What does President Musk think he's doing?

Technoutopian doomerism is in full effect

If you’re like me, you feel like you’re watching the wholesale destruction of a way of life that has, for decades, served us in the pursuit of equality, egalitarianism, and freedom. Sure, the systems DOGE is cutting were flawed, but we all know the resulting state-run solutions will be far worse. Third-world abattoirs like Louisiana and Alabama fumble the transition to state-run schooling and healthcare, and we’ll probably end up rebuilding the whole mess again anyway.

So why is this all happening? It’s because the people who want it to happen and who are performing the cuts are catastrophically stupid and, more importantly, these changes are vital to our future.

Here’s my thesis (and you won’t like it): the DOGE cuts are necessary. Let me explain.

First, Musk and Trump are complete morons. Trump is a dementia-ridden narcissist, swayed by a brain trust of “Qs”—people, primarily men, whom he thinks are good with “computer.” To a normal person, QAnon and “Q” are a ridiculous mystery cult based on a misunderstanding of nearly everything about the world. To Trump, a Q is one of those people who made money in cryptocurrency entirely by accident—people like Michael Saylor and Peter Thiel. I interviewed a guy who Trump called the “Q above all Qs.” Literally. He doesn’t understand the terminology. But that’s neither here nor there.

Like all failing businessmen, Trump clings to these people with money with a Willy Loman-esque intensity, hoping to simultaneously impress them with his power and, barring that, get a bailout when he inevitably fails.

After all, the other rich guys—bankers, legitimate businessmen, entertainment types—think he’s a roach. Not all, but many. So now the only folks he can hang out with are the real roaches, folks like Musk and Thiel who gained billions in wealth based on other peoples’ ideas, people who haven’t built a single thing in their entire career, people who got gloriously lucky.

Let’s talk about what those gloriously lucky people are doing right now.

5D Chess

There are two strategies Trump is using right now. He’s throwing slop to the dim-witted Christian conservatives who want a godly federal government aka no federal government. And he’s being run catastrophically rich men who want to retain their power, just like him.

Here are all the pieces he has on the board:

First, he has Project 2025, a plan by The Heritage Foundation aiming to reshape the U.S. federal government under a future Republican administration. It presents a comprehensive policy agenda and restructuring plan, detailed in a 900-page manual titled Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise. He knows his religious base wants Project 2025 to come to fruition—it is, in short, a last-ditch effort to create a conservative government before the inevitable societal change I’ll discuss shortly takes place.

Second, he has placed his benefactors in the Oval Office. I’ve been searching for a historical parallel to what is happening now—a sitting president being controlled by his donors to such a monstrous extent—and I’ve come up blank. We all knew past presidents bowed to the people who funded them, but none ever turned the White House into an Airbnb. This speaks to Trump’s precarious situation: he’s almost out of money, he’s a felon, and he knows he has, at most, a decade to live. Whereas a guy like Biden will be scooting around on a Rascal until he’s 100, a guy like Trump will be stroking out by a gilded toilet soon enough. This is his last moment of potency and, more importantly, the last moment of potency for a certain type of white American male—a boomer/Gen Xer with a chip on his shoulder about being left behind in the very boom cycle that propelled Thiel and Musk to prominence.

And Trump is now a pawn in this game—a useless, sacrificial piece that will eventually be discarded by the men who hate him but love his power. He doesn’t know it yet. He’s too stupid.

So we’ve got President Musk. What, precisely, has President Musk told Trump? That the world is about to be changed completely by AI.

Musk, at his heart, is a technoutopianist. He is not a utopianist in that he expects the world to become better through technology. Instead, he believes his life and the life of like-minded men will become better. His assumption is that AI will cleave off entire sections of the population, leading to mass unemployment and chaos. The Burgessian mind would embrace the coming lives of leisure we will all enjoy once AI takes over the mundane for us, but Musk only sees the dystopian side. Why does he want to go to Mars? Because it will be the last place humans can effectively build and grow a new society. Why does he want to impregnate women through IVF to increase the Musk line? Because, like in Neuromancer (a vital book for understanding this mindset) intergalactic family-run corporations will become the new royalty.

The First DOGE

First, let’s talk about what’s coming with AI. It’s coming for your job—there’s no doubt about that. Whether you hang drywall, drive a truck, practice elder law, or program CNC machines, AI will take over. It’s inevitable. Believe me when I say this view is neither unique nor far-fetched. We are about to witness the biggest shift in humanity since the arrival of the personal computer.

Here’s an interesting point: remember when President Clinton ran his own 7-year DOGE program? You probably don’t, but what happened is that Clinton and a woman named Elaine Kamarck worked together to reduce government jobs that were no longer needed. From Planet Money:

"Elaine Kamarck studies the federal workforce and government operations at the Brookings Institution. And Elaine knows, probably better than anyone, about bloat in the federal government. Because back in the '90s, the number of federal jobs actually peaked at over 3 million, and Elaine's job was to bring that number way, way down. But she did more than just that. Her job was to look at all government waste.

That’s right—this isn’t the first time we’ve taken a flamethrower to the federal government. The last time was during the Dot-Com boom, when the entire government had to be rebuilt to use fax machines, email, and computers. I distinctly remember when my father, a lifelong Defense Department logistics expert, was forced to move from a 1970s green screen and a stack of papers to a brand-new PC. The fact that he wasn’t fired outright is a testament to Kamarck’s intelligence—she understood that the person behind the keyboard was more important than the technology.

In Clinton’s case, they needed to move off paper and onto PCs. We all get that. But in our current predicament, we can easily reduce a 100-person logistics team to 10 people—or even one. There will be situations where entire programming departments or media organizations are completely run by AI, with a few humans in the loop just to collect paychecks. This is inevitable. It isn’t pretty, but it’s absolutely true.

What we’re seeing now is the Atari 800XL of AI. Wait until we get the equivalent of the MacBook M2 I’m writing this on right now. It took 50 years to go from a kid’s toy to a laptop capable of running a dozen nuclear power plants from a coffee shop. It will take 10 years for AI to replace us all.

So what Trump and Musk are doing is directionally correct. Musk knows that a massive change is coming. Take truck drivers, for example. There are currently 689,930 truck drivers in the United States. AI will decimate those jobs simply because autonomous trucks will run 24/7, requiring a human only for emergency situations. Go ahead and whine about "What happens if the trucks crash?"—but they won’t crash. They’ll be run efficiently by machines designed never to hit each other. Musk knows this.

Musk also knows the next frontier for those 689,930 men—and the billions more globally who will end up sucking Zyn pouches outside Walmart, looking for work—is space. When there’s no work on Earth, the only alternative is to hang drywall in space.

I know, I know—far-fetched. But as we’ve seen with the shipping container, the automobile, and the electric light bulb, technology can change everything in an instant. AI will change everything. And it must change everything. We cannot stop it and we should all take part in the benefits it affords. We are heading into a very different, global society, a society the Qanon adherents fear, a society without countries, an economy, or "work” in a traditional sense. And I say this from the most progressive perch possible. This new society will be as good or bad as we make it, and hopefully we’re smart enough to make it good.

So yes, DOGE is doing exactly what it should be doing. Is it doing it correctly? Absolutely not. It’s doing it in the stupidest way possible, destroying countless lives in the process. Instead of working with the current federal government—an institution full of good, smart people who might not be AI-savvy—it’s saying, "Welp, time for the trash." This is the opposite of what happened during the Clinton years, but it reflects the national mood: out with the old. Further, it is also sop for Project 2025 folks who think Trump is doing God’s work. What he’s actually doing is Musk’s work.

Finally, it’s also part of a larger, odious philosophy, weaponizing technology in a uniquely cruel way.

The Moldbug Variations

Like Russia’s Aleksandr Dugin, we have our own crackpots that people in power listen to. Our crackpot is Mencius Moldbug.

Mencius Moldbug—real name Curtis Yarvin—built an entire ideology out of a single premise: democracy doesn’t work. His argument is straightforward. The institutions that run the world—media, academia, and bureaucracy—don’t just report the news, educate students, or keep the government running. They operate as a single ideological machine, which he calls The Cathedral, enforcing progressive doctrine without a central authority. It’s not a conspiracy; it’s a system. It doesn’t need orders from above because everyone inside it already knows what to do. The result is an unstoppable leftward drift, an illusion of public consensus, and a political system that pretends to be responsive to voters while actually being ruled by an entrenched elite.

So what’s the alternative? Moldbug doesn’t want to fix democracy. He wants to scrap it entirely. His solution: replace democratic governance with a system that actually works—one modeled after a corporation, a monarchy, or both. The idea is simple. Instead of politicians playing a four-year popularity contest, put a single sovereign in charge, someone who has a financial stake in the long-term success of the country. A CEO of America, Inc. The logic is brutal but efficient: people are bad at governing themselves, but they’re great at following competent leadership. History, he argues, isn’t a march toward freedom—it’s a power struggle where the best rulers consolidate control and impose stability.

Moldbug’s philosophy isn’t just about political structures. It’s about how power actually works. He argues that people are trapped in a false narrative about history, one that makes democracy look inevitable and monarchy look like a relic. He tells his readers to take the “red pill” and start seeing history for what it really is—a chaotic mess where power is seized, not granted. Reform is a joke. Voting changes nothing. The only real option is exit—leaving the system entirely, whether that means building new city-states, embracing Bitcoin, or creating parallel societies outside the reach of The Cathedral.

For years, Moldbug’s ideas stayed niche—buried in long, meandering blog posts read by libertarians, tech entrepreneurs, and people who just really hate democracy. But his influence has grown. Silicon Valley billionaires like Peter Thiel openly discuss the need for alternative governance models. Bitcoiners and seasteaders are building financial and physical exit strategies. The reactionary right, once a disjointed collection of internet cranks, now has a coherent ideological foundation. Moldbug himself may have stopped blogging, but his ideas have taken root, shaping debates about power, governance, and the future of the nation-state itself.

Here’s the kicker: Silicon Valley thinks he’s right. As I wrote earlier, SV used to be a progressive wonderland. Now it’s run by people who made their money by finding bigger fools. The resulting philosophical change rewards people who got lucky, not people who are smart. Therefore, a Moldbugian worldview makes perfect sense.

Why tech went MAGA

Musk is a Moldbug adherent, as are Vance and Thiel. Trump doesn’t know what side of the toilet paper to use, but those around him definitely know what they want and how quickly they want it. They want a massive amount of power, fast, especially over a country and planet run entirely by their data centers. The Cathedral—the entire edifice of equality, education, and the liberal arts—is a joke to them, and it’s being torn down.

Now here’s the question: will they win?

Yes and no. DOGE will do its dirty work, and the next president—probably AOC—will come in and rebuild these systems in an AI-first way. The boys who are currently Trumpers will abandon their ideology for girls who literally hate them right now, and Gen X will be too busy realizing that Musk took away their parents’ Medicare to worry about storming the Capitol. And yes, AI will come. Yes, we will go to Mars. Yes, the world will look a lot different in a decade. And yes, it will suck.

But all hardcore philosophies eventually swing the other way. Rise up on my spokes if you like, but don't complain when you fall back down, says the wheel. Gen Z and Gen Alpha will be the first to live in a world completely overrun by AI, and their reactions to it will shape history. Trump and Musk are doing the right thing: they’re building a system that will destroy them, leaving the rest of the world—literally the global citizenry—to rebuild in its own unified image.

Even though it looks like they’re building 1984, they’re really building Brave New World. Hell, with their luck, they’ll give us The Jetsons.

Morons like Trump and Musk never win. They just disappear into madness, reduced to collecting urine in jars and hoarding bags of fingernails. Remember that next time you hear something ridiculous coming out of the White House. That’s noise, shit flooding the zone. The real test—our real test—is how we manage the thing that scares them the most: the freedom we will achieve when the world is powered by silicon-based intelligence. If things were up to them, we’d be enslaved in Amazon warehouse as meat-based backup machines. If things are up to us, we’ll usher humanity into a golden age. All you have to do is decide which side you’re fighting for.