Elon Muskās shouting match with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent might have been the final nail in the coffin for the tech billionaireās four-month stint in the White House, but it came after months of bubbling frustration at Muskās āchain-sawā 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 IRSāGary Shapleyābehind Bessentās back. (Musk eventually lost this battleāShapley lasted less than 72 hours before Bessent tapped Michael Faulkender to replace him.)
āFuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!ā a typically mild-mannered Bessent was heard shouting after Musk as they charged down the halls of the West Wing.
He knew that DOGE was a joke from the start. Everyone did. You know how we know? His complete lack of research. Anyone, even an elementary school student, would ask how something works before taking a hammer to itā¦ But only if they cared to get it right, right? And look at what DOGE didnāt touch. Military waste, dirty cops, etc.
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.
Iām not so sure him not researching or even checking with experts speaks to his lack of interest. He destroyed key components of one of Twitterās 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.
Heās 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 peopleās sensitive data was stored on them, they picked up some padlocks and set up a spreadsheet with the lock combinationsā¦ All so he could ship them to one of their other data centers, where it had already been explained to him that they couldnāt 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