When he entered Twitter's offices to take possession of the company he had just acquired, on October 26, 2022, Elon Musk arrived carrying... a sink. "Let that sink in," he wrote on the social media network, an untranslatable and absurd pun playing on the two meanings of the phrase in English: "I'll let you think about it" and "let that washbasin in." Two years later, on November 6, 2024, when Donald Trump had just been elected president of the US, he published a photomontage showing him, still carrying a sink, in the Oval Office of the White House.

The similarities are not limited to this joke. In setting up his "Department of Government Efficiency" (DOGE), a team intended to make deep cuts in US state budgets, ideally bringing them back into balance, Musk is largely reproducing heavy-handed methods used during his takeover of Twitter. It begins with his sensational announcements prior to taking action: just before taking the reins of the platform, the billionaire announced that he would lay off 80% of employees; prior to the implementation of DOGE, he promised that this program would find approximately $2,000 billion (€1,900 billion) in savings in the $6,700 billion federal budget.

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