All the Ways DOGE Could Help Musk and His Buddies Get Even Richer
Donald Trump has to wait another month and a half until he can start issuing executive orders as president. But DOGE, his newly announced and nebulously defined Department of Government Efficiency, spearheaded by businessmen Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, is already up and running — at least as a social media account.
On the Musk-owned platform X (formerly Twitter), DOGE bears the gray verification checkmark of an official government entity, even though Trump isn’t in the White House and the department itself has not been established in any formal capacity. In the meantime, the account — actual author(s) unknown — has posted various examples of supposed government waste and overspending. Their primary complaints emphasize areas where Musk and Ramaswamy could potentially leverage federal muscle to benefit themselves, along with the businesses of their pro-Trump associates.
Transportation
On Saturday, the DOGE account picked a revealing target: California High-Speed Rail, a massive public infrastructure project to connect the state’s urban centers and significantly cut travel times. An initial segment of the rail line is projected to be in operation in the early 2030s, providing service through the center of the state; if the next stage is completed, passengers would be able to travel between Los Angeles and San Francisco by train in just two hours and 40 minutes, and in far greater numbers than planes could transport.
DOGE attacked the ongoing construction of high-speed rail in California over delays and ballooning costs, noting that the state had requested an additional $8 billion in federal funds to continue working on the endeavor — a hint, perhaps, that they would recommend a rejection of that request. The post did not address the quagmire of political favor-trading and compromise that had bedeviled the project, instead making it sound as if building a train network were unrealistic and too expensive to begin with.
It’s probably no coincidence that Musk has always opposed the bullet train and once hypothesized a fantastical, headline-grabbing alternative in order to thwart momentum for the project, according to one of his biographers. In her 2017 authorized biography, Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future, Ashlee Vance describes how Musk’s 2013 proposal for a “hyperloop” that would transport people via pods in a pneumatic tube at up to 800 miles per hour “originated out of his hatred for California’s high-speed rail system.” But he may never have intended to build such a transit option, Vance writes, and just wanted to make the train concept sound inferior with his futuristic (though implausible) vision. Indeed, he never took a role at Hyperloop One, the major startup to ride the buzz around his idea, which announced last year it was shutting down. Musk’s Boring Company, spun out from SpaceX, has made very little progress on similar tunnels underneath Las Vegas while “ghosting” other cities where they had planned to build.
If Musk still has knives out for high-speed rail despite the failure of the hyperloops, there’s one quite obvious explanation: Tesla. Faster and more convenient trains in themselves are a threat to auto manufacturers, since they would reduce reliance on cars, but Musk has also staked the company’s future on the concept of self-driving robotaxis that will be able to take passengers anywhere, and has also unveiled a prototype for a “robovan,” essentially an autonomous bus. With this vision for the future of transit standing in direct opposition to rail investment — and serious doubts as to whether Tesla can hope to deliver on his latest promises — it would not be out of the question for Musk to use his influence with Trump and DOGE to further hamstring train projects.
Pharmaceuticals
Of course, Musk isn’t the only wealthy Trump backer who stands to benefit from DOGE’s policy prescriptions. Ramaswamy has taken aim at the Food and Drug Administration (which he derides as the “Failed Drug Administration”) and the National Institutes of Health, claiming that the former creates too many barriers for medical innovation while the latter funnels grant money to universities that use it to subsidize diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. He also happens to own approximately $670 million in shares of Roivant, the pharmaceutical company he founded a decade ago, which will have new drugs reviewed by the FDA during Trump’s second term in office. Allowing the agency to rush products to market would juice profits for Big Pharma across the board. Roivant lost a fortune as the largest shareholder of Axovant, a subsidiary founded by Ramaswamy whose experimental Alzheimer’s drug treatment was fast-tracked for FDA approval but failed clinical trials in 2017.
The ability to manipulate how the NIH spends on drug research — tax-dollar investment that already boosts Big Pharma as they continue to charge Americans exorbitant prices for their medicines — presents another personal advantage and clear conflict of interest. (The NIH effectively subsidizes every drug developed and approved for sale in the U.S.) Other big Trump donors include venture capitalists with money in biotech startups that may seek more favorable relationships with these agencies. DOGE itself has criticized the NIH for how it allocates resources.
Surveillance Technology
Unsurprisingly, the DOGE account has likewise complained about the costs of “illegal immigration,” despite estimates showing that efforts to mass-deport over a million undocumented immigrants in a year could cost far more. Companies that could see a financial windfall from increased spending on border security and migrant detention include Palantir, a tech firm that makes AI-powered surveillance tools and has considerable contracts with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Two of its co-founders are Joe Lonsdale — a VC who spends heavily on conservative causes, helped Musk launch a pro-Trump Super PAC this year, and donated $1 million to it — and his mentor, billionaire Peter Thiel, a longtime Trump ally in Silicon Valley. Trump’s electoral victory led Palantir’s stock price to surge 70 percent in the last month, making Lonsdale and another co-founder, Stephen Cohen, billionaires as well.
Consumer Finance
One more agency facing the wrath of DOGE and the mega-rich Trump cronies is the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Musk has said he wants to “delete” the CFPB, an institution born out of the 2008 financial crisis to guard Americans against deceptive and predatory financial schemes, and his disdain is apparently shared by Marc Andreessen, a billionaire Trump supporter who has argued that this regulator, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the Federal Trade Commission all have too much power.
The threats against the CFPB came days after the agency finalized a new rule that requires non-bank digital platforms facilitating monetary transactions to comply with the same federal laws as “large banks, credit unions, and other financial institutions,” including those pertaining to privacy and fraud. Musk, whose initial tech fortune came through the sale of the online money transfer service PayPal to eBay, has continued to push a plan for X to eventually offer a payment feature — a change that would presumably come with unwanted CFPB oversight.
In a November interview with podcast kingpin and fellow Trump endorser Joe Rogan, Andresseen egregiously misrepresented the CFPB, falsely claiming that it is controlled by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (she only helped to devise it) and that it is “debanking” people, or closing their financial accounts, over their political views (in fact, it has specifically sought to protect individuals from such discriminatory business practices by payment apps). Perhaps Andresseen was unwilling to grant the CFPB credit for securing almost $20 billion in relief for consumers since it was founded because three years ago it shut down a scam online loan startup backed by his VC firm, Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), distributing $40 million to customers who were deceived.
Crypto
Another undeniable factor in the DOGE crew’s hostility toward financial watchdogs including the CFPB and SEC is cryptocurrency. The wealthy executives, investors, and exchanges of the digital asset industry spent millions to help elect Trump and a spate of crypto-friendly Republicans after years of complaints about a crackdown by President Joe Biden’s SEC chair, Gary Gensler — and have weighed in heavily about who Trump should appoint to replace him. The CFPB, too, monitors crypto fraud, making it a natural enemy of the Big Tech players advocating for a hands-off approach to regulation of to this sector. Whatever impact DOGE has on the agencies charged with protecting your wallet, you can expect the crypto whales to come out ahead.
Still, the latest remarks and X posts from Musk, Ramaswamy, and their floating commission represent only a few priorities of the elites who wagered on Trump. Once he’s in the Oval Office, their efforts to sway his thinking and official actions will surely be expanded and escalated. And this well-funded group could develop personal grudges against many more federal institutions, branding them enemies of free market capitalism in order to tamp down their authority. After all, it’s not like billionaires to put this much money behind a politician and expect nothing in return.
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