Elon Musk’s shouting match with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent might have been the final nail in the coffin for the tech billionaire’s four-month stint in the White House, but it came after months of bubbling frustration at Musk’s “chain-saw” approach to dismantling the federal government.

Musk and Bessent exploded at each other in April when Musk attempted to force through his pick to lead the IRS—Gary Shapley—behind Bessent’s back. (Musk eventually lost this battle—Shapley lasted less than 72 hours before Bessent tapped Michael Faulkender to replace him.)

“Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!” a typically mild-mannered Bessent was heard shouting after Musk as they charged down the halls of the West Wing.

  • @[email protected]
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    2 months ago

    I hope that some day Elon comes to realize that he is utterly alone. No one, and I mean no one likes him. Everyone in his life that is friendly or supportive to his face, is putting on a show trying to get money from him or through their association with him. The assortment of adoring losers that identify with him, are merely chasing a mirage. They don’t adore him, only the fictional character that he’s constructed for PR purposes. He has to buy friends. He has to buy sex and offspring. He even has to buy the illusion of trivial accomplishments like progress in video games. He is peak loser, everyone can see it, and only a few are willing to lie to his face in exchange for maybe getting some cash. No amount of money, or fear driven bigotry, or trolling, or descendants will ever fill the gaping hole in that fetid husk he calls a soul. If there is any justice, he will be moping, riddled with regret about all this someday whenever he gets around to dying, alone in some dusty metaphorical corner.

  • @[email protected]
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    182 months ago

    That’s OK though. Libs were owned. Another event that will do nothing to harm the support from Trumps base.

    No amount of death or self-harm matters to magas as long as libs were owned and some brown people were put in their place.

    • @[email protected]
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      72 months ago

      If Trump pissed his pants on live TV his MAGats would tell you that he’s a genius who invented a self dying cloth.

    • @[email protected]
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      32 months ago

      I think some of them are starting to wake up to the reality that their economic position will not improve under their god-emperor.

      • @[email protected]
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        12 months ago

        I dunno, I hope you are right, but every time I see a headline like that it turns out to be a feel-good article based on two random disgruntled twitter posters or something.

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    2652 months ago

    Failure by what metric? First off, he went in and destroyed everything he wanted to. He got the FAA to cancel their contract with Verizon and sign with Starlink for communication; He and DOGE gutted agencies that were supposed to regulate SpaceX, Neuralink, Tesla, and X; DoJ dropped a case agains SpaceX; and since he started his rampage, more than 40 agencies have taken no actions on investigations into his companies suggesting they are at least being slow walked if not dropped all together. The transportation department lowered requirements for Tesla and other companies to report incidents with self driving cars, and the FAA gave SpaceX permission to quintuple their number of launches despite the effect on the environment and air travel.

    In what way was this a failure? Because Trump and his people hate him? Frankly, everyone hates Musk these days. Plus, I wear it as a badge of honor when the likes of Trump and his cronies hate me.

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      1082 months ago

      I agree. They’re trying to distance themselves from him because they think he is the reason their polling is sucking so hard right now. I think most everyone hates all of them, not just him.

    • WatDabney
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      462 months ago

      Very much this.

      Now it should be noted that Musk is, among other things, a desperately insecure wienie who really is crushed by the fact that basically everyone hates him and spends a great deal of time and effort cringily trying to compensate for it and pathetically failing. So at some level all of this certainly does hurt him.

      But he’s also toxically greedy and self-absorbed and wantonly destructive, and by those measures, his government tenure was a resounding success. And that he undoubtedly throws tantrums and goes on crying jags when he’s alone, just like he’s done since middle school, doesn’t make any of the rest of it any less a success.

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        162 months ago

        But he’s also toxically greedy and self-absorbed and wantonly destructive,

        Which is why I really hope he turns X against the Trump regime lol God I hope he’s petty enough to attack them now

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      212 months ago

      I agree that his time at the white house has been a huge success for his personal interests.

      However, I don’t think it all went according to plan. I think he really did expect that he could make some government services more efficient. I also think he thought that his actions would ingratiate himself to the right, all over the world. I also don’t think he expected the backlash against Tesla.

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        262 months ago

        He knew that DOGE was a joke from the start. Everyone did. You know how we know? His complete lack of research. Anyone, even an elementary school student, would ask how something works before taking a hammer to it… But only if they cared to get it right, right? And look at what DOGE didn’t touch. Military waste, dirty cops, etc.

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          2 months ago

          I’m not so sure him not researching or even checking with experts speaks to his lack of interest. He destroyed key components of one of Twitter’s data centers a few years back - literally went in himself over a weekend and yanked out a bunch of cables before cancelling the lease, as I recall the story. Then a bunch of Twitter admins had to spend a good deal of time rebuilding crucial infrastructure with the systems they had left.

          He’s shot his own foot this way before.

          (Edit) It was worse than I thought - he hired people off the street to help load rented trucks with the servers after he just yanked them out. When someone mentioned that millions of people’s sensitive data was stored on them, they picked up some padlocks and set up a spreadsheet with the lock combinations… All so he could ship them to one of their other data centers, where it had already been explained to him that they couldn’t hook them back up!

          Found this article: https://medium.com/@noahkingdavis/the-unbelievable-tale-of-when-elon-musk-personally-removed-servers-from-a-sacramento-data-center-2892f21b12c3

        • @[email protected]
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          92 months ago

          Yeah, defense spending is something like half the discretionary budget. Obviously the place to start when cutting waste, but not politically viable for arcane reasons.

      • @[email protected]
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        22 months ago

        I think he really did expect that he could make some government services more efficient.

        What a grand and intoxicating innocence.

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    612 months ago

    “Entire Trump team hated Elon Musk”…

    If you’ll recall, after Trump’s first term, it was revealed that the entire Trump team hated Donald Trump.

    Basically, any marginally competent person will hate working with people like Trump or Musk who make drastic changes without any reason or even any idea of what they’re doing.

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    102 months ago

    He accomplished all he set out to do, with one caveat, because he stood in the bad limelight his image and monetary value took a serious nosedive. This last part is why he now is standing in the back, yet leering around the room wherever the president is.

    The one thing he was aspiring towards did receive a huge blow, he was racing to become the world’s first trillionaire. And it might just be a setback that he can catch up with, but for now he does need to focus to try and crank all his stocks back up…

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    382 months ago

    Bullshit. He got pretty much everything he wanted, including gigantic government contracts for his businesses, while stopping all investigations into his criminal activity and negligent products. Also got to get high on swinging his dick around a lot, and still has trump offering him more favors for more money.

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      2 months ago

      It’s never enough for these assholes. Musk wants the whole world to bend to his will because he bought the government fair and square. Some uppity government employee shouldn’t tell him he doesn’t have the authority to install more puppets in these agencies.

    • @[email protected]
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      42 months ago

      Yes, but -like trump- he will shout stupid shit to draw away the attention from the main cause… because people will take offense

  • Match!!
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    22 months ago

    what’s with the claims of south african genocide currently being pushed, then?

  • Zier
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    52 months ago

    He, like orange donnie, was born a failure.

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    52 months ago

    It wouldn’t be a Trump administration without reality TV drama. That harms millions of people.

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    22 months ago

    I wonder if Elon knows he’s a scapegoat. Like obviously he’s a villain brought in to do a bunch of shit that was always in the Trump plan but would be unpopular with a bunch of people so Trump’s team could say “Oh no! We didn’t do any of that stuff it was all this evil Musk guy!” I just wonder if he knows that. He is pretty stupid in a lot of ways, but I really don’t think he’s truly dumb enough to not realize that was his role in the Trump admin, but he is also increasingly delusional about his own skill and intelligence so maybe that won out.

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    172 months ago

    They did exactly what they wanted him to do. Now they want to make him out as the bad guy and use him as the fall guy so they look better.