A short late arvo burst of schadenfreude³ ...

The pond hates to gloat. 

It's unseemly, vindictive, mean girlish, spiteful, real queen bee Regina George ...

Oh hang on, that just shows too much reading of the reptiles, that just shows how it's too easy to lie.

The pond loves to gloat. 

The pond loves the notion of schadenfreude and lordy lordy did it surface with a vengeance when the pond saw this Beast tabloid headline ...

Elon Musk Suffered Humiliating West Wing Tongue-Lashing: ‘F*** You! F*** You!’,Musk and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent had a screaming match in April, with President Donald Trump in earshot. (archive link)

Please say on ...

Further details have emerged about the shouting match between Scott Bessent and Elon Musk at the White House, showing just how fed up the Treasury Secretary was with the tech mogul.
A profile from The Atlantic detailing the rapid rise and fall of Musk’s influence in President Donald Trump’s world opens with a dramatic quote that Bessent is alleged to have yelled at Musk during a heated exchange last month over who should lead the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).

Hang on, hang on ... it's just the Beast doing its usual Daily Snail routine and filching headlines from others, it's actually in The Atlantic?

Eek, it is, it is, it's schadenfreude³ ...

Michael Scherer and Ashley Parker wrote The Decline and Fall of Elon Musk, The Tesla founder becomes the latest government employee to lose his job. (and if that doesn't work there's always the archive link).

Perhaps best of all, the eruption started with a man so colourless, so servile, so stilted, so slavishly in fawning child-like awe of his mango-flavoured sun god that it's difficult to discover a cartoonist prepared to waste time on him.

That made the eruption all the richer, especially as no asterisks were used to ruin the rant...

Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!”
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent was shouting at Elon Musk in the halls of the West Wing last month, loud enough for Donald Trump to hear and in a language that he could certainly understand. Bessent and Musk were fighting over which of them should choose the next IRS leader—and, implicitly, over Musk’s bureaucracy-be-damned crusade. Without securing the Treasury chief’s sign-off, Musk had pushed through his own pick for the job. Bessent was, quite obviously, not having it.
The fight had started outside the Oval Office; it continued past the Roosevelt Room and toward the chief of staff’s office, and then barreled around the corner to the national security adviser’s warren. Musk accused Bessent of having run two failed hedge funds. “I can’t hear you,” he told Bessent as they argued, their faces just inches apart. “Say it louder.”

Now in one way it was old news, what with the meek and mild and often inarticulate Bessent rant having leaked out much earlier, but Scherer and Parker used it as a springboard for a deep dive into Uncle Elon's decline and fall...

Musk came to Washington all Cybertrucks and chain saws, ready to destroy the bureaucracy, fire do-nothing federal workers, and, he bragged, save taxpayers $2 trillion in the process. He was a Tech Support–T-shirt-wearing disruptor who promised to rewire how the government operates and to defeat the “woke mind virus,” all under the auspices of the newly created Department of Government Efficiency. For weeks, he and his merry band of DOGE bros gleefully jumped from agency to agency, terrorizing bureaucrats, demanding access to sensitive data, and leaving snack wrappers on employees’ desks. But as Musk winds down his official time in Washington, he has found himself isolated within the upper reaches of the Trump administration, having failed to build necessary alliances and irritating many of the department and agency heads he was ostensibly there to help. His team failed to find anything close to the 13-figure savings he’d promised. Court challenges clipped other projects. Cabinet secretaries blocked DOGE cuts they said reduced crucial services. All the while, Musk’s net worth fell, his companies tanked in value, and he became an object of frequent gossip and ridicule.
Four months after Musk’s swashbuckling arrival, he is effectively moving on, shifting his attention back to his jobs as the leader of Tesla, SpaceX, and X, among his other companies. In a call last month with Wall Street analysts, Musk said he was planning to spend “a day or two per week” focusing on DOGE issues—similar to how he manages each of his various companies. The next week, he seemed to suggest that he’d be slimming down his government portfolio even more, telling reporters that he expected to be in Washington “every other week.” Yesterday, he told the Qatar Economic Forum in a video interview that he no longer sees a reason to spend money on politics, though that could change in the future. “I think I’ve done enough,” he said.
He remains close with Trump, who still shows genuine affection for his billionaire benefactor, according to advisers and allies. But Musk’s decision to focus elsewhere has been greeted as a relief by many federal leaders, who have been busily undoing many of his cuts in their departments or making DOGE-style changes on their own terms. Cabinet leaders—who did not appreciate being treated like staff by the man boasting about feeding their fiefdom into a “wood chipper”—have widely ignored some of his efforts, such as his February demand that all federal employees send weekly emails to their supervisors laying out their accomplishments in bullet points.
“How many people were fired because they didn’t send in their three things a week or whatever the fuck it was?” one Trump adviser, who requested anonymity to speak frankly, told us. “I think that everyone is ready to move on from this part of the administration.”

And so on, and so delicious, and now we're supposed to move on, stepping lightly over the human and planetary wreckage.

It's all there at the end of those links for anyone interested in a pleasant payback read.

Spoiler alert, the pond will offer one final gobbet by jumping to the end ...

...Musk struggled to adjust to life outside his companies, where his whims reigned supreme and he rarely needed to build consensus. “He miscalculated his ability to act just completely autonomously,” one outside Trump adviser told us. “He had some missteps in all of these agencies, which would have been fine because everyone acknowledges that when you’re moving fast and breaking things, not everything is going to go right. But it’s different when you do that and you don’t even have the buy-in of the agency you’re setting on fire.”
Musk also found himself clashing with other Trump advisers on policy questions that could take a bite out of his personal fortune. The billionaire argued against the administration’s tariff bonanza—at one point, he urged “a zero-tariff situation” between the United States and Europe—and publicly attacked Trump’s top trade adviser, Peter Navarro, calling him “dumber than a sack of bricks.” In late March, according to a New York Times report, Musk was preparing to receive a secret briefing from the Pentagon on the country’s planning for a potential war with China. After the Times story published, Trump posted on social media that Musk’s trip to the Pentagon would not include any China briefing. But the report prompted a public outcry, including over Musk’s many potential conflicts of interest.
“You could feel it, everything changed, the fever had been broken,” the longtime Trump ally and Musk foe Steve Bannon told us in a text message about the Pentagon uproar. In Bannon’s view, government officials had opted to leak to the Times rather than directly confront Musk or bring their concerns to the president—a troubling sign, he told us, of Musk’s outsize power.
Now Trump-administration officials wonder just what will happen to DOGE once Musk pivots elsewhere. In some cases, DOGE employees have already become more formally enmeshed in the administration, taking on official roles within government agencies. A top Musk aide is now the Interior Department’s assistant secretary of policy management and budget, and a DOGE point person to the Department of Energy is now chief of staff. One administration official told us that Musk’s much-vaunted—and initially chaotic—reductions in the federal workforce are now coming to fruition across the government, but in a more organized fashion.
Musk’s “special government employee” status always meant that he was going to depart the government after 130 days. But for a time, there was West Wing chatter about stretching the limit of a “working day” to allow him to extend his time in the administration. Now even Musk has stopped stoking those expectations. “The mission of DOGE—to cut waste, fraud, and abuse—will surely continue,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told us in an email. “DOGE employees who onboarded at their respective agencies will continue to work with President Trump’s cabinet to make our government more efficient.”
Speaking to a group of reporters earlier this month, Musk implied that DOGE is self-sustaining and could carry on without him. “DOGE is a way of life,” he told them, “like Buddhism.” But when asked how, exactly, DOGE could continue, he was coy. “Is Buddha needed for Buddhism?” he asked.

The arrogance, the shameless hubris is still there. 

But as for moving on and stepping over the wreckage...

No way Jose, with the gloating should come further consequences, suffering richer than a tongue lashing and a stepping out into the pastures to masticate on Tesla hay.

Now he's out, it's time stick in the boot, or at least a slipper if you're inclined to the genteel.

The evisceration of Tesla an ongoing challenge, a necessary righting for past wrongs... a man who preached climate science, suckered mug punters who swallowed the grift, and then he went over to the dark side, in the cause of his own vanity and greed.

Speaking of Buddha...

Buddha said: "I consider the positions of kings and rulers and rich farts of the Elon kind as that of dust motes. I observe treasures of gold and gems and Tesla loot as so many bricks and pebbles. I look upon the finest silken robes of rampantly fornicating billionaires dressed like Steve Jobsas tattered rags. I see the anti-Semitic Nazi-loving Henry Ford in his grave. I see myriad worlds of the universe as small seeds of fruit, and the greatest lake in India as a drop of oil on my foot. I perceive the teachings of the world to be the illusion of magicians. I discern the highest conception of emancipation as a golden brocade in a dream, and view the holy path of the illuminated ones as flowers appearing in one's eyes. I see meditation as a pillar of a mountain, Nirvana as a nightmare of daytime. I look upon the judgment of right and wrong as the serpentine dance of a dragon, and the rise and fall of beliefs as but traces left by the four seasons...and I see useless emails as a tribute to monstrous egos and malicious, malevolent madness ...

In searching for Scott Bessent cartoon, the pond came across this one, and it had at least the right element of deep creepiness ...

What a pack of lickspittle weirdos they all are ...

How soon before schadenfreude³ bites them all on the bum? Oh let it be soon ...