A former journalist-coworker of mine emailed me a couple weeks back: Is Musk attempting a coup?
An op-editor at a metro newspaper, she was referring to the bombastic and destructive collusion of the world’s richest man Elon Musk into the Donald Trump-led shock to the federal bureaucracy under the guise of the irreverently named DOGE, or Department of Government Efficiency — a boyish reference to a memecoin.
I suppose it’s possible, I wrote her. Instead, what I see in Elon Musk is a kind of arrogance I’ve found in other entrepreneurs. Brilliant in one domain and successful in others, I’ve seen plenty of them storm into some situation truly and genuinely oblivious to how over their head they really are.
I admitted that of course I couldn’t know for sure. But my bet was that in his heart, Musk fully and truly expected to barnstorm into the federal government and clean up what he perceived as dysfunction: startup style.
Would I want to write an op-ed on the topic, she asked? Sure, I said. Doesn’t the world want a bit of nuance on the topic? Then, I extended that op-ed to inform a piece for my news org Technical.ly in which put forward a rule I wish we’d all follow: only strive for power you’d offer the other side.
Read the Inquirer op-ed here, and my Technical.ly piece here.
The nuanced take wasn’t as primed for audience reach as fear-mongering on either side. Yet I got plenty of feedback — some of it appreciative of a new perspective, plenty angry on both sides. I heard that I was yet another “liberal” who just won’t give Musk a chance, and I’ve heard I was a fascist apologist who was ignoring that Musk will soon be de facto co-president. In truth, my assumption is most people haven’t even read the piece before they wrote to me. To at least one I offered a bet Musk would be out of the picture within 90 days, and so the risk will too quickly moving on to the next crisis.
Guess we’ll see.