“declared that governments were poorly configured “big dumb machines””
“To the senator Ted Cruz, he explained that “the only way to reconcile the databases and get rid of waste and fraud is to actually look at the computers””
“Muskism came to Washington soaked in memes, adolescent boasts and sadistic victory dances over mass firings. Leading a team of teenage coders and mid-level managers drawn from his suite of companies, Musk aimed to enter the codebase and rewrite regulations and budget lines from within”
“He would drag the paper-pushing bureaucracy kicking and screaming into the digital 21st century, scanning the contents of cavernous rooms of filing cabinets and feeding the data into a single interoperable system”
“The undertaking combined features of private equity-led restructuring with startup management, shot through with the sensibility of gaming and rightwing culture war. To succeed, he would need “God mode”, an overview of the whole”
“the reality was a strengthening of the state’s surveillance capacities”
“Musk had become convinced that the real bugs in the code were people, especially the non-white illegal immigrants whom he saw as pawns in a liberal scheme to corrupt democracy and beneficiaries of what he called “suicidal empathy”. He understood empathy itself in coding terms. It was an “exploit” or a software vulnerability against which the system architecture needed to be hardened”
“beneath the jokes and cosplay lay a serious conviction. If the state was just a database, then inefficiency came from bad data: undocumented foreigners, ghost employees, even “vampires” collecting social security. These were bugs in the codebase, irregularities to be traced, quarantined and purged”
“Musk’s Doge speedrun belonged to the “any%” category”
“From the start, Musk made it a priority for Doge to gain access to databases and other digital infrastructure. He often talked about the need to “control the computers””
“Establishing centralised command-and-control positions, they rolled out a playbook that can be summarised as: delete, automate and integrate”
“The logic of deletion was clearest in zero-based budgeting (ZBB), the method that Musk embraced at both Twitter and Doge. Invented in the 1960s, ZBB forced every department to justify each expense anew rather than carrying budgets forward. Long dismissed as unworkable, by 2024, Silicon Valley firms were claiming that new technology had finally made ZBB feasible”
“Manually analysing and justifying each budget item was terribly time-intensive. But with large language models (LLMs) and AI accounting tools, this process could be performed automatically. Budgets could be rebuilt by bot”
“Musk captured the computer systems of the US Treasury’s Bureau of Fiscal Service in Doge’s first month in the hopes of creating “a ‘delete’ button he could wield against any agency by cutting off its funding at the source”. Some agencies, such as USAID, were effectively dissolved, fed into “the wood chipper”, as Musk put it in a tweet”
“Zero-based budgeting rarely succeeds in cutting costs. Its real effect, in Musk’s hands, was the concentration of power”
“What Doge sought to automate, the media researcher Eryk Salvaggio noted, was “not paperwork but democratic decision-making”. Efficiency became the alibi for centralisation”
“The analogy to Silicon Valley platforms was deliberate. Uber had its “God View”, letting employees watch every ride in real time. When Musk was buying Twitter, he demanded access to the platform’s “firehose” – the unfiltered stream of all user activity. Now the same principle was being applied to the state”
“Pooling data meant eliminating the legal and privacy guardrails that existed throughout the federal government. Silos are not necessarily bad things. They are spaces of privileged information. The barriers between them can be safeguards – checks against overreach, misuse and surveillance. But from the perspective of Doge, they were obstacles to integration”
“Doge’s endpoint was governance by AI: the state not as a space of deliberation but as lines of executable code”
“Musk reinforced the conceit with a “tech support” T-shirt at cabinet meetings, presenting his role in apolitical terms. But the project was deeply political”
“Doge’s dream of data omniscience went beyond cost-benefit analysis or software modernisation – those had been mantras of earlier administrations. For Doge, the hunt for “waste, fraud and abuse” blurred seamlessly into the hunt for illegitimate people: irregularities to be deleted”
“According to a biography of Musk, his brother Kimbal took up the smartphone game Polytopia because Musk said it would teach him how to be a CEO. The first lesson was “Empathy is not an asset.” The second was “Play life like a game.””
“Treating life like a game had its own ethos and its own philosophers. In a theory often cited by Musk, Nick Bostrom speculates that we may be living in a simulation running on a mainframe in the future. Further, many of the people around us may not be human beings but computer programs: what Bostrom calls “shadow-people”, convincing imitations that lack interiority. The ethical consequences are significant. If we are surrounded by shadow people, then appeals to empathy are not moral imperatives but manipulative code. The rational response is to steel yourself against humanitarian sentiment. The economist Robin Hanson came to this conclusion in 2001 in a famous article called How to Live in a Simulation. “If you might be living in a simulation,” he wrote, “then all else equal it seems that you should care less about others.””
“Musk’s panic-mongering about people out of place expanded beyond the US. These were the same months he promoted the European far-right demand for the forced “remigration” of its immigrant population. Remigration was the human equivalent of zero-based budgeting: wipe the slate clean, remove redundant or illegitimate entries, and start over”
“The convergence of code and nativism was stark. Doge’s most consequential act of data integration was designed to accelerate mass deportations”
“By March 2025, Musk’s operatives had begun building what Wired called a “master database” to track immigrants – knitting together records across the Department of Homeland Security, IRS, Social Security Administration and voting rolls. It dovetailed with Palantir’s $30m “ImmigrationOS” contract with ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement), which promised “near real-time visibility” on non-citizens”
“The next month, the New York Times reported that the Trump administration had added thousands of individuals to the social security administration’s “death master file”, which cut off access to their credit cards and bank accounts. One former commissioner called it “financial murder”. The goal was to choke out people’s ability to make a living and force them to “self-deport””
“Muskism, in the end, means building a better matrix”
“This is what Musk was trying to do with Doge, combining ludic qualities of gaming with the fear of infiltration and an attempted renovation of governance through coding”
“Doge exposed the limits of Muskism as a mode of governance. Companies can treat workers as disposable units because the surrounding state guarantees their basic existence. Musk had ruthlessly deleted workers at his own companies and made deft use of labour law’s loopholes, but in seeking to make real cuts at Doge, he collided with the fragile contract at the core of American life – misleadingly called “entitlements”, but better understood as the survival infrastructure for many millions of people”
“Musk had imagined Doge as the realisation of the dream of reactionary technocracy, in which engineers disciplined society like a factory floor. But society is not a factory. It encompasses children, elderly people, disabled people, the geographically stranded – the very categories of life that markets define as surplus”
“In trying to impose a cyborg logic of optimisation, Musk discovered that humans were not programmable units, and that the public sector’s role is precisely to provide goods that the private sector can’t or won’t. The conflation of codebase, company and state didn’t work”
“Trump’s circle used Musk to wage war on the “woke” domains of higher education, foreign aid and scientific research under the cover of “efficiency” while attacking the administrative state and terrorising the federal workforce”
“Doge also gave an experimental prod to the flesh of the welfare state to see how the body politic responded. When resistance surged, Musk absorbed the blame, but many of the changes remained”
“Perhaps the most important was the federal government’s expanded capacity for domestic surveillance, as facilitated through Doge’s data-integration efforts”
“Muskism proved not a governing philosophy but a toolkit available to those who govern”
“This is an edited extract of Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed, published on 24 March by Penguin”