Hi, everyone, and welcome back to the Elon Musk Podcast. I'm your host, Will Walden, and if you're new here, this is a show all about Elon Musk and his groundbreaking work that he's doing with his various companies, including Tesla, SpaceX, The Boring Company, Neurolink, and of course, X. And before we dive into today's episode, I wanted to share a quick insight from our show's analytics. It turns out the 45% of you listening right now are subscribed to the show. And thank you for that.
But that means that 55% of you are not. So I'm offering you a deal. I promise to do everything in my power to keep bringing you the latest and most interesting news about Elon Musk every single day and about his companies. If you'll do me one favor and hit the subscribe or follow button on your podcast platform right now, that's it. Pretty simple and straightforward.
It takes just a second for you, but it makes a huge difference for the show Elon Musk News. As crazy as it sounds that that that is almost a literal description of the work that the Doge team is doing is helping fix the government computer systems. Many of these systems are extremely old. They don't communicate. There are a lot of mistakes in the systems. The software doesn't work. The so we are actually Texas hold. It's it's, it's ironic, but it's
true. The the overall goal here with the Doge team is to help address the, the enormous deficit. We simply cannot sustain as a country, $2 trillion deficits, the interest rates that just the interest on the national debt now exceeds the Defense Department spending. We spend a lot on the Defense Department, but we're spending like over a trillion dollars on interest. If this continues, the country will go become de facto bankrupt. It's not an optional thing.
It is an essential thing. That's the reason I'm here and taking a lot of Flack and getting a lot of death threats, By the way, I like stack them up. But if we don't do this, America will go bankrupt. That's why it has to be done. I'm confident at this point. Knock on wood. You know, look on my wooden head, the it's got a lot of work there that we can actually find a trillion dollars in savings. That would be a roughly 15% of
the $7 trillion budget. And obviously that can only be done with the support of everyone in this room. And I'd like to thank everyone for your support. Thank you very much. This can only be done with your support. So this is really there is a support function for the president and for the the agencies and departments to help achieve those savings and to effectively find 15% in reduction in fraud and waste. And we bring the receipts. So people say like, well, is
this real? Just go to doge.gov. We line item by line and we specify each item. So and we, and I should say we also, we will make mistakes. We won't be perfect, but when we make mistake, we'll fix it very quickly. So for example, with USAID, one of the things we absolutely cancelled very briefly was Ebola, Ebola prevention. I think we all wanted Ebola prevention. So we restored the Ebola prevention immediately and there was no interruption.
But we, we do need to move quickly if we're if we're to achieve a a trillion dollar deficit reduction in in financial year 2026, it requires saving $4 billion per day every day from now through the end of September. But we can do it and we will do it. Thank you. Would you have any questions of Elon while we're on the subject of those because we'll finish off with that. And if you would have any questions, please ask. You could ask me or Eli. Go ahead, please. Thank you.
Mr. President, thank you. Mr. Musk, just wanted to ask you that the President Trump put out a true social today saying that everybody in the Cabinet was was happy with you. I just wondered if that's if you had heard otherwise and if you had heard anything about members of the Cabinet who weren't happy with the way things were going, and if So, what are you doing to address those dissatisfaction? And let the Cabinet speak, just for a second. Yeah, exactly.
Is anybody unhappy with a? If you are, will throw them out of here. Is anybody? Yeah, I have a lot of respect for Elon and that he's doing this, and some disagree a little bit. But I will tell you, for the most part, I think everyone's not only happy, they're thrilled. So go ahead, Elon. Grateful. And President Trump has put together, I think, the best cabinet ever, literally. So I and I do not give false praise. This, this is an incredible
group of people. I don't think such a talented team has actually ever been assembled. I think it's literally the best cabinet that the country has ever had and I think the company should be incredibly appreciative of the people in this room. Thanks. Go. Ahead, please, yeah. Mr. President, thanking Mr. Musk, are there about half of the government employees so far appear to have responded to your request for what they've been
doing over the past week. Is there a timeline in place for next moves for people being fired? And when can the American people expect to see results from them? Yes. Well, to be, to be clear, like the, I think that e-mail perhaps was first interpreted as a performance review, but actually it was a pulse check review. Do you have a pulse? Do you have a pulse and two neurons? So if you have a pass and two neurons, you can reply to an e-mail.
This is, you know, I think not a high bar is what I'm saying. This is, should be anyone could accomplish this. But what we are trying to get to the bottom of is we think there are a number of people on the government payroll who are dead, which is probably why they can't respond. And, and some people who are not real people, like they're literally fictional individuals that are collecting paycheck. Well, somebody's collecting paychecks on a fictional
individual. So we're literally trying to figure out, are these people real? Are they alive and can they write an e-mail, which I think is a reasonable expectation for the American. You know, the American public would have at least that expectation of someone in the public sector. Mr. Master mask roughly this. Is not, it's not on my bar, guys. Go on. Employees have responded so far to this e-mail.
Does that mean that the remaining 1 million or so federal employees now risk being terminated? And is it your understanding and expectation when you post a directive on X that the Cabinet secretaries will follow that order? Because several agencies have instructed employees that this is voluntary or not to respond. Yeah, Well, I mean, so I guess there was a like last week, the President encouraged me via through social and also via phone call to be more aggressive.
And I was like, OK, you know. Yes, Sir. Mr. President, we will indeed do that with the President as commander in chief. I do what the president asks. So, and I said, can we send out an e-mail to everyone just saying, what did you get done last week? The president said yes. So it did that. And you know, we got a partial response. We're going to send another e-mail. But our goal is not to be capricious or unfair. It's we want to give people every opportunity to send an
e-mail. And the e-mail could simply be what I'm working on is 2 sensitive classifieds to describe. Like literally just that would be sufficient. You know, I think this is just common sense. And what is your target number for for how many workers employees you're looking to catch? We, we wish to keep everyone who is doing a job that is essential and doing that job well. But if if they're if the job is not essential or they're not doing the job well, they obviously should not be on the
public payroll. Hey, thank you so much for listening today. I really do appreciate your support. If you could take a second and hit the subscribe or the follow button on whatever podcast platform that you're listening on right now, I greatly appreciate it. It helps out the show tremendously and you'll never miss an episode. And each episode is about 10 minutes or less to get you caught up quickly. And please, if you want to support the show even more, go to patreon.com/stage Zero.
And please take care of yourselves and each other. And I'll see you tomorrow.