Elon Musk now says he stayed at the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) far longer than he should have, and that proximity to power went to his head.
On The Builders podcast, host Walter Isaacson suggested Musk had seemed "intoxicated" by life next to the White House. Isaacson pointed to the chainsaw Musk waved on stage at a conservative conference in February, which Musk billed as "the chainsaw for bureaucracy." "I got carried away basically," Musk said. He described Marine One, Air Force One and the Oval Office as "a little bit [seductive]," and said a month or two in the role would have been enough.
The regret is mostly about style and visibility. Musk said he should have stayed "more in the background." He did not walk back the substance: DOGE laid off more than 280,000 government workers and shut down the international aid agency. He also did not address his early pledge to cut at least $2 trillion in spending. That target later dropped to $150 billion, and many of the claimed savings were exaggerated or could not be verified.
His explanation for the shortfall is political. Trying to cut waste makes "a lot of enemies," he said, and Trump "likes to be liked." He concluded that the deficit cannot be fixed from inside government, and that "AI and robots" are the only route to solving the national debt. That is a convenient endpoint for someone who has gone back to running tech companies.
The interview leaves gaps. Musk declined to say what happened when he left in May, calling it "a weird weekend" and urging that "sleeping dogs lie." His exit came a day after he attacked Trump's tax bill for increasing the deficit, and DOGE faded out well before its planned July 4, 2026 end date. Whether regret over a chainsaw counts as an accounting of the program is a separate question.