Imagine pouring months of your life into trying to fix something that everyone agrees is broken, only to have the people who broke it in the first place try to burn your life’s work to the ground.
That, in a nutshell, is what happened to Elon Musk when he took on the role leading the Department of Government Efficiency – or DOGE, as the internet affectionately (and ironically) named it.
And now, in a refreshingly candid moment, he’s finally said out loud what a lot of us suspected all along: the personal and corporate cost was simply too high.
A Surprising Moment of Reflection from the World’s Busiest Man
Last week, Musk sat down for a long-form conversation on a podcast hosted by one of his longtime communications executives. The question was direct: knowing everything he knows now, would he do DOGE again?
“I mean… instead of doing DOGE, I would have basically just worked on my companies. And the cars… they wouldn’t have been burning the cars.”
That pause before he finished the sentence spoke volumes. You could almost hear the exhaustion.
He didn’t sugarcoat it. The push to cut obvious waste, fraud, and outright grift from federal spending was, in his words, somewhat successful. But the reaction from what he calls the “swamp” was ferocious – and it was aimed straight at Tesla.
What Actually Happened to Tesla During DOGE
Let’s be clear: this wasn’t just a few mean tweets or some bad press cycles.
- Showroom vehicles were firebombed in multiple cities
- Progressive politicians openly hoped aloud for Tesla’s stock to collapse
- Major NGOs that lost funding streams launched coordinated pressure campaigns
- Institutional investors faced intense public shaming for holding TSLA
- Regulatory scrutiny suddenly intensified on every front
In Musk’s view, the message was crystal clear: stop touching the money spigot, or we will make your company pay.
And pay they did. Tesla’s market cap took wild swings, employees faced harassment, and Musk himself became public enemy number one for large parts of the political establishment.
So Was DOGE Actually Successful?
This is where things get interesting.
If you measure success purely in dollars saved, the official DOGE website currently claims roughly $214 billion in identified cuts and savings. That’s real money – enough to fund entire federal departments for years.
But it’s nowhere near the $2 trillion Musk floated during the campaign. On paper, that looks like underperformance.
Yet I’ve come to believe the real impact runs deeper than spreadsheet numbers.
Think about it: every time DOGE spotlighted a clearly ridiculous line item – duplicate programs, obvious fraud rings, foreign-aid slush funds that somehow always ended up in the hands of connected activists – the political class had to defend it in public.
For the first time in decades, waste wasn’t just background noise. It was front-page news, night after night.
“We stopped a lot of funding that really just made no sense, that was entirely wasteful.”
– Elon Musk, December 2025
In my book, forcing that conversation at scale is a victory most reformers can only dream of.
Why the Backlash Was So Visceral
Here’s the part that still keeps me up at night.
The federal budget isn’t just money. For huge swaths of the political, academic, and NGO class, it’s oxygen.
Cut the flow – even the obviously corrupt parts – and entire ecosystems start gasping. Careers end. Influence evaporates. Power structures wobble.
When your entire business model depends on taxpayer money flowing through five layers of consultants before reaching its supposed destination, someone showing up with a spreadsheet and a sharp axe feels existential.
And existential threats don’t get polite pushback. They get molotov cocktails through showroom windows.
The Recession Trap Nobody Talks About
There’s another layer that almost never gets airtime.
A huge chunk of U.S. economic “growth” over the past two decades has been government spending – much of it wasteful, much of it borrowed.
Strip out enough of that waste fast enough and – mathematically – you’re going to see GDP prints turn ugly. Unemployment ticks up. Headlines scream recession.
At that point Congress sprints to the microphones: “See? We told you cutting spending was dangerous!” Then they vote through emergency packages that make the old waste look frugal.
It’s the ultimate heads-I-win, tails-you-lose setup for the spending class.
Musk saw that trap from a mile away, which probably explains why he sounds almost relieved to be out.
What Comes Next?
Honestly? I think we’re entering uncharted territory.
The DOGE experiment proved two things simultaneously:
- There is truly staggering waste in the federal budget
- The political system will weaponize everything – including literal violence – to protect it
That’s a private citizen with unprecedented resources and public support could only move the needle “somewhat” tells you how entrenched the problem is.
On the flip side, the fact that any cuts happened at all – and that the public saw exactly who fought them tooth and nail – plants seeds that don’t go away.
People now know which programs get defended with arson. They know which politicians cheer when an American company bleeds. That knowledge has a way of compounding.
Final Thought: Was It Worth It?
When Musk says he wouldn’t do it again, I believe him. No rational person would sign up for that meat grinder twice.
But here’s the thing – someone had to do it once.
Someone had to rip the bandage off and show the infection underneath, even if it meant getting scarred in the process.
In that sense, maybe DOGE’s greatest success wasn’t the $214 billion identified or even the programs killed.
Maybe it was proving – in the most dramatic way possible – that the system isn’t just broken.
It’s designed to protect itself at all costs. Even if that cost is watching American innovation burn.
And once people see that clearly, there’s no unseeing it.
