When it comes to Elon Musk’s personal power it’s worth speaking about what kind of goals Elon Musk has. At the recent Tesla earnings call, Elon said that deploying FSD for autonomous cars in China is difficult because Chinese law says that the videos Tesla records in China can’t leave the US and US laws says that Tesla is not allowed to train AI models in China. In Elon Musk’s presentation about what’s important for Tesla, FSD is very important.
If Elon Musk’s power would be equal to being a dictator, he would get the US laws changed so that he can train the models in China. The AI policy of the White House is however to be tough on China, and Elon Musk does not have the power to change US policy in the way that would be needed to train FSD in China. He does not have enough power to make his own interests trump the interest of the US as far as Trump sees the interests of the US.
Elon is okay with EV subsidies being lowered even if that’s bad for Tesla’s bottom line because Elon seems to actually believe in cutting government spending and that’s incompatible with having a lot of EV subventions. All the signs we have seen look like Elon actually believes in the goals of DOGE and pursues his activity at DOGE to achieve its stated goals.
While you might agree or disagree with the stated goals of DOGE, saying that Elon run a coup is silly. Each coup starts by securing power over the monopoly of violence and all the actions of DOGE seem to be focused elsewhere than getting control over the monopoly of violence.
The treasury system seems to be written in COBOL. COBOL isn’t user-friendly and if you want to run a bunch of analysis of payment flow you likely don’t want to run it on the COBOL mainframe. For that reason, they seem to have decided to export the data out of the COBOL system to another server that’s more traditional. I think it’s quite plausible that the current COBOL system lacks a “export everything” feature and that the DOGE team needed write access to get the data export to work properly. They probably also wanted to add a feature that makes that data export automatic.
While I haven’t looked into the laws myself, there are claims that the way DOGE operates might violate Privacy Act of 1974, Federal Information Security Modernization Act, Federal Records Act and the Administrative Procedure Act. While violating these kinds of laws might be standard operating procedure at intelligence agencies and the Snowden revelations did not lead to anyone being charged over violating privacy laws, the DOGE team might not be so lucky if the next president is a Democrat. It’s possible that the whole DOGE team will need pardons. Given the precedent that Biden sat at the end of his term, Trump is likely willing to give them those pardons but it creates bad incentives. Anyone at the DOGE team who has a problem with the way the team operates can be told “If you don’t play ball you don’t get your pardon”.
Elon has said that he wants to replace the current system by one that uses a blockchain to be tamperproof. That’s likely a good idea in principle, if they however spent two months to create their minimal viable product of a new government payment system and then want to move over the whole existing government payment system there’s a high likelihood for a few problems.
When it comes to Elon Musk’s personal power it’s worth speaking about what kind of goals Elon Musk has. At the recent Tesla earnings call, Elon said that deploying FSD for autonomous cars in China is difficult because Chinese law says that the videos Tesla records in China can’t leave the US and US laws says that Tesla is not allowed to train AI models in China. In Elon Musk’s presentation about what’s important for Tesla, FSD is very important.
If Elon Musk’s power would be equal to being a dictator, he would get the US laws changed so that he can train the models in China. The AI policy of the White House is however to be tough on China, and Elon Musk does not have the power to change US policy in the way that would be needed to train FSD in China. He does not have enough power to make his own interests trump the interest of the US as far as Trump sees the interests of the US.
Elon is okay with EV subsidies being lowered even if that’s bad for Tesla’s bottom line because Elon seems to actually believe in cutting government spending and that’s incompatible with having a lot of EV subventions. All the signs we have seen look like Elon actually believes in the goals of DOGE and pursues his activity at DOGE to achieve its stated goals.
While you might agree or disagree with the stated goals of DOGE, saying that Elon run a coup is silly. Each coup starts by securing power over the monopoly of violence and all the actions of DOGE seem to be focused elsewhere than getting control over the monopoly of violence.
The treasury system seems to be written in COBOL. COBOL isn’t user-friendly and if you want to run a bunch of analysis of payment flow you likely don’t want to run it on the COBOL mainframe. For that reason, they seem to have decided to export the data out of the COBOL system to another server that’s more traditional. I think it’s quite plausible that the current COBOL system lacks a “export everything” feature and that the DOGE team needed write access to get the data export to work properly. They probably also wanted to add a feature that makes that data export automatic.
While I haven’t looked into the laws myself, there are claims that the way DOGE operates might violate Privacy Act of 1974, Federal Information Security Modernization Act, Federal Records Act and the Administrative Procedure Act. While violating these kinds of laws might be standard operating procedure at intelligence agencies and the Snowden revelations did not lead to anyone being charged over violating privacy laws, the DOGE team might not be so lucky if the next president is a Democrat. It’s possible that the whole DOGE team will need pardons. Given the precedent that Biden sat at the end of his term, Trump is likely willing to give them those pardons but it creates bad incentives. Anyone at the DOGE team who has a problem with the way the team operates can be told “If you don’t play ball you don’t get your pardon”.
Elon has said that he wants to replace the current system by one that uses a blockchain to be tamperproof. That’s likely a good idea in principle, if they however spent two months to create their minimal viable product of a new government payment system and then want to move over the whole existing government payment system there’s a high likelihood for a few problems.