Elon Musk Highlights ‘Maybe the Biggest Scam of All Time’

Elon Musk has outlined what he described as potentially “the biggest scam of all time” during an interview with Texas Senator Ted Cruz.

Musk is the top adviser to President Donald Trump and Department of Government Efficiency [DOGE] chief and appeared on Cruz’s Verdict podcast. He outlined how government spending provides a loophole for nonprofits to “live like kings and queens.”

Why It Matters

DOGE is responsible for slashing operation costs and has dissected multiple federal agencies to shrink the government’s size. The department has come under criticism for making unintentional cuts to important policy areas, such as initiatives countering the spread of the Ebola virus.

Musk has admitted that the organization may get some things wrong. At a Cabinet meeting in February, he said: “We will make mistakes. We won’t be perfect, but when we make mistakes, we’ll fix it very quickly.”

What To Know

Sharing a clip of the interview on his social-media platform X, formerly Twitter, Musk described the use of nonprofit funding as “maybe the biggest scam of all time.”

“One of the biggest scam portholes we’ve uncovered, which is really crazy, is that the government will give money to a so-called nonprofit, which has very few controls/ there’s no auditing subsequently of that nonprofit,” Musk told Cruz.

“So this is the $1.9 billion to Stacey Abrams. They then give themselves extremely lavish, insane salaries, expense everything to the nonprofit, buy jets and homes and all sorts of things.”

It is not the first time that Musk has called parts of government spending a scam. Earlier in March, Musk referred to Social Security as “the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time,” saying that more than 3.2 million people older than 120 years old had to be removed from the records to prevent funds from going to people who were already dead.

So far in the Trump administration, DOGE claims that it has achieved $55 billion in federal savings, attributing these savings to contract cancellations, workforce reductions and asset sales.

What People Are Saying

Writing on X about fraud, Elon Musk said on February 24: “We are increasingly optimistic that, as the immense waste & fraud are eliminated from Social Security & Medical that there is potential to increase actual dollars received by citizens & better health care!”

What Happens Next

Musk continues in his role as the head of the Department of Government Efficiency, with the brief of finding more ways to cut down on federal spending.

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