There's an old adage that especially applies to Washington, DC that no good deed ever goes unpunished. And no one has been more victimized by that truism than Elon Musk.
Musk is arguably one of the 10 greatest entrepreneurs, wealth-creators and visionaries in world history. His businesses from Tesla to SpaceX are worth over a trillion dollars.
His patriotic voyage to Washington to help President Trump was intended to identify the waste, inefficiency, fraud and theft that is rampant in the United States government. Who better to make the government more productive and less wasteful?
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But from the start, his quest to save money for taxpayers was ridiculed and attacked by the media, the permanent ruling class, and the unaccountable blob in Washington. He attacked the vast bureaucracy in the many agencies of government where well-paid federal employees were taking home $150,000 pay checks or more, but not bothering to show up for work. He exposed the millions of dollars that were being sent out to Social Security recipients of more than 120 years old, and the antiquated computer systems in government agencies like the Air Traffic Control system that were installed in the 1980s.
His team found that the government's foreign aid programs like USAID couldn't even account for what happened to hundreds of millions of dollars as those funds got swallowed up by a syndicate of "nongovernmental organizations."
He spotlighted for all American taxpayers the outrageous and rapacious way the government bureaucrats and contractors in Washington were serving themselves and not the public. The fact that three of the five wealthiest counties in the United States are in and around Washington, DC spoke volumes to American taxpayers in faraway places like Kansas, Maine, and Montana.
In just a few months Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), identified $160 billion in savings by terminating wasteful contracts, modernizing IT systems, such as digitalizing the OPM retirement process." Just think if he had had more time and support from the people who work for the government.
He naively believed that he would be seen as a national hero. Instead, his reward for exposing to the American public that the empire of Washington wears no clothes was to create a revolt on the left against Tesla and his other world-class companies. Why the outrage? Because the crooked system is so endemic and the hundreds of billions of dollars that go into this racket and make fraudsters rich from all the graft have created a self-defense mechanism far more powerful than he or any of us thought was possible. Putting a muzzle on a rabid dog is no easy feat.
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Now Elon is understandably frustrated. He has even done a mea culpa for being "too political." He has concluded that Washington is permanently broken and perhaps even unfixable.
After all, if he and Trump can't fix our arrogant, obese and broken $7 trillion enterprise in Washington, who can?
In one of his most recent social media posts, Musk concluded that the only way to shrink out debt and Washington's tumor on American life and culture is to "grow our private economy" at warp speed so that, in relative terms, Washington becomes less and less consequential - a deadweight loss that we just write off every year as a cost of doing business.
He may be right that economic growth is the only way to fix our nation's finances. The good news is there's nobody better to do that than him.
