Elon Musk Wants to Own the Government like a Business. We Can’t Let Him.

Elon Musk’s hostile seizure of the Treasury Department’s payment system is authoritarian not only because it violates the law, tramples on the separation of powers, and replaces the constitution with the Project 2025 fantasy of executive control of all public spending. It is also the most dramatic statement yet from the Trump administration that the government has no motivation beyond serving as a vessel for wealth extraction for Trump’s fellow billionaires, especially Musk.

Musk, who has never been elected or withstood Senate confirmation, wishes to be in sole command of $6 trillion dollars of Americans’ money—funds that we collectively decided should do things like provide meals to seniors, educate kids in their most formative stages of life, and pay the physicians who care for our families. He also wants to dictate access to some of the most confidential government systems on earth, privileges that even elected members of Congress don’t have.

The cultural idea of bringing the private sector to government conjures images of speed and efficiency, cutting-edge technology, and five-star customer reviews, but strangely does not include the most elemental feature of a private business: its ownership structure. Elon Musk is not running the government like a business as much as he is owning it like one. He believes that his quarter-billion-dollar investment in Donald Trump’s candidacy entitles him to the full suite of ownership privileges: control over spending decisions, hiring and firing, access to secrets, etc.

Ownership also means that Musk can harvest our information and resources for profit, wielding his power to crush competitors and settle scores. Why else would Musk need access to these systems? As Senator Elizabeth Warren put it, Musk “wants the power to say that your grandpa, who frankly is a cranky old guy and sometimes disses Elon on X, doesn’t get his Social Security check on time.” He could deny payments to Black- or women-owned vendors, slandering them as undeserving DEI beneficiaries. Or he could simply cut off payments to the programs we all benefit from in order to pay for a tax cut for himself, as Groundwork Collaborative’s Lindsay Owens has argued.

Musk is an oligarch, and oligarchy does not benefit from a more democratic government. The Treasury crisis follows a familiar script of an authoritarian takeover that the public management scholar Don Moynihan summarized in three stages: delegitimization, deconstruction, and control. Musk has incessantly used X, one of the world’s biggest social media platforms, to rail against government, especially agencies and programs that don’t do his bidding. Now he is using his unprecedented access to our institutions to break the mechanisms of democracy, like the timely payment of funds that were appropriated by the public through Congress, and people’s trust in them. The final stage and inherently authoritarian aim of oligarchy is absolute control.

It was never efficiency that Musk was bringing from his career as a government-sponsored entrepreneur, but rather his penchant for mass firings, union busting, and one-man rule. Yet somehow this theory of leadership—only one man, only one vote—has been obscured by the fantasy that Musk will nonetheless use his technological know-how to hypercharge government performance, swapping the bureaucratic machine’s rusty parts (experts, ethics rules, security clearances) for LED screens and AI bots. But as I have written, democracy is not a rocket ship. Its ability to create more protections and avenues for public participation is the reason why it works.

The Treasury crisis is indeed a “five alarm fire” as Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez put it. But it’s also the starkest display of extreme wealth’s only true power: to replicate itself at the expense of everyone else. Through the crisis, we can see the failures of the prevailing theory of democracy preservation throughout the Trump era—the thinking that Trumpism was a virus that infected the world’s oldest democracy, and that our institutions would immunize us from the worst of it. But the threat is, was, and always will be the concentration of extreme wealth and power in a few private hands—what FDR referred to as the essence of fascism.

We cannot make the same mistake, swapping out Trump for Musk, as though he is singular in his contempt for democracy. Those of us who believe in democracy must focus relentlessly on how our economic and political systems are not just vulnerable to capture but functionally designed to empower oligarchs like Musk. And we should do more to change the culturally salient idea that extreme wealth somehow guarantees mastery over all things, from education policy to disease eradication to government efficiency.

Musk is who he’s always been: a government-subsidized entrepreneur who launders public support of his companies into personal merit, sustaining the myth of his inherent superiority over the rest of us. It should not surprise us that our institutions are being repurposed to serve his interests rather than ours.

If you ask Eleanor

"Our type of democracy requires more patience than does any kind of authoritarian government. Such governments may call themselves democratic but they do not have to wait for the people to be educated to a new idea. They can act, then wait for the people to catch up later.

That is not the case in the United States. Therefore, it is frequently necessary for the executive part of our government to mould its plans to meet the requirements of the legislative side of the government."

- Eleanor Roosevelt, My Day (September 20, 1947)

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