Hannity

I gotta start with this. So he's working for free with Doge. He's. He's kind of put a lot of his life on hold. And you sued Twitter a number of years ago. You just made him pay you $10 million.

That's right.

That's right. That's right.

I sued from long before he had it. Yeah. Yeah. And, I mean, they really did a number on me, you know, and I sued, and they had to Pay. They paid $10 million settlement.

You're okay with that?

I mean, I left it up to the lawyers and, you know, the team running Twitter. So I said, you guys do what you think is the right. It makes sense.

I think it's funny.

I think it's a very low. I was looking to get much more money than that.

So you gave him a discount when the lawsuit.

He got a dis. Oh, he got a big discount. I don't think he even knows about it.

He's become one of your. If you read and believe the media, he'd become one of your best friends. He's working for free for you.

Well, I love the president. I just want to be clear about that.

You don't care about that.

I know.

I love the.

Love the president.

I think President Trump is a good man, and he's. You know, it's nice the way he said that.

You know, there's something nice about it.

Really is, you know, because, I mean, the President has been so unfairly attacked in the media. It's truly outrageous. And I've, at this point, spent a lot of time with the president, and not once have I seen him do something that was mean or cruel or wrong. Not once.

You know, I've known him for 30 years.

Yeah.

And I've never seen anybody take as much as he's taken.

Yeah.

And we've discussed this, and I'm like, how do you deal with it?

Did I have a choice?

Well, you would say that to me. I'm like, what am I. What am I gonna do? Worry about it and. You know. And then culminating in two assassination attempts, which resulted in your endorsement.

Well, I was going to do it anyway, but that was it. Precipitating event. Yes.

That speeded it up a little bit.

Yeah.

The day of the assassination.

I didn't know that.

Yeah. I just sped it up, but I was going to do it anyway.

Mr. President, with your indulgence, I'm convinced that people only know a little bit about Elon. I don't think they know everything about Elon, because as I studied and prepared for this interview. I learned a lot about you that I didn't know. I think people will think about Tesla. Tesla. Democrats are demonizing you and trying to make the country hate you.

I just want people to understand you a little bit better and the person that you've gotten to know and have now put a lot of trust in. And, you know, just let's go over a little bit of your Bio, starting with PayPal and how you became involved in Tesla and SpaceX and Neuralink and all this.

I mean, you know, I, I think the way to think of me is like, I'm a technologist and I try to make technologies that improve the world and make life better.

Shut your shirt.

Yeah, and that's why I like my T shirt says tech support, because I'm here to provide the President with technology support. Now that may seem like, well, is that a silly thing? But actually it's a very important thing because the President will make these executive orders which are very sensible and good for the country, but then they don't get implemented, you know, so if you take for example, all the funding for the migrant hotels, the President issued an executive order, hey, we need to stop taking taxpayer money and paying for luxury hotels for illegal immigrants, which makes no sense.

Obviously, people do not want their tax dollars going to fund high end hotels for illegals. And yet they were still doing that even as late as last week. And so, you know, we went in there and we're like, this is violation of the presidential executive order. It needs to stop. So what we're doing here is one of the biggest functions of the DOGE team is just making sure that the presidential executive orders are actually carried out.

And this is, I just want to point out, this is a very important thing because the President is the elected representative of the people, so he's representing the will of the people. And if the bureaucracy is fighting the will of the people and preventing the President from implementing what the people want, then what we live in is a bureaucracy and not a democracy.

You're both aware, you have to be keenly aware that the media and the punditry class, not that, you know, I think you've proven they have no power anymore because they threw everything they had at you and they didn't win. And that was, you know, the New York Times, Washington Post, three networks, every late night comedy show, two cable channels, they just, they threw everything.

Lawfare, weaponization.

And now I see they want you two to start, they want a divorce, they want you two to start hating each other. And they try. Oh, President Elon Musk, for example. You do know that they're doing that to you?

Oh, I see it all the time. They tried it, then they stopped. That wasn't. They have many different things of hatred. Actually, Elon called me, he said, you know, they're trying to drive us apart. I said, absolutely. No. They said, we have breaking news. Donald Trump has ceded control of the presidency to Elon Musk. President Musk will be attending a cabinet meeting tonight at 8 o'.

Clock. And I say, it's just so obvious. They're so bad at it. I used to think they were good at it. They're actually bad at it, because if they were good at it, I'd never be president. Because I think nobody in history has ever gotten more bad publicity than me. I could do the greatest things. I get 98% bad publicity.

I could do outside of you, a few of your very good friends. It's like the craziest thing. But you know what I have learned, Elon? The people are smart. They get it.

Yeah, they do.

They get it. They really see what's happening.

Yes.

And at the end of this interview, what I would like is I want people to know the relationship and know more about you. What is the relationship, Mr. President?

Well, I respect him. I've always respected him. I never knew that he was right on certain things, and I'm usually pretty good at this stuff. He did Starlink, he did things that were so advanced and nobody knew what the hell they were. I can tell you in North Carolina, they had no communication. They were wiped out. Those people were, you know, they had rivers in between, land that never saw water.

All of a sudden it was a river and a vicious, like rapids. People were dying all over. They had no communication. They said, do you know Elon Musk? They didn't really know I knew him. I said, yeah. He said, could you get Starlink? It's like the first time I ever heard of it. I said, what? Starlink, A communication system.

That's unbelievable. Yeah. And he said. I called him and I said, listen, they really need it. And he got like thousands of units of this communication and it saved a lot of lives. He got it immediately and you can't get it. I mean, you have to wait a long time to get it. But he got it to him immediately. And I said, that's pretty amazing.

And I didn't even know he had it. We watched the rocket ships and we watch Tesla. I think, you know, something that had an effect on me was when I Saw the rocket ship come back and get grabbed like you grab a beautiful little baby. You grab your baby, it just hug the rocket.

I've never hung the rocket. Hugging clean rockets.

Yeah, no, but. And he said, you know, you can't really have a rocket program if you're going to dump a billion dollars into the ocean every time you fly. You have to save it. And he saved it. First time that I've seen that done. And nobody else can do it. If you look at the U.S. russia or China, they can't do it, and they won't be able to do it for a long time.

He has the technology, so you learn. I wanted somebody really smart to work with me in terms of the country, a very important aspect, because, I mean, he doesn't talk about it. He's actually a very good businessman. And when he talks about the executive orders, and this is probably true for all presidents, you write an executive order and you think it's done.

You send it out. It doesn't get done. It doesn't get implemented. They don't implement it. They maybe they're from the last administration and they are. In some cases, you try and get him out as fast as you can. But I could. As soon as he said that, I said, you know, that's interesting. You write a beautiful executive and you sign it and you assume it's going to be done, but it's not.

What he does is he takes it. And with his hundred geniuses, he's got some very brilliant young people working for him that dress much worse than him. Actually, they dress in just T shirts.

You wouldn't know.

They have 180.

Wait a minute. So he's. He's your tech support?

No, he is, actually, but he's much more than that.

I actually own tech support, though.

But he gets it done. He's a leader. Yeah, he really. He gets it done. You get a lot of tech people and you have people, they're good with tech, but they. He gets it done. You know, I said in real estate, you had guys that would draw beautiful renderings of a building, and they'd draw the rendering. It would be great. And you say, great, what are you starting?

But they were never able to get it built. They couldn't get the financings, they couldn't get the approvals. It would never get done. And then you have other guys are able to get it done. You know, they could just get it done. That was in real estate. Same thing in this. He gets it done. So when he said that, he said, you Know, when you sign these executive orders, a lot of them don't get done.

And maybe the most important ones, and he would take that executive order that I'd sign, and he would have those people go to whatever agency it was, when are you doing it? Get it done. Get it done. And some guy that maybe didn't want to do it, all of a sudden he's signing, he just doesn't want to be bothered.

Do a lot of those executive orders have to be codified into law? Do you need the Republican Congress?

And they will a lot of them be. Well, look, in the meantime, we have four years. The beauty is we have four years. That's why I like doing it right at the beginning, because an executive order is great. I mean, the one problem is both good and bad, because when they did all these executive orders, I've canceled most of them, they were terrible.

I mean, we're going to go radical left, communists, okay? It was crazy. Their executive orders were so bad, if they ever got them codified, you'd never be able to break them. So the damage that Biden has done to this country, and it's not even Biden, it's the people that circled him in the Oval Office, okay, But the damage they did to this country in terms of, let's say, open borders, you know, there's so many things, but open borders where millions of people poured into our country, and hundreds of thousands of those people are criminals, they're murderers, they're drug dealers, they're gang members, they're people from prisons from all over the world.

And we have a great guy, Tom Holman, and he is doing so incredibly. You saw the number. They're down like 96%, 95%. He is a phenomenal guy. And Kristi Noem is doing an unbelievable job. And he wanted her. He said, she's so tough. And I said, I don't think of her as that way. You know, she's very nice. He said, no, she's so tough.

And she is. I see. With the horses. She's riding the horse. Let's go. She's great. But the team we have is. Is really unbelievable. But those executive orders, I sign them, and now they get passed on to him and his group and other people. And they're all getting done. We're getting them done.

Let me. Let me go back a little bit to your background because it's. Sure, it's beyond impressive. You were the chief engineer, for example. You were an early believer in Tesla. You became the CEO and. And then the chief engineer, which was phenomenal. SpaceX, same thing. Which is unbelievable. I mean, you were the first company, private company to send astronauts successfully into.

Into space. First private company to send astronauts into orbit.

Yeah, that's.

That's pretty deep.

He's going to go into orbit. Okay. Yeah, no, he's going to go to Mars. He's.

Starlink, at some point is in.

They must ask me, like, do you want to die on Mars? And I say, well, yes, but not on impact.

StarLink is in 100 countries. This is going to be hard. I feel like I'm interviewing two brothers here.

You go ahead.

Star Shield, which could be used for national defense.

Yeah, it is already being used for national defense.

Then you have a. What is it called? Optimus. A part of Tesla.

Yeah.

Robotic arm. Then you have an AI arm. And then you have something that really fascinated me, and it's called neuralink.

Yes.

You might help the blind to see people with spinal cord injuries that they can recover. Where in the past. How close is that becoming a success?

Neuralink. We've implanted neuralink in three patients so far who are quadriplegics. And it allows them to directly control their phone and computer just using their mind, just by thinking. It's like. So we call this product telepathy. So you control your computer and for it just by thinking. And it's possible to actually control the computer and phone faster than someone who has working hands.

Then the next step would be to add a second neuralink implant past the point where the neurons are damaged so that somebody can walk again, so they can have full body functionality restored.

And you like Bobby, right?

I like Bobby, actually, yeah. I think I supported Bobby Kennedy. I think he, you know, he's unfairly aligned as someone who is anti science, but I think he isn't. He just wants to question the science, which is the essence of the science. The scientific method, fundamentally, is about always questioning the science.

Well, they didn't tell us the truth about COVID that's for sure.

Yes.

And we learned a lot with the Twitter files. And that just then raises a question. You're the richest man in the world. You may not like that part. You're pretty competitive, but that's why. But he's on your team. Well, that's true. He can't top that.

You know, I wanted to find somebody smarter than him. I searched all over. I just couldn't do it. I couldn't. I couldn't.

You really tried hard.

I couldn't find anyone smarter.

Right.

So we had it for the country.

But this is the thing we settled on.

We settled on this.

Well, thanks for having me. So I'm just trying to be yours.

This is the interesting. This is where we are as a society. And I hate to do this to you, but I'm going to do it anyway. You're doing all of these things. Nobody at Doge gets paid a penny, correct?

Well, actually, some people are federal employees.

Some are. Okay, yeah, they're helping.

But it's fair to say that the software engineers at Doge could be earning millions of dollars a year instead of earning a small fraction of that as federal employees.

Okay. So.

And they're very committed people.

So you're. You're committed to helping the blind see people with spinal cord injuries recover?

Yes.

You're committed to getting to Mars. You're committed to rescue. You're going to help rescue next month, two astronauts that I think were men. And they. They dispute that in an interview when,

at the President's request or instruction, we are accelerating the return of the astronauts, which was postponed kind of to a ridiculous degree.

They got left in space.

They've been there. They were supposed to be there eight days. They're there almost 300.

Biden, they were put. Yes, they were left up there for political reasons, which is not good. Okay.

It's not good. Now, if I had the weight of the pressure of doing that successfully on my shoulders, I think I'd be, you know. But you, when we spoke before we did this interview, you are very confident. You think this will be a successful mission?

Well, we don't want to be complacent, but we have brought astronauts back from the space station many times before and always with success. So as long as we're not complacent.

When are they. When are you going to launch?

I think it's about four weeks to bring them back.

About four weeks?

Yeah. And we're being extremely cautious.

You now have the go ahead.

Yes, well, thanks to you, they didn't

have the go ahead with Biden. What's that? He was going to leave him in space. I think he was going to leave him in space.

It's like growing up lost in space.

He didn't want the publicity. Can you believe it?

Unbelievable. And so, yeah, I want to echo something that the President said and then ask an overarching question. So people get hit with Hurricane Helene, they have no communication with the outside world. You come to the rescue. You donated that I believe.

Yes.

You donated to the people.

Saved a lot of lives in North Carolina. He saved a lot of Lives.

And California, after the wildfire.

California. But, I mean, in North Carolina, where they were really in trouble. They had no communication. People were dying. They were dying of starvation. He saved a lot of lives in North Carolina.

Okay, now you're going to rescue astronauts. And now again, you do all of this. I would think liberals would love the fact that you have the biggest electric vehicle company in the world.

Yeah, I mean, I used to be adored by the left, you know, not anymore. Less so these days.

Killed that, huh?

I mean, less.

I really didn't.

Well, I mean, this whole sort of, like, you know, they call it, like, Trump derangement Syndrome. And I didn't. You know, you don't realize how real this is until, like, it's. You can't reason with people. So, like, I was at a friend's birthday party in la, just a birthday dinner, and it was like a nice, quiet dinner, and everything was.

Everyone was behaving normally. And then I happened to mention. This is before the election, like, a month or two before I happened to mention the President's name, and it was like they got shot with a dart in the jugular that contained, like, methamphetamine and rabies. Okay. And they're like, what is wrong, guys? Like, you just can't have, like, a normal conversation.

And it's like. It's like they become completely irrational.

He has no idea. If you're friends with him, you pay a price. You know, it's like I walk into a restaurant in New York and it's like half the room gets daggers, and they want to.

No, the Idaggers level isn't saying.

I mean, there was, like, I had, like, some invitation because. So I got invited to, like, basically a big sort of Dem event like, that was. But I received the invitation, like, the beginning of last year and then. And I still attended even after I'd endorsed President Trump. And I didn't realize how profoundly that would affect, you know, how I was received.

I mean, I walk into the room and I'm getting just the dirty looks from everyone. Like, if looks could kill, I would have been dead several times over.

But that was not ashes on the floor before Trump. That never happened, right?

No.