While the entire world has been enthralled by the public feud between Elon Musk and Donald Trump, the world has also continued to move on. It remains incredibly difficult to separate the signal from the noise, especially when the world’s richest and the world’s most powerful man are the ones making the noise. That these two would eventually end up in conflict was inevitable, as the only things they share in common are anti-wokeness and being in relationships with several women (sometimes, apparently, even simultaneously).

Musk’s ambitions to reduce waste and increase efficiency in the US government via DOGE (the Department for Government Efficiency) were laudable and not at all a useless endeavour. The cuts at USAID, a development agency that was funding lobby groups in Washington DC, at least as much as actual development projects (why, for example, was anti-Trump activist Bill Kristol getting millions from the US government?), were both needed and justified.

That being said, the truly big-ticket items remained beyond Musk’s reach. As in Europe, reforming and cutting the welfare state components of modern governments has become almost impossible. Over 45 per cent of the federal budget is spent on Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. Now add about 13 per cent that goes to defence spending, and over half of the federal budget is— for political reasons—beyond any meaningful reform. People mock Musk for only having been able to create savings amounting to 1 to 2 per cent of the federal budget, but given the headwinds he encountered, this is not bad for just 160 days.