Look, sometimes you make mistakes. Maybe you send an email to the wrong person. Maybe you accidentally buy the wrong kind of pasta sauce at the grocery store. Maybe you accidentally dismantle critical global health infrastructure. These things happen! At least, that’s what Elon Musk wants us to believe.
At yesterday’s first official Musk/Trump administration cabinet meeting, Elon decided to share a cute little anecdote about his DOGE team’s approach to governing. Just a fun little story about how they “accidentally canceled” Ebola prevention efforts. What a knee slapper!
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The only problem is that almost everything here is nonsense… well, except for the part about canceling the program on Ebola prevention. Musk absolutely did that. And some other terrible stuff as well. But the fixing the mistake part? That doesn’t appear to have actually happened. Oopsie!
It’s fine when you’re building a website. Not when you’re doing anything important like building cars, rockets or running the government.
Therein lies the larger indictment of the philosophy. It’s only fine when you’re not doing anything important. If your website is important, it’s also not fine to break it.
Yeah, definitely. It’s a great mantra when you’re in startup mode and just want to validate a market or impress venture capitalists or whatever. But then when you start having customers and people relying on you, you need to start doing proper engineering.
It’s definitely not something you should do when lives are at stake.