Elon Musk

What a Waste

Hey, what if we actually were rooting out waste instead of... whatever the hell is going on instead

Endeavorance

10 Feb 2025 — 10 min read

Preamble

I've hated Elon Musk since before it was cool.

I wanna say it was somewhere around 2013 when I solidly put him in my "this dude is a piece of shit" camp. I remember my colleague at the time—we'll call him Steven—was a big fan of Musk, wishing to buy a Tesla and maybe work for him some day. I remember pointing out the cavalcade of lies and misrepresentations about Musk's businesses claims, to which he basically just called me a hater.

Fast forward a few years to around 2017, and good ol' Steven has actually done a 180. I struggle to recall the specific event that made him actually realize, "oh, this guy's a moron," but I'm fairly certain it was around the time of the whole submarine-trapped-miners-rescue thing where he also randomly called some dude a pedophile.

Hell, there is a website that tracks how long its been since Musk made myriad absurd promises. The website bills musk as "Like Donald Trump, But For Nerds."

Here's a few of my favorites:

In 2015, Musk claimed Teslas would have a 1,000 mile range "by 2017 for sure"
In 2016, Musk claimed you could autonomously drive from LA to New York in a Tesla with no human intervention as soona s 2017
In 2018, he said he was "super super serious" about starting a candy company
In 2018, he claimed that Teslas will be able to drive around a parking lot, find an empty spot, read signs to confirm its a valid spot, and handle parking for you by 2019

It's very easy to see his level of success but not know about the details that brought him there. He was pushed out of PayPal for being a moron and trying to rename it to "X" all the way back then. With the money from that, he invested in other companies until some took off, to which he then inserted himself as the genius behind the success. Reminder: he wasn't even the founder of Tesla. He just came in and took the credit. He is not a rocket scientist or mechanical engineer. He just pays them then says things that sound smart, like "unregretted user-seconds."

Point is this: I have spent over half of my life as a professional software developer. The people I've worked with over the years who actually think Musk is great have either realized they were manipulated by PR, or otherwise are similarly maladjusted people who resonate with his socially destructive and self-enriching tendencies.

I do not blindly hate on Musk because its fashionable or even because its the topic-of-the-moment, but because I have been paying attention to his actions for a long time, and his influence is directly in the one field I feel comfortable calling myself an actual expert in.

So with all that said…

DOGE eat DOGE

There's too much out there to really cover everything going on with the Musk-lead "Department of Government Efficiency," but two threads stand out to me that I wanna walk us through.

First is 25-year-old Musk acolyte Marko Elez, who recently resigned from DOGE after the Wall Street Journal published an investigative report which uncovered a recently-deleted Twitter account belonging to Elez which posted a litany of overtly (and self-described) racist rhetoric.

Not long after the report dropped, Musk posted a poll to his followers on Twitter asking if he should re-hire Elez despite the posts which were dated as recent as December, 2024. The poll landed at about 75% yes to 25% no, and since Elon is moronic at best or malicious at worst, he took the approval from his direct fans as a mandate.

Vice President J.D. Vance then chimed in, saying that he thinks Elez's life shouldn't be "destroyed" because of some shitty posts. He went on to say that we, "shouldn't reward journalists who try to destroy people," which is curious because the only thing the journalist did was point to the things that Elez did.

It's worth noting here that Vance's wife is Indian, because one of Marko Elez' deleted posts said we should "normalize Indian hate," as well as calling to instate a "eugenic immigration policy." This 25-year-old was given direct access to the Treasury Department's payment systems with top level administrator permissions.

Trump got involved as well, siding with Vance despite not knowing what he was being asked. Musk also decided to do the most Musk thing imaginable and posted, "To err is human, to forgive divine," though I feel there is a pretty stark difference between "forgiving" and "completely ignoring any consequences and reinstating someone we know to harbor extremely prejudiced views to having complete authority over how money flows in our country." I dunno, just figured we could find some kind of middle ground between the two.

But wait, there's more! We've got a helluva story regarding another Musk DOGE goon, this time its 19-year-old Edward Coristine who also goes by the handle "Big Balls" online.

If you're curious what he looks like, you can probably guess:

BigBalls in all his broccoli-haircut glory

It was recently revealed that Coristine—who mind you is among a current "elite" group of young men who have direct access to systems that control aspects of our lives, money, safety, and privacy—was fired from an internship at a sketchy internet security company for leaking their company secrets to competitors. Oh, and also was embedded in a few major criminal hacking rings. Cool!

"Edward has been terminated for leaking internal information to the competitors," said a June 2022 message from an executive of the firm, Path Network, which was seen by Bloomberg News. "This is unacceptable and there is zero tolerance for this."

Way back (two years ago) when Coristine was 17, he worked for a few months as an intern at Path Network, a DDoS mitigation agency. A DDoS is a "Distributed Denial of Service" attack, which is a common blunt-force sort of cyber attack where you essentially try to maliciously overload a server so it ceases to function.

Path Network itself has a history of employing fairly awful dudes linked to some really shitty online crime rings (such as Eric Taylor/Cosmo the God, if you want some terms to search). But Coristine was more interested in using his position at the company to show off to his buds by bragging about access to their systems.

There's honestly so much more I could talk about here, from Coristine's LLC that he formed called "Tesla.Sexy LLC" to his Russian Discord AI chatbots to the fact that his most recent listed experience is "camp counselor," but the point is this: A 19-year-old with virtually zero relevant experience, deep connections to well known cyber crime rings, and who was fired barely two years ago for leaking data is now a member of an "elite squad" who have been given complete access to the highest levels of secure data which contains information such as your social security number and bank accounts.

Yes totally cool that a 19-year-old who called his deleted LinkedIn "Big Balls," where he lists his experience working as a camp counselor can access the entire US federal payment system without anyone looking into his background, for instance, his Russian national close relatives or anything else
— Jacqueline Sweet (@jsweetli.bsky.social) 2025-02-01T21:34:54.623Z

A 19 year old. With a storied history of black-hat hacking. Has unfettered access to every bit of information the fed has on you.

I get it. I am not a fan of absurd waste in our federal government. But they aren't going after the meaningful waste, they're going after our information for some reason, alongside apolitical employees who literally are just there keeping the lights on and keeping things flowing.

They're not tackling the corruption that stems from corporate investments in politicians, the hundreds of billions of dollars that the DoD can't account for, or the incredible conflicts of interest between government contractors (like Musk himself!) and their advisory roles. They fundamentally do not care about actually rooting any of that out. They care to make a spectacle, and people who don't know any better are not just eating it up, but actively cheering it on in the name of chaos for chaos' sake.

Mini Heists

Alright, let's cool off with some heist-y stuff. I regret to say I don't have a giant heist for ya, but I do have two smaller ones that are fairly entertaining.

I Eggspected Better

First up, those egg prices at least make for some funny headlines.

Someone stole 100,000 eggs out of the back of a distribution truck in Greencastle, PA. The stolen eggs amount to around $40,000 given today's prices, but honestly that could double tomorrow. Helluva bag.

Digging into this a bit more, it turns out egg prices have gone up by over 50% in the past year, sitting at around $5.30/dozen on average. I checked with a local expert (myself) and can say with certainty: that is too damn much.

The suspect is still at large at time of writing, so if your friend invites you over for an omelette-making party, maybe raise an eyebrow. Or don't. You didn't see nuthin.

It's Good Soup

Meanwhile in Idaho (where they are pushing to make death-by-firing-squad their primary form of capital punishment), a man was caught stealing from Walmart with a pretty genius method: a literal Crime Ring.

Visionary store-goer Dylan Rockwell wore a ring with a hidden barcode on it which could be scanned at self checkout to ring up a can of tomato soup instead of whatever he pretended to scan.

Power tools? Soup. New jacket? Soup. A grill? Soup.

The local chief of police had a pretty good quote:

"Sorry Mr. Rockwell, your tactics didn't work this time but we appreciate your creativity"

In the end, despite his genius, he was caught and charged with felony burglary and misdemeanor theft.

Policy Stuff

CFPB Halted

Trump's new head of the Office of Management and Budget has directed the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to effectively cease operation.

The CFPB was established after the 2008 financial crisis to help protect average citizens from huge banks and financial corporations who would otherwise exploit financial systems at the expense of the citizens.

To date, the CFPB has returned around $20,000,000,000 back to US consumers from predatory financial institutions. Their job is to prevent banks from screwing you over. Republicans have been railing agains the Bureau, despite it being one of the few federal agencies whose sole purpose is to protect American citizen's wallets. Of course, this is often lost in the weeds as they lob claim after claim about corruption at the most boring, actually-kinda-practical agencies while letting dark money flow freely throughout Washington.

I want to note some numbers here, to really drive home the point that this isn't fixing taxpayer waste: so far, the CFPB has returned more than $20 billion to taxpayers from a lifetime budget so far of just $7.5 billion. For each dollar of taxes that goes to the CFPB, taxpayers are getting more than two dollars back. I'm no mathematician, but I plugged those numbers into ChatGPT or whatever and it said "yeah that's good, actually."

Rubio Threatens Panama

Marco Rubio—who is our secretary of state now for some reason—has threatened Panama stating they must "reduce Chinese influence" over the canal or otherwise the United States would "take action accordingly."

Trump has been loud about wanting to take back the Panama canal, same as he has been going on about wanting to buy Greenland and annex Canada. All of these should be taken as serious plans, as even Canadian PM Justin Trudeau was recently heard stating that Trump's goal of absorbing Canada is "a real thing".

Explicitly Do Evil

Google one famously touted a motto of "Don't Be Evil." Now, they've "updated" their AI ethics principles to remove a clause that says they won't deploy AI applications that are "likely to cause harm."

Google put up a blog post defending their change which is mostly just a bunch of platitudes about national security, but I would counter by saying that deploying AI-based systems of war was the literal plot from HYDRA in Captain America: The Winter Soldier. Maybe that can get the message across to the contingent of folks who I think are most likely to not see why this is a bad idea.

Hey, maybe holding companies to voluntary ethics standards isn't a good strat.

DeFARTment of Education (look, They Can't All Be Winning headlines)

The White House is working on their goal of abolishing the federal Department of Education. Now before we get into the merits of such a move, let's clarify what the Department of Education does and does not do.

The Department of Education does:

Provide financial aid and grants, especially for low-income and specialized education departments
Research education trends and provides analysis on macro-scale education approaches
Ensures civil rights are upheld in public schools, such as ensuring ADA compliance
Advises congress and the administration on Education policy based on their research

The Department of Education is legally barred from:

Developing instructional material or certification requirements
Designing course curriculums for schools (this instead happens at the state level)

However, given that the Department of Education does provide funding for some programs, that funding comes with stipulations that you must uphold United States federal anti-discrimination laws. In theory, that is the sticking point for Republicans. But really their attacks on the Department of Education are because of a long-standing push from Republicans to privatize the education system.

Their goal since around 1980 has been to dismantle the department and instate a "school choice" or "voucher" program, which basically means they want to take the money that would have gone to the department and instead offer coupons to send your kid to a private (usually synonymous with "religious") school, who in turn receives that taxpayer money. This is often seen as an attempt to funnel tax dollars into private and religious firms while reducing funding for public schools, thereby increasing the gap between rich and poor education standards.

Anyway, they wanna get rid of it, but they can't technically do that without congressional support. That said, based on everything else going on right now, I'm not so sure they really "need" that congressional support to functionally accomplish it.