Read the full transcript of Elon Musk’s interview by Senator Ted Cruz and Ben Ferguson for a discussion about D.O.G.E. and the first 50 days of the Trump Administration, premiered Mar 17, 2025.
TRANSCRIPT:
Introduction at the White House
INTERVIEWER: Welcome. It is Verdict with Senator Ted Cruz, Ben Ferguson with you. And today is a really fun day, Senator, because we have a special guest and we’re in a special place. I’m going to let you do the rest of the intro.
INTERVIEWER: Well, we’re in the White House right now and we’re here with my friend Elon Musk, who really has not been doing much of anything, has not made any news, and nobody has noticed the impact. Welcome, Elon.
ELON MUSK: Thank you.
INTERVIEWER: Holy crap.
ELON MUSK: Yes. Wow.
INTERVIEWER: Let me just say never a dull moment. Never a dull moment. The first 50 days the President has spent in office over the top and the first 50 days you’ve spent, I don’t think there’s ever been anyone to have an impact the way you have.
Comparing Twitter to the Federal Government
INTERVIEWER: Well, let me start with a question. You know a lot about which was worse, the mess you found at Twitter or the mess you found in the federal government?
ELON MUSK: Well, it’s hard to compete with the federal government.
INTERVIEWER: What surprised you about the federal government? I assume you came in and assumed it was bad. Is it worse than you expected?
ELON MUSK: It is worse than I expected. But on the plus side, that means there’s more opportunity for improvement. So if you look on the bright side, there’s actually a lot of opportunity for improvement in federal government expenditures. Because it’s so bad, if it was a well-run ship, it would be very difficult to improve.
ELON MUSK: So now it’s like if people say, well, how will you figure out how to save money in the federal government?
INTERVIEWER: You shoot any direction. Yeah. And you’re going to join us. Wow.
ELON MUSK: I’m sure you would agree.
INTERVIEWER: So a lot of folks have talked about like, you can’t miss.
ELON MUSK: Yeah, this is going any direction.
Wasteful Government Expenditures
INTERVIEWER: A lot of the crazy expenditures, things like 2 million bucks for sex change surgeries in Guatemala, an essential, you know, transgendered mice and Sesame Street in Iraq, a lot of that has gotten attention. But some of the stuff you’ve told me about, like, tell us about computer licenses and government agencies.
ELON MUSK: Yeah. So most of what DOGE is finding, you don’t need to be Sherlock Holmes. It’s very obvious. Basic stuff. So in every government department, I say every because we’ve not yet found a single exception. There are far too many software licenses and media subscriptions, meaning many more software licenses and media subscriptions than there are humans in the department.
INTERVIEWER: Like you were saying, like an agency with 15,000 people might have 30,000 licenses?
ELON MUSK: Yes.
INTERVIEWER: And even of the 15,000 employees, a good chunk of them hadn’t used the license, had never logged on or used the application.
ELON MUSK: Yes. We found entire situations of software licenses or media subscriptions. There were zero logins, and yet we…
INTERVIEWER: Were paying for it.
ELON MUSK: Yes, the government was paying for thousands of licenses of software or media subscriptions, and no one had ever logged in even once.
Government Credit Cards
INTERVIEWER: Or like credit cards, you found the same thing with government credit cards.
ELON MUSK: We found that there are twice as many credit cards as there are humans. And I still don’t have a good explanation for why this is the case. And these are $10,000 limit cards. So it’s a lot of money.
INTERVIEWER: Is it incompetent that you’re finding, or is this like the biggest money laundering scheme in the history of the world that you’re finding?
ELON MUSK: Look, I think it’s mostly. If you say, look, what’s the waste to fraud ratio? In my opinion, it’s like 80% waste, 20% fraud. But you do have these sort of gray areas.
INTERVIEWER: Example.
Waste and Fraud Examples
ELON MUSK: Example would be, so we saw a lot of payments going out of treasury that had no payment code and no explanation for the payment. And then we’d try to figure out what that payment is, and we’d see that, okay, that contract was supposed to be shut off, but someone forgot to shut off that contract. And so the company kept getting money.
INTERVIEWER: Wow.
ELON MUSK: Now is that waste or fraud?
INTERVIEWER: Yeah, both. Both.
ELON MUSK: Yeah, yeah.
INTERVIEWER: You know, you’re getting something you’re not supposed to get.
ELON MUSK: You aren’t supposed to get it, but the government sent it to you, and nobody from the government asked for it back. Take for example, the $1.9 billion given to Stacey Abrams. A fake NGO.
INTERVIEWER: Utter insanity. Explain that story. That’s, that’s just corrupt. I think that’s paying off cronies at that point.
ELON MUSK: 1,000%.
INTERVIEWER: Yeah, yeah. And by the way, she knew, like when you get $2 billion, you don’t miss that. That’s not an accident.
ELON MUSK: Allegedly it was for like, you know, environmentally friendly appliances or something. And they’ve given like, like 100 appliances so far, which $2 billion. It’s a very expensive toaster.
INTERVIEWER: Wouldn’t help an appliance. That’s something. Zero fridge boy. It’s nice, right?
The Nonprofit Scam
ELON MUSK: Obviously one of the biggest scam portholes we’ve uncovered, which is really crazy, is that the government can give money to a so-called nonprofit with very few controls. And then there’s no auditing subsequently of that nonprofit. So this is with the 1.9 billion to Stacey Abrams. They then give themselves extremely lavish, like, insane salaries, expense everything to the nonprofit, buy jets and homes and all sorts of things.
INTERVIEWER: Live like kings and queens.
ELON MUSK: Yes.
INTERVIEWER: On the taxpayer dime.
ELON MUSK: Correct. You mentioned this is happening at scale. It’s not just one or two. We’re seeing this everywhere.
Magic Money Computers
INTERVIEWER: One of the things you told me about is what you call magic money computers. Tell us about it, because I never heard of that until you brought that up.
ELON MUSK: Okay. So you may think that the government computers all talk to each other. They synchronize, they add up what funds are going somewhere, and it’s coherent that the numbers, for example, that you’re presented as a senator are actually the real numbers.
INTERVIEWER: One would think.
ELON MUSK: One would think. They’re not. I mean, they’re not totally wrong, but they’re probably off by 5% or 10% in some cases. So I call a magic money computer any computer which can just make money out of thin air.
INTERVIEWER: So how does that work?
ELON MUSK: It just issues payments.
INTERVIEWER: And you said there’s something like 11 of these computers at treasury that are sending out trillions in payments.
ELON MUSK: They’re mostly treasury, some are at HHS, some at State, there’s some at DOD. I think we found now 14 magic money computers.
INTERVIEWER: 14, okay.
ELON MUSK: They just send money out of nothing.
The Power of Computer Access
INTERVIEWER: You have an ability to see where leverage points are and how things actually happen. So I remember back, I think it was September, October of this year, before the election. We didn’t know who was going to win. And I was at your house in Austin. We were talking about it, and you said, look, I don’t want a job in Washington. And you said, all I want is the login for every computer.
INTERVIEWER: And I remember thinking at the time that sounded kind of weird, like I just didn’t get it. And I have to say, what’s interesting on this, if I would have thought, like, okay, how do you reform government? Like, sort of the traditional way to think about it is, okay, give me an org chart. Let me sit down with the people who are running agencies. And what you saw immediately is to understand what’s really going on. Get to the payment systems, get to the computers. Why is getting to the computers so critical to understanding what’s actually happening?
ELON MUSK: Well, the government is run by computers. So you’ve got essentially several hundred computers that effectively run the government. And if you want to know, did…
INTERVIEWER: You know that Ben, No.
ELON MUSK: Yeah. So when somebody like, even when the President issues an executive order, that’s got to go through a whole bunch of people until ultimately it is implemented at a computer somewhere. And if you want to know what the situation is with the accounting and you’re trying to reconcile accounting and get rid of waste and fraud, you must be able to analyze the computer databases.
ELON MUSK: Otherwise you can’t figure it out because all you’re doing is asking a human, who will then ask another human, ask another human, and finally usually ask some contractor, will ask another contractor to do a query on the computer.
INTERVIEWER: Wow.
ELON MUSK: That’s how it actually works. So it’s many layers deep. So the only way to reconcile the databases and get rid of waste and fraud is to actually look at the computers and see what’s going on. So that’s what I call, that’s what I, when I sort of cryptically refer to reprogramming the matrix. You have to understand what’s going on computers. You have to reconcile the computer databases in order to identify the waste of fraud.
INTERVIEWER: I don’t know that there was anyone in Congress who understood, certainly myself included, who understood the leverage that comes from the computer and the data in particular that Congress would think about. Give me a report on what your expenditures are rather than actually getting into the pipes. And I think that has been fascinating that it’s let you uncover a bunch of crap that just nobody knew.
ELON MUSK: Yes. I mean, in order for money to go to event count, it’s not like we’re sending truckloads of cash all over the place. We’re wiring money.
INTERVIEWER: Right.
ELON MUSK: We’re sending money through the ACH system or through the SWIFT system. So in order for money to flow, it’s going to flow electronically. So that’s what you need to look at. You need to look at the actual electronic money flows.
Government Accounting Practices
INTERVIEWER: And Tesla and all your companies, you have accounting and you have every expenditure, you have it coded for what it’s going for. Federal government doesn’t work that way. They don’t code with the money’s going for.
ELON MUSK: They do now, but they didn’t.
INTERVIEWER: And like one of the things that you told me, you said if any company kept its books the way the federal government does, they’d arrest the officers and put them in jail.
ELON MUSK: Yes. If it was a public company, it would be delisted immediately. It would fail its audit, and the officers of the company would be imprisoned. That’s the level of issues in the federal Government, unfortunately.
INTERVIEWER: Or do you think this is incompetence?
ELON MUSK: Again? It’s 80% incompetence and 20% malice.
Progress and Timeline
INTERVIEWER: So if you look at DOGE now, and you look at the government and what you’re finding, what percentage have you guys even gotten to and how much of it is Mars, where you haven’t even gotten there yet? Because there’s so much you’re finding out here. I mean, how many. You seem like a timeline guy when you say, all right, I want to get in there and get all these numbers and things. How far are we from the end game where you’ve seen it all, been able to process it all and fix it? I mean, are we years away? Months away?
ELON MUSK: Not years. I mean, I’m reasonably confident that we’ll be able to get a trillion dollars of waste and fraud out, and that meaning that it will have. We’ll have a net savings in FY26, which starts in October, obviously, of a trillion dollars, provided we’re allowed to continue and our progress is not impeded and we’re very public about what we do.
INTERVIEWER: Yeah, you put it on the website.
ELON MUSK: I don’t know how we could be more transparent. Literally, every action we do, small or large, we put on the doge.gov website and we post on the X handle. And when people complain about it and they say, oh, you’re doing something cost usual, I’m like, well, which of these costumes you do it in the daylight?
INTERVIEWER: Everyone knows exactly what you’re doing.
ELON MUSK: Extreme transparency. I don’t think anything’s been this transparent ever.
INTERVIEWER: So five years ago, you were a hero to the left. You were cool. You had electric cars, you had space.
ELON MUSK: Go to a party in Hollywood and not get dirty looks. Yeah. In fact. Yeah.
INTERVIEWER: And now you might not even get invited.
ELON MUSK: I still get invited, but I don’t know if I should go.
INTERVIEWER: And I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say today, after Donald Trump, the left hates you more than any person on Earth.
ELON MUSK: Yes. I appear to be number two. I mean, if we judge by the various signs, it’s derangement.
INTERVIEWER: It’s Trump Derangement Syndrome and Elon Derangement Syndrome. How is that for you? That’s a little bit of whiplash of going from being like, Mr. Cool to the devil incarnate in just a couple of years. Is that kind of weird to experience that transformation?
ELON MUSK: Yes.
INTERVIEWER: Why do they hate you so much?
The Real Reason Behind the Hatred
ELON MUSK: Well, because we’re clearly over the target. If DOGE was ineffective, if we were not actually getting rid of a bunch of waste and fraud, they wouldn’t care. And a bunch of that fraud – I mean, the fraud we’re seeing is overwhelmingly on the left. It’s not zero on the right, but these NGOs are almost all left-wing NGOs that are being funded, for example.
They hate me because DOGE is being effective and DOGE is getting rid of a lot of waste that people on the left were taking advantage of. That’s what it comes down to. And the single biggest thing that they’re worried about is that DOGE is going to turn off fraudulent payments of entitlements – everything from Social Security, Medicare, unemployment, disability, Small Business Administration loans – turn them off to illegals. This is the crux of the matter. This is the thing that’s why they really hate my guts and want me to die.
INTERVIEWER: And you think that’s billions? Hundreds of billions? What do you think the scale is of that?
ELON MUSK: I think across the country, it’s well north of 100 billion, maybe 200 billion. So by using entitlements fraud, the Democrats have been able to attract and retain vast numbers of illegal immigrants.
INTERVIEWER: And buy voters.
ELON MUSK: And buy voters, exactly. Basically bring in 10, 20 million people who are beholden to the Democrats for government handouts and will vote overwhelmingly Democrat, as has been demonstrated in California.
INTERVIEWER: It’s an election strategy.
ELON MUSK: Yes.
INTERVIEWER: It’s power.
The Long-Term Strategy
ELON MUSK: Yes. And it doesn’t take much to turn the swing states blue. Often a swing state might be won by 10, 20,000 votes. So the Dems can bring in 200,000 illegals and over time get them legalized, not counting any cheating that takes place. Because there is some cheating.
But even without cheating, if you bring in illegals that are 10x the voter differential in a swing state, it will no longer be a swing state and the Dems will win all the swing states. It’s just a matter of time and America will be a permanent deep blue socialist state. The House, the Senate, the Presidency and the Supreme Court will all go hardcore Democratic. They will then further cement that by bringing in even more aliens. So you just can’t vote your way out of it. Their objective is to make it a one-party socialist state. And it’ll be much worse than California because at least California is mitigated by the fact that someone can leave California.
INTERVIEWER: You can go to Texas.
ELON MUSK: Yeah, exactly. Make everywhere California.
INTERVIEWER: But worse. By the way, in the middle of the pandemic, I spent 45 minutes on the phone with Elon. He was still in California. I was walking my dog, Snowflake and trying to convince you, come to Texas. The commies in California can’t stand you. We love you, we want you here. And you didn’t quite go then, but you went not that long afterwards.
ELON MUSK: I mean, the COVID actions almost killed Tesla because every other auto plant in the country was allowed to open, but ours, which was in California, was not allowed to open.
INTERVIEWER: Wow. Wow.
ELON MUSK: So they almost killed Tesla.
Personal Reflections
INTERVIEWER: So as a personal matter, do you ever regret it? Like five years ago you go to the Oscars and Mr. Cool and now you’ve got death threats every day. Like, do you…
ELON MUSK: Well, these days the Oscars are boring. I wouldn’t want to go.
INTERVIEWER: God bless the movies they nominate. No one on earth has ever seen. Like, could they actually nominate a movie that human beings go watch?
ELON MUSK: I mean, how many great movies have come out in the last several years? Very few.
INTERVIEWER: Depressingly few.
ELON MUSK: Yeah. Very few. Last Oscars came and went. I didn’t watch it. There’s nothing to see.
INTERVIEWER: I was sad that Gene Hackman just passed away because Unforgiven was spectacular. But that was a long time ago. You’ve mentioned today here and before, about the possibility of someone wanting to take you out dealing with the death threats we see.
ELON MUSK: It’s not in my imagination. You could just look on social media.
INTERVIEWER: Yeah, but like, is it because… Yeah, and look, I’m very familiar with it.
ELON MUSK: And they’ve got signs. There are people with signs and demonstrations saying that I need to die.
Organized Opposition
INTERVIEWER: Do you think, are these just whack jobs or do you think there are hopefully foreign, sane people? Do you think there are foreign entities behind this? Do you think there are domestic entities behind the threats and also the attacks to Tesla? I mean, you know, you’re getting Tesla’s charging stations lit on fire. Do you think that’s organized and paid for?
ELON MUSK: Yes, at least some of it is organized and paid for, I think by domestic, basically left-wing organizations in America funded by left-wing billionaires, essentially.
INTERVIEWER: Is it like Act Blue or what?
ELON MUSK: Act Blue is one of them. You know, Arabella, the classic. It’s funded by the left-wing NGO cabal.
INTERVIEWER: How big of a threat is this to what you build at Tesla? I mean, I remember when Teslas came out, it was people that didn’t want to have gas cars. A lot of it was environmental reasons. I jokingly said I was like, I’m a Texas guy. I’m always going to have to have something that burns gas. My kids, now all three of my boys think that Teslas are awesome. The Cybertruck is the car they want their dad to buy, which I laugh because I never could have imagined that five years ago. And now I’m looking at the White House and the President’s Tesla Spark, which is the coolest damn thing. But I mean, you’ve changed a generation. When you look at my kids are 6 and 8 and they’re going, dad, buy us Cybertruck. And I’m considering it. That’s a full circle in a weird way.
ELON MUSK: Yeah. Well, I do have this theory that the most entertaining outcome is the most likely. So it seems often to be true. If you’re like, what twist or turn of fate would generate the highest ratings if we were a TV show, what twist or turn of fate would generate the highest ratings? There’s a good chance that happens.
INTERVIEWER: Well, I will say if ActBlue and Arabella network…
ELON MUSK: ActBlue is a huge scam. Next level.
INTERVIEWER: Do you think it’s foreign money? Chinese money? Where do you think the money in ActBlue is coming from? How do you figure that out?
ELON MUSK: Well, it’s not coming from a whole bunch of groundswell of public support because when individual donors looked at in ActBlue, they eventually turn out to be like die-hard Republicans. People have never given money in their life. So you’re going to track down a bunch of these people where it says, oh, I gave $16,000 and they’re like, I didn’t give $16,000. There’s this… Well, some of my conferences found themselves on the ActBlue list.
INTERVIEWER: Wow, so that’s if it can actually be shown that they are funding firebombing of Tesla charging stations, that’s objectively a criminal act. That is funding terrorist activity. And the statutes make clear that an incendiary device qualifies.
ELON MUSK: So that’s a terrorist activity. Yeah.
The Future of AI
INTERVIEWER: Let me ask, AI in 10 years, how is life going to be different because of AI for just a normal person?
ELON MUSK: Well, 10 years is a long time. In 10 years, probably AI could do anything better than a human can cognitively. Probably almost. I think in 10 years, based on the current rate of improvement, AI will be smarter than the smartest human. There will also be a massive number of robots, so humanoid robots.
INTERVIEWER: By the way, I gotta ask, how come your robots look so much like the creepy robots from I, Robot? Was that intentional or just… I was hoping he was gonna say yeah, just to mess with you.
ELON MUSK: It’s not meant to look like any prior robot. And we’ll iterate the design. You’ll be able to have a lot of the robot parts are cosmetic. You’ll be able to switch out the kind of snap-on cosmetic parts of the robot, make it look like something else if you’re dying.
So there’ll be ultimately billions of humanoid robots, all cars will be self-driving in 10 years. In 10 years, probably 90% of miles driven will be autonomous.
INTERVIEWER: Huh, wow, that fast?
ELON MUSK: Yeah. In five years, probably 50% of all miles driven will be autonomous.
INTERVIEWER: Now if AI will be smarter than any person, how many jobs go away because of that? And what do people do if you’ve got millions of people that are losing their jobs like that? A lot of people are understandably freaked out about that.
ELON MUSK: Well, goods and services will become close to free. So it’s not as though people will be wanting in terms of goods and services.
INTERVIEWER: So why is that? Why are goods and services free in an AI world or close to free?
ELON MUSK: Well, you have, I don’t know, tens of billions of robots, they will make you anything or provide any service you want for basically next to nothing. It’s not that people will have a lower standard of living, they’ll have actually a much higher standard of living. The challenge will be fulfillment. How do you derive fulfillment and meaning in life?
INTERVIEWER: Is Skynet real? Like, you get the apocalyptic visions of AI, how real is the prospect of killer robots annihilating humanity?
ELON MUSK: Likely, maybe 10%.
INTERVIEWER: On what time frame?
ELON MUSK: Actually 10 years.
INTERVIEWER: So soon? You see a world where that’s possible?
ELON MUSK: Yeah, but I mean you can look at it like the glass is 80 to 90% full, meaning like 80% likely, we’ll have extreme prosperity for all.
The AI Race with China
INTERVIEWER: Now I guess my view, we’re in a race to win AI. We’re in a race with China. And my view is if there are going to be killer robots, I’d rather they be American killer robots than Chinese. How likely are we winning right now? Is America winning right now? And how likely is America to win the race for AI vis-a-vis China or anyone else for the next few years?
ELON MUSK: I think America is likely to win. Then it will be a function of who controls the AI chip fabrication, the factories that make the AI chips. If they are controlled, if more of them are controlled by China, then China will win more.
INTERVIEWER: The factories that are making the AI chips, you think that will determine it?
ELON MUSK: Yes.
INTERVIEWER: And how are we doing versus China on that front?
ELON MUSK: Well, right now, almost all the advanced AI chip factories, they call them fabs, are in Taiwan.
INTERVIEWER: And what if China invades Taiwan?
ELON MUSK: 69 miles away from…
INTERVIEWER: What happens if China invades Taiwan? What happens to the world?
ELON MUSK: Well, if they were to invade in the near term, the world would be cut off from advanced AI chips. Currently, 100% of advanced AI chips are made in Taiwan.
INTERVIEWER: How fast could we put that online in America? And how important is that for national security?
ELON MUSK: I think it’s essential for national security. And we’re not doing enough.
INTERVIEWER: You’re 53 years old. I’m 118 days older than you. By what the hell have I done in my life? I know, right? 53 years old.
ELON MUSK: Pretty well. Well, so ’71 was a great year.
Birth Dates and Humor
INTERVIEWER: And I was December ’70. So I was just right before you were. The summer of ’71.
ELON MUSK: I was born 69 days after 420.
INTERVIEWER: Wow. I did ask Ben.
ELON MUSK: This is true.
INTERVIEWER: Look, this is true.
ELON MUSK: All right?
INTERVIEWER: You just opened up a can of words. I did ask Ben. Should I show up and pull up a joint and say, can we beat Rogan’s views? But I was pretty sure it might cause a scandal if we.
ELON MUSK: It just turned out to be like a chocolate cigar. Yeah.
Legacy and Future Plans
INTERVIEWER: Let me ask you. If today was your last day on Earth, what? I’m not suggesting it’s going to be, but if it were, what do you think your biggest legacy would be of everything you’ve done a hundred years from now? What do you think people would remember if it were zero to today? And will you ever go to space?
ELON MUSK: In the distant future, 100 or a thousand years ago, if SpaceX got humans to Mars, that’s what they would remember me for.
Brilliant Minds
INTERVIEWER: All right, final set of questions. Who’s the smartest guy you’ve ever met? You hang out with some brilliant people. Like, when you look, what’s a CEO you look at, other than yourself, what CEO do you say? Damn, that guy’s good.
ELON MUSK: Larry Ellison’s very smart. So I’d say Larry Ellison’s one of the smartest people. You know, Larry Page. I mean, there are a lot of people that are very smart. It’s hard to say. Like, you know, I think to some degree smart is as smart does.
So, yeah. What have they done that is difficult and significant? You know, Jeff Bezos has done a lot of difficult and significant things. I mean, there are a lot of smart humans. I call them smart. Smart for a human. A lot of people who are in the smart for a human category.
Pop Culture Lightning Round
INTERVIEWER: All right, final lightning round. Star Wars or Star Trek?
ELON MUSK: The first movie I saw in the theater was Star Wars. So I think it had a profound effect on me. I was six years old, I think. Imagine if first movie you ever see in a theater is Star Wars. It’s going to blow your mind.
INTERVIEWER: Best Star Wars movie.
ELON MUSK: Empire Strikes Back.
INTERVIEWER: The only objectively right answer. I stood in line three hours with my dad to see it on opening day. Kirk or Picard?
ELON MUSK: I like them both. Picard.
INTERVIEWER: Again, objectively right answer. By the way, James T. Kirk is a Republican and Picard is a Democrat. And the left gets very mad when I say that. Best Star Trek movie.
ELON MUSK: I mean the original. The first Star Trek movie. Maybe that’s in Wrath of Khan. Both Wrath of Khans were pretty good, but yeah, the original Wrath of Khan.
INTERVIEWER: Ricardo Montalban. Revenge is a dish best served cold. It is very cold in space. Although I will say Wrath of Khan is objectively the right answer. But four is a sleeper. When they go back to San Francisco and go find the whales and Scotty picks up the mouse and talks to it. Then goes a keyboard. How quaint. That’s a sleeper. All right, last question. Did Han shoot first?
ELON MUSK: Huh? It seemed like he shot second.
INTERVIEWER: This is verdict. And by the way, I apologize, Ben. So Ben was a jock and played tennis at Ole Miss. And so occasionally when we geek out a little. I love watching y’all geek out over.
ELON MUSK: There because the guy, he’s still on.
INTERVIEWER: The question I love.
ELON MUSK: He missed his. The alien missed his blaster shot. So why did he miss his blaster shot? Must have been because he got shot first. Now he’s missing a point blank blaster shot. If they missed, they got knocked or killed.
INTERVIEWER: But it’s a question of reality, which is, is Han Solo simply a hero or an anti-hero? And so I’m in the Han shot first category, I think. I don’t like sanitized stories.
ELON MUSK: He would have had to have shot first because otherwise why would the alien miss at point blank range?
Space Travel
INTERVIEWER: Are you ever going to go to outer space? Is that something in your life goals?
ELON MUSK: Yeah, I’d like to go to Mars at some point. And people have said, do I want to die on Mars? And I say yes, just not on impact.
INTERVIEWER: Now that’s a very good answer. The astronauts on the space station, are they political prisoners?
ELON MUSK: Some of them are.
INTERVIEWER: Because you could have given them a ride back and Joe Biden said no purely for politics.
ELON MUSK: Yeah. I mean, you know, there’s been some debate about this online, but the thing is that it was a very high level decision. So it wasn’t really even a NASA decision. It was just that the Biden White House did not want to have someone who was pro-Trump rescuing astronauts right before the election. So they pushed it.
INTERVIEWER: Well, if you’re one of those astronauts, you gotta be pretty pissed off about that.
ELON MUSK: Well, if they’re a Democrat, yes. Republican, yes. But if they’re Democrat, like everything’s fine.
INTERVIEWER: Fair enough.
ELON MUSK: So I think one of them is a Republican, one is a Democrat. It depends on which one you ask.
Closing Thoughts
INTERVIEWER: Well, thank you, Elon. This was awesome. And let me say, and by the way, I put out on X the day before yesterday, if you were having a beer with Elon and could ask him anything, what would you ask? And got lots of responses. The most common response people said is say thank you. Look, Texans and the American people appreciate what you’re doing. You don’t have to put up with this BS and you’re doing it. I’m grateful. You’re making a hell of a difference for this country. I appreciate you and the Americans appreciate you.
ELON MUSK: Yeah. It’s essential for the future of civilization. Otherwise I wouldn’t be doing it.
INTERVIEWER: Yes.
ELON MUSK: It’s not like I want to get death threats, you know.
INTERVIEWER: No. Don’t forget, we do this show Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Hit that subscribe or auto download button from the White House. It’s been a pleasure. Thanks for being with us on Verdict. We’ll see you guys back here in a couple days.
Related Posts
- Transcript of A Conversation With Dr. Shashi Tharoor on Operation Sindoor
- Full Transcript of Trump, Musk Goodbye Press Conference
- Transcript of Trump Meeting With Germany’s Merz at Oval Office
- Transcript of Why Ukraine’s Drone Attack on Russia Changes War Forever: Ian Bremmer
- Transcript of JD Vance’s Remarks At American Compass Gala