Elon Musk’s ‘Move Fast and Break Things’ Attitude Clashes with Washington

 

Politics

Elon Musk’s ‘Move Fast and Break Things’ Attitude Clashes with Washington

 

The Tesla and SpaceX founder is used to breaking things to make them better. Washington won’t like that.

 

By Calder McHugh

12/24/2024 01:17 PM EST

Calder McHugh is deputy editor of POLITICO Nightly.

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/12/24/elon-musk-washington-congress-00196006

 

House Republicans are in a state of chaos after ramming through a hastily put together package to fund the government. Frustration with Speaker Mike Johnson is simmering, ugly intraparty fights among Republicans are spilling out into the public eye and Democrats are claiming victory while President-elect Donald Trump sought to pin some of the blame on Joe Biden for the whole thing.

 

It all happened thanks to Elon Musk. Congress was on a glidepath to heading home for the holidays without much agitation, but the framework of an earlier proposed deal blew up after Musk posted over 150 times on X urging House Republicans to reject what was in place and go back to the drawing board.

 

For Congress — and the larger Washington government apparatus — it’s a warning sign of things to come, of carefully laid plans being blown up by fiat of the world’s richest person. For Musk, it’s just another day at the office.

 

The billionaire tapped by Trump to co-chair the commission dubbed the “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) embodies the Silicon Valley ethos of “move fast and break things,” more so even than Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who made the motto famous in the first place. And Musk’s embrace of creative destruction and willingness to take enormous risks in the service of mission — as he has at various moments with SpaceX, Tesla and Twitter — is now ramming straight into a Washington culture that operates very differently.

 

Thus far, the culture clash has made Republicans angry but also netted Musk a deal that he says he’s happier with. It’s also made manifest the stark differences in how disruptive entrepreneurs and government officials understand the duty of running a company or a country. The SpaceX founder’s freewheeling, “if things are not failing, you are not innovating enough” approach — which he’s used to become the richest person in the world — versus Washington’s sometimes staid, risk averse and sclerotic lawmaking could well define the successes and failures of the second Trump administration, at least for as long as Musk lasts in government and as long as it holds his interest.

 

“Elon Musk is the heir to a long tradition in Silicon Valley of making war on bureaucracy,” Charles Petersen, the Harold Hohbach historian at the Silicon Valley Archives at Stanford University, says. “This is the business philosophy of disruption — it’s better to break something than to reform it.”

 

Musk insisted that the bipartisan spending bill that was on the verge of passing the House was chock full of wasteful spending. And he sees tearing the government’s infrastructure down to the studs — even if it results in more chaos — as part of his mandate to cut government expenditures in the incoming administration.

 

For decades, Musk has been comfortable at his companies with taking on extreme risk and experiencing big, sometimes embarrassing public failure — so long as there’s a potentially large payoff. In the early days of SpaceX between 2006 and 2008, the first three rocket launches failed, putting SpaceX and Musk himself teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. Even after Musk turned the ship around with many successful launches beginning in 2008, he continued to push towards new innovation at almost any cost — including the prospect of more failure and more danger. According to a Reuters report, worker injuries have soared at SpaceX over the past decade, with workers describing Musk as cavalier about safety and an environment in which lax precautions, under-trained staff and a need to meet Musk’s lofty goals imperiled employees.

 

Since 2020, as Musk has developed the spacecraft Starship, many of his tests have ended in fiery explosions. When Musk responds publicly to criticism, he generally shrugs off concerns and pushes to take on even more risk. After one of these failures, an insouciant Musk tweeted, “So … how was your night?” and attached a video of his rocket dramatically falling apart.

 

For SpaceX, it’s the cost of doing business. When designs fail, the team at SpaceX can see what’s wrong with their product. If you’re going to innovate, you might break some rockets, the thinking goes.

 

The same goes for Tesla. The company, like SpaceX, had a flirtation with bankruptcy in 2008, and since pulling itself out of that hole, the electric car maker has still sometimes seen speedy innovation lead to public failure. In 2023, Reuters reported that Tesla documents tracked chronic failures in the cars for years. Just last week, Tesla recalled 700,000 vehicles — but managed to fix the issue with an over-the-air software update, meaning drivers didn’t have to bring in the cars for a fix.

 

Musk is constantly testing just how far he can push before something blows up and becomes unfixable. “It’s what many [tech startups] are always navigating,” Petersen says. “How much can you break something before it truly breaks?”

 

Tesla and SpaceX ultimately made him the wealthiest man on the planet. So far, his purchase of Twitter has been a different story. His decision to fire broad swaths of staff soon after taking over led to bugs cropping up regularly on the social platform — most memorably when Twitter Spaces melted down during Ron DeSantis’ official presidential campaign launch.

 

His use of the website to advance his own political ideology has been equally damaging — advertisers have been running for the hills.

 

The value of his purchase has declined nearly 72 percent, yet it’s hard to characterize it as an unmitigated loss. X has turned into a huge megaphone for Musk as he involves himself more directly in politics; he’s used it to get a seat at the White House table and is suddenly poised to wield power over the federal regulators who scrutinize his varied business interests.

 

Musk is still learning what kind of pressure works in Washington. In early December, X CEO Linda Yaccarino announced a bill “led by X” that was an updated version of the Kids Online Safety Act and urged Congress to pass it. Musk threw his weight behind it, noting on X that “Protecting kids should always be priority #1,” but House Speaker Mike Johnson shut the door on the bill, noting that it “might lead to further censorship by the government of valid conservative voices.”

 

Musk isn’t accustomed to that kind of response. In his companies, when he identifies problems and decides to fix them, Musk operates quickly and in a top down banner, ruling over every inch of his empire. “Basically, what Elon does is he shows up every week at each of his companies, he identifies the biggest problem that the company’s having that week and he fixes it,” Marc Andreessen, the venture capitalist and Trump supporter, said recently. “And he does that every week for 52 weeks in a row, and then each of his companies has solved the 52 biggest problems that year.”

 

Now, the X owner is up against much more than a company full of underlings. There are co-equal branches of government to deal with. He will have to convince a group of people with independent power bases and all kinds of their own concerns to bend the knee. And the consequences of action or inaction are on a wholly different scale. Parts of the government bureaucracy ceasing to function properly can mean millions of Americans losing access to essential government benefits and functions.

 

To succeed at his goal of cutting government spending, he’ll need to better understand the administrative state that he’s antagonized and played fast and loose with for years. “He’s clearly displayed a lack of concern around regulation. Think about PayPal with finance, Tesla with auto, SpaceX with transportation and launching things into space,” Jonathan Kerstein, a general partner at Centre Street Partners, a technology-focused investing firm, says.

 

Musk has spent the transition cutting an imposing figure in Washington, insisting that landmark changes are to come. To be successful in his mission, though, he’ll need the help of parts of the bureaucratic state that he’s been tasked with disassembling.

 

In the early days of Tesla and SpaceX, Musk has said, he gave both ventures around a 10 percent chance of success. Beating those long odds turned Musk into a Silicon Valley titan. But placing huge bets on the success of government disruption — and insisting that failure is a precursor to success — isn’t going to make him a hero in this endeavor. Just the opposite.

 

It’s the nature of the governance business, where failure can lead to human suffering. And those failures can also make you very unpopular, very fast — it’s a different game than the tech world, where there can be failures along the way to becoming a hero.

 

“[Musk] has goals. There are things he wants the government to do,” Petersen says. “You can’t achieve these things if you just burn it all down.”

 

Filed under: Donald Trump, Donald Trump 2024, Politics, SpaceX, Elon Musk, X, Tesla