Reading about Donald Trump’s plans to elevate Elon Musk into a position in the federal government might have you asking questions.
Why does it take two people to head a government office focused on efficiency?
Why will Musk be co-leading a governmental department with an acronym that matches (DOGE) his beloved, meme cryptocurrency?
Why should Musk have a role in a government that is one of the largest customers for his satellite internet technology?
How many people with sexual abuse allegations should be wedged into one administration?
Why should we want Musk — a leader famous for gutting the workforce of Twitter with disastrous business and online safety consequences — to lead government reform?
Or, given the size of Trump’s and Musk’s egos, how long will it take for them to revert to being adversaries?
Good questions, each of these.
However, as I was teaching my students about media history, a different question arose for me: What does Musk’s ascendence to a national political figure say about the internet today?
To answer that question, let’s rewind to the tech-utopian start of the internet. During the late 1960s, computer experts from every kind of American institution chipped in. Private companies provided hardware. Academic researchers at Berkeley and MIT helped out. Military agencies partnered up. While their shared progress seems idyllic now, one of their goals revealed darkness: They hoped to create a communication system strong enough to survive a nuclear attack.
Compared with the invention of other American media, this collaborative and urgent beginning aimed at helping the public was distinctive. Most other new media burst onto the scene with commercial aims.
Looking back to the 1800s, often a single private individual, such as Thomas Edison with the phonograph, invented new media technology. Other times, inventors aimed to reverse monopolies created by other technologies. This was the case with Alexander Graham Bell and his telephone: Bell and his business partner wanted to counter the market dominance of the telegraph.
The internet — between the late 1960s and the late 1980s — was different. Corporations partnered with the government and universities in creating this new digital network. A lucrative market for the internet essentially didn’t exist for decades.
We all know the history since then. American companies dominate computers and the internet, starting with the founding of Microsoft and Apple in the 1970s, through the creation of social media giants such as Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram. The switch has firmly toggled. The internet, often shepherded by government through its collaborative start, has transformed into to competitive commerce.
Given this history of the internet, Musk’s recent move — allowing him one hand to steer the government and another to steer his internet corporations — stands out.
Perhaps you don’t consider Musk and his fortune to be connected to the internet as much as his Tesla car brand. Remember, though, that one of his first technology jackpots was in creating PayPal, the online transaction service. Also, he purchased Twitter, one of the most important social media platforms, for $55 billion dollars and converted it into the now-slumping X.com.
His satellite internet service Starlink provides everyone from national militaries to adventurers with internet connections, virtually anywhere on the globe. Finally, his ambitions of creating an autonomous taxi service will rely on those cars being constantly connected to the internet.
Considering all of that, Musk’s identity and fortune have always been plugged into the internet, a technology that relied on government and university expertise.
The irony is obvious. From his perch in the “Department of Governmental Efficiency,” he might dismantle programs and hobble the type of institutions that fueled the early days of the internet. If so, it would be the equivalent of Musk pulling the drawbridge up behind him after driving a Tesla into his gleaming techno-castle. While he profits each day from government investments made decades ago, he may block others from the same benefits through promising technologies.
One example: The Defense Department spurred the internet’s development by creating the Advanced Research Projects Agency in 1958. The broad, initial goal of ARPA was to create a new communications system. By 1969, however, it had launched something specific: ARPAnet, an early computer network seen as an internet precursor.
It’s difficult to see how government investments and partnerships like this would be more likely under the regime of Musk and his proposed partner in governmental efficiency, Vivek Ramaswammy. Since Trump’s election at the start of the month, Ramaswamy said that the Defense Department has “nearly a trillion dollars of budget — they can’t even tell you where it goes,” suggesting that cuts are on the way.
Of course, in budgets as large as the Defense Department’s and with overall federal spending, there is likely waste, fraud and overspending. Efficiency is a noble goal.
However, valuing efficiency doesn’t mean that we should entrust Musk with the job.
Given his pending appointment, Musk may cement his status as the most powerful private citizen in America. Here’s hoping he remembers that the internet, the engine of his personal wealth and influence, grew from an ambitious collaboration — not from government spending that had been arbitrarily hacked to pieces.
Eric Thomas teaches visual journalism and photojournalism at the William Allen White School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. Through its opinion section, Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.
Excerpts or more from this article, originally published on Kansas Reflector appear in this post. Republished, with permission, under a Creative Commons License.
