Amid reports that Elon Musk may soon leave his role as a “special government employee” — although, like most things involving the Trump White House, clarity is elusive — historian and New Yorker writer Jill Lepore recently wrote a New York Times op-ed titled “The Failed Ideas That Drive Elon Musk.” In the piece, Lepore argues that Musk, despite his reputation as a futurist, is actually recycling dusty ideas from the past — specifically technocracy, a 1930s-era movement that imagined a society run by scientists and engineers instead of elected leaders.

Lepore traces Musk’s ideological roots to his maternal grandfather, Joshua Haldeman, a Canadian technocracy leader and conspiracy theorist who later moved to apartheid South Africa and espoused racist and anti-democratic views. Musk’s push to cut government programs, replace workers with AI and impose efficiency-driven reforms echoes the technocratic dream of a depoliticized, elite-run society.

Lepore also connects Musk’s rhetoric and goals with other early 20th century ideas, including futurist and fascist manifestos by Italy’s Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. These works glorified aggression, hierarchy and technological dominance.

“Few figures in public life are more shackled to the past,” Lepore writes of Musk.

Thus, Musk doesn’t represent a leap forward but a regression. He’s attempting to reboot a future that already failed.

“Muskism isn’t the beginning of the future,” Lepore writes. “It’s the end of a story that started more than a century ago, in the conflict between capital and labor and between autocracy and democracy. The Gilded Age of robber barons and wage-labor strikes gave rise to the Bolshevik Revolution, Communism, the first Red Scare, World War I and Fascism. That battle of ideas produced the technocracy movement, and far more lastingly, it also produced the New Deal and modern American liberalism. Technocracy lost because technocracy is incompatible with freedom.”

I have often found it ironic that many of today’s Silicon Valley billionaires and tech bros fashion themselves as libertarian “technological supermen” when their entire industry rests on a foundation of federal research and development — from semiconductors to GPS to the internet itself. Without the massive public funding of the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, Silicon Valley wouldn’t exist to disrupt anything.

What does Musk want?

So, what does Musk, in the guise of his so-called Department of Government Efficiency, want from the government he seems so eager to dismantle?

In a recent appearance on The Focus Group podcast, tech journalist Kara Swisher, who has covered Musk for years and probably knows him better than anyone not impregnated by him — indeed, who probably knows Musk better than anyone, even those impregnated by him — said he’s motivated by two things: “One he wants to go to Mars, and he needs the government to pay for it. … And then two, he wants the data so his AI will be bigger than other AIs.”

As she also put it: “Why do you rob banks? Because that’s where the money is. Why do you rob government agencies? Because that’s where the data is.”

Mars remains a distant ambition limited by the ginormous costs, need for extended human life support systems, propulsion and radiation shielding, and the physical and psychological challenges of long-term space travel.

As for the data, I fear Musk will soon succeed in stealing it, if he hasn’t succeeded already.

DOGE and the theater of efficiency

DOGE claims that it has saved the federal government $150 billion. That may sound like a hefty number, until you compare it with the $2 trillion in cuts Musk once promised, or even his more recent $1 trillion revision. As The New York Times reported Thursday, it’s not clear how much more beyond the claimed $150 billion Musk expects his DOGE team to find.

DOGE’s claim, based on a fuzzy list of asset sales, lease cancellations, and contract and grant cuts, is also smaller than the $154 billion increase in federal spending since Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20, compared with the same three-month period in 2024, The Wall Street Journal reported Friday.

As The Washington Post’s Catherine Rampell put it in a recent column, “How DOGE is making government almost comically inefficient,” Musk isn’t really interested in improving government performance. To paraphrase one of Rampell’s astute readers commenting on her article, DOGE is a political tool designed to undermine regulatory agencies, destabilize the civil service and make it harder for government to function, especially in ways that inconvenience Musk and his fellow plutocrats. And it doesn’t hurt that DOGE is good political theater for the cruelty-loving MAGA crowd.

The danger in Musk’s vision, which fits comfortably within the decadeslong right-wing push to undo the New Deal, lies not only in his embrace of a modern version of his grandfather’s technocratic fantasy, but also in what he’s willing to destroy to achieve it.