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Since arriving to the White House, the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, has been on a destructive whirlwind through the federal government. At the behest of President Trump, the South African billionaire and chief of the Department of Government Efficiency has led an effort to illegally gut numerous federal agencies, fire tens of thousands of federal workers, and perpetrate fraud while claiming to root it out.

Regarding the seemingly intentional turmoil of Musk’s actions, Trump bragged at the Conservative Political Action Conference that his administration had “effectively ended the left-wing scam known as USAID. The agency’s name has been removed from its former building, and that space will now house agents from Customs and Border Patrol.” Taken alone, these actions have the makings of an oligarchic heist or a coup that cripples the government’s capacity to provide and protect public goods.

But within a wider aperture of the administration’s priorities — ripping apart families, hoping to establish concentration camps, offering refugee status to white Afrikaners, attacking trans people, and engaging in a “war on woke” across institutions — a coherence comes into focus amid the chaos. These are men who destroy to build a racial hierarchy in service of their own wealth and profit. Or as political commentator Elie Mystal of The Nation has framed it, they are bringing a “a neo-apartheid economic agenda to the US government.”