Speaker 1: So an interview with mister Elon Musk, who of course
Speaker 1: is famed Trump advisor, CEO of Tesla SpaceX, chair of
Speaker 1: ex Corpilon. Thank you for doing this, We appreciate it.
Speaker 2: Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1: I want to begin. Among other things, everyone's attacking you
Speaker 1: for your position. What are you doing in the government.
Speaker 1: There was a cyber attack on X today which shut
Speaker 1: it down and may have been foreign sourced. It's a
Speaker 1: big story. You want to give us a moment on that.
Speaker 3: Well, we're not sure exactly what happened, but there was
Speaker 3: a massive cyber attack to try to bring down the
Speaker 3: X system with IP addresses originating in the Ukraine area.
Speaker 1: Well, so that's your suspicion. Is the website? Is the
Speaker 1: Internet up?
Speaker 2: Is it up yet? It's up? Yet? It's up yet?
Speaker 1: Okay, good, but I just was looking back. Let me
Speaker 1: get see if I get this right. They're setting fire
Speaker 1: to various Tesla charging stations near Boston. Shots were fired
Speaker 1: at a Tesla dealership in Oregon. Various non violence.
Speaker 2: What's fired? Not a metaphor? Not's fired? Yes?
Speaker 1: Downtown New York marching marching against the Tesla's showroom. Your
Speaker 1: stock is way down You've been criticized left and right.
Speaker 2: But look on the right side.
Speaker 1: I mean, what are you doing this?
Speaker 2: Always look on the always look on the right side
Speaker 2: of life.
Speaker 1: Yes, But besides that, yes, I mean, what motivates you
Speaker 1: to do this?
Speaker 3: I suppose the opera good. It's tough sledding, Yeah, it
Speaker 3: is tough sledding. But I think we're doing the right
Speaker 3: thing here. The you know, there's been a tremense amount
Speaker 3: of of wasting fort in the in the government. You know,
Speaker 3: when you're part of the government, you saw a lot
Speaker 3: of that and it's and there's been uh, you know,
Speaker 3: if you look at the Inspector General reports and the
Speaker 3: Government Accountability Office, there have been many orders that are
Speaker 3: pointed out that there's tremendous amount of waste and fraud
Speaker 3: in the government.
Speaker 2: In fact, there was.
Speaker 3: A report issued by the GAO, the govern Accountability Office
Speaker 3: last year, so during the Biden administration, which estimated the
Speaker 3: federal government fraud the.
Speaker 2: Half a trillion dollars.
Speaker 3: So just because that's not a Trump administration, think that's
Speaker 3: a Biden administration thing. So what we're trying to do
Speaker 3: is get that number down to a much smaller figure,
Speaker 3: save money for the American taxpayer. Stop money being spent
Speaker 3: on things that are that I think very few taxpayers
Speaker 3: would agree make sense, you know, transgender animal surgeries, or
Speaker 3: why are we spending Why are American tax dollars being
Speaker 3: spent on this? And the presidents are gone through a
Speaker 3: long list of absurd things. Why are the twenty million
Speaker 3: people who are definitely dead marked US alive in the
Speaker 3: Social Security database? Why we're hundreds of millions of dollars of
Speaker 3: small business Administration loans were given out to people aged
Speaker 3: eleven and.
Speaker 2: Under according to.
Speaker 3: The Social Security like, these must have some very enterprising
Speaker 3: eight year olds, you.
Speaker 1: Know, pretty strong one hundred and fifty year olds.
Speaker 3: Yes, exactly, as as the President said, you know, we
Speaker 3: have an enormous number of people marked as alive. Who
Speaker 3: one hundred and sixty? He didn't know the country was
Speaker 3: that healthy?
Speaker 1: Yes, you know, so demystify this.
Speaker 2: How do you do it?
Speaker 1: Okay? How big is your team? Where'd you recruit most
Speaker 1: of them from? And what is it that makes you
Speaker 1: choose you know, the Treasury or Social Security or USAI
Speaker 1: D How does it work? Let the public know?
Speaker 2: Please?
Speaker 3: Right, Well, we just basically follow the money, you know,
Speaker 3: we look at the presents executive orders, and we also
Speaker 3: just follow the money.
Speaker 2: So we started looking closely at.
Speaker 3: USCID because they were completely violating the presence executive orders
Speaker 3: to suspend foreign foreign aid, you know what's called foreign aid,
Speaker 3: but in our view is a lot of corruption. So
Speaker 3: what we saw there is just a trans amount of
Speaker 3: money being sent to non governmental organizations, but actually it's
Speaker 3: a This, by the way, is I think one of
Speaker 3: the biggest sources of fraud in the world is government
Speaker 3: funded non governmental organizations. This is a gigantic fraud loophole
Speaker 3: where the government can give money to an NGO and
Speaker 3: then that there are no controls over that NGO, so
Speaker 3: they've given billions dollars. In thatch, we estimate tens of
Speaker 3: billions of dollars to NGOs that are essentially scams.
Speaker 2: And by the way, I'm trying to put us up
Speaker 2: to that, you know, so I do.
Speaker 1: Want to interrupt. Secretary of State Rubio has just come
Speaker 1: out and I think he tweeted today he is accepted
Speaker 1: over eighty percent of your recommendations to shut down in
Speaker 1: USAI D. Right, So your review and analysis was spot on.
Speaker 2: Yes, So I think.
Speaker 3: When people criticize say what DOGE is doing? We say, well,
Speaker 3: which parts specifically, because we put all of the actions
Speaker 3: of the dog team on the dose dot gov website
Speaker 3: and on the DOGE headline x, so we post the receipts,
Speaker 3: so it's like this, this action has been taken, this
Speaker 3: action has been taken. So when when we get criticism,
Speaker 3: we say, like, of what of what? Which which line
Speaker 3: do you disagree with? Like which which cut? Which cut?
Speaker 3: Which cost saving do you disagree with? And people usually
Speaker 3: can't think.
Speaker 1: Of any you know, So it's transparent line by line.
Speaker 3: It's transparent line by line, which is quite remarkable, right
Speaker 3: and so, and then with respect to the Treasury, for example,
Speaker 3: we we the two main recommendations we UH suggested, which
Speaker 3: have not been implemented, was that any payments going out
Speaker 3: of the.
Speaker 2: Treasury, especially the Treasury's.
Speaker 3: Main payment computer, which is cold pen, things like a
Speaker 3: payments account manager or something like that. It's like almost
Speaker 3: five trillion a year or so about a billion an hour,
Speaker 3: that the payments be coded with the congressional appropriation, and
Speaker 3: that there be an explanation for the payment.
Speaker 2: Very basic stuff. And just doing that we.
Speaker 3: Estimate will save one hundred billion dollars a year.
Speaker 1: You're not really let me see if I get this right,
Speaker 1: particularly with so screwt. You're not really changing policy. You're
Speaker 1: auditing the fiscal mechanisms to make sure that you know,
Speaker 1: from point A gets to point B, and that's where
Speaker 1: it's supposed to get to. In some cases it doesn't
Speaker 1: get there, or some cases it may go over there.
Speaker 1: But that's it's not a policy exercise. You're not changing laws.
Speaker 1: You're just doing what any business would do in a
Speaker 1: profit and loss audit.
Speaker 3: I think we're really what what what we're adding here
Speaker 3: is caring and competence and the there's a massive amount
Speaker 3: of fraud of basically people submitting UH social Security numbers
Speaker 3: for UH social Security benefits, unemployment, small business administration loans,
Speaker 3: and UH and medical.
Speaker 2: Where where those are those are?
Speaker 3: Those are fake social screen numbers, so they're where they've
Speaker 3: stolen somebody else's social screen number.
Speaker 2: And we're trying to.
Speaker 3: We're trying to put a stop to all of that.
Speaker 3: And that that's the number which is estimated to be
Speaker 3: on the order of ten percent of federal expenditures, which is,
Speaker 3: you know, half a half a trillion.
Speaker 1: Dollars, a huge number you're working with the agency heads,
Speaker 1: you're working with the Cabinet secretary. Yes, I saw Howard
Speaker 1: Lutnik was on TV yesterday saying you were partnering with them.
Speaker 2: Is that there? Uh?
Speaker 3: Yeah, well we do is an in consult consultation with
Speaker 3: the cabinet sectories and with their departments.
Speaker 2: So we're really trying to be uh sort of.
Speaker 3: We'll refer to ourselves as tech tech support. You know,
Speaker 3: we're really helping the department get a handle on things
Speaker 3: because what actually happens here is you've got this this
Speaker 3: sort of vast federal bureaucracy, and then you've got a
Speaker 3: very thin layer on top of the of the politically
Speaker 3: appointed officials. And what has to happen is that the
Speaker 3: bureaucracy frankly is in control and they largely ignore the
Speaker 3: politically appointed people.
Speaker 1: Why should the bureaucracy, I'm sure you must have seen that.
Speaker 1: I've lived with this twice. I've worked for Reagan many
Speaker 1: years ago, and I worked for Trump in the first term.
Speaker 1: It's like a permanent bureaucracy, I might add, it's a
Speaker 1: permanently liberal bureaucracy.
Speaker 2: Yes, very much so.
Speaker 1: And it doesn't it's it's not a bureocracy that necessarily
Speaker 1: enforces or implements presidential policy.
Speaker 2: They don't.
Speaker 3: In fact, they try their best to thwart presidential policy.
Speaker 3: So the president is the elected representative of the people.
Speaker 3: And if the president cannot get things implemented as a
Speaker 3: reflection of the well of the people, then what we
Speaker 3: have is not a democracy. We have a bureaucracy. We
Speaker 3: have rule of the bureau, not rule of the people.
Speaker 3: And that's what we're trying to defeat. Here is the
Speaker 3: bureaucracy and have rule of the people.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 3: The and as you mentioned, the bureaucracy is overwhelmingly Democrats.
Speaker 2: So Washington d C.
Speaker 3: Was ninety two and a half percent I believe voted
Speaker 3: for Kamala So this overwhelmingly.
Speaker 2: A deep blue situation.
Speaker 1: How do you pick your next targeted agency or department?
Speaker 3: Well, we're we're trying to act broadly across old departments,
Speaker 3: so it's not just one department at a time.
Speaker 2: But are you in all them now? All of them?
Speaker 2: Pretty much? Yeah?
Speaker 3: Yes, Oh, we're trying to make trying to make the
Speaker 3: government more efficient across the board.
Speaker 1: So yeah, how big is your team?
Speaker 3: We're a little over one hundred at this point. Get
Speaker 3: to two hundred.
Speaker 1: You're going to get to two hundred. Yeah, okay, and
Speaker 1: you're recruiting from where.
Speaker 2: More or less.
Speaker 3: Basically it's software people, you know, information security, software people,
Speaker 3: and finance, you know, it's basically, yeah, finance and technology.
Speaker 3: And I mean, frankly, I can't believe I'm here doing this.
Speaker 3: It's kind of bizarre, but I.
Speaker 2: Kind of think that the.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we've got this enormous federal budget deficit, and it's
Speaker 3: a it's a true trillion dollar deficit.
Speaker 2: It keeps growing.
Speaker 3: Our interest payments are higher than our defense department budget.
Speaker 3: That's that's I think was the real wake up call
Speaker 3: for me was looking at seeing that the interest payments
Speaker 3: the national debt exceeded the defense department budget and that
Speaker 3: was only growing over time, which meant if we didn't
Speaker 3: do something about this, then there.
Speaker 2: Won't be any money for anything. We'll just be servicing debt.
Speaker 1: And you know how to read an income statement and
Speaker 1: you know how to read a balance sheet. You've had
Speaker 1: some business experience. I'm kidding, but yeah, you know about
Speaker 1: this stuff.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, really, I just don't want America to
Speaker 3: go bankrupt.
Speaker 1: So it's a call to action. You're feeling you're hearing
Speaker 1: a call to action. Yeah, you're giving up your other stuff.
Speaker 1: I mean, what do you How are you running your
Speaker 1: other businesses with great difficulty? Yeah, I mean, but there's
Speaker 1: no turning back.
Speaker 3: You're saying, I'm just here trying to make government more efficient,
Speaker 3: eliminate waste and fraud, and.
Speaker 2: So far we're making good progress. Actually, so our.
Speaker 3: Savings at this point exceed four billion dollars a day,
Speaker 3: so it's quitty significant.
Speaker 1: You think you'll wind up getting to a trillion dollars Yeah, savings.
Speaker 3: I mean unless's unless we're unless we're stopped, we will
Speaker 3: get to a trillion dollars of savings.
Speaker 1: And that stuff can be translated. I mean we've been talking.
Speaker 1: We had Russell vote the OMB director run earlier through
Speaker 1: very recision authority impowerment authority. But believe you said it earlier,
Speaker 1: it's an audit that will not gather dust on shelves,
Speaker 1: actually going to wind up with real savings, bend the
Speaker 1: base spending baseline down.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: There have been many good audits I sit, done by
Speaker 3: inspector generals and by government accountability offs, and they just
Speaker 3: haven't been implemented. Nothing's been done. You know, I think
Speaker 3: the GEO identified there was seventeen million dead people in
Speaker 3: the Social Security database several years ago. It's not twenty million,
Speaker 3: but we done anything about it. And I mean, I
Speaker 3: think you can sort of look at this as a
Speaker 3: complaint minimization optimization. So basically, if the government sends money
Speaker 3: out to whether it's wasteflow or porgeent fraudulent, nobody complains
Speaker 3: if they receive money, but they do complain if they
Speaker 3: don't receive money. And the people that complain the loudest
Speaker 3: are the ones receiving the fortulent money.
Speaker 1: And you're on it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, just like said, the goal, the goal
Speaker 3: here is let's let's not have America go bankrupt with
Speaker 3: waste and fraud. So that's what I'm here for. And
Speaker 3: we're making good progress.
Speaker 1: Yes, so you're going to go another year, Yeah, I
Speaker 1: think so final report middle of next year.
Speaker 3: Well, we're just getting things done as opposed to writing
Speaker 3: a report.
Speaker 2: Like I say, reports.
Speaker 3: Don't mean anything, just you've got to actually take actions.
Speaker 2: So the.
Speaker 3: I mean the waste important in entitlement spending, you know,
Speaker 3: which is all of the which is most of the
Speaker 3: federal spending is entitlements, So that that's that's like the
Speaker 3: big one to eliminate is that's the sort of half trillion,
Speaker 3: maybe six seven hundred billion a year.
Speaker 2: That is also a mechanism.
Speaker 3: By which the Democrats attract and retain illegal immigrants of
Speaker 3: I essentially paint them to come here and then turning
Speaker 3: them into voters. Yes, so this is why the Democrats
Speaker 3: are so upset about the situation, because they're losing. You know,
Speaker 3: if we turn off this gigantic money magnet for illegal immigrants,
Speaker 3: then they will leave and they will lose voters.
Speaker 1: Do you have presidents sport He said so again yesterday
Speaker 1: he completely supports your operation.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well thanks, but that's super. Without the president's support,
Speaker 3: we couldn't make any progress here. But yeah, I mean,
Speaker 3: where you'll see the biggest outcry is from the Democrats
Speaker 3: who are they don't want the way somepport to be
Speaker 3: turned off because it is a gigantic magnet to attract
Speaker 3: legal immigrants and have them stay in the country. And
Speaker 3: I mean you see some of the crazy stuff like
Speaker 3: where money from FEMA, you know, which meant FEMA's agency
Speaker 3: is meant to take care of Americans in distress and
Speaker 3: a bunch of their money was being sent to pay
Speaker 3: for luxury hotels in New York for illegal immigrants. And
Speaker 3: that was happening even after the President was elected, even
Speaker 3: after he signed an executive order saying that.
Speaker 2: Needs to stop.
Speaker 3: So we actually made sure that that money did stop going,
Speaker 3: because it's obviously it's outrageous that American taxpayer money is
Speaker 3: meant on luxury hotels for legals. But you have to say, like,
Speaker 3: why is that being done? It was because the Democrats
Speaker 3: are trying to import voters.
Speaker 2: Basically, yes, I agree.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and that's also why there's no voter ID and needed.
Speaker 3: In fact, in California, in New York State, you're not
Speaker 3: allowed to show voter I d that's a great Isn't
Speaker 3: it even insane?
Speaker 1: Insane? Yeah, I'd say that as a New Yorker.
Speaker 2: It's insane, insane.
Speaker 1: And it violates the entire Constitution and the principles behind it.
Speaker 2: Yes, producers are.
Speaker 1: Yelling at me to get out. I don't want to
Speaker 1: end this interview because too much fun.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Can I just ask you one thing twenty seconds, nothing
Speaker 1: to do with, nothing to do with Doge. Can you
Speaker 1: rescue the astronauts?
Speaker 2: Yes, we're bringing them back in a few weeks.
Speaker 1: It is not near enough attention being paid to this.
Speaker 1: You're going to get him back.
Speaker 2: We're going to get him back. God bless thank.
Speaker 1: You, thank you for all your service, Elon Musk.
Speaker 2: We appreciate it, very much, appreciate it. Take care. Thank you.