Before Elon Musk became the world’s most visible tech entrepreneur, Mark Zuckerberg was the preferred avatar of Silicon Valley.
Facebook is the final product to emerge from Zuckerberg’s history of misbehaviour at Harvard University. In 2003, he built Facemash, which scraped photos from the websites of Harvard’s nine “houses” and invited students to rate whether their peers were “hot or not”. Student groups and Harvard’s computer services department complained and Zuckerberg faced a hearing in front of the university’s administrative board, which could have resulted in his expulsion. Instead, he took the site down and was allowed to remain at the university.
Chastened by criticism and possible consequences, Zuckerberg’s next project, thefacebook, actually asked permission from users rather than stealing their photos. Surprisingly enough, it was more warmly received than his previous ventures. At the end of his first year at Harvard, Zuckerberg and several friends dropped out to pursue the work of signing three billion users up for his new social network.
Faced with a similar formative experience, some might have learned the lesson that considering the implications of your actions and exercising care is a better strategy than simply following your impulses. Not Zuckerberg. From its founding in 2004 until 2014, the company’s in-house motto was “move fast and break things”, often augmented with the admonishment, “unless you are breaking stuff, you’re not moving fast enough”. Zuckerberg liked the motto enough that he updated it to the less catchy “move fast with stable infrastructure”, a tacit acknowledgement that a multibillion dollar company should make sure its software works more often than not.
Facebook’s old motto captured the spirit of the internet boom that transformed society between the mid-1990s and mid-2010s. The business world was tired, lazy and in need of an overhaul, tech founders argued. Why be limited to the local bookshop when Amazon could send you any book in print, as well as paper towels and a pair of jeans? Who wants to look for a taxi rank when an Uber driver can meet you wherever you are? Why pay for software licences from Microsoft when Google will format your letters and spreadsheets in exchange for watching over your shoulder to better target ads at you? It was a world ripe for disruption, and tech founders were just brave and audacious enough to do it.
It took a while for the full consequences of this disruption to set in. Losing the bookstore to Amazon was one thing; losing the whole shopping district was another. Allowing thousands of apartments to become Airbnbs didn’t just hurt hoteliers, but transformed the character of entire neighbourhoods, raising prices and making long-term rental properties scarce. But existing systems of commerce weren’t the only things internet entrepreneurs were breaking.
Beginning in 2016, the government of Myanmar has persecuted, expelled and killed members of its Rohingya ethnic minority, leading to the deaths of tens of thousands and the forced migration of hundreds of thousands of others. Amnesty International, the human rights NGO, accused Facebook of playing a key role in the genocide by permitting accounts that stoked anti-Rohingya sentiment. It has demanded that Meta, parent company to Facebook, pay reparations to Rohingya groups.
The possibility that social media has been breaking whole societies has become a favoured hypothesis for legislators around the world. From India to the United States, Zuckerberg and his brethren have become frequent guests at parliamentary and congressional hearings, where they have been grilled about social media’s effects on democratic societies—including election interference, Covid misinformation, political polarisation and the rise of extremist violence.
Zuckerberg’s reactions to the idea that his products are damaging democratic society—as well as to accusations that social media is damaging mental health, particularly of girls and young women—have varied throughout the years. He has been contrite at times, confrontational at others. In recent years, Meta has indicated that it wanted to avoid the problems of damaging democracy entirely by downranking political content on its platforms, hoping that networks focused on pictures of friends’ dogs and influencers’ fashion shoots would merit less government scrutiny.
But the landscape shifted radically when Elon Musk became the new standard-bearer of “move fast and break things”. Musk has positioned himself as a disruptor of slow and broken systems, beating complacent car manufacturers to the punch in designing appealing electric cars, outracing Nasa’s bureaucratic processes in launching payloads and people into space. The reality of Musk’s status as a disruptor is more complicated than he likes to acknowledge, however. Tesla faced bankruptcy before obtaining a set of loans, notably key financing of $465m from the US Department of Energy, while SpaceX’s growth has been almost entirely due to government contracts. Musk may be a disruptor, but his greatest successes have involved a helping hand from the massive and plodding bureaucracy of the government.
When given an entirely free hand, Musk’s appetite for destruction has suggested limits to disruption as a business strategy. After purchasing Twitter and renaming it X, he fired nearly 80 per cent of the company’s employees, depopulating departments like Trust and Safety, which was responsible for preventing fraud, spam and abusive behaviour. As X became a rowdier place to be, advertisers fled, citing concerns about “brand safety”—the risk that a brand will be harmed by an association with content on X. As recently as September 2024, X was valued at less than a quarter of what Musk paid for it in 2022.
Now Musk has brought his version of “move fast and break things” to Washington DC. Impressed by his business acumen—and perhaps by the $288m Musk donated to his campaign—Trump has named Musk a “special government employee” focused on cost-cutting and efficiency. His “Doge” team has been firing thousands of government employees and encouraging tens of thousands more to quit, using tactics taken directly from Musk’s transformation of Twitter. Government employees were sent emails using the same subject line—“A Fork in the Road”—as Musk used to empty out Twitter. Many of the firings are being fought in court, while some have been quickly rescinded, as when 350 employees of the National Nuclear Security Administration, the organisation in charge of maintaining the US’s more than 3,000 nuclear warheads, were fired and rehired.
It is only a matter of time before indiscriminate firings damage morale and the ability of government agencies to do their job. But that is almost certainly the point. Move fast and break things targets systems that disruptors resent and replaces them with ones they control. Before Musk, Twitter was a key forum for journalists, government officials, academics and activists who traded news and tips, creating novel pathways into policy dialogues and the news. Musk bought a system he was highly critical of, smashed it—destroying billions in market capitalisation in the process—and replaced it with a system that amplifies far-right voices, as well as his own voice more than anyone else’s. Losing $30bn in market value may be a bargain for Musk, as it’s meant gaining a state-aligned social media network that he can turn against Trump should the two fall out.
It’s one thing to move fast and break the business world and an entirely different thing to move fast and break government. Musk is breaking systems that voters, through their representatives, chose to pay for with tax dollars. Breaking these systems means breaking the democratic processes that led to their creation in the first place.
In Doge, we see the intersection of two ideologies: the conservative belief that government can do nothing right and should do as little as possible, and the disruptor’s creed that any inefficient system deserves smashing. Their fusion is a self-fulfilling prophecy—smashed systems work poorly and can only be improved by eliminating them entirely. In the business world, disruption sometimes leads to creative destruction, allowing broken systems to be replaced by better ones. In this case though the process is short-circuited, and we’re being left with nothing but a pile of toys smashed by disobedient toddlers. Let us hope that soon the disruptors leave the field and yield to adults who move purposefully and fix things.
