DOGE aside, there are a few things that concern me about Musk and his companies. As a cofounder of PayPal, has connections to Peter Thiel CEO of Palantir, a domestic surveillance corporation. X may have less censorship after his purchase, but it's become more of a walled garden like Facebook, Instagram and the like, requiring an account to view comments. He also seems to capriciously ban accounts and posts he disagrees with, or takes as a slight. Sometimes he will make a poll and then later unban them based on the results, but it all seems quite arbitrary.

Then you've got his companies. Tesla cars, like most modern automobiles, are surveillence machines constantly sending data back to Tesla. They also charge subscriptions to unlock existing features in your own car, like performance mode, self driving, etc. This isn't specific to Tesla, but worth mentioning and why I'll never buy a modern vehicle.

SpaceX, while doing some incredible things that NASA has been unable to achieve, gets large grants from the Pentagon for "defense" contracts. Which means Musk is part of the Military Industrial Complex, and a huge conflict of interest with DOGE. Starlink also has many military contracts, and the dystopian transhumanist nightmare Neuralink has ties to DARPA.

I'm not trying to downplay his achievements, he is obviously a very intelligent and industrious man. I just don't think he's the populist hero many seem to think he is.