Journalists are missing the real story on Musk’s failed DOGE project. Michael Steele points out it’s about the servers stealing your data and Musk’s contracts.
Michael Steele nails the naivete of journalists.
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Summary
Michael Steele exposes how corporate media fawns over the Trump–Musk spectacle and ignores the real story: Musk’s federally funded data-harvesting empire and Trump’s willingness to enable it for political gain.
- The host notes that reporters lobbed “Mars vs. government” puffballs instead of asking how Musk’s firms burrowed into federal IT systems and siphoned sensitive data.
- The press missed that Musk left the White House with a richer portfolio of classified Pentagon and intelligence contracts, including SpaceX’s covert spy-satellite network.
- Dogecoin hype shows the pattern: Musk drives headlines, extracts billions, and leaves retail investors holding the bag—yet journalists still treat him as a visionary.
- While cameras fixate on Trump’s theatrics, Musk’s servers remain inside multiple agencies, vacuuming personnel data and strengthening his leverage over policymakers.
- Outside the Beltway, communities like Memphis already feel the costs of Musk’s tax-sweetened super-projects—higher pollution, fragile grids, and scant accountability.
Independent media must keep centering material realities—labor rights, data privacy, and public dollars—because corporate outlets would rather chase Musk’s memes than expose how billionaire capture undermines democracy.
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A right-wing MAGA corporate journalist, Reagan Reese, asked Elon Musk whether colonizing Mars is more complicated than “fixing” Washington, and Donald Trump grins as if the question illuminates public policy. The host’s critique resonates because it crystallizes the sickness in elite reporting: access often trumps accountability, and the circus overshadows the substance.
Mainstream newsrooms have long treated Musk as the technocratic antidote to Trump’s nativism—two colorful protagonists who guarantee ratings. Yet, the historical record reveals, and Michael Steele infers, a symbiosis in which Trump provides deregulation, photo opportunities, and public funds. At the same time, Musk offers headline-grabbing innovation narratives that divert attention from extractive economics. Consider SpaceX’s classified contract to build a large spy-satellite constellation for U.S. intelligence. The deal, revealed by Reuters, expands Musk’s footprint inside national-security infrastructure while insulating him from antitrust scrutiny. Corporate reporters dutifully reprinted Pentagon talking points about “efficiency” but rarely asked why a single private CEO should control both global internet traffic and real-time military imaging.
The data pipeline runs far deeper than rockets. Vox recently documented how engineers aligned with Musk embedded themselves in the Treasury, Small Business Administration, and other agencies, gaining privileged access to servers that handle payroll, loans, and procurement. A companion investigation in The New Republic detailed the installation of an unapproved commercial server inside the Office of Personnel Management, potentially compromising the personal records of millions of federal workers. These maneuvers mirror Musk’s control of Starlink routers over war-torn Ukraine, a leverage point that lets a single billionaire decide which regions stay online during combat.
Yet the White House press corps rarely links these dots. Instead, reporters fixate on Dogecoin jokes. When investors accused Musk of pumping the meme-coin 36,000 percent before letting it crash—and sued for $258 billion—Reuters provided sober coverage, but televised punditry still framed the episode as quirky PR rather than market manipulation. That myopic posture normalizes predation. It tells viewers that speculative bubbles are harmless entertainment and that accountability is optional for those who “move fast and break things.”
The same dynamic plays out on the community level. In Memphis, officials trumpet a $12 billion xAI supercomputer factory—billed as a job creator that “costs taxpayers nothing.” The Washington Post uncovered a darker ledger: unpermitted gas turbines, heightened asthma risk, and strain on an already unreliable grid. Residents learned about the hazards after the ribbon-cutting, not before. If national outlets applaud Musk’s “visionary investment” without contextualizing the externalities, local resistance remains isolated and under-resourced.
Trump, meanwhile, leverages Musk’s celebrity to launder his economic falsehoods. At the latest joint press conference—eagerly livestreamed by corporate networks—Trump repeated the claim that he rescued an economy “in ruins” and now presides over a “hot” global boom. Reporters could have cited Bureau of Labor Statistics data showing stagnant real wages for service-sector workers or Federal Reserve studies warning of rising household debt. Instead, they asked whether Musk finds bureaucracy “harder” than astrophysics. The question conveys reverence, not skepticism, and it enables both men to redirect scrutiny toward sci-fi fantasies.
Why does this malpractice persist? Part of the answer lies in consolidation. Six conglomerates control most U.S. news output, and each relies on advertisers, hedge-fund owners, or cross-board members who invest in defense and tech. Challenging Musk’s government contracts would endanger those revenue streams. Another factor is the access game. White House correspondents fear blacklist when they antagonize a president whose communications team can revoke press badges. Likewise, Tesla invites friendly journalists to exclusive Model Y unveilings, while excluding skeptics. The reward structure favors stenography over interrogation.
Progressive media outlets—Democracy Now!, The Intercept, ProPublica, and podcasts like Politics Done Right provide the antidote. They disclose the public-dollar subsidies baked into every “free-market” Musk enterprise. They highlight labor complaints from Tesla’s union-busting factories, civil-rights lawsuits over racist harassment on assembly lines, and the carbon toll of crypto-mining experiments. They connect these dots to Trump’s broader agenda: gutted environmental safeguards, privatized infrastructure bills, and “One Big Beautiful Bill” proposals that slash SNAP and Medicaid while expanding tax loopholes for venture capital.
Steele’s rebuke thus functions as a call to arms. Journalists must stop chasing page views and start fulfilling the watchdog role that democracy demands. That means filing FOIA requests for Starshield procurement memos, pressing the Securities and Exchange Commission on unresolved Dogecoin charges, and interviewing Memphis residents whose electricity bills spiked after xAI’s turbines roared to life. It means foregrounding workers—Tesla battery-line technicians who inhale carcinogenic fumes, SpaceX welders who risk limb and life, rather than centibillionaires who cosplay as Tony Stark.
It also requires platform accountability. When Twitter (rebranded as X) throttles links to investigative reporting on Musk, outlets should not shrug. They should diversify distribution, support public-interest alternatives like Mastodon, and lobby for antitrust enforcement that curbs gatekeeper power. Policy-makers can help by conditioning federal contracts on robust privacy protections, open-source code audits, and claw-back clauses that penalize data misuse.
Ultimately, the audience—comprising workers, students, and voters—holds the ultimate power. Viewers must demand evidence-based coverage and reward outlets that supply it. Cancel cable bundles that elevate spectacle. Subscribe to independent newsletters. Share investigative pieces across union Slack channels. Democracy thrives when citizens wield media literacy as a shield against propaganda.
Michael Steele, a former GOP chair who now critiques right-wing excess, reminds the press of its forgotten mission. By exposing the transactional bond between Trump and Musk, he punctures the myth of billionaire saviors and refocuses attention on structural exploitation. Progressives amplify that message because they recognize that democracy cannot survive on celebrity worship; it survives on informed solidarity.
In short, journalists can choose to chase rockets or to follow the money. Steele urges the latter path. Independent media have already walked it. The rest of the press must catch up—before the next “visionary” CEO installs another server in a federal basement and bills taxpayers for the privilege.
