No it's not sad, the man was basically an unelected official, laid off thousands of government workers and the second order effects of that will affect millions. All while he also toys with Ukraine and lives are lost so that he appeases an autocrat?
He's a bloviating conman and no rational person should believe that this demo will ever see the light of day, if it wasn't faked.
This is completely outside of politics.
On the road.
> Where is the mars program?
Starship is the required precursor.
> He's a bloviating conman
Enough of what he promised has been delivered that has made him a trillionaire.
> But a rich one, so, you must be wrong!
Parting fools from their money is not respectable work in my view.
I think people should be reminded of this.
We also weren't discussing GoDaddy as a registrar without mentioning it's CEO killing elephants and being an all around douchebag. Or Oracle without the lawnmower.
It's tough to ask people to dissociate the CEO from the company, especially when he's doing all the PR by himself.
Its the character. Buying a global media platform to "promote free speech" and then shunt the entire thing and himself behind a particular political party. This guy uses his money and his twitter account to support neo-nazi hate groups in my country (Britain First, Patriotic Alternative, Hundred Handers, Tommy Tennames). He has no self-restraint. Its abhorrent. Its not "about politics" when the politics is about racial superiority and ethnic cleansing.
> Imagine if you couldn't post a thread about Microsoft products on HN without republicans feeling the need to jump in to talk about how much they hate Bill Gates for his donations to Kamala Harris's campaign in 2024. It's really tiresome.
and if Bill Gate was literally campaigning for the Dems, getting up on stage, handing voters cheques and THEN being employed by the government to run a department then you'd have a point.
He repeatedly crosses the line of what is appropriate. People with that level of wealth should stay the fuck away from politics and respect democracy instead of using their money and business to have excessive influence on democratic outcomes. Its unseemly and disrespects the idea of everyone getting the same amount of votes. I respect that donations have similarities but there's a difference between making a donation and being excessively public.
People with that level of power — because it is power — will do what they will. “The strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must”.
> Its unseemly and disrespects the idea of everyone getting the same amount of votes. I respect that donations have similarities but there's a difference between making a donation and being excessively public.
We have transitioned, it would seem, from the pretence of “goodness” to naked displays of power. Unseemly, definitely.
Justice. Righteousness. Old fashioned words and old fashioned ideas. Oh for a good and righteous king!
agreed and we should hate them for it.
The temptation to succumb to Godwin's Law is so, so, so strong. How shitty and horrible of a person does one have to be for someone on HN to admit that they are a shitty and bad person? At some point the Big Bang sterotype of "nerd" who jerks off to the idea of a rich guy who "computers" and "businesses" and "engineers" outgrows tiresome and becomes despicable once said rich guy facilitates/encourages/actualizes concentration camps. Grow up.
Preferably those tasked regulating his companies.
Guess he hit a nerve, eh? My condolences you got hit by the layoffs, try to not browse Reddit and Facebook all day at your next government job. Or do, but ONLY if you work for the IRS or ATF, they deserve nothing less.
You'd have loved L Ron Hubbard back in the day.
Karin Spaink (RIP) did a good number on them.
We are talking about people with STEM doctorates and 30 years of experience working 60-80 hour weeks for a 120k salary, because that's about where the GS scale caps. People are on the road for weeks, flying economy class and sleeping in roadside motels with a $50 per diem and when they visit a vendor or a lab or a client they cannot accept a meal or a beer or anything beyond a cup of coffee because of government ethics rules. I worked in an office in Washington, DC where all the staff pooled their money to buy a water cooler, and people gave voluntary donations of $2/month to join the "water cooler club" to defray the cost of maintaining an office water cooler because OPM considered that an unnecessary expense.
The first thing DOGE did, literally in the first week, they implemented a "deferred resignation plan" — they paid people 8 months of salary to not work. The smartest and most talented people saw the writing on the wall at that point — folks with PhDs from MIT or Stanford; self-made founders; crusty veteran engineers who preferred work to retirement. They took the money and they had no problem finding alternative employment, or they took it as a sign to hang up their spurs for good. Many of them were subsequently rehired by their agencies as contractors at 2-3× their previous salary when it became evident they were irreplaceable.
(I had friends in the NNSA, the branch of the US Department of Energy that manages the nuclear arsenal. DOGE fired hundreds of employees without realizing what they did, then attempted to rescind 90% of the firings months later. Plenty of the fired employees had already found new employment. Others simply did not want to return to a job with such contingent status where they would be treated disrespectfully. Several fired employees could not be rehired because they were fired so abruptly there was no way to contact them and offer reinstatement.)
You know who didn't take up the deferred resignation offer? The unproductive layabouts you claim to despise. The ones that knew they couldn't get a better job elsewhere. Yeah, there are bad employees in the federal government, same as anywhere else. DOGE bullied out all our best talent and now we're stuck with the dregs. They paid billions of dollars for people to not work for the privilege of doing so. "Department of Government Efficiency".
If you are interested in learning more about excellent and unglamorous work done by underappreciated American civil servants, I highly recommend the book The Fifth Risk by Michael Lewis.
It will take years for those Musk lovers to grasp how much damage their sieg heiling idol has caused.
I did not, at all. Never got laid off in my life.
I have seen my share of useless employees in private companies, though. You don't have to work for the government for that. But if it makes you feel better to think that you are useful because you are in the private sector...
I have seen my share of government funding going to private companies that completely wasted that money (or worse, used it to fuel their stupid ideas). The only thing they did well was convincing the government that they would do something useful - of course they did not. I'm sure you would take that as a reason to criticise the government, "not able to spend the money properly", but before you do: more often than not, it's VCs who invest in ridiculous projects. You want to stop wasting tax money? Stop investing in bullshit tech startups, too!
VCs are interesting: they are people put in a position where they are incompetent and dominant at the same time (i.e. they invest in technologies they don't understand, but they have the power of life or death over startups). That's a perfect recipe to create overconfident assholes (similar to getting rich, actually)!
At the very least, government employees contribute to a system that does stuff for the people. Like roads and schools. Not goddamn flying cars.
You want to be actually critical? Most white collars are doing bullshit. At least those who don't work in technology may contribute less to destroying the planet. But they don't get to be condescending assholes for that.
> they deserve nothing less.
I would be curious to learn about what useless job you do for a living.
3 or 4 data points isn’t a whole lot more than an anecdote, but it’s still more data than baseless claims line you’re throwing around here
Do you care about food safety, disease prevention, consumer protection or the ability for the government to investigate blatant corruption?
Do you think this has gotten better or worse?
> This finding indicates that 91 839 663 (95% CI 85 690 135–98 291 626) all-age deaths, including 30 391 980 (26 023 132–35 482 636) in children younger than 5 years, were prevented by USAID funding over the 21-year study period. USAID funding was associated with a 65% reduction (RR 0·35, 0·29-0·42) in mortality from HIV/AIDS (representing 25·5 million deaths), 51% (RR 0·49, 0·39–0·61) from malaria (8·0 million deaths), and 50% (RR 0·50, 0·40–0·62) from neglected tropical diseases (8·9 million deaths) [1]
30B+ is pocket change for the US, but makes a massive impact in poorer countries.
It also had a soft power effect that the current US government seems completely oblivious to [2].
[1] https://www.thelancet.com/article/S0140-6736(25)01186-9/full...
[2] https://www.jstor.org/stable/23353912
[3] https://time.com/article/2026/05/15/usaid-shutdown-rise-glob...
The 90M figure is probably exaggerated, but this video is completely nuts. This is exactly why the internet has failed us.
Only the President and Congress were elected. The rest are all appointed.
> laid off thousands of government workers
He did at the direction of the President, who was elected. Government service is not a jobs program.
> the second order effects of that will affect millions
speculation
> All while he also toys with Ukraine and lives are lost so that he appeases an autocrat?
Decisions about Ukraine go through Trump. Musk is in a delicate position - it is illegal for him, as a private businessman, to be a combatant, but he seems thrust into that position.
All you need to do is see how frequently he posts on Twitter to know he's broken and trying to fill the hole with money and attention.
I've worked with engineers "on the spectrum" my entire career. They can be difficult to get along with. None of them were evil, none intended to offend or hurt others. It would just come out wrong.
Once I understood, it wasn't an issue for me any more.
That’s an amazing claim in this context.
Musk is many things, but I've never heard anyone seriously claim him to have any particular aptitude or expertise around military strategy or conflict resolution. So if Trump is unilaterally executing on Musk's musings, we can derive two definite (and highly conservative) observations:
1. Musk has opinions
2. Trump has dangerously poor judgement
Him possibly suggesting that Trump pressure Zelenskyy to comply with his demands by temporarily crippling Starshield’s performance in an active war zone, which means making it harder for Ukraine to defend itself against Putin’s jet-powered Shahed drones, is not merely an opinion. It’s an attempt to influence policy by proposing a way to harm Ukraine, without regard for the lives at stake.
We’ve seen this behaviour from him before. He doesn’t care whether any of his actions or ‘advice’ will harm others.
Of course you're correct that Trump and Musk both hate Zelenskyy, and this established fact and not conjecture. Nonetheless it all still boils down to:
1. Musk has opinions
2. Trump has dangerously poor judgement
My comment was more in regards to saying 'Musk has opinions' (who doesn't) is downplaying his involvement.
I'm basing this on what the 4 sources have stated mentioned in Telegraph article and also based on his previous behavior and comments about Zelenskyy / Ukraine and overall affinity and support for authoritarian political leaders.
It's all a game for him and winning at all costs.
Whatever it is Musk actually said to Trump (reporting of which we should take with a heaping grain of salt, since there are plenty of people with obvious motivations to lie and fabricate) we can see that the service SpaceX controls (Starlink) has remained unaffected, while the service the US military controls (Starshield) is what's in dispute.
Don't listen to what they say, watch what they do.
To this day full speed hasn't been restored, continuing to endanger lives.
'Zelensky stated that Ukrainian military commanders, the Ministry of Defense, and foreign diplomats are conducting active negotiations to resolve the constraints. However, he noted that management at SpaceX has declined direct dialogue with Ukrainian military representatives.'
Even in a degraded state, Starlink and Starshield remains a critical strategic advantage for Ukraine, even if it's less so now than before. Being less helpful to Ukraine isn't good, but it's still actively helping Ukraine, and that is worlds apart from actively helping Russia.
Musk, Trump and co know that they can't openly turn things off as it would be a PR nightmare, so the next best thing is to cripple it and deny deny deny that you've done it.
speculation
And just so i am clear on your philosophy there is no guilt that rides whatsoever with presenting this capability to the leader of the free world who then goes and does exactly what you suggested resulting in many people dying while a nation fights for its life.
So an unelected official would be correct, right?
> He did at the direction of the President, who was elected.
Where is your evidence? Reporting contradicts what you say - https://www.politico.com/news/2025/03/06/trump-cabinet-musk-...
> speculation
Not really. Multiple independent sources and reports have confirmed the damage done by Musk during his time at DOGE.
> Decisions about Ukraine go through Trump. Musk is in a delicate position - it is illegal for him, as a private businessman, to be a combatant, but he seems thrust into that position.
He is as "thrust" into that position as he was "thrust" into the DOGE role.
What are your thoughts on his illegal state-sanctioned intimidation of ex-FEMA CFO?
Free markets drive prosperity, socialism does the opposite.
What are the most expensive things in the US? Healthcare, housing, and education. Those are the most heavily regulated and subsidized by the government.
What are the cheapest things in the US? Software (free), TVs, computers, consumer goods. The least regulated and subsidized.
A bit of advice: resorting to insults is what happens when one doesn't have an argument.
If I may, I recommend a book for you: "Free to Choose" by Milton Friedman (Nobel Prize winning economist).
https://www.amazon.com/Free-Choose-Milton-Rose-Friedman/dp/B...
It's an easy read.
Just doing his job and following orders?
Have a read about his actions on Ukraine, even just this last week. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2026/10/16/musk-appro...