas, this Christmas, Musk also sees across the room a desk groaning heavy with paperwork. This is the massive backlog of decisions waiting to be made about cutting waste in federal government. Musk is stumped at first, but then posts: “Way too many decisions to be made in government. I say, cut all of them!” The paperwork is incinerated and, satisfied, Musk plays Diablo IV until 2am, then retires for the night in a second employee’s plasma.

I fantasise of course for comic effect – or, as others could put it, I’m subverting democracy with my lies. Whatever. My point is, I fully expect Musk to grow impatient with the tedious grind of running the Department of Government Efficiency and to depart from it as soon as he’s posted a photo of himself turning up on his first day.

For disruptors like Musk, the statement of intent is all. What happens next is boring, and therefore is nothing. Details are not the point. Disruptors are all fire. They bleed the impossible and bray at convention. By dint of who they are, nothing must stop them, no laws shall rein them in, no limits shall hinder, nor taxes burden. And their only judges shall be themselves.

For a disruptor to have any credibility, then, it’s essential that they never get caught in the act of being normal. So, to run a US department dedicated to cost-cutting, Musk has to take an otherwise humdrum activity (accountancy) and make it as alluring as possible. He’s given it a name, DOGE, which has crypto connotations and so is highly sexy. He’s also published a recruitment memo looking for “super-high IQ small-government revolutionaries” prepared to “make lots of enemies”. Here we can see how Musk has used his genius to turn auditing into audacity.

This last move, though, is reminiscent of Dominic Cummings advertising for “weirdos and misfits” to help run Boris Johnson’s government in 2020. The result, you may remember, was a highly dysfunctional palace of terror. It turned out a pandemic didn’t need mavericks, it needed medical experts skilled in the manufacture and distribution of vaccines and testing equipment. That’s boring, of course. It’s much more maverick to give a £10m contract for PPE to someone who owns a pub, or to get so shit-faced on wine you throw up in the Cabinet Room over a bust of Clement Attlee. So they aimed for that instead. We now know the outcome was sub-optimal.

This is the ultimate undoing of the disruptor. At some point, they hit reality, and often reality doesn’t want to be disrupted; it just wants to get on with what it was doing. You can keep defying the laws of gravity, until you drop from the sky. You can keep cutting red tape to get your submarine to the bottom of the ocean, until the ocean bursts in and collapses your dreams. And you can go on abolishing annoying regulations, until someone dies from a build-up of unnecessary fumes.

So when Musk’s recruits file in on their first day, what then? After they’re shown their desks, what makes them stay there 80 hours a week until every line in every budget has been examined? They can try seeking guidance from more experienced staff, but Musk may have fired those people. They could seek support from each other in the canteen, but Musk may have replaced that with a cupful of pellets. In the end, they’ll probably just ask AI.

Musk himself may have moved on. That’s what disruptors do, especially if things get too complicated. Problems are for losers. Responsibility for one’s actions is so Legacy. Disruptors shatter but rarely save. They break things, declare the thing is worthless because broken, and move on to the next one. With law, with regulation, with media – even with the planet. A maverick president drills and drills, and his disruptor acolyte declares “This planet’s broken” and urges us to move on to the next one.