We know. Engineers understand so much about something, and nothing about everything else. It is always risky to generalize, but before female emancipation, they were the favorite prey of women born wives, because in their private dimension, Ings are malleable like clay, and reformattable like floppy disks.

It is no coincidence that Elon Musk, the most brilliant engineer of this first quarter of a century, did NOT study engineering. If he had done so, maybe he would NOT have turned his eyes up towards Mars. And then even further up, towards the White House. His funding was decisive for the election of Donald Trump, who in exchange granted him a very important role in the future administration. In Autumn 2024, the president-elect’s entourage was eerily reminiscent of an apocalyptic film, Don’t look up.

In that 2021 colossal, Meryl Streep played a vapid President of the United States, at the mercy of her main financier, a genius and eccentric, who in exchange had unlimited access to the control room. One day, the genie dissuaded the President from destroying a comet the size of Everest on a collision course with Earth. The plan was to bring the celestial body closer, then disintegrate it just in time, and recover the precious fragments in the ocean.

It ended very badly.

Trump tasked Musk with thinning out the redundant blob of the bureaucratic and technocratic American deep state that had boycotted him during his first term. In the 2024 election, more than 90% of voters in Washington DC had voted for Kamala Harris, and now Elon was preparing to sift through the millions of officials, generals, diplomats, analysts at the Pentagon and State Department.

On a smaller scale, in 2014 Matteo Renzi attempted to scrap the bureaucrats of the Italian state, the infamous mandarins. Renzi lasted just a couple of years, while the mandarins are always there, like the leaves on the trees in spring.

Musk’s was an almost impossible mission, but if he had succeeded, and then someone had NOT stopped him, he might have continued to prune to the bitter end, as already with Twitter. Containing it or not would have drawn the line between meritorious work and catastrophe. In 2024, many doubted that Trump would be able to stand up to him.

“We must protect our genes,” said Donald Trump after winning the election. In those same hours, Elon Musk posted a photomontage of himself in the Oval Office holding a sink in his arms.