Elon Musk’s ‘chainsaw for bureaucracy’ is… this gaming PC?

While President Donald Trump has always seemed somewhat out of place in Washington, that’s nothing compared to what we’re now seeing with his pal Elon Musk. Working under the auspices of the president as a “special government employee,” Musk — the world’s richest man, who spent well over a quarter of a billion dollars to help elect Trump and other Republicans in the 2024 election cycle — is carrying out the administration’s mission to radically reshape the federal government. And he’s doing it from a gaming PC at a desk in the White House compound.

I’m a bit ashamed to admit that a not-insignificant factor in how infuriating I find this turn of events is just how absurd it looks. Yes, Trump destroyed our traditional notions of the presidency, perhaps irrevocably, and in his second term, he has adopted a theory of executive power so expansive as to approach a dictatorship. But everything about Musk’s unelected position in the administration is particularly galling. This creature of the internet, whose brain has been so poisoned by being Extremely Online that he communicates in ancient memes and “jokes” that would flop at any comedy club, is showing up to Cabinet meetings and Oval Office press conferences dressed in a long black coat and a gray-on-black “Make America Great Again” hat. (Meanwhile, journalists from right-leaning media outlets have nothing to say about Musk’s attire, even as they criticize Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy for not wearing a suit to a White House meeting.)

The New York Times reports that Musk has parked himself in the Secretary of War Suite in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, across the street from the White House. The suite’s stately rooms — which officials used for “the development, review, and acceptance of all plans of defense for our nation and our armed forces in times of conflict as well as in times of peace between 1888 and 1939,” according to the White House website as it appeared during President Barack Obama’s tenure — are now hosting a man who has demonstrated a complete lack of care or respect for federal employees and the work that they do. Instead, he’s gleefully wielding a “chainsaw for bureaucracy,” as he put it at the Conservative Political Action Conference last month.

It’s quite the tableau, isn’t it? The spartan setup appears to feature a 49-inch Samsung Odyssey G9 curved gaming monitor, which has a dual-QHD (5120×1440) screen in a super ultrawide (32:9) aspect ratio. It’s hooked up to a PC with components we can’t be sure of, but the MSI-branded graphics card looks to be in a compact form factor. That could mean it’s an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 or RTX 4070, which likely wouldn’t be beefy enough to power the entire display of the monitor in question — at least for gaming at 60 frames per second. But then, maybe he’s not the one actually playing?

The desk’s simple decor also tells a story. It consists of nothing but a MAGA hat (in standard-issue red) and a name plate for Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency.” You may have caught the fact that the acronym is short one period; that error was apparently made on purpose, to match the missing period in an AI-generated image that Musk posted on X in September — presumably because he thought he looked cool in it.

One piece of the puzzle that isn’t included in this photo is Musk’s sleeping arrangements, such as they are. Musk has been “sleeping on a couch and sometimes the floor” at the Eisenhower building, according to People — a plausible report, considering that he has spoken of having done so at Tesla factories. He has also boasted on X that DOGE employees are working “120 [hours] a week,” a brutal schedule that would amount to workdays north of 17 hours long over the course of a seven-day workweek.

This is the hastily assembled desk setup that Musk is using as he and DOGE ostensibly work to cut the fat from the federal bureaucracy, an initiative that in reality seems part of a multifaceted effort by the second Trump administration to indiscriminately purge career civil servants from executive branch agencies and replace them with loyalists. The “hastily assembled” part does make sense, considering that Musk’s modus operandi is to move fast and break things, and not worry too much about the consequences (or about doing the job well). In a Cabinet meeting last week, Musk tried to minimize the disarray caused by DOGE’s shutdown of the U.S. Agency for International Development, saying that DOGE had “accidentally canceled” USAID’s Ebola prevention work “very briefly,” but had spun it back up “immediately,” with “no interruption” to services. (Public health experts have vehemently disputed Musk’s claim that services have been restored, with one telling NPR that it’s “total garbage.”)

So no, this preposterous image — a PC tower and monitor adorned with glowing RGB lighting, juxtaposed against the palatial interior decor in fancy government offices that date to the 1880s — probably isn’t the important part about all this. But I can’t stop thinking about it anyway.