Elon Musk, the billionaire tech CEO who spent millions of dollars to send President Donald Trump back to the White House and became the face of the administration’s sweeping cuts to the federal workforce, said in interview that he “got a little too involved in politics” at the time.
“I think I got a little too involved in politics, got carried away, frankly,” Musk told The Economist’s Zanny Minton Beddoes in a wide-ranging interview published Thursday that touched on Musk’s time heading the Department of Government Efficiency as a special government employee.
Days after winning the 2024 presidential election, Trump made good on his campaign promise to carve out a role in the federal government for Musk, appointing him to co-lead DOGE alongside failed GOP presidential contender Vivek Ramasawamy until the unofficial agency’s mandated end date of July 4. Ramasawamy departed the position shortly after, leaving Musk at the helm of Trump’s unsuccessful bid to slash $2 trillion from the federal budget by making sweeping cuts to the funding and workforce of numerous federal agencies.
The drastic cuts sparked nationwide protests and legal action over the massive layoffs of government workers and the slicing of federal research and health and safety programs.
“The goal with the sort of DOGE stuff was to try to do something about the deficit, which is massive,” Musk said in the interview, adding that he “got a lot of flak from this, for this obviously.”
The Tesla and SpaceX CEO faced immense blowback for the aggressive downsizing mission, which he often touted as a “chainsaw approach” in TV appearances posts on X, which he owns. Indeed, in an appearance at the Conservative Political Action Conference in February last year, he actually wielded a chainsaw onstage to make that point. Whooping and yelling, wearing dark sunglasses and a baseball cap, Musk held up the chainsaw while shaking it, shouting, “This is the chainsaw for democracy!”
Earlier that month, Musk wrote on X: “We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper. Could gone to some great parties. Did that instead.”
Pressed in the interview over the humanitarian impact of DOGE’s dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development, Musk said recent reports of increased terrorism activity in sub-Saharan Africa and public health data indicating that children have died overseas in the absence of the organization’s nutrition and medicine programs are “false.” According to Health Policy Watch, hundreds of thousands of deaths, the majority children, are linked to the aid cuts.
“Basically it was a political organization,” Musk said of USAID.
Musk left DOGE in May 2025 upon the expiration of his 130-day term limit as a special government employee, which came amid public disagreements with Trump over his marquee tax and spending legislation. Musk has since said that he has mended his relationship with the president.
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