'Reboot' Revealed: Elon Musk's CEO-Dictator Playbook (Plan you currently see playing out)

[Dr. Acula]

'Reboot' Revealed: Elon Musk's CEO-Dictator Playbook​

In 2022, one of Peter Thiel's favorite thinkers envisioned a second Trump Administration in which the federal government would be run by a “CEO”

The Point: In 2022, one of Peter Thiel's favorite thinkers envisioned a second Trump Administration in which the federal government would be run by a “CEO” who was not Trump and laid out a playbook for how it might work. Elon Musk is following it.

The Back Story: In 2012, Curtis Yarvin — Peter Thiel’s “house philosopher”—called for something he dubbed RAGE: Retire All Government Employees. The idea: Take over the United States government and gut the federal bureaucracy. Then, replace civil servants with political loyalists who would answer to a CEO-type leader Yarvin likened to a dictator.

“If Americans want to change their government, they’re going to have to get over their dictator phobia,” he said.

Yarvin, a software programmer, framed this as a “reboot” of government.

Elon Musk’s DOGE is just a rebranded version of RAGE. He demands mass resignations, locks career employees out of their offices, threatens to delete entire departments, and seizes total control of sensitive government systems and programs. DOGE = RAGE, masked in the bland language of “efficiency.”

But Musk’s reliance on Yarvin’s playbook runs deeper.

In an essay dated April 2022, Yarvin updated RAGE to something he described as a “butterfly revolution.” In an essay on his paywalled Substack, he imagined a second Trump presidency in which Trump would enable a radical government transformation. The proposal will sound familiar to anyone who has watched Musk wreak havoc on the United States Government (USG) over the past three weeks.

Wrote Yarvin:

We’ve got to risk a full power start—a full reboot of the USG. We can only do this by giving absolute sovereignty to a single organization—with roughly the powers that the Allied occupation authorities held in Japan and Germany in the fall of 1945. This level of centralized emergency power worked to refound a nation then, for them. So it should work now, for us.”

(The metaphor of “full power start” comes from Star Trek and entails a risky process of restarting a fictional spaceship in a way that might cause “implosion.” The World War II metaphor casts the federal government as a conquered enemy now controlled by an outside force.)

Yarvin wrote that in a second term, Trump could appoint a different person to act as the nation’s “CEO.” This CEO would be enabled to run roughshod over the federal government, with Trump in the background as “chairman of the board.” The metaphors clarify the core idea: Run the government as a rogue corporation rather than a public institution beholden to the rules of democracy.

Trump himself will not be the brain …He will not be the CEO. He will be the chairman of the board—he will select the CEO (an experienced executive). This process, which obviously has to be televised, will be complete by his inauguration—at which the transition to the next regime will start immediately.

This CEO will bring a new radical new style of leadership to the federal government:

The CEO he picks will run the executive branch without any interference from the Congress or courts, probably also taking over state and local governments. Most existing important institutions, public and private, will be shut down and replaced with new and efficient systems. Trump will be monitoring this CEO’s performance, again on TV, and can fire him if need be.

Sound familiar?

Yarvin continues: Trump should amass an army of people willing to staff his new regime. Once he wins, this “magnificent army” of “ideologically trained” and Trump-loyal “ninjas” will be unleashed on the federal bureaucracy.

[H]e will throw it directly against the administrative state—not bothering with confirmed appointments, just using temporary appointments as needed. The job of this landing force is not to govern. It is to understand the government. It is to figure out what the Trump administration can actually do—when it assumes the full Constitutional powers given to the chief executive of the executive branch…

The regime must have the capacity to govern every institution it does not dismantle. The Trump regime is not a barbaric sack of America’s institutions. Genghis Khan is not in the building! It is a systematic renewal of America’s institutions. No brand or building can survive. But the new regime must perform the real functions of the old, and ideally perform them much better.

Many institutions which are necessary organs of society will have to be destroyed. These organs will have to be replaced. If they have not already been replaced in the larval stage, or even if they have, to scale—these replacements will need staff.

Government isn't the only target for this hostile takeover, wrote Yarvin:

Finally, it is not sufficient to have an army of parachute ninjas large or smart to drop into all the agencies in the executive branch. Many institutions of power are outside the government proper. Ninjas will have to land on the roofs of these buildings too—mainly journalism, academia and social media.

The new regime must seize all points of power, without respect for paper protections. Anything can be nationalized—so long as the new regime has the staff, the prize crew as it were, to nationalize it.

Yarvin envisioned a crew of experienced and educated government workers who would be recruited to staff the new regime. Musk appears to have different ideas. As Vittoria Elliott of Wired reports, Musk's chief lieutenants at DOGE (Destruction of Government by Elon) are very young men with no experience in government.

(Read "The Young, Inexperienced Engineers Aiding Elon Musk's Government Takeover," and please subscribe to Wired, which is doing excellent work.)

 

[Dr. Acula]

Yarvin is not alone in envisioning a massive purge of government. In 2021, J.D. Vance lauded Yarvin's work and called for a government purge:

I think that what Trump should do, if I was giving him one piece of advice: Fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.

Like Yarvin, Vance compared the federal government to a conquered enemy:

De-Nazification, De-Baathification ... I tend to think that we should seize the institutions of the left. And turn them against the left. We need like a de-Baathification program, a de-woke-ification program.

He added that Trump should defy any court orders designed to stop his purge.

The idea of a massive purge also appears in the writings of Balaji Srinivasan, whose ideas seem primarily derived from Yarvin's. I've written much about Srinivasan in this newsletter, so I won't quote him at length here. But his core idea, which he clearly got from Yarvin, is a corporate takeover of governments, which will afterward be run like tech companies (specifically, Twitter). Just as Musk took over Twitter and stripped "Blue Checks" of their status, he will now defrock civil servants, experts, and anyone who is loyal to democracy instead of the current regime.

Of course, the plot to destroy the federal bureaucracy also has a partner in the far-right Heritage Foundation. Project 2025, which is clearly being implemented despite mocking Republican denials during the 2024 campaign, calls for a purging and dismantling of government as well. As the Association of Federal Government Employees warned last July:

What could happen to our government and the federal workforce in 2025? A group of conservative organizations have a plan, and it’s not good for federal employees.

The plan is detailed in a blueprint called Project 2025, organized by the far-right Heritage Foundation, and backed by over 100 conservative organizations.

The plan promises a takeover of our country’s system of checks and balances in order to “dismantle the administrative state” – the operations of federal agencies and programs according to current law and regulation, including many of the laws and regulations that govern federal employment.

Longtime readers may recall that back in September, the Heritage Foundation and particular San Francisco tech interests held a conference called "Reboot 2024: The New Reality."

The New Reality
Analysis: What once seemed like a fringe theory is now being carried out by the corporate powers that have wholly captured our government. While there are some minor differences between Yarvin's approach and Musk's, here's a summary of what they have in common:

1. Install a CEO Dictator

• Yarvin’s Blueprint: Trump appoints a CEO to run the country like a private corporation, bypassing Congress and the courts.
• Musk’s Moves: Acts as federal CEO, demands unilateral control over sensitive government programs, positioning himself as an unelected decision-maker as Trump stays in the background.

2. Purge the Bureaucracy

• Yarvin’s Plan: “Retire All Government Employees” (RAGE) – fire career civil servants and replace them with loyalists.
• Musk’s Moves: DOGE is gutting teams, demanding mass resignations, locking employees out of offices, and threatening mass layoffs in federal government. Meanwhile, DOGE is recruiting inexperienced young men who owe their loyalty to Musk/Thiel.

3. Build a Loyalist Army

• Yarvin’s Blueprint: Recruit an “ideologically trained” army to replace experts and enforce the new regime.
• Musk’s Moves: Surrounding himself with young, inexperienced loyalists who enforce his will without question. Project 2025 will also provide Republican cadre to run what's left of the federal government.

4. Dismantle Democratic Institutions

• Yarvin’s Blueprint: Strip power from federal agencies, courts, and Congress, centralizing authority under the executive branch.
• Musk’s Moves: Undermining the credibility of the federal government, downplaying legal oversight, and defying regulatory authorities. Dismantling government agencies and functions with no plan for their replacement.

5. Seize Media and Information Control to Maintain Power

• Yarvin’s Blueprint: Take over government, journalism, academia, and social media to control public narratives.
• Musk’s Moves: Buying Twitter, firing journalists, boosting propaganda, and promoting fringe narratives while attacking traditional media. Leading the hostile tech takeover as Trump’s “CEO.”

Did I miss anything?

Conclusion: There is a lot more to say. What surprises me most is how the political press generally fails to inform the public that Musk is taking a systematic approach, one that has been outlined in public forums for years. (Some press outlets, like the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times, are owned by billionaires keenly interested in kowtowing to Musk and Trump.)

We are witnessing the methodical implementation of a long-planned strategy to transform American democracy into corporate autocracy. The playbook was written in plain sight and is now being followed step by step. Some dismiss the Yarvins of the world as unhinged nuts, but that's the point. These guys, with their bizarre and dangerous ideas, have gotten very far in 2025. Just look at the news.

Yarvin pitched his vision as a fictional or unlikely scenario. Unfortunately, it now appears to be our new reality. The press's failure to connect these dots isn't just a journalistic oversight — it's a critical missed warning about the systematic dismantling of democratic governance. By the time most Americans understand what's happening, the "reboot" – the destruction of government – may already be complete.

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Note: Journalists or academic researchers interested in getting full access to Ya

 

[Hater Eraser]

Man I'll slap Elon ..