Ілон Маск / Twitter
Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, Tesla CEO and owner of SpaseX, freelance advisor to the US government, and head of DOGE, talks about magic computers that take money from nowhere.
In a video from Republican Senator Ted Cruz’s podcast recorded at the White House, Musk talks about the government’s magic of taking money from nowhere. This is not fake — Musk set out this fragment in X.
Website RawStory provides a transcript of the dialog. In the above video, Cruz starts the conversation:
— One of the things you were telling me about is…
— That’s crazy! — Musk interjected.
— This is what you call «magical money computers». So tell us about it, because I’ve never heard of it until you mentioned it.
— Okay, you might think that government computers talk to each other, they synchronize, they summarize what funds are going somewhere. And that they are consistent. And that the numbers that are presented to you as a senator are actually real numbers,” Musk said.
— “You would think so!” Cruz exclaimed.
— “You’d think so, but no. I mean, they’re not completely wrong, but they’re probably 5 or 10% less in some cases. So I call it «magic money computer»: any computer that can make money out of thin air. This is magic money.
— So how does it work? — Cruz asked.
— It just issues payments.
— And you’re saying that there are about 11 computers in the Treasury Department that send out trillions of payments?
Musk replied that the computers are mostly in the Treasury Department, some in the Department of Health and Human Services, and some in the Department of Defense — departments to which he and his team have been given unimpeded access.
—We found 14 magic money computers. They just send money out of nothing,” Musk said.
Musk and his DOGE team claim that they are working to identify government «waste, fraud and abuse» in this fiscal year, which they estimate at $1 trillion. But according to the US media, in particular National Public Radio, «so far, DOGE’s measures to cancel contracts, terminate leases, and push federal agencies to reduce their workforces have had little impact on the government’s overall balance sheet — even if we take DOGE’s savings claims at face value».
It’s even kind of embarrassing to comment on it in any way. Elon Musk has already said many strange things But now this person is actually an influential government official in perhaps the most powerful country in the world, which has a lot of nuclear weapons and a great influence on international relations — which is a bit scary.