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Comment by lupusreal | Hacker News Reader

I don't expect the "DOGE" to ever be part of the government in any legal or official sense. I expect it to operate like a think tank or lobby, giving suggestions/orders to Trump.

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"Musk and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy delivered a warning to Republicans who don’t go along with their plans to slash spending as part of Trump’s proposed Department of Government Efficiency."

Sounds like he is going to use his PAC to fund challengers in primaries that don't go along with his / Trump's plans.

https://apnews.com/article/elon-musk-politics-trump-7e26c829...

So, just like everyone else with resources and political opinions.

(Endorsing and funding challengers has been a standard political tactic for decades.)

I agree with this take. It also has the unique property of causing a lot of drama and sound-bites in the media on both sides of the left/right spectrum. One side applauds it for getting things done finally, while the other bemoans the end of democracy due to "collusion" between the president and non-elected private-sector rich billionaires that supposedly seek to make a profit out of all this.

That they stand to profit seems fairly uncontroversial given their willingness to participate. What other motive could possibly exist?

The motive of actually caring about the country you live in could possibly exist.

Possibly. I don't say that I think that's what's actually the motive.

A lot of people care that the country is governed well and lives within its means.

To me it's obvious that some of those people may be billionaires.

I also find it weird when people assume billionaires only care about getting more money. They are the people who can care least about money!

Whereas it seems obvious to me that zero of those individuals would be billionaires given their mere existence is proof that governance is malfunctioning. Moreover it's quite literally impossible to get valuable input from an individual who's day-to-day existence is so thoroughly divorced from reality that they couldn't tell you what a stick of butter costs.

Elon's primary day-to-day activity, and maybe biggest cause of his success, is organizing his companies for maximum productivity.

This is very relevant for organizing government organizations for the same goal.

Elon is a con man who has somehow fallen upwards through luck of birth and government subsidies.

He didn't start any of "his" companies, I'm convinced has little to no real engineering input into them, and only remains relevant through going viral for his brain dead takes on social media, which is incidentally one of the ridiculous "investments" that he is now running into the ground.

Have you seen his vacuum train idea? I think that says it all about his engineering expertise. Full self driving using only cameras is another one. Colonizing Mars? The surface temperature of Mars is from −110°C to 35°C, with a mean of -60°C. A rocket would take 9 months to get there.

A Snake Oil salesman of the highest degree. Quite similar to another person I won't mention.

1. Neither of us have any idea what Elon Musk's day to day activities look like.

2. If Tesla had been organized for maximum productivity they would have skipped the decade-ish rolling clusterfuck of engineering faceplants, manufacturing bottlenecks, bullshit software issues, and gross body fitment problems by nothing more complex than actually taking a while to learn how cars are made by companies with multi-generational pools of experience to draw on. It's not like cars had just been invented and major R&D was required to debug the process.

3. Feel free to explain this: https://www.fresnobee.com/opinion/editorials/article26445107...

How certain are you his primary contributions aren't column inches based on uncritical coverage of hyperbolic bullshit he said near a microphone?

Marc Andreessen describes Elon Musk's day to day activities quite well in the video below.

It's pretty astonishing (scroll down):

https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1868639726275875031

The notion that Marc Andreessen has nothing of substance to do and spends sufficient time monitoring Elon Musk's daily activities to provide objective reporting on the subject strains credulity but believe what you want. Care to address the glaring proof that maximized productivity isn't an obvious outcome of whatever the fuck it is that Elon Musk spends his time on or nah?

I thought his primary day-to-day activity was playing Diablo?

I believe that's night time!

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