Elon Musk is Playing the Blame Game

Despite Elon Musk’s disdain for traditional journalism—“You are the media now,” he wrote to his followers X in January—the Tesla and SpaceX CEO has sat for a battery of interviews in the last week. Speaking with CNBC, CBS, Bloomberg, The Washington Post, and Ars Technica, Musk’s apparent goal seems to be to salvage his reputation and to reverse the damage done to his companies by his political maneuvering at DOGE.

As Musk tries to reestablish his business bona fides, he’s increasingly willing to distance himself from the White House. In an interview with CBS Sunday Morning, which is set to air in full this weekend, Musk criticized the “big, beautiful bill,” which President Trump has championed. “I was disappointed to see the massive spending bill, frankly, which increases the budget deficit, not just decreases it, and undermines the work that the DOGE team is doing,” he said. “I think a bill can be big or it can be beautiful, but I don’t know if it can be both.”

In a separate conversation with the Post, Musk claimed that DOGE had become the administration’s “whipping boy,” saying that “something bad would happen anywhere, and we would get blamed for it even if we had nothing to do with it.”

Once a permanent fixture at President Trump’s side, happily sucking up all the oxygen in the room during Cabinet meetings and out-speaking Trump during interviews in the Oval Office, Musk is now playing the blame game. Having dialed back his time at DOGE, Musk is creating the conditions to make someone or something else the fall guy when DOGE inevitably fails to live up to Musk’s promise to cut $2 trillion in government spending. The GOP spending bill, which is expected to increase the deficit by nearly $4 trillion (and, incidentally, make electric vehicles like Tesla’s more expensive to buy) just makes for an awfully convenient scapegoat.

But the truth is, even without the GOP spending bill, Musk’s promise was preposterous, as was his later claim that DOGE would find $1 trillion in cuts by the end of May. Now, Musk acts as if he never made those promises to begin with. When a Bloomberg interviewer asked him what happened to the $2 trillion promise last week, he called her question “absurd in its fundamental premise,” ignoring entirely his role in establishing that premise.

By the DOGE website’s own count, the group has cut $175 billion in spending, and even that number is tough to trust, given the endless stream of errors that have already been uncovered. But even DOGE’s shortcomings, Musk is trying to lay at Washington’s feet. “The federal bureaucracy situation is much worse than I realized,” he said. “I thought there were problems, but it sure is an uphill battle trying to improve things in D.C., to say the least.”

Now, at least, Musk seems willing to rightsize public expectations of what DOGE will ultimately achieve. In his interview with the Post, he said the group will now focus on improving government technology—you know, kind of like what United States Digital Service was doing before Musk took it over and blew that entire mission up.