Elon Musk admitted that he wouldn’t go back and lead the so-called Department of Government Efficiency again, knowing what he knows now.
Musk, in an interview with former DOGE adviser Katie Miller, said he was “somewhat” successful in his brief time in the temporary role, which ended in May. But the negative reaction by the public was enough to dissuade him from reprising it in the future, he suggested.
“If you could go back and start from scratch like it’s January 20th all again, would you go back and do it differently?” Miller, the 34-year-old wife of White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, asked. “And, knowing what you know now, do you think there’s ever a place to restart?”
“I mean, no, I don’t think so,” Musk, 54, said in Tuesday’s episode after a pause. “I think instead of doing DOGE, I would have basically built—worked on my companies, essentially. And the cars, they wouldn’t have been burning the cars.”
Vandalism of Teslas skyrocketed in the first half of the year as a show of defiance against Musk’s DOGE agenda.
“The damage to Musk himself and to Tesla and the other companies, I think is pretty close to permanent,” Pod Save America host Dan Pfeiffer said upon Musk’s exit. In addition to Tesla, Musk owns X, SpaceX, and xAI.
Musk, in an interview well after the dust had settled from his controversial gutting of several areas of the federal government, described his time in the Trump administration merely as “an interesting side quest.”
Among the moves the world’s richest person was criticized for were his cuts to the U.S. Agency for International Development.
The Associated Press reported in May that 163,500 more African children could die from hunger annually after DOGE withdrew foreign aid through the program.
DOGE ended up disbanding in November—eight months ahead of its expected conclusion. And, despite its name, it oversaw a $220 billion jump in federal spending—not including interest—in the fiscal year, according to The Wall Street Journal.
