The primary 100 days of Donald Trump’s second presidency have confirmed universally horrible— until 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. This can be a yearslong challenge, 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 “didn’t exhibit that it may ship the promised service.”
In fact, merely having a worse, costlier product ought to be no bar to Musk making a living, 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 in relation 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 an alternative. Don’t ask how the federal government can shuffle billions from one firm to a different like this. It could’t, nevertheless it looks like it’s going to.
Golden Dome: Unknown billions
Apparently, we’re constructing a missile protection protect, Golden Dome, as a result of someway we’re caught within the Eighties and must hold 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 lots of 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 monumental pile of defense-contractor cash. SpaceX’s proposal is that it might personal the expertise and lease it again to the federal government through subscription. Sure, similar to a vastly costlier Adobe Photoshop subscription.
NASA telescope launch providers: $100 million
This one’s slightly deal with, kind of an amuse-bouche, so small as to virtually not be price mentioning. NASA has given SpaceX $100 million to supply launch providers for a large telescope that may 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 navy: Virtually $6 billion
No, this isn’t a double entry. This can be a completely different launch supplier contract, and now SpaceX would be the prime launch supplier to the U.S. navy, getting near $6 billion of your cash to do it. The difficulty isn’t whether or not SpaceX is an applicable selection for this. As with the NASA providers, SpaceX has a profitable report offering this kind of factor. But in addition, as with the NASA providers, 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 corporations merely disappearing.
Blumenthal discovered that Musk and his corporations face “at the very least 65 precise or potential actions by 11 completely different federal businesses.” Blumenthal’s estimate was based mostly 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—seemingly implies that investigations into Tesla’s shoddy self-driving expertise, for instance, will likely be memory-holed shortly, by no means to bother Musk’s pocketbook once more.
Free Tesla promoting: In all probability not as helpful as Musk hoped
Confronted with plummeting Tesla inventory costs, Musk didn’t must do something that normie CEOs must do, like reduce prices, scale back stock, or rethink advertising and marketing. No, he simply acquired 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 knowledge: Priceless
All of those billions pale compared to what permitting DOGE to infiltrate authorities knowledge programs does: It provides Musk entry to knowledge 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 acquired entry to delicate labor knowledge, that knowledge seems to have, effectively, 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 knowledge privateness collapsed below the DOGE onslaught, it might have been inconceivable to suppose {that a} non-public actor may get their mitts on People’ most vital, most private knowledge. Now it appears inconceivable to suppose Musk doesn’t have already got it.
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