D.C. does with even the most heroic Americans what it does with everyone else: It diminishes them, forcing all sorts of ideological and ethical concessions.
Elon Musk is leaving Washington, and it’s better for all parties that this is the way of it. D.C. is, in many respects, a non-Newtonian fluid, presenting a solid barrier to any change that moves faster than the Laurentide Ice Sheet. An idiosyncratic futurist who thinks and operates at the speed of space travel was never going to have the patience for what needs doing.
Mr. Musk, who once called himself the president’s “first buddy,” is now operating with some distance from Mr. Trump as he says he is ending his government work to spend more time on his companies. Mr. Musk remains on good terms with Mr. Trump, according to White House officials. But he has also made it clear that he is disillusioned with Washington and frustrated with the obstacles he encountered as he upended the federal bureaucracy, raising questions about the strength of the alliance between the president and the world’s richest man.
Musk, a man who knows only the supremacy of an owner’s ability to slash whole corporate departments in a day, was ill-prepared for the finicky, exasperating work of prying apart the many knots that protect federal employees and their reporting agencies from censure, let alone termination.
Our Jeff Blehar had the right of it when he wrote all the way back in February:
Musk is laying the predicate for his own fall from grace right now, while he flies high in the esteem of the president he serves, by his careless and oftentimes casually cruel comportment. His arrogance, curdling over into clumsily manipulative cynicism, is impossible to ignore. For example, has anyone else noticed that Elon Musk tends to say a lot of things that simply aren’t true? As in, almost constantly, if X’s own AI audit of Musk’s account is anything to go by, and particularly about anything related to his role in “fixing” the federal government through his role at DOGE?
Washington does with even the most heroic Americans what it does with everyone else: It diminishes them, forcing all sorts of ideological and ethical concessions — and Elon didn’t exactly start as Eisenhower.
No, it is better for Musk — and American excellence in tech — that he depart now and return his focus to machinery and processes that have explicit on/off functions, offering the world more than a Rand Paul round-up of silly government spending.