True, it is a huge sum. Musk has offered very little in the way of specifics. And it is certainly fair to argue that he may well have conflicts of interest, given that Tesla and SpaceX, along with many other of his businesses, operate in highly regulated environments. Even so, Musk has three big things on his side.
First, the size of the state has expanded exponentially. The Code of Federal Regulations, published annually, has grown eight-fold since 1960, and now runs to more than 200 volumes, although it is hard to see how either the economy or society is eight times more complicated than it was then. Even over the last four years, President Biden has added another 120,000 people to the federal bureaucracy, taking it to the highest number ever recorded outside the pandemic. Federal agencies create rules and then need more bureaucrats to enforce them, creating a self-perpetuating increase in the size of the state machine.
Next, Musk will no doubt spend plenty of time checking the paper-clips budget, and that will be an important part of the process. But he is also planning something far more dramatic. He wants to completely re-engineer the way the state works, so that it does less, and costs less money. It is quite possible that swathes of the government actually make us less prosperous, less healthy, and less safe. We can get rid of them wholesale. That is what will make the real difference, because it is impossible to trim budgets by more than a few percentage points.
Finally, he has been here before. When Musk bought Twitter, now X, it in many ways resembled a mini-state; to take just one example, it effectively had a department of foreign affairs. Wandering around the lobby with a kitchen sink, Musk proceeded to fire 80 per cent of the staff.