Government Ai, Defending Doge And More: Takeaways From Elon Musk’s Three-hour Interview With Joe Rogan

Elon Musk joined podcaster Joe Rogan for a winding three-hour interview released Friday — touching on everything from Musk’s take on the Jeffrey Epstein files to how empathy is “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization.”

It’s not the first time Musk has talked candidly with Rogan on his show. He’s been on the podcast before, including twice just last year, and President Donald Trump himself also appeared on the show in the lead up to the election.

Chatting with Rogan, Musk called non-governmental organizations “maybe the biggest scam ever” after he took a chainsaw to U.S. Agency for International Development’s foreign aid, and reiterated his call for more air traffic controllers — blaming diversity, equity and inclusion programs for pushing out “a bunch of really good, talented old white guys” from the Federal Aviation Administration.

Musk has been in the hot seat this past month over his work with the Department of Government Efficiency, spotted recently wearing a “tech support” shirt at Trump’s cabinet meeting. The “special adviser” to the president has spearheaded sweeping changes to the federal government including axing federal agencies, instituting mass layoffs and cutting funding across multiple departments.

Here are the top three things to know from Musk’s conversation with Rogan.

Defending DOGE

The brunt of the hours-long interview focused on DOGE, Musk’s chainsaw wielding department that is focused on reducing the government’s size and spending. Speaking with Rogan, Musk said that DOGE is still funding ventures that “appear to be legitimate.”

But, Musk said, a lot of the funds he saw were not. He criticized USAID, the federal government’s primary foreign assistance agency that had 90 percent of its contracts cut this week, and argued some of the projects were widely ineffective.

“It could be the kind of thing where you sort of fund Ebola prevention, but it turns out that actually you’re funding a lab that develops new Ebola,” Musk said, providing no evidence that the U.S. government was funding a lab doing as much. “They claim it’s Ebola prevention, but it’s actually Ebola creation.”

The Tesla CEO argued that the cuts across the government come from DOGE recommendations, but are confirmed and instituted by each individual department or agency.

Addressing concerns that DOGE staffers could be privy to sensitive information across the government that requires security clearance, Musk said that the staffers are all vetted and receive the security clearances necessary to work.

“Anyone from DOGE has to go through the same vetting process that those federal employees went through,” Musk said, before adding, “But I mean, obviously the vast numbers of Social Security numbers have leaked onto the internet. People have hacked the government systems multiple times.”

Social Security a ‘Ponzi scheme’

Musk had strong criticism of Social Security, telling Rogan that the entitlement program is “the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time.”

He claimed that the Social Security system puts the government in a financial bind, because of the future obligations for Social Security to continue to pay benefits.

“Basically, people are living way longer than expected, and there are fewer babies being born, so you have more people who are retired and live for a long time and get retirement payments,” Musk said.

A federal report last year estimated that Social Security’s trust funds could go broke in 2035.

“However bad the financial situation is right now for the federal government, it’ll be much worse in the future,” Musk added.

Government AI

In Musk’s vision, AI could carry out government functions, though he didn’t provide further detail on what responsibilities it might be tasked with. That’s because the tech billionaire thinks AI will outpace human intelligence by the end of the decade, he said.

His statement comes as federal agency heads at the General Services Administration want to create a chatbot called GSAi to increase worker productivity and use other AI tools to scrub contracts and streamline processes, two staffers previously told POLITICO.

But Musk said he might limit the jurisdiction of AI if it adopts what he believes are far-fetched liberal views. “One of the concerns would be if there’s a super oppressive woke nanny AI that is omnipotent and executes you if you misgender someone,” he said. “That would be a miserable outcome.”