The primary 100 days of Donald Trump’s second presidency have confirmed universally horrible— except you’re the world’s cringiest billionaire. Whereas Elon Musk and his rabid pack of misplaced boys on the so-called Division of Authorities Effectivity have been busy making the nation worse for everybody, the primary 100 days have given him stratospheric returns on the roughly $260 million he spent to purchase a president.
Starlink Broadband: Some chunk of $42 billion
The previous Biden administration devoted $42 billion in Broadband Fairness Entry and Deployment grants to convey high-speed web to rural, underserved areas. It is a yearslong undertaking, and it’s been centered round fiber-optic web, which is cheaper in the long term and quicker than Musk’s satellite tv for pc web service, Starlink. Additionally, like all Musk firms, Starlink overpromises and underdelivers, which is partly why the corporate didn’t obtain a $885 million grant from the Rural Digital Alternative Fund in 2023, when the Federal Communications Fee decided that Starlink “didn’t show that it may ship the promised service.”
After all, merely having a worse, dearer product needs to be no bar to Musk earning money, so the federal government is now rewriting the BEAD guidelines to remove the “excessive tech bias in favor of fiber,” as Trump’s decide to supervise BEAD put it. It’s unclear how a lot of that $42 billion Starlink may see, however the firm already receives billions from BEAD. And on the subject of cash, an excessive amount of is rarely sufficient.
Starlink for the FAA: $2.4 billion
Not content material to pressure Starlink on rural areas alone, Musk seems to be on the verge of forcing Starlink on the Federal Aviation Administration, once more along with your tax {dollars}. The federal government had awarded $2.4 billion to Verizon to improve a communications platform, however now it seems like which may be diverted to Starlink as a substitute. Don’t ask how the federal government can shuffle billions from one firm to a different like this. It may possibly’t, but it surely looks as if it’s going to.
Golden Dome: Unknown billions
Apparently, we’re constructing a missile protection defend, Golden Dome, as a result of by some means we’re caught within the Eighties and need to preserve making an attempt to invent former President Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Protection Initiative, aka Star Wars. The truth that the know-how principally nonetheless doesn’t exist and, if it could possibly be willed into being, would run anyplace from a whole bunch of billions of {dollars} to $2.5 trillion.
Unsurprisingly, SpaceX is within the operating for this, and Musk has put collectively a true nightmare staff of firms owned by conservative weirdos, becoming a member of with Peter Thiel’s Palantir and Palmer Luckey’s Anduril to jockey for this new monumental pile of defense-contractor cash. SpaceX’s proposal is that it might personal the know-how and lease it again to the federal government through subscription. Sure, similar to a vastly dearer Adobe Photoshop subscription.
NASA telescope launch companies: $100 million
This one’s somewhat deal with, form of an amuse-bouche, so small as to virtually not be value mentioning. NASA has given SpaceX $100 million to supply launch companies for a large telescope that can observe near-Earth objects. To be honest, that is extra in SpaceX’s wheelhouse—and but, with Musk within the authorities, it’s nonetheless a battle of curiosity.
Launch supplier for the army: Virtually $6 billion
No, this isn’t a double entry. It is a totally different launch supplier contract, and now SpaceX would be the high launch supplier to the U.S. army, getting near $6 billion of your cash to do it. The problem isn’t whether or not SpaceX is an applicable alternative for this. As with the NASA companies, SpaceX has a profitable file offering this form of factor. But in addition, as with the NASA companies, it’s an unbelievable battle of curiosity that nobody is meant to say.
Eliminating pesky investigations: $2.37 billion
Typically it’s not simply the cash you make. There’s additionally the bills you keep away from. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, put collectively a memorandum making an attempt to estimate simply how a lot cash Musk will save from authorities inquiries into his firms merely disappearing.
Blumenthal discovered that Musk and his firms face “no less than 65 precise or potential actions by 11 totally different federal companies.” Blumenthal’s estimate was primarily based on solely 40 of these, as his workers wasn’t capable of present estimates for the opposite 25. So $2.37 billion might be on the low finish. Musk’s affect over the Trump administration’s regulatory efforts—or lack thereof—probably implies that investigations into Tesla’s shoddy self-driving know-how, for instance, shall be memory-holed shortly, by no means to hassle Musk’s pocketbook once more.
Free Tesla promoting: In all probability not as beneficial as Musk hoped
Confronted with plummeting Tesla inventory costs, Musk didn’t need to do something that normie CEOs must do, like reduce prices, cut back stock, or rethink advertising. No, he simply obtained the president to do a cheesy business in entrance of the White Home, which even included Trump pretending to purchase a Tesla. These efforts don’t seem to have moved the needle, since Tesla continues to flounder. Who knew that trashing the federal government and being a part of constructing an autocratic state wouldn’t end in extra automotive gross sales?
Authorities information: Priceless
All of those billions pale compared to what permitting DOGE to infiltrate authorities information programs does: It offers Musk entry to information that only a few others have. So it’s not simply that DOGE is serving to mix authorities databases to show the entire of the nation right into a surveillance state that tortures immigrants. A Nationwide Labor Relations Board whistleblower advised Congress that after DOGE obtained entry to delicate labor information, that information seems to have, nicely, been despatched outdoors the company. There are additionally experiences that DOGE tried to show off all monitoring instruments and delete any data of accessing the system.
Earlier than authorities information privateness collapsed below the DOGE onslaught, it might have been unimaginable to assume {that a} personal actor may get their mitts on Individuals’ most vital, most private information. Now it appears unimaginable to assume Musk doesn’t have already got it.
