The New Yorker:

The obits for the tech mogul’s time at the Department of Government Efficiency are, justifiably, vicious.

By Susan B. Glasser

It ended, of course, with a tweet. Late on Wednesday evening, Elon Musk announced the official end of his short, traumatic tenure as the head of a made-up agency called the Department of Government Efficiency. Musk’s post on X, the social-media network he owns and had sought to weaponize in service of a radical cost-costing assault on the federal government, was brief. After thanking Donald Trump for “the opportunity to reduce wasteful spending,” the world’s richest man, deflated but still defiant, added, “The @DOGE mission will only strengthen over time as it becomes a way of life throughout the government.”

The reviews of Musk’s rampage through Washington have been, deservedly, vicious: Who, during the past few crazy months, could have possibly failed to take note of his toxic combination of entitlement and ignorance, his vastly overstated claims, and his move-fast-and-break-things ethos that has resulted in wreckage that will take years to fully assess? Musk, the largest individual donor in a single election cycle in American history, seemed to truly believe what his critics feared—that his hundreds of millions of dollars spent on behalf of Trump and Republican causes had purchased him an outsized share of the Presidency itself. He sought to collect in unprecedented fashion, installing himself in the White House at Trump’s side, helicoptering around on Marine One with his young son in tow, speaking at Cabinet meetings though he held no formal Senate-confirmed seat at the table. He demanded sensitive government data on millions of Americans, empowered a former intern known online as Big Balls, and blew up the U.S.’s foreign-aid program. In February, he cavorted onstage at a conservative event with a chainsaw—no metaphorical subtlety there—and, when he fired thousands of workers and abolished entire agencies, he became the gleeful personification of the G.O.P.’s decades-long campaign to denigrate and downsize America’s federal government.

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