Both Joe Rogan and Donald Trump call Musk a genius. In fact, they call him a ‘super genius’.
Except that Musk is no such thing. As Bill Clayton wrote in November of 2023
Musk’s strength is having the enormous wealth to breathe life into existing ideas by hiring experts who do have the expertise to achieve his goals. I haven’t seen any reports about what goes on behind closed doors, but I’m guessing he hasn’t contributed anything in the way of engineering insight and problem-solving that puts people in orbit.
Musk’s wealth arose from a joint effort between Musk and his brother, Kindal and one other person. By all accounts, Kindal is actually the smarter of the two though Musk is the more aggressive when seeking attention.
For instance, when Musk bought Twitter, his first thought was to use a blockchain, somehow, with the application—solely because this was the ‘kool kidz’ tech of the time. It was Kindal who talked him out of his idiotic idea. Now Musk wants to put the treasury systems on blockchain, a plan so idiotic that it makes my teeth hurt even thinking about it.
Then there’s the Musk proposition about using AI to root out all fraud and waste in government. Sure, it’s easy to convert a decades-old legacy system that’s likely the largest in the world consisting of millions if not billions of lines of code into gee-wiz AI in a day or two. No prob.
However, you only have to look at the AI search results we’ve all laughed at to know how moronic this idea is.
Or look at the current use of AI art. Now, whose arm is that? What’s wrong with those thumbs?
Musk is aggressive, shrewd, brash, petty, and impulsive, but he is no genius. And what he and his band of merry little Musketts are doing to the government is proof positive that he’s not only not a genius, he’s actually not all that bright.
Take the government firings. The DOGE decided that they wanted to reduce government costs easily, so they focused on firing government employees as low-hanging fruit—without any attention to the fact that the total compensation for government employees is approximately $293 billion dollars, or 4.3% of government funding.
(And why not? After all, Musk crowed about feeding USAID to the wood chipper and bragged about the money saved, when our foreign aid is about 1% of the budget. Oh, and people died.)
DOGE also didn’t take into account that many of these employees live throughout the country and federal employment is a major financial benefit for many areas.
As an example, take Wyoming. Beautiful land for the most part, and a favorite tourist destination. As part of an effort to incorporate a sense of stability for the seasonal workers in the area, President Biden categorized these workers are permanent seasonal employees, with all the rights of government workers.
As new employees, each was put on probationary status, even though most have worked in the national parks for years. But being on probationary status was enough for DOGE to fire at least 10% of park workers, maybe more. That’s almost 1,000 people fired of the 8100 jobs in Wyoming.
And each of these jobs, with their stable income, leads to other jobs in the community where the federal workers reside. So firing these workers will not only mean our national parks aren’t being maintained or kept safe, but will have an economic ripple effect across the entire state.
Many of the Musk/DOGE firings weren’t just ill-considered and bad, they were a major screw up. An example of this was the firings of the people in the National Nuclear Safety Administration, part of the Department of Energy, who keep our nuclear stockpiles safe and secure.
Sources told CNN that DOGE staffers apparently did not realize that the agency oversees America’s nuclear weapons stockpile when the employees were fired Thursday. The terminations were quickly rescinded Friday, CNN reported
The workers were fired because “no one” had “taken any time to understand what we do and the importance of our work to the nation’s national security,” one source told CNN.
Energy Department scrambles to rehire nuclear bomb experts fired in major DOGE screw up
What’s worse, now the government can’t find the people to rehire them because they cancelled all their federal emails.
A memo sent to NNSA employees on Friday and obtained by NBC News read: “The termination letters for some NNSA probationary employees are being rescinded, but we do not have a good way to get in touch with those personnel.”
“Please work with your supervisors to send this information (once you get it) to people’s personal contact emails,” the memo added.
US government tries to rehire nuclear staff it fired days ago
The Musk/DOGE team also fired 50 first year members of the elite CDC Epidemic Intelligence Service, one of the premier disease research groups in the world. This, as humans infected with bird flu have been discovered in several new states this week.
Firing critically necessary people demonstrates how poorly managed this destructive action was. People fired were fired, unfired, and fired again. There’s been chaos across the government, which means our tax refunds aren’t being processed, our FEMA requests aren’t being answered, and any number of other essential government services aren’t being performed.
Also, by firing the newer members of government, we have lost a generational chance to bring in new ideas, new technologies, new training, as well as ensuring there are enough workers to actually perform the tasks and jobs delegated to them by Congress.
We know we don’t have enough migration judges, but we have even less now because Musk/DOGE just fired twenty.
The sheer stupidity of this mass, sudden firing is mind-boggling. It’s like Musk and his little gang of ijits didn’t spend ten minutes on trying to understand what a government is, and how it works. Musk somehow believes that what worked for Twitter—nothing more than one social media app among many—would work for the US Government.
And then forgot that whole sudden firing thing didn’t work that well for Twitter, either.
The federal employees fired were told to get out now; in many cases, to clear out in 30 minutes. There’s no time to ensure a half finished job will be finished correctly, or let folks know where you’re at with a task. It will be days just to discover where people left off, and even more days (weeks or months) to finish the task, because there won’t be enough people to do all the work that needs to be done even when they finally recover from the chaos.
Just like Twitter. Except it won’t be a social media site going offline for a few hours every other day, it will be closed national parks, disease outbreaks, criminals who won’t get caught, risks to our national security, unpaid taxpayers, no support in a disaster, no home loans, no VA medical, and who knows, maybe we can no longer count on getting our Social Security checks, or that our doctors will get paid by Medicare.
The havoc happening right now will negatively impact on the government for years. The only silver lining is that when all of this crap really hits the fan, the country will have no doubt as who is to blame, and it certainly won’t be someone named Biden or Harris.
That’s probably the ultimate measure of Musk’s supposed ‘genius’: smart people don’t shoot themselves in the foot. Repeatedly.
Caricature of Musk courtesy DonkeyHoteyCC BY 2.0
