Musk: “AI and robots are the only solution to the national debt ... DOGE was a failure”

[Financial News]  

Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX and former head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) under the Trump administration, said that artificial intelligence (AI) and robots are the only way to tackle America’s massive debt. He admitted that DOGE, which he had been part of, was a failure. He also regretted not returning to running his businesses sooner.

According to Axios on the 17th (local time), Musk said this during a podcast recording set to air on the 20th. The podcast is hosted by Walter Isaacson, the biographer who wrote a biography of Musk titled “Elon Musk” in 2023.
Musk told Isaacson that the DOGE experiment had failed, saying, “It has been proven impossible to solve the budget deficit from within the government.”
“The only solution to the national debt is to use AI and robots,” he said, adding, “There is no way to solve the problem using the old methods.” Musk said he hoped future administrations would use the most capable AI ever to tackle the problem by surgically cutting out its heart.
Musk said that even in the current administration there had been no appetite for cutting government spending—“not from the president, the House, the Senate, or the courts”—and added, “Basically, no one in government actually wants to cut spending, apart from a handful of people around the world like Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.).” Everyone talks a good game about austerity, he said.

Musk went on to say, “If the president had made it a top priority, we could have done it,” while noting that this was unrealistic. “If you try to tackle the deficit and stop wasteful spending, you’ll make a lot of enemies,” he said. He stressed, “President Trump wants to be liked by others, so he really hates it when people who are angry because their funding has been cut call him and air their grievances.”

Musk also regretted having been away from his companies for too long. He said he should have stayed behind the scenes and, even if he had stepped forward, should have taken charge for only a month or two. He officially worked at the White House for four months. He added ruefully, “If I could go back to that time, I could have devoted myself to AI sooner.”

Musk referred to the incident last February when he took the stage at a conservative group’s event and wielded a chainsaw while calling for the dismantling of bureaucracy as “a really weird weekend,” speaking in the third person as if he had nothing to do with it. Pressed to elaborate, he replied, “Let sleeping dogs lie,” suggesting there was no need to stir up trouble.
Isaacson, meanwhile, wrote in his 2023 book “Elon Musk” that Musk was “an amazing engineer,” but also described him as “someone who is too easily drawn into darkness and conspiracy theories when it comes to politics and people.”
[email protected] Song Kyung-jae Reporter