Elon Musk’s Chaos Saw Strikes Again
I can’t believe it. How can the same stuff happen to the same guy twice?
Elon Musk loves firing people, but instead of cutting dead weight, he seems to prefer axing the people actually keeping things running.
We saw it at Twitter when he gutted the company’s engineering, trust and safety, and customer support teams. The result? Increased outages, a flood of scams, and a platform that somehow got worse despite already being a hellscape.
Now, Musk is taking his disruptive genius to the federal government. Predictably, veteran affairs hospitals are canceling operations, and air traffic controllers are disappearing despite a national shortage.
Musk Gets Called Out
It’s one thing to cut software engineers at Twitter, and I’d say that is a bad thing for software engineers in terms of overwork and the expectations laid on them.
It’s another thing when job roles are linked to essential services. This is probably why Musk found himself in a heated confrontation with Trump’s cabinet members. This time, it wasn’t just his usual brand of cost-cutting lunacy. It was a direct threat to public safety and the passion came out.
Sean Duffy, the Transport Secretary, wasn’t having it. He straight-up slid a spreadsheet in front of the president, proving Musk was full of it when he claimed his cuts weren’t that bad. This, of course, led to Musk denying everything because when has Elon Musk ever admitted to being wrong?
A Scalpel vs. a Hatchet (Guess Which One Musk Uses)
Even Trump had to step in, telling his cabinet that while cost-cutting was important, it needed to be done with a scalpel, not a hatchet. This is not a phrase usually associated with Musk, a man who treats businesses like Lego sets, tearing them apart, throwing away pieces, and hoping something functional remains.
This could be the start of a fracture in the Musk, Trump billionaire best friends club, but at least for the moment, they still seem to be on the same page.
We shall see. But Musk doesn’t do “strategic cuts.” He does the purge.
After all, this is the same man who:
• Fired Twitter’s entire comms team, leaving journalists to email a bot that responded with poop emojis.
• Cut thousands of engineers overnight, only to beg them to come back days later because (surprise!) they were actually necessary to keep the platform running.
So, why would anyone expect him to suddenly develop a sense of nuance when dealing with, say, air traffic control or veterans’ healthcare?
The Fallout
The consequences of Musk’s scorched-earth approach to layoffs are becoming clear:
Veteran Affairs hospitals
They have ended up canceling surgeries because the necessary staff were laid off.
Air traffic control
Musk axed people midway through a national shortage. Chaos ensued.
The State Department
Seeing a mass exodus of experienced officials because Musk’s team made working there unbearable.
Government agencies
Losing institutional knowledge as career officials quit rather than deal with Musk’s chaos.
Chaos as a Business Model
The pattern is clear: Musk fires essential workers, insists everything is fine, and then scrambles when things inevitably go wrong. And yet, people still seem surprised every time. The issue isn’t that this is happening. The issue is that it appears that this is Musk’s business model, which is wholly about dominance.
Here’s the deal
• It worked at Twitter (well, for about 15 minutes before advertisers bailed).
• It kind of worked at Tesla (if you ignore the lawsuits, labor violations, and massive turnover).
Now, emboldened, he’s trying it at the federal level.
The problem? You can’t “move fast and break things” when the things you’re breaking are, you know, air traffic control and veteran healthcare.
But hey, at least Musk is consistent. If there’s one thing you can count on, it’s that he’ll keep firing people until something collapses. And then he’ll tweet about how it’s someone else’s fault.
In my experience the best software engineering jobs have been those which are stable and provide supportive environments for everyone to be their best selves and do their best work. Quite why anybody thinks a “hardcode” work environment is better than this is quite frankly a mystery to me, and the idea of doing this to a Governement department is something that I think makes little sense. There again, this is Musk brandishing a chainsaw, and what sense does that make?
Conclusion
This isn’t just about keeping things running in emergency mode, as even Twitter kept running through the bad times. It’s about keeping things running sensibly with more than just a skeleton crew.
And yet, despite the chaos, he keeps getting new gigs. At this rate, don’t be surprised if Musk somehow ends up in charge of the entire country. What could possibly go wrong?