The Real Deep State: Musk's DOGE and Yarvin's CEO-Monarch

It’s hard to overstate how much of Curtis Yarvin’s extremist playbook is being implemented at the highest levels of American government. It’s even harder to understand why so few seem to notice.

Yarvin, a former software engineer turned political theorist, is the central architect of neoreaction (NRx), a movement that rejects democracy in favor of autocratic rule by a so-called enlightened elite. His ideas, once confined to niche internet forums, have become deeply influential among a particular class of Silicon Valley power brokers—Peter Thiel, J.D. Vance, and Elon Musk—who see government as an inefficient relic, ripe for disruption.

For years, Yarvin argued that democracy was an outdated and inefficient system, that a single executive with unchecked power—what he calls a CEO-monarch—would govern more effectively, and that true reformers should focus not on winning elections but on dismantling the system from within. His ideas once sounded like the fevered fantasies of a libertarian book club, an intellectual parlor game for tech elites who saw governance as a glitch to be debugged.

Now, his theories are no longer just thought experiments. They are shaping policy.

Elon Musk, step by step, is executing a version of Yarvin’s Butterfly Revolution—his blueprint for seizing control of government infrastructure without ever staging a formal coup. And yet, somehow, it’s not even front-page news.

Yarvin’s appeal has always rested on making extreme ideas sound inevitable. He doesn’t call for democracy’s destruction with fire-and-brimstone rhetoric, but with the cold logic of a corporate reorganization. Why struggle with the inefficiencies of a sprawling, slow-moving bureaucracy when you could replace it with streamlined rule by a single “competent” executive?

Through the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), Musk is putting this theory into practice. Marketed as a bureaucratic cleanup effort, DOGE is, in reality, an experiment in state capture—a vehicle for consolidating power, bypassing Congress, and hollowing out the mechanisms that make democracy function. Its logic follows Yarvin’s playbook precisely: treat government as an outdated operating system, replace accountability with hierarchy, prioritize absolute loyalty over law.

When democracy is tied in knots, it gets handed to the billionaires and CEOs who run the country like their own private empire.

Under DOGE’s control, Treasury payments can more or less be rerouted or frozen without legislative approval, entire agencies like USAID can be starved into irrelevance, and career civil servants face an ideological purge disguised as restructuring. This isn’t just a shift in administrative priorities—it’s a direct challenge to the idea that government exists to serve the public, not private corporate rulers.

Yarvin imagined a world where a CEO could run a country like a company. Musk is ensuring that vision no longer stays hypothetical. And it’s happening so fast—under the cover of “efficiency” and “modernization”—that no one quite knows how to fight back against what is, at its core, a slow-motion corporate coup.

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Curtis Yarvin: The Man Who Wants to Kill Democracy

Yarvin has always been an evangelist for the idea that America needs a CEO-monarch—a single, all-powerful executive who governs the country as a private corporation, without the constraints of Congress, courts, or public opinion.

He doesn’t want to win elections. He wants to make elections irrelevant.

His argument, honed over years of blog posts and obscure tech conferences, goes something like this:

• America is run by an unaccountable bureaucratic blob—what he calls The Cathedral—made up of civil servants, journalists, academics, and nonprofit do-gooders who manipulate public opinion and prevent real leadership from taking hold.

• The solution isn’t reform. It isn’t electing better politicians. It’s to burn the system down and replace it with a single, unchallenged ruler—someone who can ignore Congress, override the courts, and govern by decree, like a CEO running a company.

• The way to do this isn’t through a military coup, but through a slow, systematic takeover of the state’s infrastructure—the payments, the personnel, the legal levers that actually make the government function.

Yarvin is, in many ways, the next evolution of the project Milton Friedman and Ronald Reagan began—a radical rethinking of governance through the lens of private power. But where Friedman sought to shrink the government to empower markets, and Reagan framed deregulation as a path to individual freedom, Yarvin dispenses with the pretense entirely.

He doesn’t just want less government; he wants to replace it with a “CEO-monarch,” a single autocrat who rules without constraint, running the country like a private corporation. If Friedman’s neoliberalism argued that markets should discipline democracy, and Reagan’s revolution hollowed out the state in favor of corporate influence, Yarvin’s neoreaction goes one step further: why have democracy at all when capital can rule directly?

Until recently, this was mostly just theory. But in 2024, Yarvin’s ideas got their biggest platform yet.

J.D. Vance—the Silicon Valley venture capitalist turned Trumpist Vice President—is a longtime Yarvin admirer. Peter Thiel, Musk’s closest ideological ally in the tech world, has been bankrolling these ideas for years. And now, Musk—the man who already owns the country’s largest communications platform (X, formerly Twitter), the country’s most powerful defense contractor (SpaceX), and one of its biggest energy infrastructure companies (Tesla)—has turned his full attention to restructuring the U.S. government itself.

DOGE is the mechanism for doing it.

The Coup That Doesn’t Look Like a Coup

When people think of a coup, they imagine tanks in the streets, military juntas, mass arrests. That’s not how this works. The Yarvin-Musk method is different.

Instead of seizing power by force, they seize the infrastructure of power.

Consider what DOGE has already done in just a few months:

• Seizing Control of Government Payments – DOGE has taken over the Treasury’s payment system, which processes $6 trillion annually, including Social Security checks, military salaries, and federal grants. The longtime career official overseeing it, David Lebryk, refused to comply with Musk’s team. He was removed. Now, a group of Musk-aligned operatives controls when and where federal money flows.

• Nullifying Congressional Authority – Congress holds the power of the purse. Or at least, it used to. Musk’s team has been blocking or rerouting congressionally approved spending, without a single vote. This is not a small thing—it’s a direct attack on the most fundamental check on executive power in the U.S. government.

• Hollowing Out the Bureaucracy – The Office of Personnel Management (OPM), which oversees federal hiring and security clearances, is now functionally under DOGE control. Federal workers are being pushed out, with some forced to resign under thinly veiled loyalty tests. If this continues, the executive branch will soon be staffed almost entirely by Musk and Trump loyalists.

• Shutting Down Independent Agencies – USAID, the federal agency responsible for distributing foreign aid, has been quietly frozen. Not through a law, not through a vote—simply by cutting off its funding, sending its staff home, and leaving the agency to wither on the vine.

The latest? Musk’s DOGE is setting its sights on something even more alarming: direct access to IRS taxpayer data. Under the pretense of “modernization,” DOGE has pushed for one of its engineers to be embedded at the IRS with unprecedented clearance, allowing them to access tax records, financial histories, and personal banking information for millions of Americans. IRS officials, already reeling from Trump-ordered layoffs, are deeply unsettled. Even past agency heads haven’t had this level of access. The only justification given? That DOGE needs it to “eliminate waste, fraud, and abuse.”

If approved, DOGE will have control over who gets audited, which financial records get flagged, and how federal tax enforcement is carried out. The potential for abuse is staggering. This is not just about tax collection—it’s about whether an unelected, privately run arm of the executive branch can bypass every safeguard meant to separate state power from personal and political influence.

If Musk’s goal was to turn government into a corporation, DOGE controlling the IRS would be the moment when the CEO gets to pick who pays and who doesn’t.

This is not a standard Washington power struggle or Republican cost-cutting governance. This is Yarvin’s plan playing out exactly as he envisioned: dismantle the constraints on the executive, erase the limits of presidential power, and remake the state into a privately controlled entity.

Congress must act to dismantle DOGE before it becomes entrenched. The courts must move aggressively to block these unconstitutional overreaches. Whistleblowers within the government must step forward to expose what is happening.

And the public must understand that this isn’t about “efficiency” or “modernization.” This is about replacing democracy with an unelected, unaccountable ruling corporate elite—one that answers only to itself.

It’s happening. Right now. And if nothing is done, it will soon be too late to undo.