God Mode: Musk and the Age of Unaccountability
An exposé of one man’s delusions, their consequences, and the system that let him plug in anyway.
PART I: PRETORIA’S BROKEN PRINCE: TRAUMA, POWER, AND THE MYTH OF MERIT
Imagine being born into a world designed to serve only you, and still managing to feel like the outcast.
South Africa, 1971. The air is hot, dry, and white. Not metaphorically—literally. White buses for white kids. White schools with white teachers. White doctors, white playgrounds, white futures. If you’re white, you don’t just have privilege—you have a government-sponsored delusion that your life is totally normal, that everything beyond your perimeter wall isn’t your concern. And the walls are tall. Electrified. And inside them, the elite live like post-colonial royalty. Servants. Swimming pools. Horse stables. Golf courses. Vineyards. And the obligatory generator in case the lights go out, though they rarely do in white zones.
This is the world in which Elon Musk was born: Pretoria, into a wealthy white family with ties to emerald mines in Zambia and all the moral ambiguity that comes with that.
It's apartheid, and he is on the winning team, whether he likes it or not.
But behind the wall is not only privilege and power; there are real monsters, too. And one of them lives in his house.
His father, Errol Musk, is the kind of man who might be a character in a Nabokov novel — if Nabokov hated people more. Wealthy, violent, narcissistic, and as Elon would later allege, emotionally abusive and sexually perverse. Musk has spoken about living in deathly fear of him. One beating left him hospitalised, face crushed, a trauma so severe that teachers didn’t even recognise him the next day. This is what passes for a father in that house.
And Elon? Well. He’s the weird kid. Obsessed with computers. Hyper-intelligent. Fragile. He is the kind of kid who would offer pizza and ice cream to classmates just to be invited to parties, like a broken little diplomat in a private war for social survival. But no matter how many slices he buys, nobody really wants him around. They don’t know what to do with a rich, awkward kid who flinches like a stray dog every time someone raises their voice.
He survives. But he doesn’t forgive. And somewhere in that psychological blast radius, a seed is planted: one that will grow into a man who never wants to be powerless again.
But before Pretoria shaped him, there was another inheritance—one coded in the DNA of his family’s colonial arrogance. To understand Elon Musk, you have to start with the Haldemans: a pair of authoritarian-adoring adventurers who treated apartheid like a luxury resort.
PART II: THE FAMILY TREE HAS ROOTS IN HELL
Before there was Pretoria, there was Saskatchewan. Musk’s maternal grandparents, Joshua Haldeman and Wyn Haldeman, weren’t exactly hippie farmers knitting blankets for world peace. Joshua was a chiropractor, a pilot, an amateur archaeologist, and—by all surviving accounts—an anti-socialist conspiracy enthusiast with a taste for adventure and a bookshelf full of manifestos.
In the late 1940s, when much of the world was trying to scrape Nazi residue off its boots, Joshua was railing against “creeping collectivism” in Canadian newspapers and publishing pamphlets that hinted, without subtlety, that democracy might be overrated. His brand of rugged individualism came dipped in colonial nostalgia and a peculiar affection for libertarian systems—so long as they favored him.
He wasn’t chased out of Canada by oppression. He left because the weather was cold and the political mood too inclusive. So, he packed up Wyn and their six children and flew—yes, literally flew—his family to South Africa. His reasoning? “More sun, more land, fewer rules.”
They didn’t just arrive—they descended. In their own small plane, landing like ideological missionaries in the heart of apartheid. South Africa, to the Haldemans, was an unspoiled frontier. A land where the racial hierarchy was orderly, the government shared their aversion to socialism, and the bureaucracy largely left rich white people alone.
The Haldemans took safaris. They documented “tribes” like Victorian anthropologists. They collected cultural artifacts and rare rocks. Wyn published articles about natural remedies and maternal wisdom. Joshua spoke at lectures about independence and the value of a strong man leading the family, the town, the nation.
He also defended the publication of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion—an antisemitic fabrication—in a party newspaper, and later praised apartheid South Africa as the vanguard of “White Christian Civilization” resisting an “International Conspiracy” of Jewish bankers. Wyn Haldeman shared similar views and, according to her son-in-law, they were both "fanatical" in their support for apartheid and Nazism.
They weren’t running from fascists. They were running with the wind at their backs.
In this sunburned utopia of structural white supremacy, their children thrived. One of those children—Maye Haldeman—would grow up to become a model, a dietitian, and the gateway out for Elon when South Africa started to burn through its protective myths.
So when Elon Musk was born, he wasn’t just born rich. He was born with a meticulously curated myth already forming around him—a mythology of perseverance, intelligence, and destiny, manufactured by generations of self-mythologizers who believed deeply in their own exceptionalism.
When apartheid began to collapse in the late 1980s, Pretoria no longer felt like a fortress. And like many white elites who sensed the shift, the Musk family used their exit strategy. Canada was the rehab center for their colonial hangover. Elon fled at 17, waving a Canadian passport and enrolling in Queen’s University like a time traveler skipping the messy part of history.
He told people he escaped a violent upbringing. And he wasn’t lying. He just left out the part where he escaped with a pocket full of elite privilege and a network of white safety nets most South Africans—especially Black South Africans—could only dream of.
He wasn’t starting from zero. He was rebooting on easy mode.
And just like his grandfather, Elon would later fly into new frontiers and claim them as blank slates. Mars. Tech. Finance. Speech. He inherited the plane, the tone, and the delusion: that the future is a game best played by those already holding the controller.
PART III: WELCOME TO AMERICA WITHOUT A VISA
By 1995, Elon Musk had arrived in California, the land of fruit, nuts, and fully funded delusions. He showed up armed with ambition, a Canadian passport, and just enough inherited money to skip the part where most immigrants spend years waiting tables and dodging visa restrictions. He briefly enrolled in a PhD program at Stanford—just long enough to name-drop it later—then dropped out after two days. Not semesters. Days. Because why study the world when you can start a company and declare yourself a self-starter?
He launched Zip2 with his brother Kimbal. It was essentially an internet version of the Yellow Pages mashed with basic mapping software—less revolutionary than it sounds, but revolutionary enough in 1996. Musk wasn’t writing the code, but he was crafting the pitch. The branding. The myth. And when Compaq bought the company for $307 million, Elon walked away with $22 million in his pocket and a rapidly inflating sense of self-importance.
Next came X.com, a bold attempt to revolutionise banking by making it confusing and slightly dangerous. The startup merged with Confinity, a company co-founded by Peter Thiel, and the result was PayPal. Musk became its public face—but behind the scenes, employees were gritting their teeth as he tried to rename the whole thing after his favourite letter and push half-baked ideas that made engineers nervous.
Eventually, the board kicked him out. They literally replaced him while he was on vacation in Australia with his wife Justine. It wasn’t the first time Elon would be fired from something he couldn’t stop talking about. But in the gospel of Musk, this was a betrayal akin to crucifixion. Proof that the world punished visionaries and feared disruption.
He spun it like he spins everything: he was too far ahead of his time, too radical, too smart. Never too annoying. Never too wrong. The narrative of the misunderstood genius was now gospel, and Musk was its high priest.
This was the birth of Musk 2.0: the lone wolf, the dreamer, the man who doesn’t play well with others because he’s too busy inventing the future. Collaboration? Bureaucracy? Consensus? That’s for people who need help. Musk didn’t need help. He needed space. Preferably a lot of it. Preferably in orbit.
Why fight a culture war on Earth when you can just leave the planet?
Mars wasn’t just a goal—it was the answer to a question nobody asked. Why fix democracy when you can build a dictatorship on Mars and call it liberty? Why deal with regulations, unions, or climate laws when you can declare Earth obsolete and start terraforming a rock with no atmosphere?
Musk didn’t just want to succeed in Silicon Valley. He wanted to become its mythic centre. Its Prometheus. Its Tony Stark. Its techno-messiah. The one who knew better than you. Better than governments. Better than science. Better than history.
And if he couldn’t beat the world’s systems? He’d build new ones. Ones where he writes the code, calls the shots, and gets the credit, no matter who does the work.
PART IV: THE WOMB CONQUEST AND THE WOKE MIND VIRUS
While building his empire and roasting his competitors on social media like a 12-year-old with a burner account, Elon Musk began quietly constructing his most unsettling legacy: his own genetic footprint on the future.
It started conventionally—marriage, children, divorce—but eventually, like everything Musk touches, it evolved into something stranger. Somewhere between Grimes’ electro-goth lullabies and secret twins with Neuralink executive Shivon Zilis, Elon’s approach to reproduction stopped looking like family life and started resembling a tech-fertility experiment.
By 2022, he wasn’t just having kids—he was making speeches about the “underpopulation crisis” and tweeting that he was “doing [his] part” to solve it. At first, it sounded like typical billionaire eccentricity. But behind the meme-laced declarations was a deeply ideological message: civilisation was collapsing not because of inequality, environmental destruction, or extremism, but because we weren’t having enough babies. And not just any babies; the right babies.
It’s a belief rooted in a niche but growing movement called natalism. And Musk’s flavour of it came with a distinct twist: a silent presumption that his own DNA was a kind of rare asset—something the world needed more of, for the sake of progress, intelligence, and maybe even survival.
He wasn’t alone. Tech elites like Peter Thiel and Jeff Bezos had also dipped their toes into anti-ageing research and elite procreation talk. But Musk took it public. Repeatedly. He joked about repopulating Mars with his kids. He suggested sperm donation as a strategy. He said he might father “dozens” more. And people laughed—because it sounded absurd. Until it didn’t.
Because he was already doing it.
Fourteen known children. Possibly more. According to The Wall Street Journal, Musk has allegedly floated the idea of having a legion of kids, fathering up to 5,000 more. That’s not just bizarre—it’s genetically reckless. But at this point, not even surprising. The twins with Neuralink executive Shivon Zilis were kept secret for over a year. His naming conventions read like AI error codes (“X Æ A-12” wasn’t a typo—it was a brand). What began as a chaotic family tree started to look more like a private biotech project, driven by inscrutable logic and eerily opaque intentions.
And then came the backlash. Not against Musk—against those who refused to worship his fertility gospel. Pro-Trump crypto influencer Tiffany Fong alleged on X (formerly Twitter) that Musk personally messaged her after she joked about not wanting kids. He offered her money to carry his child despite having never met in person. When she declined, her account’s monetisation was throttled. She lost nearly 80% of her income overnight. No explanation. No appeal.
Meanwhile, Musk’s existing mothers were left to fend for themselves. One of the lesser-known baby mamas, 26-year-old conservative influencer Ashley St. Clair — allegedly the mother of child thirteen — reportedly had to sell her Tesla to cover legal costs after Musk cut off private support. This, while Neuralink executive Shivon Zilis was busy posting baby number three announcements on X like it was a gender reveal party. Grimes, too, has been firing off cryptic missives about being “ghosted” by the father of her three children, adding another layer of surreal to Musk’s ever-expanding family empire.
And while Musk’s bloodline sprawled, his public war with so-called “woke culture” reached new intensity. He coined “the woke mind virus”—a phrase he wielded like a broadsword against everything from pronouns in bios to DEI programs at Twitter. The logic was both simplistic and sinister: empathy is weakness, equality is decay, and progressivism is an infection that needed to be deleted from society’s software.
He wasn't just firing employees. He was purging values. He wasn’t just buying platforms. He was trying to reboot reality—one algorithm at a time.
To Musk, the answer to decline wasn’t building systems that included more people—it was remaking society in the image of those already at the top. The future didn’t need better rules. It needed better rulers. Preferably ones with access to rocket fuel and high IQ sperm.
What we are watching isn’t eccentricity. It is a worldview: part Genghis Khan, part Ayn Rand, part Reddit thread. The genius. The breeder. The messiah. The meme.
PART V: SpaceX AND THE MARS DELUSION – PLAYING GOD IN A VACUUM
Elon Musk’s obsession with Mars is not just a tech bro fever dream—it’s a fully weaponised sci-fi delusion disguised as visionary thinking. According to Musk, we must become a “multi-planetary species” to avoid extinction. Which sounds noble, until you realise his plan to save humanity involves launching a few thousand rich people into a red desert with no breathable air, lethal radiation, and absolutely zero coffee.
Let’s get one thing straight: Musk does not know how to build a livable house on Mars. He can’t explain it. When asked about logistics—like how to stop your organs from liquefying under cosmic rays—he gives vague answers about SpaceX doing “great work” and the power of human will. It’s like asking a toddler how they’ll fly to the moon and getting a crayon drawing of a rocket ship.
But the myth endures because the visuals are just that good. The Mars rockets. The big stainless-steel phallus gleaming under Texas skies. The slow-motion launches. The glorious explosions. Each failure gets rebranded as a success story in progress. SpaceX has become less a company and more a church—and Musk, its visionary prophet.
Mars is the ultimate gated community. A blank slate. A new civilisation, free from regulators, unions, voters, journalists, feminists, trans people, brown people and complaints. A place where Musk gets to write the laws, set the culture, and play God, without having to answer to anyone. No woke mobs. No lawsuits. No labour codes. And George Soros will be forever forgotten!
It’s not about exploration. It’s about escape. From accountability. From history. From Earth. From reality.
Meanwhile, actual scientists working on planetary habitability shake their heads. There’s no breathable atmosphere. Cosmic radiation will cook you from the inside. Food production? Maybe algae. Water? Buried ice, if you can mine it. Every “solution” Musk offers is two decades and several billion dollars short of feasibility.
The real plan isn’t to save Earth. It’s to abandon it.
And he doesn’t need to get there to win. All he has to do is keep selling the dream. The rocket launches. The powerful videos. The little Mars figurines on billionaire bookshelves. Mars isn’t a destination—it’s a brand. A shiny, red diversion from the messy, expensive work of fixing the planet we’re already on.
But that’s always been the pattern: talk revolution, sell fantasy, deliver chaos. Mars is just the newest frontier in Musk’s lifelong mission to trade accountability for spectacle.
PART VI: X – A PLATFORM FORMERLY KNOWN AS FUNCTIONAL
When Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022, it wasn’t a business deal. It was a hostile takeover of the global conversation. What followed was part tech apocalypse, part live-action roleplay of a man with a god complex being handed the town square—and promptly turning it into a rage arena.
Within days, Musk had fired most of the trust and safety team. Misinformation surged. Hate speech surged. Spam bots surged. The only thing that didn’t surge? Accountability.
He rebranded Twitter as "X"—a name so vague, so unsearchable, and so loaded with juvenile symbolism that even marketing departments cringed. But for Musk, it was perfect. “X” wasn’t just a brand. It was a variable. A symbol of mystery, of masculinity, of defiance. Of ownership. Something to be claimed.
In Musk’s mind, this was no longer a company. It was a battlefield. A digital Sparta where freedom meant chaos, and chaos meant clicks. "Free speech" became a euphemism for platforming hate and rewarding extremism. Journalists were banned. Anti-fascist researchers were throttled. Neo-Nazis were verified. “All legal speech,” Musk said, as if law had ever been the moral benchmark.
The rules changed daily. One day, parody was banned. The next, swastikas trended. Users reported being shadowbanned for posting about trans rights, while others built massive followings promoting COVID conspiracies, misogyny, and crypto grifts. It wasn’t a glitch. It was the new algorithmic order.
Ad revenue plummeted. Civil rights groups pulled out. Long-time users fled. And still, Musk declared victory. Because to him, success wasn’t stability. It was dominance. Control. A kind of ideological terraforming, where the old rules of digital civility were burned to make room for something rawer, meaner, more… alpha.
He brought Andrew Tate back. Donald Trump. Alex fucking Jones! Countless others were banned for incitement, harassment, and hate. To Musk, they weren’t problems. They were testaments to his power. Reinstating them wasn’t just a gesture. It was a signal. The new digital regime had one supreme value: loyalty to the new emperor.
Meanwhile, the platform’s utility collapsed. Customer service vanished. Ads began appearing next to racial slurs. Musk began personally responding to far-right influencers, laughing at their jokes, platforming their ideas, and resharing memes accusing political opponents of pedophilia or calling Ukraine a Nazi state.
This wasn’t social media anymore. It was a livestream of his mood swings.
He used it to pump stocks. Attack critics. Threaten lawsuits. And post endless streams of juvenile memes—some lifted without credit, others invented in a fever dream of testosterone, Red Bull, and libertarian rage.
He didn’t just want to own the platform. He wanted to own the narrative. The culture. The discourse.
And so X became a reflection of its owner: erratic, angry, full of itself, loud, and strangely fragile. A place where nuance goes to die, and masculinity is redefined by the ability to say something crueller than the guy before you.
PART VII: TESLA – ELECTRIC MYTHOLOGY AND THE CULT OF THE UNQUALIFIED MESSIAH
You’d think someone who became the face of the electric vehicle revolution would’ve at least built one from scratch. But then again, if Elon Musk were honest about how many things he didn’t invent, he’d have to start crediting the caveman who discovered fire.
Tesla was not founded by Elon Musk. It was founded by engineers Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning in 2003. Musk came in later with money—money made from PayPal, which, as we’ve already covered, he also didn’t really build. What Musk did bring was a talent for myth-making, branding, and forcing himself into the spotlight like an over-caffeinated stage mom at a kindergarten recital.
He legally sued to be listed as a Tesla co-founder. And won. Not because he founded it, but because he had lawyers and ambition. So now, in the public imagination, Musk is the father of electric cars. Never mind that the first electric vehicle was built in the late 1900s. Musk’s true genius isn’t engineering—it’s taking credit in a way that’s so aggressive and repetitive that eventually everyone just stops arguing.
And then came the salute.
In January 2025, during a Republican mega-rally, Musk twice raised his arm in what many around the world recognised immediately as a Nazi-style salute. The footage went viral. Major international outlets didn’t mince words—“Hitlergruß,” they called it. A fascist gesture. A German hello soaked in genocidal history. Musk, unsurprisingly, didn’t apologise. He doubled down. On X, he posted a cryptic thread invoking Goebbels and Himmler—mocking liberals for being “selectively empathetic.” Empathy, he said, was “an emotional bottleneck in evolutionary strategy.”
If crocodiles could tweet, they’d sound like that.
What followed wasn’t just backlash—it was combustion. Protests erupted in cities around the world. Tesla showrooms were vandalised. Charging stations were blocked. A viral trend saw owners torching their Teslas on camera. Others slapped bumper stickers on their Model 3s that read: “I bought this car before Musk became a fascist.”
Musk claimed the protests were “clearly funded by radical leftists.” When asked if he truly believed that, he responded with a poll: “Are all protesters paid actors? Yes / Always.”
Meanwhile, the White House lawn was repurposed—literally—into a Tesla showroom. Trump, the presidential hustler, stood beside a Cybertruck and a red Tesla, declaring, “Everything’s computer now.”
None of it helped. Tesla stock tanked. European sales flatlined. Australian consumers staged mass boycotts. And in China, BYD officially overtook Tesla as the top EV manufacturer. The empire was wobbling, and no amount of meme magic could stabilise it.
Tesla’s actual engineering achievements—the Model S breakthroughs, battery efficiencies, software integrations—were the work of teams. Silent, faceless teams of engineers and developers who didn’t post memes about anime girls and Dogecoin during earnings calls. Musk took their work, slapped his name on the hood, and drove it into legend.
He became the face of innovation not because he invented anything, but because he made you believe he did. It’s marketing sorcery with a side of Silicon Valley cultism.
His constant overpromises—Full Self-Driving “next year,” robotaxis “next year,” affordable Teslas “next year”—have become so predictable they might as well be printed on the company’s stationery. And when the technology fails, or worse, when people die using it, Musk simply shrugs, blames others, or doubles down on Twitter (sorry, X).
Meanwhile, Tesla factories have been accused of fostering racist environments, union busting, and unsafe working conditions. But all of that gets washed away in the flood of Musk-fueled headlines about AI-powered robots and space cars. If you control the narrative, you never have to control your conscience.
So here we are: a man credited with “disrupting” an industry he didn’t create, leading a company he didn’t found, producing a product that often doesn’t work as advertised—yet still worshipped as a visionary because he figured out how to be loud, rich, and relentless.
But Tesla was just the warm-up. Musk’s real mastery lies in turning jokes into jackpots—and nowhere is that clearer than in his meme-stock messiah act with Dogecoin.
PART VIII: DOGECOIN, SCAMS, AND THE CRYPTO CULT
If there is a Mount Rushmore of meme-fueled financial idiocy, Elon Musk’s smirking face would be front and centre, carved into stone with laser eyes.
Dogecoin—yes, the cryptocurrency based on a Shiba Inu meme—was never meant to be serious. It was created in 2013 by software engineers Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer, as a joke. A parody of the crypto craze. An open-source, peer-to-peer currency wrapped in Comic Sans and Shiba Inu sarcasm. Naturally, Elon Musk eventually claimed it as his spiritual invention.
Because, of course. Musk doesn’t invent things—he adopts them, renames them, and then floods the market with enough chaotic energy that everyone forgets there were creators before him. Pure genius. Like Thomas Edison if Edison had spent his time retweeting Pepe memes and promoting Ponzi schemes.
He called himself the "Dogefather." He went on Saturday Night Live and called Dogecoin "a hustle" while millions had real money tied up in it. The price soared. Then crashed. Then soared again. Some made fortunes. Others lost life savings. Musk didn’t blink. He just tweeted another meme.
Dogecoin, unlike Bitcoin or Ethereum, had no built-in scarcity or sophisticated architecture. It was inflationary, chaotic, and essentially valueless. But to Musk, that was the point. He wasn’t investing—he was performing. The currency was secondary. The spectacle was the product.
At the height of the mania in early 2021, Dogecoin’s market cap passed $80 billion. Kids were dropping out of college to trade it. Tech bros were building entire identity brands around it. Reddit and TikTok became digital echo chambers of financial delusion. And Musk was the messiah in the middle, blessing the movement with cryptic tweets and half-smiles.
But this wasn’t just poor judgment. It was market manipulation in meme form. Every time Musk tweeted, the coin swung. Every joke had consequences. And every crash was followed by his usual shrugging indifference. “Cryptocurrency is the future,” he’d say. Or, “Don’t bet what you can’t afford to lose.” As if he weren’t the one holding the match.
Behind the scenes, regulators grew concerned. The SEC reportedly investigated whether Musk’s behaviour constituted securities fraud. Nothing stuck. Nothing ever sticks. Because Musk doesn’t sell stocks—he sells dreams. Or more accurately, he sells distraction.
And what better way to distract than by turning global finance into a meme war? While experts debated the real economic risks of speculative assets, Musk hijacked the entire conversation by posting photoshopped images of himself as Simba, Gandalf, or Napoleon, surrounded by Doge graphics and the words “To the moon.”
People laughed. Then they lost their shirts.
No one could quite figure out whether he was a genius or a troll. But one thing was clear: Dogecoin wasn’t just a coin. It was a mirror. And in that mirror, Musk saw his favourite thing—power without responsibility.
PART IX: DOGE – DEPARTMENT OF GOVERNMENT EFFICIENCY
Some men build companies. Some men build rockets. Elon Musk, not content with either, decided to meme a government agency into existence—and then demolish it from the inside with the enthusiasm of a teenage gamer on Adderall.
DOGE—the Department of Government Efficiency—was launched during Trump’s second term in early 2025 with the stated goal of streamlining federal bureaucracy. Officially, it was a “public-private initiative to modernise outdated systems.” Unofficially, it was a billionaire’s playpen made of taxpayer-funded Legos.
The acronym alone was a middle finger to decorum. Naming a federal agency after a meme coin he helped inflate wasn’t irony—it was branding. It told everyone exactly what kind of governance to expect: chaotic, unserious, unaccountable, and somehow still trending.
The first months of DOGE were a fever dream of deregulation and corporate cosplay. Musk took meetings in camo cargo pants, wore an Air Force One lapel pin as a joke, and was granted “quasi-advisory executive access” to multiple departments, including Energy, Transportation, and Commerce. He tweeted policy drafts. He rewrote procurement memos with memes. He suggested firing IRS staff via mass text and replacing them with “AI customer engagement bots trained on Reddit threads.”
In one now-infamous stunt, Musk arrived at a federal press briefing with a literal chainsaw—engraved with a Dogecoin—and used it to theatrically slice a cardboard cutout labelled “Red Tape.” To some, it was cringe. To Musk, it was strategy. It visually summed up his entire operational mode: shred first, ask questions never.
DOGE’s impact isn’t symbolic—it’s systemic. By May, entire call centres at the Social Security Administration are shut down. Probationary staff at the Department of Veterans Affairs are laid off en masse, including researchers handling PTSD care. Wait times at VA clinics triple after scheduling software is swapped for a beta product coded by, according to one whistleblower, “a bunch of Stanford teenagers who literally walk in, confiscate hard drives, and install their own builds overnight.”
The Department of Education loses access to student loan data for three weeks. The CDC and NIH shed thousands of employees. The EPA’s compliance team is reassigned to “public image innovation.” The IRS drops 7,000 workers. National parks? Slashed. USDA? Hollowed out. NASA? Put under DOGE “oversight.” Even NOAA’s storm tracking is interrupted by mass terminations.
Meanwhile, funding for childhood cancer research is gutted at the urging of then-President-elect Trump and Musk. Proposed NIH budget cuts jeopardise Alzheimer’s research and pandemic preparedness. The CDC’s National Centre for Immunisation and Respiratory Diseases, which led the COVID response, sees key offices closed. Public health experts warn these decisions could leave the country dangerously vulnerable to future outbreaks.
Musk’s defenders call it necessary pruning. Watchdogs report over $135 billion in indirect losses. Court challenges mount. Civil rights groups protest. And still, Musk tweets a graph—no source cited—showing a 2.3% reduction in “federal slack.” Whatever that means.
He floats the idea of moving all federal HR to X. A poll follows: “Should all federal hiring be managed here? Yes / Hell Yes.” The poll goes viral. The policy memo is real. Musk’s fanboys cheer. Civil servants sob.
The ethos is clear: break things fast, fix nothing, and make it look cool. DOGE becomes the embodiment of his ideology: lean, mean, and blind to consequence. Policies? Optional. Oversight? Annoying. Human lives? Collateral.
Civil servants quit. Veterans protest. Mothers are without Medicare approvals. Retirees miss their Social Security checks. Storm alerts disappear. Farmers lose access to drought reports. Cancer researchers lose funding. Public health agencies lose their nerve centres. All while Musk posts memes of chainsaws and “optimisation bots.”
This wasn’t reform. It was an ideological flashbang. The techno-fascist wet dream of governance by disruption—where anyone with big balls, Wi-Fi, and a chainsaw can overwrite a system in the name of efficiency.
To Musk, this was proof of concept. To the rest of America, it looked like sabotage wearing a Silicon Valley hoodie. DOGE wasn’t about making government work. It was about making it bleed.
PART X: THE MUSK TRIALS – ESCAPING CONSEQUENCES IN STYLE
Some men go to court. Elon Musk goes viral.
Over the years, Musk has amassed a résumé of infractions that would send any other CEO into permanent exile: SEC violations, labour law breaches, racial discrimination lawsuits, misleading investors, union busting, and using Twitter/X to manipulate markets. And yet, not a single meaningful consequence has stuck. Because when Musk breaks the rules, it’s not lawbreaking—it’s “disruption.”
The 2018 “funding secured” tweet, in which he falsely claimed to have the money to take Tesla private, led to a fine. But not silence. He paid $20 million—pocket lint—and doubled down. His online behaviour became even more erratic. Judges scolded. The SEC sighed. Musk tweeted on. He even compared the incident to a badge of honour, as if regulatory fines were just overpriced blue checks.
At Tesla factories, Black workers reported open use of racial slurs, threats, and retaliation. A lawsuit from California’s Department of Fair Employment and Housing called it “a segregated workplace.” Musk called it “misleading.” No internal overhaul. Just more factory tours and PR puff.
Union organisers were fired. OSHA violations stacked up like unopened Cybertruck orders. A whistleblower who filmed unsafe conditions was smeared online by Musk’s fan army. When journalists investigated, he mocked them as “activist bloggers” or just blocked them outright.
He once said, "The press is a click-seeking machine," but he’s the algorithm’s favourite dopamine dealer. Every lawsuit? Another opportunity to pivot. Another shiny thing. Another flamethrower, meme, or rocket launch to shift the conversation.
Musk doesn’t escape justice. He erodes it. He wears it down with so much noise, spectacle, and false equivalence that by the time truth arrives, everyone’s already moved on to the next scandal.
And if that fails? He plays the victim. In a 2025 Fox News interview, Musk nearly teared up, complaining that liberals don’t like him anymore. He bemoaned being misunderstood, scorned for “just trying to help civilisation,” and claimed his critics “only care about being popular on Twitter.”
He said this… while owning Twitter.
What we see isn’t a genius outsmarting regulators. We see a narcissist with a spotlight, a lawyer on speed dial, and a cult convinced that the law is for lesser minds. If Martha Stewart went to prison for a stock tip, what do we call a man who pumps Dogecoin for laughs on national TV?
A visionary.
In Musk’s world, consequences are for people without followers.
PART XI: THE TECHNO-MESSIAH COMPLEX – WHEN PROGRESS MEANS POWER
Elon Musk didn’t just hijack markets. He hijacked the idea of progress itself.
Somewhere between launching rockets and destroying humanity, and moderation teams, Musk became synonymous with “the future.” Journalists fell for it. Investors swallowed it. Reddit enshrined it. And society, hungry for a saviour in a collapsing world, took the bait.
We stopped asking what progress means—and started asking who says it.
The result? Innovation became an aesthetic. Speed replaced wisdom. Dystopia has a marketing department. And Musk got to define “good” as whatever made him look brilliant.
He speaks in absolutes: free speech, bad. AI, inevitable. Government, broken. Elon? Always right. Always smarter. Always the one man who sees it clearly. He doesn’t have conversations. He performs prophecy.
To question him is to question progress. Which makes you suspicious. Or worse: woke.
In this mythology, engineers become background noise. History becomes irrelevant. Musk is the lone genius, forging the next chapter in human evolution with flamethrowers and memes. A Silicon Valley Moses—if Moses read Ayn Rand and kept DMing Grimes.
Even his failures are rebranded as milestones. Twitter’s collapse wasn’t a blunder, it was “stress testing free speech.” Tesla’s production delays weren’t incompetence—they were “proof of ambition.” He once declared AI could destroy humanity, then launched his own AI startup two weeks later. When asked about the contradiction, he said: “Someone has to do it right.”
This is the messiah complex in motion. Not a messiah chosen—but one self-anointed, with a webcam and a fanbase. A prophet whose gospel is progress without consensus, whose miracles come pre-lit in Keynote, and whose disciples wear Doge socks.
He doesn't build better futures. He builds better excuses for not having one.
The tragedy isn’t that he fooled people. It’s that he shaped a generation’s idea of what leadership looks like: detached, grandiose, male, emotionally stunted, and immune to scrutiny.
PART XII: MUSK VS MEDIA – GAMING THE FOURTH ESTATE
Every dictator needs a mirror. Musk built one out of headlines.
His relationship with the media is a masterclass in manipulation. He insults journalists, mocks entire outlets, bans critics, and still gets glossy profile pieces with headlines like “The Man Who Might Save Humanity.”
Why? Because he controls the oxygen.
If you get access, you get clicks. If you criticise, you lose followers—or worse, your blue checkmark. Tech reporters now preface articles with, “We reached out to Musk for comment and were blocked.” And behind every article is the quiet fear that if you anger Elon, your publication gets ratioed by his fanboys for weeks.
Musk doesn’t need to censor journalists. He makes them irrelevant by speaking directly to millions through tweets, livestreams, and carefully leaked chaos. He bypasses gatekeepers, then sets fire to the gates. His ecosystem rewards the loyal, humiliates the sceptical, and memes away the truth.
He’s pioneered a new genre of PR: adversarial transparency. Give just enough information to distract from what matters. Leak just enough chaos to create confusion. He’ll say “the media lies,” while tweeting memes made by teenagers who think Andrew Tate is a philosopher.
He frequently posts that “everyone is the media now,” a line he uses to delegitimise trained journalists while amplifying anonymous accounts with Pepe avatars and hashtags like #ClownWorld. In Musk’s universe, citizen journalism means “anyone who agrees with me.”
And when he’s not flaming legacy media, he’s crying to it. In a now-infamous Fox News interview, Musk nearly teared up while complaining that liberals and journalists “don’t like me anymore.” He called it “unfair,” said he “just wants what’s best for civilisation,” and visibly winced when pressed about platforming hate speech. He claimed the press “used to be curious” but now only cared about clicks. A stunning lack of self-awareness from a man whose entire brand is clickbait wrapped in stainless steel.
And when that fails? Distract. Drop a teaser for a Mars colony. Announce a neural lace. Flirt with buying Disney. “Maybe I’ll start my own news channel,” he’ll say—and suddenly everyone’s chasing that story. Meanwhile, Tesla is under investigation, a Starlink satellite fails, and Neuralink quietly files for regulatory bypasses.
The goal isn’t credibility. It’s control. Musk doesn’t kill stories—he floods the zone with noise until nothing matters but him. He turns journalism into a content cycle about his reactions to journalism.
It’s not a media strategy. It’s psychological warfare, 280 characters at a time.
PART XIII: NEURALINK – MIND CONTROL FOR FUN AND PROFIT
Finally, we arrive at the darkest fantasy of all.
Neuralink is Musk’s most explicitly dystopian venture. A brain-machine interface designed, supposedly, to help humans keep up with AI. But peel back the “medical miracle” branding, and what do you find? A billionaire who thinks your thoughts are inefficient—and would like to fix that.
Initial trials included monkeys, many of whom died horribly. Some reports cited “gaping wounds,” infections, and unexplained deaths. Neuralink called it “regrettable.” Musk called it “necessary.” The press yawned. In a more just timeline, this would have been front-page horror. Instead, it was tech blog filler between launch updates and Tesla ad copy.
Now, human trials are underway. Participants are told the chip could restore mobility. But what else does it do? What does it record? Who owns the data? What’s Musk’s role in regulating emotion, memory, or preference once he’s inside your head? He once said, “We should be able to save and replay memories.” He compared Neuralink to a DVR.
Let that sink in: Elon Musk, the man who live-tweets vengeance and sells flame weapons, wants to record your pain—and maybe scrub it if it’s inefficient. This is not a Black Mirror episode. This is the press release.
He’s already joked that it could help you “delete bad breakups.” Or “skip boring conversations.” In interviews, he refers to emotional experience as “mental friction”—something to optimise. He isn’t inventing empathy. He’s debugging it.
But of course, it’s all voluntary—for now. In the same way, social media was once optional, or surveillance was something only governments did. Musk wants to put a chip in your head because he’s tired of waiting for your hands to tweet fast enough.
His vision of the future isn’t just connected; it’s uploaded. One neural network to rule them all. Think faster. Feel less. Be grateful.
And still, people line up to be plugged in.
Because when you sell progress as magic, no one asks about the cost. Especially not when the magician is holding the scalpel.
PART XIV: STARLINK – WHEN A BILLIONAIRE OWNS THE BATTLEFIELD
At first glance, Starlink was a technological marvel: thousands of low-orbit satellites creating a global web of internet access. It promised to connect the disconnected, serve rural communities, and restore communication after disasters. But under Elon Musk’s ownership, Starlink didn’t just become a tool of connectivity—it became a lever of power.
Nowhere was this clearer than in Ukraine.
In 2022, during a critical counteroffensive by Ukrainian forces, Musk denied a request to extend Starlink coverage to Crimea, a Russian-occupied region being used to launch strikes against Ukrainian civilians. The reason? Providing satellite support for a military attack in Crimea might violate U.S. sanctions. But Musk didn’t just cite legal concerns—he editorialised. He declared that Ukraine was "going too far" and warned of the dangers of inflicting a "strategic defeat" on the Kremlin.
It was a staggering moment. A private citizen—not elected, not accountable—deciding the course of a war from his personal moral perch, all while sitting on one of the most powerful communication tools on Earth.
Ukrainian officials were livid. U.S. military leaders alarmed. Critics accused Musk of playing armchair diplomat with geopolitical stakes he barely understood. International media misreported the moment as Musk “turning off” Starlink—an exaggeration, but not by much.
Starlink didn’t belong to NATO, the EU, or any democratic alliance. It belonged to Elon. And when he decided Ukraine had pushed too far, the lights went dark.
In Russia, meanwhile, reports emerged that Starlink terminals had found their way into Russian hands—illegally smuggled in via third-party countries. Eventually, SpaceX blocked these units. But for a moment, Starlink—designed to resist authoritarian shutdown—was enabling both sides of a war.
As a result, SpaceX created Starshield, a military-grade version of Starlink meant exclusively for government clients. But the damage was done. By 2024, USAID’s Inspector General had launched a probe into Starlink’s role in conflict zones, and whether American tax dollars were underwriting the whims of a man with a Twitter poll addiction.
Musk had redefined battlefield logistics—not through force, but access. Who gets to communicate? Who gets to coordinate? Who gets to connect? It wasn’t about tech anymore. It was about control.
And it raises the question: what happens when the world’s largest civilian communication grid is controlled by one man? A man who tweets memes about peace while throttling the internet in war zones? Who claims neutrality while quoting Kremlin propaganda?
Starlink isn’t a product. It’s infrastructure. And letting Elon Musk control it is like letting a toddler hold the circuit breaker to global stability.
He doesn't wear a uniform. He doesn’t stand on a battlefield. But make no mistake—this is how modern warlords operate.
With satellites. With switches. With no oversight.
And a God complex in orbit.
PART XV: THE FINAL FORM OF KREKELIUS MAXIMUS
Tesla doesn’t die. That’s the nightmare.
It mutates.
The cars stop being cars. They become SwastiCars—not by design, but because the AI “optimised” the steering wheel into a Hindu peace symbol and no one at the factory noticed for six months. The Cybertruck’s panel gaps? Now a feature: “Ambient airflow for the post-climate-change world.” Autopilot still murders pedestrians, but now it livestreams their last moments to X Premium subscribers, with Elon commenting “Interesting…” under every video.
The robotaxis arrive, sort of. They’re just Teslas with a $20,000 “Full Self-Driving” dongle that makes them circle your block indefinitely until you Venmo a homeless guy to hijack it for you. Optimus gets downgraded from “humanoid assistant” to “sentient Roomba that sobs in the corner.” The board renames Tesla “X-Auto” after Elon insists cars should “post, like, and subscribe.”
Meanwhile, Musk himself is now 70% ketamine by volume. His brain has fully migrated to a private Telegram channel where he debates Kreklius Maximus (his anime-stable-diffusion alter ego) about whether laws of physics are “woke.” Shareholders don’t care. The stock now trades in MuskBuck™, a cryptocurrency backed by “vibes and Mars rocks.” Every earnings call is just Elon whispering “The owls are not what they seem” for 45 minutes.
And the kids? Oh, the Musklets are everywhere. A genetically optimised army of platinum-blond toddlers raised by Twitter algorithms, each given a Tesla Mini (a literal Hot Wheels car with a lithium battery that explodes if you charge it wrong). They don’t learn to read—they learn to “debug Dad’s tweets for actionable directives.”
The world doesn’t end. It's just Teslas. Slowly. Then all at once.
You wake up one day and realise: You live in a boring dystopia. You drive a SwastiCar. Your toaster runs on Grok AI. Your boss is a Musklet. And the sky? That’s not the sky. It’s a Starlink ad.
Elon’s still tweeting. Your dog bought a Cybertruck.
Game over.