Is Elon Musk misunderstood — or rightfully criticized for his DOGE tenure?
Editor's note: Welcome to Double Take, a regular conversation from opinion writers Melinda Henneberger and David Mastio tackling news with differing perspectives and respectful debate. Read what the writers have to say about launching this column.
DAVID: So semi-former Trump minion Elon Musk said something true this week and it is making news. Musk said the Republicans' One Big Beautiful Bill is going to raise the deficit, undoing the work of his Department of Government Efficiency.
'I was disappointed to see the massive spending bill, frankly, which increases the budget deficit, not just decreases it, and undermines the work that the DOGE team is doing,' Musk said.
Among Trump staffers, even an obvious truth is controversial, so naturally, as The New York Times reported: 'Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff for policy, shot back at Mr. Musk on social media without naming him. Mr. Miller asserted that the bill would reduce the deficit — despite multiple independent analyses saying otherwise.'
MELINDA: He did tell the truth about the Big Ugly Bill adding to the deficit. But nearly everything else he's said about DOGE was a LIE. All he accomplished was inflicting pain, which you don't need to be some brilliant man of the future to pull off.
DAVID: But he is brilliant. Musk is a truly American character. He's an immigrant, a stellar success and an iconoclast. If he doesn't fit the DSM definition of multiple-personality disorder, he should. I like all of him — environmental visionary, space explorer, digital media baron, disrupter of government business as usual. The only one I am not so fond of is exploiter of more baby mommas than … well, anyone I have ever heard of.
MELINDA: Oh my friend, on that last point, Elon Musk is no old-school exploiter, and I'm not about to hurry past that point, either. I'm not at all surprised that he, as a devoted eugenicist, is essentially running a baby farm, turning out as many little Elons 2.0 as possible.
An April piece in the religion magazine First Things, headlined 'Elon's Family Values,' warns your fellow conservatives of the growing challenges to the traditional family, not just from 'the anti-judgmental left with its rainbow of 'family types,' but from new voices on the right who regard genes as the be-all and end-all.'
Musk, the piece goes on to say, 'embodies the values of the genetic-determinist right.' He's got either 12 or 13 kids — with either three or four women, 'including, most recently, a colleague with whom he had no intention of forming a family.'
That colleague, Shivon Zilis, an executive at his neurotechnology firm, told his biographer Walter Isaacson, 'He really wants smart people to have kids, so he encouraged me to,' and generously volunteered to donate his sperm. 'I can't possibly think of genes I would prefer for my children,' she said. Their child was reportedly conceived through 'polygenic screening to produce children with the characteristics he desires.' In fact, all but the first of the children we know about were conceived with advanced reproductive technology so as to get the 'best' results.
This is not just creepy, but alarming. The last time people in this country got all excited about eugenics, the Nazis took notice.
DAVID: I hadn't read about the eugenics, which seems more than a little extreme, but smart, conscientious, stable men have been seeking out smart, conscientious, stable women for a looooong time. (I know I am leaving myself open here: Stable, Elon? No way. He thinks he's going to Mars. I mean stable in the income provider sense.)
I don't think your Nazi parallel works though, because their eugenics was based on racial pseudoscience. Musk isn't claiming white babies are the ubermenschen — he is claiming that with careful genetic screening, we can create babies that are smarter and healthier than the traditional point-and-shoot method of reproduction.
I won't be leaping into this new science myself. There's still plenty of room for unintended consequences. But I believe in the march of science and if we can wipe out diseases, like my depression (which I am sure has hereditary component), I welcome the progress. Maybe my grandkids won't suffer what I have.
And if a little coterie of Elons 2.0 can advance the cause of mankind half as much as their father has, the world will be better off having them. What I am worried about is the fact that he isn't really raising all those kids like a father should. It is my experience that the more brilliant the kid, the more parenting they need to not go over the rails. My bet is his fatherless kids will disappoint.
MELINDA: This is very much the old-time eugenics. You think Musk's love of the R-word and of far-right parties in Europe are out of nowhere? There is nothing benign about Elon Musk. His vision is as cold and dark as that trip to Mars he wants to take.
DAVID: Elon's vision of the future isn't dark — it is practical. When electric cars were a vegetable, you could only sell them to the Birkenstock crowd. Musk made them sexy. Everybody wants one. The first time my son rode in one, he was hooked. That is the genius that the global warming clerisy lacked as they tried to shove electric cars down unwilling consumers' throats.
Elon has made getting to orbit vastly cheaper, and he is going to do more to make space travel practical. If you want mankind to survive, we need to become an interplanetary species. There is something fundamentally human about his drive to colonize and explore. It is something people of all cultures have always done.
MELINDA: His buddy the anti-enviro president is busy making sure we'll need to be an interplanetary species sooner rather than later, but what about the lives on this planet, right here and right now?
Though DOGE did not cut nearly as much as Musk said it would, or as he said that it did, he can take a bow for causing many deaths across the world by taking his trusty chainsaw to USAID.
DAVID: Wait a minute, DOGE claimed $55 billion in savings on its website according to The Post, and journalists there were only able to find $9 billion worth of lies. That means the DOGE claims were better than 80% true. I'd give real money if we could get that level of veracity across the rest of the Trump administration.
MELINDA: I'm saying look behind the numbers. That he justified vaporizing USAID, again dishonestly, by pointing to a bunch of subscriptions to Politico and The New York Times that he tried to pretend were payoffs was the perfect encapsulation of the whole DOGE effort. Could he really not go to the trouble of canceling the subscriptions without canceling lifesaving efforts across the planet? No matter what percentage of cuts promised were actually achieved, the human devastation caused by the USAID cuts alone were unforgivable.
This was what you'd expect from someone who equates empathy with weakness. And just what you like about him mystifies me.
I mean, he fired thousands of civil servants, sometimes by accident, without even bothering to find out what they did, or caring about the consequences. Those were my neighbors when I lived outside D.C., and they must have been yours, too. The sight of those dedicated, hard working people, who could have been making much more money in the private sector but were there because they wanted to serve, carrying their little boxes of plants of family photos out of federal buildings was a shameful one.
The big other thing that DOGE accomplished was invading our privacy. Remember when Republicans were against that? Excuse me if I think he just wanted to mine the data for his own business interests, but yes, that is what I think.
His tenure was short but the damage he's done will last. And he's disillusioned, at having learned that you can't destroy lives, fire those who had been investigating your companies and jump around with cheese on your head without some reputational damage? He got more than his money's worth as Donald Trump's top campaign donor just in making so many threats to his businesses go away.
Readers who disagree with me regularly tell me that I hate the president when no, the truth is that I pity him, even if I'm a lot sorrier about what he's done to our country and our world. If you know much about the family he grew up in, then you know he got everything except what he really needed. I always think it must be terrible never to have had anything but completely transactional relationships. So when he's nattering about trophy wives to West Point graduates, I'm not even sure he knows that not all of us would trade our families for more decorative ones if only we could afford it.
Maybe because I know less about how the world's richest man got the way he is, I have less sympathy for him.
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