Elon Musk wants to position himself above the federal government in an unprecedented way, according to veteran tech journalist Kara Swisher.
The Tesla and SpaceX CEO bought himself a powerful perch in the White House by giving more than a quarter billion dollars to Donald Trump's re-election campaign, and he has set about eliminating thousands of government jobs and entire federal agencies, but Swisher told "CNN This Morning" that Musk is scooping up sensitive data to give him a "god's view" of the entire government.
"There's a couple of things," Swisher said. "There's a unified CEO theory – they've got a lot of theories in Silicon Valley, this one is a dashboard where you can see everything and you can see the entire government. For example, it used to be used around Uber, which was looking at everybody's rides, and you could see someone's life by looking at their Uber rides, for example, where they're going, where they're coming from, etc., so you have a god's view of the whole thing. The more of a god's view you have, the better, in technology."
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The Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency has accessed heavily secured databases that store the private health data, financial records, work history and other sensitive personal information for millions of Americans, and Swisher is starting to get a sense of his intentions.
"Every time he diminishes himself [by referring to himself as 'IT support'], I think he knows exactly how important he is, and so I suspect he wants a god's view of the entire government," Swisher said. "Actually, our government systems have never been joined in the way he is trying to do, because, for lots of reasons – inefficiency, lack of technology and the idea that we don't want all that information in one place, we don't have a department of information like other countries do, and so we don't want to have that because we don't want the government spying on us quite that way."
"Of course, the government has an enormous viewpoint into every American," she added, "and that's that could be a dangerous thing with the wrong people in charge."