It’s both. His personal goals of government fiscal responsibility put his company in harms way.
And apparently he’s a true believer in deficit reduction, which makes it even funnier that he whiffed so badly on it with DOGE. It’s also funny that he didn’t realize he was being taken for a ride by a party that was never interested in reducing the deficit.
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That’s what it is. Not his own will.
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I know a few folks who work at agencies that got to deal with DOGE. Evidently Musk really thought there would be just large and obvious fraudulent expenditures that would be easy and painless to cut. Then the DOGE people got there and realized Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security fraud is the exact opposite - it is granular and super case specific. I.e. the sort of stuff that takes years of diligent planning and organization, not to mention up front investment, to stop.
Being in DC and involved in this world, the craziest thing to me was what did Musk and co think Trump was doing from 2016 to 2020. If this fraud was easy to stamp out why did it not happen then?
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They did manage to fire one of the best government employees I’ve ever worked with, though!
Nine-year armed forces veteran, too.
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It’s disgusting that some people are cheering for these govt worker firing. Just because they don’t understand what these govt workers are doing, it doesn’t mean they’re doing nothing or unnecessary work.
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I guess I don’t understand the point, or we are just saying the same thing in a different way. Elon wanted to save us from the Zimbabwe dollar, and he realized it came at a cost both personally and professionally. The board gave him an ultimatum, and he chose to give up DOGE to save himself and stay as CEO. He’s rich enough to not listen to anyone including his board. He just chose to keep his money and power instead of being replaced as CEO. Who could blame him?
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Save us? What he has done with DOGE will get us faster to Zimbabwe dollar.
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Don’t make this political.
Don’t make stupid claim.
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Pretty sure you can only be a “special gov contractor” or whatever he was classified as for x amount of time and his plan was to always leave by now.
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Yes, 130 day rolling per 365 days, if we’re being technical. He’s given enough money to be relabeled as an independent contractor or consultant to move around this though.
I genuinely believe the guy does whatever he feels like doing. Tough to put someone worth 400 billion in a box.
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The issue isn’t his employment status with the federal government, executive branch has wide leeway to appoint special envoy/tzar of something/etc…
The issue is how long the Tesla board was fine with him being the highly compensated CEO of their company while his primary focus was on his DOGE role on Washington.
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I guess it’s not really a “choice” when you get an ultimatum. More like an offer he could not refuse. The same as what he did to his employees with WFH, but on a much bigger scale.
The allegation was “Think of all the things in your life that are expensive and then ask yourself what they all have in common. The government is involved in some way or another (housing, healthcare, education……)”
I was responding to that. Even Medicare sets prices and/or distorts the market by its very nature of collective bargaining at scale, as it were. And again, I agree with you on the EV subsidy.
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Not to mention the only DOGE employee who has spoken publicly (and was just fired for doing so) claimed he was surprised that they didn’t find anywhere near as much “fraud, waste, and abuse” as they were told they would. His direct quote: “It’s not as inefficient as I was expecting, to be honest. I was hoping for more easy wins.”
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The post you are responding too is the sort of simple thinking that prevents real solutions. Either the government is involved or many disabled people don’t have housing, the elderly don’t have access to healthcare and the poor don’t have access to education. Figuring out how to balance priorities that is hard but that is the only way forward.
And yes, I also agree on EV subsidy. It creates all sorts of irrational economic incentives with not nearly enough benefits for its cost.
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That’s not bad… in Central Ohio it’s double that. Not quite a rounding error… those costs for you are 3.5 cents/kWh… so you’re up to 10 cents/kWh or so. Still a great rate, though!
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