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Musk, at least prior to DOGE, erred on the side of being overly optimistic and discounting risk, rather than a clear lack of rigour. You can't run moonshot companies like as is literally the case for SpaceX, or Tesla, if you don't make sure you've done your best to account for all relevant factors.
Unfortunately, the move fast and break things approach is a bit harder to endorse when it comes to federal governance, not that I'm an expert.
I do not think Musk could have done what he did at Tesla and SpaceX if he was not orientated towards objective reality. Clearly there was a lot of fake-it-till-you-make-it puffery, particularly at Tesla, but it mostly involved over-optimistic projections, and Musk didn't make obviously false statements about the present.
It is possible Musk at DOGE is still orientated towards reality, but he has taken up lying on an industrial scale. But most people who successfully make a Big Lie part of their public persona end up high on their own supply.
It's possible that his orientation towards reality has broken down through some combination of his mental health worsening, stress, drug abuse and just arising from the fact that politics is often a mind-killer. But as you correctly say, if you wear a mask often enough, it might turn out to stick.
I think the decline of Musk illustrates what makes Trump so impressive.
It is is nearly impossible to function at a high level if everyone fucking hates you, even if you have unlimited money. Musk is not handling it well, the fact that Trump has done so well for so long is amazing!
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Imo Musk has always been the same kind of person he is now - Make wildly implausible promises of over-delivering, including lying about current capabilities, and then reach beyond what anybody else can do ... while still technically significantly underdelivering compared to the promises. DOGE is the same. I'm not aware of any western government managing to significantly reduce spending in any way whatsoever - at most there is a moratorium on increase of spending. DOGE does not deliver what he is promising, but it still seems above any comparable efforts. Though I admit that his approach just objectively works best on easily-measurable metrics, such as "does the rocket fly", "how much does it cost" etc.
Sweden did in the 90s. The fiscal consolidation during the period of 94-98 amounted to some 7.5% of GDP. This led to a sustainable surplus, growth and sustainable entitlements, including pensions.
For America that would equal about $2.2T and a bit more than Musk promised.
Of course, you're never ever going to get there by firing government employees. You need to cut entitlements.
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The 2013 sequester led to a small cut in headline total spending, and the cuts to discretionary spending (which is all that DOGE is looking at) stuck. Discretionary spending on the eve of the pandemic was lower (after adjusting for inflation, but not GDP growth) than in 2012. Sweden and Canada both cut headline spending in the 1990's - again the cuts were small on a headline basis, but large after adjusting for inflation. Trend inflation was higher then so Margaret Thatcher was not able to cut headline spending in the 1980's, but spending consistently grew slower than inflation.
The problem in the current year is that the cost of the welfare-state-for-the-old grows in line with population aging, and it is genuinely impossible to cut the rest of the state faster than that without breaking things. Sustainably cutting spending in an aging society means making the welfare-state-for-the-old less generous over time.
Dunno how Sweden did it, but in Canada it was more or less an accounting trick -- health care costs were downloaded from the feds to the provinces, which was great for the federal budget but resulted in commensurate impacts on both service levels (down) and provincial budgets (up).
Probably some amount of true cutting obtained through the device of scapegoating the provinces when the health care system became underfunded, but provinces also increased taxes/deficits to make up some of the gap -- it's nowhere near as impactful as the headline numbers might imply.
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I don't think those really are comparable - all of them were reactions to concrete fiscal crises/shocks which absolutely needed a short-term budget correction. Our current problems are ballooning costs, and while I think this has significant long-term negative effects, it doesn't have that immediate necessity. But I'll grant that I myself was being hyperbolic - it would be more correct to say that governments rarely manage to limit spending with long-term foresight in mind, but only purely reactively after a crisis has already happened and desperately requires action. DOGE is attempting the former.
On the second point, I completely agree, but in my view this makes reducing welfare spending for the old a foregone conclusion, it's only a question of how long we can kick the can down the road. And mind you, Americans have a comparably rosy situation - here in Germany the old / young ratios are much more grim.
Canada/Sweden were. Sequestration was a response to an entirely artificial crisis (it was part of a deal to increase the debt ceiling), and Margaret Thatcher could have spent the North Sea oil money on spending increases instead of tax cuts.
Musk has always attempted to justify what he is doing at DOGE on the basis that the deficit and debt are a near-term crisis.
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"We are building it right now" about the Roadster, or some other vehicle that never materialized, back in 2017 or so, sounds pretty false, and pretty about the present to me.
I thought they had a working prototype on stage when they announced the Roadster. That seems consistent with "we are building it right now".
I'm pretty sure prototypes don't count as "it".
I think a prototype in the process of being put into production would count. A mere concept car would not.
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As someone in the tech industry, I actually have the exact opposite take, to say the least.
The quiet "Mittelstand" of tech is based on domain expertise, driven by B2B sales, and moves slowly but is actively transforming industries as the largest corporations don't want to be "left behind" with new innovations. This, for me, is calculated and matches your pattern of doing the "best to account for all relevant factors".
Moonshot companies and big tech are strategically opposite: operate on hype-cycles and vibes driven by marketing and build enormous moats that will plug the holes of the flaws of the Version 2 of your product (see: enshittification). This is not only "move fast and break things", but also "fuck you got mine".
Edit: This is also my experience as someone who has worked for both types of companies, one which was sold for $3XXm as a portfolio subsidiary, only to later be shuttered as a $3XXm loss once a hike in interest rates exposed it as smoke and mirrors.
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That is the crux of the problem. At the end of the day, there's no problem for Elon (really) to run SpaceX or Tesla into bankruptcy. Sure, huge loss in net wealth, but at that level you are not motivated by equity in a company being your comfortable safety net for retirement. So there's no issue in also taking risky bets.
When it comes to government (that is not some banana tier republic), you can't really operate with that mindset.
Same problem actually with Trump and doing deals as if everything is just zero-sum one-period (no long-term co-operation) real estate deal.
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He totally did in the past but I think that a combination of success and the company he keeps has lately morphed a Silicon Valley bias towards optimistic action into a bias against thinking or delay of any kind. Also I think he would genuinely care about potential damage to his companies whereas he is not likely to weight e.g. other countries getting mad, or his enemies spluttering, or federal workers losing their jobs, as damage at all, quite the opposite.
Or he might just be bipolar and worsening, with hypomania transitioning into full-blown mania. The evidence I've seen for that claim seems quite robust, man's hardly sleeping and Xeeting all day, when he isn't making other questionable life choices. Not that recent sycophancy or political mind-killing aren't factors, but he's going off the deep end.
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