One of the failures of DOGE was that it was a living embodiment of the Dunning-Kruger Effect, whereby people who are competent in one area presume they are competent across the board. Musk thinks that, because he took a large amount of his inheritance and got into Pay Pal and batteries early, he is a savant across all sorts of fields, including government, which of course he has no idea at all how it works. Hell, you could say the same for Trump, in that he was highly successful at hyping and selling a fundamentally worthless brand and has governed that way, to poor effect. Josh Marshall relates how Jeff Bezos has destroyed the Washington Post, because he is thinking like a Tech Bro and not a journalist.
Paul Krugman has one of his long weekend discussions with Henry Farrell that eventually turns to discusses the right ward dash of Silicon Valley. I do question whether "Silicon Valley" has really moved rightwards, so much as they had serous qualms about Biden's anti-trust agenda. Still, losing those campaign funds must not have been fun.
The real insight from the dialogue is how many Silicon Valley Bros have developed their worldviews from reading science fiction. What's more, there is a particular fallacy at play here. There is a gestalt in these circles that the world of states and the entire current order is going to collapse, and that they will reign over the new tech utopia that arises from this collapse.
This is why the failure to steep people in the Humanities is so dangerous.
Here's what's going to happen if the current order collapses. Warlords. That's it. That's what happens when states fail. And those warlords are not impressed by the fact that you successfully leveraged you IPO earnings to fund another start-up that you blah blah blah.
The root of Dunning-Kruger is a narcissism that posits that you are a very special boy indeed, because you succeeded - in this case - in making money. However, as Obama said, "You didn't build that." Economic success occurs in America because up until last January, consistent rules and laws are applied equally. Once those rules and order collapses, you discover that you are not the heroic figure that you thought you were in your special little genius boy cocoon. You're just meat. What's more, you're an appealing target because of all that shit you have.
Peter Thiel and his ilk are simply delusional, if they think that their business acumen will mean jackshit if society collapses around them. When things like that happens, it takes decades, sometimes centuries, to return to equilibrium.