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For most of last year, Elon Musk was the second most powerful man in America. He was running a large part of the government’s budget. And during that time, he established a track record of evil incompetence. I mean, really evil and really incompetent on enormous scales. And why aren’t people talking about it more?

Hi, I’m Paul Krugman, doing a brief follow-on to my discussion that was posted earlier today with Ro Khanna, the Congressman from Silicon Valley, who’s a very interesting guy in many ways.

One of the things that has made him especially interesting in the last few days is that he said something entirely reasonable, which is that if Democrats retake Congress, they should hold investigations into the role of Elon Musk as head of DOGE, the sort of not exactly but effectively government agency, in destroying USAID, the agency that was the principal channel for aid to the most desperate, poorest people in the world.

That’s entirely reasonable, and Khanna went on to say that there are credible estimates that the cancellation, the destruction of Doge has led to millions of unnecessary deaths, including millions of children — which is exactly true. There are studies that say that there is both in the field evidence of widespread death as a result of the cancellation and, of course reasonable health models. Because what do you think happens when you cut away tens of billions of dollars of aid to people who are living right on the edge? So of course it’s a reasonable thing to say.

Musk, of course, responded not by saying, no, it’s not true or something like that. He did say that not a single person has died because of those cuts, which is utterly implausible. But he also went on to say that he was going to sue Khanna, though he hasn’t actually so far, and that Khanna should be in prison for saying — not even saying that Musk killed people, but that there are studies that say that he killed people.

It’s quite evil and so much for free speech. Musk is very much like Trump, somebody who can dish it out but can’t take it, can’t even handle the kind of criticism that any public figure should expect to receive. Honestly, you shouldn’t be at all in the public domain unless you’re prepared to deal with a lot of insults and accusations. When you have the kind of role that Musk did that would come with the package even if he had done a decent or non-catastrophic job.

But of course he didn’t. And so let’s talk first about the evil.

It’s not just that Musk more or less personally set out to destroy this aid agency set out to cut off healthcare, nutritional assistance, just basic necessities of life for millions and millions of extremely desperate people. But he did so callously, carelessly, he even actually tweeted out, oh, “I just fed USAID to the wood chipper and I could have gone to some great parties instead.”

What can you say? This is an extraordinarily evil act. It came in the context of somebody who made enormous promises about what he was going to do. People have kind of forgotten that Musk came into DOGE promising to find trillions of dollars in waste, which he would eliminate, none of which happened. Overall, it’s pretty clear that DOGE actually worsened the budget deficit at least a little bit.

He also made specific claims along the way, most notably his claim that there were something like 20 million dead people receiving Social Security benefits. That was because the 19-year-olds that he put in positions of great influence, the Muskrats, whatever you want to call them, didn’t understand government databases. You know, you get parachuted into an agency with access to the computer system but absolutely no knowledge of what the agency does or how it does it and then couple that with a