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In 2023, Donald Trump posted that electric-car supporters should “ROT IN HELL.” Now he is showcasing Teslas on the White House lawn. Yesterday, the president stood with Elon Musk and oohed and ahhed at a lineup of the electric vehicles, saying that he hoped his purchase of one would help the carmaker’s stock, which had halved in value since mid-December thanks to a combination of customer backlash and general economic uncertainty. (The stock has rebounded by 7.6 percent since yesterday.)

Trump does not own shares in Tesla, as far as we know. He has said that he is supporting the carmaker because protesters are “harming a great American company,” and has suggested that people who vandalize Tesla cars or protest the company should be labeled domestic terrorists. But he also seems interested in helping his friend, the special government employee Elon Musk, maintain his status as the wealthiest man in the world. Yesterday’s White House spectacle was, my colleague Charlie Warzel wrote, “a stilted, corrupt attempt to juice a friend’s stock, and certainly beneath the office of the presidency.”

If any other government official had similarly promoted a friend’s product (especially on hallowed White House grounds), they would have been in clear violation of the specific regulation restricting executive-branch employees from using their role to endorse commercial products or services, Kathleen Clark, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis, told me. But the president and the vice president are exempt from that regulation, as well as from some of the other ethics rules that govern federal officials. Norms, in this case, are the primary lever for holding the commander in chief accountable.

Trump has repeatedly demonstrated his appetite for overturning norms and pushing ethical bounds, so his latest stunt as a Tesla salesman is not altogether shocking. When Trump learned in 2016 that U.S. presidents are exempt from the conflict-of-interest rules that restrict other government officials, he seemed delighted. “The president can’t have a conflict of interest,” he told The New York Times then. “I’d assumed that you’d have to set up some type of trust or whatever.”

Despite the lack of legal restriction, modern presidents have generally moved assets into blind trusts, which are controlled by independent managers, in order to diminish any perception that they are profiting from the office (or that they are making policy decisions to boost their own investment portfolios). Trump has shuffled around his assets since taking office but in general has chosen to put his family in charge of managing them. Trump recently said that he’d transferred his shares of Truth Social into a trust controlled by his son Donald Trump Jr., a move that is “irrelevant from an ethics point of view” because the money could still flow to him, Clark told me. And with his own family controlling the trust, Trump likely knows exactly where his money is and can make decisions that would increase the value of his holdings.

Presidential conflicts of interest, or even the appearance of them, can undermine public confidence (nearly two-thirds of Americans said they believe that all or most elected officials ran for office to make money, a 2023 Pew Research Center survey found). Trump may not be directly profiting off Tesla, but the problem with him hawking cars poses the same issue as other potential conflicts of interest: What’s good for Truth Social or Trump’s meme coin or Tesla is not necessarily what’s good for the country, and Trump has so far not inspired confidence that he will prioritize the latter.

Musk, too, hasn’t assuaged concerns that he will separate his business interests from his role in the Trump administration: Musk’s corporate empire relies on government contracts. And the federal firings he is overseeing through his DOGE initiative are already reshaping agencies that regulate his companies.

After he sat in the Teslas and complimented them in front of cameras yesterday, Trump told the press that he would buy one of the vehicles and pay with a personal check. That relatively small financial commitment makes a big statement about the president and where his priorities lie: with the interests of his friend, the billionaire.

Related:

The Tesla revolt The crypto world is already mad at Trump. (From January)

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Elon Musk looks desperate, Charlie Warzel writes. DOGE is courting catastrophic risk. Don’t trust the Trumpsplainers.

Today’s News

In response to the Trump administration’s tariffs, the European Union announced that it will impose tariffs on $28 billion in U.S. exports, and Canada added 25 percent tariffs on approximately $20.7 billion worth of U.S. goods. The Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil, a legal permanent resident, remains in ICE detention after his procedural hearing. He was arrested earlier this week in an effort to deport him over his role in protests against the war in Gaza. The Department of Education fired more than 1,300 employees yesterday, leaving the department with roughly half the workforce it had before Donald Trump took office.

Evening Read

Caroline Gutman / The New York Times / Redux

The Man Who Owned 181 Renoirs

By Susan Tallman

Of all the ways that today’s plutocrats spend their billions, founding an art museum is one of the more benign, somewhere behind eradicating malaria but ahead of eradicating democracy. The art in these museums is almost always contemporary, reflecting the dearth of available old masters along with a global chattering-classes consensus that avant-garde art is socially, intellectually, and culturally important. Few of these tycoons, though, are likely to find the stakes as agonizingly high as Albert C. Barnes did.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

The FAA’s troubles are more serious than you know. Academia needs to stick up for itself. The Iranian dissident asking simple questions Throw Elon Musk out of the Royal Society.

Culture Break

Netflix / Everett Collection

Watch. There’s nothing else like Mo, Hannah Giorgis writes. The Palestinian American sitcom (streaming on Netflix) is the first of its kind—and takes its humor very seriously.

Read. “As much as I love the [sci-fi] genre, I always have this desire to betray it at the same time,” Bong Joon Ho, the director of Mickey 17, told David Sims in an interview.

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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For years, Donald Trump’s critics have accused him of behaving like a crooked used-car salesman. Yesterday afternoon, he did it for real on the White House South Lawn.

Squinting in the sun with Elon Musk, Trump stood next to five Tesla vehicles, holding a piece of paper with handwritten notes about their features and costs. Trump said he would purchase a car himself at full price. Then Trump and Musk got into one of the cars. Musk explained that the electric vehicle was “like a golf cart that goes really fast.” Trump offered his own praise to the camera: “Wow. That’s beautiful. This is a different panel than I’ve—everything’s computer!”

This was a stilted, corrupt attempt to juice a friend’s stock, and certainly beneath the office of the presidency. But you ought not to overlook just how embarrassing the spectacle was for Musk. The subtext of the event—during which Trump also declared that the White House would label any acts of violence against Tesla dealerships as domestic terrorism—was the ongoing countrywide protests against Tesla, due to Musk’s role in the Trump administration. In some cities, protesters have defaced or damaged Tesla vehicles and set fire to the company’s charging stations. Tesla’s stock price has fallen sharply—almost 50 percent since its mid-December, postelection peak—on the back of terrible sales numbers in Europe. The hastily assembled White House press event was presented as a show of solidarity, but the optics were quite clear: Musk needed Trump to come in and fix his mess for him.

And Tesla isn’t the only Musk venture that’s struggling. SpaceX’s massive new Starship rocket has exploded twice this year during test flights. And Ontario, Canada, has canceled its contract with his Starlink internet company to provide service to remote communities, citing Trump’s tariffs. According to the Bloomberg Billionaire Index, Musk is $148 billion poorer than he was on Inauguration Day (he is currently worth $333.1 billion).

Just 17 days after wielding a chain saw and dancing triumphantly onstage at CPAC, the billionaire looked like he was about to cry on the Fox Business channel earlier this week. He confessed that he was having “great difficulty” running his many businesses, and let out a long, dismal sigh and shrugged when asked if he might go back to his businesses after he’s done in the administration.

The world’s richest man can be cringe, stilted, and manic in public appearances, but rarely have I seen him appear as defeated as he has of late, not two months into his role as a presidential adviser. In the past few weeks, he’s been chastised by some of Trump’s agency heads for overstepping his bounds as an adviser (Trump sided with the agency heads). Reports suggest that some Republican lawmakers are frustrated with Musk’s bluster and that the DOGE approach to slashing the federal bureaucracy is angering constituents and making lawmakers less popular in their districts. DOGE has produced few concrete “wins” for the Trump administration and has instead alienated many Americans who see Musk as presiding over a cruel operation that is haphazardly firing and rehiring people and taking away benefits. Numerous national polls in recent weeks indicate that a majority of respondents disapprove of Musk’s role and actions in the government.

Musk’s deep sighs on cable TV and emergency Tesla junkets on the White House lawn are hints that he may be beginning to understand the precariousness of his situation. He is well known for his high risk tolerance, overleveraging, and seemingly wild business bets. But his role at DOGE represents the biggest reputational and, consequently, financial gamble of his career. Musk is playing a dangerous game, and he looks to be losing control of the narrative.

And the narrative is everything. Elon Musk is many things—the richest man in the world, an internet-addled conspiracy theorist, the controller of six companies, perhaps even the shadow president of the United States—but most importantly, he is an idea. The value of Musk may be tied more to his image than his actual performance. He’s a human meme stock.

A CNN clip from late October captures this notion. In it, a reporter is standing outside one of Musk’s America PAC rallies in Pennsylvania, interviewing the CEO’s superfans, most of whom are unequivocal that Musk is “the smartest man in the world.” He has an engineer’s mindset, one attendee claims, meaning he sees the world differently. Two other men in the clip say that Musk got them to pay attention to politics (and to Trump, specifically). These people had fallen hard for a cultivated image of  Musk as a Thomas Edison or Tony Stark type, a great man of history who is single-handedly pushing the bounds of progress. Musk has had great success popularizing electric vehicles and building new rockets (though many still debate his direct involvement in the engineering). These supporters might have been fans of his companies, but they seem to have also fallen for the myth of his genius, a story born out of years of hagiographic books, news articles reporting his hyperbolic claims, and Musk’s own ability to command attention.

[Read: Elon Musk’s texts shatter the myth of the tech genius]

The image of Musk as a true visionary has proved surprisingly durable. In the early to mid-2010s, Musk took advantage of a different era of technology coverage—one that was more gadget-focused and largely uncritical—to hype his ideas for the future of transportation and interplanetary exploration. At that time, Tesla, his signature project, was coded as progressive and marketed as being in line with climate-change goals. The cultural dynamic of these ideas has changed, but the fundamental product being sold by Musk has not: one man with a singular ability to brute force his way to the future.

Musk’s trajectory changed after Trump was first elected president. It was during this period that Musk—already an incessant poster—realized how Twitter could be used to command an unbelievable amount of attention. Even when that attention was negative, the process of repeatedly making himself the main character on the platform elevated Musk’s profile. He became more polarizing (for chastising journalists, behaving erratically, making a supposed weed joke on Twitter that got him in trouble with the SEC, and getting sued for defamation for calling somebody a “pedo guy”), yet this somehow only added to Musk’s lore.

For years, valid criticisms of the Tesla executive came with an asterisk: He’s erratic, crude, even a little unstable, but that’s all part of the larger visionary package. Kara Swisher showcased this dynamic well in a 2018 New York Times column titled “Elon Musk Is the Id of Tech.” “I find the hagiography around him tiresome and even toxic,” she wrote. But also, “Mr. Musk’s mind and ideas are big ones.” As Swisher noted, Musk’s attention-seeking at the time had a secondary effect of alienating him from some of his peers and fans. But tweet by tweet, Musk found a different audience, one eager to embrace his visionary image, provided he took up their crusade against “wokeism.”

During the pandemic, Musk’s posting frequency intensified considerably as he began to stake out more reactionary territory. He called the COVID-19 panic in March 2020 “dumb” and later that year tweeted that “pronouns suck.” Musk endeared himself to the right wing by positioning himself as a free-speech warrior, a posture that ultimately led him to purchase Twitter. Right-wing influencers and the MAGA faithful saw Musk’s turn as proof of their movement’s ascendance, but what has happened since Musk turned Twitter into X is nothing short of audience capture: Musk has fully become the person his right-wing fanboys want him to be, pushing far beyond a mere  dalliance with conspiracy theories and “Great Replacement” rhetoric. It is hardly controversial to suggest based on Musk's posts and blatant political activism that the centibillionaire has been further radicalized by his platform, which he then turned into a political weapon to help elect Trump.

Musk’s X and MAGA bets mostly paid off, at least in the near term. Before Musk bought Twitter, I highlighted a comment from Lily Francus, then the director of quant research at Moody’s Analytics, who noted, “I do think fundamentally that a significant fraction of Tesla’s value is due to the fact that Elon can command this attention continuously.” Francus doesn’t go as far as to say that Tesla behaves like a meme stock—which can surge in price after going viral as a result of coordinated efforts online—but that Musk himself has this quality. Musk’s Twitter purchase was a bad deal financially and has been detrimental to X’s bottom line, but his ownership of the platform helped boost his cultural and political relevance by keeping him in the center of the news cycle. Similarly, Musk going all in on Donald Trump, becoming a megadonor to Republicans, and ultimately getting the DOGE gig all resulted in Tesla stock soaring—up until a point.

You can argue that there’s a flywheel effect to all of this. Musk’s polarizing, upsetting, attention-seeking behavior has made him unavoidable and increased his political influence, which, in turn, has increased his net worth overall. This has only improved Musk’s standing with Trump, who both respects great wealth and appears flattered by the notion that the richest man in the world wants to spend his time shadowing him around Washington and Mar-a-Lago.

Musk is used to being leveraged, trading on his reputation or his illiquid assets to keep the flywheel spinning. To his credit, he tends to make it work. He’s flouted the law when that has been advantageous to his business interests and taken advantage of a culture of elite impunity. He’s long been unafraid to get sued or reprimanded by a government agency. But two important things are different in his current situation. The first is the stakes of his reputational bet—rather than alienating himself from progressives or the media, Musk is threatening to meddle with essential government services, such as Social Security, that millions of Americans rely on. Indeed, Musk floated the idea of cutting Social Security benefits in his Fox Business interview on Monday. Whether he’s in charge of cuts or not, as DOGE’s figurehead, Musk risks infuriating countless people who object to the federal firings. Breaking the government is orders of magnitude different than buying a niche but influential microblogging platform.

[Read: There are no more red lines]

The second difference is the man he’s tied his reputation to: Trump. Musk’s attention-seeking and fondness for organizational chaos are usually unmatched, giving him an advantage in most of his dealings. This is not the case with Trump, whose shamelessness and penchant for discarding close confidants when they become liabilities are well documented. Musk is rich and powerful, but he is not the durable, singular political figure that Trump is. It is not difficult to imagine a scenario where this ends poorly for Musk. The flywheel could reverse: Musk could become universally reviled, causing the protests to increase and his net worth to shrink. The richest man in the world is valuable to Trump, as is the myth of Musk as the modern Edison. But mere billionaires? They are fungible tokens and easily interchangeable dais members in Trump’s eyes—just ask Mark Zuckerberg.

It would be foolish to suggest with any certainty that Musk is cooked. Historically, he’s managed to wriggle out of trouble. Perhaps the most hopeful outcome for Musk is that Trump has too much of his own presidency tied to Musk to throw him under the bus. It’s too early to say.

Yesterday’s White House stunt had all the hallmarks of Trump corruption, but there was something else, too—an air of desperation. It was a tacit admission that the protests are working and that Musk and Trump are rattled enough by current sentiment that they’re willing to turn the South Lawn into a showroom. Watching Musk clam up on Fox Business or quietly idle next to Trump in front of the White House, it’s even easier than normal to see past Musk’s trademark bullshitting and bluster. These moments make clear that this time, Musk has wagered the only thing he can’t easily buy back—the very myth he created for himself.

And can Elon Musk afford a tumble in Tesla's share price?

Investors will need to have a sense of the cost of Donald Trump’s tariffs before the U.S. stock market finds a bottom, Empower’s chief investment strategist said, as reflected in the modest rebound in stocks after today’s better-than-expected CPI report.

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Ottawa retaliated for Donald Trump’s 25% tariffs on steel and aluminum imported from Canada with a levy of the same amount on $29.8 billion of goods brought in from the United States, Finance Minister Dominic LeBlanc said.

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Tariffs and threats to annex Canada fall into Donald Trump's wider vision for US dominance in the world, experts say.

President Donald Trump’s trade war could become a major problem for Boeing (BA), and give European rival Airbus (AIR) a leg up on the competition.

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Sadegh Zibakalam is in trouble again. The retired 76-year-old professor of political science was already serving an 18-month sentence for criticizing the Iranian regime. He came out on medical furlough—only for Tehran’s prosecutor to start investigating him again. Now Zibakalam, one of Iran’s best-known public intellectuals, whose combined followers on Instagram, Facebook, and X total almost 2 million, is worried he may be sent back to prison.

The new charges stem from a speech he made at the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies in Qatar in January. Expressing one’s opinion can make a person a criminal in Iran. But Zibakalam had voiced not even his own view so much as a sociological observation: that Iranians no longer support the Palestinian cause, and many even cheer for Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump.

“You’ll be surprised, since October 7 last year, [to see] the number of Iranians who hate the Palestinian” groups, Zibakalam said. “But I saw it with my own eyes during the past 15 months … For [so many] of the younger generation of Iranians … their hero was Netanyahu … Everyone was talking about the U.S. elections … hoping and praying that Donald Trump would win.”

Zibakalam is himself a harsh critic of Trump and in the same speech decried the American president as “anti-women, anti-Arab, anti-immigration, and anti-Black.” He has also accused Netanyahu’s government of war crimes and called attention to the “millions of Israelis” who oppose it. Zibakalam thus was not condoning the views he described, but rather lamenting the turn of a population that once backed Palestinian leaders, such as Yasser Arafat. Iranians, he explained, have come to hate anybody associated with their own regime, whose policies oppress them. “I can tell you why they hate Hassan Nasrallah,” he said of the Hezbollah leader slain by Israel last year, and “why they hate Hamas.” The reason, he said, is “simply because the Islamic Republic supports them.”

Zibakalam is what Iranians call a liberal reformist, meaning that even while he recognizes the fundamental unfairness of the political system, he advocates for participation in the hope of staving off the worst or producing incremental change for the better. Last year, many Iranians boycotted the country’s presidential elections, but Zibakalam dutifully voted for Masud Pezeshkian, a reformist who wields little power in a government dominated by the hard-line Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. And yet, even among critics of the leadership, Zibakalam is notably outspoken. He has brushed aside regime taboos to argue repeatedly that Iran’s anti-American and anti-Israeli obsessions do not advance its national interest.

[Read: Iranian dissidents don’t want war with Israel—but they can’t stop it]

Like many Iranian reformists, Zibakalam was a revolutionary in the 1970s. He was born into a religious family in Tehran in 1948 and fell in with Iranian activist circles while studying abroad, first in Austria and then in the United Kingdom, where he was pursuing a doctorate in chemical engineering at the University of Bradford. Having initially flirted with Marxism, he ended up advocating for a left-leaning Islamism, and he headed the Islamic Student Association at Bradford from from 1972 to 1974. The Iranian student organizations he worked with were tightly allied with Palestinian militants. On a return visit to Iran in 1974, he was arrested and sentenced to three years in prison. He was released early, in 1976, and barred from going back to his Ph.D. program in Britain but allowed to teach at the University of Tehran.

Iran’s political space opened slightly in 1978, and Zibakalam helped found the Islamic Association of Academics at that time. A year later, Iranian revolutionaries overthrew the Shah, and he enthusiastically tried to serve the new regime. He was appointed to the prime minister’s office and sent to Iranian Kurdistan as part of a delegation tasked with negotiating with Kurdish rebels. The talks didn’t go anywhere, and Iranian forces went on to brutally suppress the Kurds.

Back in the University of Tehran, Zibakalam advocated for the rupture that became known as the Cultural Revolution. Named after Mao Zedong’s disastrous campaign in the 1960s and ’70s, the Iranian version led to the closure of all universities, the Islamization of their curricula, and the purging of much of their faculty—including female faculty and staff who refused to wear the hijab as well as anyone deemed disloyal to the new regime. Zibakalam has denied playing any role specifically in purging faculty, but in 1998, he publicly apologized for participating in the Cultural Revolution and asked for forgiveness from those affected.

Having served the regime for a few years in academic-management roles, he went back to Bradford in 1984, this time for a Ph.D. in peace studies. He sought to better understand the political upheaval he had helped bring about, and so he wrote his thesis on the Iranian Revolution. He returned to teach at the University of Tehran in 1990 and five years later shot to fame with his first book, How Did We Become What We Are? Seeking the Roots of Backwardness in Iran.

This book was the start of an intellectual journey that has never ceased—an attempt to figure out how Iran could catch up with the developed West. Conspiracy theories and simplistic sloganeering popular at the time tended to blame Iran’s ills solely on colonialism or capitalism. Departing from this austere nativism, Zibakalam offered instead a deep, comparative study of European and Iranian history, dating back to medieval times. The book doesn’t find a clear answer to its titular question but breaks a taboo by searching for one in choices made by Iranians themselves and not just ills done to them by outsiders. It was an immediate best seller and immensely influential inside Iran.

[Read: The fire that fueled the Iran protests]

In the years that followed, Zibakalam became a prominent defender of liberal values and critic of Iran’s foreign policy. The latter is a particular red line for the regime, which does not brook much discussion, let alone criticism, of its posture abroad. As a result of his outspokenness, Zibakalam was hounded out of his teaching position and, starting in 2014, repeatedly prosecuted. In 2011, during the Arab Spring, he’d defended the region’s various movements for democracy and contested the Iranian regime’s narrative that the uprisings were actually an “Islamic Awakening.” In Syria, then-President Bashar al-Assad put down a civil uprising with the help of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Zibakalam spoke out against this; years later, a reporter asked him his opinion of Qassem Soleimani, the Iranian general assassinated by the United States in 2020, and he said that the Syrian people should be the judge of him—an extraordinary expression of solidarity with Syrians from inside Iran.

Predictably, out of all his vocal expressions of dissent, Zibakalam has paid the highest price for his stance on Israel. Back in the early 2000s, during the Second Intifada, he criticized the Iranian position on Israel as “more Palestinian than Palestinians” and called for moderation. In 2014, during a public debate with a conservative, he shocked many by declaring, “I recognize Israel as a country because the United Nations recognizes it.” And in 2016, when he was invited to speak at a university in Mashhad, he refused to join in the tradition of trampling an American and an Israeli flag, theatrically hoisting himself onto a banister to avoid stepping on them as he climbed the stairs. “It is wrong to stomp on the flag of any country, because it is a point of identity and a national symbol,” he said after the video of his gesture went viral.

He was explicitly told that he’d lost his teaching position on account of his recognition of Israel. Even so, in 2016, he published a chronicle of the Jewish people from 2000 B.C.E. to 1948, titled Birth of Israel: A History of 4000 Years of Judaism. The book, part of a determined effort to teach his fellow Iranians more about a people their regime wants them to hate, was banned in Iran but widely disseminated via Zibakalam’s Telegram channel and as an audiobook that he read himself. Since October 7, 2023, he has taken part in public debates on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, including a televised program in which he called for a historical understanding that showed sensitivity to Jewish concerns.

Zibakalam has been charged and sentenced to a total of five years in prison since 2014, but he managed to stay out of jail until last year; his sentences were repeatedly suspended or turned into fines during the appeals process. His latest book pokes fun at this history with the title How Come They Won’t Arrest You?—a question he says he is often asked. But the day he was supposed to launch that book with a speech at Tehran’s book festival last May, he was finally arrested and sent to Tehran’s Evin prison. Four months later, he was diagnosed with cancer and released on medical furlough.

On coming out of Evin, Zibakalam knew that his continued freedom depended on him keeping his mouth shut, particularly on hot-button issues such as Israel. Nevertheless, in the past few weeks, he has shared several controversial positions with his large audiences online. He compared the open debate in the Israeli press over the cease-fire agreement with Hamas with Iran’s censorship and lack of discussion around an agreement it signed with Russia at around the same time. And when a commercial flight collided with a military helicopter over the Potomac River, in Washington, D.C., in January, Zibakalam called on Pezeshkian to send a condolence message to Trump as a means of opening a dialogue with the United States. He has also posted plenty of criticism of the U.S. administration, denouncing its treatment of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office and comparing Elon Musk’s destruction of the administrative state to the work of Iranian zealots in 1979.

[Read: Iran’s return to pragmatism]

Foreign-based media outlets pipe radical views into Iran every day from activists in the diaspora. By comparison, Zibakalam’s positions are relatively moderate. To the irritation of some opponents of the regime, he has refused to endorse its revolutionary overthrow. But the Iranian authorities perceive him as dangerous precisely because he couches his far-reaching demands in sensible, pragmatic language. He dares to ask simple questions plainly—for example, “What business does Iran have in seeking to destroy Israel?”

And sometimes, he just dares to state the facts that everybody can see but that the regime denies. That’s what was once known as speaking truth to power. It’s what he did in Doha, and it’s why he’s once again in trouble with a regime that thrives on silence and fear.

On December 26, 2004, the geological plates beneath Sumatra unleashed the third-most-powerful earthquake ever recorded. A gargantuan column of water raced toward Sri Lanka, India, Thailand, and Indonesia. None of these countries had advance-warning systems in place, so no one had time to prepare before the surge hit. Some 228,000 people died—the highest toll of any natural disaster so far this century.

Setting up prevention systems would have been inexpensive, especially compared with the countless billions the tsunami ultimately cost. But governments typically spend money on preventing disasters only after disasters strike, and the affected countries hadn’t experienced a major tsunami in years. After the events of 2004, USAID spent a tiny fraction of its budget to help fund an advance-detection system for the Pacific, which might have saved hundreds of thousands of lives had it been in place sooner. But some people would have seen such an investment as a “waste”—inefficient spending that could have gone toward some more immediate or tangible end.

DOGE has turned this dangerously flawed view into a philosophy of government. Last week, Elon Musk’s makeshift agency fired one of the main scientists responsible for providing advance warning when the next tsunami hits Alaska, Hawaii, or the Pacific Coast. The USAID document that describes America’s efforts to protect coastlines from tsunamis, titled “Pounds of Prevention”—riffing on the adage that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure—now redirects to an error message: “The resource you are trying to access is temporarily unavailable.”

More than 800 workers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have lost their job in recent weeks, including many who helped mitigate climate disasters, track hurricanes, predict ever-stronger storms, and notify potential victims. Meanwhile, cuts to volcano monitoring are crippling the government’s ability to measure eruption risk. DOGE is also reportedly preparing to cancel the lease on the government’s “nerve center” for national weather forecasts.

Musk has categorized as superfluous a good deal of spending that actually makes the country more resilient, at a time when catastrophic risk is on the rise. We never see the crises that the government averts, only the ones it fails to prevent. Preparing for them may seem wasteful—until suddenly, tragically, it doesn’t.

[Read: The diseases are coming]

The modern, globalized world is the most complex and interconnected environment that humans have ever navigated. That’s why the potential for catastrophic risk—that is, the risk of low-probability but highly destructive events—has never been greater. A single person getting sick can derail the lives of billions. A crisis in one country’s banking sector can crash economies thousands of miles away. Now is precisely the time when governments must invest more heavily in making themselves resilient to these kinds of events. But the United States is doing the opposite.

Donald Trump made the same mistake in his first term. In September 2019, his administration quietly eliminated an initiative that it saw as government waste: a $200 million program that tracked novel coronaviruses around the world. Three months later, COVID-19 infected its first victim in Wuhan. The U.S. government spent an estimated $4.6 trillion in response to the pandemic that emerged from that virus—roughly 23,000 times the budget for the preparedness program that could have helped mitigate its effects.

Complex systems—say, health care, or government, or industrial supply chains—without any built-in slack or redundancy are efficient but fragile. The effects of any disruption quickly cascade, and the potential for catastrophic risk grows. In 2021, a gust of wind turned a boat sideways in the Suez Canal—and upended the global economy, inflicting tens of billions of dollars in economic damage. Last year’s CrowdStrike outage is another example of an avalanche created by a minor problem within a system that was not resilient.

DOGE is courting these kinds of risks by automatically assuming that programs with no immediately obvious function—or at least none that Musk and his minions can discern—are wasteful. Some of its cost cutting may be eliminating genuine waste; no government spends its money perfectly. But DOGE’s campaign is riddled with errors, at the level of both understanding and execution. The agency’s strategy is akin to a climber replacing sturdy rope with low-cost string: We may not realize the full danger until it snaps.

Musk developed DOGE’s playbook when he took over Twitter, where resilience matters much less than it does in government. Gutting the social-media platform may have resulted in more harmful content and some outages, including one this week, but the stakes were low compared with the crucial government services that Musk is currently cutting. When X fails, memes go unposted. When the government fails, people can die.

The risks are not only to Americans but also to humanity, as technology and climate change have linked the destinies of far-flung people more closely and increased the likelihood of extinction-level calamities. It is not reassuring in this regard that Trump controls the world’s largest nuclear arsenal and that DOGE accidentally fired key people who manage it, that Trump doesn’t believe in climate change and is having Musk slash seemingly every agency designed to mitigate it, and that Musk summarized his view of AI risk by telling Joe Rogan that it presents “only a 20 percent chance of annihilation.” The United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction—an organization that DOGE would certainly eliminate if it could—came up with a more sophisticated figure in 2023: By its estimate, there is a 2 to 14 percent chance of an extinction-level event in the 21st century. This is not a world in which the government should be running itself on a just-in-time basis.

Musk may flippantly acknowledge the risk in interviews, but DOGE’s fundamental ethos—Silicon Valley will fix what the government cannot—almost entirely ignores it.

[Read: The dictatorship of the engineer]

Americans can’t rely on Meta, Google, and Apple to build tsunami-early-warning systems, mitigate climate change, or responsibly regulate artificial intelligence. Preventing catastrophic risk doesn’t increase shareholder value. The market will not save us.

As DOGE hollows out the Federal Aviation Administration, fires extreme-weather forecasters, and implodes the National Institutes of Health, Americans are left to wonder: What happens when another plane crashes, or a hurricane hits Florida without sufficient warning, or the next pandemic takes America by surprise? Many people may die avoidable deaths for the rest of us to learn that one billionaire’s “waste” is really a country’s strength.

Bridgewater Associates founder Ray Dalio isn’t thrilled about President Donald Trump’s escalating trade war. Looking at historical patterns, the billionaire investor has made a chilling parallel.

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