Kudlow

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.

Thanks for having me.

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. It's a big story. You wanna give us a moment on that?

Well, we're 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.

Well, so that's your suspicion. Is the website, is the internet up? Is it up yet?

It's up yet.

It's up yet, okay, good. But I just was looking back. Let me guess if I get this right. They're setting fire to various Tesla charging stations near Boston. Shots were fired at a Tesla dealer in Oregon, various non-violence-- - Shots fired, not a metaphor.

Shots fired, yes. Downtown New York, marching against the Tesla's showroom. Your stock is way down. You've been criticized, left and right.

But look on the right side.

I mean, why are you doing this?

Always look on the right side of life.

Yes. (laughing) - What's that?

Yes.

How's your day?

What motivates you to do this?

Was the offer good?

It's tough sledding.

Yeah, it is 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. If you look at the inspector general reports and the government accountability office, there have been many orders that have pointed out that there's a tremendous amount of waste and fraud in the government.

In fact, there was a report issued by the GAO at the government accountability office last year. So during the Biden administration, which estimated the federal government fraud to be half a trillion dollars. So just because that's not a Trump administration thing, it'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 makes sense. Transgender animal surgeries are, why are we spending, 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? Why were hundreds of millions of dollars of small business administration loans were given out to people age 11 and under, according to the social security? Like these must be some very enterprising eight-year-olds.

That's some pretty strong 150-year-olds.

Yes, exactly. As the president said, we have an enormous number of people marked as alive in 160. He didn't know the country was that healthy.

Yes, yes.

So demystify this. How do you do it? Okay, how big is your team?

Yeah.

Where's your recruit most of them from? And what is it that makes you choose the Treasury or Social Security or USAID? Has it worked? Let the public know, please.

Right, well, we just basically follow the money. We look at the president's executive orders and we also just follow the money. 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 non-governmental organizations.

But actually, this, by the way, is I think one of the biggest sources of fraud in the world. Is government funded non-governmental organizations? This is a gigantic fraud loophole where the government can give money to an NGO and then that there are no controls over that NGO. So they've given billions dollars. In fact, we estimate tens of billions of dollars to NGOs that are essentially scams. And we try to put a stop to that.

I do want to interrupt. Secretary of State Rubio just come out and I think he tweeted today. He has accepted over 80% of your money. recommendations to shut down in USAID. So your review and analysis was spot on.

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. When we get criticism, we say, of what? Which line do you disagree with? Like which cut saving do you disagree with? And then people usually can't think of any.

No.

It's transparent line by line.

It's transparent line by line.

Which is quite remarkable.

Right. And with respect to the Treasury, for example, the 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, things like payments account manager or something like that, but it's like almost five trillion a year. So about a billion an hour that the payments be coded with the congressional appropriation and that there be an explanation for the payment. Very basic stuff. And just doing that, we estimate we'll save a hundred billion dollars a year.

You're not really, let me see if I get this right, particularly with Social Security. You're not really changing policy. You're auditing the fiscal mechanisms to make sure that from 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 in some cases it may go over there. But it's not a policy exercise. You're not changing laws. But any business would do in a profit and loss audit.

I think 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, those are fake social security numbers. They're still in somebody else's social security number. And we're trying to put a stop to all 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.

A huge number.

Yeah.

You're working with the agency heads. You're working with the cabinet secretary.

Yes.

I saw Howard Lutnik was on TV yesterday saying you were partnering with them, is that fair?

Yeah, what we do is in consultation with the cabinet secretaries and with their departments. So we're really trying to sort of 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 does happen is that the bureaucracy, frankly, is in control. And they largely ignore the politically appointed people.

Why should the bureaucracy?

I'm sure you must have seen that.

I mean, 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.

Yes, very much so.

And it's not a bureaucracy that necessarily enforces or implements presidential policy.

They don't. In fact, they try their best to thwart presidential policy. So the president is the elected representative of the people. And if the president cannot get things implemented as a reflection of the world 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. The defeat here is the bureaucracy and have rule of the people. And as you mentioned, the bureaucracy is overwhelmingly a Democrat. So Washington DC was 92 and a half percent, I believe, voted for Kamala. So this overwhelmingly a deep blue situation.

How do you pick your next targeted agency or department?

Well, we're trying to act broadly across all departments. So it's not just one department at a time. But-- - Are you in all of them now?

All of them?

Pretty much, yeah.

Yes, oh.

We're trying to make the government more efficient across the board.

Habics your team.

Over 100 at this point.

100.

Get to 200.

You're gonna get to 200.

Yeah, okay. And you're recruiting from where?

More or less.

Basically, it's software people, information security, software people, and finance. It's basically, yeah, finance and technology. And frankly, I can't believe I'm here today. We're doing this. It's kind of bizarre. But I kind of think that the, we've got this enormous federal budget deficit. And it's a true trillion dollar deficit. It keeps growing. Our interest payments are higher than our defense department budget.

That's I think was the real wake up call for me, was looking at 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.

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.

Yeah, I mean really, I just don't want America to go bankrupt.

So it's a call to action. You're hearing a call to action?

Yeah.

You're giving up your other stuff? I mean, how are you running your other businesses?

With great difficulty. Yeah, I mean.

But there's no turning back, you're saying?

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. So it's very significant.

You think you wind up getting to a trillion dollars?

Yeah, savings.

I mean, unless we're stopped, we will get to a trillion dollars of savings.

And that stuff can be translated. I mean, we've been talking, we had Russell vote, the OMB Director on earlier, through very rescission authority, impoundment authority. But I believe you said earlier, an audit that will not gather dust on shelves is actually going to wind up with real savings. Bend the base, spending base line down.

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 there was 17 million dead people in the Social Security database several years ago. 20 million, but nobody did anything about it. And I mean, I think you can sort of look at this as a complaint minimization optimization.

So basically, if the government sends money out to whether it's wasteful or fraudulent, nobody complains if they receive money, but they do complain if they don't receive money. And the people that complain the loudest are the ones receiving the fraudulent money.

Yeah. I mean, just like I said, 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.

Yes, you are. You're gonna go another year? Yeah, I think so.

Final report, middle of next year.

Well, we're just getting things done as opposed to writing a report.

Reports don't mean anything. You gotta actually take action.

Yes.

So the, I mean, the waste important in entitlements spending, which is most of the federal spending is entitlements. So that's like the big one to eliminate. That's the sort of half trillion, maybe 600, 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.

Yes.

So this is why the Democrats are so upset about the situation because they're losing, you know, if we turn off this gigantic money magnet for illegal immigrants, then they will leave and they'll lose voters.

If you have President Sport, he said, so again, yesterday he completely supports your operation.

Yeah, well, thanks. Without the President's support, we couldn't make any progress here. But yeah, I mean, where you'll see the biggest outcry is from the Democrats who are, they don't want the waste important 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?

There's a lot of money from FEMA, which is meant, 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 'cause this obviously is outrageous that American taxpayer money is meant on luxury hotels for illegals. Why was that being done? It was because the Democrats are trying to import voters, basically.

Yes.

I agree.

Yeah, and that's also why there's no voter ID in California and New York State. You're not allowed to show voter ID. Isn't this even saying?

Insane.

Yeah.

I'd say that as a New Yorker.

Insane.

Insane.

And it violates, the entire Constitution and the principles behind it.

Yes.

Producers the element to get out. I don't want to end this interview 'cause it's too much fun.

Yeah.

Can I just ask you one thing, 20 seconds? Nothing to do with doge. Can you rescue the astronauts?

Yes, we're bringing them back in a few weeks.

There's not near enough attention being paid to this. You'll go and get them back.

We're gonna get them back.

God bless.

Thank you.

Thank you for all your service, Elon Musk. We appreciate it very much.

I appreciate it.

Take care.

Thank you.