Episode 18: Democracy Deleted: Musk, DOGE, and the Unraveling of America

Episode Summary

In the final chapter of our six-part Musk series, Bella Goode delivers a powerful reckoning with the fallout of Elon Musk’s DOGE regime—a techno-authoritarian experiment that has left America's democratic infrastructure gasping for air.

Far beyond a failed efficiency program, DOGE has become a vehicle for chaos, control, and collapse. With institutions gutted, benefits blocked, and public trust in freefall, Episode 18 dives into the devastating human cost of Musk’s governance and the deeper ideology that powers it.

From the IRS layoffs in Ogden to the rise of Orbán-style illiberalism, we expose the radical worldview reshaping our country—and ask whether democracy can survive in a system rebuilt for billionaires, by billionaires.

In This Episode:

The IRS Shutdown – How DOGE’s mass firings at the IRS led to a $500B tax shortfall and a wave of unchecked corporate tax evasion.

Ogden, Utah in Crisis – The heart-wrenching impact of DOGE layoffs on working-class communities, with interviews from displaced workers and local leaders.

Musk’s AI Catastrophe – From frozen Social Security payments to algorithmic cruelty, we examine how Musk’s “innovation” is terrorizing vulnerable families.

The Human Factor – Why Musk’s obsession with optimization—and disregard for empathy—has turned reform into ruin.

Chaos as a Strategy – How Musk uses disinformation, crisis cycles, and media distraction to deflect blame and consolidate power.

The Authoritarian Network – Musk’s ideological alignment with Viktor Orbán, Curtis Yarvin, and Peter Thiel—and how DOGE reflects their shared vision for post-democratic rule.

10 Pillars of Democracy Under Attack – A sweeping breakdown of how DOGE is systematically dismantling the foundations of a free society.

The Verdict – Why Musk has failed as a government leader, and why that failure is not just dangerous—it’s existential.

Next Episode

Our next episode takes a deep dive into Project 2025- the blueprint causing all the chaos. 

Transcript

Bella Goode  00:01

Hey everyone. It's Bella Goode and welcome to Surviving Trump. Today, I bring you the final chapter in our investigative series on Elon Musk. I'm suspicious that this will be a long episode, one of my longest, but believe me, it's going to be worth your time. We dig beneath the surface to understand just who this person is. It's a bit terrifying, and quite frankly, I can't wrap my mind around someone like this, slowly but surely dismantling our government. 

Over the past five episodes, we've tracked his rise, his grip on federal agencies through DOGE and the destruction left in his wake. But what you're about to hear, I think, goes a little bit further. This isn't about just one billionaire gone rogue. It's about the intentional redesign of American government, where public institutions are gutted, human beings are being replaced by code, and democracy itself is rebranded as inefficiency. 

In this episode, we explore the real fallout of DOGE, the broken systems, the families left behind, the institutions now buckling under the weight of Musk's techno authoritarian ideology. God, that's a mouthful. I should have changed those words, anyway, now buckling under the weight of Musk's techno authoritarian ideology, we look at the human factor, what Musk refuses to understand and why that refusal is central to his failure. We examine the web of radical influences shaping his actions, from Victor Orban to Curtis Yarvin to Peter Thiel and the tech bro aristocracy. 

And finally, we trace the chilling dismantling of America's 10 pillars of democratic freedom. This is more than a wrap up it's a reckoning. And if you think Musk is done, you better think again. So the Department of Government Efficiency, otherwise known as DOGE- and I told you before, I used to call it DOG-E but I've seen the ways I've changed now, and I'm now calling it DOGE- spearheaded by Elon Musk, was pitched as a revolutionary way to trim federal waste, eliminate bureaucratic inefficiency, and inject Silicon Valley style innovation into the US government. 

But in practice, DOGE has become a case study in reckless disruption rather than strategic reform. The initiative has triggered a wave of mass terminations, service failures and unintended consequences that are rippling across the nation. Take the Social Security Administration, for example, a program that has long been one of the most effective, efficient and fraud resistant arms of the federal government. Despite this, Elon Musk's DOGE has singled it out as a prom target in his crusade against so called government waste. Under the guise of rooting out fraud, Musk is attacking a system that has lifted millions of seniors out of poverty and remains one of the most trusted social safety nets in American history. But why is he doing this? It's a question I always ask. 

One reason for the chaos is plain incompetence. Would you believe that? Musk brought in young tech hires, most with no background in government systems, who didn't understand how the Social Security Administration's databases actually worked. They wrongly concluded that millions of dead people were still receiving benefits. Musk took that misinformation and ran with it, blasting out the claim that without fact checking, and now, instead of admitting that he was wrong, his oversized ego won't let him back down, so he keeps doubling down, making even more outrageous claims about fraud. 

Meanwhile, in the name of stopping fraud that doesn't exist, DOGE is actively dismantling one of the most critical agencies serving America's seniors. An alternative answer of him, why does he do it? Why is he doing it? An alternative answer sees the damage to Social Security as part of a deliberate scheme to undermine public faith in the government and to create an opening for lucrative privatization schemes. It's curious that DOGE hasn't so much as hinted about doing something about the overpayments to Medicare Advantage Plans run by private insurers, which we know are costing taxpayers 10s of billion dollars a year. From this perspective, it's not just a mistake, it's intentional. 

Musk and his allies see weakening the Social Security Administration as a feature, not a flaw. Undermining the safety net fits perfectly into their broader agenda, dismantle publicprograms, create chaos and make space for private profiteering. So which is it, incompetence or malice? Well, honestly, I think it's both. Musk is reckless and he's ruthless. He suffers from billionaire brain, the belief that being rich makes you right, that systems you don't understand must be broken, and that if you disrupt enough, something brilliant will magically emerge. But when you apply that kind of arrogance to something as vital as Social Security, the result isn't innovation, it's cruelty. 

Quite frankly, he shares those traits with Donald Trump, which makes them allies, although I do keep wondering when their egos are going to collide. DOGE has wreaked havoc on other social safety net programs. Take, for example, Musk's self proclaimed AI fraud detection system, which flags Social Security payments to children as suspicious. As Barry Kaufmann, president of the Alliance for Retired Americans in New York, pointed out at a recent rally, DOGE claims to have found Social Security payments going to 11 years old and under. It's called a survivor benefit annuity to young children whose parents have passed on and that's the problem with IT programmers and billionaires without a clue doing a job that they don't understand. That cold, algorithm driven approach has led to 1000s of disabled veterans and widowed parents having their benefits frozen, flagged or denied outright, often with no explanation and no recourse. 

DOGE is moving to downsize the Social Security Administration with Office closures, cutbacks on phone services and new rules requiring in person visits for some prospective beneficiaries to register. And DOGE is making those changes without consulting or notifying some of the most senior lawmakers on Capitol Hill who oversee Social Security, apparently, they're giving him a pass. It's easier than getting Trump all worked up. And here's another prime example, the IRS. Nowhere is the damage clearer than that, the Internal Revenue Service. 

Once a cornerstone of federal revenue collection the IRS has been gutted. DOGE has already axed 11,000 IRS employees with total layoffs expected to surpass 20,000 these cuts have paralyzed the agency's ability to function. According to The Washington Post, the Treasury Department now estimates a $500 billion shortfall in tax revenue for 2025 a stunning 10% drop from the 5.1 trillion collected the previous year. To put that in perspective, the US spends about 825 billion annually on the Department of Defense. That means DOGE has created a funding gap equivalent to more than half of the Pentagon's entire budget. 

This isn't an efficiency gain, it's fiscal sabotage. And beyond the budget, the human toll is undeniable. The IRS, already operating on tight margins, is now in survival mode. Agency's officials have been forced to abandon investigations into high income individuals and major corporations simply because there aren't enough staffers to pursue them. Two commissioners have resigned in protest. The head of compliance abruptly stepped down, leaving a leadership vacuum at a critical moment. Meanwhile, the effects are beginning to show in public behavior. The IRS has received 1.7% fewer returns than at this point in the 2024 filing season, and there's been a spike in online forums where users openly discuss their plans to skip paying taxes, gambling on the agency's inability to audit them. 

As always, it's not everyday workers with the W2s who exploit these gaps, it's the wealthy whose incomes are harder to track and who stand to gain the most from a weakened IRS. What about his math? What about Musk's math? Progressive Caucus Chair, Representative Greg Casar recently summed up the crisis with two figures. First, $8 million per day. That's what Elon Musk receives in federal contracts. $8 million per day he receives in federal contracts. The second figure, $65 per day, the average Social Security benefit received by a senior citizen who spent a lifetime working. It's enough to make you cry. 

Musk's DOGE program hasn't eliminated waste. It has redirected taxpayer money from the vulnerable to the powerful. It's not draining the swamp as some had hoped. It's draining people's livelihoods, while tech oligarchs rake in the subsidies contracts and the influence. So it begs the question, has he failed thus far in his mission? I suppose it depends upon who you ask, but here's my assessment. To assess whether Elon Musk has failed in his mission, we have to first ask, What exactly was that mission? On the surface? DOGE was marketed as a technocratic revolution, an attempt to optimize the federal government using principles borrowed from engineering automation and the private sector disruption. Musk promised to eliminate redundancy, increase speed and strip out what he called the legacy bloat in the federal bureaucracy. 

But beneath that, language is a far more radical aim, to fundamentally redefine how the government functions, not as a democratic institution built on service deliberation and equality and equity, but as a machine to be debugged, recoded and streamlined by elite technicians. Musk wasn't trying to run a government better, he was trying to remake it in his own image, and by that measure, yes, he has failed in his mission. Quite frankly, the metrics don't add up. The most obvious failure is quantitative. For a man obsessed with numbers, the math is damning. DOGE promised to save taxpayers billions, but its projected loss to the Treasury 500 billion in 2025 alone due to a weakened IRS enforcement. That's not efficiency. It's a hemorrhage. 

Essential services that have slowed or collapsed, delayed veterans benefits, backlogged FAA inspections and blocked USDA loans aren't bugs,they're features of a system that wasn't stress tested against human need. Efficiency without effectiveness. Musk's obsession with optimization comes from a world where success is defined by shareholder value and speed to market, but governing isn't about doing things faster. It's about doing the right things, fairly and with accountability. His attempts to flatten organizational hierarchies and slash middle management might work in a startup, but in public institutions, those layers serve essential functions, compliance, oversight, ethics, public transparency. When you gut those, you don't get a leaner system. You get one that leaks cracks and eventually collapses under its own weight. 

DOGE also rests on a dangerous assumption that government should function like a business. Musk's entire playbook relies on importing private sector logic into the public sphere. Lay off staff, automate decisions, move fast, break things, but the state doesn't exist to turn a profit or to chase quarterly growth. It exists to serve people. Applying business metrics to government work has led to predictable failures, agencies paralyzed by workforce cuts, AI programs flagging vulnerable citizens for fraud, and a growing public distrust in the institutions meant to protect them. He has no support system. He has no allies, and he has no plan B. Great reforms require coalition building institutional trust and implementation strategies that include guard rails for potential failure. Musk has none of these. 

Instead of building partnerships with agencies, he waged war on career civil servants, instead of working with lawmakers to make policy, he's been running things by executive orders and X announcements, (X meaning Twitter). Instead of collaborating with experts, he's surrounded himself with loyalists and fringe nut cases. He has no fallback plan, no exit strategy, and no meaningful ability to course correct when things go wrong and they have gone very, very wrong. So has Elon Musk failed in his mission. If the goal was to consolidate power, he has succeeded for now. If the goal was to weaken institutions, he's done that too. But if the mission was to prove that a private sector genius could run the federal government better than career professionals, then yes, he has failed spectacularly. 

What DOGE has shown us is that government is not a machine to be re-engineered, but a living system made up of people, laws, values and history, it can evolve, but not at the speed of a tweet, not through force, not without care. And Elon Musk, for all his intelligence and ambition, has proven that he doesn't understand that difference. So why has he failed in so many ways? Well, I think at the core of Musk's failure to perform effectively is not a lack of intelligence or ambition, for sure, it's a fundamental misunderstanding of people in business, government and society at large, human beings are not just variables to optimize. They are the system Musk's signature flaw, the one that defines DOGE's collapse and shadows all his ventures, is his disregard for the human factor. 

Leadership Is NOT engineering. It's not code. It's culture, trust, perception, fear, motivation and identity. Musk appears to grasp none of this, or worse, to actively dismiss it as irrelevant. For one thing, he's maniacal about efficiency, but cares less about empathy. He approaches systems the way that an engineer approaches a machine, identify the friction points, remove redundant parts, increase the speed, but humans are not mechanical. When you remove them, when you fire 20,000 workers in the name of efficiency, you're not just reducing head count, you're severing institutional memory, destroying morale and rupturing the connective tissue that holds these agencies together. Federal employees aren't cogs. Many are public servants with decades of experience operating under immense constraints to deliver services that affect millions of lives. 

Musk's failure to acknowledge that to see the value in their experience and commitment has turned what could have been a reform effort into a campaign of alienation and destruction. He commands without connection. Musk governs by impulse, not engagement. He issues decrees via tweet or press conference and then expects compliance from the agencies that have spent years developing intricate policies and systems. There is no dialog, no context, no buy in. The result is predictable, confusion, resentment, pushback. Civil servants don't resist reform because they're lazy or incompetent. They resist when they're excluded, devalued and or targeted. Musk never tried to bring these people along with him, he didn't try to build consensus, he didn't listen, and he failed. Change management is people management. Every successful organizational transformation hinges on one thing, whether the people inside the system believe in it. 

At Tesla and SpaceX Musk built a mythology around his mission, an electric future, a multi planet species, he tapped into something emotional. But with DOGE, there's no vision beyond destruction. There is no aspirational North Star, just budget cuts and bots. That's not leadership, it's called abstraction. Real change requires emotional intelligence. It requires empathy, patience, the ability to inspire and to absorb criticism. Musk instead treats dissent as disloyalty. That might work in a startup where employees are tethered to stock options, but in government where accountability is public and trust is everything, it's a recipe for collapse. He's also building a culture of fear inside DOGE and in the agencies it has touched. Fear is now the dominant workplace emotion, fear of termination, fear of public humiliation, fear of an algorithm flagging your work as inefficient and triggering the job loss. 

When fear becomes the organizing principle of a system, innovation stops. It ceases to exist. Communication breaks down. People play defense, not offense. They hide problems instead of solving them. That's the culture that Musk has created, paranoid, brittle and unstable the opposite of creative problem solving. Musk views people as obstacles, not as stakeholders. And perhaps that is his gravest miscalculation, whether federal workers or the American public. He sees them as obstacles instead of stakeholders in a shared democratic project as inefficiencies to be managed. But government isn't just a workforce. It's the way society touches the lives of its people. 

When you cut a USDA loan officer, you're not trimming fat. You're denying a farmer access to his livelihood. When you gut the FAA, you're not optimizing, you're risking lives in the sky. When you freeze Social Security payments with no human review, you're not innovating, you're terrorizing vulnerable families. Musk's machine logic doesn't account for that. It sees the output, not the impact. One of the most ironic aspects of Musk's failure is that in tech, user feedback is gold. Product teams iterate constantly based on how people respond. But in government, he's ignored every signal. Employee whistleblowers, resignations, declining service, metrics, lawsuits, even public protests. He discards it all as noise. He doesn't understand that in the public sector, emotion is data. Anger, frustration, fear. These are warning signs. They are not irrational. They are instructive. And he has failed to listen. Quite frankly, there are limits to intellectual supremacy. 

Musk may be one of the smartest people on Earth, but leadership requires more than intellect. It demands humility. It demands the recognition that other people know things that you don't, that their lived experience, institutional knowledge and human intuition are just as vital as your friggin IQ. I get annoyed. Musk doesn't seem to believe that. And that belief, I think, is his Achilles heel. He believes that he can out think systems that took generations to build. He believes he can out code human nature, but the truth is, no algorithm can replace empathy and no metric can capture dignity. No KPI can govern a society. In the end, it's people who decide. 

Government works or fails based on whether people show up, whether they trust the system, whether they believe that their work, their taxes, their participation, matters, and under DOGE, that trust is eroding fast, because people know when they're being treated as collateral and when they stop believing that's not just a policy failure, it's a democratic crisis. So how is he managing with all this chaos that he's created? If Elon Musk's fundamental failure is his inability to understand people, then his method of navigating that failure is to outrun it. Where others may pause reflect course correct, Musk,he goes faster, he accelerates, he steps on the gas. He creates movement, noise, friction, headlines, not as a byproduct of the crisis, but as his chosen route. 

Chaos isn't a bug in his operating system, it's his modus operandi. Throughout his career, Musk has thrived on volatility. From his earliest days at PayPal to his battles with regulators at Tesla and his scorched earth acquisition of X, his pattern is clear; disrupt first deal with the wreckage later, if at all. In many cases, it's worked. He's built cars that have reshaped an industry, rockets that land themselves, and a global persona that's somewhere between tech God and internet troll. But the same instincts that built his empire are now undermining it. There's also disruption in his lifestyle. Musk doesn't just tolerate disorder. He manufactures it. His management style relies on constant pivoting, gut instincts and a belief that structures the enemy of innovation. It's a world view that worships the startup hustle and dismisses process as weakness. 

When you scale that world view to the federal government, where continuity and predictability are not bugs but features, the result is systematic destabilization. Agencies are not startups. Social Security is not a product beta test. You can't do a marketing test of veteran healthcare. You have to get it right the first time. What's worse is that Musk appears to be addicted to the adrenaline of instability. When things begin to settle, he disrupts again. He craves the chaos because it gives him control. It keeps people off balance. It creates an environment where he alone appears to understand the rules, because he's the one that's rewriting them in real time, his chaos is strategic. 

He has learned that when the narrative is moving fast, accountability lags behind. If people are focused on the latest controversy, whether it's a bizarre tweet celebrity feud or a half baked AI declaration, they're not scrutinizing the structural damage that's being done. This tactic was on full display during his early months at X, while the media coverage obsessed over his personal antics and his meme posts, the platform quietly gutted safety teams reinstated banned extremists and turned into a haven for disinformation. The outrage cycle became a smoke screen for a deeper, more permanent change. It happened, and now he's running the same playbook with DOGE. While the public reacts to the latest round of firings or an offensive sound bite, entire departments are being hollowed out. Lives are being disrupted, institutions are being broken, and the chaos makes it harder for anybody to track the full scope of the damage. 

There's also another question at the heart of this chaos, is he really okay? Is he mentally okay? His behavior in recent years has become increasingly erratic. Reports of late night ketamine use, public feuds with journalists and investors, erratic decision making at Tesla and SpaceX and an obsession with online grievance narratives paint a picture of a man not in control, but controlled by his impulses. Tesla stock has dropped significantly since mid December. His flagship Cyber Truck, once a symbol of futuristic innovation, is now a meme for manufacturing failure, plagued by recalls and design flaws. His own investors are banging him to step down, and his leadership at DOGE has resulted in dysfunction so deep, two IRS commissioners and the head of compliance have resigned as I said earlier. It's hard not to look at this and ask, is this a strategy, or is it a meltdown? 

His personal life, too, is unraveling in ways that would derail most public figures. His daughter has publicly disavailed him. Former partners and employees describe him as volatile and detached. His company's reputation has been stained by labor violations, safety issues and internal dissent, and yet he remains in power, not because he's succeeding, but because he's built systems too dependent on his brand to eject him without consequences. This is the paradox, his life is in disarray, but his influence is intact. The federal government, SpaceX, Tesla, X, they're all for now still running, but they are running like overloaded servers, glitchy, unpredictable and vulnerable to collapse. His chaos hasn't destroyed the machine yet, but it's destabilizing everything around it. 

So this begs the question, you know, so where do we go from here? What is he capable of? Three months into Trump's second term, DOGE is no longer an experiment, it's the new normal, and Musk isn't just steering the machine, he's reshaping the US government with fewer checks than ever before. In this short time span, he's already executed mass layoffs across federal agencies, destabilized the IRS and triggered massive delays in public services. He's moved fast, often without consultation or oversight, relying on executive authority and Trump's full backing. 

The question now isn't if Musk has influence, it's how far he's going to take that influence, because even amid mounting failures, Elon Musk remains extraordinarily capable and danger. Despite the public backlash and early signs of institutional breakdown, Musk continues to amass control over government functions that traditionally belong to public servants, with Trump's endorsement and the DOJ looking the other way, DOGE has expanded its scope from tax enforcement to infrastructure, communications and and public benefit systems. He now oversees programs that touch millions of lives, from Social Security algorithms to federal IT procurement. 

This is not theoretical, it's already happening. His reach is stretching further by the day, and there's no clear mechanism in place to stop him. Musk's genius is not just in what he builds, but in how he sells failure as progress. You've heard this with his reports on DOGE, slash services, that's cutting waste, mass resignations, that's draining the swamp, algorithmic errors that block disabled disability payments, that's AI modernization. Because Musk controls his own media ecosystem via X. He frames the narrative. He buries critique under memes, fuels distractions with culture war rhetoric and rallies his base of loyal technophiles and anti government populists. In this media fog, institutional collapse is repackaged as innovation, accountability becomes almost impossible, even now, Musk is laying the groundwork for more control. 

His companies are bidding for contracts to digitize voter ID systems, federal benefits and even refugee intake programs. He's proposed a nationwide biometric ID linked to X accounts. My God, I can't imagine. And there's chatter inside of DOGE about creating a parallel digital citizens portal that would centralize access to all federal services overseen by a Musk backed tech consortium. Now don't get me wrong, I think the idea of a portal that you could access and gain access to a lot of information about your benefits and things like that, and it's not a bad idea. Is the problem is how he goes about it, and how he's running it, how he's building it. That's the problem that I have. In other words, the infrastructure of governance is being quietly re-coded in Silicon Valley's image under the guise of efficiency. 

And with Trump back in office and Congress fractured and court decisions uncertain, Musk is operating in a power vacuum. Unless Watch Dogs, whistleblowers, state attorneys general or an unexpected Republican defection intervene, he will continue to expanding DOGE's reach. This isn't just a crisis of governance, it's a crisis of sovereignty, we are witnessing the transformation of public institutions into private networks. If Musk succeeds, it sets a precedent that one billionaire can act as a shadow government unto himself, unaccountable, unelected and uninterested in the Democratic project. The Chaos he's created is also his greatest vulnerability. Federal employees are speaking out. Lawsuits are beginning to mount. Cities are organizing, and the public is waking up to the cost of treating governance like a startup. 

The next chapter of his life, the next next chapter of our lives, will depend upon whether institutions, activists and voters can force accountability faster than Musk can entrench himself. Because while Elon Musk may be capable of extraordinary things, so are we, and I just want to say one more thing about Musk. Who is it that's whispering in his ear? If you want to understand where his vision for America is heading, you have to look at who's whispering in his ear and funding his rise. Because Musk may be the face of DOGE, but he's far from alone. His power is buttressed by an ideological constellation of authoritarian thinkers and billionaire tech elites who believe that democracy is not just inefficient, it's obsolete, and in Trump's second term, their influence is no longer theoretical. It's policy. 

Musk has fused the authoritarian playbook of Viktor Orban and the anti-democratic philosophy of Curtis Yarvin and now, thanks to figures like Peter Thiel and his network of crypto financed libertarians, that fusion is gaining real world infrastructure. Victor Orban is Hungary's Prime Minister. He's pioneered the concept of an illiberal democracy where elections still happen, but every institution, media outlet and court system is stacked to ensure the outcome never really changes. I call it DIMO; democracy in name only, D, I, M, O. Musk and Orban share more than the occasional tweet. Orban has visited Musk at one of his facilities. They talk about AI, the crisis of the Western culture and demographic collapse. Since then, Musk has repeatedly echoed orban's language, laments birth rates, demonizes globalist elites. That's ironic, isn't it? And bemoans the decline of civilizational values. He clearly has a different definition than I do. 

His platform X now regularly amplifies orbans propaganda with favorable algorithmic treatment for far right content and friendly interviews with sympathetic influencers like Tucker Carlson. The resemblance isn't rhetorical, it's structural. DOGE is replicating Orban's strategy in real time, hollowing out independent institutions, demonizing dissent and building alternative media channels to drown out criticism. The goal is control, not through tanks in the street, but through levers of bureaucracy and information flow. And then there's Curtis Yarvin, the Neo reactionary blogger and former software engineer who has become the unlikely philosopher king of Silicon Valley's anti democracy movement. 

Yarvin believes liberal democracy is a failure, and has argued that governments should be replaced by sovereign joint stock corporations led by a single executive chosen by shareholders and immune to public accountability. Sound familiar? Musk hasn't publicly endorsed Yarvin, but DOGE reads like a love letter to his ideas. Agencies are being dismantled and reorganized under a centralized CEO style command structure, with Musk himself as the unaccountable executive. Accountability has been replaced with automation, public service replaced with private contracts. In Yarvin's vision, consent of the governed is an outdated relic. In Musk's version of government, it's simply irrelevant. 

And then there's Peter Thiel, the money behind the movement. None of this would have been possible without the money, and that's where Peter comes in, Peter Thiel. He's a billionaire co founder of PayPal and Planeteer, has spent the last decade quietly funding a counter democratic insurgency from inside America's tech elite. He has bankrolled the Senate campaigns of JD Vance and Blake masters. He supported Trump's 2024 comeback, and he's a lifelong financial backer of Curtis Yarvin's work, whatever that is. Now, Thiel's fingerprints are all over DOGE. Several of his former proteges, including David Sacks and Alex Karp, are now embedded in advisory roles across DOGE, or they're involved in adjacent contracting firms. Palantir, Thiel's data analytics company, has secured multiple federal contracts under DOGE, many without public bid, and Thiel himself has reportedly met with both Musk and Trump to discuss expanding DOGE's role into federal law enforcement, data and border surveillance. 

Thiel doesn't hide his motives. He once wrote that he no longer believes freedom and democracy are compatible. Like Musk, he sees popular sovereignty as a threat to efficiency and to wealth. Musk and Thiel are part of a larger ecosystem. It's the tech bro aristocracy that blends Ayn Rand's economics with anti-democratic ambition. Figures like David Sacks and venture capital firms like Andreessen Horowitz have created a cultural and financial network that advances this ideology across media, policy and public perception. They write the manifestos, they fund the think tanks. They launch the podcasts, and they buy the platforms. From crypto to AI to DOGE. They are building the scaffolding for post- for a post democratic system where citizenship is replaced by user accounts, voting by tokens and governance by shareholder decree, and they're doing it under the banner of freedom. 

You know, the connective tissue amongst Orban, Yarvin, Thiel and Musk is simple. It's a belief that democracy, true democracy is the problem. It slows things down. It empowers the poor. It imposes rules on the rich, and it gets in the way of visionaries. What they offer instead is a streamlined future; a state run like a company, a population managed by algorithms, a leader who doesn't answer to the people but to shareholders, or worse, just to himself. It's not just policy, it's a world view, and Musk is at the tip of its spear. It's a lot to digest, but ultimately, there is an impact, of course, on democracy and our freedoms. 

The danger of Musk's DOGE regime isn't just about malfunctioning government systems or displaced workers. It's about something far deeper, far more dangerous, a direct assault on the infrastructure of democracy itself. What we are witnessing is not reform. It's a redesign. It's a reshaping of governance in which the democracy becomes secondary, an obstacle to be engineered around, not a principle to be protected. And as this project unfolds under the banner of efficiency, it's quietly dismantling the pillars that uphold a free society. Look at how Musk's initiatives are undermining the core of pillars and are undermining our freedoms free and fair elections for example. 

Musk may not control ballots, but he controls the platform where political narratives are shaped that being X. It's become a megaphone for election denialism, for disinformation and conspiracy driven extremism by throttling journalists, promoting partisan influencers and amplifying anti democracy content Musk is undermining the conditions required for informed, fair voting. He's also sidelined the legal process by bypassing regulatory agencies and internal oversight. Musk and his allies treat court rulings as optional. With a Trump loyal DOJ at the helm, enforcement is selective. This erodes the judiciary's role as a check on executive power, transforming law into a suggestion. Then there's free press. 

Through X, Musk has turned a vital communication platform into an anti media weapon. He's attacked and banned reporters. He's spread propaganda. He's turned public discourse into a disinformation marketplace. Meanwhile, traditional journalism is defunded and drowned out. Without a robust free press, democracy can't breathe. And there's separations of power. DOGE consolidates legislative, executive and administrative authority into one, unelective office led by Musk.Congress has been effectively sidelined with little transparency into DOGE's decisions or contracting processes. This power of centralization is a quiet constitutional crisis hiding in plain sight. Civil Service neutrality, the apolitical nature of public service, is a cornerstone of democratic governance. DOGE has politicized civil service, weaponized layoffs and replaced expertise with ideology. 

Career professionals are purged or silenced, and loyalty to Musk's world view has become an unspoken prerequisite equal protection under the law, while automation and AI tools introduced under DOGE are already producing discriminatory outcomes. Social programs are being denied based on flawed algorithms. Oversight, minimal legal recourse is disappearing. If you're poor, disabled, undocumented, or simply unlucky, you're likely to face a system that no longer protects you. And then there's government's transparency, or not. DOGE is a black box. Decisions are made behind closed doors. Algorithms are proprietary. Contracts were awarded without public bids. 

Oversight Committees are being stonewalled. The public has little idea how decisions are being made and who's making them, or how to appeal them. DOGE related protests in places like Ogden, Utah have already seen escalated police responses and surveillance. With Musk's companies also developing facial recognition tools and a satellite surveillance infrastructure, there's growing concern that dissent will not just be discouraged, but tracked. And then there's education and information. Musk and his allies, particularly Trump and his anti intellectual advisors, are waging a war on Education. Funding for libraries, public universities and scientific institutions are being gutted. 

DOGE has proposed slashing education related agencies entirely. The less informed the public, the more easily it can be manipulated. And then finally, the bedrock principle that government must serve the people and answer to them. DOGE flips us upside down to system designed to insulate power, not to share it, to automate decision making, not to democratize it, to extract data, not to deliver justice. He answers to shareholders, not citizens, and it has vision of the future. That's exactly how it should be. This kind of takes the power away from voters and puts it into the hands of the people behind the screens, the kind that treats citizens more like customers than participants in a democracy. We are not heading towards some dystopian scenario. We're living it right now. 

You've just heard the final episode of my Musk series, and maybe now you see what I see. This isn't just about Elon Musk. It's about what happens when we hand the machinery of democracy to somebody who doesn't believe in democracy at all. It's about what we lose when power is consolidated in the hands of one man or one ideology that sees people as data points, systems as toys and freedom as the inefficiency to be erased. In just three months, DOGE has become the prototype for a post democratic future, one where algorithms replace accountability, one where billionaires write policy, where governance becomes government's- governance as a service, optimized, monetized and stripped of a soul. But we're not powerless. We are the counterbalance. 

For our next episode, we take a deep dive into Project 2025; the blueprint causing all the chaos. I do have two favors to ask join the conversation. The transcript links for this episode are all available, so let's talk. Drop a comment, ask a question, push back on ideas. This isn't just a podcast, it's a community. Tell me what you think. Love the show. Let me know. Have a critique. I want that too. Your feedback shapes what comes next. And hey, follow me on Blue Sky, let's keep the discussion going. 

And on that note, I leave you with some humor from Borowitz, the comedian. Dateline Washington, from Borowitz; Defending his decision to use an insecure messaging app to discuss classified war plans, National Security Advisor Mike Waltz said on Wednesday that he chose Signal because it offered more emojis. "Those sleeze bags at Atlantic are acting like using Signals some kind of scandal. You want to know, a real scandal? The government spent billions of dollars on a secure communication system that has zero emojis." Waltz says that he refused to use the Government system when it became clear to him that it lacked even rudimentary emojis like fist, fire and a smiley face. "I stand by my decision to use Signal when you're planning to bomb another country, an emoji is worth 1000 oh my god, and lots of laughs." 

Until next time, stay engaged, stay informed, and most importantly, stay in the fight. This is Bella Goode, signing off.