[pjc50]

Option 3: Elon takes over the Federal government, causes some major security incidents, and cuts off USAID stranding a number of Federal employees and cutting off short term food support for hundreds of thousands of people depending on it.

Option 4: Elon takes over a social network and tries to Orbanize the West with it.

[jnovek]

It’s not just cutting food support. Hundreds of thousands of people have died because we cut USAID.

https://www.cgdev.org/blog/update-lives-lost-usaid-cuts

[phkahler]

>> In addition, we are unable to directly update our analysis using the previous approach given the complexity of using USASpending.gov and SF133 report data from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to update from foreignassistance.gov because ID codes do not match up.

They can't really tie the cuts to actually useful programs. That was a big reason for the cuts.

[tastyface]

Correct. He has unfathomable amounts of blood on his hands. And I don't have the links handy, but I read at least two articles that directly traced his criminally negligent dismantling of USAID to individual deaths.

Every article concerning Musk or his companies needs to forever be prefaced with this fact.

[pjc50]

I deliberately undersold the claim because this is one of those things that's so big and yet so invisible in the news and discourse. If we had 100k people die in a city anywhere on the globe due to, say, an earthquake, it would be headlines. These people just .. cease to exist, unremarked.

(It does raise questions about how Elon might manage the food supply to Mars, if that ever happened)

[ben_w]

> (It does raise questions about how Elon might manage the food supply to Mars, if that ever happened)

Indeed.

One of the various things which made me down-rate my estimation for Musk's competence was him suggesting someone may want to run the first pizza restaurant on Mars. Like, sure, someone will, but this is so far down the chain of necessary tech it's like me personally pontificating about what I'll do when I'm as rich as Musk is today: If he's thinking about pizza restaurants, one has to ask if anyone's bothered with figuring out how to clean the perchlorates from the soil to get the minerals needed to fertilise the wheat to make the dough for the pizza.

I've yet to see any sign SpaceX have even built a machine for doing the Sabatier process on Mars, which itself is a prerequisite for anything like a Starship-based Mars colony even getting started, though at least Musk has gotten as far as talking about it.