Common sense would seem to suggest obstacles to this vision. As Mr. Musk is proving before our eyes, working 120 hours a week is not the same thing as doing a good job. Mr. Musk and his DOGE henchmen are making the kinds of sloppy mistakes one might expect from people toiling around the clock, subsisting, as they reportedly are, on “a steady stream of delivery pizzas, Red Bull and Doritos” and resting only intermittently in office “sleep pods.” They put up a website attempting to document their cost savings that was riddled with glaring accounting errors. They fired hundreds of workers responsible for nuclear weapons safety, then scrambled to rehire them.
Mr. Musk knows how much an executive can get away with when he is believed to possess extraordinary productive powers. He made Twitter a worse, less valuable company, dismantling its verification and moderation systems and suppressing links to other websites, and yet he profited from turning it into a MAGA megaphone. His cars catch fire, and yet they keep coming off the assembly line at his hyper-automated factories, their appeal buoyed by his cultlike fan base. And now, it seems, if anything ever stops DOGE’s wrecking ball, it will be the courts, or perhaps the president’s jealousy, not the discovery that Mr. Musk and his team don’t know what they are doing.The article spends most of its time expounding that "working" so "hard" for so many hours of the day gives Musk & his ilk a license to think of themselves as superheroes we’re fortunate to have in our own stratosphere that should be allowed boundless authority without consequences (I put "working" and "hard" in parentheses because I'm pretty sure 4 hours working a job at fucking Wal-Mart that can be taken away from you for looking at a candy bar too hungrily is harder than a job wherein you can "work" 20 hours of a day but if you wanted you could just lie on the floor and list your favorite Saved by the Bell episodes as the faucets of money still made money rain into your pockets while everybody you paid to be around you wrote country-western songs to sing around the campfire about what a genius leader you are). It's also so very performative; nothing's more eye-rolling that hearing project managers go back & forth about how late they were up all night working, to which I always think, "maybe you're just bad at your job?"
One day when the aliens find our story they'll scratch their heads re: why in the year 2025 humans still told themselves that hard work in & of itself was its own greatest reward, but I for one know why and it's not exactly hard to figure out after about 3 seconds:
It's really funny how America has always prided itself on a work ethic signaled to be important above all else, that a life defined by hard struggle worked down to the bone will somehow be rewarded either in this lifetime or the next one when it turns out that this kind of moralistic push to be working so hard as a raison d’etre *just so happens to be* what perfectly provides the means of production in ways that most benefit the biggest beneficiaries of capitalism, which just so happens to be the United States economic system. 🤔 🤷♂️
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