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Concerned about whether the world’s richest man has the power to unilaterally shut down federal agencies or cut off Social Security checks? Elon Musk claims that’s probably because you’re committing fraud against the government.
The SpaceX founder and Republican megadonor-turned-Trump-White-House adviser made the outrageous claim during an interview with Fox News anchor Bret Baier alongside members of his DOGE team on Thursday. He talked to Baier from inside the Eisenhower Executive Office Building that’s part of the White House compound.
Musk boasted that his efforts through the Department of Government Efficiency in the Trump administration — shutting down the U.S. Agency for International Development, freezing hundreds of millions of dollars in research grants and firing tens of thousands of federal employees — as “a revolution” that could be “the biggest revolution in government” since America broke away from the British empire.
He brashly predicted that his rampant dismantling of large swathes of federal agenices would lead to a “fantastic future.”
Not everyone agrees.
Multiple federal judges have ordered a stop to his actions, including reversing mass firings perpetrated and restoring funding. Musk has been called out for claiming widespread fraud when he has yet to prove it..
The centibillionaire industrialist dismissed the concerns of his critics as merely evidence of their fraud, citing his experience payment processor PayPal in the late 1990s.
”One of the things I learned PayPal was that … you know who complains the loudest and the most amount of fake righteous indignation? The fraudsters,” he declared.
Musk then repeated a false claim about former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams receiving approximately $2 million from a green energy fund authorized by Congress during the Biden administration, and said the complaints about DOGE cuts are a “crazy tell.”
“There are many such cases like that,” he said of a case that doesn’t exist.
