For one, when slashing things like money and especially people, you don’t have to necessarily use a chisel, but you should never under any circumstance use a chainsaw.
One must look no further than what has happened to Twitter, now X, since Elon Musk bought the company in 2022 to know this is true. Talented cost-cutter and management genius? Not so much.
After he made an offer to buy Twitter for $44 billion – using loans for a third of the amount, making the acquisition essentially a leveraged buyout – he tried, after weeks of high drama, to back out of the deal (he only went through with it when a Delaware judge forced his hand).
Immediately after taking the reins, he cut 80 percent of the staff, including many of the engineers who literally kept the site operating. He also decided he wouldn’t honor back pay for thousands of the employees he laid off, or the severance packages that he knew top executives were contractually entitled to – vacuous choices that resulted in multiple lawsuits that are still ongoing.
Elon also didn’t like that he had to pay rent for office space, so he just stopped paying it, resulting in lawsuits (and threatened lawsuits) in San Francisco, New York, Oakland, Columbia, and Boulder, among other cities.
Now, we imagine most prospective bosses would be concerned if not repelled by this prickish behavior, but Elon’s buddy Donald was likely super impressed because Lord knows he has also left plenty of people – including hard-working Americans who built his casinos – holding the bag through the years.
But by far the most perplexing thing Musk did after buying Twitter was sabotage the company’s relationships with its advertisers – an insane thing to do when advertising is your primary source of revenue. Elon & Co. has even sued some of them and, at one point, told them, from the stage of The New York Times’ annual DealBook Summit no less, to “Go f^*k yourself.”
Surprising nobody but maybe Elon, this ridiculousness decimated X’s revenue. According to the investment firm Fidelity, X’s valuation dropped 79 percent from October 2022 to October 2024. It eventually dropped to a $9.4 billion overall valuation, a devastating nosedive from the $44 billion that Musk paid for the company. < That said, in March 2025, the value of X returned to the value Elon paid for it. This happened because investors valued X at $44 billion in a secondary deal, where they exchanged existing stakes in the company).
From the day Musk bought Twitter in October 2022 to the end of that year, Tesla’s stock fell by half. Although Tesla’s stock rebounded by the end of 2024 – inching back closer to $400 for the first time since 2022, in part because Tesla was predicting vehicle delivery growth in 2024 – it was reported at the beginning of 2025 that the company’s sales had dropped for the first time in twelve years, sending the stock diving six percent. Tesla shares lost 44 percent of their value from December 2024 to the beginning of April 2025.
Then, Tesla lost an additional $152 billion in value – the largest hit to its market cap in its history – after the infamous Trump-Musk showdown in early June 2025, when President Trump threatened to pull government contracts from Elon’s companies.
In the months leading to the inevitable Clash of the Titans, it certainly didn’t help Tesla or X that Musk – who at a 2024 Trump campaign rally said, “I’m not just MAGA, I’m Dark Gothic MAGA” – was extremely aggressive in his support of Donald Trump in the 2024 election, while consistently trashing Democrats. Or that he threw what looked eerily like a Nazi salute at President Trump’s inauguration, twice. Elon denied that’s what he did, posting on X, “The ‘everyone is Hitler’ attack is soo tired.” Many Americans – too many, in our opinion – bought his b.s. But Germans sure didn’t, with Tesla car sales in Germany nosediving 76 percent in February alone.
While all these are perfectly legal things to do in America, it may not be the smartest business move for an executive chairman of a social media company and a public company during the most divided election in modern U.S. history. Tesla storefronts, charging stations, and vehicles became targets for violence, including AR-style semiautomatic weapons being fired at Tesla storefronts, and Molotov cocktails thrown through store windows and at Tesla vehicles. Elon and his beloved X also faced an additional problem: Users leaving the platform in droves. X lost 2.7 million active users in the U.S. between October 2024 and December 2024 alone. Meanwhile, Bluesky – a social media platform founded in 2019 by the creators of Twitter and publicly launched in 2024 – gained 2.5 million users during that time, an increase of 1,064 percent. By the end of 2024, Bluesky had well over 26 million users and by July 2025, 35 million.
Why did this happen? Well, it appears that many people felt the discourse on X had become far too toxic and that misinformation on the site had gotten out of control.
There are several other issues here, the least being that this whole venture is probably illegal. But we're going to just leave those questions to the poor judges who are trying to figure out this mess. Beyond the legalities, another issue is the set-up of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) itself. Don’t be fooled by the name. DOGE is not in any way a “department” of government, which would have to be established by the U.S. Congress. In truth, on its own, this new entity has no real power at all.
Worse, Musk was never an elected official. He wasn’t confirmed for a cabinet-level job, didn’t have a presidential commission, or hadn’t even been appointed to a high-level position within the administration. He was nothing more than a private citizen who had evidently been designated a “special government employee” after, of course, he pitched the idea to Donald while contributing almost $300 million to help him win.
Not to mention that most of the original “agents” at DOGE were engineers from Elon’s companies who had little to no work experience, much less government experience, and ranged from 19 to 24-years-old. These kids essentially took over the Office of Personnel Management and the General Services Administration, and they had access to the Treasury Department’s payment system – meaning they had access to the sensitive information of most Americans, including Social Security numbers and bank account information.
The next problem is that none of these guys seem to understand how the U.S. government operates because their “savings” targets were delusional – and literally unobtainable – from the start.
They never seemed to comprehend, for example, that there are two types of government spending: discretionary and mandatory. Discretionary spending is authorized by Congress each year through the appropriations process, but mandatory spending basically runs on autopilot. Mandatory spending, or spending that is required by law, is handled through authorizing bills, allowing the government to fund all costs associated with programs like Social Security, military pensions, benefits for veterans, Medicaid and Medicare.
Because discretionary spending accounts for only 28 percent of the federal budget – which means mandatory spending, plus interest payments on the debt (which totaled 13.1 percent of spending in FY2024), account for the other 72 percent – it’s impossible for DOGE to even come close to meeting its goal of making “at least $2 trillion in cuts” by slashing discretionary spending alone. Even if Elon had cut every penny of it, he couldn’t possibly hit his target.
This means that, if Elon was serious about his targets, things like Social Security and Medicare (together, 34.6 percent of the budget) and defense spending (12.9 percent) had to be part of the plan. He also had to break it to his buddy Trump that even if Social Security, Medicare, etc. were on the table, this still couldn’t happen if Republicans passed tax cuts that would add trillions to the national debt – which they did when they passed the One Big Beautiful Bill in July 2025.
The “savings” delusion didn’t stop there. For instance, even if DOGE had somehow gotten away with the Schedule F workaround (which they didn’t), reducing the federal workforce isn’t going to make a significant dent in the federal budget anyway. Excluding military personnel, the U.S. government spends just over $300 billion each year on salary/benefits for federal employees. This equals only around 4 percent of the federal budget. So even if you cut a quarter of these workers, that’s only a 1 percent reduction.
< That said, we don’t think anyone in the Trump administration cared about the money that would or would not be saved here, because the Schedule F scheme was really created to replace the “Deep State” with Trump loyalists – but that’s an issue for another day. >
This reality eventually started to dawn on Elon because, naturally, he started to lie about what DOGE was achieving. Within weeks, Elon announced that DOGE had already saved $55 billion through actions like layoffs, canceled contracts, and the renegotiation of leases. Problem was, most of the “canceled” contracts were ones that were already completed and most of the leases were set to expire anyway. Analysis by the Associated Press found that almost 40 percent of these contracts weren’t expected to save the government any money at all.
They also included blanket purchase agreements (BPAs) in the contract number. This is absurd because BPAs are agreements that can be used if the government needs to buy anything in the future. Nothing has been spent yet. But, assigning each of these agreements a random dollar amount gave Elon & Co. a chance to give the false impression of more government spending.
Realizing people were getting wise to their super shady tactics, DOGE stopped posting any information on its website to support its claims – even though Elon had promised to post solid details to be “maximally transparent.” The New York Times was initially able to get around this because identifying information had been embedded in the group’s source code, but the guys at DOGE changed that as well.
In the end, a Politico analysis of DOGE data showed that Elon’s foolish venture saved America less than 5 percent of what it said it did regarding contract terminations. Plus, the little money that was saved was simply returned to the agencies originally authorized by Congress to spend it. Meaning, not a dime of it went to lowering the deficit – even though President Trump said otherwise (many, many times).
Yet another major issue are the massive conflicts of interest that existed surrounding Elon Musk and his work at DOGE. It doesn’t matter that he is now gone; the fact that this was ever tolerated is a flaming red flag that should cause us all to be seriously concerned about the level of corruption in this administration.
Elon’s company SpaceX is regulated by the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). In September 2024, SpaceX was fined over $600,000 by the agency for not following license requirements for two rocket launches. On February 5th, the U.S. Department of Transportation and Elon announced that he had access to FAA technologies to make “rapid safety upgrades.” WTF?
Now, the FAA is about to abruptly move a $2.4 billion contract for an upgrade of its air traffic control communications systems from Verizon to Starlink, another Musk company, and SpaceX employees have conflict-of-interest waivers to be able to review FAA technology “on behalf of the United States.” Several of these SpaceX employees have a FAA email address. Double WTF? Of the FAA’s shift from Verizon to Starlink, Musk posted this on his social media platform X: “The Verizon system is not working and so is putting air travelers at serious risk.” Right. Of course it is.
Elon also had it in for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), an agency that has investigated complaints about Tesla’s debt collection and loan policies. In fact, Tesla, SpaceX, and four other businesses Elon controls have been investigated and/or fined 32 different times by eleven different federal agencies, including the Office of Government Ethics and the Securities and Exchange Commission, who he has publicly called “bastards.”
Then there are the government contracts. A recent analysis by The Washington Post found that Elon and his companies have received at least $38 billion in government contracts, loans, subsidies and tax credits over the past twenty years. Almost two-thirds of that money was secured in just the past five years (at least $6.3 billion was committed in 2024 alone). Fifty-two contracts with seven government agencies are ongoing, which should pay Musk & Co. $11.8 billion more over time. And that’s just the amount that is public. SpaceX is building spy satellites for the Pentagon’s National Reconnaissance Office, a contract estimated to be worth $1.8 billion.
Think about what this means. All of Elon’s successes – all his creating, pioneering, achieving, and money minting – were made possible, not only by migrating from South Africa to a country that is stable and where the rule of law is sound, but through that country’s federal subsidies, loans and contracts. And while he was gobbling up all the favors, money and power he could, he was doing everything possible to burn down the pathways for everyone else. It’s the ol’ we’re on the boat now pull up the ladder strategy. This is just not how we do things in America.
By any measure, DOGE has been an epic failure. Beyond the minuscule savings and many ongoing lawsuits challenging the legality and actions of this destructive experiment, new cumbersome red tape (including hours spent justifying the cost of mundane but extremely important tasks like having the windows washed in air traffic control towers, or demanding vendors swear they would never dare engage in evil diversity, equity and inclusion activities) are creating massive gridlock and delays. Many agencies, like the Social Security Administration, are essentially at a standstill and federal workers both past and present are traumatized.
The U.S. government employs over 3 million civilians who work in hundreds of agencies. Around 4,000 of these are political appointees while the rest are nonpartisan people hired to do the tedious and often boring work of the government. Who does Donald & Co. think make sure our drinking water is safe? Who do they think tracks extreme weather? Who do they think calculates the Consumer Price Index? Who do they think cleans our parks or handles our air traffic control systems? Who do they think designs our spaceships and nuclear bombs?
Well, they found out real quick who does these things because most agencies – including the IRS, State Department, Department of Housing and Urban Development, and the Food and Drug and Social Security Administrations – have scrambled since practically Day One to hire back the people that Elon fired.
This includes the Agriculture Department which desperately tried to hire back bird flu response workers after an avian influenza outbreak, and the National Weather Service, which lost meteorologists, hydrologists, physical scientists and electronics technicians in the initial cuts – a mistake that became very evident after devastating wildfires in California; deadly flash floods in Texas; and tornados, hurricanes, and hail storms across the entire nation.
The way Elon Musk and the Trump administration treated these people is outrageous. This “Deep State” b.s. is a highly insulting and sinister scheme that has gotten completely out of control.
This hateful rhetoric needs to stop right this second, and we ALL need to start appreciating lifelong federal employees for what they truly are: extraordinary Americans doing nothing more or less than the grinding, behind-the-scenes work of the American people. These hard-working Americans don’t deserve to be ridiculed and disrespected by rich guys trying to consolidate power.
…and don’t think for one second this unprecedented disrespect won’t have long-term effects. One employee who returned to the Food and Drug Administration summed it up: “Being back feels like a funeral. Morale is terrible. Everyone is stressed and feels the absence of our colleagues. … I’m looking for another job.” Other people just didn’t go back at all. One former Department of Agriculture safety inspector said this when he was asked to return: “I was like, yep, nope, I’m not risking it again. I’m gonna try to take the money and try to find something else.”
Operation Overhaul can do this way better, with far less sleaze!