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Elon Musk has shared that he got “carried away” during his time heading the supposed “Department of Government Efficiency,” or DOGE, in the early months of the second Donald Trump term — with the billionaire seeming to express only mild regret for the sweeping, illegal government cuts that are slated to kill millions of people across the world over the coming years.
“I think I got a little too involved in politics, got carried away, frankly,” Musk said in an interview with The Economist last week, when asked about DOGE.
He said that the goal of DOGE was to address the federal deficit, “where the interest payments exceed the amount of money spent on the Department of War.” But, despite saying that he went too far, he still suggested that further cuts are needed.
The sweeping cuts enacted by DOGE cost over 260,000 federal workers their jobs, reports have found, and countless more due to slashes to scientific research funded by the government. The cruelest cuts, however, came in the form of the closure of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).
The agency — though it’s been criticized as an arm of U.S. imperialism — funded humanitarian efforts to provide food, shelter, and education to tens of millions of people abroad. Estimates by experts have found that these cuts are leading to the early deaths of thousands of people a day; some have estimated that they’ve killed over 700,000 people so far.
Research last year published in The Lancet found that, by 2030, the DOGE cuts could cause over 14 million preventable deaths, including 4.5 million children and babies under 5. People in affected places have told U.S. media outlets that people in their countries are dying as a direct result of the cuts.
In the interview, however, Musk doubled down on his assertion that nobody has been killed as a result of his work.
When asked by Economist editor-in-chief Zanny Minton Beddoes how many people have died, Musk said “zero.”
“How many NGOs are there that could step in?” Musk went on, suggesting that humanitarian groups should have swept in after the abrupt cuts to replace the tens of billions of dollars’ worth of aid being sent by the U.S. government. He also said that any claims of cuts to humanitarian programs are “false.”
“Zero died because of DOGE. Zero point zero,” he said.
“Not everybody functions as fast as you do. If funding is cut off for antiretrovirals overnight, and it just stops, then people will die when they don’t have access to them,” Beddoes responded, referring to the devastating impacts to anti-HIV programs that were run by the U.S. and cut under DOGE.
Musk has vilified the leaders of NGOs that he claims could be stepping up. On Monday, Musk called World Central Kitchen founder José Andrés an “asshole” after Andrés criticized him on X.
Musk has previously suggested that his work for the government was noble. “We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper. Could gone to some great parties. Did that instead,” Musk said in February 2025.
In an interview with Katie Miller, wife to top White House aide Stephen Miller, last December, Musk said that he wouldn’t do it again if given the chance, because it wasn’t as successful as he had hoped. “I think instead of doing DOGE, I would have basically worked on my companies,” he said.
Meanwhile, Musk and his DOGE lackeys have made out handsomely since they worked on DOGE. After SpaceX’s IPO last month, Musk became the world’s first trillionaire, with his net worth more than doubled since last year as the company gets billions in federal contracts from the Trump administration.
At the same time, Reuters reported last week that a group of former DOGE employees have founded a startup, valued at $1.4 trillion, that aims to work with the government to provide AI-driven offensive military systems. The company, called Cathedral, has reportedly gotten $160 million in funding thus far, and is seeking to buy or partner with a data center for its operations.
Other clips from the Economist interview also circulated online over the weekend. In one segment, Beddoes confronts Musk with the idea that he’s sorely hated by many members of the public. Indeed, polling has found that the majority of U.S. adults say they dislike him — an opinion that has steadily risen over the years, but shot up significantly while he was working with DOGE last year.
“Some people do loathe you. But do you understand why? Do you think what you’re doing is helpful to Western democracy?” Beddoes said.
“Well, I — maybe some people do loathe me. I don’t care,” said Musk, who began stuttering and shifting around in his seat. “The fact that a quarter billion people follow me is that I think a lot more people actually like me than don’t. And I think a lot more people hate you, and the media.”
“I think there is certainly a loss of trust in journalism. I think, in part, there have been mistakes by journalists and journalism, I totally acknowledge that,” Beddoes responded. “But I also think that the kind of polarized environment, particularly on social media, fostered by the kinds of things you’re pushing on X, actually helps this. Makes it worse.”
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