But for me, it was [Maureen] Tkacik – as usual – in the pages of The American Prospect who pulled it all together in a way that finally made it make sense, transforming the blitzkreig Muskian chaos into a recognizable playbook. While most of the coverage of Musk’s wrecking crew has focused on the broccoli-haired Gen Z brownshirts who are wilding through the server rooms at giant, critical government agencies, Tkacik homes in on their boss, Tom Krause.
Krause is a private equity looter. He’s the guy who basically invented the playbook for PE takeovers of large tech companies, from Broadcom to Citrix to VMWare, converting their businesses from selling things to renting them out, loading them up with junk fees, slashing quality, jacking up prices over and over, and firing everyone who was good at their jobs. He is a master enshittifier, an enshittification ninja.
Krause canceled employee benefits, like thank you days for managers who pulled a lot of unpaid overtime, or bonuses for workers who upgraded their credentials. He also ended the company’s practice of handing out swag as small gifts to workers, and then stiffed the company that made the swag, wontpaying a $437,574.97 invoice for all the tchotchkes the company had ordered. That’s not the only supplier Krause stiffed: FinLync, a fintech company with a three-year contract with Krause’s company, also had to sue to get paid.
Krause’s isn’t a canny operator who roots out waste: he’s a guy who tears out all the wiring and then grudgingly restores the minimum needed to keep the machine running (no wonder Musk loves him, this is the Twitter playbook).
Trump’s a plunderer. He was elected by the plunderer class – like the crypto bros who want to run wild, transforming workers’ carefully shepherded retirement savings into useless shitcoins, while the crypto bros run off with their perfectly cromulent “fiat” money. Musk is the apotheosis of this mindset, a guy who claims credit for other peoples’ productive and useful businesses, replacing real engineering with financial engineering. Musk and Krause, they’re like two peas in a pod.
That’s why – according to anonymous DOGE employees cited by Tckacik – DOGE managers are hired for their capacity for cruelty.
After Krause’s identity as the chief wrecker at DOGE was revealed, the brilliant Anna Merlan (author of Republic of Lies, the best book on conspiratorialism), wrote that “Now the whole country gets the experience of what it’s like when private equity buys the place you work”:
That’s exactly it. We are witnessing a private equity-style plunder of the entire US government – of the USA itself.
We’ve got a lot of work ahead of ourselves. The people in charge of this system – whose names you must learn and never forget – aren’t going to go easily. But at least we know who they are. We know what they’re doing. We know how the scam works. It’s not a flurry of incomprehensible actions – it’s a playbook that killed Red Lobster, Toys R Us, and Sears. We don’t have to follow that playbook.
Lambert here: Rentiers gotta rent.
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