The New York Times reports that Musk has parked himself in the Secretary of War Suite in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, across the street from the White House. The suite’s stately rooms — which officials used for “the development, review, and acceptance of all plans of defense for our nation and our armed forces in times of conflict as well as in times of peace between 1888 and 1939,” according to the White House website as it appeared during President Barack Obama’s tenure — are now hosting a man who has demonstrated a complete lack of care or respect for federal employees and the work that they do. Instead, he’s gleefully wielding a “chainsaw for bureaucracy,” as he put it at the Conservative Political Action Conference last month.
It’s quite the tableau, isn’t it? The spartan setup appears to feature a 49-inch Samsung Odyssey G9 curved gaming monitor, which has a dual-QHD (5120×1440) screen in a super ultrawide (32:9) aspect ratio. It’s hooked up to a PC with components we can’t be sure of, but the MSI-branded graphics card looks to be in a compact form factor. That could mean it’s an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 or RTX 4070, which likely wouldn’t be beefy enough to power the entire display of the monitor in question — at least for gaming at 60 frames per second. But then, maybe he’s not the one actually playing?
The desk’s simple decor also tells a story. It consists of nothing but a MAGA hat (in standard-issue red) and a name plate for Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency.” You may have caught the fact that the acronym is short one period; that error was apparently made on purpose, to match the missing period in an AI-generated image that Musk posted on X in September — presumably because he thought he looked cool in it.
One piece of the puzzle that isn’t included in this photo is Musk’s sleeping arrangements, such as they are. Musk has been “sleeping on a couch and sometimes the floor” at the Eisenhower building, according to People — a plausible report, considering that he has spoken of having done so at Tesla factories. He has also boasted on X that DOGE employees are working “120 [hours] a week,” a brutal schedule that would amount to workdays north of 17 hours long over the course of a seven-day workweek.
This is the hastily assembled desk setup that Musk is using as he and DOGE ostensibly work to cut the fat from the federal bureaucracy, an initiative that in reality seems part of a multifaceted effort by the second Trump administration to indiscriminately purge career civil servants from executive branch agencies and replace them with loyalists. The “hastily assembled” part does make sense, considering that Musk’s modus operandi is to move fast and break things, and not worry too much about the consequences (or about doing the job well). In a Cabinet meeting last week, Musk tried to minimize the disarray caused by DOGE’s shutdown of the U.S. Agency for International Development, saying that DOGE had “accidentally canceled” USAID’s Ebola prevention work “very briefly,” but had spun it back up “immediately,” with “no interruption” to services. (Public health experts have vehemently disputed Musk’s claim that services have been restored, with one telling NPR that it’s “total garbage.”)
So no, this preposterous image — a PC tower and monitor adorned with glowing RGB lighting, juxtaposed against the palatial interior decor in fancy government offices that date to the 1880s — probably isn’t the important part about all this. But I can’t stop thinking about it anyway.
