Kudlow

All right, we welcome to the show and 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.

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. Yeah, it's a big story. You want to give us a moment on that?

Well, we don't. We're not sure exactly what happened, but there was a massive cyber attack to try to bring down the system with IP addresses originating in the Ukraine area.

Oh, well, so that's your suspicion? Is, is the website, is the Internet up? Is it up yet?

It's up.

Yeah, it's up yet. 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 non violent shots fired.

Not a metaphor.

Shots fired. Yes. Downtown New York, marching against the Tesla 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. Always look on the bright side of life.

Yes,

but besides that.

Yes. I mean, 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. The, you know, there's been a tremendous amount of waste and fraud in the government. You know, when you're part of the government, you saw a lot of that and it's, and there's been, you know, if you look at the inspector general reports and the Government Accountability Office,

there

have 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.

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 are, that I think very few taxpayers would agree make sense, you know, transgender animal surgeries or why are we spending money?

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 hundreds of millions of dollars of Small Business Administration loans were given out to people aged 11 and under according to the Social Security? I mean, like, these must be some very enterprising 8 year olds, you know,

and some pretty strong 150 year olds.

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

Yes. You know, so demystify this. How do you do it? Okay, how big is your team? Yeah. Where'd you recruit most of them from? And what is it that makes you choose? You know, the treasury or Social Security or usaid? How does it work? Let the public know, please.

Right. Well, we just basically follow the money. You know, 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, foreign aid. You know, what's called foreign aid, but in our view is a lot of corruption.

So what we saw there is just a tremendous amount of money being sent to non governmental organizations. But actually it's. This, by the way, is, I think one of the biggest sources of fraud in the world is government funded non governmental organizations. This, 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 of dollars, in fact, we estimate tens of billions of dollars to NGOs that are essentially scams.

And by the way, I try to put a stop to that.

You know, so 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. 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, this action has been taken. This action has been taken. So when, when we get criticism, we say, like, of, of what?

Which, which line do you disagree with? Like, which, which cut, which cut? Which cost saving do you disagree with? And people usually can't think of any.

No, you know, so it's transparent line by line. It's transparent line by line, which is quite remarkable.

Right. And so, and then with respect to the treasury, for example, we. The two main recommendations we suggested, which have now 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 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, will save $100 billion a year.

You're not really. Let me see if I get this right. Particularly with Social Security, you're not really changing policy.

No.

You're auditing the fiscal mechanisms to make sure that, you know, 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 some cases it may go over there. But that's, 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.

I think really what we're adding here is, 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've stolen somebody else's Social Security number.

And we're, we're trying to put a stop to all that. And that. That's the number which is estimated to be on the order of 10% of federal expenditures, which is, you know, half a. Half a trillion dollars.

A huge number. Yeah. You're working with the agency heads, you're working with the Cabinet secretaries. Yes, I saw Howard Lutnick 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 be sort of. Will refer to ourselves as tech support. You know, 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.

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.

Why should the bureaucracy.

I'm sure you must have seen that

I've lived with this twice. I worked for Reagan Many years ago, and I worked for Trump in the first term. Yeah, it's like a permanent bureaucracy, I might add. It's a permanently liberal bureaucracy.

Yes, very much so.

And it doesn't. 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 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 role of the people.

You know, the.

And as you mentioned, the bureaucracy is overwhelmingly Democrat. So Washington, D.C. was 92.5%, 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, 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.

Yeah.

So we're trying to make. Trying to make the government more efficient across the board. So. Yeah.

How big is your team?

We're a little over 100 at this point. Get to 200.

You're going to get to 200?

Yeah.

Okay. And you're recruiting from where?

More or less.

Basically, it's software people, you know, information security software people.

And finance. You know, it's basically. Yeah, finance and technology.

And I mean, frankly, I can't believe I'm here doing this. It's kind of bizarre, but I kind of think that the, you know, we've got this enormous federal budget deficit, and it's a, it's a $2 trillion deficit. It keeps growing.

Our interest payments are higher than our Defense Department budget. That's, 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, will 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 yeah, you know this stuff.

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

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

Yeah.

You've Given up your other stuff. I mean, what do you. 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'll wind up getting to a trillion dollars.

Yeah.

Of savings.

I mean, unless someone's, unless we're, 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 Vogt, the OMB director, on earlier through very precision authority, Empowerment 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 base spending baseline down.

Yeah.

There have 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.

The, you know, I think the GAO identified there were 17 million dead people in the Social Security database several years ago. It's now 20 million. But not we 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.

And you're on it.

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 going to 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. Like I say, reports don't mean anything. You got to actually take action.

Yes.

So the, I mean, the way support in entitlement spending, you know, which is all of the, which is most of the federal spending is entitlements. So that, that's, that's like the big one to eliminate because that's the sort of 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.

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 will lose voters.

You have president support. He said so again yesterday. He completely supports your operation. Yeah.

Well, thanks. That's super. Without the President's support, we couldn't. 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 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, you know, which 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. Because this obviously is outrageous, that American taxpayer money is spent on luxury hotels for illegals. But you have to say, like, 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 needed. In fact, in California and New York State, you're not allowed to show voter id. That's. Doesn't that seem insane?

Insane, Yeah. I say that as a New Yorker. It's insane, insane. And it violates the entire Constitution and the principles behind it.

Yes.

Producers are yelling at me to get out. I don't want to end this interview because. Too much fun.

Yeah.

Can I just ask you one thing? 20 seconds. Nothing to do with. 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're going to get him back.

We're going to get him back.

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

Appreciate it.

Take care.

Thank you.