Elon Musk is not the president, but it does appear that he—a foreign-born, unelected billionaire who was not confirmed by Congress—is exercising profound influence over the federal government of the United States,

Even as Mr Musk was speaking, workers at USAID ’s headquarters in Washington were being told not to come in the next day. Some 600 of the agency’s staff seem to have been locked out of their emails. That followed a weekend in which the agency’s website went offline;

It literally sounds like the plot of a dystopian science fiction movie: The richest man in the world befriends—and helps finance—another rich man who becomes president of the United States, who then gives his plutocratic benefactor carte blanche access to the operations of the federal government.

Elon Musk has taken control of government employees’ private data by having his cronies illegally install a commercial server at the Office of Personnel Management. Musk and his handpicked associates at the fake “Department of Government Efficiency” are using their ill-gotten access to control federal databases containing Social Security numbers,