It didn’t take long for American business leaders to embrace this way of thinking. It enabled them to rationalize their success as the natural outgrowth of their own productivity, and to cast heavier workloads as a way of empowering employees rather than grinding them down. When Georges Doriot, a founder of one of the first major American venture capital firms, was asked in 1960 whether he planned to hire new staff members to keep up with his company’s rapid growth, he replied, “No, we will all just work later into the night.” This mind-set spread into the tech firms Mr. Doriot invested in and shaped the worldview of Silicon Valley executives. In the early 1980s, employees working under Steve Jobs in Apple’s Macintosh division made T-shirts that read “90 hours a week and loving it!”
In recent decades, two trends in American life have supercharged the spread of this entrepreneurial work ethic, helping to push busy billionaires to the center of our politics. First, more and more ordinary Americans learned to think of work as something scarce. As deindustrialization ravaged wide swaths of the country and unionization declined, they got accustomed to cycles of layoffs and the need to retrain in new occupations or new industries. Now, in an era when over 70 percent of Americans worry about the availability of good jobs with good pay, the bosses atop our class pyramid correctly perceive how such jobs have become a status symbol: If the rich of the Gilded Age had conspicuous consumption, flaunting their freedom from toil, the rich of our new Gilded Age have conspicuous work. We see them working constantly while we hunt for extra shifts or struggle to string part-time jobs together, and we marvel at how special they must be.
Then there is the looming threat of a seismic technological breakthrough. Many tech leaders today believe that the development of artificial intelligence is poised to automate most jobs into oblivion. Tech companies including Google, Dropbox and Meta have already invoked A.I. advancements to justify recent layoffs, and over 40 percent of companies worldwide anticipate following suit in the next five years, according to a World Economic Forum survey. For those driving the A.I. boom, this is a prospect to look forward to. In the automated world to come, billionaires seem to expect to be some of the last workers standing, charged with much of the only work they imagine humans will have left to do: calling the shots for everyone else.
For Mr. Musk, culling the work forces of firms he acquires seems to be a way of bringing this future one step closer. After he took over Twitter, he fired half its employees and informed those who remained that he would be imposing an “extremely hard-core” management style; many of them took his offer to resign in exchange for three months of severance. Now Mr. Musk is applying the same playbook to the federal government, seeking to replace career officials with DOGE shock troops and machine learning algorithms. “Everything that can be machine-automated will be,” one official observing Mr. Musk’s blitz recently told The Washington Post. “And the technocrats will replace the bureaucrats.”
Common sense would seem to suggest obstacles to this vision. As Mr. Musk is proving before our eyes, working 120 hours a week is not the same thing as doing a good job. Mr. Musk and his DOGE henchmen are making the kinds of sloppy mistakes one might expect from people toiling around the clock, subsisting, as they reportedly are, on “a steady stream of delivery pizzas, Red Bull and Doritos,” and resting only intermittently in office “sleep pods.” They put up a website attempting to document their cost savings that was riddled with glaring accounting errors. They fired hundreds of workers responsible for nuclear weapons safety, then scrambled to rehire them.