Larry Kudlow (00:01):
All right. Well, welcome to the show in a special interview with Mr. Elon Musk, who of course is famed Trump advisor, CEO of Tesla, SpaceX, chair of X Corp, Elon. Thank you for doing this, we appreciate it.
Elon Musk (00:13):
Thanks for having me.
Larry Kudlow (00:15):
I want to begin, but among other things, everyone's attacking you for your position. What are you doing in the government? There was a cyber attack on X today, which shut it down and may have been foreign sourced.
Elon Musk (00:26):
Yes.
Larry Kudlow (00:26):
It's a big story. You want to give us a moment on that?
Elon Musk (00:30):
Well, we are not sure exactly what happened, but there was a massive cyber attack to try to bring down the X system with IP addresses originating in the Ukraine area.
Larry Kudlow (00:42):
Oh, wow. So that's your suspicion. Is the internet up? Is it up yet?
Elon Musk (00:46):
It's up, yeah.
Larry Kudlow (00:47):
It's up. Okay, good. But I just was looking back. Let me just see if I get this right. They're setting fire to various Tesla charging stations near Boston. Shots were fired at a Tesla dealership in Oregon. Various nonviolent-
Elon Musk (01:04):
Shots fired, not a metaphor.
Larry Kudlow (01:06):
… Shots fired, yes. Downtown New York, marching against the Tesla showroom. Your stock is way down. You've been criticized left and right-
Elon Musk (01:18):
But look on the bright side.
Larry Kudlow (01:20):
… I mean, why are you doing this? That's really what people want to know.
Elon Musk (01:24):
Always look on the bright side of life.
Larry Kudlow (01:25):
Yes, I'm an optimist.
Elon Musk (01:29):
But besides that.
Larry Kudlow (01:30):
Yes.
Elon Musk (01:31):
How's your day?
Larry Kudlow (01:32):
What motivates you to do this?
Elon Musk (01:33):
Was the offer good?
Larry Kudlow (01:35):
It's tough sledding.
Elon Musk (01:37):
Yeah, it's tough sledding, but I think we're doing the right thing here. There's been a tremendous amount of waste and fraud in the government. When you're part of the government. You saw a lot of that and there's been… If you look at the Inspector General reports and the government Accountability office, there've been many audits that have pointed out that there's tremendous amount of waste and fraud in the government. In fact, there was a report issued by the GAO, the Government Accountability Office last year. So during the Biden administration, which estimated the federal government fraud to be half a trillion dollars.
(02:20)
So just to be clear, that's not a Trump administration thing. That's a Biden administration thing. So what we're trying to do is get that number down to a much smaller figure. Save money for the American taxpayer. Stop money being spent on things that I think very few taxpayers would agree, make sense. Transgender animal surgeries, why are American tax dollars being spent on this? And the President's gone through a long list of absurd things. Why are there 20 million people who are definitely dead marked as alive, in the Social security database? Hundreds of millions of dollars of small business administration loans were given out to people aged 11 and under, according to the social security. These must be some very enterprising 8 year olds.
Larry Kudlow (03:18):
And some pretty strong hundred-and-fifty-year-olds.
Elon Musk (03:22):
Exactly. As the president said, we have an enormous number of people marked as alive who are 160, he didn't know the country was that healthy.
Larry Kudlow (03:33):
Yes. So demystify this. How do you do it? Okay. How big is your team? Where'd you recruit most of them from? And what is it that makes you choose the Treasury, or social security, or USAID? How does it work? Let the public know, please.
Elon Musk (03:51):
Right. Well, we just basically follow the money. We look at the President's executive orders and we also just follow the money. So we started looking closely at USAID because they were completely violating the president's executive orders to suspend foreign aid, what's called foreign aid, but in our view is a lot of corruption. So what we saw there is just a trans amount of money being sent to nongovernmental organizations. This, by the way, is I think one of the biggest sources of fraud in the world is, government funded nongovernmental organizations. This is a gigantic fraud loophole where the government can give money to an NGO and then there are no controls over that NGO. So they've given billions of dollars in [inaudible 00:04:43], we estimate tens of billions of dollars to NGOs that are essentially scams. And we're trying to-
Larry Kudlow (04:49):
By the way, I-
Elon Musk (04:51):
… We're trying to put a stop to that.
Larry Kudlow (04:51):
… I don't want to interrupt, but Secretary of State, Rubio just come out, I think he tweeted today, he has accepted over 80% of your recommendations to shut down in USAID. Your review and analysis was spot on.
Elon Musk (05:06):
Yes. So I think when people criticize, say what DOGE is doing, we say, "Well, which part specifically?" Because we put all of the actions of the DOGE team on the DOGE.gov website and on the DOGE handle on X. So we post the receipts. So it's like this action has been taken, this action has been taken. So when we get criticism, we say, "Of what? Which line do you disagree with? Which cost saving do you disagree with?" And then people usually can't think of any.
Larry Kudlow (05:43):
No. It's transparent line by line.
Elon Musk (05:47):
It's transparent line by line.
Larry Kudlow (05:48):
Which is quite remarkable.
Elon Musk (05:51):
And then with respect to the Treasury, for example, the two main recommendations we suggested, which have not been implemented was that any payments going out of the Treasury, especially the Treasury's main payment computer, which is called PAM, I think it's like Payments Account Manager or something like that. But it's like almost 5 trillion a year. So about a billion an hour that the payments be coded with the congressional appropriation and that there'd be an explanation for the payment. Very basic stuff. And just doing that, we estimate we'll save a hundred billion dollars a year.
Larry Kudlow (06:35):
See if I get this right, particularly with social security, you're not really changing policy-
Elon Musk (06:40):
No.
Larry Kudlow (06:40):
… you're auditing the fiscal mechanisms to make sure that point A gets to point B, and that's where it's supposed to get to. In some cases it doesn't get there, or some cases it may go over there, but it's not a policy exercise. You're not changing laws, you're just doing what any business would do in a profit and loss audit.
Elon Musk (07:05):
I think really what we're adding here is caring and competence. And there's a massive amount of fraud of basically people submitting social security numbers for social security benefits, unemployment, small business administration loans and medical where those are fake social security numbers or they're stolen somebody else's social security number. And we're trying to put a stop to all of that. And that's the number which is estimated to be on the order of 10% of federal expenditures, which is half a trillion dollars.
Larry Kudlow (07:47):
A huge number.
Elon Musk (07:48):
Yeah.
Larry Kudlow (07:50):
You're working with the agency heads, you're working with the cabinet secretaries.
Elon Musk (07:55):
Yes.
Larry Kudlow (07:55):
I saw Howard Lutnick was on TV yesterday saying you were partnering with them. Is that fair?
Elon Musk (08:02):
Yeah. What we do is in consultation with the cabinet secretaries and with their departments. So we're really trying to be sort of… We'll refer to ourselves as tech support. We're really helping the department get a handle on things. Because what actually happens here is you've got this sort of vast federal bureaucracy and then you've got a very thin layer on top of the politically appointed officials. And what tends to happen is that the bureaucracy, frankly is in control and they largely ignore the politically appointed people.
Larry Kudlow (08:46):
Why should the bureaucracy-
Elon Musk (08:48):
I'm sure you must have seen that.
Larry Kudlow (08:50):
… I've lived with this twice. I worked for Reagan many years ago and I worked for Trump in the first term. It's like a permanent bureaucracy I might add, it's a permanently liberal bureaucracy.
Elon Musk (09:00):
Yes, very much so.
Larry Kudlow (09:00):
And it's not a bureaucracy that necessarily enforces or implements presidential policy.
Elon Musk (09:08):
They don't. In fact, they try their best to thwart presidential policy. So the president is the elected representative of the people. If the president cannot get things implemented as a reflection of the will of the people, then what we have is not a democracy, we have a bureaucracy. We have rule of the bureau, not rule of the people. And that's what we're trying to defeat here is the bureaucracy and have rule of the people. And, as you mentioned, the bureaucracy is overwhelmingly Democrat. Washington D.C was ninety-two-and-half percent I believe voted for Kamala. So this is overwhelmingly a deep blue situation.
Larry Kudlow (09:58):
How do you pick your next targeted agency or department?
Elon Musk (10:05):
Well, we're trying to act broadly across all departments. So it's not just one department at a time.
Larry Kudlow (10:16):
Are you in all of them now? All of them.
Elon Musk (10:19):
Pretty much, yeah.
Larry Kudlow (10:20):
Yes? Oh.
Elon Musk (10:21):
We're trying to make the government more efficient across the board. So yeah.
Larry Kudlow (10:27):
How big your team?
Elon Musk (10:29):
We're a little over a hundred at this point.
Larry Kudlow (10:32):
A hundred?
Elon Musk (10:33):
We going to get to 200.
Larry Kudlow (10:33):
You're going to get to 200?
Elon Musk (10:33):
Yeah.
Larry Kudlow (10:35):
Okay. And you're recruiting from where, more or less?
Elon Musk (10:40):
Basically it's software people, information security software people and finance… You know, it's basically finance and technology. And I mean frankly, I can't believe I'm here doing this, it's kind of bizarre. But I think that the… You know we've got this enormous federal budget deficit and it's a two-trillion-dollar deficit. It keeps growing. Our interest payments are higher than our defense department budget, I think was the real wake-up call for me, was looking and seeing that the interest payments, the national debt exceeded the defense department budget. And that was only growing over time, which meant if we didn't do something about this, then there won't be any money for anything. We'll just be servicing debt.
Larry Kudlow (11:41):
And you know how to read an income statement and you know how to read a balance sheet. You've had some business experience. I'm kidding. But you know about this stuff.
Elon Musk (11:51):
Yeah. I mean really, I just don't want America to go bankrupt.
Larry Kudlow (11:54):
So it's a call to action. You're hearing a call to action.
Elon Musk (11:58):
Yeah.
Larry Kudlow (12:00):
You're giving up your other stuff. I mean, how are you running your other businesses?
Elon Musk (12:06):
With great difficulty. Yeah, I mean-
Larry Kudlow (12:14):
But there's no turning back, you're saying?
Elon Musk (12:15):
… I'm just here trying to make government more efficient, eliminate waste and fraud. And so far we're making good progress actually. So our savings at this point exceed 4 billion a day, it's very significant.
Larry Kudlow (12:39):
You think you'll wind up getting to a trillion dollars of savings?
Elon Musk (12:45):
Unless we're stopped. We will get to a trillion dollars of savings.
Larry Kudlow (12:48):
That stuff can be translated. I mean we've been talking, we had Russell Vought, the OMB director on earlier through very rescission authority, impoundment authority. But I believe you said it earlier, it's an audit that will not gather dust on shelves. This is actually going to wind up with real savings, bend the spending baseline down.
Elon Musk (13:09):
Yeah. There've been many good audits like I said, done by Inspector Generals and by government accountability office. And they just haven't been implemented. Nothing's been done. I think the GAO identified that there were 17 million dead people in the social security database several years ago, it's now 20 million. But we haven't done anything about it. I think we can sort of look at this as a complaint minimization, optimization. So basically if the government sends money out, whether wasteful or fraudulent. Nobody complains if they receive money, but they do complain if they don't receive money. And people that complain the loudest are the ones receiving the fraudulent money.
Larry Kudlow (13:59):
And you're on it.
Elon Musk (14:01):
Yeah. I mean the goal here is let's not have America go bankrupt with waste and fraud. So that's what I'm here for and we're making good progress.
Larry Kudlow (14:16):
Yes, you are. You're going to go another year?
Elon Musk (14:20):
Yeah, I think so.
Larry Kudlow (14:22):
Final report, middle of next year.
Elon Musk (14:26):
Well, we're just getting things done. As opposed to writing a report like I said, reports don't mean anything you got to actually take action. So I mean the waste report in entitlement spending, which most of the federal spending is entitlements. So that's the big one to eliminate. That's the half trillion, maybe 6, 700 billion a year. That is also a mechanism by which the Democrats attract and retain illegal immigrants by essentially paying them to come here and then turning them into voters. So this is why the Democrats are so upset about the situation because they're losing… If we turn off this gigantic money magnet for illegal immigrants, then they will leave and they'll lose voters.
Larry Kudlow (15:24):
But you have President's support, he said so again yesterday. He completely supports your operation.
Elon Musk (15:31):
Yeah. Well, thanks. Without the President's support, we couldn't make any progress here. But where you'll see the biggest outcry is from the Democrats, they don't want the waste and fraud to be turned off because it is a gigantic magnet to attract illegal immigrants and have them stay in the country. I mean, you see some of the crazy stuff like where money from FEMA… FEMA is an agency that's meant to take care of Americans in distress and a bunch of their money was being sent to pay for luxury hotels in New York for illegal immigrants. And that was happening even after the president was elected, even after he signed an executive order saying that needs to stop. So we actually made sure that that money did stop going. Obviously it's outrageous that American taxpayer money is spent on luxury hotels for illegals. But you have to say, "Why is that being done?" It was because the Democrats are trying to import voters basically.
Larry Kudlow (16:35):
Yes, I agree.
Elon Musk (16:37):
Yeah. And that's also why there's no voter ID needed. In fact, in California and New York state, you're not allowed to show voter ID. Doesn't it seem insane?
Larry Kudlow (16:52):
Insane.
Elon Musk (16:53):
Yeah.
Larry Kudlow (16:54):
I say that as a New Yorker, it's insane.
Elon Musk (16:56):
Yeah, insane.
Larry Kudlow (16:58):
It violates the entire constitution and the principles behind it.
Elon Musk (17:03):
Yes.
Larry Kudlow (17:03):
Producers are yelling at me to get out. I don't want to end this interview because it's too much fun.
Elon Musk (17:07):
Yeah.
Larry Kudlow (17:07):
Can I just ask you one thing? 20 seconds. Nothing to do with DOGE, can you rescue the astronauts?
Elon Musk (17:17):
Yes. We're bringing them back in a few weeks.
Larry Kudlow (17:18):
There's not near enough attention being paid to this, you're going to get him back.
Elon Musk (17:22):
We're going to get him back.
Larry Kudlow (17:23):
God bless.
Elon Musk (17:23):
Thank you.
Larry Kudlow (17:24):
Thank you for all your service, Elon Musk. We appreciate it very much.
Elon Musk (17:27):
Appreciate it.
Larry Kudlow (17:27):
Take care.
Elon Musk (17:28):
Thank you.