As President Trump sets about shrinking the government, he has repeatedly claimed that popular safety net programs, including Social Security and Medicaid, are off the table, and spoken about them delicately.
During a three-hour interview with the podcast host Joe Rogan on Friday, it seemed as if Elon Musk hadn’t gotten that memo.
“Social Security is the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time,” Musk declared.
The moment offered an immediate opening for Democrats, who accused Musk of looking to cut benefits for older and disabled people. And it created a fresh headache for Republicans who have labored to explain how they plan to cut the budget drastically without slashing popular programs like Medicaid.
These are the remarkable and at times surreal risks inherent in Trump’s decision to turn his presidency into a kind of co-production with a world-famous, often undisciplined billionaire. And the interview laid them bare.
The appearance — Musk’s most extensive solo interview since the beginning of Trump’s second administration — offered a window into his worldview that was by turns crude and contradictory. Musk defended his efforts with his Department of Government Efficiency, alternatively casting it as existential and downplaying its scope, while expounding on not-safe-for-work matters like A.I. sex robots.
Here are some takeaways from the conversation.
Musk acknowledged he has far-reaching goals.
Musk repeatedly acknowledged just how radical his aims are, calling his project of slashing the government work force, cutting contracts and eliminating regulations a “revolution” against the federal bureaucracy.
“Normally, the bureaucracy eats revolutions for breakfast,” he said. “This is the first time that they’re not, that the revolution might actually succeed.”
It is, he admitted, very different from the slower pace of change during Trump’s first administration.
“This is nothing like the first term,” Rogan later agreed.
“Yeah, this is a revolutionary cabinet,” the billionaire said, “and maybe the most revolutionary cabinet since the first revolution.”
But at times he downplayed his role.
Several lawsuits against Musk and his department involve the question of just what his role is, and whether he is legally obligated to be more transparent around his work.
In the interview, Musk appeared well aware of the need to downplay his role as a result. Even as he portrayed his efforts as transformational, he cast his department as a nonbinding adviser to government agencies.
“These are cuts that DOGE recommends to the department. And usually these recommendations are followed,” Musk said. “But these are recommendations that are then confirmed by the department.”
He expounded on his futurist beliefs.
Musk described artificial intelligence as “something we should be worried about,” but suggested he had gotten involved in the technology in order to develop a system that “doesn’t tell you that misgendering is worse than nuclear war.”
Musk said he believed A.I. would be smarter than any individual human in the next year or two, and predicted that A.I. would be smarter than all humans combined by 2029 or 2030. He said he thought there was an 80 percent chance that A.I. would have a “good outcome,” and that there was a 20 percent chance of “annihilation.”
He also talked about his long-held dream of populating Mars, which he described as “incredibly important in ensuring the long-term survival of civilization.”
He characterized it as a race against time.
“Can we make Mars self-sufficient before civilization has some sort of future fork in the road where there’s either, like, a war, nuclear war or something, or we get hit by a meteor or simply civilization might just die with a whimper in adult diapers instead of with a bang?”
Musk invoked numerous conspiracy theories.
At one point, Musk seemingly referred to a tenet of the so-called great replacement theory, which holds that Western elites want to “replace” white Americans with immigrants.
“The more illegals that the Democrats can bring in, the more likely they are to win, so that’s what they’re going to do,” he said.
He then described a conspiracy theory that liberals were planning to turn swing states blue by legalizing undocumented immigrants, calling it “an attempt to destroy democracy in America” and saying that preventing that outcome had been the “fork in the road” moment that led him to support Trump.
“We will be a permanent one-party-state country — a permanent deep-blue, socialist state, that’s what America will become,” he warned.
During the interview, Musk also suggested that the government was keeping secret “a mountain of evidence,” including videos and recordings, made by Jeffrey Epstein; speculated that federal government programs to prevent the spread of Ebola were actually involved in creating new strains of the virus; and claimed without evidence that “a bunch of really good, talented old white guys” had been pushed out of the Federal Aviation Administration as air traffic controllers to make room for less qualified women and people of color.
“We should not put the public safety at risk because of some demented philosophy,” he said.
Musk said he’s not a Nazi — and seemingly made light of such accusations.
At one point, Rogan asked Musk what it was like to have purchased Twitter, “and then people call you a Nazi on that same thing you bought?”
Musk seemed to respond with puns. “I did not see it coming,” he said, seemingly pronouncing the word “Nazi” in the middle of the sentence, a joke he has also made in writing. “It’s classic,” he said.
“People will Goebbels anything down,” he said, seeming to pronounce the last name of Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi politician, instead of the word “gobble.”
Rogan said it was “strange” that Musk had been accused of doing a Nazi salute after he made a hand gesture that looked like one after Trump’s inauguration. “Now, I can never point at things diagonally,” Musk said.
“Hopefully, people realize I am not a Nazi,” Musk said, adding that one would have to be invading Poland, committing genocide and starting wars to be considered a Nazi. “The war and genocide is the bad part,” he said, “not their mannerisms and their dress code.”
Musk and Rogan talked about A.I.-powered sex robots.
Improbably, the opening minutes of the interview featured Rogan and Musk, who is a special adviser to the president and who has an office in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, discussing how quickly sex robots powered by A.I. technology could be brought to market.
“Probably not long,” said Musk, who recently unveiled his own A.I. software. “Less than five years probably.”
“Really?” Rogan asked. “Will it be warm?”
“You can probably have whatever you want,” Musk replied, before the two men discussed the possibility of having sex with a “furry lady” or an alien from the movie “Avatar.”
THE MOMENT
A guest on Marine One
The New York Times photographer Haiyun Jiang was seated in the press cabin of Air Force One last night, somewhere between West Palm Beach, Fla., and Washington, when she learned something interesting: Musk, his son X Æ A-Xii and his mother were on the plane.
The billionaire and his family members had boarded the plane before Trump and the reporters who travel with him had gotten on. Haiyun hadn’t seen them board — but she knew she might see them disembark.
When Air Force One landed at Joint Base Andrews, Haiyun did indeed see the Musk family deplane and then board Marine One, the helicopter that usually whisks the first family — and whoever they’re traveling with — back to the White House. At that point, most of the other photographers left.
But Haiyun stuck around. She got low to the ground, knowing she could frame the helicopter’s bright windows with her lens. And that’s when she made this remarkable photo of X Æ A-Xii, better known as X, gazing at a Marine saluting outside.
X’s presence, Haiyun told me, made for a visual representation of the relationship between Trump and Musk.
“That’s a way of capturing power,” she said, “without showing the faces of power.”
MEANWHILE on X
A shutdown becomes a ‘sanity check’
My colleague Ryan Mac is watching Musk’s posts on his social media platform.
Musk claims he is not bothered by critics of his push to cut foreign aid, but he is paying attention.
On Monday, he lashed out on X in a reply to the political podcaster and former Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau, who had claimed that cuts to United States Agency for International Development grants would lead to the deaths of children.
“No one has died as result of a brief pause to do a sanity check on foreign aid funding,” Musk said. “No one.”
A “sanity check” was not how Musk described his plans for the agency a few weeks ago. Last month, as Musk’s team suspended the U.S.A.I.D. leaders and told other employees to stay home, Musk declared on X: “We’re shutting it down.”
Since then, the world has started to feel the impact. My colleague Apoorva Mandavilli wrote about a 4-year-old boy in Uganda who died last week from Ebola as the Trump administration canceled at least four contracts with organizations that helped manage the spread of the disease. (Last week, at a cabinet meeting, Musk said the government had “accidentally canceled very briefly” efforts around Ebola prevention.)
On Sunday, the acting assistant administrator for global health at U.S.A.I.D. wrote in whistle-blowing memos that the withdrawal of foreign aid would lead to up to an estimated 18 million additional cases of malaria, 200,000 cases of paralytic polio and thousands of deaths annually. That administrator, Nicholas Enrich, was placed on leave on Sunday.
— Ryan Mac
you shouldn’t miss
Musk’s mother hits the global speaking circuit
China. Kazakhstan. The United Arab Emirates. Maye Musk, the mother of Elon Musk, has long traveled the world to model, speak and promote her writing. But in the last six months, my colleagues Mara Hvistendahl and Joy Dong write, she has seemed even more in demand — including in countries with concerns to press in Washington.
Read more here.
