• Inside Elon Musk’s ‘Digital Coup’ (Makena Kelly, David Gilbert, Vittoria Elliott, Kate Knibbs, Dhruv Mehrotra, Dell Cameron, Tim Marchman, Leah Feiger, and Zoë Schiffer, 'The Big Story,' Wired, 3-13-25) Musk’s loyalists at DOGE have infiltrated dozens of federal agencies, pushed out tens of thousands of workers, and siphoned millions of people’s most sensitive data. The next step: Unleash the AI. 'In Musk’s mind, Washington needed to be debugged, hard-forked, sunset. His strike teams of young engineers would burrow into the government’s byzantine bureaucratic systems and delete what they saw fit. They’d help Trump slash the budget to the bone.'
• Techno-Fascism Comes to America (Kyle Chayka, New Yorker, 2-26-25) When a phalanx of the top Silicon Valley executives—Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Google’s Sundar Pichai—aligned behind President Trump during the Inauguration in January, many observers saw an allegiance based on corporate interests.
The ultra-wealthy C.E.O.s were turning out to support a fellow-magnate, hoping perhaps for an era of deregulation, tax breaks, and anti-“woke” cultural shifts. The historian Janis Mimura saw something more ominous: a new, proactive union of industry and governmental power, wherein the state would drive aggressive industrial policy at the expense of liberal norms.
In the second Trump Administration, a class of Silicon Valley leaders was insinuating itself into politics in a way that recalled one of Mimura’s primary subjects of study: the élite bureaucrats who seized political power and drove Japan into the Second World War. The historic parallels that help explain Elon Musk’s rampage on the federal government.
• Trump Team Eyes Politically Connected Startup to Overhaul $700 Billion Government Payments Program (Christopher Bing and Avi Asher-Schapiro, ProPublica, 4-17-25) SmartPay, a little-known firm with investors linked to JD Vance, Elon Musk and Trump, could get a piece of the federal expense card system — and its hundreds of millions in fees. “This goes against all the normal contracting safeguards,” one expert said.
• Inside Elon Musk’s War on Washington (Simon Shuster and Brian Bennett, Time, 2-9-25) No single private citizen, certainly not one whose wealth and web of businesses are directly subject to the oversight of federal authorities, has wielded such power over the machinery of the U.S. government. So far, Musk appears accountable to no one but President Trump, who handed his campaign benefactor a sweeping mandate to bring the government in line with his agenda.
• Labor Leaders Fear Elon Musk and DOGE Could Gain Access to Whistleblower Files (Caroline Haskins, Business, Wired, 4-10-25) Companies tied to Elon Musk have dozens of workplace health and safety cases open at OSHA. Union leaders and former OSHA officials are concerned.
• US DOGE Service Agreement With Department of Labor Shows $1.3 Million Fee—and Details Its Mission (Caroline Haskins, Business, Wired, 4-10-25) Special Edition: The most dangerous hackers you’ve never heard of.
• Struggle Over Americans’ Personal Data Plays Out Across the Government (Andrew Duehren and Cecilia Kang, NY Times, 2-19-25) Employees from Elon Musk's so-called Department of Government Efficiency are gaining access to vast amounts of information held by federal agencies, sparking security concerns and legal challenges over privacy risks.
“The episode at the Social Security Administration, which did not respond to requests for comment, has played out repeatedly across the federal government. In its stated quest to root out fraudulent government spending, Mr. Musk’s team of software engineers has repeatedly sought unfettered access to the wide range of personal information the U.S. government collects about its residents. The requests have often alarmed career civil servants used to jealously guarding data whose improper disclosure can in some cases violate federal law.”
• How Elon Musk Became a Kingmaker (Simon Schuster, Time, 11-21-24) No matter how often the Democrats reminded us that Trump’s fortune grew out of inherited wealth, multiple bankruptcies, and decades of corporate shenanigans, they could not deny Musk’s achievements as a businessman. Not since the age of William Randolph Hearst, the newspaper magnate who greased FDR’s ascent nearly a century ago, has a private citizen loomed so large over so many facets of American life at once, pulling the nation’s culture, its media, its economy, and now its politics into the force field of his will. For now Musk and Trump act like partners, but their agendas do not align on everything. Both are willful, impulsive, and accustomed to being in charge. What will happen if they start to clash? Musk is “just realizing that being in control, directly or indirectly, of U.S. government budgets, is going to put us on Mars in his lifetime. Doing it privately would be slower.”
• Protesters in cities across the US rally against Trump’s policies, Project 2025 and Elon Musk (Morgan Lee, AP News, 2-5-25) Protesters in Philadelphia and at state capitols in California, Minnesota, Michigan, Texas, Wisconsin, Indiana and beyond waved signs denouncing President Donald Trump; billionaire Elon Musk, the leader of Trump’s new Department of Government Efficiency; and Project 2025, a hard-right playbook for American government and society. Websites and accounts across social media issued calls for action, with messages such as "reject fascism" and "defend our democracy."
They gathered to protest the Trump administration’s early actions, decrying everything from the president’s immigration crackdown to his rollback of transgender rights and a proposal to forcibly transfer Palestinians from the Gaza Strip. The protests were a result of a movement that has organized online under the hashtags #buildtheresistance and #50501, which stands for 50 protests, 50 states, one day. Websites and accounts across social media issued calls for action, with messages such as “reject fascism” and “defend our democracy.”
• ‘0 to 1939 in 3 seconds’: Why Anti-Elon Musk Satire Is Flourishing in Britain (Michael D. Shear, NY Times, 4-6-25) Humor and art have been used to mock the powerful in Britain for centuries. Now Elon Musk is on the receiving end. On the side of an East London bus stop, one of them shows Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, emerging from a Tesla’s roof with his hand pointing upward in a straight-armed salute. “Goes from 0 to 1939 in 3 seconds,” the ad reads. “Tesla. The Swasticar.”
• I want to share my story about Elon Musk and Tesla. (Rufus Gifford on Facebook, 3-19-25) "My experience here is unique and firsthand. I share this as someone who owns and loves his Tesla, as someone who has met Elon, who has helped Elon and who will boycott any product that Elon is affiliated with going forward. (Read the comments.)
• Musk’s Team Is Building a System to Sell ‘Gold Card’ Immigrant Visas (Ryan Mac and Hamed Aleaziz, NY Times, 4-16-25) Members of Elon Musk’s government-slashing task force are building a system for the United States to sell special immigration visas, which President Trump has labeled “gold cards,” for $5 million apiece. The project represents something of a shift in mission for Elon Musk’s initiative, from cutting government costs toward a new goal of generating revenue.
• The Tactics Elon Musk Uses to Manage His ‘Legion’ of Babies—and Their Mothers (Dana Mattioli, WSJ, 4-15-25) The world’s richest man juggles more than a dozen children and ‘harem drama’ along with running his companies and advising Trump. He recently took a paternity test in a battle with one woman over money and privacy.
---Ashley St. Clair's Son's Name Is Revealed as Elon Musk Is Confirmed to Be the Father (Kayla Grant and Elizabeth Rosner, People, 4-16-25) According to a new report from the Wall Street Journal, the 26-year-old influencer's infant son, who was previously referred to as R.S.C., is named Romulus. Musk is also the father of 13 other children, whom he shares with three other women.
• Racially charged row between Musk and South Africa over Starlink (Khanyisile Ngcobo, BBC.com, Johannesburg, 4-16-25) To his more than 219 million followers on his social media platform X, Mr Musk made the racially charged claim that his satellite internet service provider was "not allowed to operate in South Africa simply because I'm not black".
But the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (Icasa) - a regulatory body in the telecommunications and broadcasting sectors - told the BBC that Starlink had never submitted an application for a licence. To operate in South Africa, Starlink needs to obtain network and service licences, which both require 30% ownership by historically disadvantaged groups. This mainly refers to South Africa's majority black population, which was shut out of the economy during the racist system of apartheid. Mr Musk - who was born in South Africa in 1971 before moving to Canada in the late 1980s and then to the US, where he became the world's richest man - appears to see this as the main stumbling block for Starlink to operate in the country.
• Trump Axed Elon Musk’s Secret Pentagon Meeting in Pure Outrage (Hafiz Rashid, New Republic, 4-16-25) Donald Trump was apparently mad at Elon Musk for planning to attend a secret briefing on China at the Pentagon last month. After news of that briefing was reported in The New York Times, Trump angrily canceled it, saying, “What the f**k is Elon doing there? Make sure he doesn’t go,” an unnamed top official told Axios. Elon Musk is finally facing (some) consequences for trying to play president.