Unfiltered Elon Musk: Cyberattack on X that shut it down
I’m going to talk to Mr. Elon Musk, who is a famous Trump advisor and the CEO of Tesla, SpaceX, and X Corp. Dear Elon, thanks for this. Thanks for that. Thanks for having me. I’d like to start, but everyone is attacking you for your opinion, among other things. What do you do for the government? Today there was a cyberattack on X that shut it down.
The attack may have come from outside the country. The page and the Internet should be up. Is it up yet? Yes, it’s up. It’s still up. Okay, good. I did look back, though. I need to make sure I understand this correctly. A number of Tesla charging points near Boston are being set on fire.
In Oregon, shots were fired at a Tesla store. Several nonviolence… There were shots. Not a figure of speech. Yes, shots were fired. In downtown New York, people were protesting against the Tesla showroom. Your stock is down a lot. A lot of people have said bad things about you.
But think about the good things. What’s the point of this? Always find the good in things. Yes. I are a dreamer. Besides that, how is your day? Why do you want to do this? Was the deal good? It’s hard to sled. No doubt about it, sliding is hard. But I believe this is the right thing to do. There is a huge amount of scam and waste in the government.
You saw a lot of that when you worked for the government. There has also been… You can read reports from the Government Accountability Office and the Inspector General. A lot of reports have shown that the government wastes and cheats a lot of money. In fact, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) put out a study on this subject last year.
So, during the Biden administration, the amount of theft in the federal government was thought to be $500 billion. To be clear, that’s not something the Trump administration did; it’s something the Biden administration did. We’re just trying to bring that number down so that it’s much lower.
This will save money for American taxpayers and stop money from going to things that I don’t think most taxpayers would agree make sense, like transgender animal surgeries. Why are American taxpayers paying for this? There’s a long list of crazy things the president has done.
Why do 20 million people who are definitely dead show up as living in the Social Security database? Social Security says that hundreds of millions of dollars in Small Business Administration loans were given to kids younger than 11 years old. There was a huge amount of money being sent to U.S. non-governmental organizations, which is what we saw.
Non-governmental groups that get money from the government are, by the way, one of the biggest sources of fraud in the world. The government can give money to an NGO and then have no control over that NGO. This is a huge way for fraud to happen. So they’ve given billions of dollars—we think tens of billions of dollars—to NGOs that are mostly just scams.
That means your review and research were right on the mark. Yes. I believe that. When people say bad things about Doge, for example, we ask, “Which part exactly?” We made sure that everything the Doge team did was posted on doge.gov and the Doge name on X. That’s why we post the papers. Not at all. So, you know… It’s clear from line to line.
Cyberattack on X
It’s clear from line to line. This is very interesting. Okay. So… The two main suggestions we made about the Treasury have now been put into action. The first was that any payments leaving the Treasury should go through the Treasury’s main payment computer, which is called PAM, and should be made through Payments Account Manager or something similar.
However, it costs about $5 trillion a year, or $1 billion an hour, for each payment to be coded with the congressional funding and a reason for the payment to be given. Pretty simple stuff. It’s thought that this alone will save us $100 billion a year. You’re not really changing policy, at least when it comes to Social Security. Let me check that I understand…
There are checks and balances in the financial systems to make sure that money flows as planned from point A to point B. It doesn’t always get there, and sometimes it does go over there. But it’s not a test of policy. Laws are not being changed. It’s the same thing any business would do during a profit and loss check.
I think what we’re really adding here is skill and care. And there’s a huge amount of fraud going on where people use fake social security numbers to apply for medical care, jobless benefits, and loans from the Small Business Administration. Either that or they have stolen someone else’s SSN. We’re trying to stop all of that.
And that number is thought to be around 10% of all government spending, which is $500 billion. A big number. Yes. You’re working with the heads of the agencies. You’re working with the secretaries of the cabinet. Yes. Howard Lutnick was on TV yesterday and said that you were going to work with them.
Is that fair? For sure, we talk to the cabinet secretaries and their offices about what we do. We’re trying very hard to be kind of, let’s call ourselves tech help. The department is really getting a handle on things with our help. There is a huge federal system, and then there is a very thin layer of officials who were chosen by the government. And the truth is that the system usually has the upper hand.
And they mostly don’t care about the people who were chosen by politics. The government shouldn’t have to. You must have seen that. This is something I’ve lived with twice. I worked for Reagan a long time ago and for Trump in his first term. It’s like a constant government agency. I should also say that it is a liberal administration all the time. Yes, very much so. And the bureaucracy doesn’t always carry out or follow presidential policy. They don’t.
When it comes to national policy, they really do their best to stop it. In this case, the president is the person who the people chose to lead them. And we don’t have a democracy if the president can’t get things done that are in line with what the people want. We have a government. There is no rule of the people; there is rule of the government. Let the people run, not the government. That’s what we’re trying to get rid of.
As you said, the system is mostly made up of Democrats. But… Are you now in all of them? All of them? Yeah, pretty much. Yes? Oh. In general, we’re trying to make the government work better, so, yeah. How many people are on your team? We’re now just over 100. 100. Reach 200. Are you going to reach 200? Yes. Okay.
How do you find people to hire? About the same. It’s mostly software people, like people who work in information security tools, and finance. It’s mostly about money and technology, you know. I really can’t believe I’m here doing this. It’s pretty strange. But I feel like the…
You may not know this, but the government budget deficit is a huge $2 trillion. It’s getting bigger. Our debt payments are more than the budget for the Defense Department. I think what really woke me up was seeing that the national debt and interest payments were more than the budget for the Defense Department.
This was only going to get worse over time, which meant that if we didn’t do something, there would be no money for anything. So it’s a reason to do something. Someone is telling you to do something. Yes. You’re giving up other things? What I mean is how are your other businesses going? With a lot of trouble.
Fraud And Waste In Government
Yes, I do mean… You mean there’s no going back, right? I’m just here to try to clean up the government and get rid of waste and scams. In fact, we’re making good progress so far. In this point, we have saved more than $4 billion a day. Oh, okay. That’s why it’s very important. Do you think you’ll reach a trillion dollars? Yes. In savings? We will save a trillion dollars if we don’t stop.
That stuff can also be translated. To give you an idea, we’ve been talking about this and just had Russell Vogt, the head of the OMB, on through very rescinding authority and empowerment authority. But I think you already said that it’s an audit that won’t be put away and forgotten. There will be real saves at the end of this. Cut down on the spending level.
As I already said, auditor generals and the government accounting office have done a lot of good work, but it hasn’t been put into action. There are basically no complaints if the government gives money to someone, even if it’s wasted or stolen. But there are complaints if they don’t receive money. And the people who complain the most are the ones who get the fake money. You’re on it.
As I already said, the goal is to keep America from going bankrupt through waste and scam. That’s why I’m here. We’re also making good progress. You are, yes. You’re going to stay another year? Yes, I believe that. Report due in the middle of next year? We’re not writing a report, so we’re just getting things done.
News stories don’t mean anything, as I said. You need to actually do something. Because of this, it’s important for entitlement spending, which makes up most of government spending. That’s like the big one to get rid of. That’s about $500 billion, or $600 billion to $700 billion a year.
Also, the Democrats use this method to bring in and keep illegal aliens by paying them to come here and then turning them into voters. Yes. Why are the Democrats so angry about this? Because they’re losing voters. If we stop this huge money magnet for illegal immigrants, they will leave, and the Democrats will lose votes.
However, the president backs you up. He said it again yesterday. You see some crazy things, like where money from FEMA goes, which is supposed to help Americans who are in trouble. A lot of their money was sent to pay for high-end hotels in New York for people who were there illegally. And they kept doing that even after the president was chosen and signed an order telling them to stop.
So we made sure that money didn’t go anywhere, because it’s clearly wrong for American government money to be used to pay for fancy hotels for illegals. But you need to explain why that was done. Basically, it was because the Democrats are trying to get people to vote for them. Yes. I agree. Yes. That’s also why you don’t need an ID to vote. In fact, you can’t show your ID to vote in California and New York State. Oh, okay.
Doesn’t that make no sense? Crazy? Yes. As someone from New York, I’d say that. It’s crazy. Yeah, crazy. It also goes against the whole Constitution and the ideas that it is based on. Yes. People who work on the show are telling me to leave. It’s too much fun to end this chat. Yes.
Could I ask you one thing? In 20 seconds. It has nothing to do with Doge. Are you able to save the astronauts? We will bring them back in a few weeks. This isn’t getting nearly enough attention. Are you going to get him back? We’ll get him back. Thank you.
Post Comment Cancel reply