Trump's tech bro who slashed, crashed and then finally fell to Earth

Elon Musk thought he could shrink America's mighty federal bureaucracy. The signs are that he simply wasn't thinking straight, writes Giles Whittell

- Giles Whittell

Ten years ago Elon Musk's first biographer described in riveting detail how Musk took on the most successful agency in the history of the US federal government - Nasa - and made it look bloated and feckless.

Nasa had been used to paying $10 million and waiting years for a new set of computer systems for a rocket, Ashlee Vance wrote. Musk's SpaceX set out to build one in weeks with off-the-shelf components for $10,000, and – give or take – it succeeded. It also built a functioning space capsule, the Dragon, for $300 million, which was “10 to 30 times less than capsule projects built [for Nasa] by other companies”.

It was surely a no-brainer that if anyone could take a chainsaw to the federal bureaucracy writ large, it was Musk. In January he got his chance. On Friday, 130 days later, he bowed out in a press conference in the Oval Office, his reputation torn to shreds, with enemies wherever he looked in business and politics and an actual black eye.

It seemed appropriate that he blamed the shiner, however implausibly, on a punch to the face from his five-year-old son. Two days earlier, the New York Times had described how people close to Musk had watched him mix work with routine drug abuse - ketamine, ecstasy, magic mushrooms and the addictive stimulant Adderall. The paper’s sources saw in that behaviour an explanation but not an excuse for a maniacal assault on American foreign aid and public service that has cost tens of thousands of livelihoods in the US and the lives of vulnerable people abroad who had depended on US-funded drugs.

What was going on? The world’s richest man was “killing the world’s poorest children”, said Bill Gates, the Microsoft founder.