In one of the opening scenes of the award-winning movie There Will Be Blood, Daniel Day-Lewis’ protagonist, Daniel Plainview, stands with his adopted son, little H.W., atop his shoulders, giving the movie’s famous “I’m an oil man” speech. Plainview uses H.W. as a prop to soften his image, describing himself as a family man, running a family business, as he lobbies to win new contracts for lucrative oil leases out West at the dawn of the gusher age.
The movie is loosely based on Upton Sinclair’s Oil, a novel depicting the corruption and exploitation that characterized the American oil industry at that time. Sinclair drew his inspiration from the Teapot Dome scandal of the Warren G. Harding administration, a scandal some historians still deem the largest political corruption scandal in American history. Harding’s Secretary of the Interior, Albert Bacon Fall, sold several Naval petroleum reserves, including those at Teapot Dome, Wyoming, to private oil companies without competitive bidding, in exchange for personal kickbacks, making Fall a very, very wealthy man.
Data is the new oil. Swap in President Trump for Harding and Elon Musk and his young son X for Daniel and H.W., and this, my friends, is the Teapot Thunderdome.
“There Will Be Blood,” Dillon Freasier, Daniel Day-Lewis, 2007.
© Paramount Vantage/Everett Collection
Anyone who still views Musk’s project to be about improving government efficiency or modernizing government technology or eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse is not playing with a full deck. This is a land grab. Musk has seized nearly every major data repository in the federal government and may now access the Social Security numbers, employment records, banking information, and tax returns of the majority of Americans. If you are a veteran, use Medicare, or have applied for Social Security Disability Insurance, he may have a chunk of your medical history too. The value of this treasure trove of data is hard to calculate — but given Musk’s keen interest in amassing enough data to build an artificial intelligence empire with his AI platform, Grok, it is safe to assume he has a pretty good idea. It certainly exceeds the $300 million he spent to put Trump in office.
It’s not just your personal data he’s after either. This is corporate espionage in broad daylight.
Musk and his DOGE boys now have access to the business and technology ideas of America’s best and brightest. They are thumbing through tens of millions of new business applications at the Small Business Administration in a terrifying game of Shark Tank in reverse. We can only assume the United States Patent and Trademark Office will be their next stop, if they are not there already. Musk has also ransacked the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau where he’ll find detailed information on the future competitors of his new digital payment platform collaboration with Visa, X Money. Over at the Food and Drug Administration he’ll find immensely valuable information from clinical trials evaluating the safety and efficacy of medical devices, like those of the competitors to his new brain chip company, Neuralink.
Meanwhile, Musk is after larger and more lucrative federal contracts for his companies, Starlink, Space X, and Tesla. The fruits of his labor are already bearing: The Federal Aviation Administration announced this week that they’ll use Starlink to upgrade its IT systems. Further, he can axe the regulators tasked with keeping an eye on companies. To date, Musk has shut down the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and helped Trump fire labor law enforcers at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the National Labor Relations Board, both of which have investigated Musk’s companies for illegal hostility and harassment of their workers.
The Teapot Dome scandal was a wakeup call for policymakers, and they strengthened and passed a number of laws in its wake. Albert Fall became the first Cabinet secretary to go to prison. The Supreme Court ruled that Congress had the power to compel testimony and Congress strengthened the Federal Corrupt Practices Act, regulating campaign finance. Congress also gave the Ways and Means Committee the ability to obtain the tax records of any taxpayer, power they used to eventually secure the public release of Trump’s tax returns.
Toward the end of There Will Be Blood, Day-Lewis’ Plainview lectures his rival, played by Paul Dano, on the cutthroat nature of the oil business. He explains that if they both have a milkshake, but Day-Lewis has a straw that reaches Dano’s milkshake, “I drink your milkshake,” making a loud, exaggerated slurping sound. “I drink it up,” he concludes.
Elon Musk is drinking America’s milkshake. We must stop him before he drinks us dry.
