What Elon Strange Trip It’s Been
You had me at Heil. Actually, after ruining my social media addiction to Twitter and spoiling the Tesla brand, I couldn’t stand Elon before he heiled. Now that’s he’s supposedly departing his official government duties, we’ll start to see two kinds of stories in the media. The first kind of story will be the result of pent up leaks, like today’s NYT (Gift Article): On the Campaign Trail, Elon Musk Juggled Drugs and Family Drama. “Mr. Musk’s drug consumption went well beyond occasional use. He told people he was taking so much ketamine, a powerful anesthetic, that it was affecting his bladder, a known effect of chronic use. He took Ecstasy and psychedelic mushrooms. And he traveled with a daily medication box that held about 20 pills, including ones with the markings of the stimulant Adderall.” This hardly seems like new news. And it definitely doesn’t qualify as surprising news. Can you imagine running several of the largest companies in the country and the country itself without shoveling handfuls of drugs down your gullet? I can barely write NextDraft without consuming enough coffee to redefine meth as a sedative. (And I don’t even want to get into what I have to take to get over writing NextDraft. At this point, my psychiatrist writes out so many prescriptions he’s implemented a surcharge for ink.) The second kind of Musk story we’ll see is the more important kind; a reflection on the enormous damage he did. Michelle Goldberg sums that part up pretty well in the NYT (Gift Article): Elon Musk’s Legacy Is Disease, Starvation and Death. “Musk apparently did not anticipate that it would be bad PR for the world’s richest man to take food and medicine from the world’s poorest children … If there were justice in the world, Musk would never be able to repair his reputation, at least not without devoting the bulk of his fortune to easing the misery he’s engendered. Musk’s sojourn in government has revealed severe flaws in his character — a blithe, dehumanizing cruelty, and a deadly incuriosity. This should shape how he’s seen for the rest of his public life.” (Spoiler Alert: It probably won’t.) I said we’d see two kind of stories following Musk’s departure from government. The truth is we’ll soon be seeing a third kind. The stories that explain how he never really left at all.
+ “Musk’s failure to follow through on his boasts, though, should not detract from a clear-eyed assessment of the extraordinary amount of damage he succeeded in wreaking. The wise men are laughing Musk out of town, and I get it. His ‘performative vandalism,’ as Jonah Goldberg put it on CNN, was in some respects just a pernicious, highly dangerous new variant of a Washington perennial: the pol who makes promises he cannot keep. But it is hard to think of any other unelected official who has done so much harm to the U.S. government in such a short period of time. The fact that the deficit may get even bigger at the end of the day only worsens the injury.” The New Yorker: Elon Musk Didn’t Blow Up Washington, but He Left Plenty of Damage Behind.
+ Even one guy with a lot of money and a ketamine tsunami coursing through his veins can’t do this kind of damage alone. The destruction of agencies, and especially of foreign aid, has been a team effort, and one, that whether we like it or not, now represents America. ProPublica: Death, Sexual Violence and Human Trafficking: Fallout From U.S. Aid Withdrawal Hits the World’s Most Fragile Locations. “‘It is devastating, but it’s not surprising,’ Eric Schwartz, a former State Department assistant secretary and member of the National Security Council during Democratic administrations, told ProPublica. ‘It’s all what people in the national security community have predicted. I struggle for adjectives to adequately describe the horror that this administration has visited on the world … It keeps me up at night.'” (The only thing that keeps Elon up at night is the Adderall.)
