Elon Musk’s shouting match with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent might have been the final nail in the coffin for the tech billionaire’s four-month stint in the White House, but it came after months of bubbling frustration at Musk’s “chain-saw” approach to dismantling the federal government.

Musk and Bessent exploded at each other in April when Musk attempted to force through his pick to lead the IRS—Gary Shapley—behind Bessent’s back. (Musk eventually lost this battle—Shapley lasted less than 72 hours before Bessent tapped Michael Faulkender to replace him.)

“Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!” a typically mild-mannered Bessent was heard shouting after Musk as they charged down the halls of the West Wing.

  • Boddhisatva@lemmy.worldEnglish
    265·
    25 days ago

    Failure by what metric? First off, he went in and destroyed everything he wanted to. He got the FAA to cancel their contract with Verizon and sign with Starlink for communication; He and DOGE gutted agencies that were supposed to regulate SpaceX, Neuralink, Tesla, and X; DoJ dropped a case agains SpaceX; and since he started his rampage, more than 40 agencies have taken no actions on investigations into his companies suggesting they are at least being slow walked if not dropped all together. The transportation department lowered requirements for Tesla and other companies to report incidents with self driving cars, and the FAA gave SpaceX permission to quintuple their number of launches despite the effect on the environment and air travel.

    In what way was this a failure? Because Trump and his people hate him? Frankly, everyone hates Musk these days. Plus, I wear it as a badge of honor when the likes of Trump and his cronies hate me.

    • WatDabney@fedia.io
      46·
      25 days ago

      Very much this.

      Now it should be noted that Musk is, among other things, a desperately insecure wienie who really is crushed by the fact that basically everyone hates him and spends a great deal of time and effort cringily trying to compensate for it and pathetically failing. So at some level all of this certainly does hurt him.

      But he’s also toxically greedy and self-absorbed and wantonly destructive, and by those measures, his government tenure was a resounding success. And that he undoubtedly throws tantrums and goes on crying jags when he’s alone, just like he’s done since middle school, doesn’t make any of the rest of it any less a success.

      • Asafum@feddit.nl
        16·
        25 days ago

        But he’s also toxically greedy and self-absorbed and wantonly destructive,

        Which is why I really hope he turns X against the Trump regime lol God I hope he’s petty enough to attack them now

    • null_dot@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      212·
      25 days ago

      I agree that his time at the white house has been a huge success for his personal interests.

      However, I don’t think it all went according to plan. I think he really did expect that he could make some government services more efficient. I also think he thought that his actions would ingratiate himself to the right, all over the world. I also don’t think he expected the backlash against Tesla.

      • Klear@sh.itjust.works
        2·
        24 days ago

        I think he really did expect that he could make some government services more efficient.

        What a grand and intoxicating innocence.

        • mineralfellow@lemmy.world
          9·
          25 days ago

          Yeah, defense spending is something like half the discretionary budget. Obviously the place to start when cutting waste, but not politically viable for arcane reasons.

        • 5too@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          24 days ago

          I’m not so sure him not researching or even checking with experts speaks to his lack of interest. He destroyed key components of one of Twitter’s data centers a few years back - literally went in himself over a weekend and yanked out a bunch of cables before cancelling the lease, as I recall the story. Then a bunch of Twitter admins had to spend a good deal of time rebuilding crucial infrastructure with the systems they had left.

          He’s shot his own foot this way before.

          (Edit) It was worse than I thought - he hired people off the street to help load rented trucks with the servers after he just yanked them out. When someone mentioned that millions of people’s sensitive data was stored on them, they picked up some padlocks and set up a spreadsheet with the lock combinations… All so he could ship them to one of their other data centers, where it had already been explained to him that they couldn’t hook them back up!

          Found this article: https://medium.com/@noahkingdavis/the-unbelievable-tale-of-when-elon-musk-personally-removed-servers-from-a-sacramento-data-center-2892f21b12c3

    • pelespirit@sh.itjust.works
      108·
      25 days ago

      I agree. They’re trying to distance themselves from him because they think he is the reason their polling is sucking so hard right now. I think most everyone hates all of them, not just him.

  • markovs_gun@lemmy.world
    2·
    24 days ago

    I wonder if Elon knows he’s a scapegoat. Like obviously he’s a villain brought in to do a bunch of shit that was always in the Trump plan but would be unpopular with a bunch of people so Trump’s team could say “Oh no! We didn’t do any of that stuff it was all this evil Musk guy!” I just wonder if he knows that. He is pretty stupid in a lot of ways, but I really don’t think he’s truly dumb enough to not realize that was his role in the Trump admin, but he is also increasingly delusional about his own skill and intelligence so maybe that won out.

  • Dragomus@lemmy.world
    10·
    24 days ago

    He accomplished all he set out to do, with one caveat, because he stood in the bad limelight his image and monetary value took a serious nosedive. This last part is why he now is standing in the back, yet leering around the room wherever the president is.

    The one thing he was aspiring towards did receive a huge blow, he was racing to become the world’s first trillionaire. And it might just be a setback that he can catch up with, but for now he does need to focus to try and crank all his stocks back up…

  • logicbomb@lemmy.world
    61·
    25 days ago

    “Entire Trump team hated Elon Musk”…

    If you’ll recall, after Trump’s first term, it was revealed that the entire Trump team hated Donald Trump.

    Basically, any marginally competent person will hate working with people like Trump or Musk who make drastic changes without any reason or even any idea of what they’re doing.

  • Zippygutterslug@lemmy.world
    13·
    25 days ago

    Lol we are supposed to believe Musk bought a presidency and is going to just leave his money-making rule-breaking new toy alone?

    Yeah right, and monkeys could fly out of my butt.

  • gradual@lemmings.world
    6·
    24 days ago

    “Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!” a typically mild-mannered Bessent was heard shouting after Musk as they charged down the halls of the West Wing.

    Video?

  • leadore@lemmy.world
    38·
    24 days ago

    Bullshit. He got pretty much everything he wanted, including gigantic government contracts for his businesses, while stopping all investigations into his criminal activity and negligent products. Also got to get high on swinging his dick around a lot, and still has trump offering him more favors for more money.

    • redlemace@lemmy.world
      4·
      24 days ago

      Yes, but -like trump- he will shout stupid shit to draw away the attention from the main cause… because people will take offense

    • Someonelol@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      12·
      24 days ago

      It’s never enough for these assholes. Musk wants the whole world to bend to his will because he bought the government fair and square. Some uppity government employee shouldn’t tell him he doesn’t have the authority to install more puppets in these agencies.

  • octopus_ink@slrpnk.netEnglish
    18·
    24 days ago

    That’s OK though. Libs were owned. Another event that will do nothing to harm the support from Trumps base.

    No amount of death or self-harm matters to magas as long as libs were owned and some brown people were put in their place.

    • Dagwood222@lemm.ee
      7·
      24 days ago

      If Trump pissed his pants on live TV his MAGats would tell you that he’s a genius who invented a self dying cloth.

    • gradual@lemmings.world
      3·
      24 days ago

      I think some of them are starting to wake up to the reality that their economic position will not improve under their god-emperor.

      • octopus_ink@slrpnk.netEnglish
        1·
        24 days ago

        I dunno, I hope you are right, but every time I see a headline like that it turns out to be a feel-good article based on two random disgruntled twitter posters or something.