Elon Musk Is Already Scamming Washington

How does Musk divide his time? We don’t really know, but as of 2017, Musk’s attorneys revealed, Tesla’s chief executive allocated about 48 hours per week to running Tesla; about 32 hours per week to running Space X; and another eight or nine hours per week running Neuralink, the Boring Company, and Open AI. (Musk claimed to work 80-90 hours total per week.) If we were to assume the same time allocation continued after Musk negotiated his controversial pay package in 2018, then Tesla’s board would be trying (thus far unsuccessfully, because of the two legal judgments; the case is on appeal) to pay Musk $437.5 million per hour.

But of course we can’t assume that same time allocation, because Musk has taken on more roles since then. In 2022, he acquired the aforementioned X, then called Twitter, and put a great deal of effort into running it into the ground (losing, according to the financial columnist Allan Sloan, more than $25 billion). Now Musk appears to spend most of his time screwing up the federal government. 

Ipsa scientia potentia est, wrote Frances Bacon, later shortened by his former secretary Thomas Hobbes to “Knowledge is power.” But in the Age of Trump power often flows from ignorance. As Politico’s Daniella Diaz and Katherine Tully-McManus pointed out, Musk’s tweets against the spending bill contained an impressive number of falsehoods, starting with his retweeting with a “YES” that “We will be fine for 33 days” if the government stays shut until Trump assumes office. A five-week shutdown of approximately the same length in late 2018 and early 2019 cost taxpayers $3 billion, the equivalent of about three months’ Tesla pay for Musk. The brunt would be borne by federal workers, who would lose five weeks’ pay just as the holidays start.