Elon Musk's dream of going to Mars failed when his second Starship rocket in two months blew up over the Caribbean on Thursday. The SpaceX explosion diverted airplanes throughout the area and produced spectacular fireworks as debris fell into the ocean. You have to wonder if Musk was minding the store instead of blowing up the federal government; he'd have better luck.
Musk's philosophy behind building these starships, which he has on an accelerated schedule in order to meet his deadline of sending a manned mission to Mars by 2030, is something he calls “rapid iterative development" the goal being to build prototypes quickly and put them on the launchpad with a willingness to blow them up. Sound familiar?
Unfortunately for us, a willingness to blow up government doesn't just destroy a hunk of metal, it destroys tens of thousands of lives. Not that Elon Musk cares about that. As he told podcaster Joe Rogan last week, "the fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy, the empathy exploit ... [T]hey’re exploiting a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response.”
As it happens, Musk had already had what one would usually describe as a bit of a humiliation on Thursday when President Trump called him in before the Cabinet and issued an edict that the agency heads were to do the "cutting" of the federal workforce, not Musk and his DOGE team. This almost certainly came at the behest of lawyers who are dealing with several lawsuits which argue Musk has no legal authority to order mass firings and directives, as he has clearly been doing.
I suspect they took this action on Thursday due to Trump's loose lips in his speech to Congress on Tuesday, when he introduced Musk as the "head of DOGE" on national television. This was an attempt at a clean up. Unfortunately, Trump just did it again, telling the Cabinet that he expects them to cut and if they don't "Elon's going to do it for them." So they're right back where they started.
It's unlikely many of Trump's Cabinet stooges will buck the DOGE "advice" but there will probably be a slowdown now since Trump has clearly gotten the word that this project's gone completely off the rails. Whether anyone can stop this speeding train, however, is anyone's guess.
But what if Musk has already gotten what he wanted out of all this? Yes, it's likely true that he's been radicalized by the online right into thinking that "the left" and immigrants are destroying the world. I don't doubt that he truly believes all that. But it's of pretty recent vintage and his long term interests are of a completely different character.
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According to this very intriguing NY Times article by a whole passel of top reporters, Musk's political philosophy, such as it is, was gelling in the fall of 2023 when he attended a $50,000 a head dinner party in Silicon Valley for entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy who was running for president. He "held forth on the patio on a variety of topics, according to four people with knowledge of the conversation: his visit that week to the U.S.-Mexico border; the war in Ukraine; his frustrations with government regulations hindering his rocket company, SpaceX; and Mr. Ramaswamy’s highest priority, the dismantling of the federal bureaucracy.." They write:
Mr. Musk made clear that he saw the gutting of that bureaucracy as primarily a technology challenge. He told the party of around 20 that when he overhauled Twitter, the social media company that he bought in 2022 and later renamed X, the key was gaining access to the company’s servers.
Wouldn’t it be great, Mr. Musk offered, if he could have access to the computers of the federal government?
According to the article, he subsequently became obsessed with this idea. So after helping Trump win with a massive $288 million campaign contribution, he immediately looked around the government and discovered the "little-known unit with reach across the government: the U.S. Digital Service, which President Barack Obama created in 2014 after the botched rollout of healthcare.gov" which would give them "direct, insider access to government systems."
They got it. As we know, Musk's crew has infiltrated all the government computer systems from Treasury to Social Security to the Pentagon. He has obtained access to vast reams of data about every American, business competitors, foreign intelligence, all of it. And all we know is that his DOGE kids have been harassing and laying off people willy nilly and making so many mistakes they would have been fired immediately in any other job.
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But maybe that isn't really their primary job. Tech reporter Kara Swisher recently appeared on The Focus Group podcast and had a very interesting theory about what's actually going on. We all know that AI is where all the action has been for the last few years with the "Magnificent 7" Big Tech companies leading the impressive growth in the stock market. Swisher claimed that Musk has been behind on the AI boom, having had his partnership with Sam Altman of Open AI blow up over his desire to monetize the free service, and was almost certainly on a hunt for data to use for his own AI purposes:
What Elon is after, from what I can guess, if I had to guess, is... He is behind. One of the big debates going on right now in AI is we're running out of data. All the LLMs have sucked in all the data. Now they need more to have an advantage.
And so that means that all the LLMs have become a commodity because they're all parsing the same information, right? That they've scraped everything they can. Government is the biggest trove of information on the planet. U.S. government is at this point, would be my guess, or China would be.
The only other country that has it all consolidated is China, because it's a surveillance economy and it's a communist country, and so they want great control over their citizens. Our government data is siloed all over the place. What if someone could bring it all together and then load it into an LLM? What if...
Swisher isn't the only one asking these questions. According to Politico, even some Republicans who are savvy about the technology are wondering. The White House press secretary Karoline Levitt assured them that Musk isn't using government data to train its AI models and I'm sure she would know. Interestingly, when the Politico reporters put the question to Musk's Grok AI, it didn't exactly deny it:
Asked whether it was trained on data from the federal government obtained by DOGE, Grok 3 responded that “it’s plausible that data DOGE accessed could have flowed to xAI projects like Grok 3.” Its “best guess” is that “Grok 3 probably wasn’t primarily trained on DOGE-obtained federal data.” (It’s worth noting AI is capable of deception.)
I have no idea if this is one of the ideas that was percolating in Musk's mind that night back in 2023 when he was smoking cigars and shooting the breeze with his fellow tech billionaires but it would hardly be surprising. As Swisher said, "why do you rob banks? Because that's where the money is. Why do you rob government agencies? Because that's where the data is." In the DOGE eat DOGE world of AI, anything is possible.
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from Heather "Digby" Parton