Genius? Idiot? Somehow both? The puzzling case of Elon Musk preoccupies a lot of people in Washington DC.

The first thing that should be said is that lots of geniuses are also deeply idiosyncratic and eccentric. And that's a good thing! It's a consequence of the fact that they see things that the rest of us do not.

After conversations with various people we have come up with a framework that certainly doesn't "explain Elon Musk" (this is probably impossible) but, perhaps, would help people in DC deal with him and his impact. This is obviously theoretical and a thought experiment, but we think this might be helpful to you, so there you go.

The framework is this—there exist two people: Elon the Communicator and Elon the Builder.

Elon the Communicator is all over the map. He gets into fights on X, retweets inaccurate information, makes grandiose claims, glories in extremely corny jokes, etc.

Meanwhile, Elon the Builder…builds.

The story of Tesla is in this regard very significant. The history of Tesla is full of PR coups ranging from the genius to the awful. Remember when Elon put a Tesla Roadster in orbit? Or how about all those viral YouTube videos of Teslas beating Ferraris and Lamborghinis at drag races? (A very unremarkable feat, as virtually all electric motors have much faster acceleration from a dead start than internal combustion engines; a golf cart will accelerate faster from a dead start than a Ferrari, but that hardly means that a golf cart is a better car.) And who can forget the Cybertruck launch, when Elon bragged about the truck's bulletproof windows, demonstrated by throwing a rock at the window, promptly shattering the window? (We'd hate to be the Tesla employee who was in charge of making sure that Cybertruck was bulletproof.) More prosaically, throughout the life of Tesla, Elon Musk has made announcements about future products or deadlines that turned out to be false. The announcements about self-driving capability are a case in point, with deadines for full-self-driving capability announced and then ignored.

All of that is true. At the same time, it is also true that, every day, cars made by Tesla roll off the lot. It's also true that, since Tesla sold its first car, it has sold more and more cars, that every year the cars are better with more features and better range and so on, and it is demonstrably true that lots and lots of people are very willing to buy those cars in exchange for their money, and they find them to be good cars. All of this is true totally independently of "the hype" and whether you believe it's "real" or not. Until Tesla, no major car company managed to be created since World War II. Until Tesla, no car company had produced an electric vehicle with mainstream appeal.

And, of course, a similar story could be told about SpaceX. Musk made all sorts of inflated claims about SpaceX over the years, claims that turned out not to be true. At the same time, it is empirically the case that SpaceX has gone from producing no rockets, to rockets that explode, to rockets that go to orbit, to rockets that take off and land on their feet, which is an unprecedented feat of engineering. Same with Starlink, which sounded like vaporware until the first devices were delivered. Same with Neuralink, which really has produced brain chips that allow quadriplegics to use computers. Same with the Boring Company, which has now built real, live, actual tunnels into which you can drive your car. Same with xAI, whose recently-released Grok 3 model is state-of-the-art which, given the very late start compared to other industry leaders, is also a mind-bogglingly impressive feat of engineering.

In other words, Elon the Communicator is all over the map. But Elon the Builder delivers.

(Sometimes not on schedule! But he delivers.)

There is a possible debate (one strikingly reminiscent of similar debates about Donald J. Trump) about whether Elon the Communicator is some sort of 300 IQ, 4D chess communications genius, whose zone-flooding, bad-pubicity-is-better-than-no-publicity attitude is calculated, or whether he just suffers (like so many of us) from poor impulse control on social media.

But on some level that debate is irrelevant, because Elon the Builder is out there, whenever Elon the Communicator turns off X and puts his iPhone back in his pocket, and Elon the Builder gets results.

Thus it is with DOGE. Many of the claims Elon has made about savings and waste found by DOGE have turned out to be inflated or otherwise mischaracterized. But to point this out is to miss the forest for the trees. DOGE has successfully identified that a much greater proportion of USAID funding was straightforward political hackery than anyone thought six months ago. DOGE has identified significant lapses of process at the Social Security Administration, which makes it very credible to suppose that waste and fraud in Social Security is much more significant than your correspondent would have thought six months ago. The idea that DOGE's "cracked engineers" (in Silicon Valley parlance) using advanced data analysis techniques and AI can identify much more waste, fraud, and abuse than anyone thought plausible six months ago is more credible than ever.

So our thought process right now is: ignore Elon the Communicator; but be confident that Elon the Builder will deliver.

As the kids say on the internet, "let him cook."

Policy News You Need To Know

#NEPA — A couple days ago, we briefed you on developments regarding NEPA, and the new guidance coming out of OIRA regarding CEQ's authority to issue new NEPA regulations. This is a big deal because it's one of the biggest regulatory obstacles to building new stuff in America. Thankfully, FAI's Thomas Hochman has a helpful explainer out on the topic.

#DOGE — Surely you know about what's called "Washington Monument syndrome." The idea is that when a politician orders some budget cuts, the bureaucrats make sure to start cutting the most politically popular things, in order to create a backlash that gets the politician to walk it back. This seems to be what's happening at NSF. A lot of the science and R&D that the Federal government pays for is not needed, either because it is highly politicized, or just because it is fake science. But, of course, a lot of it is good and useful! As James Pethokoukis writes, the NSF, under Trump Administration direction, seems to have cut the bone first.

#Crypto — Coinbase has announced that "we reached an agreement with SEC staff to dismiss their litigation against Coinbase. Once approved by the Commission (which we're told to expect next week) this would be a full dismissal, with $0 in fines paid and zero changes to our business." The Biden Administration really went to war against the crypto industry, which massively supported the election of Donald Trump. In general, financial experimentation is vastly overregulated in the US, so a light touch on crypto is probably a good idea.

#Immigration #FamilyPolicy — You sometimes hear, in connection to America's birth rate problem, that the solution is immigration. But do immigrants boost birth rates? It looks like the answer is no, or at least the impact is negligible, and it may even depress the birth rate among working-class Americans (who should be policymakers' priority), according to a new CIS report.

#Immigration — Before the election, one our big questions regarding immigration enforcement was: will the Trump Administration do workplace enforcement, and in the process risk alienating the business community, or at least segments of it? The answer, at least right now, seems to be yes. Under Tom Homan, ICE has not only conducted workplace raids but has charged business owners with felonies for harboring and aiding illegal aliens, Fox's invaluable immigration reporter Bill Melugin reports. Watch this space.

#Tax — Sober reminder from Brookings, looking at potential scenarios for a potential US fiscal crisis.

#DOGE — EPIC (or Economic Policy Innovation Center—amazing name for a think tank) has a report out on improper payments, which total up to hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars.

#Telecoms — There has been recent talk about new spectrum auctions (in connection to the reconciliation bill) and spectrum auction reauthorization authority. AAF has a helpful primer on the topic.

Friday Essays

Luke Foster, a very talented young scholar of political philosophy, has a very good essay at Law & Liberty on "what makes American education exceptional," contrasting it with the French system, among others. "Allan Bloom, in The Closing of the American Mind, recounts an anecdote from the Parisian cafés of his day in which one waiter insulted the other with “You’re such a Cartesian!” More broadly, the prevailing pedagogy grounds students in the commentary tradition, conveying that great texts of the past are significant in large measure because they have so often been read and analyzed before."

At Commonplace, the very astute sociologist Michael Lind gives us a preview of the upcoming elections in Germany.

The President's recent EO on IVF has troubled many social conservatives. An excellent place to step back and take stock is this essay by Carter Snead and Yuval Levin at EPPC on assisted reproductive technologies and what they mean in a constitutional republic.