Elon Musk recently posted a short sentence on X, the social media site he owns, that should worry all Americans — especially his friend President-elect Donald Trump.
After Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in an interview that “The U.S. cannot force us to ‘sit and listen’ at the negotiating table. We are an independent country.” Musk commented in reply, “He sense of humor is amazing.”
Musk’s response contained two embarrassing errors. First, he wrote “he sense” instead of “his sense.” Second, he used the laughing-crying emoji instead of a period.
Here is Musk, just tasked with heading a so-called “Department of Government Efficiency” together with another ambitious rich man, Vivek Ramaswamy, and instead of reviewing his one-line, six-word tweet, he posts it with the kind of errors one encounters in undergraduate papers.
Is that how a competent efficiency czar would behave?
Musk might say that minor errors don’t detract from the obvious sense of his post, that sloppiness is part and parcel of social-media writing and that one shouldn’t focus on picayune details but stick to the message. That’s all true, but doubts remain. After all, one has to assume that Musk, a self-declared genius who happens to be the richest man in the world, knew exactly what he wrote — and he didn’t care.
And there’s the problem. Mega-rich geniuses like Musk don’t become mega-rich geniuses by being sloppy. That’s the road to bankruptcy. Just imagine Musk telling a potential business partner, “Did I say $5 million? Sorry, I meant $50 million.” It’s unimaginable.
And yet when it comes to insulting the Ukrainian president, Musk can’t muster a few extra seconds to check his insult for errors. Why bother, he presumably figured. All that matters is getting the sentiment across.
When it comes to gratuitous insults, Musk is on a roll, having called the German chancellor a “Narr,” or fool, right after the governing Socialist-led coalition fell apart. But it gets worse, as Musk called “Olaf” a fool — not Chancellor Scholz and not Olaf Scholz, but plain old “Olaf,” as if diplomatic niceties and German manners mattered not a jot. Does that make Elon a “Grobian,” or boor?
Such hijinks are amusing, and they may tell us something about Musk’s character, or the degree to which his own rhetoric has been influenced by Trump’s, but what matters most is what they say about Musk’s ability to promote government efficiency.
Sloppiness and insults may work in the private sector, but they are no way to run a semi-governmental agency whose job is to investigate which bureaucracies need cutting and which don’t. So huge an undertaking requires deep knowledge of the bureaucracies and legalities in question — a knowledge that neither Musk nor Ramaswamy possesses — and some degree of humility and kindness — which neither of them appear to possess. One gets the impression that they will act like the proverbial bulls in the china shop and leave little but carnage in their wake.
Musk and Ramaswamy’s call for volunteers with high IQs and the willingness to put in 80-hour work weeks for no pay — to be, as they put it, “revolutionaries” — typifies their suicidal approach. They seem to think that being smart and energetic is sufficient to do the job of streamlining government bureaucracy. But radically-inclined smarties are doomed to failure, because one has to know and understand just what one is tasked with changing.
Revolutionaries with radical goals and insufficient knowledge — which describes basically all revolutionaries — are self-defeating and deadly. The only people who can fix government are experts who may or may not have high IQs, but who know government and the law. They could be professors, journalists, analysts, even businesspeople — as long as they are knowledgeable, decent and independent experts whose own wellbeing does not depend on how and what they choose to slash and burn.
Here’s how all this relates to Musk’s sloppiness and insults. Revolutionaries are true believers who understand what their leader means even if the message is garbled or incoherent. Musk surely knows that he has a huge fan base that will adore and follow him regardless of — or because of — his sloppiness and vulgarity. In a word, Musk is Trump.
That sounds like great news for both. But no town is big enough for two self-styled geniuses. They will quarrel, and their pact will end with a showdown in the OK Corral.
Meanwhile, in a few years, if anyone still cares, the Department of Government Efficiency will either prove to be a huge revolutionary bust or — irony of ironies — become yet another inefficient government bureaucracy.
Which emoji will Musk tweet out then? Laughing, crying or both?
Alexander J. Motyl is a professor of political science at Rutgers University-Newark. A specialist on Ukraine, Russia and the USSR, and on nationalism, revolutions, empires and theory, he is the author of 10 books of nonfiction, as well as “Imperial Ends: The Decay, Collapse, and Revival of Empires” and “Why Empires Reemerge: Imperial Collapse and Imperial Revival in Comparative Perspective.”
