The federal bureaucracy in the USA is much worse than he anticipated, says Elon Musk in an interview with The Washington Post.
I realized that there were problems, but trying to improve things in DC is undoubtedly an uphill struggle, to say the least.
Creating Doge (Department of government efficiency), a Musk-let White House initiative for streamlining that promised budget cuts of nearly 2,000 billion dollars, sparked strong emotions.
During Donald Trump's first months in the White House, the axe fell within the government apparatus: the aid agency USAID was closed, and massive cuts were made to, among other things, the education department, the disaster agency Fema, and the defense headquarters Pentagon. Moreover, government employees got emails offering them severance packages. Others got emails where they were forced to list what they had done during the past week.
"Really uncool"
The reactions to Doge did not wait:
Doge has become a scapegoat for everything. If something bad happens somewhere, we get blamed for it, even if we have nothing to do with it, says Elon Musk.
This also affected Musk personally, who founded the companies Tesla and Space X.
People burned Teslas. Why do they do that? It's really uncool.
Musk is now trying to rebuild his image by talking about space travel to Mars, robots, and cars – not politics, according to Axios. The Washington Post notes that he no longer wears a black Maga cap (Trump's slogan), during the interview he wore a t-shirt with the text "Occupy Mars".
In Thursday's post on X, Musk writes that his "period as a special government employee is coming to an end" and thanks Trump for "the opportunity to limit the wasteful" money flow.
More frosty?
The collaboration between Musk and Trump during the autumn election campaign, where the Tesla CEO often appeared on stage at rallies.
However, the relationship is said to have become less intimate. Musk, who donated 290 million dollars to Trump's campaign, recently said that he will put significantly less money into politics going forward. And he expressed disappointment over Trump's controversial budget proposal, dubbed by the president himself as the "big, beautiful bill", as it will increase the country's national debt.
