That time Elon Musk showed up with a chain saw—literally

livemint.com:

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. There he was—the self-proclaimed Technoking—on stage waving around a chain saw. Elon Musk rode a populist wave to Washington, D.C., on the promise he would take his technologist acumen to the federal government, deploying artificial intelligence to root out wasteful spending and make things more efficient.

So far, it doesn’t appear that Musk is using a scalpel. Rather, with the First Buddy spearheading Trump 2.0’s government-efficiency efforts known as DOGE, things have been messy. Musk has recommended gutting USAID, pushed for sweeping job cuts elsewhere and talked about getting rid of entire departments altogether.

To many, that has made Musk’s efforts look less like surgery and more like performative butchery. Of course, the Department of Government Efficiency, as DOGE is officially known, is still in its early days. But the way Musk talks, it is clear he doesn’t see the need for much nuance in picking targets, given the levels of waste he says he sees.

His blunt approach, coupled with the promise of using new AI technology, which few people fully understand, creates room for lots of worries. The future of work already looks scary. Many people fear AI will replace good-paying jobs and leave people without control over their lives.

Rightly or wrongly, DOGE has become the general public’s first taste of how AI could rework work in America. Musk’s approach is also giving new flair to the boring and common restructuring process known across America in the private sector. In another, more tame setting, Musk described his work as such: “It’s like a corporate turnaround but at a much larger scale." Those were his comments—via video link—to a conference in Dubai about a week before