Two hundred million dollars and $150 billion in federal cuts later, Elon Musk is telling The Economist he got swept up in something he probably should have avoided. The admission came during a 90-minute interview recorded at a Tesla factory in Texas, his first major sit-down since SpaceX floated on the US stock exchange in June, briefly lifting his personal fortune above $1.25 trillion before it settled to around $750 billion. That context matters: this is a man reckoning with political choices from the highest financial perch in recorded history.
The Political Chapter He Now Views With Ambivalence
"I got carried away, frankly," Musk told the magazine, describing his relationship with Donald Trump. The $200 million he funneled into Trump's 2024 campaign bought him a seat at the table as the de facto head of the Department of Government Efficiency, better known as Doge. What followed was a bruising stretch of $150 billion in budget cuts that The Economist called "harmful," plus the forced exit of tens of thousands of federal workers. Musk's own earlier comments had already hinted at this disillusionment: in a December podcast with Katie Miller, wife of White House adviser Stephen Miller, he said that given the chance, he would probably have stayed at his companies instead of joining the administration's operation.
What he left unsaid is almost as telling as what he admitted. There were no specific regrets named, no apology to the federal workers who lost jobs, no acknowledgment of which cuts he now considers a mistake. The candor had a ceiling.
The Predictions That Follow the Confession
Strip away the political self-reflection and the interview pivots hard into territory that would strain credulity if Musk's past calls didn't complicate easy dismissal. He predicts artificial intelligence will surpass all human intelligence within five years. Within ten, he says, robots will make paid work optional for most people. Those are not hedged forecasts. They are stated as near-certainties by someone who is simultaneously building the datacenters, the robots, and the rockets he describes.
On geopolitics, the predictions turn darker. He foresees a civil war in the United Kingdom within 20 years. He argues that any peace deal ending the war in Ukraine must include territorial concessions to Russia, a position that aligns him with the most contentious strand of current Western debate. On Mars, he holds to 2028 as the year humans first set foot on the planet, and he says he intends to power his AI venture with datacenters housed in space rather than on Earth.
What the Numbers Actually Reveal
The $200 million figure and the $150 billion in cuts sit at the center of this story because they are the only parts that are already real, already measurable. Everything else, the AI singularity, the robot economy, the Mars landing, remains in the future tense. Musk has been wrong on timelines before, sometimes by years, sometimes by a decade. He has also been right often enough that the projections cannot be filed away cleanly as fantasy.
The interview lands at a peculiar moment. SpaceX's public listing made him the wealthiest person in documented history, at least briefly. His AI company is scaling fast. And yet the headline he chose to generate was about regret, specifically the kind of regret that stops well short of a full accounting. That gap between the confession and the detail it omits is where the real story sits.
