Elon Musk: Fixing Government Waste Is Easy—‘It’s Like a Room Full of Targets, You Can’t Miss’

Elon Musk: Making the government more efficient is like being in a room full of targets. You can't miss.

“People sometimes ask, where would you start with government efficiency?

It's kind of like being in a room where the entire room is targets, and so you can shoot in any direction and not miss. It's impossible to miss because every direction is a target. So, no miss possibility.

We do have a fundamental issue, which is that the government is spending far, far more than it brings in.

The reality is that all government spending is actually taxation. All government spending is taxation.

Sometimes people think some of it is taxation, some of it is not, but it's all taxation, because the part that is not covered by tax revenue becomes inflation. You're either taxed directly or you're taxed by inflation, but you are for sure taxed. So we have to reduce government spending overall.

This will be forced upon us in the future because already just the interest payments on the debt are 23% of all federal tax revenue. Just the interest payments.

The interest payments now exceed the Defense Department budget, which is a trillion dollars a year. That's a lot of money, and that is rising rapidly.

So it can't be like, we'll trim a little bit here and there. That's not going to work. There have to be quite radical reductions in cost.”

Lancaster, Pennsylvania, October 26, 2024