Feb.07

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MuskWatch: Pushing All the Wrong Buttons?

Yesterday, we observed that Elon Musk is not terribly popular, and that "Eat the Billionaires" could be a potential angle of attack for the Democrats in 2026 and 2028. Events of the last 24 hours or so have done nothing to dispel that notion. A rundown:

• Here Come De Judges, Part I: It turns out the rumors of the legal system's death are greatly exaggerated. On Thursday, in response to a lawsuit filed by federal employee union members and retirees who claimed various violations of privacy laws in allowing Elon Musk and his merry band of teenagers to root around in (and possibly loot) the nation's payment and collection system, the DoJ agreed to restrict access to those systems.
  
  Under the proposed order, which the judge signed Thursday morning, "the Defendants will not provide access to any payment record or payment system of records maintained by or within the Bureau of the Fiscal Service." There is an exception for two "special government employees," Tom Krause, the CEO of Cloud Software Group, and Marko Elez, the 25-year old Musk employee, who are permitted "read only" access "as needed" to perform their "duties," and federal employees who also need access to do their jobs. (More on Elez below.)
  
  This agreement is in response to a request for a temporary restraining order and will remain in place until the judge rules on the plaintiffs' motion for preliminary injunction, which will be heard on February 24. Presumably, any shenanigans between now and then will be brought to the Court's attention, so there is much incentive to adhere to the terms of the order, especially since it's the defendants' proposal.
  
  What is not in the order, but is a requested remedy in the suit, is a requirement for Musk and his staff to turn over any information they have already obtained. No doubt, the judge will address this in any order on the preliminary injunction. It's also unclear what "duties" Elez and Krause have, since they are not authorized to do anything with these sensitive government systems. If the plaintiffs prevail in their motion, we should expect the judge to remove permissions from those two altogether. (Incidentally, the judge in this case, Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, has a bipartisan pedigree, having been appointed to the bench by Ronald Reagan, elevated to the D.C. District Court by Bill Clinton and then appointed to head the FISA court by William Rehnquist.)
  
  Given this posture, someone at the DoJ must have finally gotten through to either Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent, Musk, Elez, or all three. Perhaps one of the few remaining competent prosecutors pointed out that while Trump may enjoy king-like immunity, no one else does. And Musk's 25-year old charge is especially vulnerable here—cybercrimes like the ones they could be accused of carry multiple life sentences. Do they really want to hang their hat on a possible Trump pardon, especially if Trump decides Musk has gotten to be too much of an annoyance? Not to mention that states also prohibit cybercrimes, for which Trump cannot grant pardons.
  
  We can't quite breathe a sigh of relief, especially since Musk is now rooting around in other agencies' data systems, but maybe this is the beginning of institutional pushback. One can only hope. And please be clear, we do not see this as a partisan issue at all. It's a good government versus very bad government issue, in our view.
  
  
• Here Come De Judges, Part II: The wrangling over the nation's financial systems was not the only legal setback for a Musk-Trump initiative yesterday. Yesterday was supposed to be the deadline for federal employees to accept the administration's "buyout" offer, or else to accept the risk of being summarily terminated without compensation. The whole thing is a somewhat dubious proposition, since both federal law and union contracts protect a fair number of federal workers (though not all of them, and not most independent contractors).
  
  Anyhow, just hours before the deadline was to arrive, Judge George A. O'Toole Jr. of the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts (a Bill Clinton appointee, in case you are wondering) issued an order pausing the deadline until Monday afternoon. The Judge will hold an additional hearing then, and will decide whether to grant a more substantive injunction.
  
  
• The Co-President Is Angry: Many, many commentators have noticed that Elon Musk is acting as if he is the actual president. Sometimes, as in our repeated references to "co-presidents," such observations are couched in snarky language. In other cases, as in this piece headlined "It is Elon Musk who is now running the United States. Not Donald Trump" (one example among many), it is an outright declaration of the current state of affairs.
  
  There may be no human being on earth who hates being upstaged more than Donald John Trump. And so, earlier this week, the administration reminded the South African that there is one person in the country who was elected president last November, and it is NOT Elon Reeve Musk. At the moment, despite the behind-the-scenes maneuvering, the official posture of the White House is that all is well in the relationship between the Co-Presidents. However, we are less than three weeks into Trump v2.0, and this is not the first instance of tension between the real billionaire and the paper billionaire.
  
  We stand by our view that there is no way that two men who both have giant egos, who both see themselves as "disruptors," who both pride themselves on being "alpha males" can co-exist, long-term. Look at Trump v1.0, and notice that the only high-level folks who managed to hang on for more than a couple of years were people like Steven Mnuchin, who made sure to always fly under the radar (well, except when they were flying to see a solar eclipse). Anyone who challenged the throne, even a little, eventually found themselves on the outside looking in.
  
  
• Air Traffic Control?: In his remarks at the National Prayer Breakfast yesterday (more on this below), Trump continued to cast blame for the recent airplane-helicopter collision that cost the lives of 67 people. This time, instead of blaming DEI, he blamed what he described as an "obsolete" air traffic control system. "I think what is going to happen is we're all going to sit down and do a great computerized system for our control towers. Brand new—not pieced together, obsolete," he vowed.
  
  We have no knowledge whatsoever as to how good or bad the nation's air traffic control software is. Given that this appears to be an area where the budget-makers tend to cut corners, we think it is entirely believable that an overhaul is needed. However, we are not sanguine that Trump will have success here. First, because so many of his promises turn to vapor as soon as they are out of his mouth. Second, because Musk has seized upon this as an opportunity for him to gain some more influence, declaring that DOGE will make "rapid safety upgrades" to the software.
  
  Just as we know nothing about air traffic control software, we are confident that Musk and his DOGEys know nothing about it, either. On top of that "rapid upgrades" necessarily means "poorly tested upgrades." The notion of making changes to complicated software, on the fly, when lives are on the line, sounds like a very bad idea to us. This software is complex beyond belief. It would take a company with the expertise of Microsoft, IBM, or Oracle years to rewrite it and test it adequately.
  
  Forgive the semi-non sequitur, but in August 1986, Aeroméxico had one fatal crash and one near-miss in the span of a week. The airline's safety record is not particularly better or worse than any other major carrier, but the two incidents in close proximity served to fix the idea that "Aeroméxico is not safe" in the minds of many would-be passengers, and nearly caused the airline to go bankrupt.
  
  On Wednesday, roughly a week after the fatal Potomac crash, there was an incident at Seattle-Tacoma International airport where a Japan Airlines plane clipped a Delta plane. Both were on the ground, and nobody was hurt. However, if there are numerous airplane-related incidents in close order, it could well stick in the minds of voters, and become an anchor around the neck of Trump, whether that is fair or not. And if Musk actually does rewrite the software, and THEN there is some sort of incident, then the White House will definitely be in deep doo-doo.
  
  
• DOGE Uber Alles: Marko Elez spent roughly a week as one of the most powerful people in the country, by virtue of his hacked-in, high-level access to the nation's payment systems. What he, and his DOGE boss Musk, apparently forgot is that once a person has such a high profile, an army of reporters and activists begin looking anywhere and everywhere for skeletons. And in Elez' case they were not hard to find, as he was in the habit of sharing impolitic opinions on eX-Twitter. For example:
  
  
  • "You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity."
  • "Normalize Indian hate."
  • "Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool."
  • "I would not mind at all if Gaza and Israel were both wiped off the face of the Earth."
  
  In case you are wondering, Elez is a white fellow of Russian extraction. We do not know, however, if his list of acceptable marriage partners would be limited exclusively to Russians, or if he is open to white people of any (non-Jewish) heritage. Probably doesn't matter, since we would be willing to bet large sums of money he is an incel.
  
  As a result of being outed as a bigot, Elez has "resigned." It would seem that such ideas are OK if you are a co-president, but not so much if you are just a Blackshirt foot soldier. We put "resigned" in quotations because we are not really sure what that means in this context. First, Elez was already an un-appointed member of the administration. Is his resignation going to end all contact with Musk (unlikely) or will Elez just assume some other sub-Musk position (say, as an employee of SpaceX)? Second, as we and others have noted, Elez apparently achieved substantial access to the nation's financial systems, via a setup that would be hard to shut down, and that would not require Elez to be "in the building" to muck around. Is anyone really sure that he's been completely cut off? Even if Trump and Musk WANTED him to be completely cut off, it's not clear to us that they could make that happen short of forcibly seizing his notebook computer, doing a secure erase on it, and reloading the operating system from the manufacturer's website.

To return to where this item started, the evidence is mounting that Musk is a liability for Trump, and also that... the Democrats have figured that out. As to the first part of that, poll after poll has shown that the voting public is now decidedly unenthusiastic about Musk's participation in the government. Broadly speaking, in November, about a quarter of independents and Democrats liked the idea of his getting involved. Now, both groups are in the single digits. Among Republicans, about half were enthused about Musk playing a role in the Trump administration. Now, that's down to about a quarter. And again, we're only 3 weeks in. That's a pretty precipitous decline for such a short time.

Undoubtedly taking notice of this, Democrats are calling very loudly for investigations into Musk's activities. It's not entirely impossible that Republicans will comply; it would take just one Republican vote, on most committees, to make it happen. One could imagine a purple-district GOP-er deciding that it's better to be on the Musk-skeptic side than the Musk-enabler side.

In addition, we already have our first anti-Musk messaging bill, courtesy of Rep. Mark Pocan (D-WI). We generally roll our eyes at the tortured-bill-names-that-are-also-acronyms, but Pocan's is smoother than most. It's the Eliminate Looting of Our Nation by Mitigating Unethical State Kleptocracy Act, or ELON MUSK Act. The bill will not become law, not while Mike Johnson (R-LA) is speaker, but what it would do is prohibit people who work as "special" government employees (like Musk) from receiving federal contracts (like the once SpaceX has). Presumably, you can see where this is headed. Once this bill, and others like it, end up in Johnson's trash can, Democrats will scream: "See? The Republicans are more than happy to make the fat-cat billionaires even fatter with YOUR tax money."

And there you have more than 2,400 words on just one day of Muskery(?). We hereby nominate "muskrat" for "Word of the Year." Who could have seen that possibility, say, 6 months ago? (Z & L)