Elon Musk tanked the U.S. government with a social media post, and now it’s blowing up in his face.
Democrat and Republican legislators painstakingly arranged a bipartisan bill written in order to avoid a government shutdown before the holiday season. The bill was set to pass, but in the early hours of the morning of December 18, Elon Musk undid their weeks’ worth of work in five words: “This bill should not pass.”
Then he wrote many more posts. Musk shot off around a hundred posts lambasting the legislation alongside his DOGE co-chair Vivek Ramaswamy. Donald Trump took notice, and the president-elect and his VP-elect, JD Vance, followed Musk’s lead to blast the bill and demand it be changed. The bill was set to provide paychecks for hundreds of thousands of government employees, as well as disaster relief and subsidies for farmers.
It was also meant to provide $190 billion for cancer research, but Republicans tanked that provision in order to propose a skinnier version of the bill. In response, the internet was righteously furious.
“They’ve chosen billionaire tax cuts over kids with cancer,” wrote Jennifer Wexton, a congressional representative from Virginia. Bad press doesn’t get much worse than this.
The world’s richest man got even richer in recent months. Since Donald Trump won the presidency, Elon Musk’s net worth has ballooned to half a trillion dollars. He was already the richest person in history when his wealth was a little over half that amount. For all his wealth, he won’t be able to buy back his plummeting reputation after this news.
But Musk is going to try. One X user alleged that Musk is attempting to salvage his reputation by adding phony community notes to posts on X; the notes claim the cut cancer research funding was part of a measure separate from the original bill. According to Newsweek and Rolling Stone, that isn’t the case. “Elon had it removed,” the user writes. “It’s that simple.”
Congresswoman Sara Jacobs sees Musk’s meddling in this bill as a taste of what’s to come from DOGE, the cost-cutting organization that Elon Musk is slated to lead under the Trump administration. Musk has declared his intention to slash government spending by $2 trillion, a measure that would jeopardize the social security and healthcare of hundreds of millions of Americans. The billionaire has also pledged to fire countless federal workers and is compiling a “naughty” and “nice” list of employees to keep or terminate based on their loyalty to his goals. According to Rep. Jacobs, childhood cancer research is the first thing on the DOGE chopping block.
And all this just in time for Christmas.
Adding to the irony is the fact that no one actually voted for Elon Musk. By donating a quarter billion dollars to Trump and other Republicans, Musk bought his way into the halls of government. His unprecedented political influence as a private citizen made Rep. Pramila Jayapal refer to him as the United States’ “Shadow President.”
The internet meanwhile is flooded with President Musk memes, and Donald Trump is likely none too happy about it. As the Shadow President rumors abounded, a spokesperson for the president-elect declared that Trump is the “leader of the Republican Party. Full stop.” The fact that was ever in question speaks volumes. Now that Trump and his Republican colleagues are forced to clean up this PR nightmare caused by Musk, bipartisan antipathy towards the billionaire is likely to grow. Antipathy for a man who takes away funding from sick children is well deserved.
Published: Dec 21, 2024 09:53 am