How Musk is X-ing the USA

By: Sam Vaknin, Brussels Morning

When an individual or a collective are hellbent on self-destruction, there is nothing you can do but stand back and wait to pick up the pieces, if any are left.

The way he did in Twitter, the apparently sadistic narcissist Elon Musk is plunging the federal administration in the USA headlong into a civil war.

But there might be a more sinister motive behind the recent developments.

Musk deployed ostentatious brutal force and threats in order to gain unmitigated access to the OPM (Office of Personnel Management), the GSA (General Services Administration), and BFS (Bureau of fiscal Service), among others. These are the agencies that handle all incoming and outgoing payments for the Federal bureaucracy.

Musk wants access to the Federal payment system because he intends to convert X (erstwhile Twitter) into a payment system (he has already signed up Visa). Such ingress will grant him irreversible advantages against competing banks and payment services like PayPal.

Some suggest that he wishes to coerce the entire government to use X as its payment platform.

But the far likelier scenario is that Musk plans to copy the data from the Treasury’s computers that will allow him — alone among all his competitors — to tailor his financial products to minutely profiled target audiences.

The databases of the government contain all the relevant personal details and the financial transactions of both individuals and corporations, including Musk’s business adversaries. You do the math.

Sam Vaknin, Ph.D. is a former economic advisor to governments (Nigeria, Sierra Leone, North Macedonia), served as the editor in chief of “Global Politician” and as a columnist in various print and international media including “Central Europe Review” and United Press International (UPI). He taught psychology and finance in various academic institutions in several countries (http://www.narcissistic-abuse.com/cv.html )