Conservatives Must Resist Musk-ification

In his September 5th speech at the Economic Club of New York, former President Donald Trump made official an idea he’d discussed in an interview with Elon Musk several weeks earlier. If elected, Trump would create a “Government Efficiency Commission” to undertake a “complete financial and performance audit of the entire federal government,” and recommend “drastic reforms.” Musk, who had pushed the idea with Trump, would naturally be in charge. 

This proposed appointment speaks to the ongoing Musk-ification of elements of the American right. Conservatives interested in speaking to the actual problems of the multiethnic working-class majority should vigorously resist this trend. Musk’s views on what “efficiency” really means are a good window into why he represents the wrong course for a healthy conservatism.

To be sure, improving the performance and cost effectiveness of government is a good goal. Trump was correct to highlight in his speech that addressing just fraud and improper payments alone would “save trillions of dollars.” The good people at the Government Accountability Office (GAO), whose explicit mandate is to “to help the government save money and work more efficiently,” have long been on the case, confirming at a House Oversight Committee on September 10 that improper payments and fraud cost the taxpayer $236 billion in FY2023 alone. Since 2011, GAO has identified over 2,000 specific recommendations to address “fragmentation, overlap, and duplication” in the federal government, including 112 new ones in its 2024 annual report. (If anything, establishing a new panel to replicate what the GAO already does might itself be duplicative and inefficient.)

But the deeper problem with making Musk the face of government “efficiency” is that efficiency is not an end unto itself. How well government operates is one question—an important one. But what government is for is a very different question. Problems emerge when language of efficiency migrates from process-improvement to purpose-definition. In 1905, the great British writer G.K. Chesterton warned about this trap, lamenting how polite society could only seem to talk about how to make government run well rather than about what its goals should be. “General ideals used to dominate politics,” Chesterton wrote, but “[t]hey have been driven out by the cry of ‘efficiency’… Vigorous organisms talk not about their processes, but about their aims.”  

Chesterton was pointing out that as a logical matter government’s purpose cannot be just to get out of its own way. Markets are much the same. Market efficiency may be the best means to optimize for a given goal, but it can’t be the goal itself. Chesterton’s warning was simple: don’t let a focus on how overtake a clear grasp of the underlying why. When that happens, the why can quickly get obscured or perverted.

This is exactly what is at risk by painting Musk’s views as conducive to a desirable efficiency. Focusing specifically on economics, purpose must come first. This is the critical insight of healthy economics, as American Compass chief economist Oren Cass has written:

Conservative economics, unlike the fundamentalism that supplanted it for a time, begins with a confident assertion of what the market is for and then considers the public policies necessary for shaping markets toward that end. The conservative conception of the common good requires a free-market economy in which all people can choose their own life course and through their own efforts contribute productively to their communities, support their families, and raise children prepared for the same.

Contrast this with the context in which Trump and Musk discussed a government efficiency commission—laughing about the joy of firing striking workers attempting to support their families:

Elon Musk: I think it would be great to just have a government efficiency commission that takes a look at these things and just ensures that the taxpayer money, the taxpayers  hard-earned money is spent in a good way. I’d be happy to help out on such a commission.

…

Donald Trump: Well, you, you’re the greatest cutter. I mean, I look at what you do. You    walk in and you just say, “You want to quit?” They go on strike. I won’t mention the name of the company, but they go on strike and you say, “That’s okay. You’re all gone. You’re all gone. So every one of you is gone,” and you are the greatest. You would be very good. Oh, you would love it. If you look at…

Elon Musk: Well, I’d be happy to help out.

This expression of glee at undercutting workers exercising their legal right to negotiate for better wages and conditions was immediately (perhaps in some cases excessively) condemned by organized labor. Sean O’Brien, the Teamsters Union president who had just recently spoken at the RNC at Trump’s invitation, called it “economic terrorism.” The interview likely played a role in making a Teamsters endorsement of Trump untenable, despite most Teamsters members preferring Trump.

But beyond the immediate backlash, the conversation spoke to the more basic problem with the market fundamentalism still dominant in so much of our policymaking. If workers’ well-being costs too much, in time or dollars, Musk-style “efficiency” considers them a problem to be solved with layoffs. This sense of efficiency is not compatible with the belief that the purpose of the market, and the policy governing it, is to support the thriving of those same working families and their communities.

But time and again, this is exactly what Musk has attempted to do in private enterprise. In Sweden, for example, he refused to abide by the country’s labor model and negotiate with workers. The irony is that Sweden’s government has relatively little role in that model, which instead grants enormous freedom to workers and employers to design broad-based, mutually acceptable agreements on their own—exactly an approach that should appeal to conservatives. But this hostility to workers abroad shouldn’t be surprising; Musk shows the same disregard for his own American workers, too.

This misuse of “efficiency” is also not compatible with a commitment to the national interest in general. Under Musk-style efficiency, capital—not just labor—must be allowed to flow to the destination that promises the quickest short-term gain, no matter the larger implications for the nation (or even the company in question). Thus the Chinese Communist Party was able to successfully lure Tesla to China, extract loyalty statements from Musk, relocate a majority of global Tesla production to Shanghai, and then allow Tesla to tank once it had extracted the know-how it wanted. Or, as Cass puts it, “China has chewed Tesla up and is now spitting it out.”

This predictable result led to Musk admitting in January that “if there are not trade barriers established” against China then Chinse EV producers “will pretty much demolish most other car companies in the world.”

Yet Musk’s concern for market efficiency seems to have overwhelmed even this moment of better judgement in short order. In May he reversed course, opposing exactly the kind of tariffs he had previously understood were the American EV industry’s only prayer. “Things that inhibit freedom of exchange or distort the market,” he said, “are not good.” It is reasonable to worry that a Musk-inflected sense of efficient capital investment would do little to reverse the deindustrialization that has so damaged American productive capacity and supply-chain resilience.

There are other dangers to the Musk-ification of American conservatism. When an Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 Max emergency door panel blew out mid-flight in January, Musk was quick to apportion blame on recent Boeing management incentives to hire a more diverse workforce. “Do you want to fly in an airplane where they prioritized DEI hiring over your safety? That is actually happening,” he tweeted. “People will die due to DEI.”

But Boeing’s DEI commitments were the wrong punching bag. The reason parts of their planes made a habit of falling out of the sky was rooted in the same misguided sense of market “efficiency” that Musk promotes. A focus on giving investors what they wanted in the short-term prompted Boing to systematically disgorge over $30 billion to shareholders via stock buybacks while developing the 737 Max, rather than invest it in higher production quality. Airbus, by contrast, made different investment choices, which is presumably why its planes fly just fine despite Europe’s hiring policies generally being far stricter than anything Boeing has attempted.  

Conservatives must not be led down the garden path. Musk’s ongoing tendency to give airtime to a certain type of cultural grievance portends not only the danger of a deeper moral ugliness, but offers a distraction from his tired market-fundamentalist worship of “efficiency”—a philosophy that has done so much damage to American industry and American working families. Trading away a focus on strong industry and thriving families for a focus on trolling on X represents the wrong course for American conservatism.  

Musk-ification must be rejected. That starts with dropping the idea that Musk should be put in charge of a (duplicative) government efficiency panel when his views on “efficiency” would inspire more problems than solutions.