Elon Musk, ever the obnoxious showman, strutted onto the CPAC stage in Florida last week, brandishing a chainsaw like a deranged comic-book villain. The prop, a gift from Argentina’s far-right President Javier Milei, wasn’t just an empty gesture. Dressed like a hooligan, Musk revved the saw, playfully toying with the blade in a grotesque spectacle that mocked the thousands of government workers he has so gleefully thrown into economic despair.
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The symbolism wasn’t subtle. This is no ordinary budget-cutting exercise. Instead, it’s a mass execution of people' stability, security, and sanity.
Musk and his so-called "DOGE" firings have been as erratic as someone throwing darts at a board blindfolded. There is no methodology, no strategic cost-saving rationale, just vicious chaos. One day a department is intact, the next it is gutted, leaving workers blindsided and scrambling.
The people being discarded aren’t incompetent bureaucrats twiddling their thumbs, they are inspectors ensuring food safety, scientists researching critical environmental threats, public servants who keep essential services running.
These are the very individuals who make the machinery of government function, and yet, under Musk’s reckoning, they are treated as excess baggage to be tossed overboard in a sea of cruelty. Or in this case, sliced off the appendages of the U.S. government.
On Saturday, Musk doubled down on his dystopian vision, declaring in a mass email that government employees would have to "justify and explain" their jobs in order to keep them. It’s an absurd, gaslighting demand meant to create a chilling effect. As if working a stable job, earning a paycheck, and contributing to society requires a constant defense against the whims of a billionaire who treats livelihoods like pieces on a Monopoly board.
How in the hell does the richest man in the world understand what a mid-level government employee does? Think about this. A complete stranger, who has no idea the aspects of your job, sends you an email this morning and asks you to list what you did last week. How would you even know where to start?
That email is an abject affront to the backbone of the American workforce. What justifies a meaningful answer? There'll be more mass layoffs because some will answer that they weren’t sleeping in their office the way Musk and his juveniles on DOGE do. And with those layoffs will come untenable heartache.
The economic and psychological toll of mass layoffs is well-documented. Research has repeatedly shown that losing a job can be as traumatic as the death of a loved one. A study published in the Journal of Affective Disorders found that unemployment increases the risk of depression, anxiety, and even suicide.
I know firsthand the effects of being laid off. It happened to me three times, all in the name of “downsizing.” And after being collateral damage the second time, I did attempt suicide. I was in my 50s, and feared I would never work again. It is humiliating. It’s utterly demoralizing. It makes you feel helpless. It makes you feel useless. It makes you feel worthless.
The third time, I was nearing 59.
The pain of each of those incidents is still felt, particularly now as I read the stories of those who have been fired by Musk.
The other thing it does is make you obsess about money. I remember feeling like I was doomed to end up on the street — you think the very worst when you feel like the world is stacked against you.
Another study from the National Bureau of Economic Research revealed that job loss leads to a significant and often permanent decline in earnings, meaning that many of Musk's casualties may never fully recover financially. It is not just the employees themselves who suffer, it’s their spouses, children, and extended families who bear the weight of the uncertainty, the medical bills that suddenly seem insurmountable, the mortgage payments that become ticking time bombs.
Beyond individual suffering, the devastation ripples outward. When Musk and his DOGE cronies slash jobs with reckless abandon, they are not just harming those who receive the pink slips. They are gutting entire communities. A laid-off worker cannot spend money at local businesses. They cannot donate to charities. They cannot contribute to the economy in any meaningful way. Every job Musk eliminates is another chisel taken to the fragile foundation of the middle class.
Perhaps Musk, in his billionaire bubble, assumes that the people he’s throwing into economic purgatory will simply vanish into irrelevance. But they won’t. Their friends, their neighbors, and their families are watching. And they will remember the sight of Musk, grinning like a maniac, chainsaw in hand, reveling in their despair. That image, Musk as the executioner of American livelihoods, will haunt him.
History has a way of making villains out of those who mock the suffering of working people. Marie Antoinette never actually said "let them eat cake," but the phrase stuck because it captured the grotesque indifference of the aristocracy toward the struggles of the common folk. Musk, with his chainsaw theatrics, has crafted his own grotesque moment. It’s one that will be seared into the public consciousness.
One day, when he finally faces a reckoning, whether in the form of public backlash, legal consequences, or the inexorable decline of his empire, he will have no one to blame but himself. Because when you pick up a chainsaw and start swinging at the working class, don’t be surprised when they pick up an axe of their own.
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