All the world is Elon Musk’s stage, where the president’s bureaucracy-slashing, chainsaw-wielding axman is melting down.
Musk and Donald Trump are Macbeth, King Lear and The Emperor’s New Clothes all rolled into one.
There are inevitably moments of farce, but there is a growing sense, after little more than a month, that the new administration is headed to a darker, Shakespearean ending.
The president has his own driving forces; he seems empowered rather than dimmed by the chaos.
But every tragedy demands a hero with a fatal flaw. And Musk’s increasingly erratic behavior suggests his character will play that role. Sadly, he may yet lose the plot altogether.
Musk fits the part in many ways. There is little doubt that his motives in seeking to make the federal bureaucracy more efficient are noble. If Trump now likes to portray himself as a king, Musk is at the very least a prince.
He talks a lot these days about the importance of caring, and his genius perhaps insists to him that he cares more than anybody else. But his untold riches, his brilliance, and his self-acknowledged difficult upbringing have combined to create the flaw that may yet be his downfall.
From the evidence of the past few days, his mind—he has described it as a “very wild storm”—just won’t switch off.
At the December 2023 Dealbook summit, Musk offered a glimpse inside his mind, saying, “I have a fountain of ideas. I have more ideas than I could possibly execute… There’s a million things.”
But he admitted it was not a happy storm. Even when he was a child, he said, there was just a “rage of forces in my mind constantly.” A psychiatrist would take note. A bard would take notes.
He posts compulsively on his X platform, he spends nights at DOGE headquarters in a sleeping bag, he owns a several businesses—including SpaceX, X and Tesla—and he is the anointed co-president of the most powerful country in the world.
And he was not involved in politics at all until six months ago.
Inside the White House, his money and his goodwill have taken him a long way, but it has reached a stage where nobody knows how to handle him, not even Trump.
Musk was never part of the dysfunctional, close-knit, and, as it turns out, highly effective 2024 Trump campaign. Shakespearean heroes tend not to be team players.
But they’re stuck with him now, and Trump’s belligerent nature means he will fight against the expectation that their relationship will end in tears.
Nevertheless, Trump has played Julius Caesar long enough to be wary of a Brutus getting too close.
On stage at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Thursday, Musk came in with his security detail and went on stage sporting sunglasses and his “dark MAGA” look with a gold chain hanging over a T-shirt reading, “I’m not procrastinating, I’m doing side quests.”
He wielded a chainsaw given to him by Argentina’s far-right President Javier Milei, crying out, “This is the chainsaw for bureaucracy”, he mumbled his words and looked, by turns, elated and uncomfortable.
Afterward, the word “ketamine” was trending on Musk’s X platform.
The world’s richest man has used cocaine, ecstasy, LSD, and psychedelic mushrooms, according to The Wall Street Journal. He’s said he has a ketamine prescription.
“I am become meme,” Musk told Newsmax’s Rob Schmitt during a garbled interview in which he was asked what it’s like “inside the mind of a genius.”
He returned to the theme of his Dealbook interview. “My mind is a storm. It’s a storm,” he replied.
It felt like a difficult moment. A plot-changing moment. Perhaps the fourth act of a play that does not end well.
There is evidence this week that Musk has infuriated his baby mamas whose pleas he ignores, and broken the lives of federal workers whose faces he doesn’t see.
The euphoria and frenzy of the first few weeks of slashing is transitioning into the cold, hard business of difficult choices. People are beginning to realize that it is their lives and the lives of their children, their relatives, or their friends who are being affected, not a faraway Washington “swamp.”
His methods have worked building companies from scratch or rebuilding them from scraps. Yet Musk may soon understand, if he doesn’t already, that any money supposedly saved by his DOGE goons are drops in a bucket when the federal budget is $6.9 trillion.
This is not a job for teenagers and techies who live in an alternate silicon reality without kids to feed, mortgages to pay, or bills piling up. There is likely to be a reckoning.
And the prince’s face will be the one left above the parapet.
Musk’s downfall may not bring the audience the catharsis a Shakespeare audience may seek. The best we can hope is that he doesn’t drag us down with him.
