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 carry high-speed web to rural, underserved areas. It is a yearslong venture, and it’s been centered round fiber-optic web, which is cheaper in the long term and sooner than Musk’s satellite tv for pc web service, Starlink. Additionally, like all Musk corporations, 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 “failed to demonstrate that it could deliver the promised service.”
After all, merely having a worse, costlier product ought to be no bar to Musk being profitable, so the federal government is now rewriting the BEAD guidelines to get rid of the “extreme tech bias in favor of fiber,” as Trump’s choose 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 with regards to 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 like 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 Nineteen Eighties and should maintain making an attempt to invent former President Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Protection Initiative, aka Star Wars. The truth that the expertise principally nonetheless doesn’t exist and, if it may very well 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 corporations owned by conservative weirdos, becoming a member of with Peter Thiel’s Palantir and Palmer Luckey’s Anduril to jockey for this new huge pile of defense-contractor cash. SpaceX’s proposal is that it could personal the expertise and lease it again to the federal government by way of subscription. Sure, identical to a vastly costlier Adobe Photoshop subscription.
NASA telescope launch companies: $100 million
This one’s a bit deal with, form of an amuse-bouche, so small as to virtually not be price mentioning. NASA has given SpaceX $100 million to offer launch companies for an enormous telescope that can observe near-Earth objects. To be truthful, 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: Nearly $6 billion
No, this isn’t a double entry. It is a totally different launch supplier contract, and now SpaceX would be the prime 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 selection for this. As with the NASA companies, SpaceX has a profitable report 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
Generally 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 corporations merely disappearing.
Blumenthal discovered that Musk and his corporations face “at least 65 actual or potential actions by 11 different federal agencies.” Blumenthal’s estimate was based mostly on solely 40 of these, as his employees wasn’t in a position to 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 expertise, for instance, will probably be memory-holed shortly, by no means to hassle Musk’s pocketbook once more.
Free Tesla promoting: In all probability not as useful as Musk hoped
Confronted with plummeting Tesla inventory costs, Musk didn’t should do something that normie CEOs must do, like reduce prices, scale 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 lead to extra automobile gross sales?
Authorities information: Priceless
All of those billions pale compared to what permitting DOGE to infiltrate authorities information techniques does: It provides 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 instructed Congress that after DOGE obtained entry to delicate labor information, that information seems to have, nicely, been despatched outdoors the company. There are additionally studies that DOGE tried to show off all monitoring instruments and delete any information of accessing the system.
Earlier than authorities information privateness collapsed beneath the DOGE onslaught, it could have been unattainable to assume {that a} personal actor may get their mitts on People’ most vital, most private information. Now it appears unattainable to assume Musk doesn’t have already got it.
