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Resistance is normal. We saw it when he made changes to Twitter, now X. But I wouldn’t bet against Elon. If I had to guess, he’s trying to get a full map of ho

Resistance is normal. We saw it when he made changes to Twitter, now X. But I wouldn’t bet against Elon. If I had to guess, he’s trying to get a full map of how things actually work—breaking operations down into numbers, ranking everything by importance, and then… the firings will come. When I say “he,” I don’t just mean Elon himself. I mean the whole system around him—his mind, the engineers, the massive compute power, the LLMs feeding him insights. One thing is certain: he’s about to shake things up. Ray Dalio has talked about a shift in the world order, and Elon is positioning himself right in the middle of it. But he’s not looking to tear things down—he’s here to protect democracy. He’s playing a different game. All in on Elon.

jltsiren 2y ago
I think Musk is more like Prigozhin of the US. The people in power tolerate him as long as he remains useful. But when he overextends himself, his private jet may have an accident or he may fall from the window of his underground bunker.
lemon_zest 2y ago
How does this protect democracy?
- rashidae 2y ago
  Because making the U.S. solvent is critical to preserving democracy. A country drowning in debt with an inefficient government is weak. If the U.S. collapses financially, who do you think fills the void? China? Russia? Do you trust them to uphold free speech and individual rights? Fixing the system isn’t just about economics… It’s about ensuring that democracy doesn’t get replaced by something far worse.
  - lawn 2y ago
    So you're saying the $4T tax break they plan to implement harms democracy? Yeah, you have a point there.
  - lemon_zest 2y ago
    I don’t think you have a solid understanding on how government works and are conflating many things here. Fiscal balance is not going to cause the USG to gonna blink out of existence (unlike a company). While there is certainly the need to increase efficiency and solidify government operations, you don’t fix democracy by unilaterally gutting the federal government and regulations and concentrating power on a handful of rich individuals. That’s going in the opposite direction of a democratic system. Try more reading a history book and less of Elon’s feed.
  - IAmGraydon 2y ago
    [flagged]
  - insane_dreamer 2y ago
    > Because making the U.S. solvent 1. None of Elon's actions have anything to do with making the US solvent. Congress sets the US budget, not the president. And they're raising the debt ceiling to pay for tax breaks (primarily benefitting the wealthy) not lowering it. That's where any savings (which are minimal) will go. The real savings -- if Congress does it -- will be to gut Medicaid. That has nothing to do with DOGE for one, and secondly, it will have a huge negative impact on not only lower income Americans but many others (because of the knock on impact of reducing funding to nursing homes etc.) 2. The US is the larger debtor nation, but because it issues debt denominated in its own currency, it essentially holds a get out of jail card.
1shooner 2y ago
>But he’s not looking to tear things down—he’s here to protect democracy. Someone just sent me an article about lamprey control in the Great Lakes. It existed before Musk, now it doesn't. So those fisheries are on borrowed time. And I imagine that unintended consequence multiplied so many thousands of times across the country. If he's looking to not tear things down, he's failing. Separating the wheat from the chaff in federal spending would be hard, so he's just not bothering. That laziness is going to intimately and negatively touch the lives of most Americans within about a year, and most of those people aren't going to care what Ray Dalio says.
- rashidae 2y ago
  Some losses are inevitable when you overhaul a system. The bigger threat is letting the government drown in debt, which would be an existential risk to democracy. If the U.S. collapses financially, lamprey control is the least of our problems. The idea isn’t to nuke every program. It’s about cutting bloat and reallocating resources. Sure, some useful things might get trimmed. But staying on our current path until the whole system fails would be worse.
  - ipython 2y ago
    I’m tired of the old “if you’re not for this, you’re against us” absurd logic fallacies. There is no binary choice here. It’s not like we haven’t balanced the budget before without completely destroying the whole place. Within my lifetime even. Unfortunately an entire political party and more recently a reality tv star teamed up with the richest man in the world have joined forces to throw the country into chaos in a misguided attempt at … cleaning up DEI in order to save a trillion dollars? Please. If you scroll through the doge “receipts”, it’s riddled with elementary errors ($8m contract that is listed as $8b- ya know just a little $7.992b error), stuff that’s already been canceled before Trump even showed up, and a bunch of dei stuff. Color me unimpressed.
  - 1shooner 2y ago
    >Sure, some useful things might get trimmed. But staying on our current path until the whole system fails would be worse. I'm suggesting that there will be a strong political backlash. If this were as easy as Musk acts like it is, it would have been done already. I agree that Musk is not doing this to serve the people that didn't vote for him, whose representatives did not vet and confirm him. He's doing this, as you say, to position himself for greater power. And I think he is at the very beginning of a strong popular rejection as he himself becomes increasingly perceived as an existential risk to democracy.

jltsiren 2y ago

I think Musk is more like Prigozhin of the US. The people in power tolerate him as long as he remains useful. But when he overextends himself, his private jet may have an accident or he may fall from the window of his underground bunker.

lemon_zest 2y ago

How does this protect democracy?

rashidae 2y ago
Because making the U.S. solvent is critical to preserving democracy. A country drowning in debt with an inefficient government is weak. If the U.S. collapses financially, who do you think fills the void? China? Russia? Do you trust them to uphold free speech and individual rights? Fixing the system isn’t just about economics… It’s about ensuring that democracy doesn’t get replaced by something far worse.
- lawn 2y ago
  So you're saying the $4T tax break they plan to implement harms democracy? Yeah, you have a point there.
- lemon_zest 2y ago
  I don’t think you have a solid understanding on how government works and are conflating many things here. Fiscal balance is not going to cause the USG to gonna blink out of existence (unlike a company). While there is certainly the need to increase efficiency and solidify government operations, you don’t fix democracy by unilaterally gutting the federal government and regulations and concentrating power on a handful of rich individuals. That’s going in the opposite direction of a democratic system. Try more reading a history book and less of Elon’s feed.
- IAmGraydon 2y ago
  [flagged]
- insane_dreamer 2y ago
  > Because making the U.S. solvent 1. None of Elon's actions have anything to do with making the US solvent. Congress sets the US budget, not the president. And they're raising the debt ceiling to pay for tax breaks (primarily benefitting the wealthy) not lowering it. That's where any savings (which are minimal) will go. The real savings -- if Congress does it -- will be to gut Medicaid. That has nothing to do with DOGE for one, and secondly, it will have a huge negative impact on not only lower income Americans but many others (because of the knock on impact of reducing funding to nursing homes etc.) 2. The US is the larger debtor nation, but because it issues debt denominated in its own currency, it essentially holds a get out of jail card.

1shooner 2y ago

>But he’s not looking to tear things down—he’s here to protect democracy. Someone just sent me an article about lamprey control in the Great Lakes. It existed before Musk, now it doesn't. So those fisheries are on borrowed time. And I imagine that unintended consequence multiplied so many thousands of times across the country. If he's looking to not tear things down, he's failing. Separating the wheat from the chaff in federal spending would be hard, so he's just not bothering. That laziness is going to intimately and negatively touch the lives of most Americans within about a year, and most of those people aren't going to care what Ray Dalio says.

rashidae 2y ago
Some losses are inevitable when you overhaul a system. The bigger threat is letting the government drown in debt, which would be an existential risk to democracy. If the U.S. collapses financially, lamprey control is the least of our problems. The idea isn’t to nuke every program. It’s about cutting bloat and reallocating resources. Sure, some useful things might get trimmed. But staying on our current path until the whole system fails would be worse.
- ipython 2y ago
  I’m tired of the old “if you’re not for this, you’re against us” absurd logic fallacies. There is no binary choice here. It’s not like we haven’t balanced the budget before without completely destroying the whole place. Within my lifetime even. Unfortunately an entire political party and more recently a reality tv star teamed up with the richest man in the world have joined forces to throw the country into chaos in a misguided attempt at … cleaning up DEI in order to save a trillion dollars? Please. If you scroll through the doge “receipts”, it’s riddled with elementary errors ($8m contract that is listed as $8b- ya know just a little $7.992b error), stuff that’s already been canceled before Trump even showed up, and a bunch of dei stuff. Color me unimpressed.
- 1shooner 2y ago
  >Sure, some useful things might get trimmed. But staying on our current path until the whole system fails would be worse. I'm suggesting that there will be a strong political backlash. If this were as easy as Musk acts like it is, it would have been done already. I agree that Musk is not doing this to serve the people that didn't vote for him, whose representatives did not vet and confirm him. He's doing this, as you say, to position himself for greater power. And I think he is at the very beginning of a strong popular rejection as he himself becomes increasingly perceived as an existential risk to democracy.