Is there any difference between Twitter and the State Department? Elon Musk doesn’t seem to think so. He’s angry at Secretary of State Marco Rubio for not slashing the State Department payroll the way Musk did at Twitter after he bought the social media site in 2022 and turned it into X.
The inevitable clash between Chainsaw Musk and government management is finally erupting as President Trump’s Cabinet appointees push back against Musk and the efficiency commission he heads. Musk and his minions have been demanding thousands of layoffs and other draconian cost-cutting measures across the federal bureaucracy as they wage war on the administrative state. Trump’s Cabinet appointees need those resources to do their jobs, and they’ve started telling Musk to back off.
Egos are inflamed, tempers flaring. At a March 6 Cabinet meeting, Musk reportedly berated Rubio for not firing anybody, according to the New York Times, while implying that Rubio is a lightweight. Rubio said Musk was being untruthful and suggested that Musk is the phony showboater. Musk then played his trump card, reminding the room that he runs three companies worth billions of dollars apiece, as if that is all the qualification he needs to override Cabinet secretaries and cull the federal workforce.
President Trump ultimately intervened, defending Rubio and saying that department heads, not Musk, would have the final say on personnel decisions. But Musk isn’t going away, not yet anyway, and his disputes with Trump’s political appointees highlight a fatal flaw in Musk’s logic: He’s treating the federal government like a bloated, distressed company when in reality the government is nothing like a private-sector organization.
The idea of running the government like a business is a popular one. Trump himself ran on that concept in 2016, pitching himself as a dealmaker who would get better terms for America. Many critics highlighted the troubling aspects of Trump’s business background, including six bankruptcies. But voters dismissed the disses and went for a businessman president, the first since Herbert Hoover in the late 1920s.
The DOGE efficiency commission first arose as an idea when Musk interviewed Trump on Twitter last August. It was Musk’s idea, which Trump promptly endorsed. A few weeks later Trump said the job of the Musk commission, if it ever materialized, would be “conducting a complete financial and performance audit of the entire federal government and making recommendations for drastic reforms.”
Musk probably had something more audacious in mind than an audit followed by recommendations. As we know now, Musk has modeled the DOGE commission on his dramatic reshaping of Twitter after he bought it in October 2022. Musk started firing workers right away and ultimately axed the staff by 75%. In lengthy meetings, he went line by line through the company budget and cut any spending staffers couldn’t justify as essential.
There were mistakes. Musk cut cleaning service contracts and nobody arrived to remove trash from the Twitter offices for a while. Remaining staffers had to bring their own toilet paper. As Musk rolled back content policies on the site, many advertisers — the company’s main source of revenue — fled. Two years after Musk bought the platform, its value had plunged by 80%.
Elon Musk flashes his t-shirt that reads "DOGE" to the media as he walks on South Lawn of the White House, in Washington, Sunday, March 9, 2025. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana) ·ASSOCIATED PRESS
Musk’s Twitter strategy was something only an autocratic multibillionaire could have gotten away with. Musk took Twitter private, so he didn’t have any public shareholders to answer to as the company’s value collapsed. At any normal public company, by contrast, the board would fire a CEO driving customers away and revenue down. Musk did have institutional investors who lost money as Twitter’s value dropped, but they were uniquely bound to Musk, given his control over other businesses and his ability to control future opportunities for those investors.
The other billion-dollar companies Musk bragged about in the Cabinet meeting are SpaceX and Tesla. SpaceX is also privately owned, so Musk doesn’t have to answer to public shareholders in that company, either. Tesla is different. Very different. It is publicly owned, so the CEO, Musk, is answerable to millions of individual shareholders. But Musk and his entrepreneurial moxie are also crucial parts of the Tesla brand. Plus, Musk is Tesla’s biggest shareholder, with 13% of the company. His role as co-founder, CEO, large shareholder, and face of the company gives him far more control over Tesla than almost any other CEO of a large public company.
Applying Muskonomics to the US government actually leads to two questions. One, should it be run like a business, and two, should it be run like an Elon Musk business. The answer to both questions is an easy no.
There’s nothing wrong with financial and performance audits of the US government. The Government Accounting Agency, or GAO, actually does that all the time. So do other oversight branches.
There’s a big difference, though, between the mission of the government and the mission of a for-profit company. This is where the biggest fallacy of Musk’s DOGE mentality resides. You can’t measure the performance of a government agency the way you measure the performance of a for-profit company because their missions are dramatically different.
For-profit companies in a capitalist economy have one basic job: make money. A CEO’s job is to maximize shareholder value, and the market measures whether that is happening every trading day through the stock price.
The government is an anti-corporation. Its job is to do the things the market does poorly, or not at all, because there’s no way to make money doing them in a way that serves the public interest. That’s why the government is responsible for national defense, foreign relations, protecting the vulnerable, building and maintaining infrastructure, and enforcing laws that apply equally to everybody. If a for-profit company ran the US military, there’d never be enough troops or weapons for the worst-case scenarios that are a staple of military planning but anathema to cost-cutters.
The government provides taxpayer value, which, unlike shareholder value, isn’t assessed every day in the markets. But the public does assess taxpayer value every two or four years, when there are elections. Voters don’t want their taxpayer dollars wasted, but they certainly do want the trains to run on time and the potholes to get fixed. Once the government fails to fulfill its basic duties, its stock plunges via falling approval ratings and the bosses get fired in elections.
Musk is applying corporate strategy — and an odd one, at that — to the anti-corporation. He’s confusing shareholder value with taxpayer value. He’s also acting like the sole owner of the US government, as if he can Twitterize it into a shell of its former self while the best anybody else can do is grumble.
It's a symptom of Trump’s own fuzzy concept of the businessman president that he’s given Musk as much leash as he has. Trump touts himself as a builder, not a slasher: a dealmaker, not a dictator. As president, Trump will get the bill for whatever Musk breaks, while Musk moves on to whatever catches his attention next.
Maybe Musk should return to where he came from. The biggest source of his wealth, Tesla, is facing a crisis of its own as Musk’s newly radical political agenda degrades the electric car company’s image as an environmental do-gooder. Tesla’s stock has plunged more than 50% since late December, which may be the market telling Musk he needs to spend more time on his own company and less on outside projects. Musk’s own personal fortune has lost $150 billion in value during that time, mainly through the falling value of his Tesla shares.
There's one consolation for Musk, though: He’s still rich enough to listen to nobody but himself, including six bankruptcies. But voters dismissed the disses and went for a businessman president.
Rick Newman is a senior columnist for Yahoo Finance. Follow him on Bluesky and X: @rickjnewman.
