Ask Lemmy

I'll link a video about it I found both interesting and depressing. It gives insight into at least part of the reason he's doing this. The other part is that he blames the left for taking his trans daughter away from him even though he was an absent father to begin with. He's fucking delusional.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5cZEZoa8rW0

A coup.

I think he truly deeply wants to go to Mars. It’s his dream. His one mission. His destiny. I think he actually believes he is the only person that will be able to get people there. In his head, he’s space Jesus. Everyone else is an NPC. He sees government, the left, regulations, workers rights every thing as a barrier for him to move along on his goal. He’s breaking everything appart to build himself a runway. He’s doing one last grift, one last pump and dump to say goodbye and take off. He doesn’t care if the US doesn’t exist in 50 years since he will be off planet.

Cocaine & Ketamine, but cutting it with something else, I know not what (tons of money?)

Pretty obvious. Destroying free elections and democracy. US is toast. Now they just need the Nazis elected in Germany (which he’s actively manipulating) and the EU falls apart and all we’ll have left in the worlds major powers is dictatorships.

He's Cartman. They're all Cartman.

I think he's an actual Nazi, trying to turn America into a Nazi system.

Ketamine. He's doing ketamine mostly, everything else is just stuff he hires someone else to do. So I guess hiring people whilst doing ketamine.

Setting things up to allow him to become the world's first trillionaire.

The important stuff is about crippling regulatory mechanisms, opening up huge government contracts, and dismantling workers rights. Everything else is just smoke and mirrors.

He’s privatising the government and remaking it to his own technocratic specifications, a corpocracy but with racial foundations (whites at the top).

DOGE: Department Of Government Extermination.

He is a one man ponzi scheme, he would buy tesla stock,increasing his cash,the Ln spend that cash on buying stock. Its a really terrible idea because it means you conning yourself. Which is where he is now,so his trying and failing to but time and to beef up his value. Think about it, before is worth about half as much as musk,but amozon sells millions of kg of physical stuff everyday,so ya he should be worth billions. What does Elon sell? Why is his car company worth twice as much as Ford? No one is buying his shit but the stock value keeps going up? Well its a one man ponzi. Well now the walls are closing in,so what's a billionaire to do? Buy the walls. But he needs to be stopped otherwise he'll swallow the whole us economy

He’s mad we don’t like him enough. He’s a spoiled asshole rich kid knocking down our block castle because he isn’t getting 100% attention and love. He’s pathetic and it’s terrifying he has any power let alone dictatorial power.

I once heard a talk by Bill Gates about his charity work through the Gates foundation. He described how he and Melinda had dedicated tens or hundreds of millions to causes. But the best money he could spend was in petitioning the government to join the cause. Because for all the wealth and power and notoriety held by the billionaire class, it was still a drop in the bucket compared to what world states could do. It's a difference of orders of magnitude. The difference between a thousand dollars and a million dollars? That's the same as the difference between a million and a billion. World governments operate in the trillions.

This is a coup.

Musk the Billionaire is small potatoes compared to Musk at the levers of government finance. It's like a leaky faucet compared to a firehose. The one holding that firehose controls where it goes.

This is a coup. It is establishing an unelected oligarchy at the core of the Federal Government with the power to influence and manipulate policy, and execute unofficial policy through financial pressure. It's not anything new to history, and it's not 5-D chess. It is just people in power grabbing more power for themselves at the expense of all others including elected officials. In other words, a coup.

some humans are unhappy and that makes them insatiable.

he is a hoarder. like those people that fill their houses with old newspapers and refuse. he is that way with money and power.

Elon is wiping out any opposition or oversight into what he does while he's also gaining access to the inner workings of other companies whether they be rivals or potential takeovers. He will also use some of that information to get back at individuals that he has a grudge with.

Now, don't get me wrong, fuck Trump and fuck Musk.

That being said, It's most likely more simple than a master plan for world domination. He's removing protections for workers and consumers so he can cut corners, pay less, and make more money. Plain and simple.

This

He seemed highly focused on USAID initially. USAID is a means to assert soft power around the world through the influencing of hearts and minds.

Elon’s strong ties to Trump combined with this focus reek of Putin’s influence to me. He’s doing Russia’s bidding in deconstructing our government.

I think Musk is likely compromised in the same way Trump is. God, it must be some truly nefarious shit too.

Apparently, at both SpaceX and Tesla, he had a habit of going around demanding random changes because he was convinced he was the smartest person on the planet and whatever he came up with 2 seconds ago was far better than what the seasoned engineer who had spent months designing it had come up with. They had to make a team of people to try to keep him away from useful work because it was so destructive to what they were trying to do. There is no plausible explanation for that, to me, other than that he genuinely believes his own hype.

He could literally have the best and most qualified people in the room with him to explain virtually anything he wanted, for unlimited time, any time he wanted. He doesn't want that. He just wants to take some random bullshit he found on Twitter combined with his own prejudice about how things work, and act on it, taking pleasure in people getting upset about him not being supposed to do that.

I am sure there is more complex stuff at work than is obvious, but I think probably, a pretty huge chunk of it is just that he genuinely believes that the whole US government is fucking up because it's staffed with morons, and he's such a genius that he can fix it, and that's what he's currently doing. I do think there's some pathology at work in why he's so motivated to do it: He has insecurity about whether he is actually the smartest man on the planet, it creates unsettledness, and so he has to go out and take some drastic action to prove to himself that he is. Because would anyone but the smartest person do all this stuff? It's unprecedented. And therefore, he is smart on an unprecedented level, as he always knew, and he doesn't need to be unsettled. And then, the next day, the unsettledness returns.

I think most of it pretty simple. It's just "never been told no" syndrome coupled with societal reward to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars, an army of fans, a record of "success" on his resume, and so on.

If you believe the technocrat mumbo jumbo he's fracturing central government into tons of little fifedoms that his billionaire buddies can rule. And hopefully while killing bazillions of people as some kind of a 'market reset' to drive up shareholder value.

Fucking terrifying.

Your intuition is spot on.

Elon is gutting USAID because they were investigating him over starlink. Elon is gutting the government agencies that oversee electric car regulations and safety regulations. Elon is going after the SEC for investigating him. Elon is using the government's databases to amass data to target political and business competitors and to further the far right propaganda campaigns as well as build list of deportees and political targets. Elon is gutting every TLA he can to ensure his taxes decrease and yours increase. Elon is tearing through decades of support and opportunity programs designed to help the less fortunate/less abled to live comfortably so he can live more comfortably.

Everything he's doing, is for his own benefit and personal gain, to the extreme detriment of the entire country. He's neither qualified nor elected. His actions should amount to treason, but they're being enabled by a traitorous, treasonous, felonious criminal, the shittiest president this country has ever seen.

My guess is dismantling citizen protections to allow him to do as he pleases to create a long lasting legacy. The guy probably realizes the sky is the limit and wants to be able to do anything he wants without laws and other frivolous things in his way. Especially if he is controversial his name will ring out through history as “influential” whether it’s good stuff or bad (seems like he’s okay with bad)

Not playing whatever that game is that he said he's really good at but actually doesn't even play

There's a German word for that, Machtergreifung.

Securing power and increasing his profits. Easy.

It seems to me that what he did to Twitter was a dry run for what he is doing to the government. Buy it, gut it, and leave a useless shell populated by white supremacists.

Trying to find his slave labor and zero government oversight in spacecraft safety so he can have a "colonize mars" fetish

Not revenge as much as financial motives. He wants less oversight on his business activities so he can make more money and be involved in fewer lawsuits and regulatory actions. There seems to be a broader motive to degrade the US and cause chaos and hardship, which I assume is other Republicans and influences like Putin. Some are probably favors to other interests - for instance, my guess about decreasing park rangers is probably to degrade parks and decrease attendance so they can justify drilling for oil or mining in national parks. The amount of money saved by slashing federal employment is trivial in terms of the budget, so it certainly isn't that. One thing is that before the election they said they were going to specifically make sure that agencies were staffed with Trump loyalists at every level, so I'd bet when you hear there were cuts at the FDA and the staff said they seemed random, everyone who was fired voted for Democrats, had Democrat supporting social media activity, and so forth.

He read Snow Crash and misidentified the protagonist, even though the protagonist's name is Hiro Protagonist, and now he wants to build a world of Burbclaves and sovereign city states without any real central government.

Doing whatever he can to become a trillionaire. So, devalue the dollar and remove obstacles to his businesses.

Grifting. That's always the answer with the right wing.

Trying to scrub all mention online of his corkscrew dick.

In addition to the other answers: Great Replacement Theory.

Now that musk is saying he’s doing the DOGE stuff “because the globalists have plotted a Great Replacement in which they use government handouts to buy votes from illegal immigrants and urban blacks” maybe we don’t have to act like this is about deficits or cost cutting anymore.

— https://bsky.app/profile/jakemgrumbach.bsky.social/post/3lifu5gicrc27

Republican politicians have used the conspiracy theory to discredit the Democrats, falsely accusing them of inviting migrants to the country who would then give the Democratic Party an electoral edge.

—https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Replacement_conspiracy_theory_in_the_United_States#Republican_Party

List of proponents: Elon Musk.

— https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Replacement_conspiracy_theory#List_of_proponents

What Elon Musk Wants. Ezra Klein Show. The journalist Kara Swisher discusses Elon Musk’s goals in government — and the factors that have led to his radicalization.

— https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/07/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-kara-swisher.html

The Tesla CEO rang in the new year [2024] with a string of tweets worrying that Biden is ushering illegal immigrants into the U.S. to become Democratic voters

— https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/elon-musk-great-replacement-conspiracy-theory-1234941337/

power tripping? bought a president-level account and now has pseudo president-level access to muck things up. this coincidentally also puts a lot of regulations out his way.