If I were Peter Hitchens, I’d give myself a contortionist pat on the back and say “I told you so”.
If you believe Hitchens, there isn’t a single development in domestic and foreign politics that he didn’t prophesy years in advance. And when Hitchens does get one guess right, as statistical probability suggests he will sooner or later, he never tires of telling all and sundry of that feat.
Endowed with few of his prophetic powers but more in the way of taste, I shan’t brag about predicting months ago that Musk wouldn’t last long in DC, although I did. Part of my self-restraint is caused by the fact that only lazy analysts failed to make the same prediction.
Now it has been semi-announced by semi-official sources that Elon Musk will be leaving his position as head of DOGE, we all feel vindicated. However – and I’m being self-critical here – making such obvious predictions was hardly sporting.
When the lunatics run the asylum, sooner or later they’ll turn on each other, such is the ineluctable logic of madness. Not being a professional psychiatrist, I can’t diagnose Trump’s condition, although his madcap ideas and erratic behaviour suggest there is one. But Musk is undeniably bonkers.
For a man who self-admittedly suffers from the Asperger syndrome, he certainly has a broad range of interests. Thus Musk has seen few conspiracy theories he couldn’t love, Covid in particular having caught his fancy in recent time.
To counter multiplying conspiracies, he advocates giving the Ukraine to Russia and Taiwan to China. That longing seems to be consonant with Trump’s, but other than that one detects a clear divergence in their principles, inasmuch as they have them.
For example, while Trump laudably wages war on net zero idiocy, Musk sees global warming as the greatest threat to humanity, with AI and declining birth rates running in hot pursuit. Hence he advocates a universal carbon tax, obviously feeling that hoi polloi are grossly undertaxed at present. (Not to worry, Elon, ‘Liberation Day’ will take care of that iniquity.)
I’m not sure what he intends to do about AI, but his proposed solution to the ongoing depopulation of “our planet” strikes me as somewhat illogical. To Musk’s credit, he does his level best to alleviate the problem by spawning as many illegitimate children as he can. Then again, seeing that the world’s population has increased by two billion in the past 20 years, one has to question how bad the depopulation problem really is.
But then what Musk proposes is to turn our civilisation into an interplanetary one by taking millions of people and putting them on Mars, which, as Musk correctly observes, “has zero human population”. One reason for this is that it may not be fit for human habitation, but in any case Musk’s proposal of removing large numbers of people to Mars and other planets would reduce the world’s population, not increase it.
Marching in step with the present administration, Musk describes his political convictions as libertarian. If so, this is a rather recent development, considering that in the two elections before last, Musk voted for Clinton and Biden, who are to libertarianism what Fido is to a lamppost. In between, he endorsed the rapper Kanye West for president, presumably with the ticket also including Eminem as VP candidate.
Also, I wonder how Musk reconciles his newly found libertarianism with his belief not only in the universal carbon tax, but also in universal basic income. Say what you will about such policies but they are about as libertarian as China at the time of the Cultural Revolution. George Orwell, call your office: rampant statism is libertarianism.
Musk’s brief at DOGE was to cut some fat off the federal budget, and he brought to bear on that commendable task the single-track mind of an Asperger sufferer. In the process, he couldn’t quite tell the difference between trimming off fat and cutting through vital organs.
For example, his attempt to fire many air-traffic controllers at a time when that service already had severe personnel shortages was rightly described as sheer lunacy even in the pro-Trump press. Thankfully, Musk’s hand was stayed before airliners began to fall out of the sky like overripe apples off a tree.
In hinting at Musk’s impending departure, Trump said that his job had been done. Of course, it had been. Elon waved his magic wand, and the two-trillion budget deficit melted away, along with the $37 trillion public debt. All in a couple of months’ work, and trust the Tesla maker to have such demiurge powers.
The fact is that during his short time in DC, Musk managed to get up a multitude of noses, including some belonging to Trump’s closest confidants and, as the rumour has it, Trump himself. The Beltway (Washington’s ring road) is only 64 miles long, and the circle it describes isn’t large enough to accommodate two such oversized and half-mad egos.
Yet it’s not all about personality clashes. The first time I wrote about Musk, I pointed out that there is method in his madness. The method can be graphically represented with a capital S having two vertical lines running through it.
Musk’s most passionate beliefs can be traced back to his business interests, and not to any set of political convictions. Thus, his scaremongering about global warming is natural for a major maker of electric cars, a product category that has been brought into existence by falsifying climatological evidence.
China is the major supplier of batteries and other parts for Teslas, hence Musk’s belief that Taiwan should belong to the mainland communists. Hence also, I suspect but can’t prove, must be his disagreement with high tariffs on Chinese products.
And Musk’s Space X company manufactures and launches advanced rockets and spacecraft, which adds a nice commercial touch to Musk’s interplanetary lunacy. The chap always has his eye on the main chance, and that has nothing to do with making America great again.
However, over the past few months Musk has been so busy firing air-traffic controllers and, in all fairness, quite a few other state employees who ought to have been fired, that he has let his main interests slip.
For example, Tesla has lost roughly half its value, although I can’t help thinking that its peak value had little to do with reality. Tesla was then worth more than the entire German car industry, but don’t get me going on inflated share values.
The time has long since passed when the market value of a company had anything to do with its commercial performance. Tesla is an example of gross over-evaluation, but also quite a few cases have been reported of companies whose shares were valued even less than their cash reserves.
Be that as it may, such a huge drop diverted Elon’s attention from public to private interests. His pathway to his first trillion has become thornier, and something had to be done. A good job then that during his short DOGE tenure Musk was able to solve the problem that had plagued the US government for over a century.
Now he goes back to what he does best, piling up billions for number one, and never mind disinterested public service. A useful reminder, this, that those who think that a successful business career prepares one for statesmanship are sorely mistaken. But let’s not talk about Trump.