Elon Musk says he would not lead DOGE if he had it to do over again

Elon Musk regrets creating and leading the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, he said on former Trump administration official Katie Miller’s podcast.

“Instead of doing DOGE, I would have basically built, worked on my companies, essentially,” Musk said, in response to a question from Miller about whether he would lead DOGE again knowing what he knows now.

“And they wouldn’t have been burning the cars,” Musk said on the episode that aired Tuesday night, seemingly referring to protests at Tesla dealerships during his reign in Washington.

The billionaire is a founder and leader of Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink and The Boring Company. He also leads the social media company X, formerly known as Twitter, after buying the platform in 2022.

Musk also offered a muted assessment of DOGE’s success. “We were a little bit successful. We were somewhat successful,” he told Miller. “I mean, we stopped a lot of funding that really just made no sense, that was just entirely wasteful.”

He claimed that DOGE stopped “$100 [billion], maybe $200 billion of zombie payments per year.” DOGE’s website also claims it saved an estimated $214 billion.

But Musk and other DOGE officials have long exaggerated the amount of savings engineered by the unofficial agency.

An August Politico analysis of the publicly available data found that, despite DOGE’s claims to have saved taxpayers $52.8 billion by July, only $32.7 billion of those funds could be identified — and only $1.4 billion amounted to actual savings. 

Miller’s podcast was friendly turf for Musk, as it has been for the handful of administration officials who have appeared on the show, including Vice President JD Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La. Miller was a former adviser to DOGE, and held several roles in President Donald Trump’s first administration. She is married to Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff for policy and Homeland Security adviser.

Musk contributed more than a quarter-billion dollars to Trump’s reelection campaign, according to Federal Election Commission filings, and Trump named him to lead the federal cost-cutting effort shortly after his reelection.

The pair projected an image of a positive working partnership until an apparent breakup earlier this year over the Epstein files, which Musk said Trump appeared in.

Musk subsequently apologized, and the pair appeared together again for the first time in public at Charlie Kirk’s memorial service back in September.

“President Trump pledged to cut the waste, fraud and abuse in our bloated government, and the administration is committed to delivering on this pledge for the American people,” White House spokesperson Davis Ingle told MS NOW on Wednesday in response to Musk’s comments on the podcast.

Musk left Washington in May after his stint as a temporary “special government employee” expired. While federal officials have said DOGE no longer exists as a centralized entity, a report from WIRED earlier this month found that several DOGE employees remain embedded in federal agencies.

CORRECTION (Dec. 10, 2025, 4 p.m. ET): A previous version of this article misstated the amount that DOGE claimed to have saved as of July. It was $52.8 billion, not $143 billion.