ELON MUSK: 'There are dead people working in government.' Speaks at Trump Cabinet Meeting on DOGE
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Hi everyone and welcome back to the Elon Musk podcast. I'm your host, Will Walden. And if you're new here, this is a show all about Elon Musk and his groundbreaking work that he's doing with his various companies, including Tesla, SpaceX, The Boring Company, Neuralink, and of course, X.

And before we dive into today's episode, I wanted to share a quick insight from our show's analytics. It turns out that 45% of you listening right now are subscribed to the show, and thank you for that. But that means that 55% of you are not.

So I'm offering you a deal. I promise to do everything in my power to keep bringing you the latest and most interesting news about Elon Musk every single day and about his companies if you'll do me one favor and hit the subscribe or follow button on your podcast platform right now.

That's it. Pretty simple and straightforward. It takes just a second for you, but it makes a huge difference for the show. Elon Musk news. As crazy as it sounds, that is almost a literal description of the work that the Doge team is doing, is helping fix the government computer systems. Many of these systems are extremely old. They don't communicate. There are a lot of mistakes in the systems. The software doesn't work.

So, we are actually taxable. It's ironic, but it's true. The overall goal here with the Doge team is to help address the enormous deficit. We simply cannot sustain, as a country, a $2 trillion deficit. The interest rates, just the interest on the national debt now exceeds the Defense Department spending.

We spent a lot on the defense department, but we're spending over a trillion dollars on interest. If this continues, the country will become de facto bankrupt. It's not an optional thing. It is an essential thing. That's the reason I'm here. And taking a lot of flak and getting a lot of death threats, by the way. I mean, I like to stack them up. But if we don't do this, America will go bankrupt. That's why it has to be done.

I'm confident at this point, knock on wood, you know, my wooden head, the got a lot of work there that we can actually find a $20 in savings. That would be a roughly 15% of the $7 trillion budget.

And obviously, that can only be done with the support of everyone in this room. And I'd like to thank everyone for your support. Thank you very much. This can only be done with your support. So this is really, DOGE is a support function for the president and for the agencies and departments to help achieve those savings and to effectively find 15% in reduction in fraud and waste.

And we bring the receipts. So people say like, well, is this real? Just go to doge.gov. We line item by line item. We specify each item. And I should say, also, we will make mistakes. We won't be perfect. But when we make a mistake, we'll fix it very quickly.

So, for example, with USAID, one of the things we absolutely canceled very briefly was Ebola, Ebola prevention. I think we all want Ebola prevention. So we restored the Ebola prevention immediately and there was no interruption.

But we do need to move quickly if we're to achieve a trillion dollar deficit reduction in financial year 2026. It requires saving $4 billion per day every day from now through the end of September. But we can do it and we will do it.

Thank you. Would you have any questions of Elon while we're on the subject of those? Because we'll finish off with that. And if you would have any questions, please ask. You could ask me or Elon. Go ahead, please. Thank you, Mr. President. Thank you, Mr. Musk. I just wanted to ask you that President Trump put out a true social today saying that everybody in the cabinet was happy with you.

I just wondered if you had heard otherwise, and if you had heard anything about members of the cabinet who weren't happy with the way things were going. And if so, what are you doing to address those dissatisfaction? Let the cabinet speak just for a second. Is anybody unhappy with Elon? If you are, well, throw him out of here. Is anybody unhappy?

They have a lot of respect for Elon and that he's doing this and some disagree a little bit, but I will tell you for the most part, I think everyone's not only happy, they're thrilled. So go ahead, Elon. President Trump has put together, I think, the best cabinet ever.

literally so uh and i do not give false praise this this is an incredible group of people i don't think that such a talented team has actually ever been assembled i think it's literally the best cabinet that the country has ever had and i think the company should be incredibly appreciative of people in this room

Yeah, Mr. president, thank you. Mr. Musk other about half of the government employees so far appear to have responded to your request for what they've been doing over the past week. Is there a timeline in place for next moves for people being fired? And when can the American people expect to see results from that? Yes. Well, to be clear, like, the.

I think that email perhaps was misinterpreted as a performance review, but actually it was a post check review. Do you have a pass? Do you have a pulse and two neurons? So if you have a pulse and two neurons, you can reply to an email. This is, you know, I think not a high bar is what I'm saying.

This is a should be anyone could accomplish this. But what we are trying to get to the bottom of is we think there are a number of people on the government payroll who are dead, which is probably why they can't respond. And then some people who are not real people like that, literally fictional individuals that are collecting patient. Well, somebody's collecting paychecks on a fictional individual. So we're literally trying to figure out all these people real. Are they alive? And can they write an email?

which I think is a reasonable expectation for the American public would have at least that expectation of someone in the public sector.

Mr mastermaster, this is not it's not on my bar guys. Come on. Employees have responded so far to this email. Does that mean that the remaining 1Million or so federal employees now risk being terminated? And is it your understanding and expectation when you post a directive on X that the cabinet secretaries will follow that work because several agencies have instructed employees that this is voluntary or not to respond.

Yeah, well, I mean, so I guess it was like last week, the president encouraged me via social and also via phone call to be more aggressive. And I was like, OK, you know, yes, sir. Mr. President, we will do that with the president's commander in chief. I do what the president asks. So.

And I said, can we send out an email to everyone just saying what did you get done last week? The president said yes, so it did that. And, you know, we got a partial response. We're going to send another email. Our goal is not to be capricious or unfair. It's we want to give people every opportunity to send an email. And the email could simply be what I'm working on is too sensitive or classified to describe.

In fact, literally just that would be sufficient. You know, I think this is just common sense. And what is your target number for how many workers and employees you're looking to catch? We wish to keep everyone who is doing a job that is essential and doing that job well. But if the job is not essential or they're not doing the job well, they obviously should not be on the public payroll.

Hey, thank you so much for listening today. I really do appreciate your support. If you could take a second and hit this subscribe or the follow button on whatever podcast platform that you're listening on right now, I'd greatly appreciate it. It helps out the show tremendously and you'll never miss an episode. And each episode is about 10 minutes or less to get you caught up quickly. And please, if you want to support the show even more, go to patreon.com slash stage zero.

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