Musk and efficiency
Musk’s record at Twitter suggests ‘efficiency’ is not his best use
There has been little focus on the havoc Musk wreaked at Twitter.
December 3, 2024 at 2:30 p.m. EST
The Washington Post
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/12/03/elon-musk-twitter-doge-trump-x/
Elon Musk has an enviable record as an innovator and a canny entrepreneur. Just consider the accomplishments of SpaceX and Tesla.
His record at cutting down to size the one large organization where he wielded his fiscal machete, however, tells a different story. Musk bought Twitter, now X, in 2022 and promptly cut 80 percent of its staff. That Twitter survived presumably constitutes the bona fides he brings to his role as co-head of Donald Trump’s vision for the advisory panel dubbed the Department of Government Efficiency, already shorthanded as DOGE.
Yet for all the talk of how difficult it will be for Musk and his DOGE co-director, Vivek Ramaswamy, to wring their promised $2 trillion from the federal budget, there has been little focus on the havoc Musk wreaked at Twitter. If the solid functioning of the critical tasks of the federal government is at all important to the American public, it is worth pausing to consider how ill-prepared Musk and his coterie of libertarian cost-cutters are to accomplish much more than more chaos should they be entrusted with imposing efficiency on the federal bureaucracy.
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