Elon Musk’s grandiose promises and the fiery way he tried to fulfill them stand in sharp contrast with the modest results.Nathan Howard/Reuters
Elon Musk is promising that DOGE will still find US$1-trillion in cuts to U.S. government spending and he will remain an adviser to President Donald Trump, even as the world’s wealthiest person leaves Washington having achieved only a small fraction of that target.
At a White House news conference on Friday, Mr. Musk and Mr. Trump tried to project unity as the former ended his stint leading the Department of Government Efficiency, better known as DOGE after Mr. Musk’s favourite cryptocurrency.
But the South African-Canadian-American billionaire had already criticized the President’s centrepiece domestic policy legislation which, if passed, would increase the deficit by US$3.2-trillion, negating DOGE’s cuts many times over. And the pair did not outline any plan to reach Mr. Musk’s target.
“I’m confident that, over time, we will see US$1-trillion in savings,” Mr. Musk said in the Oval Office, wearing a black T-shirt reading The Dogefather. “I’ll continue to be visiting here and be a friend and adviser to the President.”
U.S. President Donald Trump gives tech billionaire Elon Musk a gold-colored key for his work establishing DOGE.
The Associated Press
Mr. Trump, sitting at the Resolute desk, said that because of Mr. Musk’s work, “we’ve found things that are unbelievably stupid and unbelievably bad” and praised DOGE’s ability at “working with computers.”
Among Mr. Musk’s accomplishments, Mr. Trump said, were eliminating US$2-billion “to Stacey Abrams” and US$8-million “for making mice transgender.”
On the first, Mr. Trump appeared to be referring to a grant to Power Forward Communities, a consortium of charities running environmental programs. Ms. Abrams, whose voter registration work in Georgia may have cost Mr. Trump the state in the 2020 election, was an adviser to one of the groups.
On the second, he was referencing National Institutes of Health studies that examined the effects of hormones in mice.
DOGE says it has cut US$165-billion in government spending. Musk Watch, a newsletter that covers the billionaire, said it can only verify US$16.3-billion of that number.
The modest outcome stands in sharp contrast with both Mr. Musk’s grandiose promises and the fiery way he tried to fulfill them. After spending roughly US$275-million to help Mr. Trump get elected, he emerged as the dominant figure in the opening weeks of the new administration.
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Mr. Musk’s DOGE staffers – many of them university students with little previous experience – ordered layoffs, and immediate program and contract cancellations across the federal government.
In his highest-profile move, Mr. Musk shut down the entire United States Agency for International Development, or USAID. Among other things, the move meant cutting off food to civil war-ravaged Sudan, and taking away health care and education from tens of millions of people in low-income countries.
Other controversies included cuts to the health department and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and efforts to gather up Americans’ personal data.
Along the way, DOGE and its leader became known for a string of strange spectacles: On one occasion, Mr. Musk wielded a chainsaw onstage at a conservative conference.
According to a New York Times report on Friday, Mr. Musk’s personal life has been equally chaotic in recent years. He has been taking ketamine, ecstasy, magic mushrooms and Adderall, the newspaper reported, and impregnated multiple women while falsely telling them their relationships were exclusive.
Asked about the report, Mr. Musk refused to directly address it. He instead accused the newspaper of “lies” on a different story, over Russian interference in the 2016 election. “Let’s move on. Next question,” Mr. Musk said.
He was also quiet on Mr. Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Earlier in the week, Mr. Musk told CBS that he was “disappointed” in the tax-cuts-and-spending package, which “undermines the work” of DOGE.
He also criticized the legislation’s plan to eliminate tax incentives for building green electricity generation and buying electric vehicles.
Mr. Musk will now turn his attention back to his own electric carmaker, Tesla, which has suffered a drop in sales since he joined up with the climate-change-denying Mr. Trump. He will also be working on xAI, an artificial intelligence company that may benefit from DOGE’s efforts to replace some government workers with chatbots.
At Friday’s news conference, Mr. Musk had a bruise on his face, which he said was caused by his son, X, punching him while “horsing around.” Mr. Trump, for his part, praised Mr. Musk for taking rhetorical blows.
“He willingly accepted the outrageous abuse and slander and lies and attacks,” Mr. Trump said, “because he does love our country.”