AMY GOODMAN: Paris Marx, I also want to ask you about Elon Musk, who you have reported on extensively. As President Trump marked his 100th day in office, The New York Times full-page — full front-page headline, “There Have Never Been 100 Days Like This.” I want to ask you about the role of Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, in Washington over these hundred days. A new Senate report finds Musk and his businesses could avoid over $2 billion in potential legal liability, thanks to cuts Musk enacted as head of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, DOGE. When Trump was inaugurated, Musk was facing up to 65 actions from 11 federal agencies targeting SpaceX, Tesla, Neuralink and xAI. Senate Democrats now say Musk has largely averted those actions, thanks to DOGE helping him, quote, “evade oversight, derail investigations, and make litigation disappear whenever he so chooses — on his terms and at his command.” Paris Marx, tell us more.

PARIS MARX: Yeah, it has been a really stunning hundred days, and even the period before that, right? Before Trump came to power, was reelected, you could see that Elon Musk was already making the shift to the right globally, you know, by supporting other extreme right-wing parties, and then, of course, to get publicly behind Donald Trump, to give hundreds of millions of dollars to support his campaign. But I think even then, it was hard to imagine that he would really play this outsized role in the actual governance of the country — right? — heading up this agency that seemed to have such broad power, to start going into these various different departments and agencies of the U.S. government, remaking it, laying people off, forcing decisions on it. And what we have seen as part of that is, you know, this ability for Elon Musk to use this kind of profile that he has as this tech leader, this tech genius, regardless of whether that’s true or not, to come in and kind of help legitimize this right-wing program that we had seen in the making for quite some time — right? — through Project 2025 and the larger kind of Heritage Foundation and these other right-wing groups in their ambitions.

But then, beyond that, you know, as you were saying there, one of the key pieces of this was not just to lay a lot of people off, to kill certain departments or significantly reduce the capacities of others, but also to ensure that what comes out on the other side of this is much more beneficial to Elon Musk, specifically, and some parts of the tech industry, more broadly, with the rollout of Starlink in many different agencies, the gutting of regulators who were looking into Elon Musk’s businesses. And we see that, you know, a section of the tech industry wants to really see a remaking of not just the aerospace industry, but military procurement, as well. And I think that we’re starting to see changes in that space, too. So, it has been a really significant hundred days. Obviously, there’s talk now about whether Elon Musk is going to continue. He’s talked about reducing the amount of time he spends there to two days a week. But even then, two days a week is quite a lot of time to cause a lot of havoc.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And this issue of Musk’s DOGE is not just centered in the United States, per se. You’ve reported, for instance, that several Canadian tech executives recently launched the initiative Build Canada. The website lists as its goals building more pipelines, firing over 100,000 federal workers in Canada and increasing immigration restrictions. What do you see as the possibility of this approach of dismantling the liberal democratic state going global?

PARIS MARX: Yeah, so, I think it is a serious worry, right? We often see things that happen, say, in the United States eventually get exported to other parts of the world. And I would not be surprised if something — if there’s not a push from the political right in other countries to try to do something similar with a DOGE organization, kind of wrapping it in this kind of cloak of efficiency and the use of technology and things like that, but actually allowing this further gutting of the state, based on what we’ve seen over the past number of decades already, right?

And so, in Canada, we have seen tech executives explicitly say that they want to see a DOGE. It’s interesting, actually. The head of Build Canada in the past few weeks came out and said, “No, our goal is not to build a DOGE,” recognizing how that term and that notion had been so toxified based on what was happening in the United States. But that didn’t also stop a number of prominent Conservatives at a recent Conservative conference in Canada to actually talk about how it would be easier to roll out a DOGE in Canada. And there was even an executive from Amazon there, a senior public policy person, who was explaining how Amazon and other cloud services could be used to collect a lot of data on government that would aid in this process of deciding which parts of the government, which programs should be eliminated, which I think is a very worrying relationship to see, not just with these Canadian tech executives. But people from a major company like Amazon being part of these conversations in Canada probably shows, you know, still how close this relationship between parts of the tech industry and the right wing are, especially when it comes to these efforts.

AMY GOODMAN: Paris Marx, we want to thank you for being with us, host of the podcast Tech Won’t Save Us. We’ll link to your latest article in your newsletter Disconnect, “Canada’s tech executives aren’t scared of Mark Carney.” And we’ll link to your four-part podcast, Elon Musk Unmasked.

Next up, today is the 50th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War. We’ll speak to the Pulitzer Prize-winning Vietnamese American writer Viet Thanh Nguyen about Vietnam, Trump’s first 100 days and more. Stay with us.

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AMY GOODMAN: “Black Waters,” folk musicians Nora Brown and Stephanie Coleman performing in our Democracy Now! studio. They joined us in March to talk about their recent appearance at the Kennedy Center where they unfurled banners to protest President Trump’s takeover of the famed cultural institution. They played at the Kennedy Center the night that the vice president, Vice President Vance, was booed there.