Earlier this week, the Economist asked plaintively whether Elon Musk was fixing the federal government, as promised, or destroying it. “This newspaper looked forward to what Mr Musk might do with some hope,” it stated, but has watched with mounting concern as Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has “broken laws with glee and callously destroyed careers,” as well as “made false claims about waste and seized personal data protected by law.”

The article concludes that Musk has become so intoxicated with authoritarian power and consumed by petty cultural and political grievances that his otherwise good organizational sense has fallen by the wayside — a genius’s tragic decline, dragging the federal government down with him.

The Economist should give Musk a little more credit. If DOGE fails at making the federal government more efficient, it’s instead because Musk has a grander vision for it, one many at the Economist might find agreeable: privatization.