On the one hand, Musk is probably trying to distance himself from his work at DOGE now that his bromance with president Donald Trump has devolved into a bitter feud.

But it also smacks of hypocrisy, considering that he previously complained that empathy is destroying society.

In late February, roughly a week after wielding the chainsaw on stage, Musk told podcaster Joe Rogan that "we've got civilizational suicidal empathy going on."

"The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy, the empathy exploit," he said at the time. "They're exploiting a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response."

The wake of chaos and destruction DOGE has left behind certainly underlines Musk's capacity to disregard the feelings of others " almost as if "cruelty is the point," as The Atlantic's Adam Serwer put it in a 2018 essay about Trump's first term.

But now that his once rosy relationship with Trump has exploded into a million pieces, metastasizing into an ugly feud rife with threats and personal attacks, Musk is trying to distance himself from his ruthless and ultimately fruitless endeavor to save the government money."