The Brooklyn Rail

A certain kind of rich man afflicted with the symptoms of moral dandyism sooner or later comes to the conclusion that it isn’t enough merely to make money. He feels obliged to hold views, to espouse causes and elect Presidents, to explain to a trembling world how and why the world went wrong. The spectacle is nearly always comic.

—Lewis Lapham, Money and Class in America (1989)

In an interview with Corriere della Sera, the most widely read newspaper in Italy, last week, Steve Bannon called Elon Musk “a truly evil person,” and vowed that he will “get Elon Musk kicked out” by the time Trump is inaugurated on January 20, by taking away Musk’s access to the White House. He also said Musk has “the maturity of a child,” and “He should go back to South Africa.”

Bannon continued the feud with what he called “the sociopathic overlords in Silicon Valley” on his podcast, War Room, saying “we’re not doing that. We’re not having Rule by Nerds.” Bannon and Stephen Miller see Big Tech as part of the globalist plot to replace American workers. And if they continue to try to take over, Bannon said, “we’re going to rip your face off.”

But Elon Musk is apparently all set to move into office space right next to the White House, in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, as Ike rolls over in his grave, mumbling “I said beware of the military-industrial complex, dammit!” Whether Musk will be given the coveted “blue pass,” allowing complete access to the West Wing, is still being decided.

These live/work arrangements between Elon and Donald mirror what’s happened since the election, when Elon has been living in “Banyan Cottage” just outside the main house at Mar-a-Lago. Trump has bragged to people that Elon is “renting” the cottage, which goes for at least $2000 a night, and the initial membership fee at Mar-a-Lago is $1 million. JD Vance has stayed in another of the cottages next to the main house during the transition.

Meanwhile, it appears that the structure of DOGE will be that people working for the pseudo-governmental agency will be designated “Special Government Employees,” and will only be allowed to work for the government for 130 days at most in a 365-day period. The designation SGE can be paid or unpaid and has more flexible rules about financial disclosures than regular US government employees. It remains to be seen what ethics rules or in fact laws, will apply to this pseudo-governmental body.

Most of the people on this advisory panel will be tech acolytes of Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Vivek Ramaswamy, and other Tech Billionaires. The New York Times has reported that a group of tech executives will fan out into actual federal agencies for six-month periods to look for ways to cut costs across the board. What they will then do with their findings is unclear.

The Federal Advisory Committee Act says that such a group of people outside the government providing advice to the executive branch must conduct all their meetings in public and all documents submitted to them must be made available to the public. That, of course, doesn’t sound very Musk- or Trump-like.

Why did the Tech Billionaires decide that they needed to actually infiltrate the US government? Because they were worried about planned, unwanted government regulation of their activities, especially AI, anti-trust moves by governmental authorities, and the possibility of higher taxes on billionaires and corporations. And the division between government and the huge corporations that the Tech Billionaires run has become tiresome to them, so why not erase the distinction? This is the conclusion that Benito Mussolini came to in Italy in 1915.

When will the public animus against huge corporations treating citizens badly that erupted when the CEO of the huge health insurance company UnitedHealthcare was shot by Luigi Mangione be turned against Tech Billionaires running the huge corporations that control our lives to a much greater extent than UnitedHealthcare? When will populism turn on the Tech Billionaires as corporate usurpers? Will Bannon and the rest of MAGA go that far, or will they be expedient like the news media and most of the Democrats?

Of the three major Social Media platforms—Meta, X, and TikTok—two have now gone full MAGA and one is about to be shut down by the US Congress. So it’s safe to say that the entire Social Media space is now under the control of MAGA, which is now controlled by Musk and Trump. And legacy media outlets appear to be coming apart, led by the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, as journalists with integrity break away to form their own outlets like Mehdi Hasan did with Zeteo, or find protected space for fact-based reporting like Hari Sreenivasan did with Amanpour & Company.