No question about it, Elon Musk is an amazing guy. He pioneered the electric car business and private space travel. Along the way, he even wrecked the liberal domination of social media, buying Twitter and giving the world back its free speech.

So why is he so unhappy about Trump’s Big, Beautiful Bill (BBB)? I thought it might be the fact that it means an end to his $7,500 EV tax credit. Apparently though, Elon is in favor of this, saying last year it will actually hurt his competition.

I think his unhappiness may just be about the fact that mastering the federal government was a lot harder than he thought. He badly overpromised what savings DOGE could achieve. Then he was wildly wrong about supposed fraud at Social Security and phantom beneficiaries. He even spouted a lot of nonsense about a nonexistent elevator at the Iron Mountain facility in Pennsylvania. It turns out these underground facilities are the best place to keep paper and digital media records.

A lot of libertarians, in the rare instances when they serve in government, find it a thoroughly frustrating experience as they cannot just wave their hands and shut down a lot of programs. By contrast, I suspect most AT readers are conventional conservatives. The kind who understand the various bureaucrats and politicians on the other side are much more formidable in real life than the cartoon characters we see on TV, like Jasmine Crockett. 

To be sure, DOGE and AI examination of government data is the wave of the future. Diligent data searching will uncover illegal immigrants, expose fraudulent benefit recipients, and clean out swollen voter rolls. But these things are a continuing process, not a one-time event.

As I previously wrote, like Tom Massie, Elon does not even grasp the rules for the Budget Reconciliation, which limits what sort of actual spending cuts can be done this way in the BBB.

Nor does he understand how profoundly wrong are the CBO projections on deficits in the BBB. Pres. Trump and Mike Johnson, of course, do understand this. As does Newt Gingrich, the only guy in generations, to run surpluses and cut taxes. He had to do this while fighting off big-spending Bill Clinton in the first major government shutdown since the Tyler administration.  Newt says straight up -- the CBO projections are garbage just like they were in 1990s. He advocates junking the agency entirely.

My basic rule of thumb is -- trust the people who have already succeeded at something to tell you what’s going on in that area.

If Elon Musk says something about rockets, or EVs, or flamethrowers, I am all ears. When it comes to cutting taxes and balancing the budget, however, let’s go with someone who actually did it. Calvin Coolidge and Dwight Eisenhower aren’t around, but Newt sure is.

Image: AT via Magic Studio