There are so many layers of grift and cause for alarm here, it’s hard to know where to begin. I’ll start with Chris Hayes noting that despite Musk’s supposed concern for government waste, none of his billions in government contracts have been deleted. On his All In show Thursday night, Hayes said his show has looked to see if Musk deleted any government contracts with his own companies. And surprise! No, he has not.

Instead, Musk is poised to add more billions – with a “b” – to his government-funded profits. According to Hayes, Musk’s existing contracts are valued at up to $38 billion. Now the world’s richest man wants to snatch for himself an already-existing $2.4 billion contract with Verizon to upgrade aviation safety technology.

CNN reported on Wednesday that the Federal Aviation Administration has "agreed to use Musk’s SpaceX Starlink internet system to upgrade the information technology networks it uses to manage US airspace, raising concerns about conflicts of interest for CEO Elon Musk.”

“Concerns about conflicts of interest” are only part of the problem.

For one thing, this hardly looks like efficiency for anything but Musk’s wallet. As CNN also reported, the FAA already has a $2.4 billion contract with Verizon to upgrade technology. According to HuffPost, it has already done nearly $200 million in work on that contract. Will Verizon just walk away from that contract and give back any money it’s already received to Musk the government? Litigation is more likely. If Verizon sues the FAA for canceling the contract, who do you think will wind up paying for it? Spoiler alert: It won’t be Musk. Meanwhile, his company will probably start from scratch and charge the rest of us for re-doing work that was already in progress.

Then there are the safety concerns. Musk, who appears to have no background in aviation, is the guy who “accidentally fired” bird flu experts in the middle of a pandemic, then had to spend government resources getting them back. He also “accidentally fired” nuclear bomb experts the government needed to hire back. That’s on top of the safety issues with his cars.

As Hayes put it, the whole thing is “both deadly serious and cartoonishly corrupt.”