Elon Musk

Elon Musk has headed three companies that have been, on the whole, very good for the United States, Tesla, SpaceX, and Starlink.

The extent to which he is personally responsible for the success of these companies is unclear. Some say he was able to merely identify these companies at an early stage in their development and invested wisely.

All of these companies have had significant dependencies on the US government. Tesla was saved from bankruptcy by a government loan during the Obama administration. The Biden administration established tax credits for purchasing electric vehicles.

Without SpaceX the United States would not have a space program. SpaceX has big contracts with the government, and probably will have even more in the future.

Starlink provides satellite internet to areas previously underserved. It is subject to government regulations more than most companies.

You probably have heard that Musk bought Twitter and renamed it X. He tried to back out of the deal, but was forced to honor it.

What he did at Twitter, is similar to what he is doing with our government. He fired people, made grandiose statements, rehired some workers and generally gained a lot of attention.

(It should be noted that most IT experts believed that Twitter had more staff than was needed for a company with its revenue.) Musk has probably lost billions on this acquisition, and X is in worse shape financially than when Musk acquired it, although it was never very profitable.

It is unclear whether this was Musk’s goal, but X has been a godsend for someone who craves attention and adoration. Musk now has a megaphone to say whatever he wants, unfiltered, to millions of worldwide followers. It also is a platform to spread his propaganda and mute information Musk doesn’t agree with.

The DOGE effort, which is not headed by Musk according to court filings, is following the Twitter playbook.

As with most things that Musk is involved in there are a lot of grandiose statements, that fall apart on closer examination. Saving a billion dollars seems like a lot, but the US government is a multi trillion dollar organization. Musk hasn’t done anything except shut down government agencies, and probably extracted a lot of information about US citizens and US agencies. He hasn’t built anything. He is just breaking things.

HIs small team of mostly 20 something IT “experts” is supposedly going to employ AI to streamline government operations, and help the FAA.

One of my first jobs at IBM was to rewrite a program in an archaic programming language to a modern language. I knew the modern language very well, but had never encountered the archaic language, and they weren’t many around who knew much about it.

It was very difficult task, but after many weeks, I completed the small project.

The 20 somethings are in a similar situation. Much of the government systems are written in a language called COBOL invented by Grace Hopper in the 1950s. I am certain that the 20 somethings have never encountered COBOL before. Understanding the large complex federal systems written in a foreign language is a daunting task. You can’t replicate or improve a system without understanding all its intricacies.

Recently it was revealed that Musk had brought in some outside programmers to work on the FAA traffic control system. The FAA embarked on a mammoth project to completely remodel the air traffic system in 2007. It was scheduled to be completed this year, but has been rescheduled to 2030. Most of the system is ready now, and limited deployment is planned to begin soon.

If you haven’t worked in IT, it is difficult to grasp how complex the air traffic control system is. Successful eighteen year IT projects are very rare. In fact the majority of programming projects of more than 24 months are abandoned before completion.

The team that accomplished this is full of subject matter experts, many of whom have spent the majority of their professional lives working on pieces of this project.

To think a group of IT folks can just walk in from another company and contribute quickly is ludicrous.

What Musk is doing with DOGE has already caused chaos across the federal government, and has damaged parts of it beyond repair for the foreseeable future. The whole DOGE effort is against the law and is creating nothing new nor saving significant amounts of tax dollars. On the bright side it is generating what Musk craves, attention.