Wearing a black “Make America great again” cap, Musk jokingly referred to himself as “humble tech support” – people laughed dutifully – and claimed that his haphazard efforts to take a chainsaw to the federal government can save a trillion dollars and dig the country out of debt.
Trump invited Elon Musk, the tech billionaire running the “department of government efficiency” (Doge), to speak before any of his cabinet secretaries after claiming that everyone present was supportive.
The cabinet on which Musk lavished such praise includes Pete Hegseth, a former Fox News host accused of sexual assault and alcohol abuse, and Robert Kennedy Jr, a vaccine conspiracy theorist who once dumped a dead bear cub in New York’s Central Park.
Yet as Jon Stewart noted this week on Comedy Central’s The Daily Show, Doge will not touch the $3bn in subsidies given to oil and gas companies, a hedge fund loophole worth $1.3bn a year, or the $2tn given to defence contractors to build a fighter jet that will soon be obsolete.
Musk tried to defend the emails he sent to government employees, asking what they did last week, as not a “performance review” but a “pulse check review” because some people on the government payroll are dead.
