Elon Musk and the ‘disruptor’ myth
He brought urgency and genius. He needed patience and strategy
Every Tesla has a fart button, designed to make an embarrassing sound under the passenger’s seat. “My finest work,” said Elon Musk: a trademark joke from someone who has achieved so much, in so many fields, that he does not need to pose as a ‘great man’. He will go down as one of the most consequential industrialists in American history, revolutionising industries by obsessing about design, process and costs.
That’s why the idea of his going into government was so exciting. Musk achieves the impossible. So what could he do with a full remit to purge waste via Donald Trump? I look at his failure in my Times column today.
And yes, it is a failure. All of this ‘he’d always leave after his 130 days was up’ is nonsense. The original idea was that Musk and biotech investor Vivek Ramaswamy would run DOGE and and complete their work by 4 July 2026. After which DOGE would ‘delete itself’. In the end, he left after a few months and his claims of $2 trillion savings were scaled back to $150 billion. Worse, when you factor in the lawsuits and payoffs, it could well be a net cost to the American taxpayer.
When I took the job last November, I wrote that Musk’s main enemy would be the legal blob.
“Legalistic weeds have now grown so high in government as to require thick textbooks of regulations to help officials navigate them. If the smallest rule is not followed (or is “deleted”, to use Musk-speak) then government can be sued. Welfare reform tends to be thwarted in this way. Ditto attempts to address illegal immigration, as Trump will soon find out. To diverge from the norm – to attempt even a fraction of the Musk “algorithm” – is to risk being sued: as presidents, prime ministers and teachers find out.”
Perhaps thought he’d prevail, as he did in his run-ins with the SEC (which he gleefully renamed Suck Elon’s —-) but with 14 state attorney-generals suing him and God knows how many FoIs, he was on a playing field whose rules he didn’t understand and could not ‘delete’. Meanwhile Tesla sales and shares tanked as his newfound tribalism damaged his companies reputation (as it was always going to do) and how he says he’s leaving politics and is going back to sleeping under the desk of the companies he runs.
The below picture, where Musk is given a chainsaw by the brave, careful and effective Argentinian reformer Javier Milei, now looks like ketamine-fuelled hubris.
As a big admirer of Musk, I take no pleasure in his failure - but as a believer in his cause (I think the state is about twice as big and half as effective as it should be) I think that failure needs to be examined.
“The methods of government would bankrupt any government”. Those words have been true since John Buchan wrote them in 1912 (in The Power House). Politics is about arse-covering, caution, legacy-hungry ministers coming in to tear up the work of their predecessors etc. Policies are judged by their intentions in politics, not their results. It will always be this way in a democracy: there is a (low) limit to how well anything will ever run in a government department. It will never, ever be efficient.
There is a strand of right-populist upstart parties that sees it differently. They blend anti-establishment rhetoric with appeals to private-sector efficiency: insiders stink! Time for the efficient outsiders. Vox is doing it in Spain; Ciotti in France. This was Dominic Cummings’ trademark, tested during lockdown when a Napoleonic top-down, no-debate model was tried - with calamitous consequences. The ‘smart’ external data guys that were drafted in got it wrong. The political disruption Cummings caused led to his eventual ejection, just as Elon Musk’s maniacal activity earned him too many enemies in Congress and the White House. In politics, you need to take people with you.
This isn’t to say reform is not possible. It is: and in my column I offer the Stepping Stones document prepared for Thatcher in 1977 which was full of radicalism, caution and strategy. Every step was explained from first principles. It was in the pre-digital age: here’s one of the hand-draw diagrams.
A version of the above is what’s needed now. It could come from any party: Labour, Tories, Reform.
It’s possible - perhaps likely - that Keir Starmer never does any of the things that could save his government and country. Possible that people turn to the ‘disruptor’ option of the proudly-inexperienced Reform UK, who voters have now entrusted with ten councils. Liz Truss proved how easy it is to ‘delete’. Musk too. But politics is about persuasion, strategy and delivery. Shooting straight for the latter without the first two ends in failure: that’s the Musk lesson. Anyway, more in my Times column.
“In politics, you need to take people with you.”
This is where the civil service falls down. It thinks the “people in this statement is them - those working in the legal quagmire of policy and apparent rules. They miss the point.
The people in politics are the electorate. The civil service is to do the electors bidding as demonstrated through the election of parliament. I get that people do not cherry pick particular policies and never engage in the very important details of any given policy. But the civil service fails to even feel the direction of an electron result. It merely continues on its way, doing what it thinks is best for someone (quite often not the British public) and makes sure all that politics happens somewhere else to someone else.
A reminder of who the people are seems needed.
In your implicit defence of Musk & Co, you try and make excuses for a strategy which was just downright foolish and doomed to failure from his first radical utterances.
Indeed, the thing that prevented total demolition of (yes it’s true probably bloated) a state, WAS the law, WAS the democratic processes.
Then there was the MARKET - freedom of investors to wield their own view on the folly of the DOGE and the actions of Trump.
The idea that any leadership can forget they have to ‘bring those three entities with them’ is arrogance and stupidity in the extreme.
What we are watching is an admittedly flawed system of democracy and a ‘free’ market, defeat a conflicting system of authoritarian populists intent on pulling down the system of state around them.
Like you said, it will need time and patience. But it will succeed in defeating Trump.
And by the way Margaret Thatcher also thought she could just shut down old industries without giving one thought to the destruction of communities around them. Her hamfisted, insensitive approach there is only just being repaired today. Britain would have been in a better place if she’d listened to those who advocated patience and time.
The problem is, politicians don’t have the time to make the really fundamental changes.