Tesla has the highest fatal accident rate of all auto brands, study finds

Or perhaps he just does it for ego and visibility.

It's hard to tell which of these two options is more likely. 4d chess or simple billionaire egomania ?

What's 4D chess about saying they'll diminish the government capacity to regulate their business and proceeding to doing so? It doesn't take an evil genius master plan to go about that.

The genius would lie in planning that in advance. You'd need to buy Twitter for quite a lot of money, use it to influence elections or at least give the impression that you'd been instrumental in influencing the election so that the new president will want to give you a new department with a funny name you made up.

I don't know man, my Occam's razor cuts another way.

Um, the DOGE is rather a necessity about now.

The USA is ~$36 TRILLION in debt. Interest payments are now consuming ~20% of tax revenue...more than the defense budget. That's insane!

Musk is also absolutely correct about over-regulation and government bureaucracy stifling innovation and economic growth.

Then there's the amazing incompetence often displayed by the current admin... Witness Afghanistan, among many other examples.

Given a two party system, I can only think this election outcome was better than the alternative!

> You'd need to buy Twitter for quite a lot of money

On the other hand, if he had been forced to buy Twitter against his better judgement, he may have an axe to grind against the "overbearing" administrative state and use the tools at hand to achieve his ends. No evil genius required, just happenstance and humans seeing patterns in chaos.

Being “forced” to honor a contract that you yourself entered and legally bound yourself to. The horror, the dishonor, the overreach of justice!

Ever heard of Chestertons fence? Coming into a government for over 300 million people without the faintest clue how it works, removing stuff that doesn’t look too useful is the worst possible strategy to improve efficiency. You don’t renovate with a wrecking ball.

It doesn't take genius for an opportunistic rich person to expand their power and wealth. You're just creating a narrative from a string of cherry picked events. The Twitter acquisition also destroyed a ton of value.

It is not a department.

Indeed, it's a Presidential advisory commission.

To create a federal executive department you need an act of Congress which is not very efficient.

It's much more efficient to just use the name "department" and bet on the chance that nobody would care about words, meanings, facts and rules.