Next For Elon: Become King of The Stock Market

Elon Musk’s DOGE has been on a rampage through the Federal government, seeking out and destroying anything it can grab in a blitzkrieg effort to dismantle the fundamental pillars of infrastructure.

From USAID to Treasury, the focus is on spending and appropriations, overwriting regulation or redirecting allocated funds when necessary, and total deletion when possible.

According to Senator Patty Murray, his next target is the Department of Labor:

The ramifications of the wealthiest man in the world having complete command over this data, and how it’s released, are expansive in scope.

Investors, both institutional and retail, make decisions on where to put their money based on numbers calculated by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The Consumer Price Index (CPI) the media releases monthly with great fanfare is one such calculation.

If Musk controls the data can any of it be trusted?

We like to think of the stock market as a fundamental, immovable backdrop of the United States. Many see it as a real-time measurement of the economic success of every American.

This is largely a misnomer, as the stock market is forward-looking, meaning it’s a prediciton of what investors believe is most likely, not necessarily a reflection of current events. For instance, companies trade at several times their current earnings because there is an expectation of growth, even in the absence of revenue. That’s how Tesla’s stock price was almost perpetually growing, even when the company was losing money on an annual basis.

The market itself can also be highly volatile. Here is the Apple chart for last week:

The red candlesticks are the days when the price went down, and on the days it went up the candlestick is green. Apple is one of the largest companies in the world with a highly entrenched product line and stable earnings, yet its stock price is volatile enough to move several dollars each day.

The overall market will slow significantly and usually sell off some on days when data like CPI or Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE ) are reported. If the numbers come in as expected, or better, the market can rally heavily. The inverse usually also occurs when the numbers are off.

One of the major reasons why it works is because investors trust the data. They know it’s being assembled by career professionals who are unbiased and reported without an agenda. Will investors still respond to data they don’t trust?

In order to put the data together, the Bureau of Labor Statistics gets insider information from companies across the economy. Will Elon Musk now have access to it? Will he personally know the ins and outs of his competitors? What could be done with this information?

If Musk wants the markets to move in a particular direction, either to benefit an ally or harm an adversary, he could manipulate the data the market relies on to make it happen.

After all, who is going to stop him?