If you asked me last week what’s more dangerous than Elon Musk exercising what, on some days, looks like de facto control over the US Treasury Department, I would’ve said “nothing.”

What, after all, could possibly be more dangerous than entrusting the US Treasury to a “red-pilled,” ketamine-addicted, born-again right-winger whose fascination with interplanetary travel may be informed in part by an apocalyptic view of a society he sees as irredeemably divorced from notions of Aryan superiority? (Notions which, in Musk’s now thoroughly deluded mind, are partially, and maybe even entirely, legitimate.) Did I mention that person’s the richest man in the world? If not, he is.

Now I know. Now I know what’s more dangerous than that: It’s Elon Musk, in his current incarnation, taking control of OpenAI, a company he co-founded when he was still among the semi-sane.

On Monday, Musk, along with agent-turned mega-mogul Ari Emanuel, bid nearly $100 billion to buy OpenAI’s nonprofit. If successful, the gambit could mean Musk gaining control of the world’s foremost artificial intelligence company and, one can only imagine, folding into xAI, or the other way around.

Without getting too far into the origins of what, despite the existential stakes, is in many respects a petty personal feud between Musk and Sam Altman, Elon suspects OpenAI intends to cheat the nonprofit in the course of converting OpenAI to a for-profit entity. Musk has leveled a bevy of additional accusations against OpenAI, including antitrust claims, the gist of which is that Altman’s colluding with Microsoft to corner the generative AI market.

I used to view (and in most respects, still do) Musk’s allegations as sour grapes: OpenAI’s the one he let get away, and… well, boy oh boy, if you’re gonna let one get away, don’t let it be that one. Maybe xAI can catch up, maybe it can’t, but it sure would be easier to wrestle control of OpenAI from Altman, and that’s precisely what Musk’s trying to do.

He was outwardly jealous last month when Altman appeared alongside Trump at The White House for a meaningless photo op masquerading as a remote groundbreaking ceremony for “Stargate,” an AI infrastructure project backed by Masayoshi Son, whose SoftBank’s leading a new funding round for OpenAI. Musk, irritable, suggested Altman couldn’t come up with the money for Stargate.

Almost invariably, Trump will end up in the mix here somewhere, pontificating, adjudicating and, unless he’s tired of the #PresidentMusk memes (hold that thought), putting the presidential finger on the scales in favor of his most important booster.

Altman rejected the offer out of hand on Monday by way of a clever quip about the value destruction which took place at Twitter after Musk took it over. “No thank you,” Altman said, on “X,” referring to Musk’s $97.4 billion bid for OpenAI’s nonprofit. “But we will buy Twitter for $9.74 billion if you want.”

Altman can afford to put on a brave face. He’s rich, powerful and backed by Microsoft. And yet, he’s staring down what amounts to a hostile takeover from a veritable god whose most recent conquest was the US government itself. Apparently, the Musk-led consortium intends to beat any competing offer for OpenAI.

Do note: Altman’s joke about Twitter’s valuation post-Musk takeover was clever, but it’s dated. Wall Street now stands to make billions on what, for a time, was the largest slug of hung debt since the financial crisis. Thanks in part to Musk’s inroads to power and proximity to the Oval Office, a lot of that debt recovered and remember: Banks earned a lot of interest on those loans, even as they encumbered balance sheets.

The OpenAI bid, first reported by The Wall Street Journal, came on a day when five former Treasury secretaries (Steve Mnuchin not among them) penned an alarmed Op-Ed in The New York Times describing Musk’s prying, and particularly the prospect that acting in his capacity as DOGE chief, he might unilaterally stop payments on some of the government’s financial obligations, as nothing short of terrifying.

“We were fortunate that during our tenures in office no effort was made to unlawfully undermine the nation’s financial commitments,” Robert Rubin, Larry Summers, Tim Geithner, Jacob Lew and Janet Yellen wrote. “Regrettably, recent reporting gives substantial cause for concern that such efforts are underway today.”

Kevin Hassett called the Op-Ed, and specifically the notion that Musk is running the Treasury department and might orchestrate a selective default, “poppycock,” but on Sunday evening, Trump himself said that thanks to Musk’s sleuthing, America might be able to declare its debt burden smaller. “It could be that a lot of those things don’t count,” Trump said, referring to Treasurys.

Without mincing words, this is all very, very troubling, and for once I’m not just saying that for the purposes of penning a compelling editorial. I’m a bit perturbed personally, and if you’re a longtime reader, you know that’s exceedingly rare. I pretend to be vexed by this or that, but in reality, I don’t so much care. About anything, which is what gives my pretensions to even-handedness more weight than they otherwise might command coming from an avowed partisan.

But on this issue, I’m genuinely concerned. Musk is gathering far, far too much power. Frankly (and ironically), the world’s best chance at impeding his quest for dominion might be Trump who, sooner or later, will tire of the suggestion that Elon runs the country. Remember: Steve Bannon was once viewed as a kind of shadow president. The next thing you knew, “Sloppy Steve” was “dumped like a dog.”