U.S. President Donald Trump and Elon Musk speak in the Oval Office before departing the White House in Washington in March.ROBERTO SCHMIDT/AFP/Getty Images

Susi Geiger is professor of markets, organizations and society at University College Dublin’s Michael Smurfit Graduate Business School.

It’s perhaps for the best that U.S. President Donald Trump and Tesla’s TSLA-Q Elon Musk have had such a dramatic falling out. But this does little to fix the damage wrought by Mr. Musk or the wider disruption he represents.

A few weeks into the tumultuous reign of the (recently banished) U.S. Department of Government Efficiency captain, medical historian Mike Magee wrote a blog post titled “Disruption For the Sake of Disruption Is Not Innovation.” It aptly escribes the “hostile takeover” of government departments in the U.S. by private industry interests and the interruptions of state functions this has caused.

Silicon Valley has long been known to elevate disruption as a virtue that lead to innovation. What this ideology misses is the fact that to reach that positive outcome, a great deal of institutional framing is necessary. When it’s institutions themselves........

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